“Look, the fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option.” - Kent Conrad (D-North Dak). 7/16/09
OK. So what the fuck is the point of voting for the Democratic Party? If the Democrats can't pass low-hanging fruit like a public option (similar to RomneyCare in Mass), with a filibuster-proof 60 seat majority, what is the use?
I can already hear the litany of excuses from some on the liberal left to explain why the public option crashed and burned. But this is not only the doing of a handful of conservative Democrats in the Senate. This is a deep institutional problem with the Democratic Party, with our electoral procedures, with the weight of economic power that prevails within our political institutions.
I hate that I was right about this, but I recall being totally alienated at the Obama victory-rally amidst huge numbers of elated people in the streets. I recall feeling stressed, thinking to myself: all of this energy has been spent for this moment, but this moment is only (at best) the opening of a small amount of space for other things to happen. And what's going to ensure that they do?
Sunday, August 16, 2009
60 seat filibuster-proof majority
"White House appears ready to drop 'public option'"
From the Associated Press
That's fucking great. I had to create a new tag, because of this story: Obama Blows.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Going mad for Mad Men? What's with the feminist love?
For the past few weeks the blogosphere has been buzzing about the premiere of season 3 of AMC's critically acclaimed Mad Men. Feminist after feminist blogger has declared her love for the show and its portrayal of gender roles in 1960s America.
At some points I found myself enjoying the show. The drama was interesting. Some of the characters are incredibly compelling. Everyone can play armchair psychologist while they watch the show. "Pete Campbell has such daddy issue and a huge case of white privilege. " "Peggy is trying so hard to shake the repression she faced growing up, but she can't even fully decide if it was a bad thing." So it has that appeal. Plus, an article in the London Review of Books after the first season really sums up its other sources of appeal perfectly:
Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the show’s advertising men or their secretaries and wives to make another gaffe for us to snigger over. ‘Have we ever hired any Jews?’ – ‘Not on my watch.’ ‘Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology; it looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.’ It’s only a short further wait until a pregnant mother inhales a tumbler of whisky and lights up a Chesterfield; or a heart attack victim complains that he can’t understand what happened: ‘All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. Did everything they told me. Drank the cream, ate the butter. And I get hit by a coronary.’ We’re meant to save a little snort, too, for the ad agency’s closeted gay art director as he dismisses psychological research: ‘We’re supposed to believe that people are living one way, and secretly thinking the exact opposite? . . . Ridiculous!’ – a line delivered with a limp-wristed wave. Mad Men is currently said to be the best and ‘smartest’ show on American TV. We’re doomed.
Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn’t That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children! The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men’s hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread. The show’s ‘1950s’ is a strange period that seems to stretch from the end of World War Two to 1960, the year the action begins. The less you think about the plot the more you are free to luxuriate in the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters. Not to mention the lush costuming: party dresses, skinny brown ties, angora cardigans, vivid blue suits and ruffled peignoirs, captured in the pure dark hues and wide lighting ranges that Technicolor never committed to film.
Sooner or later, though, unless you watch the whole series with the sound off, you will have to face up to the story.
And the main gist of the story centers around Don Draper. And Don Draper is a real asshole. And that's really what I can't get over when I watch this show. He's a terrible person, and the people around him are worshipping terrible people. That or their victims of the terrible people. And I get so tired of the psuedo-edgy male protagonists in dramas these days...it's nothing new. It's been around at least since Joseph Conrad in the 1890s. The detached male figure, isolated, trying to figure out his identity in a crazy, mixed up, modern world. It's so cliche. And what bothers me even more is that he's portrayed as being so dreamy. He's an asshole, and yet his fellow characters, and even progressives who watch, seem to admire him. You might know he's a sexist, capitalist, narcissistic asshole, but you can't help but gawk at his beauty, his power, his smooth talking.
I think there's a desire to see a lot more subversion in this show than is there. I just can't see the depiction of patriarchy and racism and economic injustice as subversion, if it's never called those things, and the man who stands as their champion is our hero. Yeah, we see a lot of misogyny, and every once in awhile we see a little hope that the women on the show just aren't going to take it any more. But that's not a startling critique of society -- society then or now. It's just a depiction of society in the 1960s.
I think it's part of an artistic cowardice among progressive artists these days that creator Michael Weiner betrays in choosing this approach. They want to show negative social structures, but they don't want to get preachy, because they don't want to alienate people who might still believe in those structures. They'd rather keep their audience big. They want to show self-congratulatory folks how far we've come and how bad things were and make them think they're watching a good piece of criticism, but they don't want to turn off the people who remain misogynists and racists among us, at least not entirely. While some of us are seeing the sexism in the show as exactly that, vintage sexism from a time before the women's movement of the 1960s, others might see it as simply a portrayal of how things once were, and maybe even, be able to watch the show and go on thinking those gender relationships were just fine. Don Draper is sexy. And rich. And he gets everything he wants, even if he is torturing himself a little inside. It's doesn't look all that bad, in the end.
