(via ColorLines):
Friday, November 26, 2010
It's the system, stupid
Dominant ideologies teach us that "personal responsibility" and individual efforts are all that shape our social and political world. All Great things, we're taught, were forged out of nothingness by Great individuals (who, it turns out, are almost always men). Accordingly, we learn American History as though it were, in the first instance, the outcome of the actions of individual Presidents. We're encouraged to admire fabulously wealthy "self-made men" at the same time that we're taught to blame only ourselves for all our hardships. These ideologies, Fredric Jameson points out, "all find their functional utility in the repression of the social and historical, and in the perpetuation of some timeless and ahistorical view of human life and social relations".
This ludicrous view is even given a "scientific" veneer in the fantasy world constructed by neoclassical economics, where we are told that the money individuals receive in market societies attaches to nothing but their marginal productive contributions. These ideas are part of the conceptual legitimation of the society we live in, and, thus, it is unsurprising that they should be ubiquitous and "obvious" to many.
Accordingly, when radicals, and Marxists in particular, criticize the capitalist class it is often assumed that the criticism is merely a moralistic condemnation of individual capitalists. For example, when those on the Left criticize, say, the dominance of multinational corporations, this criticism is often heard as an attack on "evil corporate leaders". But the Marxist complaint has never been that the individual capitalists are evil or merely in need of moral scrutiny.
The Marxist complaint isn't that the ruling class is evil. In the first instance, of course, the Marxist complaint against the ruling class consists in hostility to the fact that they are a ruling class. The Marxist complaint, therefore, is not concerned to moralistically attacking capitalists as "bad persons", it is a complaint that targets certain unequal social relations. And what grounds and structures social relations, of course, is not for any individual to decide willy nilly: human beings "make their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing", that is, "in the social production of their life, men [sic] enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of the development of their material productive forces" (see the Eighteenth Brumaire and the 1859 Preface respectively).
Thus, the complaint isn't that we have a ruling class that is too greedy, too mean to their workers, too insensitive to human need. The complaint is that we have a ruling class at all.
But we can sharpen this further still. When Marx criticizes the actions of the ruling class, it isn't because he thinks they made incompetent or insufficiently moral decisions. It's because he thinks that the basic structure of capitalism makes it rational for those in certain institutional roles, such as the role (class) of capitalist owner, to tend to act in certain ways. Hence, in order to be a capitalist at all, given the way that economic structure of capitalist societies is set up, you have to be able to compete against other capitalists, reinvest profits in further growth, etc. In order to be a capitalist, you have to do certain things whether you like it or not, given the pressures of market competition and the way that investment is structured. To be sure, as an individual you are free to diverge from the structural pressures of the system, but only so much. The reactionary slogan that "you can't buck the market" has a slice of truth to it (the reactionary part of it being that it suggests that we can't get rid of the market itself). An excessively "friendly" capitalist might easily be pushed out of business by more ruthless and exploitative competitors.
As political theorist Alan Ryan describes it:"Marx supposes that under capitalism, there are two sorts of oppression at work, rather than one. Capitalists oppress workers, driving them as hard as they can to extract maximum surplus value from them. But this is not because capitalists are individually brutal; they themselves are driven by their capital. The irrationality of a capitalist economy in which production is dictated by the accidents of market interaction is read by Marx as the blind tyranny of capital over its human subjects. The fact that capital is in any case only dead labor leads Marx to tremendous rhetorical flights in which he describes capital as a vampire, renewing its life-in-death by sucking the blood of living laborers...what humanity has done is create Frankenstein's monster; so far from the world submitting to human control, it has been set in motion as a blind force tyrannizing over all of us... Capital dominates all of us and turns all of us into its purposes."
Or, as I described in a recent post on alienation:Think of the terms in which the present financial crisis is described. People in the media talk about the economy as though it were a natural disaster, completely beyond our control, laying waste to human lives in its wake. But the market is no force of nature; it is something that human beings constructed. And what we've built up, we can tear down. "The market is like a monster we have accidentally created, but which now comes to rule our lives". Capitalism, in Marx's words, is "the complete domination of dead matter over men".
Capitalism is, thus, like a car that humanity built, which we continue to fill with fuel but which we have no capacity to control or steer. Adding the threat of global warming to this metaphor would be to say that our out-of-control vehicle is steadily heading towards a steep cliff.
