BLACK BANKING
The tiny part of the banking industry in the U.S. which is owned by African-Americans and
whose customer base is usually almost entirely African-Americans. These banks are nearly
always small, not very profitable (as compared to giant white-owned banks), and provide
little support even for the feeble and generally hopeless efforts in American bourgeois
society to promote Black Capitalism.
“[F]or over a century, black communities have been urged by black
and white leaders to rely on these segregated black banks in order to reach individual
and community prosperity. What comes into stark focus as we study these banks over
time is the tangible barrier to prosperty presented by segregation, racism, and
government credit policy. The effects of these forces on black banks demonstrate that
successful banking and wealth accumulation would remain perpetually elusive in a
segregated economy. Housing segregation, racism, and Jim Crow credit policies create
an inescapable economic trap for black communities and their banks. Black banking has
been an anemic response to racial inequality that has yielded virtually nothing in
closing the wealth gap.
“Despite these grim economic
realities, each of the following leaders has championed black banking: Frederick
Douglass, Booker T. Washington, President Lincoln, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey,
Center Woodson, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, the Black Panthers,
President Johnson, President Nixon, Alan Greenspan, President Carter, President
Reagan, President Clinton, and President Obama among others. On issues of race, there
is little else that these leaders would have agreed on. Black-owned banks represented
something different to each of them, but to all they held the promise that a
successful black bank would lead to prosperity for blacks regardless of external
circumstances.” —Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial
Wealth Gap (2017), pp. 1-2.
[With regard to Malcolm X, he
did once say “show me a capitalist and I’ll show you a bloodsucker” (quoted in Earl
Ofari, The Myth of Black Capitalism (1976), p. 3.) But Ms. Baradaran also
quotes him as asking: “Why should white people be running the banks of our community?”,
which is apparently taken from Malcom X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements
(1965), p. 39. While it is therefore true that Malcolm X was hostile to capitalism
and even hostile to wealthy Blacks, it seems he was much more of a Black nationalist
than he was an anti-capitalist. The Black Panther Party was in its best period a
consciously anti-capitalist organization, but this greatly weakened or perhaps even
disappeared in its last years. In the early 1970s they urged Blacks to “Support the
businesses that support our community.” (Baradaran, p. 189.) And Baradaran quotes the
Black sociologist Robert Staples as saying, “one of the most curious turnabouts was
the Panthers’ embrace of Black Capitalism.”
[Ms. Baradaran is a liberal
reformer who thinks that this essentially total failure of Black banks to promote the
economic development of Black people and increase their wealth is the fault not of
capitalism, but of government policies which support giant white-owned banking
corporations and discriminate against Black-owned banks. In reality, while such
government discrimination does indeed exist and aggravate the problem, the vast
and still-increasing profits of white-owned banks and financial corporations
also does not flow down to working-class white people. The economic wealth of
the entire working class—white, Black and others—has been slowly declining for
the last half century, since the beginning of the Long
Slowdown in the rate of growth of the U.S economy around 1973. In addition, the
capitalist system absolutely needs a large army of the unemployed to keep wages down
and the workers divided, and this in turn promotes the existence of an “underclass”,
which for racist reasons includes a great many African-Americans. Black banks and
Black capitalism no more work in the economic interests of Black people generally
than white-owned banks and white-owned capitalist corporations work in the interests
of white people. Despite what Ms. Baradaran believes, capitalism really is the
central problem here. —Ed.]
“The black ghetto and the white suburb were created by heavy state
intervention. A government credit infrastructure propelled the growth of the American
economy and relegated the ghetto economy to a permanently inferior position. The
government-created credit apparatus did not cross the red lines that policymakers
drew around the ghetto, and within the color line a separate and unequal economy took
root. If free-market capitalism is understood as allowing the laws of supply and
demand to operate without state intervention, then the black ghetto was certainly
engaged in capitalism, but at a time when white America was not. [Presumably she
is saying this because the capitalist state is now partially merged with and
supporting giant white-owned banks, but is not doing the same for small truly
private black-owned banks. —Ed.] Black capitalism, as it turned out, meant capitalism
only for blacks.” —Mehrsa Baradaran, ibid., p. 6. [Yes, the racist largely
white American ruling class has indeed considerably aggravated the economic situation
for African-Americans as compared with whites. But, again, this only compounds the
basic reality that capitalism, whether owned and controlled by whites or blacks, is
not at all in the interests of the workers and masses, period. —Ed.]
