Why not use our talents to educate others? or participate in organizations etc.? Get down and dirty. It just won't do to just read books and give impressive citations and the like. You have to meet the people, get to know them. Teaching workers and now prisoners has changed my life. So has helping to raise four kids, cooking, doing household chores, including cleaning toilets. Sometimes when I hear people on these lists pontificate (of course, I have done this too), I think that come the revolution, they will still be talking. I'll be making sandwiches and doing the rest of the shit work that needs to be done. I remember at the last Socialist Scholars Conference, someone at the Monthly Review book table spilled a cup of coffee. None of the left scholars standing around did anything. I ran over to a large closet, found a janitor, borrowed a mop, and cleaned up. Earlier, I helped the staff set up the table. I did not notice any other intellectuals doing the same. So we can criticize the BRC, or Malcolm X, or Ho Chi Minh, or Mao. But these folks did or are trying to do the deed, the deed of revolution. What have we done?
Michael Yates
BTW Manning Marable certainly is a radical. And BTW too, balck people are in a struggle for their very lives (A black man 20 to 29 has a one in three chance of spending at least a year in prison). No one is doing much about this and many other facets of black oppression. So who can blame black people for feeling the need to form an organization of their own? To develop a united position if they can first and then seek allies. We who are not black ought to applaud this and ask how we can help. And how is there any contradition between the formation of the BRC and the formation of a larger radical organization?
This post is a bit rambling and I apologize. And I apologize too to all of the fine activists on this list.