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[This article is an edited version of a talk given on May 8, 2003 at the Brecht Forum in New York City. New York constitutional law attorney Leonard Weinglass has handled significant political cases since the sixties. A graduate of Yale Law School, he represented SDS founder Tom Hayden in connection with the Newark riots. He next came into the spotlight working with Attorney William Kunstler on the Chicago Seven case and with Attorney Leonard Boudin in the Pentagon Papers case. Weinglass recently represented condemned Black reporter Mumia Abu Jamal.

Agency-the belief that one's actions can have an effect on political outcomes-is vital to any striving group.¹ What agency are Blacks given by utopian authors and what solutions to the problems faced by blacks do these authors propose? This paper will compare George Schuyler's Black Empire (1938) with Edward Bellamy's 1888 classic, Looking Backward and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932).

Background

This essay calls for a coalition of reform-minded groups that are developing new and remarkably congruent philosophies. What the groups have in common is resistance to being defined by the "other." The essay starts with Afrocentricity because of claims by Du Bois (1995, 26) and Asante (1993, 169) that African Americans should be in a unique position to create new solutions to problems of cultural oppression.

In his recent work, Socialism or Barbarism, István Mészáros issues a clarion call for the transformation of the capitalist system into a socialist one.¹ Mészáros is aware of the daunting nature of this challenge, for the American left, especially its socialist component, is among the weakest in the industrialized world. Unfortunately, he has few suggestions for activists.

Condemnation of Cuba was immediate, strong and practically global last month for the imprisonment of 75 political dissidents and for the summary execution of 3 ferry hijackers. Prominent among the critics were past friends of Cuba of recognized international stature.

It's a long road down to Kananaskis
It's a short road back the other way
If the cops pull you over to the side of the road
You won't have nothing to say
No, you won't have nothing to say

There's a man waiting down the Highway 40
And he's waiting with a rifle in his hand
And he's looking down the road for an out-of-province car
And he thinks he's fighting for his land
Yes, he thinks he's fighting for his land
-- (adapted from Phil Ochs, "Going Down to Mississippi")

Among the factors fomenting tensions between ecology and Marxism, perhaps the most important is the widespread view that Marx's vision of post-capitalist society not only treats natural conditions as effectively limitless but also embraces an anti-ecological ethic of technological optimism and human domination over nature. This interpretation is not just a product of facile identifications of Marx's projection with the historical experience of environmental havoc in the U.S.S.R. and other state-run "socialist" societies.

Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London & New York: Verso, 2002).