Trayvon Martin and Racist Intent

The mainstream media is awash in speculation about the individual motives of Martin's murderer, George Zimmerman. Headlines like the following are ubiquitous: "Who is George Zimmerman, and why did he kill Trayvon Martin?". Predictably, the angle that these articles take is one of individual psychologizing, probing Zimmerman's personal life and "character" for evidence of intentional, overt racist inclinations. Some articles, such as the CSM piece linked above, explore his personal life ("Zimmerman tutored a young black student") and survey character-defenses from family and neighbors ("George was a 'good dude' who simply wanted his neighborhood to be safe").

This is to be expected. In an era of colorblindness, an extremely high burden of proof is placed on anyone who dares to suggest that racial oppression has something to do with patterns of police violence, incarceration rates, housing, etc. Colorblind skepticism about the relevance of race demands a "smoking gun" in the form of an explicit, intentional racist statement. When such demands are not met, attempts to criticize contemporary racism are summarily dismissed as groundless and illegitimate.

The basic assumption here is that racism is simply "in the heart", a merely personal evil or "prejudice". The idea is that racism is merely ill-will harbored by an individual who—intentionally and deliberately—hates other people because of their race.

But this is a highly implausible picture of what reality is like.

First of all, racism has never been a matter of mere individual whim or "personal prejudice". It has always been a social phenomenon--an interlocking set of ideas woven through institutions, practices, norms, laws, and so on. People are not born racists—they acquire racist beliefs, practices and habits in the course of living in a racist society (set aside for the moment how racist societies come about in the first place). This is rarely a conscious, deliberate process. We don't come out of the womb as fully-formed consumers of ideas who then go to the ideas mall to acquire only the ones we choose. Instead, we are thrown into a web of meanings, ideas, norms, etc. that are there before us, which we did not choose. The key is to criticize these dominant sets of ideas that are the "air we breathe". However, to be in a position to rationally criticize received ideas is always a kind of achievement, not our default starting position.

The upshot is this: by psychoanalyzing George Zimmerman, we turn our attention away from the real problem. The more we are asked to focus on his psychology the more we obscure the underlying issue.

After all, people are not protesting by the tens of thousands merely because they are morally outraged at the conscious actions of George Zimmerman the man. There is, to be sure, plenty of legitimate moral outrage because what has happened was, quite obviously, a moral catastrophe. Last I checked, Zimmerman had been neither arrested nor indicted. His gun hasn't even been confiscated. That is absolutely outrageous.

But, outrageous though this is on a moral level, the slaying of Trayvon Martin is not simply a matter of morality. It's bigger than Trayvon; it's also about Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Stephon Watts, Ramarley Graham and so many others. This is about a deep-seated injustice that afflicts our whole society.

The mass marches reflect the fact that this is a social problem that reflects a widespread pattern of violence against people of color that is rooted in social oppression. Rather than taking each incident of racist police violence, decontextualizing it, and analyzing it in abstraction from every other incident, we need to see these incidents as part of a recurring pattern of racist violence. Given the extremely high incidence (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc. etc.) of unarmed black men shot to death by police officers, colorblind skepticism about the racicalized dimension is nothing short of racist obfuscation pure and simple.

Conscious intent, then, is a serious red-herring. More often than not, people are unaware of the racist ideas that they've internalized through the mass media, TV, film, music, and all the rest. Our society teaches that young black men are deviant, dangerous, hardcore criminals. It should hardly be surprising to learn that the main teachings of our society--conveyed through media, culture, the criminal injustice system, etc.--produce large numbers of people with racist beliefs. Critical consciousness is not impossible under such conditions--but it always brushes against the grain of the main narratives handed down from above. As Marx and Engels put it, "the dominant ideas are, in every epoch, the ideas of the ruling class." Political philosopher Tommie Shelby explains the point in more detail:

"Rather than focus on the mental states of individuals without regard to their socio-historical context, which can often lead us astray, I would suggest that we view racism as fundamentally a type of ideology. Put briefly and somewhat crudely, “ideologies” are widely accepted illusory systems of belief that function to establish or reinforce structures of social oppression. We should also note that these social illusions, like the belief that blacks are an inferior “race,” are often, even typically, accepted because of the unacknowledged desires or fears of those who embrace them (e.g., some white workers have embraced racist beliefs and attitudes when they were anxious about the entrance of lower-paid blacks into a tight labor market.) Racial ideologies emerged with the African slave trade and European imperialist domination of “darker” peoples. These peoples were “racialized” in an effort to legitimize their subjugation and exploitation: the idea of biological “race,” the linchpin of the ideology, was used to impute an inherent and unchangeable set of physically based characteristics to the subordinate Other, an “essential nature” which supposedly set them apart from and explained why they were appropriately exploited by the dominant group. This ideology served (and still serves) to legitimize the subordination and economic exploitation of non-white people. Even after slavery was abolished and decolonization was well under way, the ideology continued to have an impact on social relations, as it functioned to legitimize segregation, uneven socioeconomic development, a racially segmented labor market, and the social neglect of the urban poor."

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander examines some rather disturbing studies that explain the extent of this phenomenon:

"A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: "Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?" The startling results were published by the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. 95 percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups. These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today...

...Racially charged political rhetoric and media imagery have...for nearly three decades... disproportionately featured African American offenders. One study suggests that the standard crime news "script" is sol prevalent and so thoroughly racialized that viewers imagine a black perpetrator even when none exists. In that study, 60 percent of viewers who saw a story with no image falsely recalled seeing one, and 70 percent of those viewers believed the perpetrator to be African American...

...studies indicate that people become increasingly harsh when an alleged criminal is darker and more "stereotypically black"; they are more lenient when the accused is lighter and appears more stereotypically white. This is true of jurors as well as law enforcement officers."

Despite the fact that the majority of drug dealers and users are white, people are persistently led to conclude that the opposite is true. Despite the fact that white youth are more likely than their black counterparts to use and sell drugs, common "wisdom" suggests the opposite. This is instructive.

Readers of this blog will no doubt have read or heard of Geraldo Rivera's racist comments to the effect that black men in hoodies get what they deserve when they dress like "gangsters". Richard Seymour's take on Rivera's comments seem to me spot on:

Geraldo Rivera thinks the murder happened because Trayvon Martin was wearing a hoodie, and thus sending out a signal that he was a gangster. However morally cretinous this suggestion is, give Rivera credit for having some intuition about the politics of racial symbolism. He means that the murder victim is partly to blame for his death, because this symbolic action, wearing a hoodie, identifies one as someone who should be killed. He cannot help partially sharing the point of view of the killer, understanding the anxiety and horror that such sassing, such brazen boldness, such reckless wearing, walking and looking, provokes. He partially shares the point of view of the killer and that's why gets it: hey, if you don't want to get shot, don't go out looking like a punk. If you don't want to get shot, don't loiter, stand up straight, dress properly, show some manners.

Rivera deserves every bit of the scorn he's receiving for having made these remarks. But in a perverse way his comments should be welcome for those seeking to uproot and overthrow racial oppression in the US. Rather than taking the obfuscatory psychologizing route, Rivera is merely saying out loud what we're taught in this society about young black men. He is stating a commonplace "truth" about black men that is operative in all spheres of social life, from the criminal "justice" system, police squad cars, schools, workplaces, culture, media, etc.

Groping around for conscious intent is a worthless activity. This isn't about George Zimmerman the man. This is about the basic structure our society. Until we radically change it, the young black bodies will continue to pile up.

