"Neoliberal Anti-Racism" is an Oxymoron

A purportedly "anti-racist" neoliberal politics is nothing of the sort. The two projects, anti-racism on the one hand, and neoliberalism on the other, are worlds apart. Properly understood, there can be no reconciliation between them.

Are there people who will nonetheless claim that they are for abolishing racism, though they are neoliberals? Sure. But what does that prove? It proves only one thing: that there are people out there who have false beliefs about what the relationship between racism and neoliberalism is.

Since we're talking about racism here, let's focus the discussion. Let's stick with the experience of Black people in the US.

At every point in US history, anti-racist struggle has been multifaceted, diverse in terms of tactics and aims, and mixed in its level of militancy. Some currents have offered flawed analyses, some offered a mixed bag of effective resistance but facile conclusions about what liberation would consist in. This is true of the history of every movement against oppression, by the way.

To be sure, there have been many false starts and wrong turns in the movement for Black liberation in this country. There are the Thomas Sowells and Booker T. Washingtons peppered throughout history. But it hardly follows that any one person who merely purports to struggle against racism has had the last word on what Black liberation requires. That should be something for which one has to argue.

And my sense is that, once we get the arguments straight here, the situation in the contemporary United States is such that racism and capitalism are deeply intertwined, with the consequence that one cannot be overturned without the destruction of the other.

There are many reasons for this. First, racism is exacerbated and consolidated by neoliberalism. Because the bare-knuckles capitalism of neoliberalism is anti-democratic, hostile to social spending of any kind, devoted to eviscerating the public sector, etc. it is impossible to redress the deep structural and institutional basis of historical disparities within neoliberalism. That means that redressing the deep racial disparities in the US is foreclosed as a possibility as long as we have no means to meet people's needs by way of redistribution, increased social expenditure, etc. In our society, peoples needs are subordinated to the demands of capital accumulation for the rich. That is no recipe for abolishing the deep inequalities that persist between white and black people on average.

Second, racism functions to stabilize and legitimize capitalist social relations. That is, the ruling class has often stoked racism in order to divide and conquer. Moreover, the exploitation of oppressed populations has often proved to better maximize the profits of Capital. Capital thrives by seizing upon and exploiting social misery all over the globe; this is what the iron law of profit demands. Furthermore, it is clear that it simply will not be possible to build the kind of broad movement all working people need to fight against Capital if racism continues to divide us and subjugate some to the power of others. This isn't a zero-sum game. It's not as though fighting racism means further impoverishing poor whites. To think that is to buy the racist kool-aid pedalled by the proto-fascists in the Tea Bagger movement. The opposite is in fact true: a stronger, more confident movement to abolish racial hierarchies would necessary require redistribution, resistance to the logic of profit, etc.... in short, things that are to the benefit to all workers.

Third, if one is serious about Black people fighting against racist oppression, then one cannot simply think it's sufficient to have a couple of token Black persons sitting in high positions. If one is serious about Black liberation itself, then one is serious about liberating all Black people, i.e. emancipating the masses of Black people in this country from oppression. That is a necessarily egalitarian political goal, which is ipso facto anti-capitalist. Capitalism is sustained by isolating individuals from one another, convincing them that they are merely consumers who vote with their dollars, etc. When someone starts talking about organizing large swaths of people for a project of collective liberation from oppression... one has departed from path blazed by the individualism of capitalism and neoliberalism in particular.

Fourth, the ruling capitalist mythologies about "pulling oneself up by their bootstraps" help to solidify and further entrench racism. As long as structural and historical oppression and exploitation is widely blamed on the victim due to their "lack of character", "work ethic", or "culture of poverty", then we will not be in a position to fight capitalism or racism. As long as the historical and social dimensions of human life are blotted out in favor of capitalist fantasies about "personal responsibility", we will not be in a position to achieve justice of any robust sort.

Fifth, the tendency in advanced capitalist societies is to view other human beings in terms of greed and fear. This instrumentalizing, objectifying way of thinking about human beings characteristic of industrial capitalism (what Marx, Lukacs, and other came to call "reification"), was what Martin Luther King, Jr. was picking up when he said:

When I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are tied together...A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them, make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments... and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say "America, you must be born again!".

We must also point out that all of this "neoliberal anti-racist" bullshit depends on a fallacious conception of what racism is. It is not mere "individual prejudice" or "intolerance" or whatever, as WBM would surely like to pretend that it is. Nor is anti-racism about getting a few token members of color in positions of power within the US ruling structure. That is ultimately an "anti-racism" of fools. Can anyone really believe that if Andy Stern or some other Capital-friendly trade union bureaucrat got a token position in the Obama Administration, that it would therefore be reasonable to say "Ahh, but this proves it: the entire labor movement is neoliberal!". Of course not. (Yet, incidentally, this is precisely WBM's way of making his case).

Racism isn't some surface-level problem of "prejudice". It is institutional and ideological. Racism, most of the time, has little to do with the intentions or prejudices of individuals. As the political philosopher Tommie Shelby puts it:

Rather than focus on the mental states of individuals without regard to
their sociohistorical 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 unacknowl-
edged 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.