black nationalism reflux

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.princeton.edu
Wed Nov 24 00:28:40 PST 1999



>Besides, whatever you or I say on LBO will have _no_ effect on the BRC, for
>better or worse (except Art & Charles might read our posts).

Yoshie, I have no idea what the composition of this list is; it is widely accessible now through the archive. I look forward to Art, Charles or anyone else challenging me. Maybe someone new will sign up to expose me or Angela as an objective racist. At the same time, I'll see if I can get any black people to talk to me so I don't speak from the bottom of this pit of ignorance in which I sit.


>Besides, if we can't even racially integrate this
>very forum where we are having a discussion, what gives us the right to
>remain token racial minorities in a nearly all-white setting while
>criticizing an honestly all-black affair? If integration is so important,
>why not integrate this list first???

It seems to me that a good way to integrate it would then be to conduct an honest debate in which minorities would be motivated to participate. At any rate, the PBS News Hour seems more integrated to me than most leftist institutions.


>Is the BRC more or less radical than an "integrated" organization of like
>character? The BRC seems to have a wider political horizon, at least, than
>the Labor Party, which doesn't say anything about socialism, feminism,
>etc., for instance.

Good point.


>Not necessarily. Blacks & Latinos together may spearhead an organizing of
>the mass based communist party, for instance.

So argued Mike Davis in Prisoners of the American Dream. But that won't happen with separate Black Radical and Aztlan Congresses.

Anyhow, if you are unhappy with the BRC,
>why don't you organize a competing integrated organization and invite the
>BRC members and see if they will come? If you can't do that, again, there
>is no point in carping from the sideline. Leftists ought to be doers, not
>just talkers.

Sorry I am politically inactive at present. Perhaps that will change in the years ahead.

It's
>un-Marxist & voluntarist to think that "bad leaders" are the cause of
>everything bad.

I agree. We have to look at the institutional structure, i.e. the atrophy of democratic structures within the Leninist parties.


>You know, Rakesh, harping on past failures & disappointments in a cultural
>condition where people are encouraged to fetishize impossibility and to
>think, moreover, that if there is any revolutionary change, it will be for
>the worse -- that is not a politically smart move.

We don't have to rescue communism from its Bolshevik deformation to overcome hip defeatism? I respectfully disagree. By uncritically embracing Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and their respective parties, we project a vision of the communist future of which workers will easily remain at the very least ambivalent, thereby creating the grounds for the hip defeatism that here exercises you.

Yours, Rakesh

ps talk to you after the holiday.



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