[lbo-talk] Noam Chomsky is losing it

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 28 10:21:45 PDT 2011


Here's how I interpret this disagreement. Tell me if I'm wrong. Reed's basic argument is that underlining the "racial" component of some inequality produces no *objective* beneficial result - e.g., it does nothing to help combat the inequality. My sense is that the fundamental response of the anti-Reedians is that -- whether or not Reed is right about that -- *they don't care* . For them, what's important is that these inequalities are *lived* as racial inequalities, and for that reason they should be treated as such, whatever the objective results of doing so might be.

I remember being in a seminar with a historian who said the test of good historiography for him is whether the subjects of the story would have recognized their world if they could read the work in question. At the time, I thought: but what if they were mistaken about how their world worked? These are two rival approaches to writing history. I think maybe they also apply to the Reed/anti-Reed argument.

But again, maybe I'm wrong.

SA

CB: From this discussion, Reed poses falsely as excellent class theorist. Reed's position seems analogous to that of the Socialist Party in 1919 when the Communist Party split from the SP in part based on the CP position that the struggle against white supremacy was a special struggle to be waged along side of class struggle; that the SP was wrong to claim racist oppression would be solved through class struggle alone. There are specially oppressed sections of the working class, and special struggles must be waged against those oppressions not only to relieve the special oppression but to unite the working class as a whole.

The critical relationship between the class and race questions in the US is as a specific case of working class unity ( as in "workers of all countries and races ,_ unite_"). Marx had said in _Capital_ concerning the US "Labor in white skin will not be free while labor in Black skin is branded." White workers central historical task in the US remains to wage a special struggle to irradicate white supremacy from their ranks as a necessary condition for winning the class struggle.

The whole Reaganite, today Tea Party, demagogic line concerning "Tax and Spend LIberals" is code for "Negro-loving white politicians" ( LBJ was the big historical traitor to white supremacy with the Great Society and War on Poverty). The popularity of the anti-Big Government bullshit is based in this racist hook. The Reaganites have been screwing white workers based on this classic US racist gambit of "branding" the Black working class in white workers' minds. Just happened again with the Tea Party, elected based in white supremacist coded messages, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohiio with attacks on collective bargaining rights, threats of right to work for much less laws, welfare cuts.



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