Chapter 7: Rebels with a Cause
When people talk about how many Russians were killed
behind the Iron Curtain in the concentration camps, it doesn't
move American Negroes at all. The reason is very simple. The
same thing happened to them in this country. White American
workers didn't have to go through what the Russian workers
went through under Stalin because the Negroes went through it
for them on the cotton plantations of the South. Every immigrant
who walked off the gangplank to make his way in
the land of opportunity was climbing onto the Negroes' backs.
For the United States is not like any other country which has
built itself up on the basis of slavery. This country committed
the most unpardonable crime of all. After freeing the slaves,
it then segregated them off on the basis of color as inferior to
the rest of the population, both in law and in fact. For this
crime the United States will occupy a position in the annals of
history comparable only to that occupied by Hitler Germany
for the crimes it committed against the Jews. But Hitler lasted
only twelve years during which he killed 6 million Jews. The
crime of the United States has lasted over a century.
To this day, the American nation celebrates the Civil War
and records it as a war to free the slaves. But in the eyes of
Negroes the Civil War was the war which made it possible for
the United States to be industrialized, the war which resulted
in the Bargain of 1877 between Northern capital and Southern
landed aristocracy, which left the former slaves living and
working under a caste system as brutal as that of slavery itself.
Following the Civil War and a brief period of Reconstruction
during which Negroes enjoyed their newly won freedoms,
the North made its infamous deal with the South. According
to this deal, the South could go its way, using the
Negroes as sharecroppers on the cotton plantations. In return, the North got from King Cotton much of the capital it needed
for industrialization, both through export of cotton to England
and from its own textile mills. This Bargain of 1877 was
never recorded, but it ranks with the other more famous
compromises on principle which have distinguished the United
States in its relation to slavery.
The Negro question in the United States has therefore
never been purely a question of race, nor is it purely a question
of race today. Class, race, and nation are all involved. The
American nation has become the giant of industry that it is
today on the backs of the Negroes. The working class has from
the very beginning been divided. The white workers were an
aristocracy which benefited first and always from the exploitation
of the Negroes, and in between by the exploitation
of each new wave of immigrants.
What has made the problem of the socialist revolution in
the United States so complicated and difficult for American
Marxists is the fact that there has been no mass party of labor
in this country as in the industrialized countries of Western
Europe. What American Marxists have failed to understand is
that in Western Europe the mass parties of labor were formed
and were able to endure not only because of the working-class
struggle against capital but also because the workers struggled
against the landed aristocracy. During this same period no mass
party of labor arose here because the workers, as long as they
could go their way settling on the free lands of the West and
working as free labor in the new industries of the East, were
ready to allow the landed aristocracy of the South to exploit
the Negroes. Thus the concept of "Black and White, Unite
and Fight" has never had any basis in fact in this country:
the blacks and whites were never struggling for the same things
nor were they united in the same cause even when they were
fighting side by side.
When the Civil War ended with the Negroes being returned
to serfdom, it was the first major defeat of the class
struggle in the United States. From that time on, Americans,
including the radicals among them, have regarded the Negro
question as a race question. Before the Civil War, Negro struggles
were called rebellions and revolts. But after the Civil War and the formal emancipation of the Negroes, any violent action
by Negroes was just called a "race riot" even when these actions
were based on economic grounds, such as jobs, housing,
or prices.
So long have the American people lived with this contradiction
that it has become a way of life for them. That is
why the question of what the Negro struggle really represents,
what should be done about it, what is right and what is wrong,
is shaking the United States more than any other issue. Why
should America fight to free the world when America is itself
not free? Why did America fight the last war for democracy
when America itself does not have democracy? How can Americans
really be for the freedom of Africa when they are not for
freedom inside the United States? How can Americans be for
freedom and equality the world over when they do not practice
freedom and equality at home? How can Americans say they
are for parliamentary democracy and free elections abroad
when they do not have parliamentary democracy and free
elections at home? How can America give advice to countries
all over the whole world on how to solve their problems when
it cannot solve its own problems? Why does America claim to
want to give so much economic progress to everybody else when
it finds it so hard to give economic progress to its own colored
citizens? How can Americans say they have a free society when
the question of where to eat and where not to eat, where to
ride and where not to ride on buses, streetcars, and trains, in
order to avoid the Negro haunts the average American white
before he even leaves his house in the morning?
