Color of Anarchism Re: Protest ISO...

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jan 2 15:46:18 PST 2003


At 2:45 PM -0800 1/2/03, Thomas Seay wrote:
> > > You complain of criticisms of anarchism by non-anarchists, but the way
> > > you and Thomas write about other leftists, it appears that you have
> > > nothing but contempt for them. Not an auspicious approach to building
> > > respectful alliances, coalitions, etc.
>
>Yoshie, this email from you to Chuck is EXTREMELY revealing. You
>only see things in their negativity: WE ARE ALL AGAINST CAPITALISM,
>LET's UNITE. That is your slogan for everything.

Not necessarily. If LBO-talk anarchists don't want to unite with other leftists, so be it. I personally have a working relationship with local anarchists (Anti-Racist Action, aging ex-Yippies, etc.) here in Columbus; though we've had some disagreements occasionally (like when I invited Dan La Botz to come and give a talk here), no disagreement led to a burning of the bridge. They don't respond to me the way that LBO-talk anarchists like yourself, Chuck0, etc. have. I don't get any hostile put-downs from local anarchists. (To the contrary, when I got cop-baited by a local Green oddball, one local anarchist guy -- half jokingly, half seriously -- offered to go beat him up.)

I happened to join Solidarity, but I don't think of socialists in other orgs as enemies either. There aren't that many socialists in Columbus, but most of them whom I've met -- including those in the groups whose ideology I very much disapprove of, like the DSA, the RCP, the SWP, the CP, etc. -- are very good individuals and admirable activists, and I feel honored to have been able to work with them.

At 2:45 PM -0800 1/2/03, Thomas Seay wrote:
>I doubt members of the Black Panther Party worried about not having
>a lot of white members, nor should they have.

They didn't and shouldn't have, but that's not an excuse for not racially integrating anarchist and socialist orgs today. We are not in the sixties any more, and revolutionary black nationalists and pan-Africanists -- like the All-African People's Revolutionary Party -- have much more difficulties organizing the black communities than at the height of the sixties' radicalization. It's to their credit that they've kept up their organizations at all (there are some in AAPRP in Columbus also -- they wanted to invite Bob Brown last year and have him give a talk at OSU, but they couldn't get any black student org as a sponsoring organization, so they asked me, and we had the SIF serve for that purpose).

More generally, affirmation of all-black, all-Latino, all-Asian, all-female, etc. organizations is not an affirmation of all-white or mostly-white institutions. You don't say that there is no problem of underrepresentation of African Americans in higher education because there are historically black colleges, do you? -- Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>



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