Doug quoting David Roediger: >These are tricky but important matters. It is certainly true that racism >must be set in class and economic contexts. Cox was tight to quote >delightedly Julius Boeke: 'Europeans did not sail to the Indies to collect >butterflies.' Doug, it is important to understand that Roediger's study is based on Marxism. It combines insights from other fields, such as psychoanalysis but the key thing is that it is all set in terms of "class and economic interests." Christopher Cauldwell made the same point. Psychology is the handmaiden of sociology. We must proceed from the general to the particular. Roediger states that his "analysis of whiteness as the product of specific classes' attempts to come to terms with their class - never simply economic - problems by projecting their longings onto a despised race grows directly out of George Rawick's closing chapters in From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, in which Rawick probes the racism of the seventeenthand eighteenth-century Anglo-European bourgeoisie." It might be useful to identify Rawick's intellectual and political roots. He is a disciple of CLR James, who--along with Gramsci and Mariatégui--are the guiding lights of the Marxism mailing list. If you like Roediger, you certainly will appreciate the work of Rawick and James. But there should be no confusion about their orientation. They are Marxists. This is from the newly published biography of CLR James by Kent Worcester that was reviewed by Marty Glaberman in "Against the Current" and posted this morning on BRC-News, the same medium that the interview with Barbara Smith appeared on. ========= A very different version of these years was offered by George Rawick, a young historian who had been active in the Socialist Party. Rawick traveled to England in 1963 and stayed with C. L. R. and Selma James for several months in their home in north London. He later described their household as cluttered with books and papers, its occupants strapped for cash but nevertheless busily receiving visitors from all corners of the globe. Rawick also recalled the strong impression that conversations withJames left on him: "We spent a lot of time talking about politics, history, literature and art... Living with him was like an apprenticeship. Writing history, which I had been doing, is nice but it isn't revolutionary politics. I learned by watching him speak, listening to him speak. I lecture like him--never using notes."9 Rawick, who had known Martin Glaberman in Detroit, had been won over to the socialism-from-below perspective of the Facing Reality group by the late 1950s, and was impressed by the purity of its state capitalist analysis of the Soviet Union. One point he remembered in particular was James's habit of purchasing multiple copies of books, magazines, and picture postcards to pass on to friends and acquaintances. "James was always broke," Rawick said, "because he was always giving away books and never getting them back. He wanted people to read." Of course, going as far back as the early 1920s, James had exchanged books, manuscripts, and ideas with acquaintances and friends.'1 As Rawick's anecdote suggests, James had a generous nature, as well as perhaps a careless attitude toward money As he entered old age his personal style mellowed even as his politics remained firm. He combined a number of different and in certain respects contradictory. elements: a cool revolutionary ardor, a seriousness about ideas, a wry sense of humor, a friendly disposition, and a deeply internalized code of honor. Although these elements had been present from the very beginning, the particular way they were combined and integrated was distinctive to this period of his life. Anyone who had known him as a l940s Johnsonite and then talked to him in London in the 1960s would have appreciated this evolution, how he had shed the aroma of revolutionary conspiracy and adopted a dignified, older-gentlemanly persona in its stead. Yet he retained the crisp reserve that had always made him stand out in the Trotskyist milieu. George Rawick returned to London in 1967 for more collaborations, joining James, Glaberman, and another former Johnsonite, William Gorman, to work on a sequel to Facing Reality entitled The Gathering Forces. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the document was intended as a response to the new political realities of the mid-1960s. It was the most sustained, most ambitious, and perhaps the most disappointing of the various attempts that C. L. R. and his associates made to reach out to black and New Left movements in the Age of Aquarius. They clearly hoped that the Johnsonite perspective could win converts among the young and the newly radicalized. Yet the impact of their views was felt more on the undergrowth of the New Left, rather than on its public manifestations. Part of the explanation for this had to do with their ingrained worker-centrism, and also because James's polemics were framed in terms that rendered them inaccessible to a nonsocialist audience. C. L. R.'s avowed sympathy for aspects of American history and culture may also have puzzled some activists. Yet connections were made: by the late 1960s, James was well received on many college campuses, and he prodded a number of individuals in an independent-Marxist direction. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