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Some Reflections on the Concept of Privilege

For many activists committed to ending all forms of social oppression, the concept of privilege (see here for a recent example) is as familiar as it is commonplace. But what is the political import of using this concept rather than others? What, politically speaking, are its drawbacks and advantages? What does it make clear and what does it obscure?

Political concepts are a key part of radical political projects. We can't understand the world (or effectively intervene and act within it) without them. Social struggles are often compelled to expand on certain concepts they've inherited or negate others, synthesizing and forging new ground along the way. Marx's way of thinking about exploitation did not arise ex nihilo; but it clearly gave new life to a set of grievances that had been expressed throughout the history of the working class movement for a long time. It was a conceptual innovation which drew on existing struggles while, at the same time, giving them new ways of understanding the world the better to change it. There are numerous other examples of conceptual innovations, rooted in concrete struggles, which subsequently advanced our understanding of oppression (the better to destroy it).

But not every political concept is as effective or illuminating as every other. Some concepts obscure things and distort our practices, others are practically ineffective or lack explanatory power. Some are contradictory and merely reflect existing social conflicts rather than pointing to a way of overcoming them. The only way to know which political concepts are worth their salt is to see what works and what doesn't in the course of social struggle, i.e. to aim to achieve a kind of equilibrium between political practice and critical reflection. Concepts which don't advance our understanding or capacity to fight back must be revised or rejected.

***

With this in mind, what should we say about the language of privilege?

In order to focus our discussion, let's stick with a specific example: the concept of white privilege. Before we look closely at the concept, it is worth reviewing one kind of controversy that the concept provokes, centered around questions like: are white people in fact privileged? We can imagine, for example, a white person with ruffled features responding, in a defensive and slightly aggravated spirit, that they aren't, in fact, privileged, that they simply worked hard for what they have, and so on and so forth. In these kinds of debates, it is rather obvious that the denial of the existence of white privilege is tantamount to denying, in effect, that non-white people endure racial oppression.

This denial comes in many forms, but it is frequently bound up with the racist ideology of colorblindness. According to this set of ideas, race is not important, so we should do our best not to notice it. Racism has mostly been overcome and race is no longer a significant political concern. Moreover, because race no longer matters, it follows the only racists that exist today are those who continue to talk about race or think that it's significant. Thus, rather than talking about race, we should only "see only the individual" and ignore race entirely. The mere mention of race is therefore illegitimate, "divisive" and tantamount to "playing the race card." The only sensible thing is to cease to speak about race entirely.

This whole set of ideas, of course, is little more than a silencing maneuver meant to prevent discussion of the contemporary realities of racial oppression. It has the effect of consolidating the claim that we live in a "post-racial society", thereby putting anyone who challenges the racist status quo on the defensive.

Of course, it hardly needs to be said that these ideas are toxic and distort reality. They destroy movements. This sort of denial of white privilege is just racist, and that's all there is to it.

But there are other ways to take issue with the language of privilege that don't involve giving an answer to the question "are white people privileged or not?". Rather than answering the question as it stands, another approach would be to step back and ask a different question: how does the concept of privilege help us understand what racial oppression is and how to fight it? Or to put it in a slightly different way: politically speaking, how does the language of privilege advance the struggle against racial oppression?

In what follows I want to reflect a little on the concept of privilege by attempting to answer some of the question posed above. My reflections will, on the whole, be critical of the concept of privilege. But I shall not try to say whether the concept is wholly inadequate or not--I mean to leave it an open question whether there are particular contexts in which the concept is both useful and clarificatory. All I shall offer are particular reflection on what I take to be relatively discrete drawbacks of talk of privilege.

Of course, whatever we say, however, criticisms of privilege hardly leave us in the position of needing to invents an entire alternative to the language of privilege out of whole cloth. We have only to glance at the history of struggle against anti-black racism in the US, for example, to gather gather together a rich vocabulary, including (but not limited to) concepts like: oppression, domination, power, colonization, imperialism, exploitation, marginalization, subordination, dehumanization, cultural imperialism, and so on. The concept of privilege is one among a large field of political concepts at our disposal and it is by no means obvious that it is the most illuminating.

***

One drawback of the language of privilege is that it can often carry with it individualistic components that are problematic when imported into social and political contexts. Given the way that the language is sometimes used, it almost sounds as if members of dominant groups (e.g. men vis-a-vis women, hetero people vis-a-vis lgbt people, etc.) simply need to accept responsibility and offer verbal repentance as individuals in order to do their part in changing the status quo. That is, the language of privilege can sometimes make it sound as if the only obligation of, say, white people in a racist society is to individually acknowledge their privilege and apologize for it.

But individual-level concepts such as apology, guilt, acknowledgement, repentance, responsibility and so on fail to capture the historical, social, political and structural features of racial oppression. Racial oppression is not a set of ideas or attitudes individuals have (although ideas and attitudes play a role in reproducing and justifying it). Oppression refers to asymmetrical social relations among groups of persons involving power, domination, exploitation and so on.

Social relations are never isolated, particularistic or self-standing. They are always embedded in some kind of social system, i.e. in a set of material social institutions (whether they are legal, economic, political, cultural, informal, otherwise). A materialist approach to oppression here is crucial.

Oppression does not come to be as the result of uncoordinated individual attitudes. Oppression is an ongoing social process whereby certain groups are systematically criminalized, brutalized, marginalized, exploited, or denied access to the necessities of life. So our task isn't merely to strike up this or that individual attitude toward this state of affairs; our task is to talk about how this social process works so that we can build social movements to decisively smash it once and for all.

***

Let us illustrate this last point by way of example. Take the specific problem of racist police brutality (set aside all of the other awful things that the police as an institution do--from sexually assaulting women to breaking strikes).

As a white person, I do not expect to be harassed or brutalized by racist police in the same way that black and brown people of my age and gender do. It is an understatement to say that police racism directly affects my sisters and brothers of color in a way that it doesn't directly affect me. That is a fact in a racist society where the cops are a key part of a prison-industrial complex that reproduces and exacerbates racial inequalities.

Now, some would say that we should understand this fact in terms of privilege. We could say, for example, that I am privileged and, once I acknowledge this privilege and recognize that others have it much worse than I do, that there's nothing more to say or do.

But this would be politically inadequate and misleading. At its root, the basic problem isn't that I'm "privileged" by not having to directly endure the effects of racist police violence. The problem is the racist police violence itself (and the social system that both creates and sustains it).

Now, to be sure, it's of immense importance--especially for white working people--to be unequivocal about the fact that racist police violence occurs every day. It also needs to be clearly stated that, because it is racist police violence, that it specifically targets racially oppressed groups. In an era of colorblindness, it's absolutely crucial to fight against the racist denial of these very real social facts. And it's even more important that everyone--again, especially working white folks--to see racist police brutality as an injustice that they themselves have an interest in struggling to defeat. Anti-racist activists should never pander to the sensibilities of racist whites, or dilute their demands to appease those under the sway of racist ideas. Racism must be taken head-on in an uncompromising way. But the question remains: are these goals well-served by the language of privilege? I don't see that they are.

Compared to other frameworks--e.g. thinking in terms of socially structured forms of oppression rooted in certain material conditions--talk of privilege can make it sound like the job of whites is done once they acknowledge that they aren't directly subject to racist police violence.

