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March 10, 2017

Leftism — race and class again

Having blogged here about how, contra The Atlantic and Doug Henwood, segregation and Jim Crow were ultimately about race and NOT about some 11-dimensional chess way of breaking up white-black working class solidarity, and having followed up here on how Adolph Reed, along with Henwood, and many acolytes, take a class-first, or almost a class-only stance, even vis-a-vis Black Lives Matter, I was quite pleased by this week's Existential Comics. The last one third is pictured in the panel at left; the full comic is here.

It also led me to note how little I'd seen Henwood, or Reed, from lesser amounts of reading him, mention Frantz Fanon in the first place.

Per "The Wretched of the Earth," Fanon also challenges Marxist-type revolutionaries to actively engage the lumpenproletariat. In reality, that never happened. In the early USSR, the Social-Revolutionaries, NOT the Bolsheviks, won the one semi-free election after the Revolution was consolidated. Lenin forced that party to integrate with the Bolsheviks.

Stalin did the same after World War II in his conquest area. Farmers and peasants parties in places like Poland were forced to amalgamate with Marxists. In China, starting from scratch, Mao ignored peasants in the first place, as actions like the Great Leap Forward showed.

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