The December Marxist IQ by Norman Markowitz

by: Tuesday 2 December 2014

 

The demonstrations in Ferguson Missouri against the ongoing institutional racism in the criminal justice and legal system have sparked global interest.  This month’s  Marxist IQ is dedicated to those who are  participating in these ongoing demonstrations

1.       The struggle against police brutality, affecting  minority groups especially and working and low income people generally has a long history.  In the 1960s in many cities, the Civil Rights Movement fought to establish

a.       Civilian Review Boards to investigate charges of police brutality

b.      Bipartisan Commissions to study the question

c.       Support your local police campaigns

.     All of the above

2.       The position of the CPUSA from the 1920s to today  on questions of racist oppression has been

a.       To say that all these questions will be addressed after socialism is established

b.      To support the development of African-American and minority capitalism as the solution to racist oppression

c.       To see the struggle against racist oppression and for African-American Liberation as inseparable from the struggle for socialism and the liberation of the whole working class

d.      To support various Democratic party compromises on Civil Rights legislation

  1.  Marxists see the “concept of race” as

a.       Useful to understand differences between people so as to advance selective breeding

b.      A complement to class analysis to understand what groups will be successful and what groups will not

c.       Ideology with no scientific basis whatsoever, developing from chattel slavery and colonialism

d.      Crucial to an understanding of evolution

  1.  The Study, “We Charge Genocide” sponsored by the CPUSA led Civil Rights Congress and dealing with the sordid  and bloody history of racist oppression in the U.S.  was presented to the United Nations and translated into many languages in the early 1950s although largely suppressed in the U.S.  The individual most associated with the study was

a.       NAACP leader Walter White

b.      Democratic Presidential Candidate Adlai Stevenson

c.       CPUSA leader William Patterson

d.      Trade union leader Walter Reuther

 

  1.  In the 1970s, this then leading CPUSA scholar and activist, after surviving a crude frameup in a political trial, became a leader of a national movement against racist and political repression and an activist against what today is called the prison industrial complex, struggles which she continues to be to this day She is

a.       Condoleeza Rice

b.      Angela Davis

c.       Donna Brazile

d.      Hillary Clinton

 

Answers to the November IQ

1.b

2.a

3.c

4.c

5.d

 

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Comments

  • There are a few errors here. The last three questions should be 3, 4, 5, not all listed as one. I tried to change that for some reason but it did not go through. Thanks to E.E. W. Clay for his fine comments and he got all the answers right, by the way
    Norman Markowitz

    Posted by norman markowitz, 12/08/2014 5:27pm (9 years ago)

  • 1. a
    2. c
    3. c
    4. c
    5. b

    The last question, 1., or 5. above, is interesting because just as Angela Yvonne Davis's attempted state sponsored murder and persecution elicited youth erupting in massive and intergenerational protests, sinking deep roots in the human, civil, labor and nature rights movements, in her case (this is only my opinion on the answer(smile)), a similar reinvigoration of these, and new movements has been precipitated in the case of Michael "Mike-Mike" Brown Jr. As youth-Jewish, women, African American, white, non-white erupt in protests-but this time in the midst of a co-existent binary-chip revolution, with literally millions with hand held computers and cameras, the world interconnected in with-as a Karl Marx or a James E. Jackson might write-"newfangled" tools of capitalism itself, make for an accelerated, magnified, revolutionary situation in which capitalism is pregnant with socialism.
    The marshaling of this situation, for workers, by workers and of workers, with the international interconnections for resistance, for labor, civil and human rights, adderessing the sophistication of the state's mechanisms for executing genocide (Bob Mc Culloch's Grand Jury debacle), the use of the archaic Grand Jury system aiding this, the role and position of the Federal government, but critically, the unified community's response, for peace, jobs and income, housing, health care, security, for love- in a word: freedom, will be all important in the future, for the working class's well-being-and therefore socialism, both in Ferguson and the world.

    Posted by E.E.W. Clay, 12/03/2014 10:39am (9 years ago)

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