I should add one more thing to stave off a misunderstanding. It's not that I think that individual members of the ruling class should be exempt from moral critique qua persons. On the contrary, I think many of them are reprehensible in many respects. But we shouldn't confuse such moral criticism from the political critique we need in order to properly place their behavior in its institutional context. Suppose some individual capitalist was won over by such moralizing critique and then sold off their productive assets to become a revolutionary. This is all well and good, but the way the system is set up it is certain that someone else will fill this person's "empty seat" at the ruling class table in no time. The Marxist argument is that we need to get rid of these seats and this table itself, not just the particular individuals who happen to sit there at any one time.
I also hardly mean to suggest that because we're all dominated by capital, we're all somehow in the same predicament. We're not; capitalism is a class society and the ruling class dominates and exploits the majority of us for their benefit. But we won't get very far if we think that capitalism is a highly coordinated, planned system that is ruled by a small, highly organized and conscious class whose intentional actions shape the system all the way down. This is not a left-wing critique, but a conspiracy theory that draws on the individualist ideology I impugned above. This kind of line suggests that the ruling class deliberately drove the world economy into the dumps, since whatever happens would have to be intended by the all-powerful rulers.
But this isn't Marxist in the least; the most interesting part of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that we get a dialectical interpretation of the relationship between structure and agency, between system and individual, such that neither is wholly reducible to the other. The actions of the ruling class do matter and need to be critiqued, but always in the context of the pressures of capitalist system which shape and structure their motivations and actions. In the case of the recent economic meltdown, for example, this analysis allows us to see how capitalism makes certain actions appear locally rational for individual capitalists, but collectively irrational even for the entire capitalist class writ large! It is an chaotic system that structurally requires myopic individual (or firm-level) profit accumulation.
Marx says on many occasions things to the effect that "human beings make their own history, but...". As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, the goal of socialists is to remove that "but...".
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Nostalgia Film as Ideology
"...Nostalgia art gives us the image of various generations of the past as fashion-plate images that entertain no determinable ideological relationship to other moments of time: they are not the outcome of anything, nor are they the antecedents of our present; they are simply images. This is the sense in which I describe them as substitutes for any genuine historical consciousness rather than specific new forms of the latter." - Fredric Jameson, Interview (1986) in Flash Art.
"Nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation. The inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse, George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), set out to recapture as so many films have attempted since, the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era; and one tends to feel, that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire- not merely the stability and prosperity of pax Americana but also the first naive innocence of the counter-cultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs. With this initial breakthrough, other generational periods open up for aesthetic colonization (e.g. Polanski's Chinatown, Bertolucci's Il Conformista)... [Nostalgia film] approaches the "past" through stylistic connotation, conveying "pastness" by the glossy qualities of the image, and "1930s-ness" or "1950s-ness" by the attributes of fashion, as for example, some Disney-EPCOT "concept" of China."
"Every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today." -Jameson (1984), "Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", in New Left Review
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I must confess that I had an early (ages 8-12) fascination with nostalgia films about the 1950s before I had any inkling that they were, in the sense described above, nostalgia films. The Sandlot (1993) was a film that my family owned growing up, which I watched more times than I can count. Grease (1978) and Stand By Me (1986) were staples as well. Or, take Back to the Future (1985): think of the contrast between downtown Hill Valley in the 1980s (run down, with homeless people lying about) versus the 1950s. My thinking at the time was that the 1950s and early 60s was an era of "cleanliness", tight-knit communities, small neighborhood shops, block parties, stability, innocence and all the rest of it. I recall often wishing that I'd grown up "then".
It is striking, then, how much films of this sort shape contemporary consciousness of what we take to be the past. I'm not sure, but I wager that schools didn't have "decade day" before the 1980s. Would it have been possible, or even made sense, in the 1920s to hold a "decade dress-up day"? Could there have been intelligible, ostensibly distinct, stereotypes corresponding to "1910s-ness" or "1890s-ness"? My guess is that the answer is no. So what is it about the present state of affairs that makes possible the reification of decades into "glossy images" that track shifts in fashion? It seems to me that any answer we give must take seriously the third Jameson quote above.
There is, to be sure, a serious question here about how to critically understand the post-war era (e.g. as arising out of the reconfiguration of global capitalism and power relations after WWII, the emergence of a "consumer society", changes in the forces of production, a decline in class struggle, ruthless repression of the Left, violently enforced conformity, elimination of the memory of the 1930s, etc.). But critically understanding nostalgia film requires that we ask a different question: what was it about the ideological/political pressures of the early 1970s (and, to some extent, the decade and a half that followed) that cultivated this need to retrieve a "lost past"? Moreover, in what ways can we understand the objects of desire in nostalgia film as a projection of such pressures and needs?
