By the League Revolutionary Education collective
Photo: John Partipilo and author at Tennessee Lookout
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The most reactionary ruling class forces in the United States have launched a massive attack on the reality of the Black experience in America. Black history is American history — and the denial and falsification of Black history is the denial and falsification of the history of America and the reality of America’s multiracial working class. Today’s political, cultural, and legal attacks on wokeness and Critical Race Theory (CRT) — the censorship of curricula from K-12 through college and graduate school, book banning in schools and libraries, fake news and lies — are ruling class tools in the intensifying motion toward fascism. Truth and knowledge, science and history are powerful weapons in our collective revolutionary arsenal. Juneteenth offers important lessons that inform our path to power.
Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom by Black folks who were stolen from their homelands and exploited as chattel slave labor to fuel capitalism’s rapacious drive for maximum profit. For centuries, the dehumanization of African peoples and the creation of the slavocracy in the Americas was central for establishing the United States as a world power and for the global expansion of capitalism. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote:
“Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor…”
The legacy of Juneteenth develops out of the transition in the United States from a capitalist system based largely on slave labor to the capitalist wage labor system. The Black freedom struggle in America precedes the Civil War, but erupts during this period of intense instability. The Civil War was a political war between sections of the ruling class to determine which form of capitalism would be dominant in America — industry fueled by wage labor in the North or agriculture driven by slave labor in the South.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. This news did not reach many enslaved Africans until two years later, when the Union army announced the freedom of more than 250,000 Africans in formerly Confederate held territory, Galveston Bay, Texas. On June 19, 1865, African Americans were now free from chattel slavery, marking our actual independence day — known as Juneteenth: Black Independence Day.
Reality check
The Emancipation Proclamation reads: “[A]ll persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, henceforward, and forever free.” It was a strategic political move to preserve the Union. While the Emancipation Proclamation freed some enslaved Africans, it was not a purely “benevolent” act. In 1862 Lincoln had written:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 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 save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union” (Italics added).
The Reconstruction era that followed the Union victory in the Civil War was short-lived and ended with the Compromise of 1877. Almost immediately the Ku Klux Klan — founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865 — and other violent paramilitary white supremacist groups formed to terrorize freed Blacks and white folks who supported abolition and Reconstruction governments. By the 1890s, Jim Crow constitutions and Black Codes were in place throughout the South along with violence, lynchings, widespread terror and destruction. Jim Crow rule legally ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — but it never ended as a de facto reality. The reforms of the 1960s and 1970s have been eviscerated. State violence, repressive laws, extralegal terror, lies and false narratives — hallmarks of fascist rule — are again on the rise.
Revolutionary awakening: the rise of Woke consciousness
The specter of white supremacy looming over the world is manifest in the culture and practice of the U.S. ruling class across the centuries and is congealed into the capitalist socioeconomic and political system that haunts us today. Although white supremacy seems as intangible as a spirit, its presence as an ideology is alive and bound to the body of capitalism.
In the 21st century, people around the globe are impacted by the many crises of capitalism — poverty, houselessness, famine, deepening exploitation, ecocide, racial and gender violence, intensifying fascism, and war. The global COVID pandemic exacerbated existing polarizations. The poor are getting poorer precisely because the rich are getting richer. In the United States, because of racial apartheid and discrimination, Black folks, in particular, and other oppressed peoples are disproportionately dispossessed and disposable.
Digital technology is the force driving shifts in the economy and society. This technology helps create the abundance to meet humanity’s needs and to heal the metabolic rift between humanity and nature. Digitization, automation, robotics and artificial intelligence make it possible to feed, house, and clothe the masses of people. But capitalism denies the global majority these necessities of life. Why? New technologies are not used to protect the planet or to ensure the wellbeing of humans and of all life. Rather, they are used to protect capitalist wealth and private property and to reproduce white supremacy, the ideology that maintains it.
However, a problem is arising for the ruling class. As conditions deteriorate, pauperizing and even killing huge swathes of working-class people — our critical consciousness once laid dormant is being awakened. Black folks, other oppressed peoples and genders, and many workers, who for a time had been pacified into bourgeois induced sleep, hypnotized by the “American Dream,” are now becoming what is described as “woke.”
Historically, woke comes out of the Black experience confronting racial oppression and state violence. Today, we are moving from critical race consciousness to class consciousness. Wokeness has come to include working class folks across race and gender who are in struggle and conscious of our common humanity and our common enemy.
Critical race theorists and other critical scholars try performing exorcisms — to disrupt racial hierarchies, to challenge white privilege, to destroy racism. But revolutionaries know that, in this case, to evict the spirit requires killing the body. For white supremacy to end, capitalism must die. To be woke means we have an awareness of exploitation, oppression, anti-blackness. We revolutionaries stand in true solidarity with Black experience as an expression of our unity as a multiracial and multigendered working class.
Knowledge, power and revolution: taking power to create our future
The only way the ruling class can win and can maintain power is to put out the “big lie” through the media, education, and politics. Their attack on wokeness — anti-wokeness — is their cover. Control over knowledge production and dissemination through all forms and levels of education, media and communication, and culture is power. In their motion to consolidate fascist rule, ruling class forces try to kill truth. But truth cannot and will not be silenced because it informs our consciousness, study, hope and vision, and our rising revolutionary movement.
The baseline for successful revolutionary transformation is understanding the science and history of the world as it really is. These are the tools of the working class in our struggle to take power. There has been pushback, protest and vocal opposition — in the streets, in the schools, on social media, and in the mainstream media — from scholars, teachers and professors, parents and students, librarians and authors, journalists, and even some elected officials on what is being taught on every level of education, what books are in our libraries, what lies are being put out in the media and political spaces.
Revolutionary pedagogy and practice, although not always understood as such, has been at the heart of what folks are fighting for. The fascist offensive is denying the history and ongoing reality of pervasive white supremacy as their tool for division and control of material conditions, cultural narrative and education, politics and social institutions. We must reject the denial of history to unmask its falsification. We must embrace the reality of our collective American history and affirm our diverse experiences. Woke revolutionary comrades must rally to create a future that is both necessary and possible — where we are all nurtured, safe, loved, free, and where we protect each other and the planet.
Published on April 23, 2023
This article originated in Rally!
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