I've just re-subscribed to the lbo list and thus am entering the discussion of the BRC in mid- or perhaps late stream. I want to respond to Carrol's reply today to Doug's inquiry about what actually went on at the BRC (tagged on below) and to several comments made yesterday and today on the BRC.
I teach at UIC in Chicago where the BRC was held & I organized the annual eight-day Institute on Culture and Society of the Marxist Literary Group which met June 13-20 and thus coincided with the BRC. (Thanks again, Doug, for joining us.) When I realized this coincidence would be the case, I immediately asked black colleagues at UIC and black comrades from political organizations to which I belong who were working on the organizing committee about whether we (the mostly white MLG people) would be able to attend some of the BRC sessions.
>From the get-go, it was clear that the question of just how the BRC
could be a specifically BLACK Radical Congress if it were open to
white registrants was one over which the organizers were agonizing. In
the weeks just before the BRC I was in daily contact with these people,
who made it clear that heated arguments were going on and continued to go
on over this issue until the last minute. My friends on the committee
finally informed me that, although they were deeply, painfully conflicted
about making such a request, they would prefer that the BRC be understood
to be a specifically black event, meant to allow a space for black
activists with often widely divergent positions and politics to meet and
figure out ways to work with each other, understanding this as a vitally
necessary first and long-overdue step to take BEFORE it would be possible
to begin to address how
to make stronger links with predominantly white activist/left/radical
constituencies.
I informed the MLG registants of this, most of whom understood the issues and respected the organizers' preference. However, those who disagreed with the policy went over to the Friday night opening plenary and were admitted without opposition or any resistance.
Reading some of the responses to the BRC "exclusivity" policy on this list and others has convinced me that it was indeed necessary as a FIRST step, as Carrol realizes, toward a more unified black&white left. Comments such as those yesterday by someone who claimed that "combatting corporate capitalism was more important than Black, Gay or Women's 'struggles'" (the quotes here obviously implying that these aren't authentic struggles) are PRECISELY what the BRC organizers are reacting to--the smug finger-shaking superiority of traditional leftists who assume everyone else should be as able as they are to consider race- and gender-based experiences of oppression secondary effects of class oppression, and therefore not worthy of the primary attention of "serious" leftists such as themselves. There's been an undercurrent of dismissiveness toward "identity" issues on this and many, many other supposedly left lists and discussions of late, often pitting "identity politics", caricatured, against "real politics", equally caricatured or left undefined. I won't list here the many, many recent books/articles etc. in this vein, but simply note that the worst excesses of the worst kind of "identity politics" haven't simply sprung up out of the blue overnight. Rather, they've been consistently fertilized at least since the 1970s by a rich supply of self-righteous doo-doo unwittingly provided by those lefties whom "anonymous" referred to earlier today as "whiny, condescending bourgeois whites" (Rakesh's "Nation" readers who see the magazine as a mirror of bourgie middle-class progressive values and priorities), folks who don't have to prioritize or even think much about race or gender if they don't want to. As long as they chose to exercise this option, an option that simply isn't available for most Americans, groups like the BRC will sontinue to see, and to rightly see, the white middle-class progressive left as an obstacle to be overcome rather than as a potential partner.
This point has been made often enough over the years, but it sure seems to be taking a long time to sink into some folks' heads.
Jamie
On Wed, 24 Jun 1998, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Doug wrote on June 23:
>
> > This discussion of the BRC is providing more heat than light, since no
> > one's really reported what went on there. Does anyone know what was
> > discussed and by whom, and what, if any, post-conference organizational
> > plans were made?
>
> I too wish for a good deal more information than is yet available on the
> Black Radical Congress, but the debate on the question of the Congress has
> really been over fundamental understanding of principle in respect to the
> concrete conditions of the U.S., now and historically. More information on
> the Congress, in this context, is more apt to blur than clarify those more
> fundamental issues, as disputants emphasize (or obscure) their positions
> by reference to specific details of the conference.
>
> My argument, and I think the core argument of most who posted defending
> the validity of such a conference existing, was that the calling of the
> Congress represented, *in principle*, the route to the unification of the
> U.S. working class, EVEN IF THIS PARTICULAR CONGRESS TURNED OUT TO BE A
> COMPLETE DISASTER. Even in that case, the really serious barriers to
> achieving "cross-'racial'" unity of the u.s. working class were those
> marxists who denied the *duty* of blacks, of women, of other "marginal"
> working class groups, to organize themselves.
>
> I myself see no way to *ever* organize a (marxist) working-class party in
> the United States unless the vast majority of white marxists/radicals come
> to understand AND ACCEPT unconditionally not just the right but the duty
> of blacks, women, etc. to organize themselves *separately* AS WELL AS
> to participate in the struggle to unify the class. The u.s. working class
> will remain *permanently* divided by race and by gender until unity across
> those lines is forced by efforts such as that which the BRC is attempting
> to generate. One could only wish that in the near future a WRC should be
> called....