Why does your academic interests bother me? They in themselves don't bother me. I am in contact with PhD's galore on PEN-L. What they don't do is run a bunch of ultraleft "I am a communist" jive by people the way you do. You are a communist only in the Walter Mitty sense.
>1. Carson reported a meeting Malcolm X had with the KKK as the latter was
>terrorizing SNCC.
THIS IS COOPERATION WITH KKK TERROR? The FBI cooperated with the KKK, you idiot. It assisted in bombings, shootings, etc. Malcolm X denounced Klan terror.
>2. Breitman argues that Malcolm X evolved towards socialism and national
>liberation movements. I think he overstates the case for the former (for
>example, having read his last speeches, I don't see much more than
>radical shopkeeper politics in terms of an actual domestic political
>economic agenda--certainly the autobiography doesn't move beyond this);
Radical shopkeeper? This is just some stupid phrase-mongering from Rakesh. We have no idea what he means. Malcolm X denounced the capitalist system repeatedly after he broke with the NOI. He was hostile to the 2 capitalist parties. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam. He denounced imperialist intervention in the Congo. He told an audience, that included me, that the Militant newspaper of the Trotskyist SWP told the truth. He met frequently with SWP leaders in the last year or so of his life and was friendly. He was also becoming more and more receptive to socialist ideas that attorney Conrad Lynn was promoting to him. These ideas included the Marxism of CLR James who Lynn was a close associate of.
>moreover Malcolm X never achieved the critical analysis of national
>liberation movements which has always struck me as Fanon's greatest
>insight, though his embrace of the peasantry as the subject of
>revolutionary change seems to me simply wrong or simplistic (no analysis
>of the internal differentiation of the peasantry and an unjustified
>writing off of the industrial working class as a labor aristocracy). For
>example, see Issa Shivji's criticism of Fanon on this.
I can top that. Consult Mvendi ZZag Kyrilltum's demolishing critique of Shivji in the March '93 Journal of Postcolonial Heuristics. After Shivji read this critique, he dropped out of academia and began managing 7-11's in Houston, Texas.
>3. I have given my reasons why I think the NOI can only serve as a force
>of oppression against black people. It may be incorrect to characterize it
>as a fascist movement.
You mean you were incorrect. What's with this passive voice bullshit. You were the one who went beserk, not me.
>4. The NOI is likely to give a black imprimatur to racist and class biased
>policies, e.g., termination of AFDC or the placing of fatherless black
>children in orphanages run by crazy Muslim brothers. It's this imprimatur
>to actual policy, not hate speech, that worries me. It's the overlap
>between Farakahn and James Q Wilson that troubles me.
Oh, please. This is yesterday's news. The NOI is Booker T. Washington with black nationalist rhetoric. You don't need a PhD to understand this.
>5. As for the dialectical or revolutionary possibilities in minority
>national movements (AIM or La Raza Unida), I disagree. It's not that I
>think the fight against Dick Wilson was not more than justified. I do.
>It's just that the occupation of ALcatraz seems to me not have had
>revolutioanry implications, and La Raza Unida never was clear about what
>it was trying to do. Electoral politics on the basis of an ethnically
>defined party in multiethnic polities? Secession?
Why don't you spend less time reading obscure academics like Shivji and more time reading first-rate Marxists like CLR James. Then you might understand it.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)