Fwd: [PEN-L:1867] Re: Black Radical Congress (fwd)

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Tue Dec 29 09:10:02 PST 1998


Charles mentioned to me that the BRC line was open to non black leftists. I expressed my skepticism towards a black radical congress again. If Louis P wants to criticize my views, I would appreciate he not attribute arguments to me that I do not make or at least justify any implications he derives from my argument.

I feel the greatest danger is a resurgence of the myth of primordial ethnic identity implicitly based on behavior maximizing inclusive fitness. This myth has been resurrected by Moynihan and Huntingon, invoked to make sense of the Balkans and Rwanda, and treated as common sense by reactionary black leaders from Farrakhan to Asante. A nice discussion of this is in a book by Yawya Sadowski, The Myth of Global Chaos just out from Brookings Institute Press. This kind of psuedo Darwinism ironically resonates with social scientists whose egos are damaged by natural scientists; due to physics envy, they want their objects of study, as Carchedi has noted, to be as free from social determination as the natural scientists, so the idea of society composed of natural kinds exhibiting Darwinian behavior allows them to imagine that they can proceed "objectively". Moreover, this belief in the hardwiring of group behavior expunges history from society (or this pseudo evoltionist history is reduced to the driving to dominance of certain genotypes and the extended phenotypes they code *within* races, though that means finality of racial groups is assumed and we are returned to the world of Platonic ideal types) and plays into the diminishment of conscious historical action that is the signature of our time, as Frank Furedi has eloquently argued. For these reasons, I remain skeptical of a radical congress organized around blackness; I think it cannot avoid the myth of primordial ethnic or racial identity.At the same time, there may be good sociobiological reasons we are susceptible to organizations based on appeals to pseudo ethnicity or mythical races or imagined national communities.

Comradely, Rakesh



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list