Thus what began as a class issue and was made into a
race issue by the simple act of separating off the Negroes on
the basis of color, has now in fact become a national issue, the
great, the pervasive, the All-American question that is shaking
up every organization, every institution, and every individual
inside America and affecting the relationships of all these to
the rest of the world: labor, the professions, the church, the
courts, the armed forces, industry, employment, transportation,
the family, marriage, schools, hospitals, neighborhoods, cities,
suburbs, government on all levels, police, firemen, social welfare, political parties, press, TV, radio, movies, sports. The
list is endless.
In the period following the Bargain of 1877, the Negro
question remained dormant. Although this period was characterized
by most brutal and shameful beatings, lynchings, and
rape (worse than before the Civil War because now things
were supposed to be different), Americans found it possible
to look the other way. All that the Abolitionists had talked
about and exposed in the prewar period was drowned out in
the thunderous expansion of American industry and the shifting
of the class struggle to the railroads and new industries created
as a result of the war.
The first serious eruption of violence between whites and
Negroes came in the big riot of 1908 in Springfield, Illinois.
This in turn led to the birth of the NAACP, an organization
formed by Negro intellectuals to defend Negro rights. The
First World War and the crisis of American capitalism propelled
into the urban centers and the United States Army many
Negroes who brought with them all the questions and grievances
which up to then had been silenced by the police state in the
South. It was at this juncture that Negroes began to discover
the many "ifs" and "buts" of American democracy. Up to
this point they had been considering "Up North" a haven,
revering Abe Lincoln and the Republican Party as their benefactors,
putting the Yankee on a pedestal as the fighter for
their freedom. Their disillusionment with Northern democracy
continues to smoulder in every Negro who has settled up North
after knowing life in the South.
The clash between their expectations and the harsh realities
of life in the North, plus the blow that they sensed had been
dealt to Western Civilization by the First World War and the
Russian Revolution, created the mass basis for the Garvey
movement, which at its height is estimated to have attracted
anywhere from one to six million Negroes, and forced the people
of the United States for the first time since the Civil War
to face the reality of the Negroes as a force. This reality was
never to leave them completely again.
After the First World War the Northern ghettos began to
swell as those Negroes in the South who could eke out enough money to make the trip continued to migrate to the North. In
1931, simultaneously with the Depression, the Scottsboro Case,
involving the legal lynching by the Southern courts of nine
young Negro boys, raised the Negro question once again to
the status of a major issue not only in the United States but
throughout the world. But Negroes were still on the defensive.
During the Depression more thousands of Negroes, displaced
by the mechanization of the farms, flocked into the cities both
North and South. Here they took every advantage of the social
reforms of the New Deal.
During the 1930's the CIO erupted, and the pattern
which had been created by American capitalism in the Civil
War repeated itself. To save the Union, Lincoln had freed the
slaves. Now to save the union, Negroes were admitted into it,
lest the capitalists use them as strikebreakers and scabs. But
this was not too difficult for the unions to do. There were
not too many Negroes in industry anyway, except at Ford
(which was not unionized until 1941) and in steel where the
Negroes did the heaviest and most menial work out of which
the immigrants had been upgraded. The bulk of the Negroes
were unemployed and on relief.
With the coming of the Second World War, Negroes up
North made use of the opportunity created by the weakness of
American capitalism to organize the March on Washington
movement. Out of this movement came Executive Order 8802,
opening up jobs in defense industries to Negroes. Negroes did not
give credit for this Order to Roosevelt and the American government.
Far from it. Recognizing that America and its allies had
their backs to the wall in their struggle with Hitler and Tojo,
Negroes said that Hitler and Tojo, by creating the war which
made the Americans give them jobs in industry, had done more
for them in four years than Uncle Sam had done in 300 years.
