The Black National Question in the U.S.

[Althusser]

How does revleft feel about Black Nationalists wanting to take a part of America and run it themselves. Obviously we want the eventual withering away of nations (after socialist revolution) but for now, how do you feel about it?

People like Omali Yeshitela clarified that it wouldn't be so that people would be separated and forced to live in fenced off camps by race, but as a way out of a system of racial oppression, of white power and neo-colonialism.

Also what tendencies have been (and are) sympathetic to this struggle?

[Popular Front of Judea]

There is that call for national self-determination in the 'Black Belt' by the Comintern in the late 20s:


The Sixth Congress of the Comintern held in 1928 changed the party's policy drastically; it claimed that blacks in the United States were a separate national group and that black farmers in the South were an incipient revolutionary force. The Comintern therefore ordered the party to press the demand for a separate nation for blacks within the so-called "Black Belt", a swath of counties with a majority black population extending from eastern Virginia and the Carolinas through central Georgia, Alabama, the delta regions of Mississippi and Louisiana and the coastal areas of Texas.

The Communist Party USA and African Americans | Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Party_USA_and_African_Americans#The_ Third_Period_and_national_self-determination_.281928_.E2.80.93_1935.29)

[Flying Purple People Eater]

How would splitting the south into two different racially defined states put a stop to racial suppression? If anything it'd set chauvinism over the roof, disregarding the fact that it would never fucking happen.

You are not going to free yourself from neo-colonialism by creating an all African-American capitalist enclave right next to the world's largest capitalist power (a power which would then have a significantly higher white population, and we know how that went down in Eastern Germany).

[Bea Arthur]

How would splitting the south into two different racially defined states put a stop to racial suppression? If anything it'd set chauvinism over the roof, disregarding the fact that it would never fucking happen.

You are not going to free yourself from neo-colonialism by creating an all African-American capitalist enclave right next to the world's largest capitalist power (a power which would then have a significantly higher white population, and we know how that went down in Eastern Germany).

Are you black? If not, I would advise you not to try to decide for black people what their politics should be. It's just as bad as the Cominter, a group of white Russian men telling black Americans what their politics should be. Disgraceful!!

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Are you black? If not, I would advise you not to try to decide for black people what their politics should be. It's just as bad as the Cominter, a group of white Russian men telling black Americans what their politics should be. Disgraceful!!

Are you a member of the ComIntern? If not, I would advise you not to try to decide for Marxists-Leninists what their politics should be. Disgraceful!

As for black people in the United States, the different black communities do not seem to have a common economic life separate from other communities in the United States - thus they do not seem to be a nation in the Leninist sense. A separate black nation is an impossibility.

[Bea Arthur]

Are you a member of the ComIntern? If not, I would advise you not to try to decide for Marxists-Leninists what their politics should be. Disgraceful!

As for black people in the United States, the different black communities do not seem to have a common economic life separate from other communities in the United States - thus they do not seem to be a nation in the Leninist sense. A separate black nation is an impossibility.

You, like your pal Devrim in the other thread, are trying to create false equivalencies by suggesting that oppressor groups and oppressed groups have equal right to make their own political demands. Oppressed southern blacks had every right to form their own politics. Oppressor groups like your heroes in the anti-woman, pro-imperialist, anti-gay Comintern, do not have that right! Yes, I am telling them to keep their grubby hands off the politics of oppressed groups!!

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

You, like your pal Devrim in the other thread, are trying to create false equivalencies by suggesting that oppressor groups and oppressed groups have equal right to make their own political demands. Oppressed southern blacks had every right to form their own politics. Oppressor groups like your heroes in the anti-woman, pro-imperialist, anti-gay Comintern, do not have that right!

Well, I suppose that Devrim is indeed my pal in that we are both opposed to this sort of rabid liberal moralism. Not a firm basis for friendship, but I've seen worse. For the benefit of the tragically confused, this isn't about "rights", but advancing the correct political line. This often means being opposed to the consciousness of oppressed groups as it spontaneously develops - but such is politics. Tailists accomplish nothing.

Not that you have any right to complain about groups - and note that the ComIntern isn't exactly filled with "my heroes" but whatever - being anti-woman or anti-gay when this sort of "rights of the oppressed to shitty politics" liberalism often leads to championing murderously anti-woman and anti-gay religious groups. Physician, heal thyself. Or rather - Tartuffe, denounce thyself.