<< Let me see if I can put what I think is the essential political matter in a sentence or two. If race is a social construct, not a biological one, and a construct we'd like to destabilize or undo, then doesn't racial nationalism contribute to the reification of race? I really don't know the answer to that, which is why I'm not ready to say "enough" to the discussion itself, but only to the personal insults. >>
Race is indeed a social construct, but it was reified in colonial Virginia, as Ted Allen, Lerone Bennett, Edmund Morgan, and many other historians have shown. In cannot be "unreified" short of white supremacy's destruction, which is its aim, but one hopes it can be transcended in the Marxist-Hegelian meaning.
I'm aware that academic Marxists pursue some bizarre theoretical schemes. In my day of jousting with them, the worst was Eugene Genovese, who has since abandoned Marxism. I'll try to address that in a future thread, because I believe it has useful lessons for today and tomorrow. This list has several contributors who seem as out of touch with mass realities as Gene was in the 1970s (his tranparent purpose was to be the academic establishment's tame and loyal Marxist, which became the key to his soaring fame and fortune). The one whose postings here have provoked my shock, anger, and dismay the most is Rakesh, whose methods of obscurantism coupled with hollow bombast are pages from the Genovese guidebook, which has brought us to this point.
In the epoch of imperialism, Marxists who are engaged in mass work generally follow the Leninist strategy of organizing to unify the proletariat AND oppressed people. Many differences then erupt -- organize how? organize into what? organize for what? These lead to heated debates over, for example, the Democratic Party, the trade unions, and so forth. Considerable paper is filled with debates over whether or not certain racial minorities constitute nations in the Leninist meaning. But for this discussion, those issues don't need to be resolved.
Unifying the proletariat is most significantly done at the point of production, and the same holds true to the extent that can be done also for oppressed people. That is why, for Marxists, examples such as DRUM are so powerful. But oppressed people are oppressed not simply as proletarians, but as entire social groups. Thus the central importance of the concept of community, which Doug has disparaged.
(Language is important, and the choice of the term "community," which in my experience we began to apply usefully in the 1950s and 1960s in polar opposition to "neighborhood," the reactionaries' divisive term, is intentionally selected as connoting unity rather than division.)
Although sects have debated whether or not Black people and others in the U.S. are or are not nations, some theoreticians (C.L.R. James, for one), have preferred to avoid a categorical answer, but instead prefer to engage in the struggle by believing that they are to the extent they consciously assert their nationhood, and that out of that consciousness arises a radical, sometimes revolutionary, challenge to their oppressors -- principally but not exclusively the bourgeoisie -- and to the extent routing the oppressors within the expoited classes occurs, it serves further to unify the proletariat. This is difficult to elaborate abstractly, but is easier to demonstrate in practice, particularly in the factory-based insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s.
Avoiding involvement in the internal debates of oppressed people and their leaders (such as, for example, between La Raza Unida in Zavala County, Texas; the [Mexican nationalist] MLN in Tierra Amarilla, Colorado; and self- identified Chicano leaders such as Kiko Martinez) does not equal abstention from solidarity with their struggles, which have engaged me often. In contrast, Rakesh's formula leaves no option for engagement except along the lines of pre-imperialism Marxism. It is especially offensive that he twists Jim Forman into an implied opponent of Malcolm X, when anyone who worked with Jim knows not only that's illegitimate, but also that Rakesh could not pursue that line for five minutes among actual radical insurgents.
However, the concept of community is not simply a construct to mark off the boundaries of oppression. The Flint sit-down strike, for example, depended not only on factory occupations, but also on (working class) community-based solidarity, such as the legendary activities of Genora Johnson.
Given the way this debate periodically erupts on LBO, is it too much to ask that participants read the classic texts on these subjects, such as "Black Awakening in Capitalist America," "The Demand for Black Labor," "White Blindspot," "Indignant Heart," "Detroit, I Do Mind Dying," and lots of others? We really don't need to reinvent the experience from scratch, I hope.
Ken Lawrence