In Defense of Marxism Against bourgeois Identity Politics of American Exceptionalism
A Response to Lawrence Ware's Eulogy on Cedric Robinson and Black Marxism
by Lil Joe
July 2016

Reverend Lawrence Ware is a Christian preacher and functioning member of the Democratic Party. It is on this basis that his attacks on Marxism are considered. It has nothing to do with Ware's self-designation of himself as 'a new black man in exile. This is oxymoronic since the first homo sapiens on Earth were black Africans of the Bushman genetic heritage. This makes 'black folk' the oldest people on earth.

On the basis of scientific paleontology, paleoanthropology and genetic research we are all Africans. But, let us be clear: Homo sapiens sapiens is but the sole surviving hominin species. As a Bible believing Baptist preacher Ware and the rest of his racialist elk (both those who call themselves blacks as well as those who call themselves 'white', believe 'man' to have been a 'special creation'. They also believe the mass of humanity, with the exception of Noah and his family, were wiped out by their angry God, Jehovah. Leaving Noah's three sons to be founders of human races - Ham, the Black man, Shem the Asiatic and Japeth the 'white man'. This myth has been refuted by empirical data based sciences. Humanity isn't some specially created species in the image of some mythical god 6,000 years ago. There was no flood and races don't exist. Hominins are species with the common ancestor that seperated from their/our Chimpanzee relative 6-7 million years ago. We are the last species of the genus homo. The Ape family doesn't necessarily originate in Africa. Dryopithecines in either Africa or Eurasia could have given rise to early Hominoidae.

Evolutionary tree of the superfamily Hominoidea, emphasizing the subfamily Homininae: after an initial separation from the main line (some 18 million years ago) of Hylobatidae (current gibbons), the line of subfamily Ponginae broke away-leading to the current orangutan; and later the Homininae split into the tribe Hominini (with subtribes Hominina and Panina), and the tribe Gorillini.

There's no such thing as race. (See: On "White skin privilege", ruling class ideology and careerism) By pretending to be 'a new black man' and a 'socialist', Ware is able to pretend that he is genetically and politically part and parcel of 'the Left'. Thus that his attacks on Marxism and 'the white working class' is motivated on grounds of 'revolutionary' - at any rate, 'progressive' - considerations. It has nothing to do with his calling himself a 'socialist' - he is neither based in nor representative of the working class: he is a functioning member of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a political representative of the economic interests of capitalist ruling classes. In this context his attacks on Marxism are consistent. This is precisely the political basis for his ideological praise both for Cedric Robinson and the book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.

Ware's eulogy for Robinson is a political eulogy. It's an ideological attack on Marxism. It's written in unison with Robinson's class-biased attacks on Marxism and the English working-class. The Foward to the book is written by another professional anti-Marxist ideologist Robin D.G. Kelley. The same as professors Ware and Robinson, professor Kelley is paid for promoting bourgeois racialist identity politics and attack the English working class. The same as Ware, Kelley presented a revivalistic eulogy which praises Robinson and the (largely forgotten, irrelevant) book Black Marxism - for purportedly refuting the Marxist exposition and critique of the cosmopolitan ('universal') character of capitalist commodity production based on wage labour relations of production corresponding to the appropriation and exploitation of wage labour by capital.

I am reminded of a recollection by Lenin on this topic:

There is a well known saying that if geometrical axioms affected human interests attempts would certainly be made to refute them. Theories of natural history which conflicted with the old prejudices of theology provoked, and still provoke, the most rabid opposition. No wonder, therefore, that the Marxian doctrine, which directly serves to enlighten and organise the advanced class in modern society, indicates the tasks facing this class and demonstrates the inevitable replacement (by virtue of economic development) of the present system by a new order - no wonder that this doctrine has had to fight for every step forward in the course of its life. Needless to say, this applies to bourgeois science and philosophy, officially taught by official professors in order to befuddle the rising generation of the propertied classes and to "coach" it against internal and foreign enemies. This science will not even hear of Marxism, declaring that it has been refuted and annihilated. Marx is attacked with equal zest by young scholars who are making a career by refuting socialism, and by decrepit elders who are preserving the tradition of all kinds of outworn "systems". The progress of Marxism, the fact that its ideas are spreading and taking firm hold among the working class, inevitably increase the frequency and intensity of these bourgeois attacks on Marxism, which becomes stronger, more hardened and more vigorous every time it is "annihilated" by official science. (Lenin: Marxism and Revisionism)

I will use my response to Ware to present a defense of Marxian and materialist conception of history and its corresponding explication of the laws of motion of capitalist commodity production by wage labour. This materialist conception of history has been validated and vindicated by modern paleoanthropology and materialist methods. It's employed in contemporary paleoanthropological and archaeological and economic anthropological research e.g. Marvin Harris wrote The Rise of Anthropological Theory in which he lays out the foundations of cultural materialism (CM) and critically considers other major anthropological theories and also the work and writings of professors Julian Steward, Leslie White, R. Brian Ferguson, Martin F. Murphy, Maxine L. Margulis, Allen Johnson and the materialist archaeologist Timothy Earle. It is not 'just a philosophy'. Robinson, Ware and Kelley's deliberate ignorance of the advances by empirical science and the mentioned practitioners in field research based anthropology including economics is calculated to continue their mythical racial cultural pretensions as 'black history' and is the same as Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski advocacy of religious Creationism and Intelligent Design as "history" and "science". Historians search through statements, biographies, autobiographies, records, memos, speeches and literature and selectively cherry pick those which support their claims and assertions. "History", for them, is research of texts and not empirical research. What both Black cultural nationalists (Afrocentrists) and Creationists (ID'ers) have in common is opposition to Marxism and the materialist conception of history.

Robinson, Ware - and Martin Luther King Jr. before them, and also Cornel West - reject and attack Marxism and the materialist conception of history on essentially the same claim of culture as spirituality as do Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski at the creationist's bunker called the Discovery Institute. The creationists don't hide their reactionary intention. Their declaration called the "wedge strategy" openly states:

THE WEDGE STRATEGY CENTER FOR THE RENEWAL OF SCIENCE & CULTURE INTRODUCTION

"The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences. Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art. The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology and sociology. Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions. Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth. Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."

Engels compares Marx's Capital to Darwin's Origin of Species. The sciences of materialist economics and culture didn't stop with the publication of Capital, any more than the science of evolution ended with the publication of Origin of Species -- or for instance the materialistic basis for sciences of physics with Newton's Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica or astronomy with the publication of Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. I don't know whether as Christians and ordained preachers Lawrence Ware, Cornel West and including Michael Eric Dyson, go along with hatred for scientific materialism and opposition to Marxism to include opposition to Darwin and evolutionary biology?

