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revues

Adolph Reed, Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun : Race, class, crisis: the discourse of racial disparity and its analytical discontents

Article d’Adolph Reed, Jr. et de Merlin Chowkwanyun paru dans Socialist Register 2012, p. 149-175


A Harvard University study of more than 2,500 middle-income African American families found that, when compared to other ethnic groups in the same income bracket, blacks were up to 23 percent more likely. ‘Our data would seem to discredit the notion that black Americans are less likely’, said head researcher Russell Waterstone, noting the study also found that women of African descent were no more or less prone than Latinas. ‘In fact, over the past several decades, we’ve seen the African-American community nearly triple in probability’. The study noted that, furthermore, Asian-Americans.

The Onion, 30 November 2010

The only thing that hasn’t changed about black politics since 1965 is how we think about it.

Willie Legette (ca. 1999)
Catégories
livres

Adolph Reed, Jr. : Race, Politics, and Culture

Echange entre Adolph Reed, Jr., Timothy W. Luke, Alex Willingham, David Gross, Paul Piccone, Andrew Feenberg, Jennifer Jordan et Joel Kovel paru dans le livre édité par Adolph Reed, Jr., Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1986, p. 245-273


Part IV
What’s left ? : An Exchange

REED:
The opening paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire might be applied to radical activism in the 1960s. When the counterculturists and black nationalists proclaimed a revolutionary break with bourgeois culture, they did so in a language that affirmed the mass-marketing culture’s principle of self-definition through commodity consumption. When the New Left sought wholesale theoretical clarity, the principal turns taken — Marxism-Leninism and Pan-Africanism — entailed departure from lived history and initiation of a search for authenticity in the past. In each case the goal of authenticity — ultimately a variety of the quest for selffulfillment — overrode engaged political critique.

Catégories
revues

Adolph Reed, Jr. : Marx, Race and Neoliberalism

Article d’Adolph Reed, Jr. paru dans New Labor Forum, Volume 22, Issue 1, Winter 2013, p. 49-57


A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it perceives capitalism dialectically, as a social totality that includes modes of production, relations of production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most important contribution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A historical materialist perspective should stress that “race”— which includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other — is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a particular system of production.

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livres

Adolph L. Reed Jr. : W.E.B. Du Bois and American Politics

Extrait du livre d’Adolph L. Reed Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and American Politics: Fabianism and the Color Line, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 71-89


6
Three Confusions about Du Bois
Interracialism, Pan-Africanism, Socialism

DU BOIS’S PROMINENCE in this century’s Afro-American political life is widely recognized. Yet attempts to categorize him with respect to the various strategic and ideological programs constitutive of black political debate have yielded an uncommonly confusing picture. The confusion about locating Du Bois programmatically has two sources. The first is quite simple: Du Bois lived and acted through several discrete social and political situations that seemed to him to require different strategic responses for the race. Sometimes, especially when sundered from the situations to which they were responses, the strategies that he proposed appear to contradict one another. Analysts, then, have chosen and defended one or another set of strategies or one or another period as authentically Du Boisian. This is a problem of temporal or contextual focus.

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revues

Adolph L. Reed Jr. : Black Particularity Reconsidered

Article d’Adolph L. Reed Jr. paru dans Telos, March 1979 (39), p. 71-93


Over forty years ago Benjamin pointed out that « mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. » (l) This statement captures the central cultural dynamic of a « late » capitalism. The triumph of the commodity form over every sphere of social existence has been made possible by a profound homogenization of work, play, aspirations and self-definition among subject populations — a condition Marcuse has characterized as one-dimensionality. (2) Ironically, while U.S. radicals in the late 1960s fantasized about a « new man » in the abstract, capital was in the process of concretely putting the finishing touches on its new individual. Beneath the current black-female-student-chicano-homosexual-old-young-handicapped, etc., etc., ad nauseum, « struggles » lies a simple truth: there is no coherent opposition to the present administrative apparatus.

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revues

Adolph Reed, Jr. : « Scientistic Socialism: Notes on the New Afro-American Magic Marxism »

Article d’Adolph Reed, Jr. paru dans Endarch. A Journal of Theory, Issue 1, Fall 1974, p. 21-39


Three years ago, after the Black Panther Party had recanted and returned to the Baptist Church, the only self-styled ‘Marxist political tendency to be found on this side of the veil was that embodied in the Black Workers Congress which, according to its somewhat generous self-assessment, was not only ‘Marxist-Leninist’ but ‘Maoist’ as well. Every other tendency among black people was hostile to Marxism. The arguments scarcely need to be recalled : « Marx and Engels were Europeans; what can racist Europeans have to say that is useful to us? » « Why do you have to depend on the white man for your ideology; can’t we develop something new of our own? » etc. Of course there was also a great deal of red-baiting going on and even more self-righteous posturing.
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revues

Vivek Chibber : « Capitalism, class and universalism: Escaping the cul-de-sac of postcolonial theory »

Article de Vivek Chibber paru dans Socialist Register, Vol. 50, 2014, p. 63-79.

 

 

After a long, seemingly interminable hiatus, we appear to be witnessing the re-emergence of a global resistance to capitalism, at least in its neoliberal guise. It has been more than four decades since anti-capitalist movements exploded with such force on a global scale. To be sure, there were tremors every now and then, brief episodes that temporarily derailed the neoliberal project as it swept the globe. But not like that which we have witnessed in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas over the past two years. How far they will develop, how deep will be their impact, it is still impossible to predict. But they have already changed the complexion of left discourse. Suddenly, the issue of capital and class is back on the agenda, not as an abstract or theoretical discussion, but as an urgent political question.