Marx issued the call to all the workers of the globe, regardless of race, sex, creed or any other condition whatsoever. As a social party we receive the Negro and all other races upon absolutely equal terms. We are the party of the working class, the whole working class, and we will not suffer ourselves to be divided by any specious appeal to race prejudice; and if we should be coaxed or driven from the straight road we will be lost in the wilderness and ought to perish there, for we shall no longer be a Socialist party.
– Eugene Debs, “The Negro in the Class Struggle” (1903)_
How have changes in social group identity affected the politics of capitalism and the Left’s responses to it? While vulgar-propagandistic and economic-reformist Revisionist pseudo-“Marxism” appeared to reduce the problem of capitalism to exploitation – to the neglect of other forms of social oppression – there have been several important attempts to grasp the struggle for socialism in capitalism in broader and deeper ways, occasioned by crises that have transformed the concrete practices and lived experience of people – for instance, as matters of gender roles, sexuality, and “racial” segregation and affinity – as capitalism has developed and changed over the course of the past century. We will read from among the most sharply acute and incisively critical attempts by Marxists to articulate these crises of social identity as opportunities for finding how capitalism potentially points beyond itself in the struggle for socialism.
- * required / • recommended reading
Week 1: Women’s Question
* Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The longest revolution”(1966)
* **Clara Zetkin **and Vladimir Lenin, “An interview on the woman question”(1920)
• Quintin Hoare, “On Mitchell’s ‘Women: the longest revolution’ “ (1967)
• Mitchell, reply to Quintin Hoare (1967)
Week 2: Women’s Question and sexuality
* Cornelia Möser, Lucy Parker, Ursula Jensen, Joy McReady, Women: the Longest Revolution (Frankfurt), The Platypus Review #84, March 2016
* Margaret Power, Brit Schulte, Yasmin Nair, Women: The Longest Revolution (Chicago), The Platypus Review #84, March 2016
Week 3: Gay Identity and sexuality
* Theodor W. Adorno, “Sexual taboos and the law today”(1963)
* John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and gay identity”(1983)
Week 4: Race and the Black Question
- * Max Shachtman, Communism and the Negro AKA Race and Revolution (1933)
Week 5: Race and the Black Question
* Richard Fraser, “Two lectures on the black question in America and revolutionary integrationism” (1953)
* **James Robertson **and Shirley Stoute, “For black Trotskyism” (1963)
* Bayard Rustin, “From protest to politics” (1965)
* Spartacist League, “Black and red: Class struggle road to Negro freedom” (1966)
Week 6: Race and the Black Question
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), [
Week 7: Race and the Black Question
* Bayard Rustin, “The failure of black separatism” (1970)
* Bayard Rustin, “The blacks and the unions” (1971)
• Spartacist League, “Soul power or workers’ power: The rise and fall of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers” (1974)
* Adolph Reed, “Black particularity reconsidered” (1979)
* Adolph Reed, “Paths to Critical Theory” (1984)