But by zooming in and staying at the individual level, we don't bring the big picture into focus. We miss the forest for the trees. We also fail to make clear that white working people have an interest in being a part of the collective struggle to completely dismantle racial oppression--in all of its material and institutional dimensions. In many registers, it seems to me that the language of privilege papers over this crucial fact. At worst, it threatens to make it possible to take existing structures of oppression for granted while recommending various sorts of individual attitudes toward it. At best, it merely offers one way of accommodating it that is, to be sure, better than the racist denial that racial oppression exists, but nonetheless inadequate for those who want to change the world.

***

Another potential drawback of the concept of white privilege is that it can encourage us to make the mistake of thinking of white people as an internally undifferentiated mass with identical interests. But whites are internally divided as a group: along lines of gender, sexuality, and, especially, along class lines. It's not the case that white working-class single mothers have the same interests as the CEO of Goldman Sachs.

As Michelle Alexander argues at length in her excellent (and must-read) book The New Jim Crow, it has often been the case throughout US history that racist forms of social control have been used by dominant groups to divide and conquer black people and poor whites. She discusses, for instance, Bacon's Rebellion and Populism, but there are numerous other examples where elites used racism to prevent a movement from below that could challenge their power. Of course, even though it grew out of a need to legitimate chattel slavery and colonial domination, racial oppression has long since taken on a life of its own and it has infected social life in many ways--not all of which stem from the conscious interventions of a ruling class intent on dividing and conquering. But we fail to understand the history of racial oppression in the US--and the movements which have sought to fight back against it--if we completely ignore the way in which the ruling class at different periods has benefited enormously from racial oppression and racist ideology. The language of privilege, it seems to me, can lead us to do just that.

After all, as Marxists have long argued, the efficacy of divide and conquer is neither inevitable nor natural. Whether "racist bribes" will be effective for ruling groups always depends upon on the political consciousness and level of struggle on the ground. To say that racism in the contemporary white working class is a barrier to solidarity is not to say that solidarity is impossible--it is merely to draw our attention to the current challenges we face in building a mass movement against both racial oppression and class exploitation. The potential for such a movement is great, especially today. We would be cynical and defeatist if we give up the fight for it. Barriers to genuine solidarity are subject to change through consciousness raising, political argument, and social struggle--radicals have to be part of all three.

The language of privilege does not provide us with any help in thinking practically about how to build such struggles. It leaves a lot out. For example, as Richard Seymour points out:

"I seem to recall from somewhere that it was Angela Davis who urged readers to imagine the capitalist system as a pyramid, with heterosexual white male capitalists at the top, and black, gay women prisoners at the bottom. Each struggle by those at the bottom would also lift those further up, such that the more subaltern one’s situation, the more potentially universal one’s interests are. The marxist understanding of the working class as the ‘universal class’ hinges partially on this strategic insight."

But this strategic insight--that the more subaltern one's situation, the more potentially universal one's interests--is not visible if we have only the language of privilege at our disposal to make sense of a social field shot through with various forms of oppression.

***

Another difficulty I see with the language of privilege is that can easily devolve into what Marxist-influenced radical theorist Iris Marion Young calls the "distributive paradigm". According to this paradigm, racial disparities are nothing more than a pattern of distribution of certain goods or advantages. To be privileged, then, is to possess some thing that others lack. Accordingly the solution to the problem is to make sure to allow others to get their hands on what privileged groups have. As Young puts it,

"The distributive paradigm implicitly assumes that [what matters is] what individual persons have, how much they have, and how that amount compares with what other persons have.This focus on possession tends to preclude thinking about what people are doing according to what institutionalized rules, how their doings and havings are structured by institutionalized relations that constitute their positions, and how the combined effect of their doings has recursive effects on their lives."

Now, it's not that distributive issues don't matter. Racism affects the distribution of advantages, privileges and material benefits. So fighting racism means fighting to change those distributions. The fight for reparations is clearly an instance of such a fight for distribution (although it also contains elements of the demand for recognition of historical injustices and all the harms and injuries--material as well as symbolic--that accompany them). Nonetheless, unequal distribution is not the root of racial oppression, it is merely one of its effects. As Marx argues in the Critique of the Gotha Program, any pattern of distribution always presupposes some organized system of production, a division of labor, power relations, institutional structure, and so forth. Understanding racial oppression means examining how all of these material factors in all their empirical richness. But if all we talk about is how privileges are distributed, how some possess or lack privileges, we fail to critically engage with the oppressive social relations that produce such unequal distributions in the first place.

Take the example of slavery in the US. Of course, slavery meant that masters enjoyed all sorts of material advantages and privileges (e.g. education, better housing, leisure, medical care, lavish meals, etc.) that slaves were denied. But we won't have gotten very far if we only critique the way that these privileges are unequally distributed between master and slaves. The root of the problem, after all, wasn't one of distribution. Rather, it was the oppressive and exploitative character of the master/slave relationship itself. This power relationship does not change when masters give slaves certain privileges or benefits that they previously lacked. A kind slave master is nothing but a kind oppressor. As Fredrick Douglass put it:

"My feelings [toward slave masters] were not the result of any marked cruelty in the treatment I received; they sprung from the consideration of my being a slave at all. It was slavery—not its mere incidents—that I hated."

Talk of privilege doesn't capture Douglass's point, which is fundamentally about an oppressive social relationship. This problem comes out even more clearly when we examine the word "under-privileged". It suggests that a person is only suffering from a lack of "privileges" that others enjoy. This language fits neatly with individualistic talk of "social mobility" as the answer to social injustice. It makes it sound as though we only need to make it possible for some fraction of the "under-privileged" to be able to fight their way into the camp of the "privileged". But this perspective obscures the way that racial oppression is constituted by materially structured social relations of domination. Instead, it focuses our attention only on things that people possess or lack.

But even if some groups were given more than they have now, this wouldn't necessarily change the basic relations of power in our society. It would be worth fighting for nonetheless, because it would improve the well-being and political confidence of the oppressed. But it remains true that "if they can give it you, they can take it away". Distributive struggles are crucial--but they are not the whole story. The root of the problem has to do with certain asymmetrical relations of power. Instead of "underprivileged individuals" or "under-served communities" we need to talk about racially oppressed groups who stand in need of full liberation and full social equality, not merely a bundle of goods and privileges that they presently lack.

***

The language of privilege is hardly the worst framework out there for making sense of oppression. Compared to the racist prison-house of colorblindness, it is a clear improvement because it attempts to bring questions involving (but not limited to) race and gender to the fore. This is important. We live in an era of colorblindness--in which myths are entertained on the left as well as the right that we live in a "post racial" society.

But it is radically false to say that the concept of privilege is the only way that we, today, have to make sense of racial oppression. The history of anti-racist struggle equips us with a far richer set of possibilities. It should be an open, practical question which concepts best advance understanding and political struggle. But, given the drawbacks and limitations discussed above, the concept of privilege is more trouble than its worth.

To get to the root of problem, we need to understand oppression in terms of oppressive social relationships that are built into the basic structure of society. The focus on the basic structure of society--where various forms of oppression intersect and reinforce one another--suggests a way out of the antimonies of the framework of privilege.

At the end of the day, talk of privilege does not suggest a way of understanding or overthrowing the prison/industrial complex (i.e. the "New Jim Crow"). It does not suggest a way of coming together to fight back against austerity--which is crushing people of color more than anyone else. It does not point to a way of stopping foreclosures, evictions, mass-layoffs or police violence. It does not suggest a way of fighting for an end to a system that ruthlessly exploits human beings for profit, which thrives on imperialism, neo-colonialism, racism, sexism, and suppression of all kinds. We need a way of thinking about these problems that generalizes the experience of particular struggles and links them together to build the kind of bonds of solidarity that can challenge the system itself.