Working in industry, fighting inside the armed forces, the
Negroes now began to seize upon all the weaknesses of American
capitalism. This led to a series of riots in army camps and
major cities in the North which reached their peak at the
height of the war in the year 1943. Only when the official
records of the Armed Services are made public will Americans know how many hundreds of revolts took place among the
Negro soldiers and sailors during the Second World War.
Inside the plants of the war industries the newly employed
Negro workers carried on an offensive battle against both
management and the white workers, forcing the white workers
to face up to the idiocies of their prejudices and making them
admit for the first time that Negroes could perform or learn all
the operations of American production which the world had
been led to believe could only be done by the superior whites.
On the union floor, Negro workers raised problems which
the white workers and the union had never before had to face,
often causing splits inside the union and among the workers
on the issues of human rights and human behavior.
When the war was over, the Negroes did not return to
the farms as they had done in large numbers after the First
World War. They had established themselves in industry and
in Northern communities, and in many plants had built up
seniority while white workers were losing it by moving from
plant to plant.
In the South the whites started again the old intimidation
that had been launched after the First World War. The Klan
was reborn and a series of bombings and lynchings erupted
from Florida to Mississippi in a campaign to put back in his
place this Negro who, having seen another world in the army
and in industry, was determined never to be tied down again.
In 1948 President Truman, recognizing the growing political
strength of the Negroes in the Northern cities, fought and won
the election on a program of civil rights, despite the split-away
of the Dixiecrats in Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and
Alabama. By now the national government was on the defensive,
both in the world and at home. The Cold War was under
way and the familiar American pattern was repeating itself.
"To save the free world from Communism" the United States
was now ready to yield some rights to its Negro citizens.
In 1954 the Supreme Court handed down its famous decision
regarding school desegregation, repudiating the old ruling
that separate schools could be equal. The Court expected
the desegregation to take place only "with all deliberate speed."
Instead, Negro parents in the South began to organize and mobilize to send their children to formerly all-white schools,
even in the face of hostile mobs bent upon upholding the
familiar ways of American life and ready to spit and jeer at
little children to do so. Then 14-year old Emmett Till from
Chicago was brutally lynched in Mississippi and his kidnappers
and murderers were let off scot-free in the courts. The flood
tide of Negro revolt that had been dammed up for so long began
to burst. For the first time Negroes were ready for an offensive
against white society. Hitherto their actions had been
defensive. Now there would come a series of offensive actions
with staggering momentum, one right after the other. Going
from the defensive to the offensive, the Negroes now constituted
a revolutionary force completely different from that of the immigrant
workers, each group of which had been assimilated into
the American Way of Life.
In 1955-1956 the Montgomery bus boycott became an
international issue as an entire community organized itself to
boycott public transportation until the buses were desegregated
according to Federal law. In the border states of Kentucky,
Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and in Washington,
D.C., Negro parents were determined not to be put off by
white mobs, and Eisenhower had to send Federal troops to Little
Rock to uphold the Supreme Court decision.
Meanwhile, as the sleeping giant of Africa began to waken,
the Negro people, who up to that time had been somewhat
ashamed of their ancestry, instead began to feel ashamed that,
living in the most advanced country in the world, they were
so far behind their African brothers in achieving freedom. For
the first time the Negroes began to appreciate that although
they are a minority in the United States they are a majority
in the world, and that what in the United States is portrayed
as a race question is on a world scale the question of the rights
of the majority of the human race.
In 1960 the Negro offensive took a new step forward. The
sit-in movement started, astonishing Negroes who had migrated
North in the belief that Southern Negroes would never rise
up and fight for their rights. The student sit-in movement
aimed at taking and enforcing equal rights in restaurants,
stores, libraries, movies, beaches, parks, and all other public places in the South. Unlike any previous Negro movement, it
aimed at creating the issue, provoking it. The Negro students
were not just in the courts arguing the law, as the NAACP
had been doing for so many years. They were making and
enforcing it themselves, on the spot.
