[lbo-talk] Noam Chomsky is losing it

[c b]

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.