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Unsystematic remarks about how to theorize oppression in a Marxist framework

What does solidarity mean for socialist politics? Take the example of the oppression of women. We've all encountered self-styled progressive men who seem to think that the fight against sexism is merely of interest to women. The liberation of women isn't their own responsibility; it's only the job of women to fight sexism and gender oppression. Because they're men, they might even think that they just won't be able to ever understand the oppression of women. So these men think it's OK to stand on the sidelines.

That's not a socialist position. To be a socialist and a man is to be absolutely committed to ending the oppression of women. It is think that you have a responsibility to learn everything there is to know about how women are oppressed by listening and immersing yourself in the history of struggle. To be a socialist and a man is to believe, first of all, that you have a responsibility to refuse participate in the oppression of women. Second of all it is to believe that you have a responsibility to be an active participant in the struggle for women's liberation. You have to think that the fight for women's liberation is your fight too. The same goes for straight people and the fight against lgbt oppression, for white lgbt people in the fight against racism, and so on. To be a socialist is to think that you have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with all groups fighting against oppression, to see their struggle as your own struggle. That's the core meaning of the politics of solidarity, of uniting and fighting.

***

A major way that racism functions in contemporary societies is that many white people feel indifferent to the suffering of people of color. Their default position is to think that black suffering is their problem, but someone else's problem. This was obvious during the aftermath of Katrina. What this makes clear is that many whites don't see racial oppression and inequality as a problem which they have a responsibility to struggle against. We can imagine them telling themselves things like "well, that's not my problem, that's just a problem for the black community to solve." You see this same thing in the conservative victim-blaming ideologies of "self help".

Socialists completely reject this way of thinking. Solidarity requires that we care about the pain and suffering of other human beings. It means that we take the oppression of any one particular group to be an injury to all. We don't carve up society into different racial groups and say that injustices faced by one group are only of concern to members of that group. The politics of solidarity requires that you see the struggles of the oppressed as your struggle as well. It requires that you make it your business to learn about the history of resistance to all forms of oppression, even those that don't affect you directly. The more people that are enlisted in the fight against oppression the better.

***

Modern racism emerges out of European colonialism and the slave trade. It grows out of a need to justify the enslavement, domination and subordination of non-white peoples to the ruling classes of Europe. Thus, racism and capitalism co-originate and make each other possible. Modern capitalism comes of age in the context of expropriations of indigenous populations, colonial extraction of natural resources, and the enslavement of human beings. It is for this reason, that race and class are deeply intertwined. The class system has always depended upon racial oppression, and racial oppression has always occurred in the context of class divisions. Thus, to think that you can overthrow one without the other is naive. For example, the Latino and Black liberation struggles in the US, in periods of heightened struggle and radicalization, have always concluded that fully abolishing racism means doing away with capitalism. Read the 13 point program of the Young Lords Party, or the program of the Black Panthers. They are uncompromising anti-capitalists. I think that's the kind of perspective the Left needs today.

***

Black oppression is not entirely reducible to class oppression, but it is inextricably bound up with it. Capitalism comes into existence "dripping", as Marx vividly put it, "from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt". That is to say, Marx's theory of primitive accumulation had it that capitalism only comes to exist on the back of the dispossession of peasants, the expropriation of indigenous populations, colonialism and slavery. Racism and capitalism are linked from the very beginning.

This view, that racial oppression is not wholly reducible to class exploitation is basically the position defended by Trotsky in debates with Afro-Trinidadian Marxist CLR James within the SWP in the 30s and 40s. Trotsky's position was to reject the nationalist approach staked out by the CP as mechanical and inflexible. Whether socialists should support the self-determination line is a question of whether the masses of black people are demanding it. But Trotsky wanted to walk a fine line here, he did not want to simply reject the call for self-determination out of hand. On the contrary, Trotsky sensed some latent racism amongst leftists who decried self-determination because it "distracted from class". Trotsky said of this phenomenon that "the argument that the slogan for self-determination leads away from the class point of view is an adaptation of the ideology of the white workers". "The Negro", Trotsky argued in 1939, "can be developed to the class point of view only when the white worker is educated", i.e. only when white workers are disabused of racist beliefs, when racism is smashed within the labor movement. For Trotsky, however, the black struggle against racism should not wait for white workers to be won over to anti-racism, it had to begin immediately, and the job of all socialists was to support such struggles in whatever form they took. He thus argued for a "merciless struggle against... the colossal prejudices of white workers [which] makes no concession to them whatsoever".

***

What is the relationship between race and class? In order to answer this question, we have to talk about social relations, the level of development of the productive forces, the mode of production, distributions of power, geography, culture, the basic structure of political institutions, in short all the things that make up the bread and butter of the Marxist analysis of society and history. That is to say, race must be understood materially and historically, i.e. in terms of the material conditions of society in its historical context.

The material character of racism makes clear why we can't disentangle race and class. This is why we cannot say that race is a mere epiphenomenon that is only to be found in our language, culture and discourse. Race isn't just an idea or concept which we can critically analyze by solely examining the genealogy of its movement in thought and language. Neither is racism a merely individual or ethical problem that happens to afflict certain individuals. Racial domination is materially inscribed in the basic social institutions that constitute modern capitalist societies. It is a structural feature of the system. We therefore can't properly understand contemporary capitalism without understanding the function that race plays within it. Capitalism has always been racialized from the very beginning. But if we can't understand capitalism without understanding racism, neither can we properly understand race without understanding how racism has always been entangled in other social relations of power, in the economic structure of society, etc. That is, we can't understand what the roots of racism are unless we understand the historical development of contemporary capitalist societies (including their imperialist and colonialist projects). No critique of capitalism without the critique of racism; no critique of racism without the critique of capitalism.

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Who Benefits From Oppression?

On the face of it, this is an easy question to answer: the oppressors. But unpacking this simple answer requires that we raise several questions that are not as easily answered: Who are the oppressors? Where are they located in the social system? Whom do they oppress, and why? How do they oppress? In what precise relation do they stand vis-a-vis the oppressed?

I don't intend to attempt to offer full answers to any of these questions. I have a more modest goal: to think through a particular strategy for answering them familiar to some on the socialist Left. I have in mind the sort of argument (see here) put forward by Lindsey German (formerly of the Socialist Workers Party (UK)). For a similar argument, see this article at SW.org.

Here's German's statement of the argument I'm going to examine:

I want to reject the concept of patriarchy as at best a muddled term simply meaning women’s oppression (in which case it cannot explain this oppression), and at worst a completely idealist notion which has no basis in material reality. I want to show that it is not men who “benefit” from the oppression of women but capital. I want to look at the way in which the family has changed, and how as it has changed women’s conception of themselves has also changed. Hopefully that will demonstrate that women’s continued oppression is not the result of male conspiracy (or an alliance between male workers and the capitalist class), but of the continuation of class society in every part of the world. It follows that I shall argue the “socialist” countries have no more in common with socialism than they have with women’s liberation.

So the answer that we should expect German to give to our question "who benefits?" is: the ruling class. But is that accurate?

