Still More on Privilege

See previous posts on "privilege" here (the first instalment) and here (the second). 

Marxist Marginalia has prompted really excellent discussion (and debate) on the concept of privilege that is worth reading. It has helped me clarify a lot of my own thinking about these matters and the general analysis put forward by herrnaphta seems to me basically correct.

Stressing points of agreement at the onset--as herrnaphta does at the beginning of the post--is important because, as I tried to argue in a recent post, all too often debates about privilege track the wrong issues and leave the most important ones unaddressed. To be fair, there are plenty of defenders of colorblindness out there who respond caustically and abrasively to the language of privilege, so proponents of the privilege framework can hardly be blamed for taking a generally defensive position when criticisms are leveled at their perspective. And, of course, one finds these colorblind types on the left as well as the right, so a generally wide scope of suspicion here seems to me justified as well. We shouldn't assume that these points of agreement are shared by everyone in radical circles, especially since there are colorblind analyses circulating around on the left. Marxists should be forthcoming about where they stand and should do their best to stave off misunderstandings by actively, explicitly pushing against colorblind forces on the left.

Be that as it may, there are important political questions left over after we agree that colorblindness is a toxic (racist) ideology that papers over oppression and silences its critics. There are still important questions left over after we agree that people of color endure forms of oppression that white people do not. I think the discussion at Marxist Marginalia does a great job of fleshing these questions out.

If there's one important point that I'm willing to concede that the privilege-based approach seems to emphasize more often than many Marxists, it is the following point:

Part of building an effective movement against white supremacy involves white activists understanding their privilege, and taking it into account when building solidarity with people of color...How can white people stop acting out their privileges? Obviously there are important ways that this can be done: realizing that you, as a white activist, need to shut the fuck up once in a while and that not everyone always wants to hear what you have to say is a good start, and a lesson that every white person needs to learn in general.

This accords with Trotsky's argument that black workers "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 at all levels---formal and informal, explicit and implicit. This is why he argued for a "merciless struggle against... the colossal prejudices of white workers [which] makes no concession to them whatsoever". Trotsky's uncompromising anti-racist position seems to me exactly right.

We could, of course, generalize from this argument. For instance: Men in a society marked by gender oppression have to learn how to shut the fuck up once in a while as well. Why? Because gender oppression is multifaceted and, as is well known, operates through the socialization process by way of certain norms and expectations about how "ideal" women and men are to comport themselves, interact conversationally, dress, behave, and so on.

One toxic element of that process is this: men, from a young age, are expected to be more vocal, more self-confident in expressing their opinions, more likely to sound off without paying attention to how long they've been speaking, and so on. The corresponding social expectations for women here encourage deference, listening patiently to what men have to say, doubting that one has the right to speak authoritatively, feeling unjustified in being self-confident, and so on. Unless we resist these default aspects of gender socialization in an oppressive society such as ours, the result is that men tend to dominate discussions and women don't get the opportunity to speak their mind. The result is patronizing, sexist "men who explain things" or, if you like, "mansplainers". These aren't inevitable characteristics that all men and women share, but this what we're up against if we're fighting for the liberation of women in society today.

This is a familiar problem for any conscious teacher who has to lead class discussions. I regularly have a number of male students who, though they have nothing particularly brilliant to say, have a very low threshold for raising their hand and feel quite comfortable pontificating and sounding off for long periods of time. There is also a tendency for male students to be dismissive toward the contributions of female students. On the other hand, many times I'll have a number of  women students who are far less willing to speak in class, even when they have very good things to say.

Unsurprisingly, female students seem more likely to express self-doubt that they have something valuable to add, whereas male students are far more likely to have a devil-may-care arrogance about them in virtue of which they feel confident raising their hands and speaking over and over. These are not timeless features of human beings. These tendencies are produced by unequal social relations and oppressive norms specifying how gendered persons are to behave, comport themselves, interact socially, etc. What's more: these oppressive relations and norms are not free-floating, they are historically emergent and institutionalized and---most importantly---they are inscribed into the material structure of our society.

Liberation, of course, requires exploding these oppressive expectations and relationships---in all of their material richness---through collective struggle. No amount of inward-looking reflection or attitudinal change will fundamentally uproot these forms of oppression. Only collective action which sets itself the goal of transforming the basic structure of society can end oppression. As I put it in a recent post:

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 an essential role in reproducing and justifying it). Oppression refers to asymmetrical social relations among groups of persons involving power, domination, exploitation and so on. 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.

However, reflection on these micro-political instantiations of macro-level oppression is still important for a number of reasons. After all, we don't want to reproduce---intentionally or not---these attitudes, practices, norms, cultural forms, and expectations in radical movements aiming to overthrow oppression. As is well known, the New Left movements of the 60s had a lot of deep problems with gender oppression in their ranks. Women were often ridiculed, slandered, or cast aside when it came time to decide who would occupy leadership roles. That was in spite of the fact that many, though not all, of these same organizations---on paper---had progressive positions regarding women's liberation.

We have come a long way since then thanks in large measure to the struggles of the women's liberation movement of the late 60s and early 70s. So it isn't inevitable that sexist ideologies will infect our movements, but it is will remain a strong possibility as long as we're living in a sexist society. Thus we have to consciously, actively, explicitly work against it on all levels if we're to avoid reproducing and consolidating it. The same is true of racial oppression and, I would argue, class domination (e.g. see this recent post on the revolutionary party that addresses the question of radical consciousness and class pressures).

But these problems---problems of building radical movements dedicated to linking different struggles against oppression on the basis of socialist solidarity---are not problems that are taken seriously by all. Some doubt that such movements are either possible or desirable. Others turn away from political movements entirely and propose that we lose ourselves in the inner-workings of micro-level oppression. I attempted to criticize this inward-looking, individualist approach in my first post on privilege. I think Marxist Marginalia does a good job of criticizing it as well, and I generally agree with analysis there that:

...white privilege theory is a product of the defeat of the movements of the sixties and seventies, and that the emphasis on individual behavior we find there arose as an alternative to collective political action. In the wake of those defeats, it became far easier to imagine changing the behavior of individuals than organizing a collective movement around systemic change. Political pessimism wrote itself into political theory through a variety of ways – Roediger’s adaptation of social history to argue that racism came from below, for example, dovetailed politically with the theoretically very different arguments for a Foucauldian emphasis on the micro-politics of power. Not all of this, of course, was detrimental. Some of it filled in gaps left by more systemically-focused theories of racism. But what became hegemonic was an anti-politics – a turn away from collective action towards individual rehabilitation.