Martin Luther King is the leading theorist. He did not believe in identity politics. He rejected black nationalism, He was a civil rights activist and not an academic professor. He was a Church pastor. He was a great human being. He is appropriated by the ordained reverends-professors mentioned - Lawrence Ware, Cornel West and Michael Etic Dyson - and by them is placed in a cultural racialist category as an icon in 'black radical tradition', 'black prophetic tradition' and 'black history'. He is referenced by them to justify Christian opposition to Marxism and the materialist conception of history. In one of his writings King explained his assessment of Marxism and the materialist conception of history from the standpoint of Christianity:

During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretative works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day. First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter. Second, I strongly disagreed with communism's ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence, murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the 'millennial' end. http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/135514

First, King is honest where he says he rejects the materialist conception of history because it has no place for a supernatural causitive agency, or 'God'. I have shown what the materialist conception of history is, and that it is the same method and explication used by paleoanthropologists and archaeologists regarding e.g. Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and class societies beginning with agriculture. To reject the materialist method is to reject the scientific method. This is what Christian authorities have done from the beginning. As Carl Sagan observed in his classic work on science, Cosmos:

"The last scientist who worked in the Library was a mathematician, astronomer, physicist and the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy--an extraordinary range of accomplishments for any individual in any age. Her name was Hypatia. The Alexandria of Hypatia's time--by then long under Roman rule--was a city under grave strain. Slavery had sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture. Hypatia stood at the epicenter of these mighty social forces. Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman govenor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger, she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishoners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint."

Second, King is a liar. Nowhere did he read in any of the several thousand pages of Marx's Capital or Communist Manifesto a single paragraph where it was advocated that workers engage in murder and lying as a justifiable means to establish a 'millennial end'. Not only is that a lie it turns the truth on its head. Marx never used such Machiavellian advocacy. It is not in Capital or the Communist Manifesto where the concept of a millenial kingdom is to be established by tyrannical murdering blood baths. Rather -- this is sanctified in the Bible as the means by which the millenial kingdom of Christ is to be established:

Revelation Chapter 19: And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. 12His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself.13And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.14And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. 15And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. 16And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS. 17And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; 18That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great. Revelation chapter 19 KJV (King James Version)

Were King not so busy winning the approval of the ruling capitalist classes and states, by denigrating Marx and the materialist conception of history, and associating himself with Christianity and governments of Christian heads of state, he should have written what he actually objects to regarding Marx's actual critical views on Christianity and politics. Marx's position on the social principles of Christianity are clearly stated:

"The social principles of Christianity have now had eighteen hundred years to be developed, and need no further development by Prussian Consistorial Counsellors. The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorifies the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, with somewhat doleful grimaces. The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable. The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor's compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of these infamies on earth. The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread. The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary. So much for the social principles of Christianity."

Since King rejected the materialist conception of history standpoint that the atrocious behavior of the dominant classes are motivated by material interests (economic gain and political power) by stating: "as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms [but, rather] history is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter", the logical conclusion is the history of colonising and slave trading European nations of Christians that such behavior was of their belief in 'divine government' of Yahew/Christ/Holy Ghost providence as the 'creative personal power in the universe' His actualising 'absolute moral order':

"Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. Of the Christian colonial system, W. Howitt, a man who makes a speciality of Christianity, says: "The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth." The history of the colonial administration of Holland - and Holland was the head capitalistic nation of the 17th century - "is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness" Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men stealers were trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were the chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says: "This one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families." To secure Malacca, the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in 1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him, to "abstain" from the payment of £21,875, the price of his treason. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000. Sweet commerce! The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in plantation-colonies destined for export trade only, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself. Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children £50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay they were tomahawked by red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as "means that God and Nature had given into its hand." The colonial system ripened, like a hot-house, trade and navigation. The "societies Monopolia" of Luther were powerful levers for concentration of capital." Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Thirty-One

Yes, this is quoted from Marx in Capital. Reverend Martin Luther King and the Reverends Lawrence Ware, Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West denounce Marxism and its justification for revolutionary violence but one never has encountered from either of them a denunciation of all the violence in the Bible - purportedly ordered by God and proclaimed by his prophets!

Deuteronomy: For the LORD your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you. And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.(Deuternomy chapter 20) Joshua: Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in. The LORD said unto Joshua, See, I have given into thine hand Jericho, and the king thereof, and the mighty men of valour. And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are therein, to the LORD: only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent. And ye, in any wise keep yourselves from the accursed thing, lest ye take yourselves accursed, when ye take of the accursed thing, and make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it. But all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are consecrated unto the LORD: they shall come into the treasury of the LORD. So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. (Book Joshua chapter 6) 1st Samuel: Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Turn the page from ancient ideological justifications for genocidal conquests. Lets deal with the concept of revolutionary violence when used by appropriated toiling classes and oppressed masses for the overthrow of appropriating classes and foreign and domestic oppressors -- e.g. the Maccabees Revolt, the Spartacus slaves' rebellion, the Wat Tyler peasants revolt, the Munzer peasants war in Germany, the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the Nat Turner Rebellion, the Conspiracy of Equals, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Black Panther Party, the Palestinian Intifada . . . In the cases of these actual historical events where slaves, peasants and oppressed people staged uprisings, ruling class historians denounce the uprisings. The rebels are decried as bloodthirsty savages for killing those who held them in check by violence and terror. Yet, when in the Bible, as in the below case of Abraham's use of violence, it's regarded as not just the exercise of violence, but righteous violence.

Let's see what Thus saith the Lord:

And there went out the king of Sodom, and the king of Gomorrah, and the king of Admah, and the king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela (the same is Zoar) and they joined battle with them in the vale of Siddim; With Chedorlaomer the king of Elam, and with Tidal king of nations, and Amraphel king of Shinar, and Arioch king of Ellasar; four kings with five. And the vale of Siddim was full of slimepits; and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, and fell there; and they that remained fled to the mountain. And they took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all their victuals, and went their way. And they took Lot, Abram's brother's son, who dwelt in Sodom, and his goods, and departed. And there came one that had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew; for he dwelt in the plain of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol, and brother of Aner: and these were confederate with Abram. And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. And he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus. And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people. And the king of Sodom went out to meet him after his return from the slaughter of Chedorlaomer, and of the kings that were with him, at the valley of Shaveh, which is the king's dale. And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth: And blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him tithes of all. And the king of Sodom said unto Abram, Give me the persons, and take the goods to thyself. (Genesis chapter 14)

