A materialist critique of race--one that situates race with material social life--is the kind of understanding that leftists desperately need today. Rather than discussing race within the rarefied realm of "pure discourse", we see that race is historically concrete and inscribed within the basic set of institutions that make up modern capitalism.
Another bonus provided by this way of understanding race is that we get (yet another) means of unmasking the preposterous blathering of charlatans like Walter Benn Michaels for what it is (PS: Jacobin- I harbor no hard feelings about your generally interesting and thoughtful magazine. But WBM is a charlatan and I'm (respectfully) disappointed that you gave him a forum to further disseminate his views on the Left).
Mills's introduction to the talk lays out the existing political terrain of contemporary racism well. As he puts it, today we have both traditional and nouveau racism. Traditional racism, rooted in the racial "science" of the 19th and 20th centuries (phrenology, eugenics, Nazi Rassenwissenschaft, etc. etc.), held the scientifically false view that distinct "races" existed by nature and could be biologically demarcated. Although "scientific" or "traditional" racism received serious blows during the 20th Century (especially in the wake of Auschwitz), it is making a steady comeback. The idea is that the human species can, on the basis of inherited biological properties, be carved up into clearly demarcated subgroups (i.e. races), who have distinct behavioral patterns, mental capacities, drives, sexual tendencies, moral beliefs, cultures, etc.
But modern science has consistently shown that such views are incoherent: there is no biological warrant for using certain phenotypic characteristics to assign people to clearly distinguished racial groups. Note that this isn't yet to dispute the additional step of concluding that "Race A" is superior to "Race B", this is to undercut the entire process of "biologically" or "genetically" assigning human beings to races at all.
Still, the blows struck against traditional racism did cause racist ideologies to shift and reconfigure themselves. Hence, we have the emergence of nouveau or "colorblind" racism. This is the view that since race isn't natural or biological, it simply doesn't exist at all. And, furthermore, because it doesn't exist, it cannot be a meaningful political concept that helps us make sense of the contemporary social world.
Since the term "race" allegedly has no real referent, its usage is always a mistake. Because there is no such thing, colorblind racists will argue, all talk of race should be expunged from our vocabulary. In this way, colorblind racists are able to claim that anyone who so much as utters the word "race" in political contexts is real racist. According to colorblind racists, "racism consists in talking about race as though it matters".
This colorblind position is precisely view staked out by Walter Benn-Michaels, but it is frequently trumpeted on the hard-line Hayekian Right (this is a favorite talking-point of the racist blowhard Ron Paul). Hence, WBM thinks he has grounds for claiming that any talk of fighting against racism today is just an illusion that serves to blind us to what really matters. His position is, if nothing else, extremely simple: if you think that racial oppression is real, you are a dupe. If you so much as mention race, you are simply defending an increase in the Gini coefficient.
Thus, the clear upshot of Mills's talk is that we come to see, among other (more interesting) things, how the WBM view is complete bullshit. Race is a social and political concept. The choice between the two positions above (traditional biological vs. colorblind racism) is a false one. Just because something is not determined by heritable biological properties, it hardly follows that it isn't real. Simply because something isn't natural and inevitable, it doesn't follow that it doesn't exist. Money is clearly something that is contingently constructed by human beings for concrete social and practical reasons. But it doesn't follow that because money is constructed it is less real. Likewise, because mountains are natural and, hence, not socially constituted, it doesn't follow that they are "more real" than currency. That the contemporary United States has a top marginal tax rate of 35% is a fact. But it is not a fact explained by biological facts about the natural world or the constitution of human beings. It is a contingent, socially determined fact, and as such it is in our power to change it.
So, once we reject faux-scientific traditional racism, it's not as though we must conclude that race doesn't exist. It clearly does, but it is neither natural nor inevitable. That we are divided into so-called racial groups on the basis of certain phenotypic characteristics is a contingent fact, i.e. one that could have been otherwise. So, the decision to arrange human societies into different subsets on the basis of phenotypic traits was a contingent one, indeed a political one. We have not always been so designated our divided- so the question naturally arises: how, concretely and historically, did racial designations emerge and why?