This seems to me right on the money. The privilege analysis gets a lot right, and maybe even brought to light micro-political elements less well addressed by system-level theorizing, but in many guises it simply expresses a pessimism about the possibility of challenging the system. But in times such as these, such pessimism wears its implausibility on its sleeve. We shouldn't be sanguine about the challenges of building a multi-racial radical movement under conditions of racial oppression. But neither should we be confident that such a goal is neither possible nor desirable. As Marxist activist Duncan Hallas once put the point, "isn't the working class... under the influence of racist, sexist, nationalist ideas [and so on]? All that is true... but it can be changed in struggle. It is a long, hard and complicated struggle. But it is also the only cause worth fighting for."

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Once More on Privilege

Perhaps some of you were brave enough to wade through my long-winded, meandering series of reflections on the concept of "privilege" that I posed a couple of weeks back. Readers interested in this topic may have noticed a couple of debates recently that touch on this topic. The topic has been on my mind a lot lately.

I'm thinking about doing something more extensive on privilege, something that actually engages more closely with the concepts most sophisticated defenders. The target of my recent critical post did not really have in mind people like Noel Ignatiev or contributors to Race Traitor. Instead, I had in mind the large set of radical (and radicalizing) people committed to anti-racist struggle who frequently make use of the concept.

Right now, however, I'm not interested in a thorough consideration of the concept of privilege. Instead, I simply want to point out a problem that seems to surface whenever debates around the concept emerge.

As I pointed out in my critique, there are plenty of people who buy into the ideology of colorblindness and, because of their endorsement of colorblindness, chafe against the language of privilege for all the wrong reasons. Though I take myself to be a critic of the concept of privilege, I share nothing politically or philosophically on these matters with colorblind critics, and I harbor special ire for those colorblind critics who profess to be representatives of the Marxist left.

Yet, all too often the defenders of the language of privilege respond to critics as if they were all defenders of colorblindness. That is counterproductive and distorts the discussion considerably. There is a lot of room for debate on pressing political questions--e.g. what kind of movement do we want to build? are multi-racial socialist organizations worth fighting for, is solidarity in the fight against oppression possible or desirable?--that take for granted that colorblindness is bullshit, that we don't live in a "post-racial" society, that racially oppressed people are, as such, subject to forms oppression that white people are not, etc. Fighting colorblindness is crucial, but among those who are already won to fighting it, many questions remain (such as those I mentioned above).

Take the following quotation from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Socialist Worker article "Race, Class and Marxism":

Oppression is not just an ideological tool to divide groups of workers, but has real material consequences as well. Because of racism, for example, the median household income for white families as of 2006 was over $50,000 a year. For Blacks, it was just under $32,000. By every measure of the quality of life in the U.S., whites are on the top and Blacks are on the bottom.

Marxists do not deny that these differences exist, nor do we deny that oppression means the lives of some workers are actually worse than others. For Marxists, the question is the cause of the differences. Are the disparities the result of white workers benefiting directly from the oppression of Black workers? That is, do white workers make more on average because Black workers make less?

To accept this explanation means to ignore the biggest beneficiary in the disparity in wages--employers and bosses. That employers are able to use racism to justify paying Black workers less brings the wages of all workers down--the employers enjoy the difference.

This is not to deny that white workers receive some advantages in U.S. society because they are white in a racist society. If they did not get some advantage--and with it, the illusion that the system works for them--then racism would not be effective in dividing Black and white workers.

This last bit is most important, because it is precisely this point that defenders of the language of privilege almost always charge Marxists with denying. The question isn't whether or not white workers enjoy certain advantages that black workers do not, given that we live in a racist society. White people of all classes are spared certain forms of racial oppression that non-white people endure. To say this is simply to restate the fact that we live in a racist society, a fact not contested by (genuine) Marxist critics.

The root of the debate is what framework best explains how this situation came about, how it is reproduced over time, and how we can change it. It seems to me that the language of privilege is substantially worse on all three counts when compared with a framework that focuses on oppressive social relations and the ways in which they are structured by the social system writ large.

Lots of white workers are racist. That is a sociological fact. White workers, insofar as they're white, are not racially oppressed. That is also a sociological fact. Because non-white people endure racial oppression in a racist society, they live with specific burdens that white people do not have to live with (e.g. consider the tribulations of raising black children (see here and here) in a racist society). Again, another fact.

But neither (genuine) Marxists nor those committed to the language of privilege deny these claims. So acknowledging these facts does not decisively speak in favor of the privilege framework as against other competing theories of oppression such as that advanced by contemporary Marxists. More, as we will see below, needs to be said in order to defend the privilege framework. My guess is that its dominance and wide currency during the 1990s has lent it kind of default credibility among many of today's radicals. But, like any worthwhile political framework, it should have to earn this credibility by showing that it is better than other competing approaches.

It seems to me that the basic questions here are as follows. By what social process do racist white workers come to hold racist beliefs? How is racist ideology--by ideology we mean "false consciousness"--produced and reproduced over time? What social function does it play? And, finally: Does the fact that certain groups are subjected to special forms of oppression under capitalism mean that workers of different groups cannot unite and fight for liberation from class exploitation and all forms of oppression?

I won't argue for these claims here, but the (genuine) Marxist response here would, first of all, be to locate the origins of racist ideology in a historical process of development that grows out of the need to legitimate slavery, colonialism, imperialism, genocide, primitive accumulation and so on. The continuous reproduction of racist ideology would be explained by its entanglement in a dialectic of ongoing social processes rooted in material conditions. The function it plays, of course, would be various and shifting, but basically geared toward maintaining oppressive social relations and staving off the possibility of a multi-racial challenge from below. And, as for multi-racial struggle, Marxists would say that it is both possible and necessary for us to fight for. Multi-racial struggle and solidarity is not historically unprecedented, but it is, to be sure, quite difficult to achieve under racist conditions. It can only be built upon an uncompromising commitment to completely uproot all forms of oppression. A colorblind multi-racial radical movement, on the other hand, is neither desirable nor possible. It would be a contradiction in terms and would serve to perpetuate racial oppression rather than challenge it. Genuine solidarity means taking seriously the principle that an injury to one worker is an injury to all.

