the master's tools

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Charles wrote:
>>>I think there is a kernel of truth in what Lorde says, but the opposite
>>>is also true: you have to fight fire with fire.
>
>And the opposite truth is actually one of the differences between
>anarchists and Marxists again. Marxist believe the state, one of the
>masters's tools, cannot whither away under socialism until there are no
>more capitalist states, because you have to fight fire with fire. You
>can't defeat the bourgeois state if you let down your guard. They will
>come and get you with their states, as the bourgeoisie demonstrated in by
>the multinational invasion of the young Soviet Union, the Nazis
>holocaustic invasion of the SU and the Cold War.
>
>So, much of the criticism of the Soviet Union by non-communist leftists is
>actually based on following Lorde's maxim too far. That nasty master's
>tool, the repressive apparatus, must be retained to defend against the
>vicious bourgeois state until the workers overthrown them from within and
>to repress the bourgeoisie.<<<

I agree with Charles with regard to anarchists.  Lorde herself, however,
was not such a simpleton in a postmodern fashion, and in her remark about
"the master's tools," she was not being anticommunist.  Lorde went to the
USSR in 1976 as the invited American observer to the African-Asian Writers
Conference sponsored by the Union of Soviet Writers.  She wrote about her
experiences and observations in her essay "Notes from a Trip to Russia" (in
_Sister Outsider_) which is quite interesting and in many ways sympathetic
to the Soviets, though she wasn't blind to the faults she did see.  In the
essay, she wrote:

*****   I have no reason to believe Russia is a free society....But bread
does cost a few kopecs a loaf and everybody I saw seemed to have enough of
it....[T]hat, in a world where most people -- certainly most Black people
-- are on a breadconcern level, seems to me to be quite a lot.  If you
conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around
at the others.   *****

So, Lorde wasn't at all dogmatic, least of all dogmatically anti-Leninist
or anti-Soviet, unlike many Anarchists and most postmodernists.

BTW, Lorde's mother is from Grenada, and Lorde was a supporter of the New
Jewel Movement (as she supported many other struggles).  She spent a week
in Grenada two months after the U.S. invasion of the island.  She wrote an
essay titled "Grenada Revisited" (also in _Sister Outsider_) -- an eloquent
indictment of U.S. imperialism.

Yoshie