Abraham might have been 'justified by faith' - for entry to the world to come [Christ's kingdom; which, as we have seen, itself is founded on violence!] In this material world in this empirical universe the propertied classes and armies don't rely on prayers to ancestors and gods to preserve and increase wealth. They use organised violence. Abraham was justified by faith in Yahweh because on command he was not just willing to but in the process of killing his son as an offering. Similarly, the king of Moab sacrificed (killed) his son to his god as a burnt offering to win favor to defeat Yahweh and the Israelites (2nd Kings chapter 3) and in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart Okonkwo sacrificed (killed) his son to please Igbo gods and the Christian god had his 'only begotten son' sacrificed (tortured, executed by the State) as a ransom. But wealth was a different matter. Only Jesus, as a communist, denigrated wealth and its god, Mammon. Abraham was willing to 'sacrifice' his wife for money. He got paid (pimped her) by pharaoh instead (also Abimelek king of Gerar). Sarah made Abraham a wealthy man (Genesis chapters 12 and chapter 20). Abraham was a man of the world. He knew who to plunder and who to pay off. He shared the loot mentioned above with the regional suzerain, Melchizedek. This Melchizedek, the same as other suzerains of the time were, in their kingdoms, high priests if not gods (Sargon, Hammurabi, Rameses). Paul, the ascribed author of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews identified Jesus as Christ with this Melshidezik (Hebrews 6).

Christian preachers of American exceptionalism and identity politics whether Republican 'white racists' or Democrat 'minority' racialists present Christians and 'Judeo-Christian' denominations as religions of 'peace' and cornerstone's of 'civilisation'. Republican Christians distinguish Christianity and 'Judeo-Christian civilization' from 'radical Islam' as for 'truth, justice and the American way' in opposition to 'communist dictatorship' and 'Islamic terrorism'. They assert that Islam is founded on violence. They quote passages from the Quran as proof. They deliberately and deceitfully ignore that Muhammad 'the prophet' regarded himself in the Judeo-Christian 'prophetic tradition'. The Quran itself is based in the monotheistic supremacy articulated in the Hebrew 'Old Testament' and Christian 'New Testament'. Zionism, Crusader and Jihad are one and the same. Israeli Zionists, Christian Crusaders and Islamic Jihadists are killing each other in the name of the same god of Joshua. They believe they have the same 'divine inspiration' for the slaughter of the innocent as they believe Joshua had (see above). The Democrats are no different. Just listen to them attempt to justify the entries into World Wars I & II and the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea, Serbia, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Syria.

Martin Luther King Jr wasn't a Democrat. He in fact refused to become a member of the capitalist war party. King and Malcolm X both were the real deal. Martin Luther King Jr was a Christian pastor and civil rights fighter. Malcolm X was a Muslim minister and a black nationalist talker. King was a doer of his words and Malcolm talked against what King was doing. Malcolm talked about 'black revolution' and denounced desegregation. King participated in 'the Negro revolution' - fought racial segregation and racial discrimination. But, concerning Dixiecratic domestic policy and Democrat wars Martin and Malcolm were (spoke) the same critiques in different words. A man of peace King is justified by his actions. It is by behavior and not by faith (religious beliefs) that one is judged and justified.

Martin Luther King Jr never thought or wrote of himself as a 'black prophet' or 'black radical'. King was a continuation of the civil rights movement and the work of Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips as advanced by W.E.B. Dubois' N.A.A.C.P. and A. Philip Randolph. These were opposed by Booker T. Washington and were denounced by Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. The so-called black prophetic tradition and black radical tradition as articulated in the cultural nationalism of Ron Karenga, Cedric Robinson, Cornel West, Lawrence Ware, Michael Eric Dyson and Robin Kelly is in the uncle Tom category of Booker T. Washington and black seperatists. Notwithstanding their militant sounding rhetoric Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X accepted segregation and racial discrimination and while these preachers-professors call themselves socialists Garvey, Muhammad and Malcolm openly advocated for capitalism euphemistically called 'black business' advocacy. What Garvey, Muhammad, Malcolm, Robinson, West, Ware, Dyson and Kelly have in common though is opposition to Marxism. Ostensibly associating Marx and Marxism with 'the white man', 'white devils', 'atheism' , 'universalism', 'white supremacy', 'white skin privilege' and 'Eurocentrism'.

Though the attack on Marxism is presented in racial language, calling it the product of 'white' Eurocentricism, as contrasted to black "Afrocentricism", it has nothing to do with white European thought verses black African thinking. Garvey, Muhammad, Malcolm, Robinson, West, Ware, Dyson and Kelley were not/are not Africans. Africans don't think racially.

Robin Kelley wrote in his Forward to Robinson's Black Marxism: "Combining political theory, history, philosophy, cultural analysis, and biography, among other things, Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilization in which it was born or mass movements outside Europe."

Racism is not innate in European 'white people'. The philosophical epistemology of innate ideas, is derived from Platonism and not addressed by any so-called black African epistemology. The epistemology of innate ideas, including innate racism ideology, didn't originate among African hunters-gatherers, pastoralists, horticulturalists and or agricultural producing classes. This ideology corresponding to division of managerial labour from material production originated among appropriating classes as managerial classes -- or rather by priests and philosophers who were the ideological representatives of those appropriating classes, beginning with Plato. It was challenged beginning with Aristotle. It was refuted by John Locke, James Watson and B.F. Skinner. It is disposed finally by modern neuroscience.

Robinson nor Kelley bothered to examine the history of philosophical epistemological polemics. Rather, it is merely asserted that there is some kind of innate racial identity consciousness. It is a bare assertion. Predicated upon this bare assertion it is charged that Marx and Marxists fail to 'deal with this' assumed but never biologically demonstrated genetic inheritance of innate racial consciousness. It is to Plato and centuries later Thomas Jefferson, as ideological spokespersons of the appropriating classes, Robinson and Kelley are to be considered. The same as Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Descartes (on one side of his dualism), Bishop Berkeley, Kant and other European idealists.

Robinson and Kelley are not "African" pantheists. They are European in their Idealist presuppositions - in opposition to materialist epistemology. Idealists, Kelley and Robinson included, believe consciousness is prior to existence and determine material behavior. Racism is an ideology. Thus the assertion that an inborn racial ideology determine behavior. Of course Marxists as materialists deal with this bullshit! Marxists are epistemological materialists: it is not the consciousness of individuals that determine existence; but, to the contrary, it is their social being that determine their consciousness.