These answers seem to be correct. But they are controversial and worth debating out within the growing radical movement in the US. Better to debate these questions than to cast aside all critiques of the language of privilege on the grounds that they are motivated by colorblind ideology.

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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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Roundup: "Kony 2012" and "Humanitarian" Imperialism

I don't really have anything new to add to the (growing) camp of left-wing criticisms of the completely ridiculous, politically insidious "Kony 2012" campaign. The people behind it are total douche-bags. The campaign itself uses moralism to cloak its imperialist "humanitarian intervention" politics. Here are a handful of pieces that I've found especially helpful on this question (feel free to suggest more in the comments):

Richard Seymour, whose excellent book The Liberal Defense of Murder is well worth reading to get a deeper understanding of "humanitarian intervention", has an excellent blog post here and a great article in ABC Australia here.

A comrade over at Needs Moar Class War has a detailed piece here that is well worth reading as well.

SW.org printed an article that nicely skewers the racist, colonial attitudes implicit in the "Kony 2012" campaign.

American Leftist has some thoughtful remarks and a link to a few interesting videos by Ugandans here.

Mahmood Mamdani, who's usually quite good on African politics (esp. on Sudan and Zimbabwe), has a short piece here on the controversy.

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Red Chicago: Multi-Racial Political Organization in the 1930s

I read Randi Storch's excellent book Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots 1928-35 (see here for a review) a couple of months back and have been meaning to post on it ever since. There's a lot to say about this rich, well-researched and engaging social history of the Communist Party (CP) in Chicago during the "Third Period". But I only want to focus here on one particular theme running through the history here: the viability of multi-racial Left political organizations in a fundamentally racist society.

There is a lot that radicals can learn from the successes and failures of the CP in Chicago in the 1930s. By way of summarizing some of Storch's findings, I hope to try to shed some light on the challenges and prospects for building a fighting, multi-racial Left organization dedicated to fully uprooting racial oppression.

***

Before I say anything about Storch's book, it's worth reviewing what seems to have become the "standard view" about racism, working class politics and the possibility of multi-racial solidarity in the fight against oppression. The received wisdom is that the white working class has always been the most forceful defender of racial oppression throughout American history (whereas, allegedly, middle and ruling-class whites have been more "tolerant" and open to criticizing racism). According to this story, white workers have, without exception, been gripped by anti-Black racism throughout American history. Working-class racism has, in other words, been an unchanging feature of U.S. political life.

It follows, then, that Black/white unity is highly unlikely at best, or downright reactionary at worst. Highly unlikely because of the aforementioned historical narrative about unrelenting racism on the part of white workers. Reactionary because black/white solidarity under such conditions could only mean forcing black workers to compromise with the racism of white workers. But this would be tantamount to tolerating a fundamental injustice while, at the same time, diluting the forces of those committed to anti-racism and black liberation.

Now, the standard view rightly acknowledges that genuine multi-racial solidarity is indeed incompatible with white racism. And, it is of course quite true that there is a long history of racism in the working class movement, and even in the socialist movement in the US. The conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) was explicitly racist and excluded black and other non-white workers from its ranks. The Utopian Socialists like Owen and Forrier were racists, and the right-wing forces in the Second International supported colonialism. In the US, the early socialist movement varied from being, on the one hand, class reductionist/colorblind to explicitly racist on the other.

Daniel De Leon's Socialist Labor Party (SLP), for example, stood up against racism and fought for equality, but, at the same time, believed that racism was nothing more than a class question. As Ahmed Shawki describes it, De Leon argued that "Black workers were like white workers, and their problems were those of all workers. Racial oppression was simply a manifestation of class oppression. Therefore ...agitation around non-economic questions--segregation, lynching, or race riots--could only distract from the real struggle." The right-wing of the Socialist Party (SP), unlike the class-reductionism of the SLP, was explicitly racist. For example, Victor Berger, the first SP candidate elected to office in the US in 1902, openly scapegoated immigrants and described non-white people as "inherently inferior".

So that history of racism within the working-class movement is certainly there. But if this racism disfigures much of the history of the movement in the US, it could hardly be described as a monotone, static property of white working-class consciousness. Even the social/political status of being designated as "white" is dynamic and changing--indeed some previously "non-white" groups (e.g. Jews, Italians, Greeks, Irish) actually became white as social/economic/political configurations shifted.

In truth, the history of the working class in the US is far more complex than the standard view acknowledges. Despite the racism described above, there is also a long tradition of multi-racial struggle among black and white workers in the United States where anti-racist and class struggles overlapped and complimented each other. Contrary to the standard view, history itself refutes the cynical hypothesis that white/black unity on the basis of anti-racist, class struggle from below is impossible. Thus, the overall history of working class whites in the US would be better described as shifting, fractured, mixed and internally conflicted on questions of racism. Storch's book is useful in large part because it excavates an important piece of this largely hidden and little-discussed history of black and white workers uniting to fight for a shared project of ending oppression and exploitation.

***

"On a January evening in 1934, approximately six thousand Chicagoans gathered in the city's large Coliseum Hall to celebrate and remember Lenin... The audience included a contingent of five hundred children in addition to the thousands of grown women and men, half of whom were African American and the other half of whom were a mixture of native-born whites and first- or second-generation immigrants from various ethnic communities. They represented a number of occupations, including skilled and unskilled industrial workers, artists, intellectuals, and students."

This is a convenient introduction to the history that Storch's book uncovers. In the 1930s the Chicago district of the CP was--despite all of its problems and contradictions--a vibrant, multi-racial organization with thousands of members (and a much larger periphery) that actively fought against racism, fomented mass organizations dedicated to stopping evictions, and put together a movement of Unemployed Councils that collected popular discontent and channeled it into a large-scale fight-back.

In the early 1930's, black people made up 7% of Chicago's population, but constituted roughly 25% of the more than 3,300 Chicagoan members of the CP. In a city as thoroughly saturated with anti-Black racism as Chicago, this is a striking statistic.

