Black Cold War Liberalism as an Agency Reduction Formation during the Late 1940s and the Early 1950s

1990

Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, 2019

We analyze class, race, and revolution in the US through Marxist theory and philosophy, and the experience and lessons from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (League) in the auto and related plants and community in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The League brought the black liberation movement to the point of production. They grasped the dialectics and interpenetration of class exploitation and racial oppression within capitalism, and the strategic centrality of white supremacy for ruling class profit and control. Their struggle embodied the unity and interrelation of theory and practice, and the necessity of becoming proletarian intellectuals. The League came to Marxism-Leninism as the theory most closely related to their practice as workers at the point of production. Armed with the weapon of Marxism, former League members stayed the course through the stages of capitalist development-from Detroit as the epicenter of global capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the technological shift from labor enhancing to labor replacing automation and robotization in the plants, to the deepening capitalist crisis, economic, ecological, and social destruction, and intensifying militarism and fascism in the current moment. For over fifty years, they were part of the leadership of the multiracial, multinational, and multigendered working class in the 1960s, and remain active within today's rising movement. Former League members consistently lift up the strategic direction and class unity necessary for revolutionary transformation in the interests of the working class, and for the survival of humanity and the planet.

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, 2022

This chapter offers insight on how existing paradigms within Black Studies, specifically the ideas of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, can advance sociological scholarship toward greater understanding of the macro-level factors that shape Black mobilizations. In this chapter, I assess mainstream sociological research on the Civil Rights Movement and theoretical paradigms that emerged from its study, using racial capitalism as a lens to explain dynamics such as the political process of movement emergence, state-sponsored repression, and demobilization. The chapter then focuses on the reparatory justice movement as an example of how racial capitalism perpetuates wide disparities between Black and white people historically and contemporarily, and how reparations activists actively deploy the idea of racial capitalism to address inequities and transform society.

Journal of Black Studies, 2002

National Black law journal, 1990

2020

The essay proposes a short history of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a radical left-wing organization founded in Detroit in 1969. Even though the League disappeared in 1971, its role was significant, and it allows us to write a more complex history of the Black Power Movement by linking the Old Left with the New Left. Its internal quarrels were not only due to clashes of ego but, instead, reflected actual political differences.

National Black law journal, 1990

2017

African-Americans are often perceived as a homogeneous or cohesive body within the social and racial spectrum in the United States. They are often lampooned together when issues of race, segregation, civil rights, and affirmative action are mentioned as if Negroes or blacks were affected by the above issues in the same manner or degree. This paper argues that African-Americans have always been divided and fragmented. Their cultural history has been marred by disputes caused by intra as well as inter-racial differences. Ideological, class, and attitude factors seem to take African-American divisions beyond the usual din of black-white antagonism. The markers of Negro or black racial identity and its attendant factors are every conceivable hueand matters of ideology and attitude as much as pigmentation. The Harlem Renaissance and its “New Negro” project divided more than it united the black literati in the 1920s and 1930s. It can be seen as the seedbed for later inter-racial contestat...

2008