Nelson Peery’s Legacy – Darryl “Waistline” Mitchell

Nelson Peery (June 22, 1923-September 6, 2015) earned himself an honorable place in the history of the US communist movement. He was an authentic propagandist of Marxism – the science of society. He helped a generation of revolutionaries develop a different understanding of the science of society.

 

As a revolutionary with an extraordinarily high degree of self-consciousness, Nelson’s life reveals that he deeply understood that the individual matters. He was a self identified Marxist-Leninist for much of his political life and carried water for the Leninist section of the Comintern. Nelson lived the life of a professional revolutionary, no matter what his day job. Self-conscious individuals earn footnotes in history because they express what three generations of Marxists called the “role of the individual in history.”

 

Marx and Engels’ narrative of the dialectic of the individual in social production and life is a beautiful thing. Human beings live in collectives, nurture our young and bring them into the existing ritualized social relations of production. Production relations are part of our species life activity. Therefore, individuals are always bound up with one form of collective or another, and a certain ritualized behavior that is part of the system of reproduction. Don’t nobody do anything in real life, isolated from humanity, alone and all by themselves. Our very thought process is the result of socialized behavior passed from one generation to the next.

 

 

The individual’s complex socialized life is bound up with the technology of productive forces specifically the division of labor. The collectives that are the foundation of an ancient tribal society before the rise of the agricultural revolution would naturally be different from the collectives of a society based on slavery or feudalism. Collective cooperation to get things done occur as the result of the social division of labor. This division of labor was built up from where one individual with primitive tools made the entire product, to today’s digital revolution. A society based on industrial mechanics – industrial revolution – is by definition very different from the new society which is based on the computer on a chip, digital processes and robotics.

 

Marxists inherited a theory of the role of the individual in history based on industrial mechanics – an early stage of development of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was the platform upon which a new social division of labor arose, socialized production and the factory system. Socialized production and the factory system are a social-technical division of labor where products can only be produced based on collectives operating gigantic machinery together, in real time. The factory system of production depends upon industrial cooperation between individuals, departments of individuals and entire branches of industries. During the epoch of the industrial revolution, revolutionaries formed organizations based on the factory system, industrial cooperation and its form of administration.

 

All production is social, but only the industrial method of production creates socialized means of production, worked simultaneously by hundreds, if not thousands to create a single product. During the period of transition from agriculture to industry, the role of the individual was experienced and understood based on socialized production and what Marx called “the factory system.” Nelson Peery lived the adage, “Everything to and through the collective.” Yet he understood his individual role in the collective.

 

Robotics begins destruction of industrial cooperation, the factory system and its underlying division of labor. Robotics destroys the industrial form of collectivity. The new economic architecture based on the semiconductor also begins the destruction of bureaucracy, or at any rate, the industrial form of bureaucracy. The “internet of all things” and the introduction of an interactive worldwide platform allowing everyone on earth to connect with each other, in real time, is the new way of life. An example of the new collectivity is the Wiki model, where documents and books become living – interactive, and subject to alteration and enhancement by the multitudes. 

 

Nelson was born during an era when the major energy sources in agriculture were the mule, horse and human labor. This era gave way to the Henry Ford stage of industrial production and mechanization of agriculture. Nelson witnessed this mechanization, the destruction of the sharecropping system by the tractor, fought in WW II, and then fought his way through Watts 1965 and lived long enough to see robots in the fields. Nelson returned to the ancestors during a period when Moore’s law no longer resembles a ramp (inclined plan) and appears as a vertical line ascending to the heavens. A general overview of Nelson’s life can be found here:

 

A solider trained to fight and kill in defense of democracy and equality, Nelson was a roughneck, unwilling to genuflect to an individual and willing to challenge the system of segregation and resist the architecture of capitalist production relations. His understanding of the social movement and organization was shaped by the fight against the fascistic “House Un-American Activity Committee” – McCarthyism of the 1950s. It is my contention that this experience would go on to shape his view of organization and collectivity. Peery’s philosophical approach and persistent fight for education was shared by his wife Sue Ying. Their collectivity was at the foundation of a renovated Marxism.

 

During the height of the Civil Rights and the anti-war movements, Nelson the individual, became a lightning rod and mobilizing force for revolutionaries already won over to Marxism. At least this was the case with the revolutionaries in Detroit. Without Nelson there would not have been a California Communist League, formed in the wake of the Watts 1965 rebellion, or a Communist Labor Party (USNA). While something would have been formed with or without Nelson, it would not have had his specific rendering of the national-colonial question. Nelson waged a principled fight and polemics to form a multinational communist party in the US, rooted in the fighting section of the industrial proletariat.

