The following is a response to Sharon Smith's (a steering committee member of the International Socialist Organization) critique of identity politics that originally appeared on Good Morning, Revolution. Posting here is not necessarily meant as an endorsement, but as an opening up of a discussion in the process of reconception and refoundation.

By Comrade Baba

In an article “The politics of identity” published in the journal of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a Trotskyist group in the US, Sharon Smith argues:

“At the most basic material level, no one group of workers ever benefits from particular forms of oppression.”(1)

Smith’s reasoning: “Whenever capitalists can force a higher paid group of workers to compete with a lower paid group, wages tend to drop. . . . The only beneficiaries are capitalists, who earn bigger profits, while ensuring the survival of the rule of the profit system.”

Smith’s argument, an attempt to undermine identity politics and “counterpos[e] to it a Marxist analysis,” greatly oversimplifies the problems of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Rather than a Marxist analysis, a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, the argument reduces social reality and its multiple contradictions into a single abstract contradiction between Labor and Capital.

While the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is the fundamental contradiction in capitalist society, the social relations in capitalist society are too complex and particular to be reduced to extensions of the fundamental contradiction. These social relations have their own histories and particularities. They have to be understood in their own right.

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The following is a pamphlet written by MLM Revolutionary Study Group about the Cultural Revolution in China, and what its legacy is for the future. The Cultural Revolution has been the center of much debate and is certainly an extremely radical and revolutionary episode in human history. Thanks to Ernesto Aguilar and China Study Group for pointing it out.

The following article originally appeared on Navigating the Storm, the blog of Kali Akuno. We are reposting it here for study and discussion. The piece is also available as a PDF.

Barack Obama and the New Afrikan¹ “National Question”. Are We Free Yet?
 
by Kali Akuno

Saturday, May 24th, 2008  
 
In Honor of the 83rd Birthday of Malcolm X and the clarity he brought to the New Afrikan revolutionary movement.
 
Since the stunning Iowa victory of Senator Barack Obama in January, a great deal has been said and written about the declining or ongoing significance of “race” and “racial prejudice” in US society and the prospect of a person of Afrikan descent being its President as proof of its substantive social transformation. While this discussion must be regarded as an advance over the conservative moralistic and race-coded discussions that have dominated political debate in the US since the 1980’s, we must acknowledge its critical limitations. 
 
In the main, these discussions individualize the issues and only engage the behavioral and subjective aspects of inequality and oppression. What is fundamentally missing is a critical discussion of the structural and systemic nature of oppression and exploitation within the US and how the Obama campaign “phenomenon” relates to these structures and dynamics. 
 
This paper seeks to investigate the strategic relationship of the Obama campaign to the structural dynamics of oppression and exploitation within the US.  In particular, it will focus on the question of New Afrikan or Black national oppression within the US and how the Obama campaign addresses this oppression. It also seeks to address certain strategic questions that progressive forces within the national liberation and multi-national working class movements must struggle with over the course of the next six months in order to ensure that our demands and interests are advanced – regardless of whether Obama wins or loses the Presidential election in November.   
 
Some of the strategic questions this paper seeks to address are: 
1.  What is Obama’s organic relationship to the New Afrikan or Black nation? 
2.  What class position, alignment and program does Obama represent? 
3.  How does Obama’s campaign strategy and program relate to the historic interests and demands of the Black nation? 

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The following originally appeared on Ernesto Aguilar's blog.

The Real Problem with Copwatch

by Ernesto Aguilar

Gathering Forces recently posted a fascinating piece on the nature of Copwatch, a grassroots organizing model for police accountability. As the lead trainer/organizer and co-founder of the now defunct Houston Copwatch (not to be confused with the newer Houston Copwatch), I read the piece with much interest. The defunct Houston Copwatch managed to gain a great deal of media in English and Spanish TV and newspapers, though the work didn’t last. I left the group before it folded, but have to say the Gathering Forces analysis offers some poignant critiques.

First, the good stuff. Copwatch can do valuable community work. The educational “Know Your Rights” outreach Copwatch does, tempered by the understanding that some officers may violate policies regardless, is vital information for youth and others. Addressing the epidemic of police misconduct, as well as the need for accountability for a plethora of community needs is empowering to many people. However, the organizing model offers a lot of opportunities for critique and improvement.

Copwatch as a concept emerged, by many accounts, around 1990 with the launch of Berkeley Copwatch. Since then, Copwatch organizations have popped up around the country. There is really no unifying vision to speak of. Some Copwatch-named groups are positioned around ferreting out bad cops, some around accountability, others on challenging power dynamics. In a historical sense, the challenge to police power was most prominent during the rise of the Black Liberation movement. However, Copwatch, in my estimation, doesn’t have an actual claim to that history, beyond anecdotal reference.

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The following pamphlet was originally written as a discussion document by the Kasama Project. We are reprinting it here for the value of its approach toward the "pull of the sect" and its insistence on reconception.  It is also available as a PDF.

Contributing to Revolution’s Long March

By Enzo Rhyner, J.B. Connors, John Steele, Kobayashi Maru, Mike Ely, Rita Stephan, and Rosa Harris

Overcoming Two Absences

Life on earth is wracked by contradiction. Each moment, especially in our era, throws up new and particular contradictions starkly.

In just the first year of Kasama, we’ve seen the rise of Obama — with all it has meant, including in the thinking of progressive people. And we are standing amid the early shockwaves of a wrenching, global economic crisis that has awakened and alarmed hundreds of millions of people, and re-injected the word “socialism” into public discourse.

And meanwhile, there really is not yet any sense of a revolutionary or communist alternatives on the political radar screen. The intermediate are alarmed and panicky, while many of the most consciously progressive are (in a way never seen in our lifetime) loosely gathered around the new U.S. government.

In future moments, millions of people will organize themselves into upsurges and seek new ways to think, to live and to die. And at such moments, there may be much demanded of communists. To make revolution, large forces need to be united around programs and common visions for an alternative future — and they need to be materialist plans that have an actual hope of achieving liberation.

This world calls out for fearless actions, and the disciplined sacrifice to carry them out. Urgently. Always urgently. Answers will be needed in the midst of major social conjunctures. Lines of demarcation will need to be drawn at each point along the way.

And yet, there it is: At this moment, it is not clear what revolution in the U.S. would look like, or how determined revolutionaries can help advance the conditions for revolution. And there is, at this moment, no existing revolutionary organization with prospects of developing significant roots among oppressed people and their potential allies.

These two absences — of revolutionary strategy and organization in the U.S. — have existed for a long time (despite deception and self-deception). The whole point of forming our Kasama Project is to make a common contribution to filling those voids.

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