[A-List] Martin Luther King, Jr:/The Martin Luther King You Don't See on ...

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"Class" is somethihng Melvin P obviously knows little if anything  about
even--especially--using the word "class" in varied senses.
 
Jim C.
 
 
Comment 
 
Professor Cravens comment on King are utterly devoid of history and any  
class perspective in which to judge Dr. King. His entire comments are based on  
Dr. King's sex affairs, which he claims made his less effective and somehow  
hampered the African American peoples movement. The difference between a Dr.  
King Jr. and a Malcolm X or a  or a WEB Dubois and a Booker Washington has  very 
little to do with sex and can only be understood in a class framework or  what 
political tendency they expressed in a given historical period.
 
Dr. King was an "Uncle Tom." Let deal with the class thing first, in  
respects to Dr. Martin Luther King social and political position - role, in the  
African American Liberation struggle. 
 
Uncle Tom is a fictional character from the novel "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," a  
novel in  American history that literally alerted the thing of the people  of 
America concerning slavery as an institution and the need for it to end. 
 
Uncle Tom’s world was of slavery and he worked in the big house of the  
plantation. Uncle Tom was beat to dead - whipped until dead, because he refused  to 
beat a female slave.  So was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Uncle Tom  was beat 
to death by a slave named Sambo. Like Judas and Pontius Pilot, no one  names 
there child Sambo. 
 
Uncle Tom was a "House Negro" as it is called, or in the words of Malcolm  X, 
"a house nigger." For the bourgeois nationalist ideologue, being a "house  
nigger" is flat . . . a social position unworthy of examination or history: a  
sell-out and rat bastard. In fact, for the bourgeois nationalist  ideologue, 
the "big house" itself is bad and evil and needs no explanation.  What in fact 
is the "big house" that was the economic, educational and  administration 
center for plantation slavery? 
 
Master and his family lived in the house but this was no mere house of just  
any kind of slavery. Plantation slavery - Southern style, was not patriarchal  
relations of the ancient world where social structures and systems as 
inherited  culture gyrates around deploying the slave on the basis of the securing of 
 simply use-values, in contradistinction to value production or production 
for  purposes of exchange. Under the former, slave labor tied to necessities 
rather  than exchange, the system more or less allowed slaves to gain their 
freedom or  blend into the social life of the family and be recognized as "family" 
- after  some determined period of serving. To a degree this feature was 
present during  our period of indentured slavery - servants. 
 
As cotton became King things changed. Imagine the mass production of new  
cotton clothes rather than clothing made from oily wool. The spinning gins of  
Marx Capital, and England displacing "Egyptian cotton" is no imaginative  
narrative but life in the mid 18000s, described from an economic materialists  
revolutionary standpoint.  The "best thing since cotton" and its  significance has 
been lost to history, defeated in my lifetime at the brutal  hands of 
polyester and John Troyota’s suit in "Saturday Night Fever." 
 
(Note: I never went polyester and dressed as did the best paid industrial  
workers of Detroit. Our attire was legendary and historical. In Detroit, my  
generation would iron our blue jeans - denim, and crease them as did ole Master  
with his white cotton suit. In this particular culture most of the men ironed  
their own clothes because the women had long ago rebelled and made it clear 
that  "I ain‘t doing shit. My mother, bless her heart and soul would set up the 
 ironing board and all six of us would start crying, begging daddy to stop 
moma  from ironing our clothes because we liked them a certain way. Daddy would 
say,  "Ardell, you trying to do all the work," to which she would reply, "I 
wasn’t  doing shit in the first place. I’m setting up the ironing board for y’
all cause  yall wait to the last minute and the kinds need their school clothes 
done by  8:00. ). 
 
(Note 2: there is much made of the fact that Uncle Tom wore the cast off  
clothes of Master . . .or rather Mistra - "the Man." This is because slaves did  
not have money and most slave clothes were made from stiff burlap and would 
itch  you to death. Soon as we got money and went North, who did we press our 
denim  plants like . . . Mistra or rather Master. Can you see Master sipping 
mint  juleps in the sweltering Mississippi sun. Jesus . . . This kind of 
narrative  once made my stomach hurt because I was not mature enough to be honest with 
the  keyboard and this further trapped a generation into overwhelming feeling 
of  guilt that hampered our investigation of class phenomenon within a 
revolutionary  Marxist framework). 
 
