Malcolm X and building a Black Tammany Hall

[Carrol Cox]

I agree pretty fully with Lou's post, including the sentence copied below, but I
would like to add a couple footnotes to it. (a) One always *aims* at some
"entire" group [I use "group" here as a blank check]. (b) But one also remembers
that in practice, even in times of maximum struggle, one will only reach a
minority of that group, that the majority will remain more or less detached, and
that another minority will be aggressive traitors.

These points are not contradictory. To do less than *aim* at the ENTIRE group
will doom one to one or another of the various ideological hangups that Lou
mentions in his post -- that is one will get caught up in the endless nonsense of
attempting to predict in advance the exact psychological state of everyone in the
group, who will respond to what kind of stimulus, etc. etc.

Lou is of course also right to note (as others have done) that "community" is a
term that comes up in the course of struggle, and is always defined in the
context of a given struggle. There is nothing that anyone can say about the term
in the abstract that will be very useful.

Carrol

Louis Proyect wrote:


>  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.