[Marxism] Letter to a Marxmail subscriber

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lajany Otum 

Louis Proyect wrote:


> Even if I accepted that it was not racist under Lyndon Johnson,

^^^
CB: It is an astonishing denial of facts to claim that a party that
passed all the civil rights legislation that ended Jim Crow was "racist"
at the time it was passing all that legislation. The Dixicrat leading
national racists quit the DP because it was leading the anti-racist
charge in the federal government.  The DP controlling faction was
objectively anti-racist at that juncture. 

^^^^

 I would 
> still maintain that it was racist from the day of its birth until the

> LBJ administration. 

^^^^
CB; Already in 1948 Strom Thurmond and the leading racist Dixicrats
left the DP and ran as a third party.  That's strong indirect evidence
that Truman's initial small civil rights moves were anti-racist.  There
was a reason that Black people started shifting from the RP to the DP
with FDR. I'll take the masses of Black people's political assessment on
racism in the US  over any other political section.

^^^^

That makes it racist for about 98 percent of its 
> history.

^^^^^
CB: Starting with FDR, the DP transformed  into the major party
carrying the anti-racist struggle. It reversed history as the party of
the slavocracy and the South. That's why the Dixicrats quit.

^^^^

 That's pretty bad in my opinion, but you are entitled to try to 
> prettify it if you like daunting challenges.
>

&&&&&&
CB: It doesn't need prettifying , just reciting what actually happened;
 and it's not a challenge at all to recite the facts, which contradict
left dogma. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

^^^^^^^

Even if you accepted Charles Brown's line that that the Democratic
Party ceased to be a party of racism under Lyndon Johnson,

^^^^
CB; It's not a line. It's a stone cold fact, which is only not accepted
by somebody who doesn't have any idea what happened in the US in the
1950's and 60's.   One has to be in complete fantasy land to say that
the DP that made the Congress pass the Civil Rights laws of the 60's was
a "racist" party. That's absurd, dillusionary, coo coo.

^^^^^^^
 you'd still have to explain why the democratic party is as consistent
and vociferous as anyone else in its support for Israeli racism and
apartheid, for instance, or why the prison industrial complex and the
incarceration rates of the poor and minorities ballooned under the
Clintons, the executioners of Ray Rector. In other words the democratic
party have just shifted their support from containing the blacks and the
poor through segregation to containing them through incarceration. This
strategy of incarceration rather than segregation, supported by the
democrats, seems to be the mechanism that US ruling class have
effectively contained and rolled back the civil rights movement, and is
far more consistent with neo-liberal management of society than the old
cumbersome jim crow arrangements were. 
Lajany Otum

^^^^^^
CB: In the current Reaganite period, it is the majority of white US
voters who have shifted to supporting Reaganite racism. The DP can't win
until a new White anti-racist majority becomes conscious.




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