Davis was a political activist and writer from an early age, joining the Communist Party USA when she was fifteen. Her writings ranged from the struggle against racism and for prison abolition, for women's liberation to campaigning against imperialist war, and in support of Palestinian rights.
According
to an article by Helen Halyard “ Davis has joined with other academics, such as
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, to promote the theory that
blacks in America remain the victims of a caste system epitomized by the
disproportionate number of African Americans in the US prison system. Davis and
a section of the pseudo-left have latched on to the massive growth of America's
prisons as a rationale for promoting racial politics to divert attention away
from the more fundamental class issues. While referring to the capitalist
economic system, Davis described the prisons largely in racial terms, at one
point saying, "it was a way to manage black bodies in the aftermath of
slavery."[1]
Her most famous work was: Women, Race, and Class, published
in 1981. While useful from the standpoint of a historical study of female
oppression, its heavy concentration on race over class stemmed from her philosophical
outlook. Davis's central premise is that race, not class, is the fundamental
division in American society.
From an early age, she was influenced by philosophers such
as Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a
leading representative of the Frankfurt School. After fleeing the Nazis,
Marcuse came to the United States, where he became a university professor and
wrote several books, including One Dimensional Man, that influenced the 1960s
student movement. Marcuse, as is well known, worked for the OSS, the predecessor
of the CIA, during World War II.
Marcuse's anti-working-class politics led him to believe a
"proto-fascist syndrome in the working class" existed. He thought the
"revolution" would not be made by the working class but by the young
intelligentsia, small fringe groups or guerrilla movements. Its driving force
was not the class contradictions of capitalist society but critical thinking
and the actions of an enlightened elite. Davis's promotion of racial politics has
absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. Her racial politics are the product of a
strain of anti-Marxist thought going back decades, including postmodernism and
neo-anarchism.
Suffice it to say the SWP mentions nothing of her reactionary
political evolution. The pamphlet presents her as a radical activist still on
the side of the oppressed. While mistakenly still seen as a figure of the left,
she smoothly transitioned from left icon to "left" academia, securing
a position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has recently
retired.
[1]
At University of Michigan symposium Angela Davis offers political cover for
Obama- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/31/adav-j31.html