Consider Oliver Cox:

Racial antagonism is part and parcel of this class struggle, because it developed within the capitalist system as one of its fundamental traits. It may be demonstrated that racial antagonism, as we know it today, never existed in the world before about 1492; moreover, racial feeling developed concomitantly with the development of our modem social system. Probably one of the most persistent social illusions of modem times is that we have race prejudice against other people because they are physically different-that race prejudice is instinctive. The interest behind racial antagonism is an exploitative interest- the peculiar type of economic exploitation characteristic of capitalist society. . . . [However] the individual is born into it and accepts it unconsciously, like his language, without question. (Kindle Locations 461-487) Negroes - to consider the United States specifically - must not be allowed to think of themselves as human beings having certain basic rights protected in the formal law. On the whole, they came to America as forced labor, and our slavocracy could not persist without a consistent set of social attitudes which justified the system naturally. Negroes had to be thought of as subsocial and subhuman. To treat a slave as if he were a full-fledged human being would not only be dangerous but also highly inconsistent with the social system. However, it should not be forgotten that, above all else, the slave was a worker whose labor was exploited in production for profit in a capitalist market. It is this fundamental fact which identifies the Negro problem in the United States with the problem of all workers regardless of color. We can understand, therefore, the Negro problem only in so far as we understand their position as workers. Moreover, their status as workers has been categorically like that of white workers; indeed, with the crystallization of social forces, the real position and problems of both Negro and white workers are beginning unmistakably to converge. (Oliver Cox: Caste, class, & race; a study in social dynamics)

Robinson, Kelley and Lawrence Ware are socialised American racialists qua black cultural nationalists. Their respective opposition to 'eurocentric' Weltanschauung, isn't based in any 'African' Weltanschauung. It's based in crude and reactionary American exceptionalism. Why do they target Marx and Marxists for attack? Rather than, say, Adam Smith and Max Weber? It isn't because Marx and Engels were "Europeans". So were Smith and Weber! Rather, it is that Marx and Marxists did a scientific exposition of the laws of exploitation in capitalist commodity production by wage labour which justify worker's revolutionary expropriation of the productive forces. This is why Marx and Marxists are targeted by reactionary American exceptionalists that mask themselves in black skin politics.

Racialist ideology is a variation on bourgeois patriotism. It's reinforced on television annually 24/7 every February. As every Thanksgiving, Veterans Day, Memorial Day and Fourth of July, American workers are force fed American exceptionalist patriotism by televised war movies so, Black exceptionalist patriotism is fed to them every Black History Month. Under patriotic banners, workers fight not their class enemy, the bourgeoisie - i.e. the nation's capitalists that exploit them - but the enemy of their class enemy. American Negroes are not "black nationalists'; but, in the main, are just gullible and proud American patriots:

Calvin Coolidge, as quoted in commencement address at Howard University (6 June 1924), Washington, D.C.:

"The propaganda of prejudice and hatred which sought to keep the colored men from supporting the national cause completely failed. The black man showed himself the same kind of citizen, moved by the same kind of patriotism, as the white man. They were tempted, but not one betrayed his country. Among well-nigh 400,000 colored men who were taken into the military service, about one-half had overseas experience. They came home with many decorations and their conduct repeatedly won high commendation from both American and European commanders. The colored people have repeatedly proved their devotion to the high ideals of our country. They gave their services in the war with the same patriotism and readiness that other citizens did. The records of the selective draft show that somewhat more than 2,250,000 colored men were registered. The records further prove that, far from seeking to avoid participation in the national defense, they showed that they wished to enlist before the selective service act was put into operation, and they did not attempt to evade that act afterwards."

Ben Johnson well exposed the ideology of patriotism (nationalism) when he said of it: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. George Bernard Shaw said of it: "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.* Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.* You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.* Albert Einstein said of it: Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism-how passionately I hate them! * I am against any nationalism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious. Emma Goldman exposed it as: "Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. ... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others."

Shaw, Einstein and Goldman were socialists.

So were the leadership of the Black Panther Party:

"Statement from the Black Panther Party Central Committee at National Headquarters, Oakland, California, delivered by the Deputy Chairman, David Brothers of the New York State Black Panther Party Central Staff. We will not try to fight fire with fire because all of the people that fire is best put out with water. Therefore, the Black Panther Party will not fight racism with racism. But we will fight racism with solidarity. We will not fight capitalism with capitalism (Black capitalism), but with the implementation of socialism and socialist programs for the people. We will not fight U.S. government imperialism with more imperialism because the peoples of the world and other races, especially in America, must fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism."

Black Panther Party members were singled out for brutal state repression because as "Marxist-Leninists" the Party advocated and actually organised working class black youth armed self-defense while at the same time teaching Marxism and proletarian internationalism of the Communist Manifesto:

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. Working men of all countries, Unite!

Cultural nationalist/Afrocentrists are just as much racist agencies of capitalist class interests as are 'white nationalists' racists - i.e. 'race patriots' - for the same reason any scoundrel advocates 'national' and or 'racial' solidarity. It is the ideology of 'internal' class collaboration which instruct the producing classes of the geopolitical territory to subordinate their material < economic and social > interests to the material interests of the appropriating classes. The class of workers or peasant occupants of a geopolitical territory; or genetic marker; are told by bourgeois ideologists they are 'one people' or of 'one race' with one national or racial 'destiny'.

When bourgeois patriots say national interests trump class interests (national or racial unity v. class division) it is predicated upon the 'national' capitalist bourgeoisie maintaining ownership of the nations productive forces (land, factories, commercial outlets and financial institutions) and continue to appropriate surplus labour as revenue on one side of the class divide and on the other side of the class divide serfs or share croppers continue to 'volunarily' turn over surplus produce to land owners or peasants to pay rent, and the working classes continue to sell labour power for wages in exchange for continued production for unpaid surplus labour time in order to yield the surplus product embodying surplus value appropriated by the 'national' capitalists for his profit. This, the nationalist politician calls, everyone sacrificing for the 'national effort' and bourgeois ideologists calls 'shared sacrifice' one's 'patriotic duty'. Today workers are told wages and benefits reductions and government austerity measures are to be accepted to enable the 'nation' to compete in a globalised economy. Thus, where Ben Johnson said patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel it has been updated and paraphrased 'patriotism is the last bastion of the scoundrel'.

Working-class internationalism is antithetical to bourgeois nationalism. Patriotism is posited as part of working class indoctrination through socialisation and enculturation by educational and religious institutions. As part and parcel of socialisation once feelings of patriotism/nationalism are internalised by individuals and reinforced by culture its hard to dismiss from his or her self-consciousness. Proletarian internationalism on the other hand is something that's consciously learned. American children grow up on television and in schools.

