On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 6:35 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> I pretty much agree with what Nathan says here. My aim was not of course
> to answer all the incribly complex theoretical and practical problems
> involved but, primarily, to point to the necessity of keeping those matters
> in mind in debates about the emergent left in the United States. I didn't
> specifically name the Panthers in my first post, but I did have them
> specifically in mind. They _discovered_ the "solution" in practice: A strong
> Black organization (or organizations) which ALSO was totally committed to
> the total left effort. That is wht has so enraged me for 40 years -- the
> failure of so many white leftists to understand the importance of the
> Panthers. History never repeats itself, and the Panthers won't return, but
> their solution remains fundamental. J. Edgar Hoover was a clever old prick,
> and he knew what he was doing when he gave out instructions to the FBI to
> criminalize the Panthers. I quite the Marxism list over a minor matter, but
> my leaving that list eventually had been certain ever since so many of them,
> including the moderator, continued to slander the Panthers.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
>
> On 10/14/2011 5:12 PM, Nathan S. wrote:
>
> On 10/14/2011 05:41 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>>
>>> Let's factor this in in _any_ debate over "race" and the left. (1)
>>> Unless a substantial number of Blacks are in any left movement, there
>>> is no left movement. (2) Blacks in massive numbers are not going to
>>> join a left movement that does not put the fight against racial
>>> injustice very near the center of its program. (3) And regardless of
>>> what a left movement's politics on "race" are, Blacks in the requisite
>>> numbers are going to join only through a black organization (or
>>> organizations) representing Black intgerests BUT also
>>> regardingthemselves as an integral part of the total left.
>>>
>>> Left thinking that does not take these facts into consideration is not
>>> left thinking.
>>>
>>> Carrol
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>>>
>>
>> Sascha Lilley recently did an interview with Amy Sonnie and James
>> Tracey, and largely what I gathered was that the various white-oriented
>> leftist movements especially among the working class were heavily
>> involved with "racial" struggle. The Black Panthers, after all, were
>> outspoken communists. Obviously there is a "continuing significance of
>> race", but it would do us well to remember that Italians, Irish and Jews
>> (and sometimes Scotch-Irish, save that they settled in remote enough
>> areas to become dominant and normal) were initially held to be racially,
>> i.e., bioculturally, inferior, especially after the late 19th century
>> immigration to the States. Jews today in the US are usually "white" by
>> someone else's categorization. But after blacks, Jews are still the
>> leading target in the questionable FBI database on hate crimes IIRC.
>>
>> To give a tortuous demonstration of my point, Luis Wacquant (also
>> interviewed on Lilley's show by the cohost IIRC) recently argued that
>> the imprisonment wave in the United States is a heavily racialized
>> phenomenon of state power in the Focaultian sense of "sovereign power"
>> over the body (prison) and over family (kids without dads, though I want
>> to be careful with that statement) with a strong element of economic
>> discipline. He says in no uncertain terms that punishment is a clearly
>> racialized phenomenon. Likewise Sonnie and Tracey suggests that the
>> reactionary backlash by working-class whites was strongly motivated by
>> race, and of course there's Calhoun and about two hundred years of
>> scholarship obsessed with "race" and tracking down the One True Aryan
>> Bloodline of Europe and the Mid-Atlantic American States or whatever.
>> But Wacquant outlined several specific ways to address the prison
>> problem, and *every* single one of them was a policy suggestion largely
>> devoid of racial content (This recalls the fact I've seen cited in a
>> number of places, that upon controlling for income in the prison
>> population, whites are no longer over-represented. I have to question
>> that data in light of other points, like Wacquant's on the lowering rate
>> of violent white offenders actually incarcerated since the 1970s vs.
>> increased reports of violent acts by whites). I guess this puts me on
>> the Henwood/Reed part of the spectrum here. The things necessary to help
>> blacks in the US are also going to help a large segment of people of
>> different perceived skin tones, etc.
>>
>> None of this is to disagree with Carrol's points, but I would suggest
>> that (3) is a lot like the '70s-era politics of leftist groupuscles
>> separated by subjectivities in order to be effective--unless Carrol is
>> suggesting that in a much more vernacular, i.e., everyday way, like how
>> individuals in neighborhoods tend towards certain obvious class and race
>> similarities, so whatever groups rise from them would be contingently
>> homogeneous but not so out of theoretical necessity.
>>
>> Apologies for the name-dropping blather, neologisms and other
>> poly-syllabic words.
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>>
>
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