It depends first on what we mean by "benefit". Suppose that we take "benefit" to simply mean money. What German wants to say is that working class men do not procure monetary benefits from living in a society that oppresses women, but the ruling class does. She offers two arguments in defense of that claim. First, a labor market in which men and women are divided, with women forced to accept lower wages and worse jobs, does not benefit working men as members of the working class. That is, this sort of labor market drives down wages across the board, making all workers worse off. Second, the ruling class directly benefits from dividing and conquering the labor market along gender lines, since the strength of a united class would be far more effective in bargaining for a larger share of ruling class profits. Notice that this is a counter-factual claim. That is, it asks us to imagine a contrary-to-fact scenario (i.e. one in which the working class isn't divided, but united) in order to make its point. Since a united working class, one without internal hierarchies and relations of domination, would be much better for all workers, it follows that internal inequalities within the working class are not in it's long-run interest as a class.

Now, for my part, I think both of these arguments are sound. First of all, a divided labor market is worse for workers and better for employers, hence why employers love "two tiered" pension plans, etc. etc. When workers compete amongst themselves for jobs, be it through "legitimate" means (i.e. by "meritocratic" means) or "illegitimate" means (i.e. by means of coercion, power, etc.), capitalists benefit because this increases their bargaining power vis-a-vis labor. When the strength of capital relative to labor increases, wages tend to fall. The converse is true: when the strength of labor relative to capital increases, labor is able to secure a larger fraction of profits. Also, the counter-factual scenario described above does make clear that a genuinely egalitarian and united working class would be the best scenario for the class as a whole.

But does this establish German's answer to the "who benefits?" question? I do not think that it does. Let's stick with the "monetary" interpretation of "benefit" (I'll consider other forms of "benefit" later). Is it in fact true that working class men don't draw any such benefits from the oppression of women? The answer, I think, is no: working class men do benefit from the oppression of women. Let's consider some examples. Take divorce. Studies show that the living standards of women tend, on average, to substantially drop after divorce, whereas men's living standards go up. That trend, German would surely agree, exists because we live in a society in which women are oppressed, thus the difference in monetary benefit from divorce derives from oppression. Yet men consistently come out on top, and thus benefit from it. Were arrangements to change such that men's living standards didn't go up on average after divorce, they would thereby lose a material benefit.

Now, German can reply here as follows: "but this is small potatoes compared to the benefits the ruling class garners from a sexist labor market and a sexual division of labor in the home". And she's right, as far as the claim goes. But replying in this way concedes my point: working class men do benefit, albeit in particular ways that don't mesh with their overall class interests, from the oppression of women. That's in part how sexism reproduces itself over time: some men are reluctant to give up benefits and privileges (however small, in the grand scheme of things) granted to them by sexist social relations. And this is also in part why the divide-and-conquer tactics of the ruling class are effective in some cases. After all, if the divide-and-conquer tactics didn't include some promise of a small benefit (small in comparison to the large overall gains that could be won without divisions), they wouldn't work. To say that men don't benefit at all is to lack an explanation of how the ruling class is sometimes able to successfully divide and conquer on the basis of gender oppression.

Think of it this way. Suppose that a sexist male worker has a balance sheet that adds up all of the relevant benefits and costs that pertain to his status. I agree, along with German, that there should be a large red entry in the "costs" column that makes clear what the worker is losing as a result of living in a capitalist society in which the working class is divided, and thus more easily conquered, by capital. But that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be any small green entries in the "benefit" column. Though they will be canceled out by the large red entry in "costs" column, there are still going to be entries in the "benefit" column.

Or take this example of benefiting from sexism. Imagine a household in which a married man and woman, both employed and both working class, abide by a traditional sexist division of labor at home. The woman works what we might call a "double day", that is, she puts in her paid 40 hrs a week at work, but returns home do her second shift of hard domestic labor for no pay. Suppose she is hard at work washing dishes while her husband relaxes on the couch and reads a stimulating novel. Would we really say that the man isn't benefiting from this sexist division of labor? To be sure, we can imagine a world that was better for both the man and the woman in which domestic labor wasn't privatized and unpaid, but socialized and equitably distributed. This arrangement would grant both parties greater benefits than they (respectively) receive in the status quo. But though this arrangement is a surely goal worth fighting for, it's a counter-factual scenario. The "who benefits?" question, however, pertains to the actual world. And in the sexist world we actually live in, the man on the couch is befitting in the short term, since he enjoys the fruits of his wife's labor while he reclines and reads.

And there are still other examples of benefits. For instance, in a sexist labor market, individual male workers benefit from having more job options available to them. Moreover, they benefit, as individual male workers, from their ability to more easily get promoted, get raises, etc. in the workplace. These benefits are real, material facts about our society. To be sure, qua worker, it is not in the overall class interest of male workers to exclude and subordinate any other members of their class. Each member of the working class is stronger when the class as a whole is stronger. From the narrow perspective of earnings, sexist working class men stand to benefit much more from united working class action than they do from the status quo. But that doesn't mean that men don't, in the mean time, gather various monetary benefits from living in a sexist society. Even though capital benefits long-term from sexism in a way that workers don't, it doesn't follow that no working class men benefit from it. Beyond being false, this claim creates confusion and has the potential to alienate left-wing allies who are drawn to socialist (and, in particular, Marxist) politics in a time of economic crisis.

So, I think the socialist Left can do without the "working men don't benefit from sexism" claim. First off, even from the perspective of monetary benefits, we've seen that the claim is false. Second, when we broaden the meaning of "benefit" the claim is even less plausible. There are innumerable examples here, but think, for instance, of the way that many young girls are socialized to be less confident in answering questions in a math class, whereas boys are socialized to think they should always "speak up" and answer such questions confidently. That isn't straight-forwardly monetary, but it is a benefit that boys enjoy (whether they want to or not) because of sexist gender norms in the socialization process. Saying that men don't benefit at all obscures these facts.

Still, socialists have extremely valuable, indeed essential, points to make in these discussions. It is true that the question "who benefits?" requires an answer that is class-specific. Saying "men as a whole benefit" is imprecise- since men of different classes may benefit in different ways (or, in some cases, some men may not benefit at all). Moreover, it also needs to be said that not every form of womens' oppression generates a direct benefit to men. Take "beauty" norms. Women are pressured to comply with oppressive norms that specify how they are to dress, what they are to look like, etc. Moreover, these norms pressure women into buying all sorts of expensive products, chemicals, etc. in order to live up to the standards placed before them. But, although men don't have to deal with this particular load of shit, they aren't really benefiting from the fact that women do have to deal with it. They are off the hook, sure. But that's more of a "negative" benefit than a positive one. It's not as though mens lives are better because women are forced to comply with all of these oppressive norms. To be sure, mens lives would be worse if they were similarly forced to comply. But just because something would be worse, it doesn't follow that I benefit from not enduring it. I wouldn't say that I benefit from the fact that I'm not being electrocuted right now. It is, to be sure, a privilege not to be oppressed in some particular way. But having the privilege of not being oppressed is not the same as directly benefiting from the continued existence of a form of oppression. This distinction is important. Sometimes this sort of privilege overlaps with certain benefits, but I would wager that it doesn't always overlap.

What, I think, motivates arguments like that put forward by German is the worry that if one admits that working class men benefit from sexism, one must admit that the working class is too fractured and divided to be capable of uniting to fight the ruling class. But that's not so. The idea that it is impossible for the working class to unite emerges from other sources (e.g. for an influential statement of the impossibility claim see Laclau and Mouffe's arguments in favor of this thesis in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). Drawing attention to the ways in which some sections of the working class derive benefits from oppressing other workers does not undermine the possibility of working class unity. Nor does it commit us to controversial concepts like the "labor aristocracy" or the like. On the contrary, such a critique of schisms among working class people is a necessary precondition to working class solidarity. Solidarity is an egalitarian idea that presupposes relations of equality and respect; there cannot be solidarity between two groups when one is actively involved in the oppression of another. Socialists have long realized this, and the history of the socialist Left is filled with interventions by Marxists arguing against racism, sexism and other forms of oppression from within the ranks of the labor movement.