At home the kids watch cartoons written by adults and watch mostly xenophobic and patriotic movies indoctrinating American exceptionalism and in school are forced to learn by heart and daily stand with right hand over heart to recite the Pledge of Allegence to a flag, followed by the singing of patriotic songs, 'my country tis of thee' or religious-patriotic-racist genocidal doctrine of conquest manifest destiny articulated in the lyrics of "America, the Beautiful" and the singing of the militarist 'the star spangled banner' at sports events.

The reality of this indoctrination function in American schools is very clearly portrayed by socialist folk singer Pete Seeger:

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie.
I learned that soldiers seldom die.
I learned that everybody's free,
And that's what the teacher said to me.
That's what I learned in school.
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.
I learned our Government must be strong;
It's always right and never wrong;
Our leaders are the finest men
And we elect them again and again.
I learned that war is not so bad;
I learned about the great ones we have had;
We fought in Germany and in France
And someday I might get my chance.

Preaching and lecturing, advocating American exceptionalism, God, and patriotism, pathetic preachers, pundits, politicians and professors advocating on behalf of Hillary Clinton's identity politics propaganda have replaced red state Dixiecrats promoting racial identity ideology.

Marxism is Science

Marxism is a product of capitalism that emerged from a global trade engendered revolutionising of the sciences corresponding to an emerging revolutionisation of the means of production on the basis of division of labour and the wages system.

The capitalist mode of appropriation of labour power and its products, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property by wage labour displacing the landed feudal modes of production and appropriation's relations of production; resulting in global commerce established since the 16th century. With the overthrow of feudal modes of producing and exchanging goods and services the progress of technology together with inventions used in science as well as production and transportation a philosophical revolution occurred together with the new explorations of the heavens and the earth. Feudal dogma's and virtues became laughable [See: Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and Voltaire's Candide]. In scientific practice and philosophical materialism Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas were rejected together with submission to their authority.

Thales, Anaximander, Anaximines, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Epicurus argued the earth and celestial planets along with the sun, moon and stars are natural objects and life forms on Earth are natural and indigenous to earth and change over time. The Church had for a thousand years suppressed materialism and empiricism. Plato and Aristotle were appropriated by the Church Fathers and their successors. Ionian and Greco-Roman 'pagan knowledge' was violently rejected. Democritus, Empedocles and Epicurus argued that the universe was omnipresent and comprised of indivisible tiny objects called atoms. In the 15th century Lucretius' On the Nature of Things was rediscovered. Columbus, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Spinosa, Francis Bacon, Kepler, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Erasmus Darwin and Carl Linnaeus enabled the confirmation of the observations based Ionian and Athenian materialist ratiocinations. The material universe is universally comprised of natural elements.

The rising bourgeoisie and scientific methods of empirical ratiocination using either rediscovered, imported, invented technologies to observe, collect and analyse data became the basis for scientific theory. Astronomy supplanted astrology by observations using telescopes and incline planes, spectrums and other technologies. Micro worlds of plants and animals including the existence of cells and bacteria were discovered and studied. Natural philosophy is put on a scientific basis. Natural philosophy on the basis of empirical ratiocination continues to investigate the cosmos, its nature, and natural laws. On the basis of data from plants and animals collected from all over Earth, together with genetic and bio-molecular research and paleontology, have proved the natural origin of species and speciation enforced by natural selection. The discoveries of Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Lynn Margulis, et al., and genome research generally places evolutionary biology and taxonomy on empirical foundations. The recent discovery of the Higgs boson/Higgs field has further completed and validated the standard model of particle physics. The recent detections of gravity waves has further validated the theory of general relativity. The economic crash of 2008 and continuing flat wages relative together with increasingly uncompensated labour productivity and deepening recession has further validated the Marxian discoveries of laws of motion of capitalist commodity production based upon wage labour.

Ancient agricultural civilisations of Africa and Asia had science and advanced technology thousands of years prior to the Reniassance. Hominin sciences and technological modes of production have existed for millions of years! Paleolithic hominin pebble tools 2.8 million years ago fashioned hammerstones and cores by percussion flake modes of production:

The Acheulean tool industry first appeared around 1.5 million years ago in East Central Africa. These tools are associated with Homo ergaster and western Homo erectus. The key innovations are (1) chipping the stone from both sides to produce a symmetrical (bifacial) cutting edge, (2) the shaping of an entire stone into a recognizable and repeated tool form, and (3) variation in the tool forms for different tool uses. Manufacture shifted from flakes struck from a stone core to shaping a more massive tool by careful repetitive flaking. The most common tool materials were quartzite, glassy lava, chert and flint. Handprint : Ancestral Tools

Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development to which human labour has attained, but they are also indicators of the social conditions under which that labour is carried on. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm

By 500,000 years ago the Acheulean methods had penetrated into Europe, primarily associated with Homo heidelbergensis, where they continued until about 200,000 years ago. The industry spread as far as the Near East and India, but apparently never reached Asia, where Homo erectus continued to use Oldowan tools right up to the time that species went extinct. Finally, Acheulean tools show a regularity of design and manufacture that is maintained for over a million years. This is clear evidence for specialized skills and design criteria that were handed down by explicit socialization within a geographically dispersed human culture. http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/stones.html

Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development to which human labour has attained, but they are also indicators of the social conditions under which that labour is carried on. Among the instruments of labour, those of a mechanical nature, which, taken as a whole, we may call the bone and muscles of production, offer much more decided characteristics of a given epoch of production, than those which, like pipes, tubs, baskets, jars, &c., serve only to hold the materials for labour, which latter class, we may in a general way, call the vascular system of production. The latter first begins to play an important part in the chemical industries. Capital Vol. I - Chapter Seven


The Mousterian industry appeared around 200,000 years ago and persisted until about 40,000 years ago, in much the same areas of Europe, the Near East and Africa where Acheulean tools appear. In Europe these tools are most closely associated with Homo neanderthalensis, but elsewhere were made by both Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens. Mousterian tools required a preliminary shaping of the stone core from which the actual blade is struck off. The toolmakers either shaped a rock into a rounded surface before striking off the raised area as a wedge shaped flake (see photo at left), or they shaped the core as a long prism of stone before striking off triangular flakes from its length, like slices from a baguette. http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/stones.html

The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments. The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin state in which it supplies [1] man with necessaries or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and is the universal subject of human labour. All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connexion with their environment, are subjects of labour spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest, and ores which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand, the subject of labour has, so to say, been filtered through previous labour, we call it raw material; such is ore already extracted and ready for washing. All raw material is the subject of labour, but not every subject of labour is raw material: it can only become so, after it has undergone some alteration by means of labour. An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity. Capital Vol. I - Chapter Seven


