First a group of LBO participants proclaimed the rights of Nazis to take to the streets unmolested, to speak, to teach, and to hold tenured professorships. They addressed their scathing attacks not against the Nazis, but toward those -- myself included -- who have chosen to support the demands of and to participate in the mass anti-Nazi movement (such as SOS Rascisme's mobilizations against Professor Robert Faurisson in France, anti-KKK actions throughout the United States, and so forth).
Next -- surprise! -- we learned that The Nation is proccupied with reforming capitalism to assuage the wealthy liberal conscience; it's chosen vehicle, the Democratic Party. But The Nation's columnists have alternated between scolding and ignoring the mass movements of struggle for many years. The novelty is that one Nation columnist, in a separate publication, violated Louis Proyect's favorite cause, leading Louis -- in other respects he is LBO's Alex Cockburn, and proud of his posture -- to cancel his subscription. Such militancy! Will he burn his library card next?
If he does, Louis might never learn the difference between the (Alabama) Lowndes County Freedom Party (also known as the Black Panther Party) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. It was the latter, led by Fannie Lou Hamer of SNCC, that the Democratic National Convention refused to seat in 1964. Louis is evidently unaware that MFDP ran candidates against the Democrats and Republicans, and later demanded that Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine be seated in Congress as Mississippi representatives, replacing the Democrats who had denied their constituents the right to vote. To thwart that threatened independence and to capture the black vote, liberals created the Mississippi Loyalist Democrats, who were seated at the 1968 DNC in Chicago, as protesters' blood flowed outside on Michigan Avenue and in Grant Park. Those Mississippi liberals -- notably Hodding Carter and Patt Derian, were richly rewarded with high offices in the Carter administration.
Now finally, many among the LBO group are arguing that those who stood and fought gallantly against chattel slavery were either wrong or misguided, or at best wasted their efforts. (Providing podiums for Nazis is noble, but expropriating slaveowners at gunpoint isn't? This is negation of the negation with a vengeance.) No wonder there is such pessimism here about the prospects for revolution. If even the magnificent movement to abolish slavery -- which began in slave quarters, Underground Railroad "stations," maroon camps, pulpits, and parlor meetings in solidarity with Amistad mutineers, then spread to the fiery plains of Kansas and the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, long before Edmund Ruffin fired the symbolic first shot at Fort Sumter -- failed to merit respect, what cause might ever stir them to the barricades?
Accompanying these crackpot "left" analyses is a palpable contempt for activists that appears to be broadly shared among LBOers, regardless of their fierce debates on matters of doctrine and party affiliation. Does anyone here care about real conditions of life among working and oppressed people, and how we are struggling to bring change?
Ken Lawrence