I mocked my critics as whiteys after I was called black in complexion, white in politics. I had some very choice responses to Carrol but was advised that it would be best to remain tame. Partly because I can indeed cuss up a storm.
I did not ask for Louis P to be censored (I myself quit the line once when he equated my politics with Gitlin's; again he or my other critics have said nothing of my criticism of Gitlin's racist populism as if anybody had criticized him in the same terms before--at any rate, I could not handle responding to arguments I had not made and that Louis P was attributing to me in clearly provocative fashion). Now Carrol's prozac influenced comments did not offend me. And Louis P unsubbed after I announced to the list that I was not bothered by Carrol's pathetic attempt at insults. I have interpreted the ad hominems against me in the course of defenses of Malcolm X as pathetic attempts to self proclaim anti racism.
At the same time, many black people, including even the critical race theorists who are putatively at the acme of academic radicalism, are as anti marxist in substance, despite rhetorical flourish, as many white people. There can be quite a bit of unthinking Marxist prejudice among minorities against Marxist ideas. I never pretended to represent a black viewpoint, and I have never justified anything I said in terms of how authentically black it is. Nor do I think it is a good idea for any black person to conflate his or her opinion with that of the race's. I openly entered discussion with Arthur as a left communist (that's the only race I have claimed in this discussion), hardly the majority viewpoint of any ethnic group or class fraction.
I said that the NOI, including when Malcolm X was its major spokesman, had made the greatest contribution to the Klan since the invention of the bedsheet. While failing to reproduce some crucial sentences, Louis P argued that Malcolm X's dealings were a tacit agreement, not cooperation, with the Klan.
Again this debate began about the character of the NOI as an anti racist organization. At any rate, surely you know this bedsheet comment is not my line, but by the retort of the NAACP to Malcolm at the Harvard Law School debate in 1961. Did I call Malcolm X a Nazi? Please quote me. I called the NOI black fascism because, as I said, Jim Crow could only remain respectable to blacks and anti racist whites in the form of a radical sounding black demagogue. But as you surely know, this insight is not original to me.
I quoted Malcolm X militating against blacks joining workers' organizations in March 1964--that is, I have quoted him as a loose talking wrecker of an integrated workers' movement; I hear in this statement the words of arch Castroite Carlos Moore, i.e. Marxism is an ProleAryan outlook.
I believe this is strong evidence that he never really broke from a fundamental commitment to racial separatism even if he was willing to accept white money or praise new John Browns who died on behalf of the OAAU or even now express some support of the efforts of civil rights workers. Malcolm X was clear that while he was willing to support civil rights efforts, they could never be a real solution to the problem--which he continued to intimate was separatism and secession. He motivated Stokely Carmichael to give up a faith in "idealistic inter-racialism."
So no one has yet commented on this March passage; nor my criticism of Patricia Collin's interpretation of it as an indication (since Malcom X was willing to accept white money) of developing class consciousness. I may be wrong, so please argue the point out.
To recommend waiting on joining the workers' movement until all conflicts within the black community have been eliminated is a death sense to an integrated proletarian movement. Malcolm X here is operating in terms of at least one important tradition of the black church--pro boss. I have also said that Malcolm X remained committed to black secession even after the break with Elijah Muhammad while commencing in the interim a tradition of community control (the focus of which was never clarified--property ownership, election of black officials, community review boards?), the limits of which in any form I also suggested in a note on the strategy favored by Robt Allen in Black Awakening in Capitalist America.
Whatever good comes from these attempts at community control in reaction to "colonial" oppression is compromised if blacks are prevented from joining other organizations through which to exercise greater control over the workplace, the distribution of income and the polity generally. And here Malcolm X, having never broken from racial separatism within the US, disastorously compromised the struggle for real power by ordinary people over their lives.
So yes Malcolm X was willing to accept white money for the OAAU, supported the anti colonial revolt of white Algerians; and Stokely allowed white boys to come to the African Liberation Days.
But where is the quote where Malcolm X expresses any kind of comradeship, much less love, with the whites who had already been in the civil rights movement? Why wasn't it these whites and jews who led Malcolm to reconsider his anti white demonology, instead of white Muslims in Mecca? That's an honest question which Ken may be uniquely situated to answer.
Where is the proof that like MLK jr late in his life, Malcolm X would have spoken on behalf of, encouraged or even allowed participation by blacks in integrated workers' or poor peoples' or unemployed movements? I am not saying that such evidence does not exist. I do not know of it. And it seems to me not possible that such support would have been forthcoming.
Wahneema can backpeddle all she wants, but she called my a shyster in my dealings with Malcolm X's latest writings of which I am less critical in many places than many black academics (if anyone would care to consult Joe Wood's volume; I acutally think Cornel West's contribution is quite insightful).
She hasn't made a case for it, so it must be on the evidence you (Ken) provide that she relies. There are two things here: whether the grounds on which I want to criticize Malcolm X are there (he remained an anti worker separatist and secessionist; he never broke from gender apartheid; he had no way of criticizing post colonial African regimes that he could not simply dismiss as compradorial, etc) and whether criticisms on such grounds (anti integrationism, sexism, post colonialism) is justified.
It seems quite possible to me that Malcolm X would never have given up basking in the pan african glory, ridiculously taken as liberating by Yoshie and Wahneema, of the Organization of African Unity--a true viper's nest. ANd again there is more reason to believe he would have aligned himself with Carlos Moore and his absurd critique of Marxism as Prole Aryanism than continue to admire Castro.
Now for Mattick
I know of no reference to Otto Strasser in Mattick's writings. Which is not deny Ken Lawrence's story, only to say that I cannot comment on it. I also don't know if Strasser was an anti semite in the late 40s.
If Strasser however was among those militant Nazis who helped bring the Party to power only later to be excommunicated with other prebians, his frustration with it may have been helpful in demonstrating the commitment of the Nazis, despite their plebian image, to *monopoly state capitalism*, as Franz Neumann--pointing to the expropriation of small business for example-- theorized the formation in his Behemoth, a work that had decisive influence on C Wright Mills in the development of his critical analysis of American society. So if Strasser could be used to show the Nazis were in the service not of plebians but of the very kind of power structure now found in all advanced capitalist countries, this could have been helpful in complicating the simple opposition between democracy and fascism as the latter was transmuted into totalitarianism in the course of the Cold War.
This is not to confirm Mattick's sponsorship of Strasser; nor to deny it. I will ask PM Jr who was not yet 5 at this time.
I would challenge you to find a single anti semitic argument in Mattick's published writings, however.
Yes, writing on behalf of the workers' councils and the Kronstadt workers, the council communists, the council communists concentrated on where socialism had turned authoritarian first in the hands of the Bolsheviks. They radicalized Rosa's critique, and they suggested how envious Hitler was of the power Stalin and Trotsky commanded to discipline labor. For example, Schumpeter also praised Bolshevism for its ability to discipline, that is crush, labor.
Yours, Rakesh