Finally, the socialist counter-factual claim discussed above is powerful and can't be re-stated enough: if things were to radically change and the working class did overcome its internal divisions and inequalities... there would be no difficulty in bringing the basic structure of our society under democratic, community control in order to service human needs rather than profit. It is only the basis of having built such a working-class movement that we can really talk about building a socialist society, that is, an egalitarian society based on freedom, equality and solidarity. Any politics that promises full liberation without overcoming the domination of the ruling class is complicit in the continued domination of human beings by the iron laws of profit.

[Postscript: There is also a further complication here that concerns the notion of "benefit". In one sense, "benefit" is analogous to "good for someone". "Good for", of course, could be read (in an Aristotelian spirit) as "conducive to one's flourishing or well-being". Now, upon reflection, few of us would want to say that it is good for someone to oppress another. While they might acquire certain material privileges by means of oppression, they would nonetheless fall short of flourishing. Being oppressive is not a character trait we would associate with flourishing or living well; on the contrary, we understand such behavior to be a vice, something that evinces internal obstacles to flourishing. So, in this sense, we could say that men don't benefit from sexism since it is not good for them to be oppressors. It would be better, even from the perspective of their own well-being, if they weren't oppressive but rather more disposed to want to stand in relations of equality vis-a-vis women. This, of course, probably isn't the interpretation of "benefit" most people have in mind when they discuss the "who benefits?" question.]

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A Couple of Thoughts Re: Charles Blow's Op/Ed

Read Blow's piece, titled "Let's Rescue the Race Debate" here. In general, the piece makes quite a few important points that are often obscured in the racist echo chamber that is the mainstream media.

Although Blow doesn't explicitly mention the phenomenon of "color blind" racism, he offers a number of persuasive arguments that expose it for the sophistry that it is.

Nonetheless, I am bothered by a couple of things that are going on in the article. First off, although Blow can hardly be blamed for this, the cautious "bad people exist on all sides of the debate", we need to seek "common ground" language employed toward the end of the piece evinces an important way that racial domination functions in the contemporary U.S. What I have in mind here concerns the fact that the white establishment is still uncomfortable and resentful when confronted with politically organized, confident, and critical black voices. That's precisely what all the blathering about "reverse racism", "culture of victimization", etc. is about. It is a pre-emptive strike against confident black social critique. By creating the stereotype of the "angry black voice", those concerned to defend white supremacy have a convenient way of dismissing any and all criticism of existing society authored by black people. It is, in effect, a way of saying to the oppressed: shut up and stop complaining, your grievances are illegitimate... your voice simply doesn't, indeed couldn't, matter. Note, also that history is inadmissible because it upsets the a priori assumptions built into this ideology (e.g. that the US is the "greatest" country on earth with a divine mandate, etc.).

The upshot of this preemptive strike is that anyone who wishes to criticize white supremacy is meant to always feel like they're on the defensive. The norm created by the preemptive strike is this: so as not to ruffle the feathers of whites, black social critics must tread lightly in public. The same problem faces feminist critics, as well as socialists who wish to make the argument that we should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich. In the case of the feminist critic, even soft-core feminists who merely aim to make extremely modest critiques of things like the wage gap, there is a pressure from above to avoid sounding like a "bitch" (this is, incidentally, one reason why I love the title of the feminist magazine Bitch, which basically redeploys this sexist epithet by throwing it back in the face of sexists as if to say, "yeah, I'm not fucking around about women's liberation, what's it to you?").

I digress. Back to the Blow piece.

I groaned when I first read the Booker T. Washington bit at the beginning of the piece, but was relieved when Blow noted how laden with irony it is that conservatives are so fond of using the quote. To be sure, there are ironies here worth commenting on. But I think Blow radically misses the mark when says that "W.E.B. Du Bois [was] an Obama-like figure who advocated a more broad-based, activist movement for racial equality to be led by an erudite black intelligentsia." Ummmm... what??

This is a disturbing and politically conservative comparison. To be sure, we know that Obama wants politically active black people to buy into the myth that he "advocates a more broad-based, activist movement for racial equality." We know that this is the self-image that he cultivates when he needs support from ordinary black people. But the trouble here is that creating a broad-based activist movement of any kind, and one for racial justice in particular, is simply not what he's about.

Recall his statements to $1,500 a plate dinners during the Midterm campaigns. Recall his public statements in interviews about "folks that weren't serious in the first place". Recall Axlerod's patronizing, vitriolic attacks on progressives for not being "enthusiastic" enough. Recall, in effect, his entire first two years in office: the priorities are clear.

Building a broad-based activist movement means convincing ordinary people to organize themselves independently of the "proper channels" in order to make their demands heard by those in power, whether or not those in power care to listen. It doesn't mean brow-beating ordinary people from above after you've promised them modest reforms and given them nothing.

Nothing can come of the comparison between Obama and DuBois except political confusion. In reality, Obama is far more like Booker T. Washington than he is like any serious activist against racial oppression. Obama has found many occasions to make Cosby-style complaints about "personal responsibility" that jibe with the conservative intuitions of white conservatives for whom Booker T. Washington is a "breath of fresh air". What you won't hear is a word reflecting the tradition of oppositional voices of folks like MLK, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, or Cornel West.

One more thought here. Although Blow makes some reasonable points regarding the differential experiences of whites and black people, one gets the sense from the article that racism is, at the end of the day, simply a matter of intentional attitudes that an individual has.

This, as I've pointed out elsewhere, is a narrow and ultimately unhelpful rubric for understanding racism.

Racism is not "in the heart". It's not in the first instance about the intentions or attitudes of individuals. Racism has both a material and ideological existence, both of which can come apart from the intentions of individual actors. For this reason, we should entirely abjure discussions about whether so-and-so intends to be racist or not. As I wrote in a previous post:

On the question of concerted intent and racism, I think its ridiculous to assume that because someone intends not to be racist, that they are therefore not implicated perpetuating racism. Racism, if we agree that it is a social phenomenon, is not an aberration or a sin committed by an individual who simply makes bad choices. Someone is not 'rotten to the core' simply because they are complicit or directly involved in sustaining racism in any way. When someone says "hey, what you just said strikes me as rather racist", it should not be tantamount to "you are a bad, bad person and you intentionally mean to harm others!". This is not the way to talk about racism, and doing so in this way only makes the "but I didn't mean it" or "but he's actually a good guy, I swear" character defenses seem plausible (when, in fact, they are totally irrelevant).

This is a needed antidote to Blow's view that "prejudices can be found among all races". Racism isn't in the first instance about individual-level attitudes or prejudices. And it isn't just a matter of some individual not liking another individual who has different phenotypic characteristics. We can't make sense of what the idea of race is, let alone racial hierarchies, without understanding history and macro-level social dynamics. To pretend that racism is an individual-to-individual problem, measurable by asking respondents questions in polls, is misguided.

