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First off, I've been pretty mature and level-headed considering some of the wild and overall insulting stuff hurled at me over pointing out that the Democrats are always the Democrats. Your silence when people were saying that stuff was noted. Second, lighten the hell up, really. Irving Howe was a cranky old grouch and racist asshole. Michael Harrington was a fence-sitter and straddled the status quo when the urban middle class of New York City was being repulsive, racist, and classist towards a set of political developments that could have led to a genuine municipal democratic socialism. If you go read David Harvey, one of his pinpoints on the timeline of neoliberal history is 1975 and Gerald Ford telling NYC to 'Drop Dead'. That was the moment of finance capitalism in America speaking from the Oval Office and causing a counter-revolution we are still in the death grip of. The only reason that happened was because Howe and Harrington and Shanker had broken the alliance between the middle class unionists and the working class taxpayers who were most reliant upon the Welfare state. I will close here with this quote from Noel Ignativev's essay on Thomas E. Watson, the Populist politician who ended life as a Dixiecrat < https://hardcrackers.com/rainbow-coalition-class-war/>: In 1896, the national Democratic Party, feeling the heat of Populism, nominated William Jennings Bryan for President on a platform that borrowed planks from Populism. Now the Party was confronted with a dilemma, to go with Bryan or hold out for the complete platform. At its St. Louis Convention, the Party split, some voting to support Bryan, others to remain independent. As a compromise Watson agreed to accept the Populist nomination for vice-president on a ticket headed by Bryan. The election, won by Republican William McKinley, was a debacle for Populism, leaving its supporters embittered and leading to the Party’s demise. Watson withdrew from politics, turning his attention to writing histories, biographies, and a novel. Then in 1904 he returned to politics, now as an advocate of disfranchising black voters. (At that time, black people still voted in the South even though their political organizations had been repressed and their power reduced when Reconstruction was overturned.) How to explain the change? It was not a result of corruption, bribery or personal betrayal; in fact, it was not personal at all, but representative of a general problem in U.S. history, and there was logic in it. The so-called “Negro Question” had always been his nemesis; if, he reasoned, the black vote could be eliminated as a factor in elections, poor whites would no longer be afraid to vote their interests, and the banker-industrialists dominating the New South could be overturned. Hence, he endorsed the disfranchisement of black voters. He also launched attacks against the Catholic Church, which he accused of serving a foreign power, and against Jews, whom he saw as representatives of northern capitalist interests. (His stirring up popular resentment of Jews led to the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta.) The roots of his transubstantiation were to be found in his failure, and the failure of the movement he led, even in the days when he was preaching unity of black and white poor, to address the material basis of the disunity. There were always fissures in the Populist coalition, largely based in differences in standing between black wage-laborers and white farm owners: for example, when the Colored Farmers’ Alliance proposed to call a strike of black cotton-pickers, the president of the (white) Alliance denounced it as an effort “to better their condition at the expense of their white brethren.” Watson’s efforts at uniting the poor of both races had always been grounded on the premise that the “races” had divergent (as well as common) interests; it was, therefore, a small step for him to abandon those efforts when new avenues promising greater success opened. What if black laborers were more often than whites wage-workers? What if black sharecroppers generally found themselves laboring under more unfavorable terms than whites, terms enforced by legal and extra-legal terror? What if black people made up the overwhelming majority of victims of the convict lease system? What if rural schools for black children were open a hundred days of the year, shutting down during cotton-picking season, while schools for whites stayed open year-round? Why, when the task is to unite the laborers, focus on the things that divide them? Doesn’t it make more sense to focus on the grievances they have in common, their common subordination to the banks, railroads and corrupt public officials? The answer is, no, it does not. History shows it does not. This sort of false unity always leaves the black worker on the bottom. It is black and white together on the picket line, and after the strike is over the white workers return to the skilled trades, the machining departments and the cleaner assembly areas, and the black workers return to the labor gang, the coke plant and the open hearth. Every “victory” of this kind feeds the poison of white supremacy and pushes further off the real unity of the working class. <https://hardcrackers.com/rainbow-coalition-class-war/#_edn2> +++++++ If anyone reading this is serious about socialist politics and revolution, it require the thorough and unflinching examination of the record with regard to racism and how it defined the foundation of DSA. Unless that exercise is undertaken unflinchingly, you only cause more problems. I do not agree with Ignatiev on everything, including his estimation of spontaneity as opposed to the role of a party, nor his conception of how international law should be handled within revolutionary struggle, but I agree with him here. -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart from: Saman Sepehri <p70vo...@yahoo.com> to: Andrew Stewart <hasc.warrior.s...@gmail.com>, Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> date: Sep 10, 2018, 11:02 PM subject: Re: [Marxism] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA?s Founders What in the hell does this have anything to do with any serious discussion of DSA today--for or against (cis-gendered man having sex with etc.etc.... jussy gossip about Irwing Howe sodomizing Harrington...)? This from your previous comment says it all: "First, I have to admit that I find it deeply satisfying to see that I garnered such a reaction, it means I struck a nerve. Either way one looks at it, my ego profits mightily from this exercise. Way cool!" Please stop trolling on this list. No matter what you think you are doing. Don't need this filth presented as debate on DSA, any more than I need "grabbing Pussy" on part of Trump as legitimate discussion. On Monday, September 10, 2018, 9:14:34 PM CDT, Andrew Stewart via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. ***************************************************************** a) There is nothing bizarre or even radical in describing Bayard Rustin as a cis-gendered man, which he was. He did not present himself as trans in public and I have not encountered anything saying otherwise. He was cis, he was a man who had sex with men (MSM), and he was Black. Ergo "*they all are cis men and, except for Rustin, white heterosexuals*" is the proper _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