These Negro students were the sons and daughters of
Negroes who fought and worked during the war, taught their
children what their own parents had not taught them—that
they were inferior to no one and had the same rights as any
American—and now sent them to college to prepare for their
equality. Their movement created pandemonium in the whole
apparatus of the Southern courts—local courts, appeals courts,
federal courts contradicted each other right and left, often in
the presence of hundreds of Negroes who jammed the court-rooms.
As the movement enlisted support and participation
from thousands of white students on Southern and Northern
campuses, pandemonium also began to be created in the relations
of these youths to their parents. In 1961 the movement
took on national scope with mixed groups of Freedom Riders
converging on Deep South cities from both North and South.
Negro youth employed the non-violent tactics that had
been evolved by Martin Luther King in the Montgomery
boycott. These tactics were extremely effective insofar as they
enabled the youth to take the initiative in a disciplined manner,
achieve cooperation between white and Negro youth, and
dramatize the realities of Southern justice. But the white mobs
in the South responded with violence, and it was these mobs
who were upheld by the Southern authorities as they restored
order by hosing the students, throwing tear gas at them, arresting
and jailing them, convicting them of breaking the law,
and fining or imprisoning them.
Meanwhile another road was being worked out by Negro
workers, both in the North and in the South. In Monroe,
North Carolina, the Negro community, under the leadership
of Robert F. Williams, an ex-marine and former auto worker,
armed itself to meet Ku Klux Klan violence with violence. In
the big cities of the North—Chicago, Detroit, Harlem, Los
Angeles—the Black Muslims began to consolidate and multiply,
attracting to their ranks hundreds of thousands of the lowest layers of Negro workers—domestic servants, the unemployed
made expendable by automation, and outcasts from society
in the prisons and hospitals. Through the militant black nationalist
philosophy of the Muslims, these Negroes are now
being rehabilitated and their social personalities liberated, but
not for integration into this society. The Black Muslims, whose
membership consists only of Afro-Americans, emphasize the
need for American Negroes to follow the example of the
Africans. According to their philosophy, white society is doomed
and the only hope for the black man is to cut himself off entirely
from this doomed society, develop a citizenship of his own,
taking for himself the "40 acres" promised but never given him
after the Civil War, and preparing himself to defend his people
against all white injustice and aggression.
With the growth of the Black Muslim movement and the
emergence of the new Negroes in the South represented by the
students and the Monroe community, the old Negro organizations
like the NAACP have become a joke. NAACP, as Dick
Gregory says, means Negroes who Are not Acting like Colored
People. Whites who protest "But I belong to the NAACP," are
laughed at for deluding themselves that they have thereby
bought insurance against the coming explosions. Like the union,
the NAACP at this stage of the struggle has been by-passed by
harsh realities.
Antagonisms among Negroes themselves have grown as
debate and disagreement have sharpened over methods of struggle;
Negroes have begun to realize that they will also have to
fight Negroes before they win their freedom. Not only that.
Inside the CIO, which built its reputation on the solidarity of
the workers, there has sprung up a new organization of Negro
workers who have made it clear that when the Negro masses
explode, the labor organizations cannot expect Negro unionists
to defend labor against the Negroes, for labor itself has proved
to be too much a part of the American Way of Life which has
to be uprooted. Thus, at this point in American history when
the labor movement is on the decline, the Negro movement is
on the upsurge. The fact has to be faced that since 1955 the
development and momentum of the Negro struggle have made
the Negroes the one revolutionary force dominating the American scene. Today the whole nation and the world are aware
of their striking force, from boycotts to sit-ins to wade-ins to
Freedom Rides. Inside the United States there is widespread
fear of the growing strength of the Black Muslims, described
by Martin Luther King as the "extremist elements lurking in
the wings." In the last half dozen years hundreds of organizations
for Negro struggle have sprung up around specific issues,
disbanding as speedily as they were formed when their objectives
are achieved, and organizing anew when new problems
require action. Among these, and growing in significance every
day, are the parents' organizations in Northern cities which,
through the issue of school redistricting, are challenging the
whole social pattern of city and suburb, and of government of
the black central city areas by white "absentee landlords," that
has grown up since the war.