Succinctly put, the question cannot simply be: were the 1950s/early60s really like that? Neither should it be: should we want to return to it? Our question must be: what is it about contemporary societies such that this nostalgic image, whatever its historical veracity, is the American "privileged lost object of desire"?
There are a couple of obvious things to say. The global economic landslide of the early 1970s marked the decisive end of the "long boom" of the postwar era. It marked a rupture, a tectonic shift in the conditions that grounded the social formations and cultural configurations of the 1950s and early 60s. If the active, conscious revolt of the late 1960s was a determinate negation, the early 1970s represented a structural, subterranean shift in the basic center of gravity. Suddenly the arrangements upon which postwar prosperity had been built no longer created the conditions for continued profit accumulation. Stagflation set in, and unemployment skyrocketed. The 1973 oil crisis struck at the heart of the manufactured obsession with ostentatious automobiles.
Unsurprisingly, this shift in the global conjuncture meant that the old ideological repertoire of postwar American capitalism went into crisis. The old ideological stabilizers were being undermined by new events; the old legitimating devices weren't able to do their work when faced with the landslide of the early 1970s.
But as Marxists are aware, ideological shifts don't immediately, mechanically accompany shifts in the economic structure of society. As Zizek noted after the 9/11 attacks, "On September 11th, the USA was given the opportunity to realize what kind of world it was part of. It might have taken this opportunity -but it did not; instead it opted to reassert its traditional ideological commitments: out with feelings of responsibility and guilt towards the impoverished Third World, we are the victims now!" Something similar accompanied the erosion of the postwar era (although I would want a less univocal and more internally conflicted analysis of "America" than Zizek offers). Rather than question the very ideological coordinates of the postwar era in light of counter-veiling evidence; the temptation was to cling hopelessly to the manufactured objects of desire appropriate to that anachronistic ideology.
But, and this is where the Jameson bit above is particularly interesting, the mode of interaction with this "past" is one in which the "image of various generations of the past as fashion-plate images... entertain no determinable ideological relationship to other moments of time: they are not the outcome of anything, nor are they the antecedents of our present; they are simply images". Here, Marx's analysis of the fetishism of commodities is operative in the background. Rather than encountering the past in all of its material complexity, we see only various objects on a shelf, shorn of history or ties to social relations. This is only more perverse when we note that the objects in questions are ostensibly about the past.
Another interesting question for me here is how race fits into this picture. It's clear that there is something deeply racist about the entire ideology of nostalgia here, insofar as it wears its white-exclusiveness on its sleeve. That is, the ideology simply couldn't be a fantasy for black people- it isn't even aimed at convincing black people to want such a return to this "idyllic past". The result is that the ideology doesn't even see black people as subjects in need of convincing here; they are non-persons who are best blotted out of this fantasy entirely. Seeing them as subjects to whom white American must justify themselves would be to accept the gains of the struggles of the 1960s; but this nostalgic ideology, of course, in part seeks to forget such struggles entirely. So, it's not that the ideology has an active anti-black theme per se, the ideology entirely erases and blots out blackness.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
"Wallstreet Regains its Swagger"
Watch here. Whew, I must confess that I was worried about whether their swagger was being threatened. I guess I can stop staying up at night now, assured that Obama's embrace of the Paulson Plan did what it set out to do.
Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter
Here.
Just keep this in mind the next time you hear some (rich) asshole in Washington telling us "we" all need to "live within our means", or "tighten our belts". The politics of austerity, as we know, is based on the false premise that we live in a condition of scarcity. But, and correct me if I'm wrong here, I have a hard time seeing how "our" condition is one of scarcity when the ruling class is able to appropriate "profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion".
Make no mistake where the battle lines are drawn here: Obama and the Democrats are already pushing to extend ruling class tax giveaways while imposing harsh austerity on the rest of us. Their disagreements with the Republicans are over marginalia. Their operating assumptions are identical: privatize the profits and wealth, socialize the risks and fall-out.
Monday, November 22, 2010
New Materials on Zimbabwe Land Reform
Read them here. Haven't gone through yet, but it appears to be a welcomed corrective to the mass of intentional misinformation out there about land reform efforts in general.