Harry Haywood

Black militants in the CP joined for a variety of reasons. When Harry Haywood joined the CP in the late 20s, he did so on the basis of his judgment that:

"it comprised the best and most sincerely revolutionary and internationally minded elements among white radicals and therefore formed the basis for the revolutionary unity of Blacks and whites...it was part of a world revolutionary movement uniting Chinese, Africans and Latin Americans with Europeans and North Americans through the Third International."

Haywood's remarks suggest that he was (in part) drawn to the CP because it was part of a global anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movement fighting to throw off the exploitation and oppression faced by (especially non-European) peoples across the globe. This fact, combined with an ambitious program to fight racism in the US at a time when anti-racist struggle was generally low, no doubt contributed in large part to the CP's successes in the 1930s as a multi-racial radical organization.

***

In the 20s and 30s, there was a vibrant political scene in the black community in Chicago. There were, for example, annual rallies and marches celebrating the Nat Turner rebellion as well as a radicalized layer of activists in or around Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). There were also a host of politically active community institutions such as the NAACP, the Urban League, churches, and the Chicago Defender.

In the early 30s, there were frequently open-air political debates in Washington Park between Garveyites and Communists. "By 1932, Communists were speaking daily at the park to crowds that sometimes reached between two and five thousand." UNIA was a mass movement with millions of members in the early 20s, but by the late 20s (following Garvey's deportation and a slew of scandals) the organization was in sharp decline. Still, Garvey's movement had a lasting effect on political consciousness in the black community that manifested itself in the open-air soapboxing and debates in Washington Park. These vibrant public political discussions drew in a layer of radical (and radicalizing) black Chicagoans, among them, David Pointdexter.

Poindexter had moved to Chicago from Nashville, TN where he had witnessed lynchings first-hand. As Storch describes it,

"Pointdexter first gravitated toward the Garveyites, but, listening to the debates in Washington Park, he eventually found Communists more convincing. William Patterson, an African American party leader, later recalled that the party's belief that blacks and whites needed to work together ultimately caused Pointdexter to leave the Garveyite movement."

Pointdexter developed a reputation as a fiery orator, "when he got through preachin' everybody'd be ready to go into the lake with him. That's how much power he had over people." Claude Lightfoot was another black militant drawn into CP at this time. 

Lightfoot cut his teeth as an activist within the Democratic Party in Chicago, but eventually he found his way to the CP, partly,

"for idealistic reasons, to help the poor, the downtrodden and oppressed people all over the world." But if these reasons were important motivations for his decision to join, he also admitted that he joined "after having gotten up on the soap box... cursing out the police and then marching away triumphantly with the workers."

Unlike the racist Democratic Party in Chicago, the CP's candidates for a variety of city, state and federal offices included a large number of black members. One candidate for state representative, Dora Huckleberry, was described in a pamphlet as a "militant Negro woman. Arrested many times for her participation in struggles against discrimination and unemployment. A fighter for Negro rights." 

Candidates with this political profile were an important part of the CP in the 30s, even though contemporary liberal "wisdom" would have us believe that the Democratic Party has, for most of the 20th century, been the leading political force in the US for anti-racism. It's fair to say that the CP did more anti-racist organizing in the 30s alone than the Democratic Party has done in all of its existence.

Leadership roles with the Chicago district were not confined to white cadre. Key leadership positions were occupied by black members who took an active role in shaping the organization's approach to black politics in the city. The flood of black members into the organization in the early 30s permeated the group from top to bottom.

Even conservative newspapers, such as The Whip, acknowledged the inroads the CP had made in the black community in Chicago:

"The Communists have framed a program of social remedies which cannot fail to appeal to the hungering, jobless millions, who live in barren want, while everywhere about them is evidence of restricted plenty in the greedy hands of the few."

As Storch sees it, these sympathetic attitudes toward the CP

"...made their way to the grassroots... it was not unusual, when parents feared an eviction, for them to tell their children to "run quick and find the Reds!"... James Yates, an African American members of the Unemployed Councils on the South Side, expressed the party's significance to him: "I was a part of their hopes, their dreams, and they were a part of mine. And we were a part of an even larger world of marching poor people. By now I understand that the Depression was worldwide and that the unemployed and poor were demonstrating and agitating for jobs and food all over the globe. We were millions. We couldn't lose."

***

The CP's emphasis on interracial political organization also

"brought blacks and whites together... often for the first time. Lowell Washington, an African American member of the Unemployed Councils, remembered, "I never really ever talked to a white man before, and I certainly hadn't said more than two words to a white lady, and here I was being treated with respect and speaking my mind and not having to worry about saying something that might rile 'em up...Let me tell you it changed the way I thought about things."

That this was exceptional speaks to the deep-seated racism--indeed, apartheid conditions--in Chicago in the 1930s. Nonetheless, despite all of its flaws, it is incredible that the CP was able to carve out a space--however small and tenuous--for social interactions approaching equality and solidarity among white and black radicals.

Unsurprisingly, these "frequent, unprecedented displays of interracial solidarity on Chicago's streets sparked the city's administration into action." As has often been the case throughout American history, city officials and business elites were deeply troubled by the emergence of a multi-racial political movement capable of upsetting the balance of power in the city by mobilizing groups of workers often pitted against one another.

In 1932, the City of Chicago, backed by police violence, ordered an end to the growing anti-eviction actions organized by the CP to keep working people in their homes in the midst of the Great Depression. At one point, police stormed a large crowd of anti-eviction organizers and murdered several activists, among them Abe Grey, "one of the best Negro organizers in the Party". Several days later, one of Grey's friends was found murdered, his body mutilated. CP members were virtually certain that this was the work of the Chicago Police. The CP organized mass marches and speak-outs to protest this spate of police brutality, drawing together white and black activists by the thousands into the struggle.

The fact that the CP was able to pull this off in Chicago in the 30s---where black people were regularly met with terrorism, bombings, and brutal violence when they merely attempted to move out of "designated" areas of the city---demonstrates at least two things. First, it shows that dogged, consistent organizing work on the basis of anti-racist, socialist politics has the potential to forge political formations that can tear asunder existing racist ideologies. Second, it shows that a multi-racial front--built on solidarity and genuine equality--against racist and capitalist domination is both possible and worth fighting for.