In order to answer this question, we have to talk about social relations, the level of development of the productive forces, the mode of production, distributions of power, geography, culture, the basic structure of political institutions, in short all the things that make up the bread and butter of the Marxist analysis of society and history. This is, in a loose sense, the point of Mill's argument: race must be understood materially and historically, i.e. in terms of the material conditions of society in its historical context.
This is why we can't disentangle race and class (or race and gender, for that matter). This is precisely why we cannot say that race is a mere epiphenomenon that is only to be found in our language and discourse. Race isn't just an idea or concept which we can critically analyze by solely examining the genealogy of its movement in thought and language. Mills's point is that racial divisions are materially inscribed in the basic institutions that constitute modern capitalist societies. We therefore can't properly understand those societies without understanding race. But neither can we properly understand race without understanding how racism is entangled in other relations of power, the economic structure of society, etc. That is, we don't understand what the roots of racism are unless we understand the historical development of contemporary capitalist societies (including their imperialist and colonialist projects).
Racism has both material/institutional as well as ideational existence: and we can't grasp what that means for fighting oppression unless we have a historical materialist approach to the critique of modern social formations.
The result, for blowhards like WBM, is that we see that he has neither a serious analysis of modern capitalism, nor a serious analysis of racism. He misunderstands each, and thus has no means of understanding how both are intertwined. In this way, we come to see what his procedure really is: he takes the language of ruling class ideologists who care nothing for fighting racism, and then attempts to drag political radicals through the mud by associating anti-racism, as such, with ruling class ideologists. Why might someone do this? Because they care nothing for actually fighting oppression, and they have no fucking clue about history or how contemporary societies are organized. "Neoliberal anti-racism" is, at the end of the say, an oxymoron.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Mills on Materializing Race
Thursday, November 11, 2010
More details on Obama's austerity package
Here.
"Highlights" below.
- Raises the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare to 69.
- Cuts Social Security benefits.
- Ends the mortgage tax deduction.
- Ends the tax deduction for workers' health benefits.
- Freezes salaries for federal workers for 3 years.
- Establishes co-pays for veterans at VA health services.
- Raises fees to visit the national parks and the Smithsonian.
- Merges the Small Business Administration into an agency (Commerce) that has always prioritized helping bigger businesses, and cuts their budget.
- Eliminates the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.
White House gives in on Bush Tax Cuts
Here. As others have pointed out- this is not surprising. But even this is a rather quick and premature surrender.
Liberals will console themselves by claiming that there is no other way- that this is inevitable. But such fatalist narratives evince serious desperation. And I think liberals are right to feel desperate right now. They, like millions of other Americans, wanted to see real, qualitative change in 2008. But they've seen more of the same. They've even seen a great deal of betrayal. They've even had the White House flip them a bird a couple of times for daring to speak up or criticize the record of the Administration.
When is enough enough?
Progressives want to see real health care reform (i.e. single-payer), they want us to end the occupations and wars, they want to see an attempt to rein in the power of corporate elites, they want to see much higher taxes on the rich to expand public services (not cut them), etc.
But how do we win these reforms? This is where I think most liberals have got to re-think their views. We won't win these reforms by working within the Democrat Party such as it is. In fact, previous gains (e.g. Social Security, The Wagner Act, Civil Rights Act, Women's Suffrage, Free Public Education, etc.) were not won by playing nice with the Democrats. They were won through independent struggle against both of the major pro-business parties. And that is what we need to focus on now- building the movements, building independent organizations, creating the activist infrastructure that we need to collectively demand things that our electoral system gives us no voice to demand.
If you want to tax the rich and end the wars, who should you vote for? How can you vote in such a way that that political goal is given voice? At present you cannot. At present the electoral mechanism doesn't register such voices. It only hears two words: "Democrat" or "Republican". To all other human concerns it is completely deaf. We can do much better- and we don't have to settle for this demoralizing, conservative process. When people join together from below to challenge those at the top, there is nothing that we can't do.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
It's On
Obama's Deficit Commission is proposing massive, deep, punitive, cruel cuts to the living standards of the vast majority of us.
