I tend to think these arguments blame militant minorities for the death of what Bob Jessop has called the Keynesian welfare state, instead of the Democrats themselves whose willingness to end class based reforms and impose one regressive policy after another had the effect of alienating voters, white and black, from the Demos and electoral politics altogether and pushing some white workers into the Republican Party. Martin Carnoy thinks the Republicans use racial symbols to win over some of these white voters and the Democrats must come up with ways to counter such racial symbolism; at the same time Carnoy realizes the problem is that the Democrats didn't have a lot to offer the working class even when they controlled both the Presidency and the House.
The problem here is not the Democrats allowed themselves to be contaminated by minorities--as Gitlin and Alterman seem to suggest in an insiduously racist manner while neglecting the barrenness of those minority programs--but the constraints the capitalist system puts on electoral politics. A more instrumentalist theory of those constraints is Tom Ferguson's; Mattick's theory of the limits of the mixed economy could be counterposed as more structural. I have spoken here in favor of the anti parliamentary left before. Here I don't think Adolph Reed Jr or Doug Henwood agree with me.
Here is a hodge podge of replies.
1. From previous LBO exchanges, Nathan knows why I am skeptical of such a way of countering Farakhan--though I respect his opinion and thank him for the support even when he disagreed with me. Carrol's criticism is a fair one--black nationalism already exists; it's only a question of suggesting a different direction to it than Farakhan has and that's what the BRC is trying to do. The invited speakers at the BRC did not include non black people or open dialogue with non black labor or socialist organizations. There was even the the Kwame Toure' like policy, relaxed at the last possible moment, that non blacks were not welcome to the whole Congress--not certain sessions within it. I think Farakhan's racial exclusivism was acceded to and that's no way to fight it.
I also think reading lists almost exclusively on the problem of racism or by only black socialists are no way to open the mind and the personality. But when I checked the BRC site immediately after Chicago Meeting MONTHS AGO, that's what I saw (even Robin Kelley's reading list had only a few exceptions).
It angers me because the leaders are so cosmpolitan, yet the ideas discussed seemed to imprison their followers within blackness. Who says ancient greek scientific philosophy or the Paris Commune doesn't belong as much to African or Asian American people today as to the modern greeks and french? Or can the former only be read by black youth if they are confident first that it was a stolen legacy from Egypt and furthermore those Egyptians were really black? Or are the black origins of this philosophy the only thing worth knowing? Don't reading lists mostly about racism and mostly by black socialists or radicals insinuate such a narrowing of the mind or the imprisoning of the self within Farakhan's black nationalist viewpoint?
I say to the minority youth whom I have taught: the world is your home. How are the possibilities immanent in the social world to be manifested if one remains focused on what racism is, what only black socialists have done, what only black activists have done as black activists? Are black people ontologically grounded in their blackness? Do we think that an organization defined by blackness is where black people really belong?
2. Louis P writes in defense of radical things black people have done. Fine. Ignoring differences in these organization's class composition, aims and tactics, he call them--along with Malcolm X, the NOI, the BPP and BRC--black nationalist and supports them all. Or maybe he doesn't think the BPP was black nationalist but ultra leftist. Or maybe the black nationalism he supports is revolutionary while the BPP was a reactionary nationalist outfit? Who knows? Who cares?
Malcolm X's economics remained premised on a vision of black separatism or at best control of the smaller property in the ghettoes in which the majority of blacks had been and remain forcibly separated from the rest of the population. The limits of such a strategy for black workers and the black unemployed were never analyzed. So while Malcolm X would not describe himself as a black nationalist at the end of his life, his domestic economic vision did indeed remain separatist and petty bourgeois. I think it is this respectable economics that makes him acceptable to the powers that be.
3. As far as I know, no one has compared Malcolm X's own admission of his meeting with the Klan in 1961 with the FBI's account of that meeting. They are quite different accounts of what went down and what Malcolm believed. Moreover, the meeting is never mentioned in The Autobiograpy as Joe Wood
underlines in his intro to the Malcolm X book he edited (St Martin'sPress, early 1990s) And Louis has never explained why he cut the FBI file off where he did. I suggest that remains in the context of this debate the only actual attempt at falsification of the actual record, a falsification from which the Autobiography also suffers
4. Mussolini may have got Marx wrong in the first place; Lenin's critique of Russian populism may been misguided. It would be interesting to see whether there is continuity between these earlier errors and their later political errors--in Mussolini's case fascism; in Lenin's case, an authoritarian socialism of which Rosa, Pannekoek and Gorter began the criticism. Similarly, I have been arguing that Malcolm X's earlier commitment to the NOI vision continues to damage even his latest politics despite a heroic attempt to question its assumptions
5. Malcolm X's hatred of the Jew inspired white integrationist seems to have never been reversed. He can't admit the existence of white American anti racism (or ever express genuine comradeship with those whites who struggled to end apartheid; those whites who were also often reds were summarily dismissed by Stokely in the name of black power, though that purge was thus anti red in effect).
It seems that only the existence of white Muslim brothers made Malcolm X reconsider his demonology of whites--not the existence of white and, yes, jewish American civil rights workers.
Malcolm X can't see black/minority-labor cooperation--see for example Peter Rachleff's history of labor in 19th century Richmond. Perhaps such a thing remains impossible to imagine because of the assumptions about the real impossibility of race mixing. And at no point did Malcolm X investigate the role of the black clergy in counseling black workers against efforts to integrate workers'organizations and instead encouraging them to opt for developing community, i.e., black separtist, organizations. Eric Arnesen mentioned this in a review of books on black labor in International Labor and Working Class History several years ago. The NOI carried out and carries out this role today to the extreme.
6. I am not trying to set Forman against Malcolm, though I think the former's class based criticism of Stokeley's ideas about black power could be applied to Malcolm's ideas as well, even if Forman himself did not do so.
Rakesh