The politics of multi-racial radical political organization is complex and liable to run aground in a number of different ways. The biggest danger is that an abstract, colorblind goal of "unity" encourages accommodation with the racist order by designating certain issues "divisive" or "distractions" from the "main goals". "Unity" of this sort is nothing but a compromise with oppression. It is not an emancipatory goal. But genuine solidarity---which requires, as a precondition, that white workers reject racial oppression and enlist themselves in the fight against it---is both inspiring as an ideal in its own right, and necessary if the working class as a whole is to emancipate itself. For all its faults and mistakes---organizational, political and personal---radicals today can learn a lot from the CP's anti-racist work in Chicago in the early 1930s.

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Socialist Politics and the City

(This is a slightly edited version of a post from September 2011).

A while back, I got into a lively debate with some comrades about the role of the city in socialist politics. The debate seemed to dwell on the question of whether the city or the urban form (it's worth noting that those very concepts were contested in the discussion) coheres with (or makes possible) the socialist ideal of a collectively self-governing society free of exploitation and oppression. I won't try to summarize the objections or positions of those with whom I disagreed, since I wouldn't be able to do them justice. But I would like to reflect a bit more about the position I found myself defending in that discussion.

Let me begin by confessing that much of my thinking about these matters is strongly influenced by an article Mike Davis wrote a couple years back for New Left Review. Here's an excerpt that is particularly emblematic of the view he puts forward in that essay:

There are innumerable examples and they all point toward a single unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any particular green design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth. As we all know, several additional Earths would be required to allow all of humanity to live in a suburban house with two cars and a lawn, and this obvious constraint is sometimes evoked to justify the impossibility of reconciling finite resources with rising standards of living. Most contemporary cities, in rich countries or poor, repress the potential environmental efficiencies inherent in human-settlement density. The ecological genius of the city remains a vast, largely hidden power. But there is no planetary shortage of ‘carrying capacity’ if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality. Public affluence—represented by great urban parks, free museums, libraries and infinite possibilities for human interaction—represents an alternative route to a rich standard of life based on Earth-friendly sociality. Although seldom noticed by academic urban theorists, university campuses are often little quasi-socialist paradises around rich public spaces for learning, research, performance and human reproduction.

The brilliance of Davis's argument is that he weaves together the ecological genius of urban living with the social and political importance of the city. Taking ecological concerns seriously, he argues, requires anti-capitalism. But sustainability also requires urban forms. And, independently of ecological concerns, Davis gives us reasons to think that the socialist ideal has always had a close affinity with the forms of social organization made possible by dense urban communities. All three political concerns -anti-capitalist, ecological and urban- hang together in a kind of equilibrium, each drawing support from the other. I find this to be a a highly plausible and attractive picture.

Before I say more about why I endorse this picture, let me say a little bit about what's essential to the idea of the city. Like any familiar concept, the idea of city carries with it innumerable associations and meanings, not all of which I intend to endorse. As I've noted elsewhere, the idea of "the urban" (or worse, "the inner city") is often a racialized euphemism in the United States. I've written elsewhere about the phenomenon of suburban white "fear of the city", which goes hand in hand with the racist image of black people (especially young black men) as dangerous, pathological, angry, and so on. This racist ideology, when combined with individualistic/consumerist ideologies nourished by the suburban form, yields an especially potent anti-city form of consciousness. Of course, as waves of gentrification flood into cities, expelling working class residents, most of them people of color, this generalized "fear of the city" has begun to wane among middle and ruling class whites. Still, it's fair to say that there is still plenty of animus against the urban form out there. In defending the city as an ideal, I'd like to sidestep these ideological encumbrances.

By "city", I mean nothing more than a densely populated community in which functional uses are integrated (rather than separated), that is walkable and bikable, where large numbers of people with very different backgrounds live together and share basic social institutions (e.g. libraries, parks, museums, schools, etc.). I mean an active, lively built environment that makes use of efficiencies created by density, mixed-use, and diversity. I mean a space that laid out on a human scale, not a automotive scale. Though every city fails to fully embody this ideal, big cities come the closest to approximating it. I'll elaborate more on this ideal in a moment.

Still, attractive though this ideal may be, cities continue to get a bad rap. Cities, it is often said, are dirty, cramped, polluted, dangerous, and concrete-heavy. They embody the worst of capitalist industrialization. According to this common view, if cities are gray and asphalt, suburbs and towns are green and leafy. Suburban living, the story goes, is comfortable, safe, harmonious and, most importantly for "green" politics, loaded with expansive lawns and large trees. Low density residential configurations make for a less concrete-heavy landscape, and strict separation of uses entails that residential spaces are far from industrial spaces. It follows, then, that cities, with all their iniquity, pollution and concrete, are the antithesis of sustainable living. Sustainability requires a suburban home with a Prius parked out front, a new-fangled energy efficient refrigerator full of organic produce, etc.

Though these ideas have wide currency, on reflection they have little plausibility.

As the Davis quote makes clear, we would need several additional earths for everyone on the planet to have the massive single-family McMansion with a big irrigated lawn, a couple of cars, etc. It therefore goes without saying that the McMansion lifestyle cannot be egalitarian or, for that matter, socialist in spirit since it is only possible on the assumption that the vast majority of humanity doesn't enjoy it. Now, McMansion enthusiasts might complain that I'm for levelling everyone down to shared poverty. But I'm not; I'm for privileging public wealth over private consumption. I'd rather enjoy the beauty and grandness of world-class public buildings than lock myself up in a McMansion.

Still, we know that McMansions aren't the root of the problem. The problem is one of a basic model of social/economic development that became dominant in in the postwar era. I'm talking about the low-density, use-segregated, car-heavy model of development characteristic of Postwar suburban sprawl, which has been nothing less than an unmitigated environmental (and social) disaster. It is well-known that this model was pushed by ruling classes after WWII to facilitate economic growth (think of, for instance, the impact of the suburban form on the sales of new construction homes, cars, appliances, etc.). The construction of the interstate highway system, in conjunction with huge subsidies for mortgages in low-density suburban areas, made this model hegemonic for a generation. Its dominance continues, though it is becoming increasingly contested and mired by its own contradictions.

