If it needs repeating, Louis is quite right that R's remark about the NOI and KKK is ridiculous pap.
> . . .
> The sort of politics that Rakesh is espousing is rooted in the Marxist
> backlash against black nationalism which began in the 1960s. The
> Spartacist
> League, the Progressive Labor Party, the CPUSA at a certain point, all
> professed the need for "black-white" unity and accused Malcolm X and other
Why is "black-white unity" in quotes?
The CP's wrong approach to Malcolm X is also obvious. But their position is being stereotyped here.
> such thinkers as driving a wedge between blacks and whites. This is
> complete bullshit. The wedge already had been driven in the 19th century
> when white workers were coopted into supporting racist exclusion in the
> trade unions.
Something tells me the old CP understood this, their errors notwithstanding.
> The 1930s saw a partial healing of these divisions when the CPUSA
> fought to
> integrate the trade unions. After WWII, the CPUSA was driven out of the
> unions and old racial privileges began to reemerge. Under the
The equation of the suppression of the CP and regress in race relations within unions sounds way overdrawn to me. It gives no credit to institutional changes won by the labor movement (with key CP leadership), but it dovetails with a skewed vew of the state as a plaything of implacable reactionary capital.
> impact of the
> black power movement of the 1960s, black caucuses began to form in the
> unions and fight for affirmative action. Many Marxists were disoriented by
The black caucuses were interested in far more than affirmative action. We seem to be looking at this through race-conscious glasses, giving nationalists themselves too little credit for broad-mindedness.
> these iniatives and thought that they "divided the working class,"
> including Alex Cockburn and your own magazine, LM. To the CPUSA's credit,
> it supported such initiatives and Gerald Horne wrote an excellent book on
> the subject.
>
> If you analyze the position of Rakesh, the Spartacist League and others,
> you can only come to the conclusion that independent black
> political action
> is counter-revolutionary. This sort of position is well-known to the
> organizers of the BRC and I am not surprised that they decided to
> "moderate" who would attend the conference. As it turns out, most of the
> people who support this position are not African-American.
You can only come to that conclusion in the heat of polemical frenzy. Very rarely do you hear anybody say that independent black political action is counter- revolutionary.
What you do see more commonly is the opposite error: uncritical support for anything black or brown. This is one way radicals end up tailing do-nothing bourgeois pols.
Independent political action CAN be counter- revolutionary, not to mention unproductive. Maybe not as often as independent white political action, but often enough to justify a critical eye.
By contrast, labor-based action is rarely counter-productive, especially now, though as for nationalism, it is always open to evaluation as to how it cricitizes the system and how strongly it acts.
MBS