 

 

Marxism came hard to the bourgeois US working class. Everything in US society was formed in an environment of the developing Anglo-American bourgeois settlers’ state, and the unfettered development of the industrial revolution in the North, and this included the development of a militant Marxism, that did not cater to the highest paid workers.

 

The settler population as a collective, and then the emerging American working class were intimate parts of the genocidal wars against the original inhabitants of the land, the theft of half of Mexico’s territory, containment of the non-sovereign peoples, and historically supported and upheld the system of exclusion and isolation of the black slaves and their descendants. The Anglo-American people would go on to become the most privilege and imperial of all peoples in the history of private property. Clearly, the US multinational state remains the international hangman of revolutions and enemy of the people of the earth. A militant and partisan Marxism did not come easy for US revolutionaries.

 

I cannot adequately explain why Nelson Peery the person became a pivot in the development of US Marxism – the science of society. I do understand why Nelson Peery, as a black man and descendant of slaves, raised in Minnesota, would play a vital role in development of the science of society. The national-minorities, as a political category, tended to occupy the lowest social position and status in all imperial centers. The development of US Marxism had to be carried out by an individual and collective that personified the role of the lowest section of the proletarian eking out an existence in the imperial center, in masters’ house, amongst the ruling peoples.

 

Our working class was formed from European immigrants who brought with them the outlook of their mother country. These revolutionaries deployed a form of Marxism based in a European narrative and had no way to understand American history, the suffering, the shame, the colonial question, the color line and the lived experience of generations of US residents. Nelson understood America differently, as a black Anglo, which means a black person that had lived in the north and assimilated aspects of the culture of second and third generation European immigrants, in the context of the general segregation of the Negro/black.

 

Despite bourgeois imperialist heritage, privilege built on the foundation of Indian genocide, bribery based on colonial possessions, and some pretty nasty history, Peery knew from his study of the Civil War that a population that had previously supported slavery could be rallied to fight to overthrow the slave system. Nelson understood Karl Marx and Frederick Engels notion of what they called the ideological form and the way people thought things out, and how to get to their hearts. Nelson suggested on more than one occasion that comrades should ponder how soldiers could uphold slavery one moment and a year later march to their death in the Civil War, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, . . . His truth is marching on!” At times of revolutionary crisis people’s thinking can be transformed very rapidly.

 

 

Nelson witnessed the victory of the anarcho-syndicalist movement of the Henry Ford era factory workers. He lived the experience of the US working class victory in the fight for legal industrial unionism, and played his part in reforming the system in favor of the workers. Reform changes the relations within and between classes without changing the property relations. This takes place as the result of political action that creates new features in the system, which more often than not, are legal structures that protect the workers share of the social product. The Wagner Act for instance.

Nelson clarified the difference between reform, concessions and social revolution. While facing the color line in everyday life, Nelson developed a love for the US proletariat, born of a faith erected on a monument of science, facts and vision of the possible. He understood and wrote: “The vision of one revolution becomes the cause of the next.” (The Future Is Up to Us, page 47).

 

Peery’s vision of hope was buttressed by Marx’s concept of social revolution and the understanding that society changes qualitatively, and this includes the thinking of people. Old modes of understanding decay and begin to die when the economic foundation upon which the belief system was built is shattered, and due to advances in science. Then people can be introduced to new ideas and a new vision that express the new possibilities that come with new productive forces. New thinking often cloaks itself in old ideological forms. People become open to new ideas during moments of crisis and transitions from one stage of development to the next. Peery was able to merge hope, vision and faith with the scientific law of social development and the dialectic of change.

 

Peery’s renovated Marxism was the product of a collective effort. The collective charted the rise of the robotic economy and the opening of an epoch of social revolution. This process was described in his booklet, “Entering an Epoch of Social Revolution.” Peery further describes the deep change that is society being torn from its moorings in the old social order in his “The Future Is Up to Us.” http://www.speakersforanewamerica.com/EnteringAnEpochOfSocialRevolution2.pdf

 

Peery’s philosophical view was militantly materialist and advanced the way in which revolutionaries understood Marx dialectic. Marx’s dialectics asserts that matter moves, behaves and develops a certain way, according to a law system, and this law system of motion is knowable, even when our knowledge is limited by the era in which we are born. Peery’s experience during different stages of development of the industrial system and his ceaseless study were the basis for him to play a central role in renovation of the dialectic of the leap, the place of antagonism in the leap (transition) from an old quality to a new quality and the role of an organization of propagandists.

 

 

This renovated Marxism began to speak of social revolution different from the Leninists of the Comintern. Qualitatively new means of production births a new form of the laboring class, which develops outside the old social division of labor and old social organization of labor. The new form of the laboring class is birthed in antagonism with the old social order precisely because it develops outside the old productive relations.

