Blacks’ Wrath Had the Rotten Pillars of the Bourgeois and Democratic “Civilization” Crumbling

As the racket of the “black revolt” in California waned, before international conformism buried that “unfortunate” event under a thick blanket of silence and the “enlightened” bourgeois anxiously tried to identify the “mysterious” causes that made the “peaceful and regular” functioning of the democratic mechanism jam, few observers from both sides of the Atlantic found solace in remembering that after all explosions of collective violence were no news in the US. For example, one just as serious happened – with no follow‑up – in 1943 in Detroit.

But the new, blazing episode of not just vaguely popular but proletarian wrath carries something that is profoundly new to those following with passion and hope and not just cold objectivity.

That is what has us saying: “The black revolt has been oppressed; long live the black revolt!”

The change – for the history of the struggles for the emancipation of black wage and under wage workers and certainly not for the history of class struggles in general – is the right on time concurrence between the pompous and rhetoric presidential promulgation of civil and political rights and the break out of the impersonal, collective, “uncivilized” undermining wrath of the “recipients” of such “magnanimous” gesture. Between the latest try to entice the tortured slave with a miserable, cheap carrot and the immediate refusal of that very slave to get blindfolded and bend to the old master.

Brutally and under no instruction – not from their leaders, in great part more Gandhist than Gandhi himself nor from the “communism” of URSS stamp as “l’Unità” [l’Unità was the official newspaper of the stalinist Partito Comunista Italiano] zealously reminded the readers of its rejection and disapproval of violence – but tamed by the hard lesson imparted by the ways of social life, blacks in California shouted to the world the simple and atrocious truth on political and civil equality amounting to nothing as long as economic disequality is effective. They did so with energy and action, without possessing theoretical consciousness of it and with no need for articulate language. They expressed that economic disequality is overcomed by overturning with force the bases of a society divided in classes and not through laws, decrees, sermons and homilies.

It is this brutal laceration of the fabric of legal pretenses and democratic hypocrisies that has discombobulated – and it could not be otherwise – the bourgeoisie while it has filled and could have not but filled us marxists with enthusiasm. And it is this very laceration that must make those proletarians – historically white skinned – that are slumbering in the false luxury of the metropolises of capitalism meditate.

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When the North, already on the track of full capitalism, launched its crusade for the emancipation of slavery that reigned in the South, it was not for humanitarian grounds or to honor the undying principles of 1789. It was because breaking the chains of a patriarchal precapitalist economy was necessary in order to “free” labour power, a massive resource to be offered to the hungry monstrosity of Capital.

Before the Civil War, the North was already encouraging slaves to run from southern plantations.

The North was too attracted by the fantasy of having at its disposal a labour force that would have offered itself to the market at the lowest prices. Besides this direct benefit, it would have also ensured a reduction of the wages of those wage workers that were already employed, or at least ensured that their wages would have not further increased.

During and after the war, that process picked up speed fast, coming to be universal.

It was a necessary step in history to get out the limits of an extremely underdeveloped economy. Marxism saluted that very step and not because it ignored the fact that black labour force, “liberated” in the South, would find in the North an already prepared mechanism of exploitation, under certain aspects, even more cruel.

In the words of Capital, blacks would have been free only to bring their black skin to the labour market to have it tanned.

Blacks were freed from the chains of the Southerner slavery but also from the protective shield of an economy and society based on personal and human relations instead of impersonal and dishuman ones. They were free meaning they were on their own, vulnerable, defenceless.

In truth, the slave that fled to the North realized he was not less inferior than before and that is because he was less paid, lacked professional qualifications, was confined inside new ghettos as a soldier of the reserve army of labour and a potential menace breaking apart the connective tissue of private property’s regime and private appropriation. He was segregated and discriminated against as someone who shouldn’t look at himself as a man but as nothing more than a working animal – therefore selling himself short without asking for more or for better.

Now, a century after his supposed “emancipation”, he has been granted “full” civil rights in the very age his average income is incredibly inferior compared to the one of his white fellow citizen, his wage is half of what his white brother’s wage is and his companion’s wage is a third of what the wage of a white worker’s companion is.

In the very age the golden metropolises of business confine him in ghettos that are terrifying for their misery, sickness and vice, segregating him behind the invisible walls of prejudices, traditions and police regulations.

In the very age unemployment that the bourgeois hypocrisy classifies as “technologic” (meaning that is “inescapable”, a price that has to be paid in order to make progress, a fault that is not on the present society) claims the most victims among black ranks as they are the ones of the basic labourers and lumpen responsible for filthy and strenuous task.

