Syllabus for Black History Month Discussions

I. Quote from Bob Avakian: “There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.” (BAsics 1:1)

Question: Is this true? Why or why not?

II. From “The American Enterprise—Property and Slavery Peculiar Notions of “Freedom” and Profound Contradictions,” by Bob Avakian:

Think about this: Patrick Henry issues the cry, since made famous, “Give me liberty or give me death!”—while himself owning slaves, and vigorously defending and fighting for the “rights” of slaveowners. Another leading figure in the American revolution, Richard Henry Lee, champions the move for American independence and freedom, while forcing his slaves to carry his banner denouncing British taxation on people such as himself (the Stamp Act) as “chains of slavery”!

Question: What questions does this passage raise for you about the “Founding Fathers” of the U.S.?

III. Bob Avakian has written:

Over the 200 years that this Constitution has been in force, down to today, despite the formal rights of persons it proclaims, and even though the Constitution has been amended to outlaw slavery where one person actually owns another as property, the U.S. Constitution has always remained a document that upholds and gives legal authority to a system in which the masses of people, or their ability to work, have been used as wealth-creating property for the profit of the few. (Cited in “Two Constitutions, Two Different Systems, Two Different Futures for African-American People," Revolution #265, April , 2012)

Question: Is this true? Why or why not?

IV. Bob Avakian points out:

This system has decisively and fundamentally failed—betrayed—Black people at crucial points in its history. And in particular we can identify two crucial turning points after slavery was defeated in the Civil War… [L]ooking at this in broad historical terms. Here were these major turning points—after the Civil War and then again after World War 2, with Reconstruction and then with the Civil Rights Movement—where the question was sharply, directly, and decisively posed: will the system give everybody equal rights? And the system answered NO! It was not simply a matter that the ruling class would not do this, but more profoundly it was the fact that they could not. They could not because it would have torn up their whole system, it would have undermined their whole economic base and their whole superstructure to do this. ("How This System Has Betrayed Black People: Crucial Turning Points")

Question: What took place at these two historical turning points? Discuss Bob Avakian's analysis that the system "fundamentally failed—betrayed—Black people" at those turning points.

V. The following is a quote from The Oppression of Black People, The Crimes of This System and the Revolution We Need; section on "The Civil War”

As pointed to in the passage cited from Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, the Civil War itself came about because of the clash between two different economic and social systems: slavery, based on plantation farming in the South; and capitalism, based on factory and other wage-labor centered in the North. The slave owners needed more land because their plantation system of farming used up the land so fast, while the northern capitalists wanted to control the country as a whole, both for resources and to further develop their control of the national market. By the time of the Civil War, these two forces—these two social systems—were clashing on virtually every major question of economics. For example, factory production was just getting going in the North, and these northern capitalists wanted to erect high tariffs (in effect, taxes on imported goods) to secure the U.S. national market and “protect” their industries against the English capitalists, who could produce things much more cheaply; but the slave-holders insisted on low tariffs to enable them to easily trade with those same English manufacturers. And these basic economic conflicts found expression in politics, culture, and even religion—the Baptist and Methodist churches, among others, split into northern and southern branches over the “godliness” (or “ungodliness”) of slavery!

Why? Simply because people in the North had become enlightened? No. While there was a surge of more radical thinking in the North in the decades prior to the Civil War, and militant opponents of slavery such as Frederick Douglass and John Brown began to get a hearing and gain a following, this was ultimately an expression of more fundamental changes going on in the economic base of society—that is, the relations that people enter into to carry out production—and the intensifying contradictions within that economic base, and between that economic base and the political structure which had arisen on top of it.

In short, slavery had changed from being the stimulus that it was in the early days of capitalism into a fetter on the development of capitalism. The constitution that served the economic base of 1789—a constitution which legalized and institutionalized slavery—could no longer contain the intensified contradictions of 1860. Abraham Lincoln himself, the president of the United States during the time of the Civil War, was the political representative of the bourgeoisie—the factory-owners, railroad-owners, and other capitalists centered in the North—and he fought the war in their interests. In the view of Lincoln, the power of the slave states had to be at minimum sharply curtailed; and it was only when he was convinced that there was no other way forward that he went to war. Similarly, Lincoln delayed emancipating the slaves and then delayed allowing the slaves to enlist in the Union army until he was convinced that there was no other way to carry out his basic aim of “saving the Union.” Lincoln himself said:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

Discuss the nature of the clash that brought things to the point where the Civil War needed to be fought.

What were Lincoln’s views on the abolition of slavery?