>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.
Oh, Michael Yates, I guess you are talking about me. You can use my name, though I can understand why you would want to depersonalize me.
It seems to me that you have the rather foolish propensity to think that we actually show more than a tiny bit of ourselves to each other via the internet; you simply jump to a comprehensive judgement on the basis of a limited and thus misleading basis of internet writing. That you would privilige such writing indicates to me the kind of intellectualism that you rail against (of course in writing).
By the way, I taught two years in a inner city high school (every morning for one period before going to my own grad courses), volunteered in an adult literacy program, organized demonstrations for the firing of racist cops (successful) and against a racist anthropologist (for which I could have been expelled), wrote (unsigned) propaganda against the gulf war (against which I organized tirelessly despite real harrassment) and requested for years that I teach introductory composition courses for EOP/AA students at Berkeley. I always joined the picket lines in my immediate vicinity--haven't had a functioning car until recently. It's true that I am not political right now. It's not the time for me. My experience, limited as it may be, however suggests to me the irreducibly multi-ethnic nature of the oppressed American working class. It's going to be made up more and more of the kids of Mexican Americans, Philipinos, Indians, Cambodians, African Americans, etc. My experience gives me every confidence that we can and will and already do fight together. And I am not in favor of separate ethnic organizations which does not mean that I don't think racism is a big problem.
So has helping to raise four kids, cooking, doing
>household chores, including cleaning toilets.
I also worked in child care for a year (3-4 hours a day)--don't have any kids yet. But have changed a lot of diapers. Which as you know is a lot more yucky than cleaning the toilet.
> I'll be
>making sandwiches and doing the rest of the shit work that needs to be
>done.
Oh no doubt you'll be doing a lot of shit work, based on what I know about you operate.
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.
This is admirable. Did people buy a lot of your written work off the MR table once it was cleaned up?
ch 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.
Why should there be a unified black position--as if there are no contradictions, differences among blacks?
>We who are not black ought to applaud this and ask how we can
>help.
That's one approach. I don't support anything a black organization do just because it's a black organization. I can see how this would simplify life for you. You seem busy.
> And how is there any contradition between the formation of the
>BRC and the formation of a larger radical organization?
It is true that there is not necessarily a contradiction but there is every danger of that irreducibly multiethnic working class balkanizing itself or never coming to recognition of its common interests which are also its most important interests.
Yours, Rakesh