Sing a Battle Song, page 39
—One-quarter of the US people are living in substandard housing, dilapidated or lacking in adequate plumbing or heating, firetraps. Half of the Black people in the US live in bad housing. Peeling paint in tenements has led to a major plague of lead paint poisoning; lead poisoning today cripples more children annually than did polio before the Salk vaccine. Children are exposed to rat bites as well as broken-down facilities leading to accidents and disease. Families are forced to pay high rents for rotten apartments. The system’s “solutions” to these criminal conditions are urban renewal which tears apart poor people’s communities in order to build more profitable higher-rent apartments, irrational tract-housing which destroys the countryside, and mobile homes which are structurally unsound and dangerous—financed at incredible profits. The housing crisis produces profits for real estate speculators and big landlords and unlivable conditions for millions of US people.
—Old age, instead of being a mark of respect and value, is scary in our society. Old people are poor, many die in old-age homes as if age were a disease. This society discards those whose labor is no longer exploitable for market value. The premium put on youth distorts human links between generations. Old people’s lessons from life and stories of the past are seldom learned. Our loss.
—Children are denied self-respect, dignity and creativity. They have no social power in a driving, competitive society. Almost nothing is built with small people in mind—stairs, toilets, turnstiles, signs, systems of transportation. Schools, television and publishing companies subject young people to a brutal culture of ultra-violence, sexist stereotypes and racism. Children are denied community; day-care facilities are minimal and always facing severe cutbacks. Kids are newer people and have, by the fact of being born, earned the rights that all human beings deserve.
—Personal debt to banks and corporations has increased astronomically in the past decade. The ruling class controls and manages millions of people by tying them to the system with debt. Because of high inflation and unemployment, delinquencies on installment loans hit a new high during January and February 1974.
All of this has a profoundly destructive effect on the people and the quality of life in the US. People turn against one another and ourselves. Over one half of the hospital beds in the US are occupied by mental patients. Alcoholism, drug addiction, child beating, rape, gambling, anger and suicide are all at crisis proportions.
For people in the US the basic fact of life is fear. People are afraid of society. No one knows what is going to happen. Fear of illness, fear of getting laid off. Afraid to go outdoors. Afraid of Black people moving into the neighborhood, afraid of loss of status, afraid of not looking right, afraid of being taken advantage of, afraid to speak up, afraid of growing old.
Still, Vietnam and Black rebellion, the resistance of youth and the rising of women begin to pry open minds and reclaim people imperialism tried to destroy. It is harder to sell the bourgeois life. The lace over the machinery of greed and brutality has gaping holes. The circus has lost its glitter. Imperialism’s seamy side is up for those who will examine its ugly contours and help plan its downfall.
—The Changing Nature of the Working Class—
People who must sell their labor power in order to survive make up the large and growing US proletariat (working class). The position in society of the working class is in fundamental conflict with the role and function and activities of the imperialists.
Oppressed peoples, women and youth and other anti-imperialist forces can and should deliver telling blows against the empire now; the actual building of socialism cannot succeed without the active support of the industrial proletariat.
This is the proletariat’s historic mission. It is a revolutionary duty to analyze and interpret the factors and causes which are obstacles to forward motion of the working-class in the struggle against the class enemy.
One can repeat formulas of class structure according to income and work and feel like a lot has been accomplished. But what is needed is a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, “the living soul of Marxism.” What is needed is a method that analyzes the motion of society, the contradictions and the changes, in relationship to historic realities, possibilities, and necessities. In the US in the past twenty years, the white industrial proletariat has seldom exercised its revolutionary initiative.
Third World peoples in the US, and also women, youth and members of the armed forces have shown the most consistent initiative and practice as measured by the decisive anti-imperialist struggle of this entire period: the war in Vietnam. These groups have been the carriers of proletarian internationalism for this time.
The historic prediction of the leading role of the industrial proletariat in capitalist countries emphasized the concrete processes by which the workers would be socialized and would increasingly find themselves in a common situation of oppression. One of the defining characteristics of the US working class is that it is composed of workers of both the oppressor and the oppressed nations. Any attempt to predict the role of the US working class must place great emphasis on the leadership that has been given by Black and Third World people.
The changing nature of the working class places Black and Third World workers in a strategic position. They have become a major part of basic industry—steel, auto, chemical, transportation—as well as the vital sectors that service the cities—hospital, transit and clerical work. This has created a new level of militant leadership from below, challenging white supremacy in the unions, confronting and radicalizing white co-workers. Black and Third World workers have raised demands in the interest of the whole class, including the colonized of empire—in contrast to the existing leadership of the labor aristocracy, represented by the AFL-CIO hierarchy, which raises demands that favor the most skilled, works against the interests of the poor and the unorganized, and helps sustain imperialism.
