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SOME POINTS ON THE U.C.P.A. by Willie Thompson In present circumstances it is not surprising thet policies like those advocated by the Universal Coloured Peoples Association should be exercising a fair amount of attraction. It is nevertheless thoroughly reprehensible, and doubly so when socialists accept them uncritically. Certain valid points made by the U.C.P.A. manifesto only serve to show up its essential weakness. It points out for instance that certain types of "advancement" mean nothing but "..a replacement of exploitation of Black by White by exploitation of Black by Black .... of colour discrimination by class discrimination". Very true, --- but then the manifesto makes "Black Power" the key point in its programme, though it never analyses the implications of this ambiguous slogan. What does "Black Power" mean? The replacement of white by black domination? Surely not. The “annihilation of oppression" in a state where the black population is a small minority can only mean the reconstitution of society on an entirely non-racial basis, a socialist community where colour is irrelevant, i.e. that despised word "integration", though in an entirely different sense from that given to it by the liberals, The U.C.P.A. calls for the destruction of the system of exploitation of black people. Does it imagine that this can be smashed without reference to the exploitation of the entire working class? Is the black militant to isolate himself from his fellow-workers in industrial struggle, to refuse to collaborate with white tenants in rent strikes and other mass actions? "For too many years he has let the white man do his thinking for him...... and lost his own personality". Which white man? What is this but communal chauvinism, or rather, to call things by their true names, racialism? The U.C.P.A. has an immediate programme for establishing various community services for the benefit of coloured people, staffed exclusively by coloured people. Have we not heard this somewhere before? Is this not what in other contexts and other places we call apartheid? This is not to say that Socialists should not give critical and conditional support to organisations like the U.C.P.A., to individuals like Stokely Carmichael and Michael X, and even to slogans like "Black Power" insofar as it is a demand for majority rule, but they must expose and refute, patiently and tactfully, but no less determinedly, the reactionary and misleading aspects of such ideas and organisations. If the policies peddled by the U.C.P.A. take hold they could do more damage to the British working class than the Orange and Green has done to the Irish.