> This is an abstraction. Real politics involves contradictions. For example,
> for women to meet men as equal partners in the radical movement, it was
> necessary for them to segregate themselves and form all women's groups that
> were closed to men. Once they achieved a higher level of self-confidence,
> unity was possible on a higher plane.
Now Wojtek comes from eastern europe, where various sorts of "nationalisms" have, if my (limited) understanding of modern history is correct, a mostly vicious history. But Lou's point has to be grasped, I am having a hard time understanding why it can't be grasped.
The principles Lou puts forth here were established through bitter experience under the most varied conditions. And they predate anything that can remotely be called "identity politics," but are rather -- and how many times must this be stated in how many ways? -- A ROAD TO A UNIVERSALIST POLITICS, TO A MULTI-"RACIAL" POLITICS. And also it is frustrating to see so many on this list plunge ahead with attacks on an abstract "nationalism" without, apparently, having the least familiarity with the wide (and sometimes bitterly opposed) understandings of that term *within* (REPEAT, WITHIN) the so-called "black nationalist" position. And many of those understandings (I would cite those of Baraka, Marable, and Reed -- who of course have sharp differences with each other too) are far more universalistic (and even *pro white*) than most of the critics of the Congress apparently are capable of.
The resistance to the idea of a black core to a U.S. revolutionary movement is itself the best evidence I know of for the need for such a strategy.
The same applies to questions of gender. As long as leftist circles are cluttered with the likes of whatever nut it was who recently declared that women have a biological destiny as "mothers" (thereby showing his ignorance of both biology and history), there is going to be a continuing need for women's caucuses. Such a use of pseudo-biology puts him in the same category of pseudo scientists as Murray et al., and there is no way women can defend either themselves or, more importantly, The Left as a whole, against such troglodytism without the continuation of "exclusively" women's organizations and caucuses.
Carrol