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Rounding out a discussion of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, the author engages in a dialogue with his respondents about the significance of the congress. This essay assesses the legacy of the 1968 congress as a manifestation of the black radical tradition and a critical involvement with socialism. Drawing on C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, it argues that black freedom struggles in the Americas and Europe, including slave revolts, have been an essential part of the history of labor and freedom struggles. It also contends that race has been overdetermined in ways that have historically understated the centrality of black labor to the emergence of modern capitalism, to anticapitalist struggle, and to the movement for universal freedom and a more broadly defined socialism. The essay concludes by asserting that black radical politics pose a challenge to the color- and colonial-blindness of the conventional Left while at the same time reimaging what freedom can mean in the present.

In the modern, extant world of practical history, the dominant "democratic" tradition splits sharply into three, often hostile strands. These strands are liberal democracy, social revolutionary democracy, and participatory democracy. Especially for analytical purposes, it is important to see these strands as distinct sharing only the vaguest general commitment to government by and for broad reaches of the population (thedemos). However, the three strands, for all their differences—and hostilities—should be seen historically as standing in profound and significantdialecticalrelationship with each other. In this light, liberal and social revolutionary democracy are opposites in an antithetical tension that is increasingly extreme. Participatory democracy will then appear as a third term, a still emerging synthetical response arising out of attempts to resolve the tension between the two earlier democratic variants, and clearly showing marks of its inheritance from them.