Workers World in 1967
Published Mar 6, 2008 10:16 PM
Editor’s Note: Workers World is in its 50th year of publication.
Throughout 2008, we intend to share with our readers some of the paper’s
content over the past half century. The following article on the historic
Newark rebellion was originally published on the front page of WW in the issue
dated July 20, 1967. The article was written by the late theoretical leader and
chairperson of Workers World Party, Sam Marcy. The news article alongside
Marcy’s article explains that the rebellion began on July 13, 1967, the
day after Newark police arrested a Black cab driver, John William Smith, for
driving “too close behind a police car.” They beat Smith in the
police station and charged him with resisting arrest. During his arraignment
Smith shouted into a microphone: “There was absolutely no resistance!
That is a cover story. They caved in my ribs, busted a hernia and put a hole in
my head. They did the damage.”
When word spread about what had happened to Smith, the Black masses came
out and pelted the station. Mayor Hugh Addonizio ordered an
“investigation” of charges of police brutality to be carried out by
the police themselves. The uprising then began and lasted four days. Police
stations were attacked and squad cars and stores burned. The ruling class
called in hundreds of state troopers and 2,000 national guardsmen who together
with the police killed 25 men, women and children and wounded more than a
thousand.
The legacy of gross unemployment and police brutality, the root cause of
the 1967 rebellion, continues forty-one years later in Newark, with an official
poverty rate of nearly one-third of the population.
Long live the Newark Rebellion
Glorious answer to master class
Armed resistance turning point in struggle
By Sam Marcy
They did not die in vain. Those who were brutally murdered, mercilessly beaten,
shot at, wounded and jailed will forever be remembered by the oppressed and
exploited everywhere as symbols of glorious resistance to the unendurable
oppression of a master class whose arrogance, cruelty, and indifference to
human life has few parallels in history.
The embattled people of Newark have written a truly momentous chapter in the
history of the liberation struggle. Their deeds are still reverberating
throughout the four corners of the earth. It is no exaggeration to say that
they have drawn the attention of practically all humankind and demonstrated, by
their example, the indomitable will and inflexible determination of the Black
People to achieve their freedom at whatever cost.
The ruling class and its servitors, its pious priests, and pliant press, its
gunmen and its executioners—all who helped, each in his own way, to
subdue the rebellious people—will forever be pilloried by later
generations of all humankind.
“Looters,” “snipers,” “thieves,”
“rioters on a rampage”: these are the ancient epithets hurled at
all the oppressed wherever and whenever they seek to unshackle themselves from
slavery. Have not these very epithets been hurled at all revolutionary
uprisings beginning with the great Peasant Uprisings of the 14th and 15th
centuries, through the French Revolution and all the way down the line up to
and including the latest revolutionary convulsions?
In its historic contest for class supremacy with older social formations, the
bourgeoisie committed unbelievable crimes and inflicted the most wanton
destruction in order to expropriate the land and property of entire social
classes, peoples, and vast continents. Invariably the bourgeoisie used the most
unmitigated terror: conquest by fire and sword.
By comparison, the so-called “lootings” in Newark, about which the
bourgeois press raves so much, are merely individual expropriations incidental
to the struggle. They are in reality pitifully small and born out of the depths
of simple hunger and deprivation. Yet the bourgeois press squealed like a stuck
pig as though these incidents were a death blow to its entire social
system.
Newark signifies a crossing of the Rubicon. In a certain sense a turning point
in the struggle has been reached. Both the oppressor and the oppressed have for
a long time sensed its coming and have long anticipated it. Now it has
descended with a suddenness and might that has literally shaken the racist
structure to its very foundations. The Newark experience demonstrates that the
volcanic character of explosions in the ghettoes are of a general and abiding
nature and can in no way be attributed to temporary, conjunctural, or
accidental factors as the master class would have the world believe.
The Newark rebellion exceeds in social significance, if not in magnitude, the
historic upheaval in Watts. Newark came after Watts, after Cleveland,
Cincinnati, Buffalo and other cities. By the time the tidal wave of rebellion
reached Newark the masses instinctively knew the outcome of the uneven
struggle, and the measure of the range of the enemy for vengeance.
The cruel and inhuman vengeance visited on the populace in the rebellious
ghettoes by the terrorist apparatus of the bourgeoisie could not but leave a
marked imprint on the consciousness of the Black people of Newark.