Imperialism on the decline creates new historic conditions for organizing revolutionary struggles in the oppressor nation. The crisis has affected millions. But crisis does not automatically produce red consciousness. The traditional solution to domestic economic crisis—war—remains an option for imperialism. In the face of imperial decline, the rulers make fascistic appeals to whites to try to recoup economic stability and privilege by going along with and enforcing even more intensified oppression of Third World people—welfare cutbacks, miseducation, and expeditionary war against Third World revolution. The imperialists are only able to do this by launching counterrevolution at home as well as abroad.
The revolutionary potential and contribution of poor, unemployed and imprisoned people cannot be dismissed with the category “lumpen-proletariat.” Modern imperialism involves chronic stagnation, creating large numbers of permanently unemployed or underemployed people. This large group cannot be equated with the small group described by Marx. Cultural and community ties between today’s unemployed and the most exploited workers here plays a leading role in working-class struggle. Working-class unity cannot be built on the terms of the most privileged sectors. Rather, the demands of the most oppressed must be the basis for isolating the labor aristocracy in their support for US imperialism, and for building a revolutionary class unity.
There is as yet no dynamic way to analyze the class position of women. The class of a woman is typically determined by the class of her husband or her father. This solely derivative criteria is sexist. The usual alternative is to define a woman’s class solely by her role in the work force. Yet in itself this is inadequate since the overwhelming majority of women perform socially necessary labor of reproducing and caring for children, and taking care of home and mate. The work of women holds up half the sky. A synthesis of women’s household work and her work in the productive process is demanded by these conditions and has yet to be fully achieved.
The concept of a giant, inclusive “middle-class” as applied to salaried and wage workers who must work to live is essentially a status category, broadly representing income differences, not a true class. Granting higher status has been a major tactic of social control, raised to an ideological weapon to mute conflicting class interests by making the affluence of a few the aspirations of many. In fact, the true middle class is more and more an insignificant segment of the population.
The great mass of the white collar workers, clericals, service people, teachers and professionals are underpaid, exploited and profoundly bored by the daily dullness of their routines. They comprise the majority of the US work force at home. They cling to the image of respectability that once separated the old middle class from the mass of blue collar workers. Their consciousness must be changed. The interpenetration of women’s consciousness, youth consciousness, and Third World national identity are great channels through which their class consciousness—as workers opposing their class enemy—can be irrigated and made fertile.
As imperialist crisis deepens, the entire fabric of social control is tightened and becomes more severe.
Law-and-order and the propaganda barrage to instill capitalist values all intensify. The cultural crisis created, however, spills out in rebellion, in resistance to alienating work, and in revolution. Revolutionary constituencies will form along lines of cultural cohesion as well as along class lines. Cultural identity can be an important element in the process of revolutionizing mass groupings. This has been seen in national liberation movements, and also to some degree in the women’s movement and the youth movement.
There are broad social movements developing and growing in the US. We have experienced, in the last decade, a tremendous upsurge of anti-imperialist consciousness and a severe breakdown of the established institutions of power and cultural control. All of this affects the consciousness and social/ political direction of the working class and provides important new openings for revolutionary organizing.
BLACK AND OTHER THIRD WORLD PEOPLE IN THE US
Black and other Third World people inside the US make up oppressed nations, subjugated peoples. The oppression of Third World peoples takes many of the same forms as the imperialist control of people in colonies in Africa, Asia or Latin America.
—The Black Nation—
The Black nation in the US is huge—the second largest Black nation in the world. It is a nation formed out of distinct common history. The Black revolution is rooted in the cultural identity, common oppression and resistance which synthesizes two realities: the African who was stolen to this country, and the slave and descendents of slaves who built it.
The struggles of Black people in this generation have shaken racist power and culture to the heart of the empire, because the colonized status of Black and Third World peoples inside the heartland of imperialism is the foundation of the economy and cultural structure of the US.
The Black struggle for self-determination is the strategic leading force of the US revolution, forged from a centuries-long tradition of resistance and revolt in the face of counterattack by the club, the cattle prod, the gun and the lynch rope.
From the clandestine organizations of the earliest slavery days, through mass uprisings, the open carrying of self-defense weapons, to guerrilla combat, the Black movement has historically raised the level of the whole struggle.
The state has imposed the necessity, liberation movements in other countries have helped point the direction. By fighting for control over their communities, schools, jobs and their future as a people, Black people also push forward the overthrow of the existing power relations in the entire society.