Because tools were combined with other components (handles, spear shafts) and used in wider applications (dressing hides, shaping wood tools, hunting large game), Mousterian technology was the keystone for many interrelated manufacturing activities in other materials: specialized tools created specialized labor. As these activities evolved and standardized, the efficient and flexible Mousterian toolmaking procedures made possible the accumulation of physical comforts on which wealth and social status are based. http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/stones.html

The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. The human being is in the most literal sense a ζῶον πολιτιχόν, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society - a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness - is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. Marx, Grundrisse

Finally, the Magdalenian period (18,000 to 12,000 years ago) saw the increased use of delicate flaked stones for arrows and spears, multibarbed harpoon points, and spear throwers made of wood, bone or antler. During this period a new tool appears - symbolic representation, as in these cave paintings from Chauvet (left). Symbols define human culture as a realm of shared representation and visualization, rather than solely a domain of imitated technical skills. On this basis written language soon evolved through the use of pictures and counting tallies that signify administrative control, calendar time, historical record, and spoken narrative. Upper Paleolithic tool assemblages include end scrapers, burins (chisel like stones for working bone and ivory), bone points, ivory beads, tooth necklaces, and abstract animal or human figurines. All these imply a parallel refinement in clothing, shelters, utensils, ornament, medicine, nutrition and ritual practices. By this time, then, stone and bone tools supported a great variety of manufacturing activities and almost certainly produced both the division of labor based on gender and age, and a social hierarchy among families within a single group, partly symbolized in the accumulation of valuable possessions and the wearing of different kinds of ornaments. http://www.handprint.com/LS/ANC/stones.html

From this standpoint, human history can be divided into two main epochs: the food-gathering epoch, which extended over hundreds of thousands of years; and the food-producing epoch, which began with the invention of agriculture and stockbreeding, not much more than 8,000-10,000 years ago. In the food-gathering epoch the first division of labor was very simple. It is generally described as a sexual division, or division of labor between the female and male sexes. (Children contributed their share as soon as they were old enough, the girls being trained in female occupations and the boys in male occupations.) The nature of this division of labor was a differentiation between the sexes in the methods and kinds of food-gathering. Men were the hunters of big game - a full-time occupation which took them away from home or camp for longer or shorter periods of time. Women were the collectors of vegetable products around the camp or dwelling places. Now it must be understood that, with the exception of a few specialized areas in the world at certain historical stages, the most reliable sources for food supplies were not animal (supplied by the man) but vegetable (supplied by the women.). Most reliable supplies of food were provided by the women collectors, not the men hunters. But women were also hunters - hunters of what is known as slow game and small game. In addition to digging up roots, tubers, plants, etc., they collected grubs, bugs, lizards, mollusks and small animals such as hares, marsupials, etc. This activity of the women was of decisive importance. For much of this small game was brought back to the camp alive, and these animals provided the basis for the first experience and experiments in animal taming and domestication. Thus it was in the hands of women that the all-important techniques of animal domestication began, which were ultimately climaxed in stockbreeding. And this domestication has its roots in maternity. The Myth of Women's Inferiority by Evelyn Reed 1954

Assuming some form of social production to exist (e.g., primitive Indian communities, or the more ingeniously developed communism of the Peruvians), a distinction can always be made between that portion of labour whose product is directly consumed individually by the producers and their families and - aside from the part which is productively consumed - that portion of labour which is invariably surplus-labour, whose product serves constantly to satisfy the general social needs no matter how this surplus-product may be divided, and no matter who may function as representative of these social needs. Capital, Vol.3, Chapter 51

At the earlier stages only occasional exchanges can take place; particular skill in the making of weapons and tools may lead to a temporary division of labor. Thus in many places undoubted remains of workshops for the making of stone tools have been found, dating from the later Stone Age. The artists who here perfected their skill probably worked for the whole community, as each special handicraftsman still does in the gentile communities in India. In no case could exchange arise at this stage except within the tribe itself, and then only as an exceptional event. But now, with the differentiation of pastoral tribes, we find all the conditions ripe for exchange between branches of different tribes and its development into a regular established institution. Originally tribes exchanged with tribe through the respective chiefs of the gentes; but as the herds began to pass into private ownership, exchange between individuals became more common, and, finally, the only form. Now the chief article which the pastoral tribes exchanged with their neighbors was cattle; cattle became the commodity by which all other commodities were valued and which was everywhere willingly taken in exchange for them - in short, cattle acquired a money function and already at this stage did the work of money. With such necessity and speed, even at the very beginning of commodity exchange, did the need for a money commodity develop. Of the industrial achievements of this stage, two are particularly important. The first is the loom, the second the smelting of metal ores and the working of metals. Copper and tin and their alloy, bronze, were by far the most important. Bronze provided serviceable tools and weapons, though it could not displace stone tools; only iron could do that, and the method of obtaining iron was not yet understood. Gold and silver were beginning to be used for ornament and decoration, and must already have acquired a high value as compared with copper and bronze. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State- Chapter IX

The first step made by an object of utility towards acquiring exchange-value is when it forms a non-use-value for its owner, and that happens when it forms a superfluous portion of some article required for his immediate wants. Objects in themselves are external to man, and consequently alienable by him. In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners of those alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals. But such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive society based on property in common, whether such a society takes the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian community, or a Peruvian Inca State. The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins on the boundaries of such communities, at their points of contact with other similar communities, or with members of the latter. So soon, however, as products once become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become so in its internal intercourse. The proportions in which they are exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance. What makes them exchangeable is the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. Meantime the need for foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social act. In the course of time, therefore, some portion at least of the products of labour must be produced with a special view to exchange. From that moment the distinction becomes firmly established between the utility of an object for the purposes of consumption, and its utility for the purposes of exchange. Capital Vol. I The increase of production in all branches - cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts - gave human labor-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State- Chapter IX

