First off, I owe you an apology. I did not get a chance to read directly
your first post to the list before reading Jim Farmelant's forward which
was somehow framed in a way that ticked me off. Reading your email
directly did not elicit such a confrontational reaction. That having been
said, I don't think we're going to agree on much of anything. For while
I had other kinds of conversations (not intellectual ones, though) with
some African American Muslims back in the '70s, by this late date I've had
it. But there are a few bullet points I must make, to highlight some
fundamentally divergent assumptions.
First, a few necessary distinctions, and then some further points:
(1) I do not propose, for example, to address huge crowds of black people
denouncing them for their religious beliefs and backward superstitions and
wave a red flag with a hammer and sickle in front of their faces. I do
draw a distinction between mass agitation and how one addresses
intellectuals in their capacity as intellectuals.
(2) The reasons black intellectuals in various areas were turned off
decades ago by Marxists were manifold, but the differences worth discussing
are not religious or intellectual differences. It has to do with the
rigidities inherent in racial and colonial relations which made a meshing
of psychological and cultural attitudes and party politics difficult, along
with the commandeering practices and top-down agendas of the communist
parties. There are indeed many examples of these complaints to be found in
the writings of Black American and Caribbean authors.
(3) As for "spirituality", it's a word that can mean anything or nothing,
so I have to shrug my shoulders. If someone says Coltrane was a spiritual
player, I know what is meant, and I can perceive what is intended, and I
can feel it without having to believe anything. Beyond that, there's not
much I can do with such claims. Yes, faith and religion are incompatible
with Marxist theory, absolutely incompatible. But don't misunderstand what
I mean. They are incompatible with Marxism as a conceptual mechanism for
comprehending the world. But neither Marx nor any marxist since has ever
made rejection of religious belief any precondition for any kind of social
action, since a general aspect of the theory is that only change in
conditions and change in action is going to change very many minds.
(4) I consider Cedric Robinson an intellectual charlatan, his book
intellectually false and dishonest.
(5) One could go on for ever and ever analyzing the role of religion with
respect to the resistance of the Maroons, Haitians, American slaves, civil
rights movement, etc. etc. Why not? But that's not a part of the argument
I recognize as a matter in dispute. Engels analyzed the role of religion
in the German peasant uprisings, from an historical materialist
perspective, as well as the development of early Christianity. Ok,
then. But recognizing religious beliefs and practices as modes of
adaptation in various social and historical circumstances is just not the
same thing as granting them any validity as such.
(6) I note that your litany of historical examples stops with Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King, neither of whom outlived the 1960s. I imagine you
might provide some other examples in the time frame of the past 35 years,
but you didn't, and in any case, I ask: if we grant that these strategies
of social adaptation had validity in their time, do they still remain
viable TODAY? I don't think they do; I think they're a desperate measure
to hold onto something that's dying.
(7) Similarly, Cornel West and other prominent black intellectuals are
figures of TODAY, and should be judged by intellectual standards to be
demanded of them today. And if they prove to be mediocre, myopic, or
opportunist, why should they be given a free pass, or should we be so
thrilled or relieved that a black person jumped through all the hoops to
gain a certain status that we should all shout hooray and dumb ourselves
down accordingly? For some reason, this double standard, borne of
defensiveness and desperation, seems to be universally accepted. It is
also in the long run a sure prescription for suicide. Marable is a far
superior or at least more disciplined intellect than Cornel, though there
are a few things I could say about him I will not say publicly.
(8) As for Jon Henrik Clarke, whatever empirical historical contributions
he has made stand on their own. As is true with every intellectual
discipline including all the sciences, when people overreach their
objective expertise and leap to more general philosophical claims, they are
not necessarily trustworthy, and this goes for physicists and biologists as
it does for historians. His comments about Du Bois and Robeson I can
appreciate, and his disillusionment with the Soviet Union is hardly
unique. However, his Afrocentric perspective is BS. For example:
I never thought that the left movement â communist or socialists â
never made any serious study of the history and background of the African
people of the world. And they have a preconceived notion of us that had
nothing to do with our reality. These African communal societies, in
which each got according to his needs, were not copied from Europe
because they existed before there was a Europe. In these societies,
based on (African) concepts of society and the community, everyone had a
responsibility. In these societies, there was no word for jail, because
no one had gone to one. No word for orphanage, because no one had every
thrown away any children. No word for old people's home, because no one
had ever thrown away grandma and grandpa. And while I had some
admiration for the conclusion of Marx, I dare to say that he was a
political opportunist and jonnie- come-lately because he was rehashing
something that was in the world before the first European wore a shoe or
lived in a house, that had a window"
This is horseshit. The study of premodern societies was in any case fairly
new in Marx's time and I don't even know what reliable information about
Africa was available then, but to suggest the entire historical record of
marxist scholarship is predicated on looking down at Africans, I don't buy
it. To suggest that premodern African societies exemplify some perfect
model, especially one relevant for the modern world, is delusional. And in
my experience of black Americans in the 70s--who have nothing in common
with Africans but fancy they do, a typically American conceit!--they only
proved that their pseudo-Africanity hindered their development and
comprehension of their own society, because their mentality never reached
beyond the confines of the ghetto. And most importantly, not a one of them
ever learned how to treat their women, or stop their macho men in their
tracks. As for Black American men who turned to Islam, well, I remember a
few very "spiritual" people, and others undoubtedly acted on the impulse it
was a step towards embracing a larger world than the one they were raised
in, but in the final analysis, it's just ignorant and sad.
