Classics (was Re: Approval and Condemnation: Must they be based o nMorality?)

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Wed May 16 17:34:54 PDT 2001


Carrol>...Debs's Socialist Party (which tolerated overt racists within its ranks).

Debs himself had an economistic line on race (paraphrase> we have nothing unique to offer the Negro in addition to the solution of class struggle), but Du Bois was a member of the SPUSA, A. Phillip Randolph from the time he edited The Messenger after WWI, was. About half of the founders of the NAACP around 1909 or so were prominent in the SPUSA. I wouldn't over-emphasize this though (i'd take the approach of Robert L. Allen in "Reluctant Reformers" on the SPUSA or Harold Cruse on the CPUSA in, "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, " from the mid-60s. The Old Left was weak in theory on race, much better in militant mass struggles, to a point, prime example off the top of my head the March on Washington that was called off in 1941 to desegregrate the military. Bayard Rustin, had been in the YCL, prior to the CPUSA through it's front groups, making it's displeasure (along with FDR) known about a MASS MARCH in D.C. Remember before the Nazis invaded the fSU, the yanks were not coming and WWII in the eyes of the Party was the Second (british) Imperialist War. Michael Pugliese P.S. Jack London sure, no argument there. Bastard Nietzscheanism and Racism galore there.



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