The basic logic is that, out of the mass mobilization of spontaneous movements, cadre emerged to form revolutionary organizations. For the middle strata, the Congress of African People, 1970. For students, the Student Organization of Black Unity, 1969. For industrial workers, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 1969. For the unemployed and inner city black youth, there was the Black Panther Party of 1966. There are several key examples from the 1960s. My argument is that the black struggle was an autonomous force expressing both the response to class exploitation and the particularity of racist oppression as an essential aspect of any revolutionary expression of the masses of poor and working people in the United States. This emerged out of mass mobilization, the development of revolutionary cadre, and the building of vanguard organizations, even after the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965, Che Guevara in 1967, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. A big event of the 1960s was the cry for black power in 1966. The way to understand the revolution is to chronicle the reforms necessary to carry out revolutionary transformation. The dialectics are how they are interconnected, how the tactics of reform can serve the strategic goal of revolution. Both are necessary-reform and revolution. What is key here is that these are not polar opposites. But the next moment was moving from the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Liberation movement-and that was moving back from reform to revolution. This was a strategic rethinking of revolution into reform. The first was conceptually moving the freedom movement into the framework of a civil rights movement. Two critical moments for black people’s struggle set the framework for understanding the dialectics we need to learn from the time of 1968. As a veteran of the 1960s, my responsibility is to combine self-criticism with a challenge from those times, for these times. We can perhaps more than ever feel the urgency of the question: What lessons are to be drawn from the New Left as another generation undertakes the project of building a Left for the 21st century? Opening remarksĪbdul Alkalimat: It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to share my views for this important topic. entangled in a seemingly endless war in Asia and people calling for the impeachment of an unpopular president, with activists fighting in the streets and calling for liberation along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality, the Left’s every attempt to discover new methods and new ideas seems to invoke a memory of the political horizons of 1968. Ushered in by a New Left that sought to distinguish itself from the Old Left that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the monumental events of 1968 set the tone for everything from protest politics to academic leftism. Panel descriptionįor half a century, 1968 has represented a high-water mark of social and political transformation, a year of social upheaval that spanned the entire globe. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Speaking at the event were Abdul Alkalimat, professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champagne, and author of numerous books, including Malcolm X for Beginners Joseph Estes, a member of Platypus and of the Campaign for a Socialist Party Johnny Mercer, a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and an artist working in Chicago and Mitchel Cohen, pamphleteer, poet, and founder of the Red Balloon Collective at SUNY Stony Brook in 1969. On April 6, 2018, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion, Fifty Years of 1968, as the opening plenary of its 10th International Convention, 1918–2018: A Century of Counterrevolution, held in Chicago. Abdul Alkalimat, Joseph Estes, Johnny Mercer, and Mitchel Cohen
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