This is to be expected. All capitalist governments in the Western world are doing the same, be they center-left or center-right. They're all more or less caving in and trying to force working people to pay for the crisis caused by bankers and capitalist speculators. They are trying to balance the budget on the backs of working people, precisely those hit hardest by the recession. They are insulating the rich and powerful from having to pick up the mess they've created for humanity. The function of our "representatives" in the system is thus laid bare.
Why is this happening?
The global economy is in severe crisis. The crisis was fomented by the reckless, dogged pursuit of profit. But what exactly is a crisis? What is the problem? To identify why a capitalist economy isn't working, we need to understand what makes it run in the first place. Capitalism is about the uninterrupted accumulation of ever greater profits for the small class of persons who own the means of production in the economy. It is a system that is conditional on capitalists making lots and lots of money in profit; when that condition isn't satisfied, the system grinds to a halt.
So what's the problem right now? Isn't there just a lot of scarcity and not enough to go around?
Hardly. Quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is not one of not enough, it is one of too much. If this is paradoxical, it is because capitalism is laden with contradictions, and this is clearly one of them. There's clearly not "too much" in the sense that every single person has more than they need. There's "too much" because this is a crisis of overproduction. This means that the owners of vast amounts of capital are hoarding large surpluses because there aren't profitable places to invest it. Potentially productive wealth is sitting idle because the capitalists who own it cannot make highly profitable use of it.
Think small for a second. Think of those who invested in condominiums. Now, capitalists invested in housing not because they cared about condominiums. They weren't coordinating with each other to quench human need. No, there was a mad scramble to invest in condominiums purely because investors thought that's where the money was. With property values soaring ever higher, partly because of this mad scramble, it seemed like a great opportunity to make big profits. So what happened? Why didn't this pan out?
Right now, there simply aren't enough people with the money to buy those condos. To be sure, there are tons of people who need homes. There are even people who are being thrown out of their homes as we speak at the wishes of the big banks. Capitalism isn't responsive to human needs as such- it only recognizes cold, hard cash. And there are not enough consumers with the money to purchase the condos, so the condos sit idle and unused.
We can generalize from this example. Lots of rich investors, who have massive amounts of capital at their disposal, are not investing it right now because there are no profitable investments that can absorb all the surplus capital they're sitting on. Hence, our economy is running at about half of its capacity. In other words, hence the recession. The owners of capital are waiting until conditions of profitability re-emerge so that they can invest- until then they will just sit on what they have. And why shouldn't they? It's not as though they can't live it up in the mean time given the enormity of the surpluses at their disposal.
But, of course, the opportunity to "live it up" isn't available to all of us. It's certainly not available if you're out of work and desperate for a job to pay your bills, like millions of Americans right now.
So we have the following situation. We have massive amounts of idle capital and massive amounts of unemployed labor, sitting side by side, amidst a world that is full of human need. As David Harvey has remarked: "how stupid is that?"
The politicians who represent capital in our political system don't see it that way. Obama and the Democrats don't see anything "stupid" about this situation at all. According to the way they tell it, this is the natural way the world works. This is capitalism in all its glory. Accordingly, the Democrats, like the Republicans, have only one basic policy goal right now: we must re-establish the conditions in which capitalists can earn high profits so that the system will start functioning again.
This goal can't but be unfair to the vast majority of us. Why is it that we must bribe the rich with high profit rates in order to reduce unemployment and have a functioning society? Why is it that capital must be pleased in order for basic social institutions to have the funding they need? This is absurd. This is a one way street, an unjustifiable dependence relation.
But, again, the Democrats don't see it that way. They only see one problem: how can we restore the system to previous levels of profitability? In other words, what can we do to make rich capitalists happy again by creating the conditions in which they can earn high rates of return?
This last was the question for which the infamous $787 billion bailout was supposed to be the answer. The woefully inadequate stimulus was implemented for the same reason: to restore conditions of profitability. To be sure, the stimulus did some limited amounts of good, and I would have liked to have seen a far more ambitious spending regimen that actually faced up to the realities of the problems at hand. But it wasn't implemented with the intent of satisfying unmet human needs. It wasn't implemented for the betterment of all. It was implemented only because fiscal stimulus is one way of attempting to solve the problem of effective demand, i.e. the problem of having nobody with the money to buy all of the things that enable capitalists to turn a profit.