O.k. . . . . the story. 
 
Slavery in the American South, firmly drawn into the vortex of   capitalism 
altered the economic essence of master-slave relations, converting  master into 
a capitalist planter on the one hand and the slave population into  
proletarians in chains.  Slavery here was a value producing society using  rudimentary 
tools of production or a technology of the pre-electro-mechanical  era. 
 
Uncle Tom represented a strata - a narrow layer, not very much different  
than trade union representatives during the ascendancy and peaking of the  
industrial epoch. "Tom" is not so much a "black thing" but a class thing that is  
dubbed "Uncle Tom" to indicate that this social position amongst African  
Americans - as a people, originated in slavery and the plantation system. 
 
Tom’s contradictory role flowed from his social position between field hand  
and Master - Mistra. Tom would get you a sandwich and sneak and teach one how 
to  read words and the Northern sky so that one could plot escape North. Tom 
would  tell you when it was best to escape at night and when the hounds were 
sleep. 
 
Tom was beat to death because he refused to beat a female slave. If master  
expressed the bourgeoisie as a class and he did in its Southern variant, then  
the field slave represented the absolute lowest segment of the proletariat and 
 Tom’s social position was higher than field salve. 
 
(Note 3: I liken trade union leaders to Uncle Tom the person and  
personification of a certain class tendency and I was a trade union  representative and 
of the highest strata of industrial workers in America. I was  or rather 
inherited the Uncle Tom legacy and within this legacy became a  communist and 
Marxists.) 
 
(Note 4: the various Indian peoples in the USNA,  pushed unto  reservations, 
did not enter the industrial order on the same curve as blacks or  rather 
Negroes in America - African Americans.  During the 1970s a popular  term 
expressing the Uncle Tom phenomenon amongst Indians was "apples" - red on  the outside 
and white on the inside. This was funny as shit to me because it was  a 
popular imaginative saying expressing the circumstance of the middle strata,  
connected by a thousand threads to the institutional administration of bourgeois  
rule. Class orientation makes it impossible for me to forget  that this is  the 
exact same social position of the trade union leaders - no matter what their  
personal ideology or politics, so I end up in some "Uncle Tom stuff," by way 
of  the trade union movement and as a communist I had to fight for leadership  
wherever I was at, period. Why? To sell papers and spread the communist 
gospel.) 
 
More later, because the phenomenon of Tom . . . Mr. Uncle Tom if you will,  
and the phenomena of the black leader are not identical. Tom arose on the basis 
 of bourgeois slavery and class fragmentation characteristic of any modern 
class  society.  This was not ancient slavery where the codes of the Sumerian  
Harrmarbi applied.  Modern classes and class stuff is what we are looking  at 
and it happens to be what the American people want to hear. 
 
I swear the America people are very tied of politicians and intellectual  
talking about who had sex with whom as an explanation of their economic life and  
the direction of the social struggle. 
 
This thing called "the black leader thing,"  is bound up with the post  Civil 
War era and the fascist counter-revolution and the importation of Jim Crow  
from the North to the South as the institutional basis of Southern fascism. Jim 
 Crow origins as a system is in the North not the South. 
 
"The Strange Career of Jim Crow" by C. Van Woodard is magnificent and is  the 
book that reared a generation of communist on the color question in America.  
Please . . . This is a must have book. 
 
Professor Cravens comment on King are utterly devoid of history and any  
class perspective in which to judge Dr. King. His entire comments are based on  
Dr. King's sex affairs. The difference between a Dr. King Jr. and a Malcolm  X 
or a  or a WEB Dubois and a Booker Washington has very little to do with  sex 
and can only be understood in a class framework or what political tendency  
they expressed in a given historical period.
 

Melvin P.
 
 
 



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