Master and Slave

“[The] assumption that the slave was a total victim is at its heart elitist and untenable. What flows from it is the view that the slave could not help himself because he had no culture, history, community, or opportunity for change and development and that, consequently, he had to be liberated by those whose history had fortunately left them intact and thus in human terms better equipped to help him.

But if the slave had a history, then his behavior changed over time as he learned from the past and met new experiences. Men, however, do not move in their own behalf or make revolutions for light and transient reasons. Only when they no longer can stand the contradictions in their own personalities do they move in a sharp and decisive fashion. The victim is always in the process of becoming the rebel, because the contradictions demand this resolution.

As the German philosopher Hegel understood in the famous passage on master and slave in The Phenomenology of Mind, the slave fights against the master by wrestling with his own internal conflicts. The will of the master and the will of teh slave both appear as a contradiction within the slave.”

~George Rawick, taken from From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community

…Thinking about this quote in relationship to this interesting post over at Lenin’s Tomb that discusses the contemporary debate about self-liberation vs external liberation, or in other words why fighting for our damn selves is so essential rather than asking someone else to fight (or in the case of this post, not fight) for us…

Themes from Indignant Heart: A Black Workers’ Journal (Part 1)

I recently finished the first part of Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal by Charles Denby and have to say that it is a great, great read.

The book is a written account of his life as orally told by Denby (or rather, by Si Owens who originally wrote under the pseudonym of Matthew Ward and later under the pseudonym of Charles Denby). Denby was originally born in Alabama in the early 20th century to a family of sharecroppers and farmers. He joined a massive migration northbound in 1924 when he moved to Detroit to find work in the factories.

During the Depression he was laid off so he temporarily moved back South, first to Alabama with his family and then to Memphis when he found the farm work unbearable. He would eventually return to Detroit in the 40s to work in the auto plants. He was a rank and file militant and recounts numerous episodes of the everyday resistance among black workers against the white racists of the rural south, against the bosses in the northern factories and the growing union bureaucracy.