But, of course, throwing that kind of money around when you already have two unpaid wars going on isn't cheap. Between all of these expenditures and the massive loss of tax revenue due to sharply reduced profits, incomes, etc., the deficit has risen considerably. Enter the language of austerity and budget cuts. This is what we're being told: If the government is in the red, then something must be done. But if the basic goal is to restore high rates of profit for the capitalist class, then clearly we can't solve the deficit problem by taxing the rich. Where, then, will the money come from?
It will come from forcing punishing cuts down the throats of ordinary people. It will come from slashing and burning schools, public transit, public health care, and other programs. As I've pointed out elsewhere, this austerity is making profits possible right now.
But this isn't the message we will hear from Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans. They won't sell it this way, they're smarter than that. We'll hear nothing but budget-cut fatalism from them. But that is to be expected. They are the enemy of the vast majority of people in this country- they stand for the interests of the few, not the aspirations of the many. They'll try to say that "spending is out of control" in Washington, but we know better.
The way to resist this process can't be to go in for the Democrats. The Democrats are the agents pushing through the cuts. They are precisely the ones insulating the system from real change.
And make no mistake, the system is what needs changing. What's the point of going all-in for the reformist Keynesian fix, if it leaves the culprits who dragged the whole system down in power? Why continue to allow the commanding heights of our economy to be in the hands of an unelected, unaccountable elite who care nothing for us and everything for their private gain. Why tolerate a system in which the minority profit at the expense of the majority?
Many aren't tolerating such a state of affairs. The inspiring mass resistance in France, Greece and also, now, the UK is the model that progressives must look to. We won't get more by asking for less. We've got to ask for it all- and we've got to be convinced of the power we all have when we act together in concert.
What is the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform?
It is the brainchild of Obama and the Democrats. Soon enough we'll be aswim in tall tales from unthinking Obamaheads and other apologists for the Democrats that will try to persuade us that the punishing budget cuts on the table are the sole work of Republcians. Don't believe it.
This commission, let us call it the "Deficit Commission", was created during a period in which the Democrats had supermajorities in the Senate and crushing majorities in the House. This is what we get when America votes Democrat in massive numbers.
The Commission has a large majority of people who believe that we must privatize Social Security and make punishing cuts to Medicare. Who put them there? Are they all Republicans? Nope. They're representatives of both parties and Obama put them there.
To be sure, there has been some push-back from within the Democrat party to the sharp conservative tilt of the Commission. But anyone who knows anything about the House Progressive Caucus in the Democratic Party knows that they are clowns. At times they seem full of sound and fury, but ultimately they do nothing but cave in to the corporate-friendly Democrat leadership. They are a marginal force in the organization of which they are a basically passive appendage.
My point in saying all of this isn't to hammer away at the Democrats because I have something personal against them. The point is that we, i.e. ordinary people who have the "crazy" view that Medicare and Social Security shouldn't be slahsed and burned, have to know who the enemy is. It is not just the Republican Party. It is both the Republicans and the Democrats, although I must admit that right now the Democrats are certainly giving the GOP a run for their money. If pushed I would say that the Democrats are a bigger part of the problem than the Republicans. At least most people know the Republicans suck. The trouble with the Democrats is that they try to sweet talk you. They mislead plenty of good people who care about admirable things (e.g. stopping climate change, beating back the advance of the Right, stopping wars and occupation, etc. etc.) and siphon off legitimate oppositional political energy and defuse it. They manipulate legitimate anger about the system and use it to do essentially the same things that the Republicans do. That's perverse. We deserve better.
Obama's Early Embrace of Austerity
Although few liberals took note, Obama and the Democrats began soon after the 2008 election to discuss the idea of doing what George W. Bush himself couldn't do after he won in 2004: eviscerating and privatizing social security. This was Obama's message right out of the gates: "we'll need to make tough choices", "we need to start living within our means", etc.
