Modern John Brown: Herbert Aptheker

James Heartfield Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Wed Oct 11 10:14:51 PDT 2000


In message <a9.c220f3a.27153411 at aol.com>, JKSCHW at aol.com writes
>In his misspent radical youth, he wrote a good book on US Labor and American
>Foreign Policy that is still worth reading. --jks

Justin, does this go into the collaboration between the CIA and the AFL in rebuilding Europe's postwar labour movement?

In message <s9e448a6.062 at mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>, Charles Brown <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes


>I don't know anybody radical who thinks Gunnar Myrdal had any
>special insights on race in the U.S.

Well, more fool them.

I would say that Myrdal was pretty important in developing the liberal critique of racism (i.e. Weberian idealist, rather than Marxist materialist). An American Dilemma, though wrong in its method, is nonetheless a pretty remarkable document, both for its empirical sweep and for what it says about the way that a part of the establishment in the US was trying to distance itself from explicitly racial thinking.

The problem with Aptheker's pamphlet against Myrdal is that he criticises him by contrasting Myrdal's liberal opinions with a more radicalised version of the same attitudes. So, for example, Aptheker jumps on some fairly peripheral comments of Myrdal's to the effect that the Southern ideology was in its own way an American ideology. Aptheker busts a gut insisting that, no, on the contrary, Southern racism was wholly alien to America's democratic traditions! Less attractively, Aptheker casts aspersions on Myrdal's national origins, calling into question his insights as an outsider.

Having said that, of course it was indicative, and pertinent that Myrdal chased all the Communist Party supporters out of the project (having ripped off whatever they had to offer). -- James Heartfield



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