Yours,
Eric
Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> The unfortunate post I sent to the list instead of directly to Angela
> was the last in a series of posts to Angela in response to off-list
> posts she had sent to me. I was not really prepared now to develop my
> position in a way that I thought suitable for the list itself. But since
> I sent that post, I am now forwarding the preceding post to Angela,
> since it will provide a little context.
>
> Doug speaks of communicating across borders. I think lbo does serve this
> purpose rather successfully. I am delighted, for example, to be on the
> same list with Max Sawicky, rough as many of our exchanges have been,
> and of course with Doug himself.
>
> But not all borders are easy to debate across, and the border
> established, for example, by the passage from Rakesh quoted in Ken's
> last post, a despicable attack on nearly two generations of black
> leadership, is not a border across which debate can be very useful. If
> U.S. leftists will really tolerate positions such as that, then the
> struggles of the 60s were indeed wasted.
>
> I find it sad that someone should threaten to make a scene over my nasty
> personal comment on Rakesh, but apparently that same person can contain
> his/her equanimity in the face of Rakesh's steadily worsening attack on
> so many heroes of the black liberation struggle. It only underlines for
> me the probability that most Americans objectively refuse to believe
> that African Americans can be trusted to think for themselves. THat is
> the only assumption that, for me, makes Rakesh's position intelligible.
>
> Carrol
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject: Re: Oakland highlights
> Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 14:35:21 -0600
> From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu>
> To: rcollins at netlink.com.au
> <199901091402.JAA12686 at bonjour.cc.columbia.edu> <199901091652.LAA01887 at sawasdee.cc.columbia.edu> <3697A57B.42598E1B at mail.ilstu.edu> <3698D11C.A1EBF5BF at net
>
> angela,
>
> I've now reformatted and printed your post for my own more careful
> reading, and I'll try to give (probably in installments) as considered a
> reply as possible. I say as possible because my thinking really is
> muffled currently by depression, and I can only think in little bursts.
> So I'll respond in a series of observations, etc. rather than in any
> organized and developed way. These observations are in helter-skelter
> order, so if they are coherent, or possibly so, you will have to
> construct the coherence by reordering them.
>
> 1. Re "Racism": There is no such thing -- one needs to take something of
> a nominalist position and speak of Racisms. I am concerned with racism
> in the United States. Some of what I have to say is probably relevant in
> other nations, but I can't judge that.
>
> 2. Racism is an ideology, not a theory, and as such it explains nothing
> but itself needs to be explained. One of the biggest blunders, endlessly
> repeated, in U.S. historiography and unfortunately endlessly swallowed
> even by those, black and white, who want to be anti-racist, is that
> racism caused slavery. On the contrary, slavery caused racism. And today
> racism does not cause the exploitation and oppression of black people;
> the exploitation and oppression of black people causes racism. Hence
> racism as an ideology cannot be attacked directly.
>
> 3. The causes of racism (all the 100+ forms of oppression of black
> people) *can* be attacked directly. And the very process of attacking
> those oppressions, provided the attack is carried out with black people
> in the lead, has a powerful impact on racism. (To put it crudely, and
> not too accurately, but it will do as a metaphor: the one thing most
> likely to have an impact on a white worker's racism is for a black woman
> to punch him in the nose, *hard*!) Black militancy does NOT cause
> backlash. The subsidence of black militancy causes backlash.
> (Incidentally, this last point applies to the struggle for women's
> emancipation too.)
>
> 4. Both incidentally and centrally: I didn't reach these conclusions by
> thinking or reading or writing: I only came to realize them by those
> processes *after* I had learned them by participation in the struggles
> (anti-war, civil rights, etc.) of the '60s. In the '60s "we" (all U.S.
> radicals, dead and alive) finally learned that we had to resee and
> reunderstand the entire history of progressive and working-class
> struggle in the United States. (And this is relevant to what you
> perceive as the hostility expressed towards Rakesh. I mostly pity him,
> but I can't help feeling a real hostility also, because he is attempting
> to reaffirm everything that has been wrong with u.s. radicalism for 150
> to 200 years.)