Thus ... like any other specific mode of production, it presupposes a given level of the social productive forces and their forms of development as its historical precondition: a precondition which is itself the historical result and product of a preceding process, and from which the new mode of production proceeds as its given basis; that the production relations corresponding to this specific, historically determined mode of production - relations which human beings enter into during the process of social life, in the creation of their social life - possess a specific, historical and transitory character; and, finally, that the distribution relations essentially coincident with these production relations are their opposite side, so that both share the same historically transitory character. In the study of distribution relations, the initial point of departure is the alleged fact that the annual product is apportioned among wages, profit and rent. But if so expressed, it is a misstatement. The product is apportioned on one side to capital, on the other to revenue. One of these revenues, wages, never itself assumes the form of revenue, revenue of the labourer, until after it has first confronted this labourer in the form of capital. The confrontation of produced conditions of labour and of the products of labour generally, as capital, with the direct producers implies from the outset a definite social character of the material conditions of labour in relation to the labourers, and thereby a definite relationship into which they enter with the owners of the means of production and among themselves during production itself. The transformation of these conditions of labour into capital implies in turn the expropriation of the direct producers from the land, and thus a definite form of landed property. If one portion of the product were not transformed into capital, the other would not assume the forms of wages, profit and rent. On the other hand, if the capitalist mode of production presupposes this definite social form of the conditions of production, so does it reproduce it continually. It produces not merely the material products, but reproduces continually the production relations in which the former are produced, and thereby also the corresponding distribution relations. Capital, Vol.3

And with the formation of the merchant class came also the development of metallic money, the minted coin, a new instrument for the domination of the non-producer over the producer and his production. The commodity of commodities had been discovered, that which holds all other commodities hidden in itself, the magic power which can change at will into everything desirable and desired. The man who had it ruled the world of production-and who had more of it than anybody else? The merchant. The worship of money was safe in his hands. He took good care to make it clear that, in face of money, all commodities, and hence all producers of commodities, must prostrate themselves in adoration in the dust. He proved practically that all other forms of wealth fade into mere semblance beside this incarnation of wealth as such. Never again has the power of money shown itself in such primitive brutality and violence as during these days of its youth. After commodities had begun to sell for money, loans and advances in money came also, and with them interest and usury. No legislation of later times so utterly and ruthlessly delivers over the debtor to the usurious creditor as the legislation of ancient Athens and ancient Rome-and in both cities it arose spontaneously, as customary law, without any compulsion other than the economic. Alongside wealth in commodities and slaves, alongside wealth in money, there now appeared wealth in land also. The individuals' rights of possession in the pieces of land originally allotted to them by gens or tribe had now become so established that the land was their hereditary property. Recently they had striven above all to secure their freedom against the rights of the gentile community over these lands, since these rights had become for them a fetter. They got rid of the fetter - but soon afterwards of their new landed property also. Full, free ownership of the land meant not only power, uncurtailed and unlimited, to possess the land; it meant also the power to alienate it. As long as the land belonged to the gens, no such power could exist. But when the new landed proprietor shook off once and for all the fetters laid upon him by the prior right of gens and tribe, he also cut the ties which had hitherto inseparably attached him to the land. Money, invented at the same time as private property in land, showed him what that meant. Land could now become a commodity; it could be sold and pledged. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State- Chapter IX

Old Kingdoms of ancient Egypt as well as Sumer and Mesopotamia produced citisens who understood astronomy as well as animal husbandry and agriculture. This knowledge was passed down from Mesolithic hunters-gatherers along with herders and horticulturalists which settled in the furtile river valley territories. Without knowledge of botony and zoology, discovered and exploited by Paleolithic hominins and passed down to Homo sapiens, agriculture would not have been possible. Ditto, the civilisations of the Indus Valley and China and the agricultural civilisations in Africa and the Americas. However, their scientific knowledge and mathematics were in the possession of temple priests and subsequent religious scribes and monks which in all cases polluted knowledge with myths and superstitions. The same was the case in Europe prior to the Reformation and Renaissance. Once competitive capitalistic commodity production on the basis of wage labour merged with global commerce, the rising capitalist mode of production revolutionised trading cities in Italy, the Netherlands, England and France. The emergence of revolutionary ideas presupposes an emerging revolutionary class. Corresponding to revolutionary economic interests a rising bourgeoisie had material interests in advancing technology, science and renaissance philosophical and cultural revolutions leading directly to French, Scottish and German enlightenments including materialism, economic science and socialism.

Modern science arose where historical conditions engendered capitalism and capitalist technology, science and industrial revolutions.

The earliest known (historically recorded) steam engines are recognised to have been present 2100 years ago in Alexandria, Egypt in social conditions corresponding to the then 'world-economy of the Afro-Asian-Mediterranean basin'. The 'world-economy' of agriculture based on chattel slavery. Ancient metallurgical mining and manufacturing were based on slave gang mining and specialised craftsmanship. This was also the case in large-scale agriculture. There was Mediterranean sea trade between merchandising cities and relatively distant overland trade between cities of this fertile crescent economy connecting India with China (the silk road caravans) but no quintessential economic demand for excessive surplus commodities. Since separating from related panina and hominima one distinctive trait of hominin behavior is tool making economics. So long as tools in use fit environmental requirements they remained basic. Paleolithic tools were effective for hundreds of thousands of years. Paleolithic and Mesolithic modes of production and means of food acquisition by hunting, gathering, fishing and migrations occurred as needed. So to Neolithic herding, pastoralism, horticulture and agriculture. Steam engine aeolipiles had no practical (economic) value in economies based on chattel slavery. Steam powered industry along with Chinese invented paper, printing press, compass and gun powder was to have an economic value and entirely different function with the rise of capitalist commodity production by wage workers in Europe and internationally.

It's interesting that 'Afro-Centric' American exceptionalists never talk about a 'white' or "European versions" of scientific discoveries in the fields of astronomy, physics, biology, chemistry or todays current advances in particle physics e.g., the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN's, (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), Large Hadron Collider. People go there from all over the world including Asian, African, Latin American and even from the U.S, including Black scientists. When research scientists and science or medical teachers and professors who are Black do research and experiments, perform surgery or teach students, are they doing any of this from a 'black perspective'? Of course not because there is no black version of physics, chemistry, biology, &c.

There is no 'black version of scientific facts. Marxian economics is an exact science. Marxist economists in the United States and in England and in Nigeria do empirical research to reach empirically validated yet falsifiable theoretical conclusions. As astronomer Carl Sagan noted science is a method of analysis and not a body of doctrinal beliefs. Genetic markers that determine pigmentation and morphological characteristics of individual's participating in scientific projects have never been determinate or relevant to the scientific methods employed by these scientists.

Galileo, predicated upon observational data provided empirical proof confirmed Corpernicus' heliocentric theory; thus displacing the geocentric Aristotelian-Ptolemaic paradigm. Galileo discovered the law of gravity and by experiment proved it. On the access to cosmological data provided by Tycho Brahe, Kepler discovered the principle of planetary orbits. Isaac Newton advanced the human understanding of gravitational force. Similarly, through empirical observation, Adam Smith established social theory (political economy) as an empirical science by the labour theory of value predicated upon division of labour corresponding to commerce. John Locke articulated a labour theory of property rights. Not to be confused with Adam Smith's labour theory of value. David Ricardo is to Adam Smith, what Kepler is to Galileo. So Marx is to David Ricardo and Adam Smith what Newton is to Galileo.

