>>> dhenwood at panix.com 03/26/01 09:36AM >>>
I read a bunch of Robinson's book last night. Almost all of it is devoted to making the case that the U.S.'s treatment of African Americans has been one long crime against humanity, which it is. He devotes only a few pages at the end to a proposed solution, which is mostly a trust fund, endowed by the government, to distribute various social benefits to black people (and the creation of political institutions independent of the Democrats - he's quite critical of the way the Dems court black votes and then offer little but betrayal in return). Robinson leaves the working out of details to hearings and commissions, but he suggests things like free tuition to compensate for generations of limited educational access. Shouldn't everyone have free tuition?
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CB: Yes, everyone should have free tuition for "higher" education.
A good approach for the left would be to support reparations for Black people , and then expand the idea to the whole working class. Sort of use the issue of slavery as a lead in " from a different angle" than usual for the emancipation/reparation for all labor. The battle of the working class as a whole is also rooted in the history of exploitation, the history of the labor movement as a whole, not just exploitation this year. Socialist revolution is rooted in history just as much as reparations struggle is.
The same should be done with affirmative action in general, reparations being a specific form of affirmative action. For example, rather than white worker opposing affirmative action in admissions for higher education, the demand should be for affirmative action for Black people AND WORKING PEOPLE AS A WHOLE. CUT TUITION WAY BACK.
Sometimes the partisans of the working class are too shy in their demands. It is as if we don't have a strong enough belief in the enormity and depth of our own cause, the damages due the working class for centuries of exploitation of surplus value. We don't have the nerve that Marx's theory should give us.
In the 1960's , I believe there was some increase in the admissions of white working class students to college based on the first thrusts from the civil rights movement. College tuitions were so much lower. It seems obvious that one result of widespread Reaganism was to shutout this opening for the working class in general by enormous leaps in the tuition. We should foreground the demand : Cut college tuition everywhere. Education , not incarceration.
I do not give the full argumentation here, which must have some complexity and sense of dialectics, but in general, the white left must find ways to expand the militant thrusts that will first come from Black segments of society, expand them in a manner complementary to the demands of Black people, which will always be leading because U.S. capitalism always dumps on Black people the worst of all within the working class.
As Yoshie advised a while ago parlay reparations for historically super exploited Black labor into all labor expropriating the expropriators.
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Without expropriating the expropriators, how do you possibly propose to repair the damage done by slavery & its legacy continuing to the present?
It seems to me that reparations of any substance are impossible under capitalism. So, unlike Gordon, I don't think that "reparations are liberalism." I'm not against Nathan's proposal of linking "the fight against the estate tax repeal" with the campaigns for reparations, but I think that the estate tax doesn't yield much.
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Yoshie