On “White Privilege” and the RCP

(Letter)

27 July 2012

Dear comrades,

Our YSp polemic, “Freedom Road Socialist Organization: Democrats’ Loyal Maoists,” (WV No. 1004, 8 June) apparently hit its mark. Thus, we find FRSO’s Eric Odell taking to cyberspace with gems like this from a 14 June posting: “I don’t think it’s correct to say that FRSO ‘in the main’ supported Obama. I think the majority of individuals on the National Executive Committee at the time did, but within the organization as a whole people were all over the place on the question.” (Odell, of course, as he states in a later posting, is a member of that august body, the FRSO NEC.)

However, we made a sloppy formulation in the piece, i.e., “A particularly repellent contribution to anti-Marxist ‘theory’ by the Avakian RCP as well as PUL [Proletarian Unity League] was the notion that white working people and their bosses are somehow united in ‘white privilege’.” The forerunners of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) certainly associated themselves with the wing of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that embraced “white-skin privilege” and the RCP still sometimes trots out that same anti-proletarian position. But it did not consistently ply this line, nor did Avakian originate it.

“White-skin privilege” was particularly associated with Noel Ignatin (now known as Ignatiev). Ignatin and Ted Allen’s pamphlet White Blindspot & Can White Workers Radicals be Radicalized? (1969) includes a polemic against Progressive Labor Party (PL), which would become the principal factional rival of the New Left Maoist wing of SDS known as RYM. Our own origin as a youth organization was in the 1969 SDS split, when the SL critically supported the PL wing as a subjectively pro-working-class tendency to the left of the likes of Avakian, while forming our own Trotskyist oppositional caucus within this wing of SDS (see our pamphlet Youth, Class and Party [1974]).

However, Avakian & Co. were surely not applying “white-skin privilege,” but rather a type of “Jim Crow Maoism,” when they blocked with rampaging white racists on the streets of Boston in 1974 against school busing to achieve minimal integration, infamously headlining their newspaper: “People Must Unite to Smash Boston Busing Plan.” Small wonder that during the 1970s, one can find them polemicizing against “white-skin privilege.”

At bottom, the political line of the American right-wing Maoists in the late 1960s, following Frantz Fanon, was that the working class in advanced capitalist countries was “bought off” by the spoils of imperialism and hence one could look only to the Third World masses for any revolutionary potential. This outlook changed somewhat after the May 1968 general strike in France. When the Avakian group made its turn to tailing the working class, it adapted to the most backward consciousness—e.g., through its grotesque line on Boston busing.

As for the FRSO, what we wrote about their embrace of this guilty white liberalism is utterly correct. Maybe those FRSO cadres who originated from the RCP are still doing penance for the Boston busing line. In any event, their “white privilege” line today has more to do with quasi-religious moralizing than with a Marxist program for the liberation of the black masses as a strategic component of a third, socialist, American revolution.

The Avakianites, as we noted in our article, “Behind the Split in the RCP, Part 2” (WV No. 199, 31 March 1978) have had two, three, many lines on the black question, all of them wrong:

“In fact, so long as the black nationalists were willing to play footsie with the RU in high-level negotiations, Avakian’s line had little to distinguish it from that later dubbed ‘Bundism.’ Though polemicizing against the ‘white skin privilege’ line so popular in SDS, the RU/RCP has been all over the map on the black question—sometimes sympathetic to the ‘black belt’ theory, sometimes terming U.S. blacks a ‘nation of a new type,’ and sometimes (as in the RCP Programme) avoiding the question altogether.”

Thus, our polemic against the FRSO unwittingly gave Avakian too much credit for originality and for having any consistency.

Yours for new Octobers,
B. Brodie