Science is a method of analysis of data that has in it skepticism engendering corrections, that exposed e.g., nationalist and or racist bias motivating the Piltdown fraud ... the Nebraska Man fraud ... Jensen and Shockley's phrenological-bell curve fraud. Chancellor Williams, George G.M. James, Cedric Robinson, Robin D.G. Kelley and Lawrence Ware are, in their respective assertions - presentations, as fake and phony as Carl Baugh, Don Patton, Ian Juby, Dawson and Smith Woodward, Jensen and Shockley in respectively promoting racialism in deliberate opposition to Marxian materialist conception of history calling for proletarian international revolution. It isn't accidental that anti-communism presents itself in racial costume.

There is no black version of M-C...P...C' M' and no black version of E=mc2.

Profits of capital are derived from worker exploitation. This economic system in the United States is known as capitalism. It is a mode of production characterised by commodity production by wages workers. Capitalists appropriate (purchase) workers' labor power as a commodity. The commodity producing labor process is a valorisation process: the production of commodities embodying value and surplus value. Having appropriated labor power of workers capitalists own the wealth produced by the labor power.

The circulation process of capital takes place in three stages: First stage: The capitalist appears as a buyer on the commodity and labor market; his money is transformed into commodities, or it goes through the circulation process M-C. Second stage: Productive consumption of the purchased commodities by the capitalist. He acts in the capacity of a capitalist producer of commodities; his capital passes through the process of production. The result is a commodity of more value than that of the elements composing it. Third stage: The capitalist returns to the market as a seller; his commodities are exchanged for money, or they pass through the circulation process C-M. Hence the formula for the circulation process of money capital is: M-C...P...C'-M', the dots indicating the points where the process of circulation was interrupted, and C' and M' designating C and M increased by surplus value. So soon as the process M-C has been completed, the purchaser has more than simply the means of production and labor-power required for the manufacture of some useful article. He has also at his disposal a greater supply of labor-power, or a greater quantity of labor, than is necessary for the reproduction of the value of this labor-power, and he has at the same time the means of production required for the materialization of this quantity of labor. In other words, he has at his disposal the elements required for the production of articles of a greater value than these elements, he has a mass of commodities containing surplus-value. The value advanced by him in the form of money has then assumed a natural form in which it can be incarnated as a value generating more value. In brief, value exists then in the form of productive capital which has the faculty of creating value and surplus-value. Let us call capital in this form P. Now the value of P is equal to that of L+Pm, it is equal to M exchanged for L and Pm. M is the same capital-value as P, only it has a different form of existence, it is capital value in the form of money-money-capital. As a matter of course, the formula M-C...P...C' -M' does not represent the normal form of the circulation of money-capital, until capitalist production is fully developed, because it is conditioned on the existence of a social class of wage-laborers. The application of labor-power, labor, can not be carried into effect anywhere but in the labor process. Marx, Capital, Volume II, Part I, Chapter 1 | Library of Economics and Liberty

But as we have seen, during that portion of his day's labour in which he produces the value of his labour-power, say three shillings, he produces only an equivalent for the value of his labour-power already advanced by the capitalist; the new value created only replaces the variable capital advanced. It is owing to this fact, that the production of the new value of three shillings takes the semblance of a mere reproduction. That portion of the working-day, then, during which this reproduction takes place, I call "necessary" labour time, and the labour expended during that time I call "necessary" labour. . . During the second period of the labour-process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the workman, it is true, labours, expends labour-power; but his labour, being no longer necessary labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the working-day, I name surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time, I give the name of surplus-labour. It is every bit as important, for a correct understanding of surplus-value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of surplus labour-time, as nothing but materialised surplus-labour, as it is, for a proper comprehension of value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labour, as nothing but materialised labour. Since, on the one hand, the values of the variable capital and of the labour-power purchased by that capital are equal, and the value of this labour-power determines the necessary portion of the working-day; and since, on the other hand, the surplus-value is determined by the surplus portion of the working-day, it follows that surplus-value bears the same ratio to variable capital, that surplus-labour does to necessary labour, or in other words, the rate of surplus-value, s/v = (surplus labour)/(necessary labour). Both ratios, s/v and (surplus labour)/(necessary labour), express the same thing in different ways; in the one case by reference to materialised, incorporated labour, in the other by reference to living, fluent labour. The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the labourer by the capitalist. Capital Vol. I - Chapter Nine

I end with the following quote from Che:

"Naturally we, who often do not show the requisite concern for theory, will not run the risk of expounding the truth of the Cuban Revolution as though we were its masters. We will simply try to give the bases from which one can interpret this truth. In fact, the Cuban Revolution must be separated into two absolutely distinct stages: that of the armed action up to January 1, 1959, and the political, economic and social transformations since then. Even these two stages deserve further subdivisions; however, we will not take them from the viewpoint of historical exposition, but from the viewpoint of the evolution of the revolutionary thought of its leaders through their contact with the people. Incidentally, here one must introduce a general attitude toward one of the most controversial terms of the modern world: Marxism. When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist or a biologist when asked if he is a "Newtonian," or if he is a "Pasteurian". There are truths so evident, so much a part of people's knowledge, that it is now useless to discuss them. One ought to be "Marxist' with the same naturalness with which one is "Newtonian" in physics, or "Pasteurian" in biology, considering that if facts determine new concepts, these new concepts will never divest themselves of that portion of truth possessed by the older concepts they have outdated. Such is the case, for example, of Einsteinian relativity or of Planck's "quantum" theory with respect to the discoveries of Newton; they take nothing at all away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it had achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman provided the necessary stepping-stone for them. The advances in social and political science, as in other fields, belong to a long historical process whose links are connecting, adding up, moulding and constantly perfecting themselves. In the origin of peoples, there exists a Chinese, Arab or Hindu mathematics; today, mathematics has no frontiers. In the course of history there was a Greek Pythagoras, an Italian Galileo, an English Newton, a German Gauss, a Russian Lobachevsky, an Einstein, etc. Thus in the field of social and political sciences, from Democritus to Marx, a long series of thinkers added their original investigations and accumulated a body of experience and of doctrines. The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny. At that moment Marx puts himself in a position where he becomes the necessary target of all who have a special interest in maintaining the old-similar to Democritus before him, whose work was burned by Plato and his disciples, the ideologues of Athenian slave aristocracy."

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