Millions of Americans probably wondered, "who the hell is we?"
Of course, what Obama and the Dems meant was that ordinary people would have to have austerity forced down their throats. Ordinary people would have have to bear the burden of the global capitalist crisis that has dramatically dried up tax revenues.
But whereas the vast majority of us were being told how we would be screwed, there existed another group to whom no such imperatives applied. That group was the rich and powerful, the very group that nearly brought down the entire world economy. I'm talking about the financial elites and owners of the commanding heights of the economy. These folks were never told by Obama that they had to live within their means. They were never told that they would have to face tough choices. Instead, their dominance was taken as a fixed point- the unquestioned starting point for all further policy decisions.
Accordingly, Obama enthusiastically continued the bailout program put in place by Bush and Paulson, refuse to hold the recipients accountable, allow them to dole out massive bonuses, etc. In effect, Obama's government, like Bush's before him, transferred private capitalist debt from banks and corporations to the state: massive private losses were socialized for the public to pay for. But while Obama was showering the rich with funds, he was also telling the vast majority of us to brace for a punishing blow. He was telling us that we can expect austerity measures and cuts in the near future.
Scour the globe if you like, but you won't find a single society on the planet where ordinary people take kindly to austerity and cuts. The vast majority of people grasp what the drill is with austerity and budget cuts. Their living standards will be pushed down, their jobs will be cut, their public services slashed and burned, their schools forsaken or closed, their transportation networks scrapped. It's no surprise that they don't take it lying down.
Powerful politicians in both factions of the US's single business party know this. They know that while their misleading talk about tax cuts might seduce some who'd do well to know that they were being misled, talk about slashing and burning public spending is not popular.
So they don't do the slashing and burning right before elections. This is true of Republican and Democrat alike.
OK- back to the leading question of this post. I've pointed out Obama's "liberal" use of the language of austerity, his innuendo lending credibility to privatizing Social Security, etc. This is all just a way of saying that Obama didn't embrace the politics of austerity as a result of Republican pressure. And if he is more aggressively pro-cut after the midterms, we should not assume that the reason has to do with Republican pressure either. The point I'm making is that he and the Dems have been floating the idea of punishing cuts to Medicare and Social Security for a while, and now that the election has past they have some space to do it. No politician, Republican or Democrat, was screw over the majority of the population with cuts right before an election. This is especially true of the Dems in recent years- since their crushing majorities would have made it rather difficult to blame on the Republicans (though many dogmatic Obama apologists would no doubt have tried to do so).
Revolt Erupts Among Students in the UK
Revolt among UK students erupts amidst proposals to introduce punishing cuts to education.
Monday, November 8, 2010
"Fiery Leftist Opinion"
Bad News for Liberals May Be Good News for a Liberal Magazine
"Other than perhaps the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, there were few places as despondent on election night as the Manhattan offices of The Nation, the 146-year-old journal of fiery leftist opinion."
See the NYTimes article here.
Yes, "fiery leftist opinion". They said it. I bet Louis Proyect fell out of his seat when he read that. I nearly did.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Tea Party: New Whine in Old Bottles
Read Gary Younge's article here. He makes an excellent point: the "Tea Party" is not a coherent, organized group. Its apparent coherence, organizational power and grassroots support is merely the effect of the media. And to the extent that such an entity does exist, it is a loose group of assholes that have existed for quite some time. Dick Armey is, for example, described as a "tea party activist" these days.
It's important to point out here is that the tea baggers represent something like a fifth of the American electorate. The way the media froths at the site of tea baggers would lead you to think that that they are much more widely supported. But though the Democrat Party has found an excellent campaign tool in the Tea Party (don't worry, I'm sure they'll use it again in 2012), the 2/3 of Americans who didn't bother to turn out to vote in the Midterms likely see through this shallow "scare out the vote" tactic.
(More of) Obama's Legislative Accomplishments
Here. Some context here is helpful. Obama used to tell progressives that he believed in single payer, a position which he subsequently would come to reject. Having rejected the idea of single payer, Obama started off the Democrat primaries in the run-up to the 2008 election with the most conservative health care proposal in the field.