 

The new form of proletariat is digital, meaning two things; this proletariat was born roughly after 1990 during the rise of the protest against globalization. The new proletariat deploys means of production based on the computer on a chip, rather than the old means of production based on industrial mechanics. In other words, my grandchildren.

 

Second, this new form of proletariat lives and develops in the context of a new technology regime, digital, robotic production. Digital technology began the destruction of the division of labor in production of socially necessary means of production. Strategically, and practically the amount of people deployed in the production of socially necessary means of life is in permanent decline as a percentage of the population. Even as the proletariat grows in absolute terms, it declines as a percentage of the population and as a percentage of laborers involved in socially necessary production.

 

This core of the new proletariat, its destitute and homeless section is a communist class to one degree or another because they can’t pay the rent no-more. The most destitute are the core of the communist class whose fight is for political power to establish a communist economy. Such an economy produces, distributes its socially necessary production and educates people without demanding money or labor from the individual labor, or a moral commitment to believe a certain way, as a condition to live and prosper. Communism grows out of robotics.

 

In Peery’s lifetime, the communist movement transitioned from an industrial based ideological movement of people who believed in communism to a 21st century practical movement of people demanding socially necessary means of life for all, even people without money, and without a demand for labor exchange as a condition to live and prosper in society.

 

As an historical personality, Peery was the living link between three generations of communist revolutionaries. He was the continuity and break within a pole of US Marxism, whose foundation was established by V. I. Lenin and the Third Communist International. Peery’s legacy is his distinct presentation of a retooled Marxism. “To the forge, Comrades!” “Strike where the iron is hot!,” “the objectivity of,” “Marx said prosperity is the death of revolution,” “line of march,” and a host of sayings those who knew him best could better describe.

 

I never had a personal relationship with Nelson Peery and along with a large group of revolutionaries in Detroit, entered the orbit of his Marxist polarity around 1971-72. We are the Baker group and began calling ourselves such after the 1971 split in the old League of Revolutionary Black Workers. I knew Nelson from his writings, rather than personally, although I met him on several occasions.

 

My personal favorite quotation from Nelson Peery is from his “The Future is Up to Us,” where he states: “When fundamental things change, everything dependent upon them must also change. This does not imply that results of change are direct or immediate. However, scientific thinking demands that we find the motivation for change, place such changes in their proper context and make some estimate of their consequences.”

 

In my view, the evolution of Peery’s contributions to the science of society are displayed in works such as “The Future Is Up to Us,” “Entering an Epoch of Social Revolution,” “African American Liberation and Revolution,” “The Comintern position on the Negro Question,” “The Negro National Colonial Question” and several articles, interviews and videos of him presented on this Facebook page and in the pages of the Peoples Tribune, over the past 45 years.

 

Peery seems to be the author of the 2008 article, African American Question Takes on New Meaning,” although the article has no by-line. This article is groundbreaking in its treatment of the color line and the role of black Americans in American history.

 

“African American Question Takes on New Meaning,” was one of Nelson’s intellectual doors through which I passed in the evolution of his presentation of the color line from its genesis up to today – the era of the rising robotic economy. Peery and the Peery polarity outlined the process by which the black community was destroyed and replaced by majority black neighborhoods. A community and neighborhood are different.

 

Segregation backed up by state, extra-legal and illegal violence, held blacks from all classes and strata together, as a people in their community. Within Marxism the word community implies economic exchange between different classes and so it was with the black community. Segregation accelerated the formation of blacks, pardon Negroes, as a people and a community.

 

Once legal segregation was dismantled, those with money moved out of the black community and took their place in the larger society alongside their economic and social counterparts of all colors and nationalities. The black community began to decay and then disintegrated, along with local Negro businesses, which had serviced a segregated market. Negro businesses belong to the era of segregation, while black businesses which service all sections of the market without regard to color belongs to the post segregation era.

 

 

Today we have vast formerly black communities that are increasingly integrated, but majority black areas that are proletarian slums. Peery’s approach to the colonial question reaffirmed my conviction to never use race and racism as analytical tools. There is only one race, the human race. The historically evolved social position of blacks in America is not a racial question. It is a colonial question; whose sharpest feature is the color line.

 

Many of the general themes and narratives on the Facebook page, Marxist Glossary Discussion, and in Marxist Glossapedia, (to be published September 2018) are based in the Peery polarity, although the Glossary Discussion page does not belong to any organization.

 

Peery’s approach to the science of Marxism is a gift to the proletariat to which he dedicated his life. The Peery polarity is not the property of an organization. Nelson’s legacy, of course, belongs to no one and everyone. Peery was able to shed much of the old industrial doctrines that corresponded to society as it completed its transition from agriculture to the factory system and large-scale industry. He was not able to transform the organization of which he was a central figure, and he understood he could not.