And let's face it, there's something intoxicating about the show and all of its sin, and I don't just mean the incredible amount of alcohol the characters consume. These people are attractive. They have very sexy sex. And the nostalgia of years past, even if we can recognize the social ills of the time, appeals to us at some level, even if it's not the old fashion or the traditional family, but something like the smell of social change in the air. I can understand the desire to try to read more subversion into the show than is actually there. Watching the show has some pleasure in it, so it's not unbelievable we'd want to think we're doing more than we are by watching it.
I just wish we could watch shows like this and acknowledge what it is we like about them, not try to turn them into the works of art for social justice and social commentary that they aren't even trying to be. Showing sexism is not the same thing as fighting sexism or even labeling sexism. And it isn't necessarily progressive in any way (Even Jezebel's feature on "15 Feminist Moments From Mad Men" is really just a list of moments where sexist things happened to women). Let's just face the fact that at the end of the day, watching a drama about Don Draper and the madness of the 1960s is good entertainment. There's little redeeming about him, and as far as I can see, little redeeming about the show and its take on anything, including gender roles.
US Income Inequality: The Gap Grows
As you can see, nearly a quarter of total income goes to the top 1 percent of Americans, nearly as high as the most recent peak, in 1928. (Notice any correlation of events?).Recessions (depressions?) seem to hurt some people more than others...
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
No. I do not worship the Free Market God, for I have seen his frailties, and he is not a true God.
Now, from that weird break below to ramble briefly about sex, I return to the issue of healthcare that we can't seem to escape lately:
Please stop telling me how great the free market is at fixing things and creating the best systems possible. See, I work for a private company. And I see the bureaucracy, and the laziness, and the shit we get away with doing to customers and the crap we can pass off as a product to them. And guess what? We still have paying customers. Thousands of them. We still have customers because there's no real competition for us (broadband service in rural communities). The free market hasn't made competing with us look very profitable. And so our customers get what we give them, which isn't great. We could do better, but why would we when we are already making money? There's nothing magical about the profit motive, you see. The only thing unique about it compared to other motives is it usually, but not always, leads to profit. Sometimes it leads to failure. Much like political motive. Sometimes political motive creates a product that is successful from a political standpoint. Sometimes it fails. But neither motive is perfect. And when one has failed, I say, let's try another.
Pro-sex? Anti-porn? Where do I fall?
Deep inside my brain there is an ongoing dialogue about pornography, about sex, about relationships, about misogyny, and about love.
There are, in this dialogue, two competing sides. There is what I consider my more idealistic side, what I sometimes fear is naive (in fact, what I've been told is naive by pro-feminists even), and yet still can't decide is actually wrong or any more unreasonable than any desires for utopia.
Every so often I'm forced to reckon with the way popular culture depicts sexual relationships between men and women. Most recently, it was the tragedy in Pennsylvania where a man who blogged about how cruel women as a whole were for not having sex with him targeted and killed women at a gym. Men all over the internet expressed horror at what he did, but expressed that they understood what he was talking about, that yes, women are uppity, and yes, women do dismiss the wrong guys, and yes, women do send the wrong signals and then insult their dignity.
What's clear is that a lot of men think they have a right or entitlement to have sex with women, simply for being alive, and it's not like this is happening in a vaccuum. Most romantic comedies these days, especially those geared at men (or can we not consider, say, Judd Apatow movies to be romantic comedies, even though they involve both romance and comedy, simply because they're geared at men?), involve some sort of conquest where sex is the end prize, where sex marks the man's success in life, or success as a man, and the woman involved is fairly irrelevant at least up until the big final moments when he realizes actual feelings aren't bad to consider.
The hilarious premises are about how to trick the opposite sex into having sex with you or being in a "relationship" with you. Men and women are in competition. Sex is a game. Human connection is irrelevant. This isn't like friendship where you meet a certain person and click and then rely on each other. Romance, or sex, is strategy. It's tricks. It's like an illusion. You either win the game, or you lose it, and that has nothing to do with the particular human you are pursuing or the particular human you are, but is a matter of technique and generalized truths about each sex.
It's not hard for me, as a feminist, to see that this cultural understanding of sex can be dangerous. Which isn't to say many people will take the path Sodini took and mass-murder a group of women because he sees them as the enemy or opposing team, which is, of course, exactly how they're portrayed in this love-game. But that's not to say it doesn't have widespread negative consequences, relating to partner violence, incredible possessiveness and jealousy, the sense of entitlement to women's bodies that leads to street harrassment, sexual violence and assault, and even puritanical protection of those bodies. The plain fact is that I don't like living in a society where sex boundaries are not only set up like this, but depicted as cute and funny in popular culture.
