Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 19:55:08 -0500 (EST) From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) Subject: Re: M-I: No self-determination under capitalism? Louis P writes: >One of the biggest confusions in the socialist movement over the last 25 >years or so has been around this question. Socialism in the abstract is >opposed to black nationalism, feminism, gay liberation, etc. This is not >just restricted to the Trotskyite sectarians. It was also a tendency in the >CPUSA as well. It also argued in the 1960s that the nationalism of Malcolm X >and the new feminist movement injured working-class unity. Lou, I don't know about the American socialist movement as a whole, but I am somewhat familiar with the position of the CP vis a vis the black nationalist movement of the 1960s (though this was two decades before I became a member). And not just Malcolm X. Nationalism, in most of its manifestations within modern society is seen by orthodox Marxists as petty bourgeois, opportunistic, and short sighted While the party had a long and honorable pedigree in promoting black-white unity on a variety of fronts, including labor and civil rights, it, too, held a somewhat jaudiced view of the 1960s black power movement. This despite the fact that many of its most prominent members (Angela Davis and James Jackson come immediately to mind) had important links to the Black Panthers, for example. There were several reasons for the Party's shying away from this aspect of the black struggle. First of all, black nationalists tended to identify more with Maoist currents within Marxism-Leninism, rather than with the orthodox Marxian theory espoused by the Soviet Union and its satellite parties, including the CPUSA (which was then supporting Moscow in its feud with China). Second, the endorsement by many black nationalist groups of "revolutionary" violence (which, of course, also included a lot of petty crime, the settling of personal scores, and some outright extortion of neighborhood businessmen) alienated many of those on the Left who had traditionally supported the CP, and who in fact, had been an important source of funding and legal support. And such policies ran counter to the above-ground legal work in electoral politics that had long been a staple of the Party's public life. Then, too, there was the growing bitterness between black militants and more traditional civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, with whom the Party was forging an increasingly close relationship. Of course, state and federal police agencies like the FBI (through its cointelpro activities) were only to glad to exploit and exacerbate these fundamental conflicts. To say that this period wreaked havoc with the Party's reputation among younger blacks, in particular, is merely to state the obvious. It left wounds from which the CP never fully recovered and which were, in a sense reopened by the unfortunate (and, in my opinion, poorly negotiated) debacle in 1990-91. At the same time, the Party was largely innocent of that shabby phrase-mongering and outright huckstering that marked many of the left groups tailing of the black revolutionaries (and, in the case of the SWP, their fading memories). Hindsight affords luxuries those at the time can ill-manage. At any rate, let's give the devil his due. I am less clear now about the Party's position on feminism. I do remember sitting around in 1976 with a bunch of Harvard history professors and students (we had circulated a petition on behalf of Herbert Aptheker in his battle with the Yale history department) as the topic turned to the ERA. Someone mentioned the Communist Party's position as being opposed to this amendment, prompting, I remember, Frederick Cooper to mutter something about the Party being "a bunch of FBI agents, anyway." Ten years later, when I actually came into the Party I was told that US Communists had been unstinting in their support for feminist legislation, including the ERA . The CP's quarrel with American feminism revolved, they said, around "issues of class versus gender". Does anyone have any independent information about this? I had always considered the Party's position on womens' issues to be quite sound. Louis Godena --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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