[lbo-talk] wineheads, soldiers, loud mouths, and riffraff

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Tue Nov 24 16:11:03 PST 2009


At 10:03 AM 11/24/2009, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Someplace in the archives of quite a few years ago there are posts by me
>arguing that Lenin's thought in WITBD assumed the necessity of
>spontaneous resistance as the context for his arguments. He did not
>oppose spontneity but the _worship_ of spontaneity. An interesting point
>in shag's account is the attempt of SCLC to control the continued
>spontaneous acts of resistance apparently not realizing that their
>program's effectiveness in part depended on that continuing spontaneous
>activity. (Though some of it, no doubt, was the product of what might be
>called moledfular organization of a few for a particular act.

yeah. As Kelley says, it was understandable why the SCLC wanted to quell violence and he doesn't attack them, per se, for being bourgeois in their interests. He does point out that the black poor in Birmingham weren't drawn into the SCLC as a movement because they didn't see how its goals appealed to them. They were concerned with other issues -- and, as Kelley says, the oft unexplored intraracial class differences that broke out of the 'the politics of respectability'. (cultural differences among blacks that appeared to light around class differences.) And since they were the targets of police brutality, they were not persuaded by organizations that focused more on "reducing black crime than police use of excessive force."

In this context, Kelley's talking about post-1963. In 1967, the ACMHR (Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights) took up the task of oganizing with other CR orgs, putting police brutality at the forefront of their struggle. They became less willing to negotiate, more willing to use militant rhetoric, and they sued the city to try to obtain police records to investigate killings and beatings.

However, they received little support from the CR leadership, prompting Richard Arrington, Jr., Birmingha'sm first black mayor to insist that:

"The failure of the so-called black leaders in this community speak out about police brutality simply confirms my belief that there is really no such thing as black leaders in this community -- they are people who are used by the white power structure in this community who take an ego trip because they are called upon by some powerful white citizens to fit black folk into an agenda that has been set up by the white community, particularly the business structure here." (p 93)

In the midst of massive deindustrialization which began in the 1950s and accelerated throughout the 60s, Great Society sentiments led to the establishment of the Jefferson County Committee for Economic Opportunity (JCCEO) in 1965. The org was supposed to administer social programs providing job training programs, early childhood education, legal services, emergency food and medical aid, among other programs. They hired "some middle-class and working-class African Americans to work in administrative posts in social welfare agencies." JCCEO was underfunded, though, receiving paltry funds from the city, county, state, and federal governments.

Pressure from poor blacks and the federal government, though, led to an alteration in the way JCCEO worked. While initially run by people appointed by the mayor, it was transformed into an org run 1/3 by public officials or reps from agencies, 1/3 from private community groups, and 1/3 reps from poor "target" comunities elected by their neighborhood advisory councils.

What happened, though, was that disagreements broke out and Kelley ses the JCCEO as a new terrain in which "race rebels" struggled. They did so by exhibiting

"a militant sense of entitlement reminiscent of the Communist-led movements of the 1930s, the public transportation battles of the 40s, and the uprisings surrounding the SCLC's direct action campaigns."

In this context, where the black middle class was usurped into administrative roles, the black poor who tried to work on the JCCEO found themselves fighting both whites and blacks representing the interests of bureaucrats.

These struggles, where the black poor learned that the CR movement put blacks in some limited positions of power but that didn't translate into fair treatment. For example, the Poor People's Action Committee protested the JCCEO's discriminatory practices -- discriminatory against the poor -- when placed black women training participants in a chicken packing plant, rather than placing them in the promised human relations positions.

This set the stage for more militant struggles, and prompted the black poor to increasingly join radical organizations that focused specifically on the needs of the poor (e.g., the National Welfare Rights Organizations) and black nationalist organizations influenced by Malcoml X and the Black Power Movement such as the Alabama Black Liberation Front, all of which were brutally repressed by the police.

Kelley writes that "These movements -- much like the Communist Party three decades earlier -- showed more sensitivity to the specific problems of poor residents and sought change through alternative means of opposition." (p 97)

Another interesting point has to do with something that was briefly discussed here: are the "most" marginalized and oppressed hopelessly apolitical?

Kelley argues that they are not so when their expectations and day-to-day lives are shaped by the rhetoric of social movements such as the Black Power movements that spoke directly to people's needs -- working with they where they are, rather than where movement leaders want them to be.

In this case, in the late 70s, "Coming out of a decade in which Black Power slogans shaped much of African American political discourse, Birmingham's black poor showed greater interest in mainstream politics and were much more willing in the 1980s to support municipal government and to participate in political institutions intended to improve the quality of life, including those originating in city hall. Yet, despite their new sense of enfranchisement, their protests continued, suggestion a failure on the part of (Richard) Arrington's administration to provide essential city services for the poorest neighborhoods. This dual sense of empowerment and dissatisfaction is revealed in Philip Coulter's study of residents who take advantage of the Mayor's Office of Citizens Assistance, established soon after Arrington's election.(The black poor were most likely, along with wealthy whites, to make complaints). These studies challenge William Wilson's hypothesis that the "underclass" is socially isolated from and indifferent toward political institutions. As I have suggested throughout this chapter, their high participation rate also reflects a tradition of activism. The only difference is that they have greater access to legimiate political avenues." (99-100)

his next task is to take up what took place in more formal political organizations. I've just read the first few pages of his research on blacks in the communist party. Awesome stuff. He wants to ask why, if there was such repression and malevolence toward "black national chauvinism", why did statements of black natioanlism nonetheless thrive and grow under this phase of the community party in the 1930s?


>Continuimg riots during the '60s were, I have always thought, an
>important, perhaps essential part of the movement as a whole.
>
>Bellamy, in China Shakes the World, has an interesting chapter on an
>_unofficial_ guerilla group, not under Party disclipline. He
>accompanied themon an action the point of which was to sneak into a
>village, kidnap the local Landlord and his wife, leave and excecute the
>landlord before releasing his wife. Two points about the chapter were of
>interest. First, he mentions that the Party would have been very upset
>on his accompanying the undisciplined group, not wanting an American to
>be killed and cause international fuss. The other was that the wife of
>the landlord was not at all unhappy to see her husband shot! That leads
>Bellamy to give an account of the importance of women in the Chinese
>Revolutoinl
>
>Carrol
>
>
>shag carpet bomb wrote:
> >
> >
>
>___________________________________
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