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7. Black Workers Congress
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Our objectives: 1. Workers' control of their places of work -- the factories,
mines, fields, offices, transportation services and communication facilities -- so
that the exploitation of labor will cease and no person or corporation will get
rich off the labor of another person, but all people will work far the collective
benefit of humanity.
-Black Workers Congress manifesto, 1971
Our objectives: 1. Workers' control of their places of work -- the factories,
mines, fields, offices, transportation services and communication facilities -- so
that the exploitation of labor will cease and no person or corporation will get
rich off the labor of another person, but all people will work far the collective
benefit of humanity.
-Black Workers Congress manifesto, 1971
139
The Forman idea of revolutionary theory and practice, "Formanism," reflected a precise, if restricted, sense of organization and an amalgam of popularized theoretical tendencies of the 1960s. The major organizational form was the umbrella group operating with a popular front strategy. The organizations had plans for becoming mass-membership groups; but more important than gaining members were the immediate goals of organizing conferences, workshops, and lectures and producing documents. This procedure would attract outside funding and prepare the ground for political education classes. The end product of this program was supposed to be the creation of Frantz Fanon Institutes. In effect, Formanism substituted ideological struggle for struggle over material conditions. The focus had to remain ideological because people were recruited into study groups and organizing commissions rather than action groups prepared to deal with immediate issues. Reduced to study groups and organizing commissions, politics was effectively separated from the problems of work and daily life. The education itself was anticolonial, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist, but ideas were not presented in the context of a serious class analysis of the roles blacks play in America or of the state of mid-twentieth-century capitalism. Unlike the economically grounded and disciplined organizational approach of Marxism-Leninism, the approach of Fanon-Formanism was exemplified by loosely structured groups stressing psychological interpretations of social reality and the accumulation of technical skills. Formanism was less a program for moving toward power than a defensive tactic for dealing with oppression.
The Forman idea of revolutionary theory and practice, "Formanism," reflected a precise, if restricted, sense of organization and an amalgam of popularized theoretical tendencies of the 1960s. The major organizational form was the umbrella group operating with a popular front strategy. The organizations had plans for becoming mass-membership groups; but more important than gaining members were the immediate goals of organizing conferences, workshops, and lectures and producing documents. This procedure would attract outside funding and prepare the ground for political education classes. The end product of this program was supposed to be the creation of Frantz Fanon Institutes. In effect, Formanism substituted ideological struggle for struggle over material conditions. The focus had to remain ideological because people were recruited into study groups and organizing commissions rather than action groups prepared to deal with immediate issues. Reduced to study groups and organizing commissions, politics was effectively separated from the problems of work and daily life. The education itself was anticolonial, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist, but ideas were not presented in the context of a serious class analysis of the roles blacks play in America or of the state of mid-twentieth-century capitalism. Unlike the economically grounded and disciplined organizational approach of Marxism-Leninism, the approach of Fanon-Formanism was exemplified by loosely structured groups stressing psychological interpretations of social reality and the accumulation of technical skills. Formanism was less a program for moving toward power than a defensive tactic for dealing with oppression.