**NOTE** This program originally aired and was posted January 14, 2011. We weren’t in live this week, but it is never wrong to revisit these discussions, topics and people!
Dr. Carole Boyce Davies joined us this morning for a discussion of the life, work and continuing relevance of Claudia Jones. Boyce-Davies’ book, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, provided us a nice basis from which to discuss primarily, as she writes, “Recovering the Radical Black Female Subject,” along with other topics such as internal colonialism, communism and radical pan-Africanism. We also talked briefly about the current state Black/Africana Studies as we also looked to pay tribute to the real politics of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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I attempted to download the program but only heard D. MLK for several minutes. Did I bail out too soon? I never knew Claudia Jones but have numemrous friends who did. I’m wondering if Dr. Boyce Davies spoke with them? I’m also intrigued by the “Left of Marx” formula-where does that go? Intersted in more info and discusion about Claudia Jones.
Yes, you bailed too soon. the full show is there for streaming or download.
As Pink Floyd aptly noted, there are always “Pigs on the Wing”. What Pink Floyd failed to note is that Communist Pigs are no better than Capitalist ones. The album, “Animals”, which I will play on my radio show this afternoon with commentary, was based on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Which, in turn, was based on Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”.
“The first chapter of the Manifesto, “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, examines the Marxist conception of history, with the initial idea asserting that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. It goes on to say that in capitalism, the working class, proletariat, are fighting in the class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the bourgeois, and that past class struggle ended either with revolution that restructured society, or “common ruin of the contending classes”.
It continues by adding that the bourgeois exploits the proletariat by “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones”.
The Manifesto explains that the reason the bourgeois exist and exploit the proletariat with low wages is because of private property, “the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital”, and that competition amongst the proletariat creates wage-labour, which rests entirely on the competition among the workers!