Many readers of this blog will already know that I have no love for cars, so I'll set the issue of cars aside for the moment the problem of the environmental costs associated car-exclusive built environments. (See here for some of my own views, and see here and here for more recent socialist critiques). This leaves many other problems to be dealt with, e.g. extremely high per capita uses of energy (think of the energy spent heating a McMansion in the winter). Even the surface-level aesthetic credentials of the ideal "green" suburb are dubious. Most suburbs are monotonous nightmares where indigenous plant life is uprooted, old trees cut down to make space for useless lawns, tacky landscaping, multi-lane highways and, of course, massive parking lots. Many of the suburbs surrounding Chicago (especially the newer ones) tend to have far fewer trees than the typical street in the city. Moreover, the low density of suburbs combined with their extreme un-walkability (and un-bikability) means that you can only enjoy what green-space there is from the windows of an automobile. And let's not forget the massive, four-lane highways connecting sprawling residential subdivisions with other single-use spheres of activity. To say that these are an eyesore is an understatement.

But the problems of the suburban form aren't simply aesthetic or ecological. The social, political and economic problems are profound as well. I'll keep this point brief. The suburban form, as such, privileges individual consumption over public goods, it alienates individuals from one another, it nourishes individualist/consumerist ideologies by leaving little space for non-commercial social interactions among people. Moreover, suburbs are usually planned piecemeal in a top-down manner by developers in conjunction with national (and multi-national) corporations, they are often racially exclusive, and lots of them are little more than quasi-feudal gated "communities" meant to keep out those who aren't rich. It has also been noted (by Davis, among others) that the low-density spatial configuration of suburbs makes organization and collective action less likely to transpire (compared with a dense, urban working-class neighborhood where residents would be far more likely to unite and fight).

So much for suburbia. But what's the alternative?

The only viable alternative, I'd like to suggest, is the city. But not everyone on the Left agrees with that claim. Anarcho-primitivists, for example, argue that the city isn't the only alternative to suburbia. In fact, according to their view, city-dwellers should reject cities for similar reasons and return to pre-capitalist forms of social organization that predate the industrial revolution.

I could spend several posts saying why this view is wrong, so I'll have to be unfairly brief here. First of all, as a Marxist, I am not unequivocally negative about Modernity. I am ambivalent: modernity has brought with it all kinds of progressive possibilities for developing human potential, but it has also brought vastly increased environmental destruction and new forms of exploitation and oppression.

In classical Marxism, the ambivalence toward modernity (which, under any plausible interpretation of modern, has to be loosely identified with capitalism) expresses itself as follows. On the one hand, capitalism has developed the forces of production (e.g. technologies, productive instruments, productive techniques, technically useful knowledge) to an extremely high degree. But the highly developed productive forces and technology in capitalist society are not put in the service of human liberation. Though we can do so today in ways that would have been unthinkable in the Bronze Age, capitalism doesn't use the productive forces to eradicate all forms of poverty, suffering, and starvation. Technological innovation is not put in the service of developing human potential or creating green/sustainable living. Rather it is put in the service of generating ever growing profits. As far as the default mode of the system is concerned, it's all about the bottom line, all the time, and in the long run that the bottom line requires endless compound economic growth. It's not hard to see that this spells destruction for the natural environment.

But that destruction isn't the result of technology, industry, and cities as such (as primitivists would have it). Environmental degradation is the result of the social/political system of capitalism, i.e. an apparatus which generates and uses technology for purposes other than human need and ecological considerations. So the culprit is our political system, not technology or the urban form itself. A sustainable, green socialist society need not dispense with all technologies developed after the emergence of capitalism. That would be absurd. After the revolution, I'd still like to have modern plumbing thank you very much. And aside from improving human lives in innumerable other ways, many technologies enable efficiencies that reduce per capita energy consumption and waste.

And let us not even begin to list the incredible forms of knowledge, association, culture, and so forth that have been enabled by modern technological developments. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should radically change the uses that capitalism puts technology to. And we should radically change the way that technological innovation proceeds under capitalism, and put in the service of worthier goals. And, to be sure, many technologies currently in vogue in capitalist societies will need to be abandoned, chief among them the personal automobile as a primary means for each individual to get around. So much for primitivism.

So if I'm right, that leaves us with the city as an ideal form of socialist community. I've set this up as a negative, indirect argument for the city using the process of elimination. But I don't think that's the main thing the city has going for it.

Aside from the environmental gains to be made from consolidating space, eliminating waste, and creating efficiencies from the shared use of public institutions and utilities, there are social and political benefits that attach to city life as well. As Davis points out, the possibilities for spontaneous social interaction and the propensity to feel a sense of shared fate make the urban form an excellent accompaniment to the socialist ideal of a free community of equals, or an association of free producers. Furthermore, if socialist politics privilege the common good and public wealth over private gain and individual greed, then cities are an excellent physical embodiment of the socialist ideal. Rather than hiding our interdependence on one another, cities lay it bare in a way that other forms of structuring communities do not.

The close affinity between collective self-governance from below and the dense, urban form should not be overlooked either. To some extent, the Occupy movement has certainly born this out. If we want to affirm the fact that we are a community of equals who cooperate together for mutual gain, urban forms are the way to go. There is an implicit disavowal of community and interdependence in low-density suburban forms. The built environment in suburban forms creates an illusion of individual self-sufficiency that encourages toxic political forms of consciousness. At their best, however, cities make it hard to ignore our interdependence. There's something intrinsically valuable, I think, about being aware of the ways that we're profoundly connected and inter-dependent.

Cities also unleash human potential and creativity in ways that no other social form can. The sheer density of interesting and creative people living in close proximity to one another creates the possibility for endless combinations of different approaches, lifestyles, artistic endeavors, and projects. If socialism is about making human development, rather than profit, the priority of social production, I can think of no better means than the best aspects of dense urban spaces.

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Clint Eastwood and "Halftime in America"

If you watched the Super Bowl last night, you couldn't have missed the nationalistic theme running through all of the commercials for the "Big Three" US car manufacturers: Ford, GM and Chrysler. A particularly striking example of this was Chrylser's halftime advertisement which consisted of little more than a two-minute monologue by Clint Eastwood. View it here. A Chicago Tribune article described the halftime ad as follows:

Is what is good for Chrysler good for America?

The auto maker courted controversy and won kudos for a two-minute Super Bowl advertisement that was less a car sales pitch than a political message in a presidential election year.