>
> 5. From Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States
> of America" (NLR 181):
>
> It was not Afro-Americans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation;
> it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans
> resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining
> Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more
> straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era
> of the American, French and Haitian revolutions on, they claimed liberty
> as theirs by natural right. They did not originate the large
> nineteenth-century literature purporting to prove their biological
> inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary can be
> very deceptive. Both Afro- and Euro-Americans used the words that today
> denote race, but they did not understand those words the same way.
> Afro-Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as
> Frederick Douglass put it, "not *color*, but *crime*." Afro-Americans
> invented themselves, not as a race, but as a nation. They were not
> troubled, as modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary
> to express their sense of nationality. Afro-American soldiers [in the
> Union Army] who petitioned on behalf of "These poor nation of colour"
> and "we Poore Nation of a Colered rast [race]" saw nothing incongrouous
> about the language. (pp. 114-115).
>
> I highly recommend this whole article. For me when I read it back in the
> early 1990s it finally summarized and focuse what I had been moving
> towards since the mid-60s.
>
> 6. This information I got from a paper by Bill Fletcher delivered at the
> 1996 Midwest Radical Scholars and Activists Conference in Chicago. I
> don't remember many details, and I know no source where details can be
> gotten. It is only an example, and as I always insist, one can find an
> example of anything at all and exampels prove nothing at all. But I
> think the point of this example can be derived from the whole history of
> the u.s. working class, and is consistent with, perhaps implicit in,
> fundamental marxist theory.
>
> Back around 1935 a CIO local in Memphis Tenn. (ar most racist town)
> decided to organize *black* workers first in a local tobacco factory. It
> worked, the local grew rapidly, and began to organize *white* workers
> even more successfully than white only locals did. At this point the
> national leadership closed down that local. This sort of thing is
> central to understanding the eventual failure of the union drives of the
> 1930s. (By eventual, I mean their current status: the decay was long,
> but it was there from the very beginning, and its core was the deep deep
> conviction of white radicals that blacks were not really capable of
> thinking for themselves. I see Rakesh (who would be regarded by most
> whites as black -- but that is another story) as sharing this
> conviction). ***I see myself as sharing this conviction***; **I see most
> blacks as sharing this conviction**. It is the birthright of every
> American. I see it as a conviction -- a birthright -- which will forever
> block progress in the u.s. unless it is destroyed.
>
> 7. What may be a digression, but my observations on "race" do need to be
> seen within some of my basic perspectives. My point of departure here is
> the application to the 1990s of a passage from Marx's *Wages, Price and
> Profit* (which Marx never applied in the way I am applying, but he
> should have). Here is the passage:
>
> ...general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise but to
> sink the average standard of wages, or to push the *value of labour*
> more or less to its *minimum limit*. Such being the tendency of *things*
> in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce
> their resistance against the encroachmentss of capital, and abandon
> their temporary improvement? If they did, they [my emphasis] WOULD BE
> DEGRADED TO ONE LEVEL MASS OF BROKEN WRETCHES PAST SALVATION....By
> cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would
> certainly DISQUALIFY THEMSELVES FOR THE INITIATING OF ANY LARGER
> MOVEMENT.
> Selected Works of M & E (Moscow), II, 74-75.
>
> I generalize this from wages to the general concerns of the class under
> capitalism, to struggling against all those features of capitalism in
> general and the capitalism of any specific time and place, that disunify
> and weaken the class. [Incidentally, before I go on: What would be your
> response to someone who claimed that women's caucuses or women's study
> groups were anti-working class?] Racism, or, rather, the objective
> conditions which generate and regenerate racist ideology, is the main
> enemy of class unity in the United States. A class (or fraction of a
> class) that does not place the battle against those conditions at the
> very forefront of their struggle will indeed disqualify themselves for
> initiating any higher struggle. And this, again, is one of the reasons I
> more than disagree with Rakesh -- in fact am hostile to the positions he
> expresses.