His proposal, essentially a watered-down version of Romney-Care from Massachusetts, has a history that is worth noting. The idea of an individual mandate to purchase private or public insurance emerged in the early 1970s from Richard Nixon as a response to Ted Kennedy's push for single-payer. The idea of a "health care marketplace" was hatched by the right-wing American Enterprise Institute as a response to Clinton's (already weak-sauce) proposal for health care reform. The idea of using a public plan (itself modeled on private plans) to pick up the slack left over after the for-profit plans have cherry-picked all of the least costly individuals to insure, was first put into action by Republican governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. So there you have it- basic components components of Obama's proposal emerged from the likes of Richard Nixon, AEI, and Mitt Romney. Progressive indeed.
Now, this is just a brief history of the ideas included in candidate Obama's proposal. The actual bill itself is actually a great deal less ambitious than the Republican-drafted proposal described above. Obama gave up on the public option when it became clear that industry "stakeholders" weren't having any of it (that's funny... I don't remember voting in elections in 2008 determining who the industry "stakeholders" with veto-power over legislation would be, do you?). Moreover, the Democrat's point-person for drafting the bill, Max Baucus, received the most contributions from the health insurance industry of any congressperson in 2008 (don't forget that the industry has something like 5 lobbyists for each member of Congress). All told, the industry spent millions trying to exact concessions from the Democrats, and so far it has proven to be money well-spent.
At every single stop along the way, Obama and the Democrats have compromised and given concessions to the powerful for-profit insurance industry. The priorities of Obama and the Democrats are on display here for all to see.
And, as if all of this wasn't frustrating enough, now it turns out that the Federal Government isn't even interested in enforcing the already tepid bill it passed, as the SW.org article above makes clear.
But just hold on one second- it actually gets worse. Obama and the Democrats signaled even before the Midterms that they are interested in making punishing cuts to Social Security and Medicare. It seems now, in the wake of the Midterms, that the Democrats are going to be even more aggressive in pushing through austerity measures. That means, in short, forcing the majority of the population to pay for the mess caused by reckless financiers and bankers who got bailed out by the Bush and Obama administration. Again, the priorities of the Democrats are on display for all to see. They sold us out to protect the assets of the rich and powerful. This has become something of a guiding theme since the Democrats took back Congress in 2006.
The task of progressives is not to apologize for this kind of right-wing treachery, but to fight it. Voting for the Democrats has little to do with democracy. This is what democracy looks like.
Friday, November 5, 2010
More Inept Garbage from the NYTimes
This is so confused it's hard to know where to begin. Here's how this heap of bullshit begins:
Keith Olbermann, the pre-eminent liberal voice on American television, was suspended Friday after his employer, MSNBC, discovered that he made campaign contributions to three Democrats last month.The indefinite suspension was a stark display of the clash between objective journalism and opinion journalism on television.
Hold it right there. How is it that someone can be the "pre-eminent liberal voice on American television" and then be rebuked for making campaign contributions to Democrats? If Olbermann's TV persona is, quite literally, one of "pre-eminent liberal voice" then why should we expect that he wouldn't make contributions to campaigns that are, ostensibly at least, left-liberal? Why are we surprised?
Then there is this obscure crap about a "stark display of the clash between objective journalism and opinion journalism on television". First of all, what the fuck is this distinction anyway? Second, how is it supposed to be relevant here?
Are we really to believe that journalists don't have political views of their own? How could journalists not have political views? Everyone already knew what Olbermann's politics were, in fact this is part of who he is and why people watch him. So what has changed? Why is this predictable fact supposed to impinge on his journalistic work? People don't flip on Bill O'Reilly because they think it's possible they might get a Maoist analysis of U.S. politics; they watch precisely because he's got political things to say that resonate with them.