All this poses very fundamental questions not only for
American society as a whole but for American revolutionaries.
The old slogan "Black and White, Unite and Fight" has been
proved false and obsolete, and the same is now happening to
the assumption that Negroes can achieve their rights inside this
society or without shaking up and revolutionizing the whole
social structure. What is involved is not only the likelihood of
open and armed revolt of the Negroes against the state power
in the South. The Negroes are now posing before all the institutions
of American society, and particularly those which are
supposedly on their side (the labor organizations, the liberals,
the old Negro organizations, and the Marxists), the same questions
that have been posed by the Algerian Revolution to all
of French society, with this difference that Algeria is outside
France while the Negroes are right here inside America. But
in the same way that, during the course of the Algerian Revolution,
Algerians fought Frenchmen, and Algerians fought
Algerians, and Frenchmen representing the national government
eventually had to fight Frenchmen in Algeria, and the Algerians
had to take over political power and now have to expropriate
the property of Frenchmen—so in the United States the Negro
revolt will lead to armed struggle between Negroes and whites,
Negroes and Negroes, and Federal troops and armed civilians,
and will have to move to political power and economic power. Already clashes between Federal troops and white civilians
have been narrowly averted. The counter-revolution in the
South may not yet be as well organized as the Secret Army
Organization was in Algeria and France, but the attitudes,
actions, and atrocities perpetrated by white civilians against
Negroes are no different.
American Marxists have tended to fall into the trap of
thinking of the Negroes as Negroes, i.e. in race terms, when
in fact the Negroes have been and are today the most oppressed
and submerged sections of the workers, on whom has
fallen most sharply the burden of unemployment due to automation.
The Negroes have more economic grievances than any
other section of American society. But in a country with the
material abundance of the United States, economic grievances
alone could not impart to their struggles all their revolutionary
impact. The strength of the Negro cause and its power to
shake up the social structure of the nation comes from the fact
that in the Negro struggle all the questions of human rights
and human relationships are posed. At the same time the
American Negroes are most conscious of, and best able to time
their actions in relation to, the crises and weaknesses of American
capitalism, both at home and abroad.
American Marxists have also allowed themselves to fall
into the trap of treating the question of violence and non-violence
in the Negro struggle in a way that they would
never dream of in relation to the class struggle. That is, they
have toyed with the idea that the Negroes are a minority who
might be massacred if they used other than non-violent methods.
This is because American Marxists have always thought of the
working class as white and have themselves discriminated
against Negroes by hesitating to recognize them as workers.
Now they must face the fact that the Negro struggle
in the United States is not just a race struggle. It is not something
apart from and long antedating the final struggle for
a classless society which is supposed to take place at some
future time when American capitalist society is in total crisis.
The goal of the classless society is precisely what has
been and is today at the heart of the Negro struggle. It is
the Negroes who represent the revolutionary struggle for a classless society—not indeed the classless society of American folk-lore
in which every individual is supposed to be able to climb
to the top in order to exploit newcomers at the bottom. Every
other section of the working class has been to one extent or
another assimilated into this American Way of Life. Only the
Negroes have been excluded from it and continue to be excluded
from it, despite the frantic efforts of Kennedy & Co. to
incorporate a chosen few Negroes at the top. It is this exclusion
which has given the Negro struggle for a classless society its
distinctive revolutionary character. For when the Negroes struggle
for a classless society, they struggle that all men may be
equal, in production, in consumption, in the community, in
the courts, in the schools, in the universities, in transportation,
in social activity, in government, and indeed in every sphere of
American life.
American Marxists have never been able to grasp this
because they have always thought that the social revolution
in American must be led by white workers. They have also
been afraid that if Negroes started violent revolutionary action,
they would find the white workers lined up against them. Even
when the Marxists have verbally repudiated the theory of
"Black and White, Unite and Fight" this theory and these
fears about Negro revolt have remained with them. But the
crisis in the United States today and the corresponding momentum
of the Negro struggle are such that it is obvious that
Negroes are not going to consult whites, workers or not workers,
before taking action. They will go their way, doing what
they think they must do, taking what actions they feel they
must take, and forcing the whites to make up their minds
whether, when, and if they are coming along.
