On Mon, 8 Oct 2007 23:54:45 +0100 "Lenin's Tomb"
<leninstombblog at googlemail.com> writes:
> On 10/8/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> That isn't what the passage argues. Yoshie's is in fact a version
> of an
> argument made by Manning Marable in Beyond Black and White, which
> acknowledges the successes of the past, but also points to the ways
> in which
> formal oppression moulded a collective identity that has now been
> lost to a
> highly dog-eat-dog, individualistic, atomised and competitive world
> of poor
> man's capitalism. He argues for a new African-American politics
> that is
> rooted in the attempt to roll back the onslaught of corporate
> capital.
> Yoshie is arguing for class-based politics, and is making the
> commonplace
> left-wing argument that capitalism has been empowered by its ability
> to
> adapt to the formal demands of the 1960s movement.
>
> Ditto this:
Well over on Marxmail I wrote the following concerning this issue: -------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:31:21 -0400 Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> writes:
> dave.walters at comcast.net wrote:
> > Another take on this story:
> >
> > Iran: Islamist, Socialist Revolutions Don't Mix Says Aleida
> Guevara
> > http://www.indymedia.ie/article/84501
> >
>
> Actually, this is not "another take". This is the initial article
> that I
> posted to the list under the heading "Islamist, Socialist
> Revolutions
> Don't Mix". Speaking of Islamism, I feel obligated to report that
> MRZine
> editor Yoshie Furuhashi has now declared that it was wrong to oppose
> "de
> jure discrimination" like the Jim Crow laws because:
I am not at all sure that's what Yoshie is saying. I think her point is that the struggle against de jure discrimination is insufficient for ending oppression. Indeed, the abolition of de jure discrimination, if unaccompanied by a class-based politics, can wind up making capitalism stronger, and can leave de facto racism and sexism stronger, even though de jure racism and sexism might have been abolished. From a Marxist standpoint, this is not a particularly remarkable point. As you may recall, back in the 1960s. both Malcom X and Dr. King came to rather similar conclusions themselves. So, we had Malcom X in the last year of his life, starting to work with Marxist groups, like the SWP. And Dr. King during the last year of his life was beginning to launch a "poor people's campaign", and was seeking to tie the civil rights movement with labor struggles. Indeed, he was in Memphis, where he was assasinated, to support a strike by sanitation workers.
I suspect that if it had been anyone but Yoshie who had written that piece, you would have had no problem seeing this. She is certainly correct, that civil rights struggles against de jure discrimination, did indeed lead to backlashes, at least among white male workers, who perceived this ending of de jure discrimination as coming at their expense. (Indeed, that had always been one of the political functions of de jure discrimination in the first place, which was to ensure the loyalty of a relative privileged stratum of white workers would be preserved).
I think that Doug did have a germ of a point,
in perceiving the ghost of Christopher Lasch
in what Yoshie wrote concerning working
class families, but then again, Lasch actually
did have a germ of a point on this issue too.
That does not mean that Lasch's proposed solution
of having the left embrace social conservatism
was a desirable or even workable solution
to the problem that he had described.
But that doesn't mean that the problem
that he (and Yoshie) describe is not
a real one. Social atomization is a
very real phenomenon that cannot simply
be wished away.
>