Like any movement, the Black struggle grows by qualitative leaps and thru periods of building and regrouping of forces. Organized struggles in local areas and the ongoing day-to-day battles of Black people are often not as visible as the actions and rebellions of a high-tide period. But they are urgent and necessary in the development of a people’s movement. The Black movement today embraces the bursting-forth of revolutionary Black art and literature, the battles for land and political power in the rural South, consistent organized support for African liberation, the ever-increasing organization and militancy of Black women, ideological debate and study. Black political conventions in Gary and Little Rock have attempted to develop unifying strategies and direction; Black prisoners have opened a determined front behind the bars; armed struggle against police power has continued in the cities. Always the Black movement persists, finding new forms to meet new conditions and new hardships—tenacious in the people’s fight for liberation.
Institutions of Racism:
They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.
—Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard)
Racism is a weapon at the command of the ruling class, deliberately fashioned into a culturally sanctioned institution, written into law, and enforced by all the power of conscious custom and the state.
All primary national institutions—corporations, government, social services and organized labor—are under 100% effective white oppressive control. Black people as a group do not control their schools, their jobs or national policy. Despite all the state’s propaganda, Black people have not been “incorporated” into the upper, or even middle, levels of the US social structure.
In fact, the conditions of life for many Black people have worsened over the last ten years. During the last decade, the differential between the wages of Black and white workers has increased, segregation in the schools has increased, drug addiction has become an epidemic. The annual sales of General Motors—$30 billion—equals the purchasing power of the entire Black population.
Institutionalized racism is maintained and perpetuated over the generations by the schools, the unemployment cycle, the drug trade, immigration laws, birth control, the army, the prisons.
Black and Mexican and Puerto Rican and Asian labor has been essential in building this country. The labor of Third World people cleans the streets, the floors, hauls the heavy loads, cooks the food.
Last hired, first fired, the unemployment rate among Black people in the cities is four times that of whites and the unemployment among Black youth is now expected to exceed 30%. The high rate of Black unemployment reduces the effects of depression cycles on the rest of the population and encourages competition instead of solidarity.
As an example of this relationship: General Motors announced on January 2, 1974, that about 4500 workers would be laid off at its Linden, New Jersey plant because of the “energy crisis.” The layoffs were part of a total of over 86,000 GM workers laid off at that time nation-wide. Union officials said that 60% of the workers being laid off indefinitely at Linden were Black people, Puerto Ricans and women. Skilled workers, mostly white, were shoved back onto the assembly lines.
Third World women are the lowest paid and in the least skilled jobs in the country. Black women make up half the household workers—in other people’s houses. They suffer the triple jeopardy of sex, race and poverty. Black women earn less than half of what white men earn; they are confronted by an infant and maternal mortality rate which is twice that among whites. There is no low-cost daycare, due to cutbacks in welfare and health programs.
The city is becoming Third World territory. Third World people are a majority in 50 of the largest cities. Where they are a large minority (New York, Chicago, Houston, Detroit), the public school populations are often more than 50% Third World. Much of the white population has moved to outer areas and to the suburbs. The cities do not represent, govern, serve, educate or support their population.
An army of occupation prowls the streets of Black communities. Sometimes, they patrol in the name of the welfare of the community. But last year, half the murders of civilians by police—including several children—were Black people. In New York City alone, 53 Black people were shot and killed by police in 1973. From 1968-1972, there were over 100 “legal” murders of Black revolutionaries in the US.
The Black community has paid a tremendous price in the loss of leaders like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, Jonathan and George Jackson, Bobby Hutton, Zayd Shakur.
Black people are more likely to get arrested, to get long prison sentences, to be refused parole, to be beaten and killed. The rulers are setting up a unified fascist infrastructure with identity cards, federal training and arming of police forces. Academic apologists preaching biological inferiority, such as William Shockly, fabricate the justifications for forced sterilization of Third World women.
These are attacks on a people as a whole. The heroin epidemic, a counterinsurgency weapon and product of the high profits of the international drug trade, is a form of genocide against a whole generation of Black youth. In the name of a cure, methadone is replacing heroin but serves the same purpose when controlled by the state—debilitation thru addiction with the added benefit of increased control.
A measure of the genocidal cost to Black people of imperialist rule is their life expectancy, today fully ten years less than whites. That means that nearly 300 million years of life are being stolen from Black people in the US today.
The courts are machines for administering the penalties of white rulers to Black victims. The prisons are living tombs. They function as a major institution of economic and political control over the Black nation—the ruling-class safety valve for the rebels, for the alienated. Prison acts as a control on the critical mass on the streets, out of work, angry. There are more Black men in prison than in colleges. Behavior modification techniques are now in widespread use in the prisons as an attempted “final solution” to the “problem” of rebellion and righteous anger.