BLACK BELT THESIS
The theory or viewpoint that African-Americans not only have a moral right to reclaim
their ancestral homeland in the Black Belt area of the American Southeast as their own, but
that they absolutely should do so, and that any opposition to doing so (even on the
part of Blacks!) is a white racist point of view.
Of course, what people have a right
to do, and what it is actually in their own true interests to do, can be very
different things, as certainly seems to be the case here.
“Though the majority of Black people have been dispersed from their
homeland in the U.S., millions remain in this ‘Black Belt’ area, mainly in the
cities, and millions in the North still have ties with the deep South. Though the
majority of Blacks living in the North were born there, 3 in 10 were born in the
South, most in the ‘Black Belt’ area. The dispersal of millions of Blacks from the
‘Black Belt’ in the last several decades has been the result of economic compulsion;
and often the same kind of terror that was used to force Blacks back onto the
plantations after the Civil War and Reconstruction was used after WW II to force
them off, when it became most profitable for the imperialists. For all these reasons
the working class and its Party upholds the right of Black people to return to and
reclaim their homeland.
“The right of self-determination,
the right of nations to establish their own independent state, is a key aspect of
equality between nations, and the proletariat supports this right in order to unite
workers of all nations in the common struggle against imperialism. The proletariat
and its Party in the U.S. upholds the right of Black people to self-determination,
the right to secede from the rest of the U.S. and set up a separate state in the
general area of the ‘Black Belt.’
“But at the same time the
right to form a separate state is not the same thing as the obligation to do
so, and upholding the right to secede is not necessarily the same thing as saying
secession is correct. The proletariat and its Party does not advocate this separation
for Black people nor favor it under present and foreseeable conditions. Nor does it
see that reconstituting Black people in the deep South in order to exercise their
right of self-determination is the main thrust and highest goal of the Black people’s
struggle. Self-determination is a legitimate demand for Black people, but it is not
the main demand.
“The main demands are those
common to all oppressed nationalities in the U.S. The main thrust of the Black
people’s struggle is against these common forms of national oppression, against class
exploitation, for proletarian revolution as the means to end both, and for socialism
and communism as the highest goal.”
—Programme and Constitution
of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (1975), pp. 122-3. [In the almost
40 years since this was written the ties of most Blacks in the North to the “Black
Belt” South have further weakened, and the actual feasibility of establishing an
economically viable separate country in that area have further diminished. However,
the general point of view in this passage still seems correct to me. —S.H.]
“The Black Belt Theory [is] a dogmatist and narrow nationalist
fantasy under today’s conditions, [and] is based on various resolutions on the Black
national question passed by the Communist International (Comintern) in the 1920s and
1930s. It holds that the heart of the struggle for Black liberation is and should be
for self-determination, the right to form a separate country in the Black Belt area
of the South (a large, crescent shaped area in the South, named for the color of its
soil).
“Those who argue for this
theory try to conceal their opportunism behind the fact that Black people are a
nation and that this nation was forged in, and its people once lived primarily as
sharecroppers and small farmers in, the Black Belt. But this theory ignores the
tremendous changes in the conditions under which Black people are oppressed and
exploited which have occurred since World War I and especially since World War II.
Today Black people are overwhelmingly workers in the Northern and Southern cities
and suffer national oppression under these conditions. Their struggle and demands
reflect this central fact....
“For more on the Black Belt
Theory, see the article, ‘Living Socialism and Dead Dogmatism: The Proletarian
Line and the Struggle Against Opportunism on the National Question in the U.S.,’
reprinted from Red Papers 6 in The Communist, Vol. 1, No. 2.” —Bill
Klingel and Joanne Psihountas, “Important Struggles in Building the Revolutionary
Communist Party, USA” (Oct. 1978), p. 48, online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Pamphlets/ImportantStrugglesInBuildingTheRCPUSA-1978.pdf
The article referenced in The Communist is online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/TheCommunist/TheCommunist-RCP-02-May1977.pdf
BLANQUI, Louis Auguste (1805-1881)
Dedicated French revolutionary and utopian communist. He was the leader of a succession of
secret revolutionary societies, participated in several conspiracies to seize political
power, and as a consequence of the failure of these plots ended up spending over 36 years
in prison. It has aptly been said of him that whenever a revolutionary upsurge struck
France Louis Blanqui was not a leader of it—because he was already in prison! Marx
and Engels admired Blanqui for his revolutionary enthusiasm and dedication, but they strongly
criticized him for his conspiratorial strategy and failure to understand the necessity of
organizing the masses for revolution, and making the revolution a mass-based phenomenon.
