I think this review, which is hilarious in parts and thoroughly recommended, provides a hugely relevant commentary on the vacuity of the current Henwood vs Cox/Furuhashi/Brown debates. To sweeten the pill a little let me add that I do see myself of 10-15 years ago as an equal object of ridicule here. Tahir
............. Elbaum does put his finger on the fact that the Third World Marxist- Stalinist- Marxist-Leninist and Maoist milieu was much more successful, in the 1960's and 1970's, in attracting and influencing militants of color. And he is equally right in saying that most of the Trotskyist currents, not to mention the "post-Trotskyists" to whom I was closest, were partially blind to America's "blind spot", the centrality of race, in the American class equation. The ISC, when I was in it in Berkeley in the late 1960's, was all for black power, and (like many other groups) worked with the Black Panthers, but itself had virtually no black members. Trotskyist groups such as the SWP did have some, as did all the others. but there is no question that Elbaum's milieu was far more successful with blacks, Latinos, and Asians (as was the CPUSA). To cut to the quick, I think that the answer to this difference was relatively straightforward. As Elbaum himself points out, many people of color who threw themselves into the ferment of the 1960's and 1970's and joined revolutionary groups were the first generation of their families to attend college, and were-whether they knew it or not-- on their way into the middle class. Thus it is hardly surprising, when one thinks about it, that they would be attracted to the regimes and movements of "progressive" middle-class elites in the Third World. This was just as true, in a different way, for many transient militants of the white New Left, similarly bound (after 1973) for the professional classes, not to mention the actually ruling class offspring one found in groups such as the Weathermen. Elbaum does point out that the white memberships of many Third World Marxist groups were from working-class families and were similarly the first generation of their families to attend college. He also shows a preponderant origin of such people in the "prairie radicalism" (i.e. populism) of the Midwest, in contrast to the more "European" left of the two coasts, one important clue to their essentially populist politics. These are important social- historical- cultural insights, which could be developed much further. Charles Denby's Black Worker's Notebook (Denby was a member of Raya Dunayevskaya's New and Letters group) effectively identifies the middle-class character of the Black Power milieu around Stokely Carmichael et al., as well as black workers' distance from it; the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers similarly critiqued the black nationalist middle class, though it was hardly anti-nationalist itself.)
It is undeniable that the 1960's movements of peoples of color in the U.S. were influenced by the global climate of the de-colonization of most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia following World War II, and the "de-centering" of actually Eurocentric views of Western and world history, following the 1914-1945 "de-centering" of Europe in the new lines drawn by the Cold War. They were similarly influenced by-and themselves were the main force enacting-the shattering of centuries of white supremacy in American society. It would be idealistic and moralistic to explain their attraction to "Third World Marxism", Maoism and Marxism-Leninism by the meaningless assertion that "they had the wrong ideas." One important part of the answer is definitely the weight of arriving middle-class elements in these political groups, who are today to be found in the black and Latino professional classes. But the typical black, Latino or Asian militant in the U.S. waving Mao's little red book or chanting "We want a pork chop/Off the pig" was not signing on for Stalin's gulag, or the millions who died in Mao's "great leap forward" in 1957, or mass murder in Pol Pot's Cambodia, or the ghoulish torture of untold numbers of political prisoners in Sekou Toure's Guinea, (where the black nationalist Stokely Carmichael spent his last days with no dissent anyone ever heard about), any more than the working-class militant in the CPUSA in 1935 was signing on for the Moscow Trials or the massacre of the Spanish anarchists and Trotskyists. All the above real history and theory blotted out or falsified by "Third World Marxism" was available and known in the 1960's and thereafter to those who sought it. The question is precisely one of exactly when groups of people in motion are ready to seek or hear certain truths. What Elbaum can't face is that the entirety of "Third World Marxism" was and is anti-working class, whether in Saigon in 1945 or in Budapest and Poznan in 1956 or in Jakarta in 1965 or in case of the Shanghai workers slaughtered in the midst of the "Cultural Revolution" in 1966-69. Workers, white and non-white, in the American sixties sensed this more clearly than did Elbaum's minions, blinded by ideology ....................
But, to conclude, if Elbaum has offered us hundreds of pages on the wars of sects and ideologies that no one-himself included-- misses, it is not from an antiquarian impulse. The real agenda is spelled out in one of the effusive blurbs on the dust cover: "Finally, we have one book that can successfully connect the dots between the battles of the 1960's and the emerging challenges and struggles of the new century." The giveaway is Elbaum's treatment of the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, which are presented as something almost as momentous as the 1960's, and which offered the few Marxist-Leninist groups ("Marxist-Leninists for Mondale" as someone once called them) still around their last chance at mass influence. In contrast to the 1960's, the Jackson campaigns came and went with no lasting impact except to further illustrate the dead end of the old Rooseveltian New Deal coalition and the Keynesian welfare-statism that was the bread and butter of the old Democratic Party and of the CPUSA's strategy within the Democratic Party. And when all is said and done, this fatal legacy of the CP's role at the height of Stalinism in the mid-1930's is Elbaum's legacy as well. Just as he tells us nothing about the true origins of Marxism-Leninism and Third World Marxism, Elbaum tells us nothing about the CPUSA coming off its 1930's "heroic" phase, herding the American working class off to World War II through the enforcement of the no-strike pledge, the calumny of any critic of U.S. imperialism's moment of arrival at world power as a Hitlero-fascist, and applause in the Daily Worker for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it is necessary to connect some further dots: this book aims at being a contribution to some new "progressive coalition" wedding the American working class to some revamping of the capitalist state in an all-out drive to "Beat Bush" around a Dean campaign (or something like it) in 2004. It joins the groundswell of dissent among capitalist forces themselves, currently being articulated by the likes of George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stieglitz and Paul Krugman as the still-dominant neo-liberal paradigm of the past 25 years begins to seriously fray. While Elbaum's book makes occasional passing reference to economic hard times times the 1970's, he doesn't see the extent to which American decline has circumscribed any possible agenda of "reform", which can only be some kind of "Tax The Rich", share-the-declining-wealth kind of left populism, with suitably "diverse" forces that will probably be the final fruit of the "progressive" middle classes ......................