Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 19:43:57 -0600
From: rahul-AT-peaches.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Re: RAHUL: CLUTCHING YOUR PEARLS


Ralph, I agree with your perceptive remarks about the attitude of black
Americans toward West Indians and Africans. It works the other way, too: a
lot of West Indians and Africans think American blacks are inherently
inferior.

I disliked Mississippi Masala for several reasons. First, as I mentioned
was the Indian bad, black good attitude, which I found to be only half
right. Second, she overstated the case: both the Indian guy who didn't know
what to do with his new bride and the totally useless father who sat on his
butt waiting for his estate in Uganda to come back to him by magic were
just absurd caricatures. Indians do have sex -- that's why there are so
many of us. Third, the plot was very weak -- this girl seems to have no
brain in her head and just meander mindlessly, hoping to get away from her
dismal existence to an even more dismal one. Of course, the movie was good
for several laughs. On the whole, though, it seemed to be a typical effort
by an avant garde Indian woman to pander to smug mush-headed white liberals
by uncritically slamming Indian men. Not that they don't deserve a lot of
what she said, but it's done in a way to suggest to all these Americans
that they're superior to Indians because they're so much more liberal about
race and gender. Of course, on the whole they might just be, but I still
don't like anyone selling cheap self-satisfaction.


You said re the black church:

>Or does your cosmology dictate that all of social phenomena are to
>be judged in terms of their instrumental organizing value to your
>vanguard ambitions?  This is of course the way the left thinks,
>which is why I shun them.

Personally, I'm torn between the way you think on the matter and the way,
as you say, most of the left thinks. As long as I remain in my ivory tower,
I'm perfectly comfortable assessing all social phenomena according to my
own moral, intellectual, and aesthetic criteria. However, people are dying
out there. If somebody does something to try to stop that, I have to give
them credit, even if I think they're full of shit. You espouse a certain
purity that's very seductive. I've spent most of my life feeling the same
way -- still do, when I don't try to fight it. The opposite kind of purity,
which we see in so many Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Enverist-Gonzaloists is
also very seductive. When I was 12, I was strongly influenced by it. As I
approach the advanced age of 27, however, I have to concede something to
impurity. It doesn't lead to totalitarianism or to sitting on the
sidelines. Besides, my particular shade of darkie was created by
miscegenation -- I'm looking forward to a coffee-colored world someday.

>About the Black Panthers: look, because I think it's necessary to
>study them, it doesn't mean I have to love them.  I think the
>leaders were knuckleheads.  Please don't bring up Eldridge
>Cleaver: he was a psychopath.  Please don't compare me to him, or
>worse, compare William Blake to him.  Are you insane?

I'm not insane. That's not an unalloyed good, though -- for one thing, it
means I can't write poetry for shit. Yes, Cleaver was and is a psychopath,
but I don't think Blake was quite sane himself. You're a lot more sensible
than Cleaver and Blake was a great poet, while Cleaver is a writer of minor
interest. Those things said, I don't think what I said was quite devoid of
meaning. What I was getting at is that the mix of personal feeling and
politics can be very powerful, when it's done correctly, and that both
Blake and Cleaver partake of that power. In the same way, Einstein and
Steven Hawking were both physicists. I'm surprised at your reaction, since
it seems to go against your own oft-stated dictum of not judging art by its
political content or implications. Maybe I didn't say it clearly enough,
before: when I read Soul on Ice, I thought Cleaver was a sicko too, just an
interesting one. I love T.S. Eliot, even thought he was a elitist royalist
Anglican  prick. I think Cleaver was more than just articulate and
intelligent -- he possessed the gift of making his own experiences and
thoughts vivid and compelling, even when you thought he was full of it.

>One must study the Panthers for other reasons.  First and
>foremost, it was a grassroots movement that attracted a whole lot
>of ordinary, non-adventurist, non-psycho people in the rank and
>file.  If the leaders were as sincere, level-headed, and
>intelligent as the followers, maybe the organization wouldn't have
>been destroyed so easily.  Given the characters who ran the
>organization, destroying it was a piece of cake.  A number of
>decent people lost their lives because of the police.  The
>Panthers' influence seems to have been extensive, and they
>represented a new stage in community-based organization.  Their
>Achilles heel was, to oversimplify, their vanguardism, while their
>real strength was their grassroots base.  Being socialists of a
>sort, they were a new stage in socialist organization, something
>that could not be predicted within the classical Marxist-Leninist
>vanguard framework, although sadly some of that same thinking was
>embedded in that movement, i.e. the debased "third-worldist" and
>Maoist form of Marxism, i.e. the low-rent kind.
>
>So the Panthers should be studied and studied very critically, far
>more critically than the limited self-criticism of leaders who
>have written their autobiographies or otherwise gone out on the
>lecture and Bar-B-Q circuit.
>
>The point is to study the highest stage that class struggle
>reached in the previous epoch of revolutionary upsurge, i.e. the
>1960s, and learn what can be learned from that experience.   Never
>again in the USA will any of these Marxist-Leninst parties ever
>play a decisive political role.  The next form of political
>organization will spring up overnight.  The task is to look around
>at the gathering forces and study both what is there and is not
>there and to find that fulcrum of social transformation, which is
>not to be found by tailing after the first two-bit charlatan that
>tries to stick his dick in your mouth.



I'll concede that the Panthers had a large grassroots base that was united
around very sensible concerns, and that they had a lot of sincere,
levelheaded members. I also think that Marxist-Leninist parties (narrowly
defined) will never again play an important role in the First World and
even though they have the potential base of support in the Third World,
they'll fail there too. For that matter, I see virtually no potential for
any of the left to get it together before capitalism has wrecked most of
the world. I can't go along with you on considering the Panthers the
highest stage of revolutionary struggle in the previous epoch, though. From
whatever I know (I've only read a couple of books that deal with them, so I
may be missing a lot), they were in every way a decline from the Marxist
movements in the US before them. Their appeal was particularist rather than
universalist, their philosophies were obscure, theoretically they were of
course a big step down from much of the Marxist tradition, and their
political program was regressive in the extreme. A United States of Black
America was and is a ludicrous idea. Furthermore, if you get down to brass
tacks, although they garnered a lot of support, they accomplished virtually
nothing and then self-destructed (with a little help from our friends in
the FBI). Compare that with the labor movement of the 1930's and 40's,
which at least gained relative prosperity for the working class for a
generation or more.

I think, if there's one phenomenon to study to understand what are the new
organizational forms that will be possible, it's the Zapatistas. Not the
armed struggle, but the vision of civil society they're trying to put
forth. As yet (although I haven't read much of their stuff in the last 9 or
10 months), I would say that their vision is very inchoate and uncritical,
but it forms the nucleus of what may be the only feasible kind of program
the people can put forth against the combination of capital and state in
the future.

There's much more to say, which I'll try to address shortly.

Rahul




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