There are, BTW, other perspectives of black intellectuals on
modernity. Richard Wright was fanatical in his embrace of modernity, and
had no brief for tradition. It is understandable then why the likes of
Cornel West would continually slander him. And I recommend Paul Gilroy as
an antidote for all this Afrocentric crap.
(9) There is much more to be said about intellectual standards to be
demanded today, and about the pervasive mediocrity of the American mind
across the board, and about the substandard intellectual level that
university-educated professional black people--not the poor and illiterate
but the educated privileged ones--too often settle for. There is a
tendency among intellectuals in general to succumb to power, to succumb to
it in two ways: either to grovel before power or hunger after it. They
stunt their intellectual growth in this process and end up deluding
themselves. It is a shame though how they pass on their shortcomings to
their students.
I have to stop here, because this is depressing me.
At 11:37 AM 8/3/2006 -0500, Austin Jackson wrote:
Jim, thanks for the article. Thanks, Chris, for the welcome. I asked the
poster for clarity, prefacing with, "With all due respect," so I'm not
sure why the poster felt it necessary offer invitations to kiss his
ass. That's pretty tough typing; I hope our paths cross in the
future. I'll just pray for him now, superstitious African American Muslim
man I am. As Malcolm X once said, I man curses because he lacks the words
or intellegence to express what he has to say. Anyway...is
faith/spirtuality/religion incompatable with Marxist theory? West was
attacked by the poster, in part, because of West's Christian beliefs. I
was surprised by this, since this stance seems to echo the same Marxist
orthadoxy that alienated many African American, African, and Caribbean
scholar-activists who initially embrassed Marxism as a theory of
liberation. What's ironic about this Marxist dismissal of African/African
American spirituality as "superstition" is that it was these same
"superstitions" that provide the basis for Black revolutionary warfare
against slavery and Western imperialism. This is one of the major claims
in Cedric Robinson's BLACK MARXISM: THE MAKING OF THE BLACK RADICAL
TRADITION (1983) -- that Marxists resist interrogating the epistemic
consequences of its European roots, denying the history, experience, and
culture of so-called Third World people from Western radical tradition,
negating indigenous methods of social organization used to resist and
overthrow imperialist social order -- such as "traditional" religion or
spirituality. For instance, Jamaican Maroons, organized by traditional
African spiritual and cultural practices (obeah, spirit possession, nommo,
the drum, etc.), waged successful guerrilla warfare against their Spanish
and British oppressors. The same in Haiti, in which enslaved Africans
invoked traditional religious practices to wage the first successful
anti-imperialist revolution in the Western hemisphere -- almost 50 years
before Marx penned his theory of revolution in 1848. Numerous other
examples abound in the U.S., from 1619 to the liberatory theology of
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (who, shortly before their
assassinations, openly advocated a turn toward "democratic socialism"). In
short, I'm wondering how Marxists who dismiss African/African American
culture as "superstition" because of traditional religious faith reconcile
the fact that these same superstitions have been historically responsible
for ordering Black revolutionary action? If the end goals is the end of
capitalist domination and exploitation, instead of castigating West (the
only prominent Black scholar today, besides Manning Marable, claiming
Marxism) wouldn't it be more useful to consider these "superstitions"
based on how they either generate or impede real, transformaive social
action? In one of his last interviews, the late John Henrike Clarke
recalls the missed opportunity for some kind of unity (do to Marxist
cultural/racial prejudice) between the Black and Western radical
traditions in Harlem in the 1920's: "I was active briefly in the Young
Communist League. We were looking for a way out of the conditions in
which we lived, they open doors for us, they opened doors for us and gave
us a platform that we did not have. Paul Robeson was the one artist who
made the great sacrifice based on commitment and that commitment that an
artist is supposed to use his or her art to change the society in which
they lived. DuBois was our greatest single intellect we've produced in
the western world, and he's not just an African American intellect, was an
American intellect was an American intellect...the (Communist) Party came
closest to what those men wanted stand for in th world, which was a fair
deal for the working people for the world. We would examine much later to
our sorrow that we were in an argument between not a liberator and an
oppressor but two oppressors with different techniques and methodologies
of oppression. In the final analysis Russia did not want us to be free
any more than the united states, England, and the imperial powers wanted
us to be free, but under their domination. I never thought that the left
movement â communist or socialists â never made any serious study of
the history and background of the African people of the world. And they
have a preconceived notion of us that had nothing to do with our reality.
These African communal societies, in which each got according to his
needs, were not copied from Europe because they existed before there was a
Europe. In these societies, based on (African) concepts of society and
the community, everyone had a responsibility. In these societies, there
was no word for jail, because no one had gone to one. No word for
orphanage, because no one had every thrown away any children. No word for
old people's home, because no one had ever thrown away grandma and
grandpa. And while I had some admiration for the conclusion of Marx, I
dare to say that he was a political opportunist and jonnie- come-lately
because he was rehashing something that was in the world before the first
European wore a shoe or lived in a house, that had a window" (LONG AND
MIGHTY WALK, 1996)
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