Red Spice

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Sat Jun 27 16:35:07 PDT 1998


There is an article today in the NYT about the relevance of the Communist Manifesto. It seems to have been moved from the business page to the style section where it is juxtaposed to an article about the Spice Girls. Perhaps this strange juxtaposition was intended by the editors to suggest that Marx could fill the void created by the departure of Ginger Spice: Red Spice.

best, rakesh

BTW Louis P is a fucking asshole and a liar. I have never said, intimated or insinuated the BRC would create white backlash. One of the big reasons I support ruthless criticism of Reed and Herbert Hill of the AFL-CIO/DLC/liberal left is its objective irrelevance at best to the mass of black people who should not attentuate their struggles against discrimination and button up to placate these forces. I think WJ WIlson's thesis that if blacks do so, the DP will give them meaningful class reform in return is total bullshit. (Max wants us to believe in the great gains possible under capitalism, instead of learning from the last twenty years of defeats about the limits of the system).

In terms of the development of black radicalism--while disagreeing with me, Nathan at least understood that this was my focus-- I spoke in favor of an open black congress in which there is sanctioned non black radical participation in at least some of the sessions or, preferrably, black sessions within a radical congress organized in response to the failures of the institutionalized libeal left.

I have written a long reply to his previous messages, including his comical history of Washington, Garvey, Malcolm X and others. There is a little that is critical and rational in that history; it's just party bullshit which would be obvious to anyone who has read Judith Stein on Garvey (who mastered the art of How to Make Loomis Simmons Rich before David Alan Grier invented the huckster) , James Anderson on Booker T Washington's slave labor camps which he called schools for industrial training, Reed on DuBois, Joe Wood's ed volume on Malcolm X (what makes his radicalism so interesting is that Malcolm and the NOI had cooperated with the KKK in terrorizing integration activists). But I am not interested in debate with him.



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