Blanqui himself had little knowledge about how to organize the masses, had little faith in
them or their potential, and actually did not really trust the masses. He thought that once
one of his conspiratorial plots was successful he would still not be able to fully trust
the masses for some time or institute democracy. In this he showed his pronounced
paternalistic attitudes toward the people. (That is not a
complement!)
“The Blanquists, Lenin wrote, expected ‘that mankind will be
emancipated from wage-slavery, not by the proletarian class struggle, but through a
conspiracy hatched by a small minority of intellectuals’. Substituting actions by a
secret clique of conspirators for the work of a revolutionary party, they did not take
into account the actual situation required for a victorious uprising and neglected
links with the masses.” —Note 66, Lenin, SW 3 (1967).
“BLOCK UNIVERSE”
In physics and cosmology in contemporary bourgeois society the ancient mystical idea that “All
is One”, and that there is no such thing as change (or time!), is still all the rage. One
popular version of this nonsense is the “block universe” theory, sometimes also called
“eternalism”. The “block universe” refers to the whole history of the universe at once. That
is, it abstracts away from particular times, places and conditions. And, what do you know, if
you abstract away (ignore) all changes and references to time, then there are no changes, and
time is “unreal”. How about that! (Talk about daft!) Here is one cosmologist’s
“explanation” of this dopey theory:
“This is a timeless picture, because it refers to the whole history of
the universe at once. There is no preferred moment of time, no reference to what time it
is now, no reference at all to anything corresponding to our experience of the present
moment. No meaning to ‘future’ or ‘past’ or ‘present’....
“The picture of the history of the
universe, taken as one, as a system of events connected by causal relations, is called
the block universe. The reason for that perhaps peculiar name is that it suggests
that what is real is the whole history at once—the allusion is to a block of stone, from
which something solid and unchanging can be carved....
“These ... arguments lead to a view
of nature that denies the reality of the present moment and instead speaks of nature in
terms of the block universe picture in which what is real is only the entire history of
the world taken as one.” —Lee Smolin, Time Reborn (2013), pp. 57, 58 & 94. [For
some short reviews of this book see:
https://www.massline.org/ScienceGrp/TimeReborn.htm]
“... natural philosophy, particularly in the Hegelian form, erred
because it did not concede to nature any development in time, any ‘succession’ but only
‘co-existence’.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring, Preface to the 1885 edition, MECW
25:12. [Contemporary physics and cosmology in bourgeois society, though no longer
explicitly Hegelian, often continues this general sort of philosophical idealism. —Ed.]
BLOODY SUNDAY MASSACRE (Russia — 1905)
“On January 9, 1905, over 140,000 St. Petersburg workers carrying
gonfalons and icons, marched to the Winter Palace to submit a petition to the tsar.
The march was staged by the priest Gapon, an agent of the secret police, at a time
when the strike of the Putilov workers, which began on January 3 (16), had already
spread to the other factories in the city. The Bolsheviks exposed Gapon’s venture,
warning the workers that the tsar might unleash a massacre. The Bolsheviks were
right. On orders from the tsar, the troops met the demonstrating workers, their
wives and children with rifle shots, sabres and Cossack whips. More than a thousand
workers were killed and five thousand wounded. January 9, or Bloody Sunday as it
came to be known, sparked off the 1905 Revolution.” —Endnote 113, LCW 31.
BLOWBACK
The unintended negative consequences of a policy or action.
This term was invented by the American
CIA to describe some of the negative consequences (even from their
own reactionary bourgeois perspective) of the overthrow they engineered of the elected
Mosaddegh government in Iran in 1953. Of course no class,
movement or political party is totally immune from making mistakes which lead to consequences
they do not desire. But the U.S. government and its “intelligence” agencies, because of their
notorious stupidity, have been particularly prone toward doing this. Chalmers Johnson, who
was once a consultant to the CIA himself (but who later became an opponent of American
imperialism) wrote a well-known book with the title Blowback (2000) which documents
many such episodes, though still from a bourgeois, anti-communist perspective.
“Officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented [the term
blowback] for their own internal use… [It] refers to the unintended consequences of policies
that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign
acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often
turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.” —Chalmers Johnson, explaining the
term ‘blowback’ in his book by that same name.
The region of the American Southeast in which the soil is a dark black color. This is also
the region where most Black slaves were held on plantations during the slave era and where,
in the aftermath of slavery, the African-American populations remained quite high. However,
during the 20th century a large part of this Black or African-American population moved to
northern industrial states to find jobs, especially during and after World War II. So since
then it is no longer true that the Black Belt is the exclusive, or even primary, home
region of Black Americans.