So what we need to really destroy both contemporary racism and the historical legacies of past racism is serious structural change to the economic structure of society. That isn't going to be accomplished by playing nice with the ruling class. Nor will it come from pandering to the racist ideologies in circulation in American political culture. It will come only from struggle from below. The serious blows to racism in history have all been won when the oppressed organized themselves, often in solidarity with white allies, to strike a blow against status quo relations of power.

Playing nice with power doesn't win anything for the oppressed, as Fredrick Douglass made clear. When Kanye said "George Bush doesn't care about black people" he was absolutely right. But he could have generalized. Those in power at present are indifferent to the historic and contemporary oppression of black people. They are indifferent to black suffering. They are defensive and indignant when anyone suggests that some institutions are systematically implicated in brutalizing and terrorizing people of color.

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Startling

"The top 225 individuals now possess wealth equal to the combined incomes of the bottom 47 percent of the world's population. (Roughly, the average wealth of each one of these individuals is equal to the combined incomes of ten million people earning the average income of the bottom half of humanity)... In the US, the upper 1 percent of the population owns more wealth than the bottom 95 percent". -from David Schweickart's After Capitalism.

Now, ask yourself the following questions.

1. How did such inequalities come about?
2. How is such a vastly unequal state of affairs reproduced and maintained?
3. By what means are we (95% of the population of the US) made to tolerate such an arrangement?
4. Why is the discussion of this matter absent from mainstream political discourse?
5. What could we (collectively, as a society) do with the (socially produced) wealth held by the top 1% if it was put to uses other than the enrichment of a small elite?
   
6. When so much human potential and talent is wasted by the destructive forces of poverty, oppression and exploitation, why should we allow such vast resources to be concentrated among a tiny clique of people for whom there is no such thing as enough wealth?

This is what animates the socialist thought that "another world is possible".

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Israel and Apartheid

(via the Guardian) Evidently, documents have surfaced that show that Israel offered to sell the Apartheid regime in South Africa the bomb in the mid 1970s.

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"Against Diversity"

I am a regular reader of the journal New Left Review. Its one of the few places where you find unflinching radical politics combined with sharp academic rigor. The short polemic in the most recent volume entitled "Against Diversity" by Walter Benn Michaels, however is neither radical nor rigorous. Frankly, it's an embarrassment to the entire journal.

The short, rambling article is summarized in the "programme notes" at the beginning of the journal as follows: "Tears and triumphs for race and gender have dominated the discussion of the 2008 US election. Benn Michaels argues that the Obama and Clinton campaigns are victories for neoliberalism, not over it -serving only to camouflage inequality"

The baffling mention of "tears and triumphs for race and gender" notwithstanding (that will be addressed shortly), the idea that Obama and Clinton represent victories for neoliberalism despite their promiscuous use of the language of "change" is indeed an interesting topic. In my view at least, there are necessary critiques to be made of the Obama/Clinton campaigns (and the Democratic Party writ large) on the basis of their entanglement with Capital and their commitment to neoliberalism and capitalism. Undertaking such an anti-capitalist critique, however, is not Benn Michaels's aim.

Benn Michales's target in this polemic isn't neoliberalism, capitalism or the absence of American Left in the electoral arena, it's a blunt attack on anyone concerned to fight racial or sexual oppression. This sort of complaint is hardly new. Class exploitation and staggering social inequality persist, the old argument goes, precisely because too much emphasis is placed on ‘identity politics’ (an amorphous and often unclear umbrella that threatens to be so broad as to include any critical politics aimed at fighting forms of oppression other than class).

Of course, Benn-Michaels (BM) never puts the thought in quite this clear and direct a formulation. His article is, after all, a polemic: littered with exaggerated rhetoric, false dichotomies, straw-person accounts of his enemies and facts assembled in order to imply conclusions that simply don’t follow.

The first example of the above is the opening sentence of the piece, which equates “the salience of racism and sexism” with “discrimination” and “prejudice”. The move being made here is to define racism and sexism in terms of “prejudice”, “discrimination” and “the perpetuation of false stereotypes”. But it's ridiculous and downright dense to assume that the contemporary social/economic/political dimensions of racism and sexism, as they exist today, are merely a matter of personal prejudices and “false stereotypes.” Thus, BM's polemic begins with a false conception of what the phenomena of racial and sexual oppression actually are. This is classic straw-man argumentation: assume a weak and inaccurate version of what you intend to argue against, and then contrast it with (what you think) is the strongest version of your own view.

Any serious examination of, for instance, racism would take seriously many things that BM seems intent on hiding from view, e.g. critical engagement with history, serious analysis of social movements and struggles against racial oppression, the ideational/ideological features of racism, the institutional dimensions of racism, etc. If BM is right, all of these matters are simply not relevant to Left politics. That is a frightening and false position.

So, having assumed a rather anemic and unrealistic conception of what racism is, BM moves to show us how faulty such "anti-racist" politics are. In contrast to the narrow focus on “discrimination” and “prejudice”, BM points our attention to toward the "noble" concerns that have been lost amidst the alleged preoccupation with gender and race: "equality, justice and openness". In his own words:

“The US today is certainly a less discriminatory society than it was before the Civil Rights movement and the rise of feminism; but is not a more just, open and equal society. On the contrary: it is no more just, it is less open and it is much less equal.”

He continues:

“In 1947 –seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, sixteen years before The Feminine Mystique –the top fifth of American wage-earners made 43 percent of the money earned in the US. Today that same quintile gets 50.5 percent. The bottom fifth got 5 per cent of total income; today it gets 3.4 percent. After half a century of anti-racism and feminism, the US today is a less equal society than was the racist, sexist society of Jim Crow. Furthermore, virtually all of the growth in equality has taken place since the Civil Rights Act of 1965- which means not only that the struggle against discrimination have failed to alleviate inequality, but that they have been compatible with a radical expansion of it. Indeed they have helped to enable the increasing gulf between rich and poor.”(My emphasis)

Whoa, whoa. Hold it right there for a second. Let’s try to make sense out of this.

It’s certainly true that income inequality has increased since 1947. It’s also true that virtually all of the most dramatic growth in income inequality occurred after 1965; it began in the early 1970s. But what has any of this to do with Brown v. Board of Education, Betty Freidan, anti-racism and women's lib? Very little. The relatively low measure (by US Standards) of income inequality in 1947 was a reflection of gains won from past struggles in the 30s, post-War Keynesian (left-liberal) policies and the broad economic circumstances of that era. The increase of inequality to which BM draws our attention, actually began with the global economic landslide of the early 1970s and the concurrent revival of the Right and laissez-faire economic policy (i.e. neoliberalism). This had nothing to do with 1960s social movements or the Civil Rights Act (which was passed and signed into law in 1964, not 1965). The economic downturn that began in 1973 was a global phenomenon, as was the concomitant rise of neoliberalism as a global political/economic movement. To blame that on, say, the Voting Rights Act is downright crazy.

It's also completely ignorant and unfair to the actual history of the struggle against Jim Crow as well as the early 1970s swell of feminist activism; both of these struggles were hardly indifferent to or supportive of capitalism. On the contrary, both struggled mercilessly against the imperatives of Capital. Some obvious examples, on the anti-racist front, include MLK's 'poor peoples' campaign and his explicit turn against capitalism, Malcolm X's late arguments against capitalist exploitation, the Black Panther Party's staunch anti-capitalist platform, etc. It's almost as though BM wants to wipe out the memory of these movements. Surely he is old enough that he should be able recall what they actually stood for.