In the very age that while he is equal to his white fellow soldier in the eyes of death on the battlefields, he has been made completely unequal to the eyes of policemen, judges, IRS agents, factory owners, union bonzes and his hovel’s owners.

It is also true – and inconceivable for zealots – that the burst of the black revolt caught fire in California where the average black wage earner makes more than on the East coast. But it is indeed in those lands of booming capitalism and fictitious proletarian “wealth” that unequal treatment between people of different skin is stronger. It is right there that the ghetto, already defined on the Atlantic coasts, is precipitously tightening in front of the ruling class – which is white!

It is the hypocrisy of an egalitarianism jesuitically written on paper but negated in practice in a society carved by very deep class furrows that infuriated black people manfully bursted against. It was no different from the outbreak of anger of the white proletarians dizzily drawn and then dumped in new industrial centers of advanced capitalism, squashed in bidonvilles, shanty towns, in the neighborhoods of the very Christian bourgeois society where they are “free” to sell their labour power in order to… avoid starvation. It will be no different every time the sacrosanct fury of the dominated, exploited and if it was not enough, scorned classes will outbreak!

McIntyre, cardinal of Holy Mother Church, exclaimed: «A premeditated revolt against the law, the rights of the neighbor and the maintenance of order!» as if the novel slave with no chains at his feet had reasons to respect the very law that bends him to the ground and keeps him on his knees. As if blacks, “neighbors” of the whites, knew that they had “rights” or they could have ever detected in a society based upon the lying trinomial of freedom, equality and brotherhood something different than disorder elevated to a principle.

«Rights are not conquered with violence», shouted Johnson.

That is a lie.

Black people remember, even if it is just by hearsay, that white people secured the rights they were denied in the English metropolis in a long lasting war. They know that whites and blacks, temporarily unified, seized, in an even longer war, a ragged fragment of “emancipation” to this day imperceptible and distant.

Everyday, they see and hear the chauvinistic rhetoric glorifying the slaughter of the Native Americans that were opposing the march of the Founding Fathers towards new lands and “rights”. They see (and hear about) the crude brutality of the pioneers of the West “redeemed” from the civilization of the Bible and Alcohol.

What was that, if not violence?

They obscurely understood that there is no crux in American, or every other country, history that has not been settled through force, and there’s no “right” that is not the resultant of the clash, often bloody and always violent, between the forces of the past and the ones of the future.

What has peacefully waiting for a hundred years for some magnanimous concessions from whites achieved for blacks besides the little that the occasional outburst of anger has been able to rip from the stingy and cowardly hands of the owners even if just out of fear?

And how has the governator Brown, defender of the rights whites felt were being threatened by the revolt, answered if not with the democratic violence of assault rifles, nightsticks, tanks and the declaration of martial law?

What is this if not the experience of the oppressed classes under any sky, of any skin color and “racial” origin?

Blacks in Los Angeles, no matter if pure proletarians or lumpenproletarians, that declared “Our war is here, not in Vietnam” conveyed a conception not different from the one of those men that “climbed to the sky” in the Paris Commune or in Petrograd, destroyers of the myths of order, national interest, civilizing wars and announcers of a humane civilization at last.

* * *

Bourgeois, don’t be comforted by the thought that this distant event does not concern you, that the racial issue does not arise in Italy.

The racial issue is a social issue which is increasingly evident these days.

Make that the unemployed and underemployed of our tattered South do not locate the valve of emigration anymore. Make that they cannot rush to get flayed beyond the sacred borders any longer.

Or to get killed in tragedies not caused by bad luck, unpredictable atmospheric oddities or, who knows, evil eye even but caused by the thirst for profit of Capital. Its apprehension to cut the costs of materials, housing, transports, safety equipment just to secure higher margins of unpaid labour and maybe even profit off the rebuilding process following those tragedies that are inevitable and anything but unexpected – and always hypocritically wept.

Make the bidonvilles of our manufacturing cities and moral capitals (!!) flooded – more than they already are these days – with pariahs with no jobs, food and reserves and there will you have an italian “racism”, already blatant in the complaints of the Northerners against the “barbaric” and “uncivilized” Southerners.

It’s the social structure we are damned to live in today that raises those abominations and it is under its ruins that they will cease to exist.

That is what the Californian “black revolt” warns and reminds those that are oblivious and sleeping in the apparent slumber of wellness, drugged by the democratic and reformist opium. A revolt that is not distant and exotic but very present among us. Premature and defeated but herald of victory nonetheless!