Rugged Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood proclaimed it was "Halftime in America" in the spot that did not mention a Chrysler car or truck but intoned that the automaker's successful turnaround could be used as an example for the United States as it struggles with high unemployment and a slow economic growth rate.

"Detroit's showing us it can be done," Eastwood said.

Traffic on Twitter showed overwhelmingly positive comments for the advertisement. The "Dirty Harry" star and Academy Award-winning director spoke to Americans as if he were a football coach making a halftime speech encouraging his team to work together to win in the second half.

"This country can't be knocked out with one punch," Eastwood said in the ad. "We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it's halftime America. And, our second half is about to begin."

The beginning of the ad says little specifically about cars but describes the sense in which it is "halftime in America", adding that "people are out of work and they're hurting. And they're all wondering what they're going to do to make a comeback." Later, Eastwood adds that "the people of Detroit know a little something about [hardship]...they almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again." Eastwood also toes the post-political bipartisanship-consensus line, adding a few remarks impugning "the fog of division, discord and blame" which prevent us from "coming together as one".

What should we make of this? Various hysterical right-wingers are upset by the advertisement (e.g. evidently Karl Rove is "offended") since it appears to give cover to the Obama administration's bailout of the auto manufacturers in 2009 (which, of course, the Republicans would have carried out just the same had they been in power). Although some Obama apologists—as well as car industry higher-ups—will counter this charge by dismissing the idea that the advertisement is political at all, the right-wingers actually have a point here. The ad is deeply political. And it is also—despite numerous claims to the contrary—still very much a car advertisement. The politics go hand-in-hand with the hard argument to buy what Chrysler is selling.

The right-wingers are wrong, of course, to object to the content of the politics of the ad since they are basically right-wing politics (more on that below). If the Right thought twice about it, they'd realize that the message is in fundamental harmony with their outlook (even if it it appears to lend support to the "wrong faction" of the ruling class). But the claim that the ad has political significance is quite right. In fact, the ad is simply unintelligible unless it is set against the backdrop of political ideas of such as the Nation, of being "American", or the "National interest" and so on. If you weren't already familiar with these political concepts you would not have understood what was going on in the ad at all.

On the surface, the ad strikes a populist note. It begins by noting that lots of ordinary people are hurting, that the economy is bad, that jobs are scarce. All of that is, of course, quite true. But rather than connect the source of the economic misery of the 99% to the actions of the 1% (and the policies of their servants in Government), the advertisement takes a stridently nationalistic approach to these problems. Suddenly the 1% is no longer the culprit and its time for us to link arms with our wealthy rulers and unite for a "better America".

The basic premise underlying this nationalistic message is that all living in the US—the very richest and the very poorest—have the same basic interests. The idea is that everyone does well when the 1% does well, so we all have an interest in learning to love and trust the 1%. The only obstacle to success becomes, as Eastwood puts it, "division, discord and blame". The message is clear: stop complaining that the 1% dominates the political and economic system, stop creating discord and division by fighting against racism. Embrace your corporate overlords and unite under the banner of "the Nation" and then "we" can rise up together and "win the game in the second half."

According to Eastwood, America's "second half" is just beginning. It's time for "The Nation" to bounce back and start scoring some goddamn touchdowns. This sports metaphor transforms all US residents to equal teammates, all engaged in a common project, all agreeing that we want to "win" (as if it's clear what that means).

But there's more to the sports metaphor: we are also encouraged to think that the interests of the 99% coincide with the interests of the ownership of the Big Three. As the Chicago Tribune article points out, the idea is that "what is good for Chrysler is good for America". Of course, it's no secret that from the perspective of the US auto industry, the "team" has not been doing well for the last 30 years. "We've" been knocked down and "beaten by competing teams". The obvious solution, then, jumps out at us: "our team" needs to get back up, unite, and pull off a come-from-behind win. "We" have to set aside our "petty differences" and stop "blaming" other "teammates" with all these complaints about the dominance of the 1%. "We" have to stop "pitting Americans against other Americans". "We" have to come together and "win the future" before the Chinese beat "us". This is a line toed by the Democrats every bit as much as the Republicans.

Of course, this whole nationalist message is rotten to the core. It rests on a fundamental fantasy: the myth of the "Nation", an imagined community of people who all more or less have the same basic interests, who all live in a closed society designed to enable everyone in that society to flourish equally. The only real threats to the "National Interest" are in-fighting and "attacks" from without. Thus a "strong" Nation pushes other nations around and demands unity at home.

Watch the ad and you'll notice that Eastwood, on behalf of the Chrysler Corporation, talks a lot about "us" and "we". But who does this "we" refer to? And who the hell authorized him, or Chrysler for that matter, to speak on behalf of everyone? Evidently the "we" refers to everyone who is properly considered "American" (we can leave aside for the moment the question of who decides who's "American" and who's not).

This idea of the "National interest" is part and parcel of this message of "let's all band together as Americans—regardless of class position—and pull together." The trouble, however, is that the idea of a "National interest" is a myth. The concept assumes that everyone who is properly called an "American", regardless of class divisions, shares some core set of interests so that what's good for the 1% is good for the 99%. It'd be nice it were true, but it's "radically false" as Noam Chomsky puts it:

The whole framework of discussion is misleading. We’re sort of taught to talk about the world as a world of states, which, if you study international relations theory, there’s what’s called “realist international relations theory,” which says there is an anarchic world of states, and states pursue their national interest. It’s all mythology. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. There are a few common interests, like we don’t want to be destroyed. But for the most part they have very different interests. Part of the doctrinal system in the U.S. is to pretend that we’re all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that’s radically false.

The Chrysler ad pushes this radically false claim to its breaking point. It conflates the interests of the ownership of Chrysler with the interests of ordinary working people. It also pits those considered "American" against "foreign competitors" rather than against our own 1% right here at home. The effect is to make it appear as though those in power are benevolent parental figures—like NFL coaches—who just need our cooperation so that we can pull together and just fucking win goddammit.

Of course it's not hard to spin xenophobic, racist (esp. sinophobic and islamophobic) and anti-immigrant conclusions from this outlook. Moreover, the close identification of the interests of "the Nation" and the interests of Big Business, combined with this xenophobic element, is reminiscent of Fascism. This isn't to say that the Chrysler ad is fascist; it is not. It is an opportunistic employment of the language of the "Nation" to put a positive spin on the interests of the owners of the Auto Industry. But it is no exaggeration to say the basic drift of this nationalistic political approach, if taken seriously, points us in the direction of fascist politics.

