Mills on Materializing Race

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.

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"Neoliberal Anti-Racism" is an Oxymoron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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WBM Strikes Again

I'm not sure whether I'd recommend reading all of it (it's a waste of time), but skimming for gems like the following might be of interest.

"But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things [i.e. anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc.]."

This man is a charlatan. If you want to understand where neoliberalism came from and why it emerged when it did, read David Harvey. To say that it arises "precisely as a commitment to anti-racism" is preposterous, and politically reactionary to boot. It's classic blame-the-victim. Neoliberalism began to emerge in the early 70s as a class project to reconsolidate power and roll-back the gains from the period between 1935-1970. What was happening in 1970 in terms of anti-racist struggle? Well, prominent members of the anti-capitalist Black Panther Party were being murdered in their sleep by the State. In what universe could that, or the eruptions of black rebellion all over the country in the late 1960s, have in fact represented a "commitment to" neoliberalism. It's quite obvious that WBM's not interested in a serious confrontation with historical facts; on the contrary, he's happy to rewrite events to fit his "anti-racists and anti-sexists caused neoliberalism" fantasy.

Here's another gem:

"The truth is, it’s hard to find any political movement that’s really against neoliberalism today, the closest I can come is the Tea Party. The Tea Party represents in my view, not actually a serious, because it’s so inchoate and it’s so in a certain sense diluted, but nonetheless a real reaction against neoliberalism that is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist Right. It’s a striking fact that what the American Left mainly wants to do is reduce the Tea Party to racists as quickly as humanly possible. They’re thrilled when some Nazis come out and say “Yeah, we support the Tea Party” or some member of the Tea Party says something racist, which is frequently enough. But you can’t understand the real politics of the Tea Party unless you understand how important their opposition to illegal immigration is."

Wow. The only problem with the tea-baggers is that they are "inchoate" and "diluted". Hmm. Interesting...

I can't even say that 2% of that quote above is true. Maybe 1% insofar as some tea-baggers' angst derives from legitimate grievances (e.g. social misery visited upon them by capitalism) which then manifests itself as racism or xenophobia. But, in a way, isn't that true of WBM as well? Isn't he toeing the classic Right populist line, i.e. "soft" complaints about capitalist inequality coupled with a vitriolic hatred for struggles against racial or sexual oppression?

Also, to say that a group dedicated to liquidating government's role in public life is dedicated to fighting neoliberalism is to wear one's ignorance on one's sleeve. Hasn't WBM read about the Koch brothers and the obvious astro-turf "roots" of the Tea Bagger edifice? Hasn't he paid any attention to real Left movements of late against neoliberalism, such as teachers and students struggling to stop school closings, or this for example?

WBM's point about dismissing the tea baggers as racists reeks of utter disdain for the entire idea of criticizing racism. Of course, there is a facile way of calling a person "racist" in such a way that it seems to just mean "you're an evil person", where that has some important connection to that person's intentions. But all of the politically sharp and critical ways of fighting racism give a more nuanced story here. The manifest content of the Tea Bagger phenomenon is racist; they are in the business of scapegoating and slandering people of color and blaming them for the crisis we're in. Now, what's interesting is that there is a substantial contingent of Tea Baggers who voted Obama; clearly, there are interesting things to say about how the impotence and powerlessness of some of these confused folks is finding an outlet in the false promise of racist hatred. But WBM doesn't pursue this thought; he follows the Tea Bagger thought and gives it an academic veneer.

Also, what he says about immigration is completely inept. The populist attack from the Right against "illegal immigration" is not, as we have seen with SB1070, an attack on the merely "illegal" part. That is already to paint the whole thing in "law and order" terms and basically accept the Right's dubious frame hook, line and sinker. Ask any tea bagger if they think we should make immigration legal and accessible and they'll start whining to you about "amnesty". What they want (ask Joe Arpaio, for example) is for "all those people" to "get out". They want to ethnically cleanse large parts of this country and make it "pure American" again. And many have rightly said that this kind of politics is proto-fascist. The anti-immigrant Right in this country is xenophobic to the core. It's no accident that they often pursue english-only policies, and strongly support police harassment and repression of people with brown skin (whether or not they are documented). And then there are the "Minutemen" who shoot people (women and children included) on the border to stop them from "breaking the law". Perhaps they are renegades against neoliberalism as well?

Now, of course the spike in xenophobia and anti-immigrant (as well as islamophobic) racism has something to do with the crisis. But WBM botches that point (see above) so badly that it verges on an apologia for tea-bagger racism. I remind you that anti-immigrant fascist movements in Europe have also been galvanized by the crisis and have been picking up steam in recent years. These are interesting questions, but WBM has no nuanced understanding of them.

Check out the passage where he claims that Glenn Beck is in fact unconsciously a left-winger who has an "important" position on immigration. Who knew?

Again, his complete lack of understanding of immigration, racism, class and ideology is staggering. Do we need any more proof that this man is not really on the Left? This man's facile scapegoating is politically corrosive, and isn't going to help build the kind of broad movements we need to fight against exploitation and oppression. This is a smug, old white man complaining about things that have never mattered to him: fighting sexism and racism. Of course neoliberalism (and, I might add, even more "friendly" versions of capitalism) are bad. But do we really need WBM to tell us that? And can we really make sense of that claim with all of WBM's Right-wing garbage tacked onto it?

Perhaps he should just stick to writing facile polemics against literary theory to the effect that texts simply mean what their authors want them to mean (making WBM the literary equivalent of Antonin Scalia).

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No Benn-Michaels Takedown in LRB

From what I could see, there was basically no critical response to Walter Benn-Michael's most recent, confused screed against feminism and anti-racism in the newest edition of the London Review of Books (BM's tripe appeared a couple months ago). Disappointing. How many respectable publications are going to give him a forum to write polemical trash without being challenged?

In that piece BM actually argued: "anti-racism and anti-sexism have nothing whatsoever to do with Left-wing politics".

Perhaps I wrong here, tactically, about how best to deal with right-wing elements like BM within the Left (very broadly construed). Perhaps, its better not to take the 'bait' and to let his rants fade into irrelevance. But my sense is that his facile, divisive argument infects more of the Left than we'd like to admit. Hence my disappointment that someone on the socialist Left didn't step up to convincingly reject his nonsense in LRB.

The worst part of his tripe is that it obfuscates the issues it raises, making it difficult for others to put forward the the nuanced point that some struggles against racism and sexism have indeed been coopted and defanged by capitalism.

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"Against Diversity"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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