In 1968 the SWP ran Fred Halstead for President and Paul Boutelle was his running-mate. Fred was a leader of the Vietnam antiwar movement and Paul was a prominent Harlem black nationalist who had worked closely with Malcolm X. The 2 main slogans of the campaign were "Bring the Troops Home Now" and "Black Control of the Black Community," which drove the ultraleftists crazy. They preferred slogans "Victory to the NLF" and were generally hostile to black nationalism.
Boutelle was under enormous pressure to not join a "white" organization. I was at one of my first meetings in the NY branch when he got up and read from an anonymous letter from a party member. It said that the SWP did not need "hate whitey" n-words like him. He challenged the sender to meet him outside. That was impossible, of course, because it was the FBI who sent it. This was revealed in an SWP suit against the FBI. I myself received a postcard at work around this time reminding me to come to the next party meeting, where plans on how to overthrow capitalism would be discussed. The postcard was read by just about everybody until it got to my desk. John Falzon, a VP, called me into his office and told me that if they found out that it was a Met Life employee who was harassing me, he'd be fired on the spot. As it turned out, it was the FBI who sent it, as I discovered from my FOIA request. The postcard was sent by the NYC FBI, according to a memo that had "Buy US Savings Bonds" written at the bottom.
So where did this mushy term "black community" come from? It emerged out of the black urban uprisings of the 1960s on a spontaneous basis. Nobody coined the term as Etizoni coined "communitarian". There is no ideology lurking beneath the term. What happened is that street fighters, when asked by reporters what they wanted, responded "We want the cops and the army out of our community. We want to control our own community." Into this algebraic formulation, there were two possibilities: black capitalism or black anticapitalist struggle. Since the black nationalists of the era were self-destroying through Maoist ultraleftism, while the cops were destroying them, a political vacuum was created. Into this vacuum, black capitalism and Democratic Party reformism crept in.
There were dogmatic Marxists in the SWP who hated this notion of a "black community". We had a big debate in the party in 1971 against the "For a Proletarian Orientation Tendency", whose arguments were of a Spartacist nature that both Doug and Rakesh reflect. They kept harping on the danger of the black bourgeoisie. If we didn't expressly target the black bourgeoisie in our agitational literature, we would be giving it aid and comfort. What was revealed in the course of the preconvention discussion is that there is hardly any black bourgeoisie to speak of. Except for a handful of men in the food, communications and auto retailing business, there are no legitimate bourgeois figures. Also, Andrew Hacker reveals in his latest book on money that black people are grossly underrepresented in upper management. Private corporations, despite public relations effort to correct their racist reputations, remain lily-white at the top levels. Only 5 of 104 corporations--Sears, Xerox, Mobil, Kraft and Merrill Lynch--have African-Americans in senior executive positions. The Forbes 400 list has cited more than a thousand different men and women since it began the survey in 1982. Of this group, only five--less than one-half of one percent--has been black. The only major gain in employment due to affirmative action has been in the public sector, but that is about to change as Clinton concessions to the right-wing continue unabated.
One of the reasons Doug finds it so hard to understand this question of the "black community" is that he not approaching the question dialectically. If we are interested in struggles that are untainted by "alien" class influences, we will end up in splendid isolation like the Spartacist League. Even the trade union movement is deeply contaminated by bourgeois influence, as Ron Carey's troubles point out.
Revolutionary politics is not about choosing "pure" slogans, but in mobilizing people against their oppressor. In the 1960s and early 70s, black people were mobilizing around the notion that the "black community" was a victim of racism. They did not split hairs over whether a black sanitation worker was more oppressed than a funeral parlor owner. And you know something? They were closer to the truth than their ultraleft critics. You can not go by for a week without hearing about some cops pulling a black lawyer, schoolteacher or executive out of their car and beating them up during an arrest because they "fit" the profile of a criminal. It is better to move the ENTIRE black community against the capitalist forces of oppression than to sit on the sideline worrying about whether we are crossing imaginary class lines.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)