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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 14:35:21 -0600
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox@mail.ilstu.edu>
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Subject: Re: Oakland highlights
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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


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