The chief need for all Americans is to recognize these
facts and to be ready to take bold action along with Negroes,
recognizing that the Negroes are the growing revolutionary
force in the country, and that just as capitalist production has
created new methods of production and new layers of workers,
it has also produced new Negroes.
Many, including some Negroes, will say that they do not
understand just what the Negroes are fighting for in this period.
That is primarily because the Negro struggle, as an offensive social struggle, is only about eight years old. In those eight
years the Negroes have been evolving their own strategy and
tactics, not trying to fit into any preconceived pattern, using
each and every method, non-violent resistance, violent resistance,
moral suasion, economic boycotts, sit-ins, stand-ins,
etc., sometimes confusing but more often clarifying the nature
of the coming showdown.
Today, as a result of all these struggles, they are learning
that their chief weakness is the lack of political power. They
do not control one sheriff in the United States, North or South.
They have no say about Federal troops, National Guards, city
police, FBI, Interstate Commerce Commission, post office authorities,
school boards, voting registration, employment commissions.
Yet in every issue and in every sphere, and whatever
methods they have used, they have found themselves directly up
against the corrupt powers-that-be.
Up to now it has been unnatural for the Negroes to think
in terms of black political power. Instead they have thought
in terms of investing white politicians with power and then
putting pressure on them to deal out justice to the Negroes.
Now, to Negroes in the South, it is becoming clearly a question
of investing blacks with power, and nobody knows this
better than the whites who openly admit their fears that this is
the inevitable result of Negro voting.
The struggle for black political power is a revolutionary
struggle because, unlike the struggle for white power, it is the
climax of a ceaseless struggle on the part of Negroes for human
rights. Moreover, it comes in a period in the United States when
the struggle for human relations rather than for material goods
has become the chief task of human beings. The tragedy is that
all Americans cannot recognize this and join in this struggle.
But the very fact that most white Americans do not recognize
it and are in fact opposed to it is what makes it a revolutionary
struggle. Because it takes two sides to struggle, the revolution
and the counter-revolution.
Chapter 8: The American Revolution
Any social movement starts with the aim of achieving
some rights heretofore denied. Sometimes a portion of these
rights is achieved without a change in the social structure of
the country. When this happens, the movement is not revolutionary,
even though it has brought about social change. Such
a movement was the CIO. At other times a movement is unable
to achieve the rights it seeks without taking power from
the existing government and creating a totally new order. When
this happens, it is a revolution.
Very few revolutions start with a conscious attempt to take
power. No revolution has ever started with everyone in the
country agreeing with the goal of the revolutionary movement.
It is clashes, both ideological and physical, among segments of
the population and usually the whip of the counter-revolution
which give the revolution its momentum. Sometimes the revolution
is violent, sometimes it is non-violent, but always it is the
revolution. Sometimes those in the revolution are conscious of
the consequences of their actions, sometimes they are not, but
always there is action.
Who will and who will not start a full-scale revolution cannot
be foretold. The basis for a revolution is created when the
organic structure and conditions within a given country have
aroused mass concern. Sometimes the revolution is started by
its opponents who by some act arouse the masses to anger and
action. Sometimes a very marked improvement in living conditions
inculcates in the masses a belief that there is no limit
to what they should or can have. Sometimes it is just seeing
one segment of the population living so much better than the
rest.
No one has ever been able to predict which class or race
would start a revolution or how many people would be required to do it. The only certainty is that the success of a revolution
depends on the joining in of the working people who make
up the bulk of the population.
Marx's theory of revolution was developed in relation to
the advanced capitalist countries. The United States is the most
advanced capitalist country in the world. Not only that. It is the
citadel of world capitalism without which the other capitalist
countries could not survive. Therefore any revolutionary who
evades facing the specific conditions and realities of American
capitalism is like the British workers in Marx's day who were
so preoccupied with keeping the Irish workers down that they
couldn't fight for their own advancement, or all the American
socialists who have been so preoccupied with Stalinism, either
pro or con, that they have not sought or been able to find
the basis of the revolution that is here, right in front of their
eyes, in the most advanced capitalist country in the world.
