I thought I was perfectly plain about this: one is critical of the fact that the way in which these demands were raised and absorbed by the system permitted the perpetuation of a racial hierarchy; a global system of appropriation of labour modelled on white supremacy; the perpetual rollback of actual abortion access; the persistence of homophobia etc.
> Yes there may be limits to what has been
> achieved but that is not the same as being critical in regards to was
> heroically achieved at the expense of the destruction of many, many heroic
> lives. Those are unalloyed gains.
I think we're in danger of falling into several non-sequiturs here. The fact that a particular gain may itself be worth unconditionally defending doesn't mean that it comes with no alloying disadvantages. It simply means that whatever its limits and problems these are by no means sufficient to warrant dismissing the gains or getting nostalgic. I take the point that care in language is extremely important, but I don't accept that an uncritical attitude to our own gains is either healthy or indicated.
The organic proletarian intellectuals of LBO-talk would be smart to learn
>
from the ways in which these activists changed the world rather than
> patronize them about their secondary concenrs.
I see. So, when someone like Manning Marable points to the unintended and obviously baleful conditions resulting from one partially successful period of struggle, he is being patronising to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers and the SNCC and the CORE and so on? I really don't see how this is so, and in general I don't see how you are engaging with what has actually been said.