Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“The segregated church is a of race traceable to Enlightenment thinkers' theories on human being and byproduct of the sociopolitical construct belonging, which ordered bodies according to their physical appearance. The concept actually "signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of bodies.”

“The raceless gospel also encourages us to see race as it is a sociopolitical construct, built from the tip of our tongues up, a human invention and what Brian Bantum describes as "a tragic incarnation." In the end, it is an invitation so beautifully explained by mystic and theologian Howard Thurman, who said, "I have always wanted to be me without making it difficult for you to be you." ”

“I don't simply have a problem with race but believe that race is the problem with our shared human being and belonging. I have no interest in working with the word, so don't add this book to your anti-racism reading list. I am anti-race. Because there is no racial justice. Race was not created to be just. There is no racial equality. Race was not created with the belief that human beings are created equal.”

“the whole movement was…based on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves… should be directly emancipated or not, but whether the twenty million free Americans of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders; whether the vast territories of the Republic should become the nurseries of free states or of slavery…” -Karl Marx, October 25, 1861

“It did not escape the slaveholders' notice that a new power had arisen, the Northwest, whose population, which had almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already more or less equal to the white population of the slave states—a power which neither by tradition, temperament, nor way of life was itself be dragged from in the fashion of the old Northern states.” -Karl Marx

“Thus, while the Republicans prohibited any growth of slave territories, the Southern party laid claim to all territories as legally warranted domains. What they had tried, for instance, with Kansas imposing slavery on a territory against the will of the settlers themselves, by way of the central government—they now held up as a law for all Union territories.” -Karl Marx

“John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders admire as their statesman par excellence, declared in the Senate as early as 1847 that only the Senate offered the South the means of restoring a balance of power between South and North, that the extension of the slave territory was necessary to restore this balance, and that therefore the attempts of the South to create new slave states by force were justified.” -Karl Marx

“Hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill been passed, erasing the geographical boundary of slavery and making its introduction into new territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, fell upon Kansas, a bowie-knife in one hand and a revolver in the other…” -Karl Marx

“the Union had in fact become the slave of the 300,000 slaveholders who rule the South. This state of affairs had been brought about by a series of compromises which the South owed to its alliance with the Northern Democrats. All the periodic attempts made since 1817 to resist the ever increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had come to grief against this alliance.”

“Closely connected with this foreign policy…aimed at conquering new territory for the expansion of slavery and the rule of the slaveholders, was the resumption of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. Stephen A. Douglas himself declared in the Senate on August 20, 1859, that during the previous year more Negroes had been requisitioned from Africa than ever before in any single year…” -Karl Marx

“As in domestic policy, so also in the foreign policy of the United States the interests of the slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact purchased the presidential office by issuing the Ostend Manifesto, in which the acquisition of Cuba, whether by payment or by force of arms, is proclaimed as the great political task of the nation.”

“By the frame of the Government… people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief, and have with equal wisdom provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance no Administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four years.” -Abe Lincoln

“In any law upon this subject ought not all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and humane jurisprudence to be introduced, so that a free man be not in any case surrendered as a slave?…to provide by law for the enforcement of that clause in the Constitution which guarantees that "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States"?” -Abe Lincoln

“The freed people, the former abolitionists of whatever race, sex, or class had to contend with the consequences—angry white men in the South and greedy businessmen in the North.”

“Considering the remarkable sequence of events I have surveyed here, it is clear that some individuals are so placed that they can influence the course of history. Lincoln did so with the Emancipation Proclamation. He thereby started a revolution, but he did not live to finish it.”

“Karl Marx's conception of history bequeathed a theoretical puzzle to later historical materialists, namely, what is the role of the individual in history? Such powerful writers and thinkers as Plekhanov, Deutscher, Sartre, and Mandel debated the topic, often drawing attention to the fact that even deep-laid historical processes often depend on highly personal capacities and decisions.”

“Marx and Engels … with occasional misgivings, they had placed a wager that the Civil War would lead to slave emancipation, and that emancipation would in its turn pose the issue of votes for the freedmen. They further predicted more and larger labor struggles. Their predictions were borne out, although the new unions were eventually contained or defeated.”

“If the nonappearance of a US labor party marked a critical defeat for Karl Marx, the failure of the Republican Party to emerge from Reconstruction and its sequel as a party of bourgeois rectitude and reform registered a spectacular defeat for Lincoln's hopes for his party and country. After dominating Washington for half a century the Republicans were the party of cartels and corruption.”

“Both color-blindness and conscious racism prevented US labor from taking up the cause of the victims of white oppression in the South. Employers were often able to exploit and foster racial antagonism.”

“Eugene Debs was arrested for defying the government injunction, and read Marx's work in jail. Marx's ideas were themselves beginning to influence the culture of US radicalism, just as they were also, in their turn, shaped by the American experience of robber baron capitalism and desperate class struggle.”

“Eugene Debs's American Railway Union (ARU)... tried to organize the entire railroad industry. In 1892 the ARU forced major concessions from the Northern Union railroad, and its membership grew to 150,000. However, when the ARU showed that it could paralyze one half of the entire rail net-work, the administration of Grover Cleveland stepped in to break the strike through injunctions and imprisonments.”

“Prior to the triumph of the ultra racists in 1900 there were several movements which showed that white and black farmers and laborers could support the same goals; these included the Readjusters movement, which gained power in Virginia in the late 1870s, the Farmers' Alliance, the "fusion" movement in North Carolina, and many branches of Populism.”

“But appreciative as he [Engels] was, he insisted that the whole [workers] movement would lose its way unless it could develop a transformative program: "A new party must have a distinct platform," one adapted to American conditions. Without this, any "new party would have but a rudimentary existence." ”

“In 1887 Engels paid tribute to the giant strides being made by the American workers movement, embracing momentous class battles in Illinois and Pennsylvania, the spread of the Eight Hour Leagues, the growth of the Knights of Labor, the sacrifices that had established May 1 as International Labor Day, and the electoral achievements of the first state-level labor parties.”

“in the 1880s, female activists challenged the idea that a woman's place was in the home. While male labor organizers were prone to support the notion that the male worker should earn a "family wage," the socialist organizations, especially those influenced by the German SPD...urged that women would not be truly emancipated until they entered the world of paid labor on equal terms with men.”

“The freed people of the South and the labor organizers of the North not only faced physical threats but also found their attempts to organize and negotiate assaulted in the name of the same conservative strain in free labor ideology—that which construed any regulation or combination as a violation of "freedom of contract." The Republicans and Democrats deferred to this doctrine and the Supreme Court codified it.”

“There was orchestrated violence in the North, but it was put into the shade by Jim Crow. During the years 1884-1899, between 107 and 241 African Americans were murdered each year by lynch mobs, with total victims numbering more than 3,000. Lynchings were concentrated in the South and a great majority of the victims were black, but… sometimes targeted white labor organizers, Chinese, and Mexicans.”

“The double defeat of Reconstruction had suppressed black rights in the South and curtailed labor rights in the North. Jim Crow in the South and the widespread use of Pinkerton's men and other goons in the North were both victories for privatized violence and a minimal view of the state.”

“The strike leadership required the authorities to enact a series of radical measures, including restoration of wage cuts and the generalization of the eight-hour day, but were thwarted when a Committee of Public Safety set up by the leading men of the city raised a militia and sent it to crush the rebellion and end the strike.”

“African Americans played a prominent role in the St. Louis action, a fact harped on by municipal authorities and the local press in their attacks on the strike. A report of the general meeting convened by the strike leadership noted: "The chairman introduced the Negro speaker, whose remarks were frequently applauded. " ”