Zimbabwe, as I've argued elsewhere, puts those on the critical Left in a difficult position given the way the terms of debate are constructed in mainstream forums. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that Mugabe's regime is corrupt, anti-egalitarian in many respects, and self-serving. But on the other, it is absolutely imperative that we understand this regime in the context of the interrelated phenomena of colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism.
It's not that we should let Mugabe off the hook by attributing all of his regime's problems to the legacy of colonialism and the effects of continued neo-colonial oppression. But there is something extremely suspicious about attempts by, say, British newspapers to demonize Mugabe as the sole ill plaguing Zimbabwe. This to say, there is something covertly racist about claims of this sort insofar as they insinuate, albeit without directly saying so, that it might have been better to let the "experts" (i.e. colonial elites, be they British or White Rhodesian) maintain control rather than to allow the "incompetent natives" to take matters into their own hands. To fail to mention global capitalism or colonialism is to fail to mention the main cause of human misery and oppression for the last 300 years, which is, needless to say, a bit of a problem.
In cases in which white elites acquired property through the brutal exploitation of colonialism, it's absurd to argue that there's anything prima facie unjust about tinkering with existing property holdings. Absurd though it is, many seem to have no problem getting idignant when the matter of land reform is raised. Just imagine, for example, the vile sorts of things that would go on in the heads of many old, white commentators in the newspapers at the mere mention of such re-distributive reforms. Such vileness is hardly vitiated when clothed in neoliberalism ("but we merely want to maintain firm property rights to encourage development", etc. etc.).
Racist Border Patrol Murders Immigrant, "Details Sketchy"
Article here. This is the reality of xenophobia and nativism when it drives border policy. There is little difference between the Border Patrol and the proto-fascist, murderous Minutemen.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
A Couple of Thoughts Re: Charles Blow's Op/Ed
Read Blow's piece, titled "Let's Rescue the Race Debate" here. In general, the piece makes quite a few important points that are often obscured in the racist echo chamber that is the mainstream media.
Although Blow doesn't explicitly mention the phenomenon of "color blind" racism, he offers a number of persuasive arguments that expose it for the sophistry that it is.
Nonetheless, I am bothered by a couple of things that are going on in the article. First off, although Blow can hardly be blamed for this, the cautious "bad people exist on all sides of the debate", we need to seek "common ground" language employed toward the end of the piece evinces an important way that racial domination functions in the contemporary U.S. What I have in mind here concerns the fact that the white establishment is still uncomfortable and resentful when confronted with politically organized, confident, and critical black voices. That's precisely what all the blathering about "reverse racism", "culture of victimization", etc. is about. It is a pre-emptive strike against confident black social critique. By creating the stereotype of the "angry black voice", those concerned to defend white supremacy have a convenient way of dismissing any and all criticism of existing society authored by black people. It is, in effect, a way of saying to the oppressed: shut up and stop complaining, your grievances are illegitimate... your voice simply doesn't, indeed couldn't, matter. Note, also that history is inadmissible because it upsets the a priori assumptions built into this ideology (e.g. that the US is the "greatest" country on earth with a divine mandate, etc.).
The upshot of this preemptive strike is that anyone who wishes to criticize white supremacy is meant to always feel like they're on the defensive. The norm created by the preemptive strike is this: so as not to ruffle the feathers of whites, black social critics must tread lightly in public. The same problem faces feminist critics, as well as socialists who wish to make the argument that we should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich. In the case of the feminist critic, even soft-core feminists who merely aim to make extremely modest critiques of things like the wage gap, there is a pressure from above to avoid sounding like a "bitch" (this is, incidentally, one reason why I love the title of the feminist magazine Bitch, which basically redeploys this sexist epithet by throwing it back in the face of sexists as if to say, "yeah, I'm not fucking around about women's liberation, what's it to you?").
I digress. Back to the Blow piece.
I groaned when I first read the Booker T. Washington bit at the beginning of the piece, but was relieved when Blow noted how laden with irony it is that conservatives are so fond of using the quote. To be sure, there are ironies here worth commenting on. But I think Blow radically misses the mark when says that "W.E.B. Du Bois [was] an Obama-like figure who advocated a more broad-based, activist movement for racial equality to be led by an erudite black intelligentsia." Ummmm... what??