American socialists have never been able to understand why
there should be a revolution in the United States when there is
such an abundance of commodities in this country. Rather than
face this question squarely, they have become refugees in theory,
if not in physical fact, from the American Revolution.
Preoccupied, while still living in America, with how revolutionary
regimes live up to or fall short of their socialist ideals,
American revolutionaries have failed to understand the problems
actually faced by these regimes after they come to power.
They have not understood the nature of the problem of accumulating
capital enough for industrialization, and that the
burden of this accumulation must be placed on the backs of
the workers—just as it was in all capitalist countries, and
especially on the backs of Negro workers in the United States—
unless they can get the needed capital from already developed
countries like the United States. But the United States will
share its resources with the underdeveloped countries only if
there is a social revolution in the United States. Which brings
us right back to the question of the American Revolution.
The American Revolution does not necessarily have to
start from economic grievances. Nor does it have to start with
the American working class in the lead. The development of
capitalism in the United States has generated more than enough contradictions to pose the question of the total social reorganization
of the country. Some of these contradictions relate to sheer
poverty and the workers' life in production. Others are just as
important and have even wider bearing on the quality of social
existence. Man is imaginative and creative. His needs go far
beyond the realm of the material.
What is man's greatest human need in the United States
today? It is to stop shirking responsibility and start assuming
responsibility. When Americans stop doing the one and start
doing the other, they will begin to travel the revolutionary
road. But to do this they must use as much creative imagination
in politics as up to now they have used in production. The
fact is that the more imaginative Americans have been in creating
new techniques of production, the less imaginative they
have been in creating new relations between people. Americans
today are like a bunch of ants who have been struggling all
summer long to accumulate a harvest and then can't decide
how to distribute it and therefore fight among themselves and
destroy each other to get at the accumulation.
The greatest obstacle in the way of the American people
beginning to behave like human beings rather than like
animals is the great American illusion of freedom.
Stop an American and begin to make some serious criticisms
of our society, and nine times out of ten his final defense will
be: "But this is the freest and finest country in the world."
When you probe into what he means by this, it turns out that
what he is really talking about is the material goods that he can
acquire in exchange for his birthright of political freedom. That
is, he is free to have an automobile, a TV, a hi-fi, and all kinds
of food, clothing, and drink as long as he doesn't offend anybody
he works for or anybody in an official capacity, and as
long as he doesn't challenge the accepted pattern of racial,
economic, and political relations inside the country or its
foreign policy outside. On these questions most Americans
absolve themselves from any responsibility by saying that all
that is "politics" and "I am not interested in politics." What
they really mean is that they are afraid to assume political responsibility
because it would mean jeopardizing their economic
and social status. No people in the world have more to say about the lack of free speech in Russia, China, Cuba, and
Ghana. The reason is that as long as they have these other
places to talk about, they can evade facing the silent police
state that has grown up inside America. If you casually mention
the police state to an American, the first thing that comes
to his mind is some other country. He doesn't see his own police
state.
That is because in the United States, more than in any
other country in the world, every man is a policeman over himself,
a prisoner of his own fears. He is afraid to think because
he is afraid of what his neighbors might think of what he
thinks if they found out what he was thinking, or what his boss
might think, or what the police might think, or the FBI, or the
CIA. And all because he thinks he has a lot to lose. He thinks
he has to choose between material goods and political freedom.
And when the two are counterposed, Americans today will
choose material goods. Believing they have much to lose, Americans
find excuses where there are no excuses, evade issues before
the issues arise, shun situations and conversations which
could lead to conflict, leave politics and political decisions to the
politicians. They will not regain their membership in the human
race until they recognize that their greatest need is no
longer to make material goods but to make politics.