>
> 8. Another digression. I'll send you the instructions for subbing to the
> maillist of the Black Radical Congress. You will see on that maillist a
> number of the positions that Rakesh is *abstractly* right in seeing as
> destructive but *totally* and viciously wrong in his conception of how
> to fight them. His conception, as I said above, is grounded (though he
> can't know this) in the conviction that, when all is said and done,
> African Americans cannot be trusted to think for themselves. The BRC
> list is too heavy for you to read many of the posts, but by sampling you
> would began to get a sense of the huge variety of positions within the
> "black community." You would also perhaps began to see why it is, at the
> present time, impossible for a white-led or predominantly white
> organization to gain the trust of huge numbers of the African American
> "community." (I did, didn't I, post on how that word "community" had no
> theoretical content but was needed as a blank check in many contexts?)
>
> 9. This is inserted after glancing through your recent posts to the list
> on this subject.
>
> a. There is no necessary contradiction (dialectical or otherwise) in
> accusing the same person of being both "unscholarly" and "academic" (I
> think those charges are valid re Rakesh). He is academic in that his
> theory is totally abstracted from the realities of u.s. history and
> politics (he makes the error of identifying theory and thought, and as
> is the case with all dogmatists attempts to make theory do the work of
> thought). He is unscholarly in that he makes *empirical* statements
> about Malcolm X in particular and black nationalism in general which
> simply are false -- false in the way in which the editorial pages of the
> WSJ are false. Again, he lets his theory do not only the work of thought
> but the work of empirical investigation. Lou and Ken and I are writing
> not merely out of political theory or even merely out of historical
> knowledge (though both are important) but out of over 3 decades (more in
> Ken's case) of bitter experience in *trying to make things happen*
> politically in the u.s., and seeing those efforts either fail or reach a
> limit and always and endlessly for the same reason, racism, and *NOT*
> subjective racism or prejudice or bigotry but over the same stubborn
> refusal illustrated by Rakesh of non-African Americans in trusting
> African Americans to think.
>
> b. For 60 years now there has been a crucial battle going on *within the
> African American community* over precisely the issues that Rakesh is
> concerned about -- and one of the chief crosses the African American
> opponents of reactionary black nationalism have to carry is the utter
> stupidity of people like Rakesh, who continually reconfirm for
> Afro-Americans that whites, even well-intentioned whites, simply are not
> to be trusted.
>
> c. This is, I think, mostly a battle within the u.s., and more
> specifically, on one side by those who either through direct political
> practice or really imaginative reading of history *know* that nothing is
> of more crucial importance to progressive (let alone revolutionary) u.s.
> politics than a strong and independent (but in certain senses
> anti-nationalist) black movement *and* strong and unified support for
> that movement among "whites."
>
> 10. In a fumbling way I and my wife argued these points with the white
> anti-war movement in bloomington-normal back in november of 1969. We
> argued that the movement must take a stand against the growing
> repression of the black movment. We lost the battle. The winners spoke
> in the name of "unity." Two weeks later the fucking chicago cops killed
> Fred Hampton and the whole fucking movement in Illinois (and around the
> whle damn nation) began to come apart.
>
> 11. Until attitudes like Rakesh's began to pop up on various lists two
> years ago (and they have been particularly strong at various times on
> lbo) I really thought that in the 60s the u.s. left had at long last
> learned the essential "lesson" of u.s. history. Obviously most leftists
> haven't -- and I'm fucking bitter about it.
>
> Once when accused of dogmatism, Samuel Johnson replied. "No Sir! I am
> not dogmatic, I am deliberate!" On this point I am deliberate, and
> while I will observe the decorum of the lists and not say this on list,
> I do believe Rakesh (on this issue anyway) represents the enemy, not
> just a mistaken comrade.
>
> I'm not close to finished on this question (or these questions) -- but
> then to be so would be to have virtually accomplished the revolution in
> the u.s. So I'm going to break off here for now.
>
> Carrol