The most insidious part of this nationalist argument is that gathers surface-level plausibility from its sober acknowledgement of the economic suffering of the 99%. It's not false that the people of Detroit have been hit extremely hard by the decline of the auto industry. But this decline isn't the result of anything the 99% did or didn't do. The decline, disinvestment, layoffs, and economic misery that has plagued the Rustbelt is 100% due to the choices of the 1%—at home and abroad.

The bottom line is this: the Chrysler ad turns our ire away from the 1% and, cloaked in the flag, advises us to love and trust our oppressors.

The fact that the Big Three are exploiting the economic misery of the Rustbelt in a multi-million dollar ad designed to strengthen their political and economic clout is more than just a little twisted. After all, the ultra-rich investors of the 1% who own the auto industry are the ones to blame for all of the Rustbelt's economic misery in the first place. They are the ones who decided to downsize, close plants, and disinvest—all in an effort to keep profits high so that they could continue to line their pockets. And let's not forget that even amidst declining profits, the owners of the Big Three have been doing quite well—at the same time that the living standards of everyone living in the Rustbelt have sharply plummeted. Even during their worst quarters as business owners, the owners still live in fabulous wealth, 100% insulated from the decline and economic misery forced upon millions of working people. They don't deal with the reality of hospital bills, unemployment, school closings, soaring crime rates, foreclosures and lots retirement. Even when things look "bad" for the industry, they live lives of plenty. It is sickening to think that these assholes can get away with selling themselves as humanitarians in the struggle to help "America win in the second half". They are the cause of the misery they say they want to help mitigate.

Of course, the reasons for the decline of US auto manufacturing are complex, but it is no exaggeration to say that the decline has everything to do with ruling class missteps and anxieties about profitability, and nothing whatsoever to do with ordinary working people. But, predictably, the industry's owners have an interest in externalizing all culpability and blaming everything on "high labor costs" forced on owners by the UAW. Never mind that auto workers everywhere else in the world are better paid and enjoy stronger unions than in the US (we can also set aside the fact that the Chrysler ad evidently edited out Wisconsin pro-union signs from one of the clips in the montage). It's nuts to think that the Big Three would do anything except try to manage public relations to their benefit by hammering away at was once one of the strongest unions in the US.

The "high labor costs" argument is repeated over and over by industry ideologues in the Wikipedia article on the auto industry. The narrative coming from the self-serving owners of the auto companies is simple: If only those pesky workers had just given in to the owners' violent campaign against unionization back in 1937, then the Big Three would be sitting on top of the world right now!

But, of course, the answer to our economic woes, to mass unemployment, to the sharp decline of once prosperous industrial centers, isn't to put our faith in the 1% and the imaginary community of "the Nation". The answer is for ordinary working people to take direct control of our massive industrial capacity and put it to use meeting human needs and developing human being's capacities and talents.

For example, it is far from obvious that the US auto industry needs to be producing more cars right now. Set aside the fact that effective demand does not exist right now for an expansion of car sales. What's more, environmentally speaking it simply makes no sense to continue to manufacture tons of cars (most of which aren't even designed to last more than 4-5 years) in a world where global temperatures are rising and oil reserves are shrinking. Building millions of personal automobiles a year is wasteful, inefficient, and unsustainable. The workforce in Detroit would be far better employed building buses, train cars, wind turbines and other green technologies that the country desperately needs. Every single city in the United States has a substandard and inadequate fleet of public transportation vehicles. Equipping every city with a vastly enlarged fleet of modern, state of the art hybrid buses manufactured in Detroit would be a huge step forward for everyone. This would put surplus labor and surplus industrial capacity together to meet human needs in a sustainable way. It seems like a no-brainer although, to be sure, it is hardly a feasible short-term goal.

Of course, the owners will retort: but none of this is profitable. All of the research and long-term planning brushes against the grain of our stock-holder's demand for short-run profits. These measures would also require big capital investments up front, which could cut into short-run profit. What's more, these projects would require a larger paid workforce, but employing more people increases labor costs and reduces profit. Moreover, if we build buses and vehicles that are made to last, this will reduce yearly sales and cut into profits as well. The owners therefore have every incentive to resist doing this.

My response to the owner's complaints are simple: I don't care what they think, because we really have no use for them. They do nothing except skim off the top for themselves and keep willing workers from using existing capacity to meet human need.

It's true that profit-seeking owners have no interest in combining excess industrial capacity and excess labor to meet human needs. But that's not an argument against my proposal. That's an argument against private ownership of the auto industry. Cut out the owners 100% and let those on the shop floor hire new co-workers to work on this project with them. All of the worries about profitability melt away.

By letting workers run production democratically, pay scales become more egalitarian. By cutting out profiteers, wages may be raised and the working day can be shortened. In order to maintain high productivity alongside shortened work hours, more workers are brought aboard and employment levels soar. Previously unemployed workers are brought back into the fold. And instead of producing overpriced shit that we don't need, we would be able to efficiently meet human needs in a sustainable way. Rather than wasting surplus labor and surplus industrial capacity, both would be utilized their fullest extent.

POSTSCRIPT:

While doing a bit of research for this post, I wanted at one point to find some figures on how rich the owners of the auto companies are. First, I searched "Chrysler CEO wealth" in Google. The first 20 results were scary. They all offered different links to articles with the title "Business must address wealth gap, Chrysler CEO says". Next, I searched "Chrysler CEO rich", and the first 30 hits all had the headline "Rivals' UAW deals too rich for Chrysler, CEO says". It's not easy to stumble upon any facts about how much money the owners make. If you search "Chrysler CEO earnings" the first hit is "Chrysler CEO receives no salary for 2010: filing | Reuters". They have clearly invested a lot of money and energy manicuring their online image so that enraged citizens can't look up how much money they're raking in (much of it tax-payer subsidized) at a time when we Democrats and Republicans are harping on the "need" to tighten "our" belts and accept austerity. The ruling class is clearly worried about the class consciousness raised by the Occupy movement. We should see ever imaginable aspect of their public image as calculated moves to mitigate the effects of the political atmosphere created by Occupy.

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