But politics today in the United States is not just ordinary
politics made by ordinary politicans. Not since the 30's and
the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt has there been political statesmanship
in the United States. Roosevelt's problems and therefore
his responsibilities, as he made very clear in his First
Inaugural Address, were extraordinary. But Roosevelt's problems
were largely domestic. Today, in contrast, every issue, no
matter how local or domestic it may seem, has international
repercussions inherent in it from the very beginning.
In President Eisenhower's Farewell Address, he warned
the people of the growing power of the "military-industrial complex"
inside the country. Ike was speaking mainly of the actual
military power and personnel. He did not go into the way this
apparatus has been interwined with those who control the
economic processes of the country and with the various investigating
agencies which at every level control the thought processes of the population. All together, these now constitute
a military-economic-police bloc which was not elected by the
people and cannot be held responsible to the people but which
makes all the decisions controlling the life of the people.
This bloc has its present power because the United States
actually does have its back to the wall both domestically and
internationally. Domestically, it is dependent upon the war
economy for economic survival as a capitalist country, and has
been so dependent since the Great Depression of the 30's.
Internationally, it is dependent upon the military for protection
against the world revolutionary movement that is arising among
the have-not peoples of the world, and has been so dependent
since the 1949 Revolution in China and the Korean War. The
United States has lost all the spiritual power which underlies
political power of a peaceful kind.
It is the refusal of the American people to face this situation
openly and to assume responsibility for tackling it uncompromisingly
that gives the military-economic-police bloc its
strength. If the secret police were not so secret and silent, it
would be much easier to fight. An open enemy is the best
enemy. But the fear of the American people of clashing openly
with this bloc adds strength to it.
Most secret of all is the CIA, which even members of
Congress do not dare question. Yet the CIA has the power
to go into a country, organize a war or a revolution or a
counter-revolution, recruit among the American people for its
schemes; it has the funds and the staff at its disposal to fight
an underground war not only against the Russians but against
every country in the world.
The FBI is the secret police force closest to the lives of
the people. Unlike the FBI of the 30's which used to be hailed
as the great protector of the people against the criminal elements,
the FBI today functions chiefly as a political police
to pry into the private lives and thoughts of every American.
What the FBI does in complete secrecy, the House Un-American
Activities Committee does in semi-secrecy, having
the power to drag before it any individual or group which
actively challenges the status quo in this country. In this way it
dangles over all whom it queries the kind of public suspicion and silent condemnation from which there is only one way for
the individual to escape—to prove his or her loyalty to the
police state by becoming an informer for it.
If the leap that the American people have to take in order
to meet the problems of this new age of abundance were not
so great, the powers of the secret police would likewise not be
so great. In the 30's the problems were relatively simple. All
that was required was that the poor struggle against the rich,
who were the capitalists and whose failure was clear and
obvious.
Today in the 60's, the struggle is much more difficult.
What it requires is that people in every stratum of the population
clash not only with the agents of the silent police state
but with their own prejudices, their own outmoded ideas, their
own fears which keep them from grappling with the new
realities of our age. The American people must find a way to
insist upon their own right and responsibility to make political
decisions and to determine policy in all spheres of social existence
—whether it is foreign policy, the work process, education,
race relations, community life. The coming struggle is a
political struggle to take political power out of the hands of
the few and put it into the hands of the many. But in order to
get this power into the hands of the many, it will be necessary
for the many not only to fight the powerful few but to fight
and clash among themselves as well.
Notes
1 When I speak of "the union" without further qualification, I mean,
[return]
unless the context indicates otherwise, the United Automobile Workers
(UAW). This union displays in clearest form the main trends and developments
in the CIO as a whole, and in addition it is the union I know
best from long personal experience.
2 The phrase "Clear it with Sidney" originated at the Democratic
[return]
Convention in 1944 when Roosevelt said labor leader Sidney Hillman
should be consulted on the choice of a vice-presidential candidate.
3 I am not implying that Latin America constitutes the entire
[return]
United States Empire. But together with Canada, Latin America does
constitute the heart and core of the Empire, and both its problems and
its fate can best be studied there.