The distinction between "objective journalism and opinion journalism" is a red herring. It only muddies the waters, since the distinction doesn't pick out anything real at all. As I argued in a recent post, it is impossible to report on politics neutrally. It simply cannot be done. Reporting on politics requires that you have an idea of what it is you're reporting on, i.e. you must first have an idea of what politics is and what it isn't, what is political and what's not. Unfortunately, the determination of what's political and what's not is itself a political battleground. Concrete struggles determine what's "normal" and what's "controversial", what's legitimately "political" and what's not up for contestation. For example, the feminist slogan "the personal is political" was subversive precisely because it declared that an entire sphere of modern life (e.g. housework, marriage, the 'private' realm, etc. etc.) was political, whereas it had hitherto been deemed apolitical.
The idea of what politics is in much contemporary mainstream journalism is preposterous. It is a narrow conception that takes our eyes off the real targets and focuses our attention on trivial bullshit. It is a conception of politics that helps to preserve and stabilize the status quo.
So, the idea that there is "objective" journalism and "opinion" journalism is not a well-founded one. All journalism, even mere reporting of fact, requires that the journalist decide what's of significance and what's not. The set of possible facts that one could report on at any one given moment is massive, nearly infinite. The only neutral course of action would be to report on everything all at once (e.g. the roaming habits of zebra, the price of tomato paste, the chemical composition of toothpaste, etc. etc.). But reporting on everything all at once is impossible, and even it were possible it would be practically useless to us. The unavoidable fact of journalism is that some judgments about what's worth reporting on and what's not must be made. Some decision about what's of significance and what's not are a necessary precursor to any journalism whatsoever. And like it or not, judgments about what's important, what's significant, what's relevant, etc. are political. Such judgments are evaluative, i.e. they invoke ideas about value, political ideals, what ought to come to pass, etc. etc.
Our task must not be to pretend we're doing "objective" journalism. Our task must be to understand and criticize the judgments about significance and value that guide journalistic practices. If an article presupposes a narrow, implausible conception of politics, we should criticize and reject this conception. But we can't even have a public discussion about what's important if we aren't aware that such judgments are being made. You cannot criticize what you don't see as a possible object of criticism. We can't argue about something that is hidden, implicit and never brought to the fore.
This is often how it goes: the evaluative/political infrastructure of culture and media is never made explicit. The article under examination here makes impressive headway in concealing the evaluative judgments that structure it. It muddies things up so thoroughly, that it's difficult to know what's at stake in the politics of media at all. The article itself has such fallacious presuppositions about what politics is, that we cannot hope to find anything but garbage there.
Finally one point about the supposed contrary of "neutral" journalism: so-called "opinion journalism". "Opinion" is another bullshit term. I think we should expunge our vocabulary of it entirely. It is an individualist term that makes it appear as though our political convictions are like our preference for chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Our political views aren't like mere "tastes". If there are any beliefs for which we should be expected to give justifying reasons, political beliefs are the leading candidates.
Politics necessarily involves other people. It is the least personal thing there is. So how could beliefs about something that involves everyone possibly be the same as individual tastes or preferences for one flavor or other? Political beliefs must be thought of as claims that we endorse on the basis of reasons that we could give to others in order to justify ourselves. They aren't mere "opinions" or individual "tastes" we can hide behind when someone challenges them.
When someone prefaces statements with "well, this is only my opinion" I cringe. If it is merely your "personal preference", why bother disclosing it to others at all? If it could not in principle have a claim on someone else, why even utter it in a public situation?
The moral of the story is this: all journalism is political. The only questions are what are the politics involved? and are the politics justifiable, i.e. can they be backed up by convincing reasons?
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
"Vote or Die"
Turnout all over the country hovered somewhere near 40%. That means 60% of the country probably didn't feel that they had anything at stake in the elections. Given that our "representatives" in government are either rich business people themselves, or subservient to business interests, do you think they're upset by this low turnout figure? Hardly. They count on a large chunk of the population sitting out of the political process. They understand that doing things the way they get done in Washington requires the exclusion of 2/3 of the population given how antithetical public policy is to the interests of the many.
To moralistically bash people with stupid slogans like "vote or die", or "don't be apathetic" is to add insult to injury. Many people, indeed super-majorities (!) of Americans, grasp that the present electoral mechanism gives them no real choice- and to demand that they accept this lack of choice with a smile and go through the motions is absurd and politically reactionary.