There is deep and profound meaning to a battle where the combatants can gauge
fairly well that its immediate outcome will be unfavorable, but nevertheless
still are willing to engage the enemy spontaneously, with audacity and
determination. It is this element which imparts an entirely new character to
the struggle.
While the immediate result may appear unfavorable in the sense that the people
were overcome by sheer overwhelming brute force, the battle of Newark can in no
way be regarded as a defeat. On the contrary, the very character of the
“defeat” lays the basis for ultimate victory. For the true import
of Newark lies in the fact that it galvanized as never before the Black masses
in an enduring bond which will not succumb to the mere employment of naked
violence alone.
The spontaneous character of the ghetto uprisings is both their strength and
their weakness. No great modern social revolution has ever taken place without
it being preceded by a spontaneous convulsion of the revolutionary masses and
their direct intervention in the political arena, often in defiance of their
own leaders and always in contravention of the acceptable norms of political
behavior set by their oppressors.
Without the masses first taking matters into their own hands it is doubtful if
any of the great revolutions of modern times would have been successful. The
word revolution itself has practically and almost always been synonymous with
direct and spontaneous interventions of the popular masses themselves. Only
afterward have the leaders acted and, in the celebrated cases of successful
revolutions, shown the path to victory. Naturally, as in the case of Newark and
other ghetto uprisings, the masses acted only under continuous provocation and
under conditions of insufferable oppression.
The master class has for a long time entertained the notion that it can
cultivate and develop whole stratum of officialdom in the Afro-American
community which would act as its agent among the masses, hold them in tow,
extinguish the fires of rebellion whenever they occur, and stabilize the
conditions of exploitation and oppression. But the uprisings in the ghettoes
and the course they have taken have shown beyond doubt the utter hollowness of
any such notions. For the masses followed their own inclinations and instincts
and were deaf to any who came with special pleading for surrender.
The frequent failure of established leadership to give voice, direction, and
organization to the hopes and aspirations of the popular masses in periods of
social crisis has been worldwide in character and has its origins in the great
social power of capital over the laboring masses and in the conservatism of the
old social order generally. It would be strange if this did not in some measure
also apply to the Afro-American community.
In the crucible of prolonged rebellion, revolutionary leadership is sure to
develop and measure up to the great historic opportunity for liberation.
The battle of Newark has at last brought to clear visibility the true nature of
the Black liberation struggle as having both a national and class character at
the same time.
The authoritative organ of U.S. finance capital, the New York Times, on July
16th, makes the extraordinary admission that “the United States is torn
by a confrontation between the two nations that inhabit it, the 11 percent the
census calls Negroes and the great majority, those who many young Negroes call
‘Whitey.’”
“Confrontations between the two nations that inhabit it”! This is a
true sociological generalization which this organ of the ruling class is forced
to make in order to bring its own conceptions in harmony with reality so as to
be able to better cope with the rising tide of Black liberation. Marxists and
Leninists of course should have always known that there are two nations within
the framework of one giant imperialist state.
What is of course missing in the Times’ admission of the “two
nations” is the class character of each of them. Given the imperialist
character of the state and the social system which it represents, it has been
obligatory to characterize the white nation as the oppressing one and the Black
nation as the oppressed. This has often been befogged and clouded by an
overgrowth of bourgeois ideology, which denies the independent character of the
Afro-American movement and its right to determine its own independent destiny,
free from the will of the oppressing nation and the master class which
dominates both nations.
More often than not, exponents of bourgeois liberal ideology have sought to
make the Afro-American liberation movement an appendage to their politics and
in the service of capitalism. They not only deny the independent character of
the movement but hinder its development by trying to obliterate its national
and class character. The scope and breadth of the present movement has made
their theoretical pretensions ridiculous especially in the light of recent
events.
However, clarifying the nature of the Afro-American liberation struggle does
not give a prescription for white workers and progressives to preach any kind
of separatism whatsoever but merely to redouble their efforts for solidarity
with the Black people and against the virulence of racism, and for the right of
self-determination for Black people; that is, the right to determine for
themselves their own path to freedom and equality with others.
The urgent task for the white workers and progressives generally today is to
demonstrate in words and deeds genuine working class solidarity with the Black
people in the current unfolding struggle and to stick with them through all
their trials and tribulations. This in turn will also help the white workers to
free themselves from bondage to “their own” imperialist masters and
revive the historical conditions for the common emancipation of both black and
white from capitalist slavery.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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