This is a disturbing and politically conservative comparison. To be sure, we know that Obama wants politically active black people to buy into the myth that he "advocates a more broad-based, activist movement for racial equality." We know that this is the self-image that he cultivates when he needs support from ordinary black people. But the trouble here is that creating a broad-based activist movement of any kind, and one for racial justice in particular, is simply not what he's about.
Recall his statements to $1,500 a plate dinners during the Midterm campaigns. Recall his public statements in interviews about "folks that weren't serious in the first place". Recall Axlerod's patronizing, vitriolic attacks on progressives for not being "enthusiastic" enough. Recall, in effect, his entire first two years in office: the priorities are clear.
Building a broad-based activist movement means convincing ordinary people to organize themselves independently of the "proper channels" in order to make their demands heard by those in power, whether or not those in power care to listen. It doesn't mean brow-beating ordinary people from above after you've promised them modest reforms and given them nothing.
Nothing can come of the comparison between Obama and DuBois except political confusion. In reality, Obama is far more like Booker T. Washington than he is like any serious activist against racial oppression. Obama has found many occasions to make Cosby-style complaints about "personal responsibility" that jibe with the conservative intuitions of white conservatives for whom Booker T. Washington is a "breath of fresh air". What you won't hear is a word reflecting the tradition of oppositional voices of folks like MLK, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, or Cornel West.
One more thought here. Although Blow makes some reasonable points regarding the differential experiences of whites and black people, one gets the sense from the article that racism is, at the end of the day, simply a matter of intentional attitudes that an individual has.
This, as I've pointed out elsewhere, is a narrow and ultimately unhelpful rubric for understanding racism.
Racism is not "in the heart". It's not in the first instance about the intentions or attitudes of individuals. Racism has both a material and ideological existence, both of which can come apart from the intentions of individual actors. For this reason, we should entirely abjure discussions about whether so-and-so intends to be racist or not. As I wrote in a previous post:On the question of concerted intent and racism, I think its ridiculous to assume that because someone intends not to be racist, that they are therefore not implicated perpetuating racism. Racism, if we agree that it is a social phenomenon, is not an aberration or a sin committed by an individual who simply makes bad choices. Someone is not 'rotten to the core' simply because they are complicit or directly involved in sustaining racism in any way. When someone says "hey, what you just said strikes me as rather racist", it should not be tantamount to "you are a bad, bad person and you intentionally mean to harm others!". This is not the way to talk about racism, and doing so in this way only makes the "but I didn't mean it" or "but he's actually a good guy, I swear" character defenses seem plausible (when, in fact, they are totally irrelevant).
This is a needed antidote to Blow's view that "prejudices can be found among all races". Racism isn't in the first instance about individual-level attitudes or prejudices. And it isn't just a matter of some individual not liking another individual who has different phenotypic characteristics. We can't make sense of what the idea of race is, let alone racial hierarchies, without understanding history and macro-level social dynamics. To pretend that racism is an individual-to-individual problem, measurable by asking respondents questions in polls, is misguided.
So what we need to really destroy both contemporary racism and the historical legacies of past racism is serious structural change to the economic structure of society. That isn't going to be accomplished by playing nice with the ruling class. Nor will it come from pandering to the racist ideologies in circulation in American political culture. It will come only from struggle from below. The serious blows to racism in history have all been won when the oppressed organized themselves, often in solidarity with white allies, to strike a blow against status quo relations of power.
Playing nice with power doesn't win anything for the oppressed, as Fredrick Douglass made clear. When Kanye said "George Bush doesn't care about black people" he was absolutely right. But he could have generalized. Those in power at present are indifferent to the historic and contemporary oppression of black people. They are indifferent to black suffering. They are defensive and indignant when anyone suggests that some institutions are systematically implicated in brutalizing and terrorizing people of color.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Michael Yates: Change we were foolish to believe in
Before the elections, I kept getting emails from moveon.org telling me that this would be the most important election in my lifetime. Those nasty Republicans, led by the crazy people in the Tea Party, were intent on overturning everything that the good Democrats had wrought. Now Ms. Vanden Heuvel is telling me that this is going to happen unless we “fight for a real debate . . .”Read the rest here.
Here is what I think. Thanks to government largesse, banks and other corporations are now awash in cash, and profits have soared to record levels. Yet, the banks are not making loans, and the corporations are not buying new equipment and opening new facilities. Despite gross misconduct, no top corporate officials have been prosecuted, and many of the very companies that put the economy in the ditch are as flush as ever. Were those nasty Republicans in power when this happened? No.
Friday, November 12, 2010
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