American Negroes: On thp Verge of Revolution?
Rustin, Bayard
Is it correct to speak of "race rebellion," or "Negro rebellion"? Are America's Negroes on the verge of revolution? More than one newspaper and television commentator has already begun to draw...
...If independence revolutions are no model, what of social revolutions...
...As a minority, Negroes by themselves cannot bring about such a social revolution...
...Whatever separatist impulses exist among American Negroes cannot find appropriate models in the colonial world...
...the distinction is often overlooked in a middle-class culture that tends to lump the two together...
...It contains the petty criminal and antisocial elements...
...From the revolutionist point of view, the question is not whether steps could be taken to strengthen organization among the lumpenproletariat but whether that group could be a central agent of social transformation...
...The independence movements in colonial territories provide no model for the simple reason that American Negroes can have no geographical focus for nationalist sentiment...
...The distinction is important...
...Upon what classes do the advocates of rioting, the voices of apocalypse, base their revolutionary perspective...
...They can participate in it as a powerful and stimulating force...
...It is relatively unorganized, incohesive, unstable...
...From "A Way Out of the Exploding Ghetto," The New York Times Magazine, August 13, 1967...
...Numbers is not the only issue...
...In either case the decisive factor will be the political direction in which the majority will move...
...This is another way of posing the question I left hanging earlier: Who is rioting...
...or they can provoke a counterrevolution...
...The reality is that the revolutionary rhetoric now employed by some young Negro militants cannot create the preconditions for successful, or even authentic, revolution...
...Generally, the answer has been no...
...Moreover, American Negroes do not constitute a popular majority struggling against a relatively small white colonial ruling group —the ideal condition for guerrilla warfare...
...It has a relation to the production of goods and services, much of it is organized in unions...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan is correct in locating the riots in the "lower class" or, in the words of another controversial man, Karl Marx, in the "lumpenproletariat" or "slum proletariat...
...At least in the French and Russian revolutions revolutionary leaders and parties sought to mobilize fairly definable and cohesive socio-economic classes—workers, peasants, the middle classes —classes which, though oppressed or aggrieved, were part of the society they sought to transform...
...This is a more interesting subject because the phrase "social revolution" has been widely used by the civil-rights and liberal movements generally...
...Lower class does not mean working class...
...The latter is unemployed or marginally employed...
...Above all, unlike the working class, it lacks the sense of a stake in society...
...More than one newspaper and television commentator has already begun to draw comparisons between the ghetto uprisings and the French, Russian, Algerian, Irish, and Black African independence revolutions...
...That is, it would aim to create a new majority coalition capable of exercising political power in the interest of new social policies...
...By definition the coalition has to be interracial...
...The working class is employed...
...When the slum proletariat is black, its alienation is even greater...
...Some Black Power advocates have proclaimed the beginnings of guerrilla warfare and see the urban Negro as a counterpart to the Vietcong...
...Such action would be democratic...
...It enjoys a measure of cohesion, discipline and stability lacking in the lower class...
...Also important is the class content of revolt...
...But in this sense—and the sense in which I have been using it for 30 years—the term designates fundamental changes in social and economic class relations resulting from mass political action...
Vol. 14 • September 1967 • No. 5