Now, BM takes a couple of swings at neoliberalism by referring to the Gini Coefficient and arguing that the American Dream is ‘no longer a reality’ (can anyone say “fucking duh?"). It seems that some have been so glib as to take this to be a Left-wing argument. But any true Leftist here would ask: when was the so-called "American Dream" ever a reality in capitalism? Could BM perhaps give us a date, a "golden era", a point in time to which we should attempt to return? And what was the "American Dream" anyway? Was it the suburban, white, reactionary patriarchal family structure characteristic of much of post-war America? Was it the so-called postwar "affluent society" marked by its unrelenting endorsement of over-consumption, single-family homes, and large gas-guzzling automobiles? Is this what is no longer a reality for some sectors of the population?

Now there are interesting, critical, nuanced things to say about the politics of postwar America and the rise of neoliberalism. For example, we could talk about how struggles of the 1960s were derailed in the early 1970s. We could talk about how militant anti-racist organizations were dismantled, infiltrated and slaughtered by the Federal Government. We could talk about 1973, the global economic crisis that followed, and the re-consolidation of class-power by elites that followed. We could talk about how capital crushed organized labor across the board. We could examine how all of these factors lead to a reconfiguration of policies and institutions that resulted in steadily rising inequality for the next 40 years. None of this, I repeat, none of this, however, is part of BM's analysis. His answer is that anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles are to blame for our problems.

So, we've seen that BM is big on pointing to the one statistic he seems to understand: income inequality. But what, precisely, does a rise in income inequality have to do with concerns for racial and sexual justice?

Not much. But again, we have to remember that BM isn’t interested in the actual features of neoliberalism or the economic/political history of the 20^th century; his target isn’t capitalism at all, and the end of the day his target is it’s feminism and anti-racism, as such.

Some of his defenders seem baffled when I make this claim, but this speaks more to their imprecise reading of the article than to BM's actual position as stated in his writings.

What else are we supposed to make of his absurd claim that “a half century of anti-racism and feminism” (wondering what the hell he means by "anti racism" and "feminism"?... yeah, so are the rest of us) has not just been compatible with radical expansions of inequality, but has “helped to enable” it? This is preposterous bullshit.

He tells us that income inequality increased "in spite of" the CRM and the Women’s Movement. So what? Income inequality increased in spite a lot of things. Income inequality increased and the Right surged back into prominence despite the efforts of the Left everywhere (in spite of the struggles of labor, in spite of the anti-capitalism of New Left movements, in spite of every radical effort and struggle of the 1960s). It hardly follows that these struggles were therefore compatible with what followed (i.e. with Ronald Reagan, deregulation, privatization, the destruction of the welfare state, union-busting, etc.).

So what is BM’s justification for his claim that feminism and anti-racist movements help “enable the increasing gap between rich and poor”? Well, it is due to the fact that sex and race are merely “sorting devices” (yeah, he actually said it). He tells us that the real inequalities “that matter most in American society”, aren’t due to racism, sexism or homophobia: they’re due solely to neoliberalism. Read this as: the only inequality that’s relevant is income inequality, that is, sexism and racism just don’t matter.

This is far worse than the imprecise, vulgar-Marxist understanding of sexism and racism as wholly reducible to a particular stage of Capital. BM's essay is a full-fledged denial that sexual and racial oppression matter for the Left at all. What he’s suggesting is that racial and sexual oppression today are merely chimeras; myths that serve to take our eye off the real culprit: neoliberalism. That isn’t just false, it’s dangerous.

But this still doesn’t explain how BM can think that “the Clinton and Obama campaigns… are victories for a commitment to justice that has no argument with inequality as long as its beneficiaries are as racially and sexually diverse as its victims”. Why on earth should we conflate feminism with the Clinton campaign, or assume that Obama is the defender of radical racial equality par excellence? Clinton, leaving aside her own anti-feminist commitments, faced all sorts of sexism from the opponents and the media during her bid for the presidency. Moreover, part of Obama’s message and appeal has to do with his avoidance of race as an issue, his denial of the gravity of racism and his Cosby-like claims that blacks take ‘personal responsibility’. If anything, Obama has put far too little emphasis on race throughout his campaign. Taking racial justice seriously means seeing Obama's candidacy as simulatenously a truly important milestone (which would bave been the case even were he a conservative Republican), as well as an opportunity for 'colorblind racists' to affirm their false belief that our society has finally overcome racism and thus silence any further discussion of racism.

Obama and Clinton no more represent a victory for neoliberalism than do Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore or John Kerry. But again, BM isn’t making a point about the poverty of American politics or its absence of a Left voice. He’s writing a polemic against anyone who takes racial and sexual oppression seriously.

It’s true that neoliberalism doesn’t have any necessary connection with an explicit and assertive racism. But it’s also true that neoliberalism doesn’t have any necessary connection with racial justice or the liberation of women either: ideologically, it is totally indifferent so long as the goal of capital accumulation is accomplished. But this is a sense in which neoliberalism is a horrifying ideology: it understands us only as reified exchangeable units; commodified subjects which are equivalent to a quantifiable set of consumer preferences.

So, if BM thinks that race and gender are merely ‘sorting devices’, this can only be because he has succumbed to the reifying logic of neoliberalism of which he claims to be an opponent.

This article is atrocious. It takes a truth about inequality caused by neoliberalism, and tries to weave it into a false narrative about the "evils" of feminism and anti-racism. It paves over deep, systemic injustices by reducing struggles against racial/sexual subordination to a narrow, soft-core obsession with ‘prejudice’ and ‘discrimination’. It doesn’t even provide a coherent argument against neoliberalism, but rather uses some of the ravages of capitalism to justify a racist and sexist denial of the political relevance of race and sex. Rather than seeing the complicated, intricate ways in which different forms of oppression are woven together, BM offers us a crude scapegoating tale about the sources of injustice. In this sense, BM is basically a less aggressive Pat Buchanan.

The dirty secret of the piece is that it attempts to cover up an unjustified disdain for feminism and anti-racism by pointing to a few statistics about income inequality. If you want a trenchant critique of neoliberalism, read someone else because BM's lukewarm assessment isn't blowing this anti-capitalist's skirt up in the least. He would do well to drop the flimsy critique of inequality (which reeks of reformist-liberal baggage), and simply join the ranks of David Horowitz in espousing his hatred for feminism and anti-racist politics. Or why not, on this view, join up with colorblind racists like Ron Paul who argue that Rightist libertarians cannot in principle be racists because when they look at society they "don't see" race, only individuals (i.e. atomized, egoistic, utility-maximizing robots shorn of any relation to history, politics or culture).

In fairness to BM, I do think there is a point to be made about the poverty of a feminism that embraces neoliberalism, or an anti-racism that did not also make a critique of capitalism part of its project. However, BM doesn't make any nuanced points here, perhaps because he's not sympathetic to these projects. After all, why think seriously about feminist theory if sexual oppression is merely a myth that serves to blind us to income inequality? I've got a serious problem with even placing BM's argument on the Left at all. His argument is so easily appropriated by the Pat Buchanan Right it's not even funny.

Perhaps I've got the wrong idea, but I thought being a socialist meant more than just thinking that income inequality was wrong. I thought being a socialist meant thinking that oppression was something worth fighting against, whatever its form. I thought Marxism was about critiquing production, not some moralistic objection to the more egregiously unequal distributions that capitalism yields.

Reading this in NLR, of all places, was a serious disappointment. This isn’t what you expect to find in a journal where one reads the likes of Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler. This isn’t even a serious, coherent or innovative piece: its polemical trash.

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