I think the love-game portrayal I described above is part of this problem, and I think porn is another part of it. A piece of culture created solely to sexually gratify the onlooker. How can there be a human connection when only one human is involved? The other is merely a performer on the stage, a character, sometimes just an object of gratification. It's not just masturbation that relies on the fantasy of another person, it's a sole focus on the image of a voiceless stranger.
I don't say all this expecting that, ideally, every sexual act would be the culmination of years of getting to know the other person, of knowing them deeply, and of wanting to love them. I don't pretend to advocate against completely casual sex between two people. What I want though, is the acknowledgement between both parties that their partners are humans, who are fully dimensional, with depth, and thoughts, and likes and dislikes and vulnerabilities.
And so, I say, when asked about the issue of pornography, that I'm not anti-porn in the sense that I'm actively campaigning to shut it down or outlaw it or even to chastise those who consume and produce it. But I do see its creation as a symptom of a society in which sexual relationships are not seen as fully human, and therefore, I see it as something that would not exist if my dream of a feminist utopia were realized. People would no longer get off by looking at one dimensional, voiceless, personless representations of the opposite sex, because they'd want sex to involve mutual humanity...(You have to already share my belief here that our sexual desires and the things that gratify us are, at least in part, constructed by the society we live in. If you disagree we'll discuss in another post)
And this, of course, is where the nay sayers, and, in fact, my own, other, nay saying strain of thought catch up with me. "But wait, it says, is there really ever going to be a time when people won't need visual stimulation to feel sexually satisfied when . Maybe if the actors in porn were just portrayed more like real people and there were real stories and realistic encounters it would be better. Maybe we could just improve porn. Maybe even in a completely economically just society, where education was available and free, and jobs were not in short supply, some people would still want to act in porn, and maybe in a society with no sexual baggage and a totally human outlook on sex, people would still want porn. "
Yes, maybe I'm being naive and judgmental about why people watch porn and why people act in porn. It's possible. And I can't help but be insecure about the fact that I did grow up in a subculture with pretty puritan views of sexuality. Could I have internalized that and could I just be trying to justify that from a feminist perspective? It could be. But I just don't think that's it. I don't FEEL like I have issues with sexuality. I don't judge people who have different sexual behaviors than myself. I just don't think sex should be about conquest. I don't think it should be a sign of someone's success as a person or a man or a woman or a social being. And not because I believe in some ancient view or morality or want to shame anyone for experiencing pleasure. Honestly, it's just because I think anything else is dangerous.
I can't shake the idea that porn and all those comedies I talked about above are not signs of a healthy societal view of sexual relationships and that they breed bad ideas about who gets to have pleasure and how. When we think of ourselves as having a right to have sex with others and players in a big game where sex is the prize, dehumanizing partners and potential partners seems like a natural consequence.
I'm at a stalemate with myself in this conversation. What knowledge or life experience would make me land more firmly on one side or the other?
How did we get so delusional?
At what point does the discourse about healthcare in the mainstream media send me into a hair-pulling, teeth gnashing, fit of rage?
About the same time CNN uncritically says things like this to characterize the opponents of reform:
Specter remained calm most of the time, except when a woman asked if the bill meant a 74-year-old man with cancer would be written off by an overhauled health care system.
"Nobody 74 is going to be written off because they have cancer," he responded angrily. "That's a vicious, untrue rumor."
Is a news outlet no longer capable of then following up with comment on whether or not the bill allows for 74 year olds with cancer to be left to die?! Is it not a matter of fact or fiction? There is in fact a bill in public. There are in fact reporters capable of reading. Let's not leave this as a "here's what this side says, here's what that side says," issue if it isn't one. There's a truth here. Fucking write about it.
In particular, Republicans and some Democrats reject a government-funded public health insurance option, arguing it would lead to a government takeover of the health care system.No comment on whether a public option actually could elad to a government takeover, what they actually mean by a government takeover, whether these claims are legitimate or just political fuckery. That's just the end of the article.
I can't take much more of the healthcare debate. I imagine being politically conscious in the early 90s fight could've killed me.
p.s. If I hear one more person say they don't want the government taking away their healthcare OPTIONS I will freak the fuck out. WHAT OPTIONS DO YOU HAVE?! I've never had options. I was either lucky enough to have coverage or unlucky to not have coverage at every point in my life. It has always been completely out of my hands. And what's certain is that when I have had coverage, I haven't had any choices, no say in what that coverage is, in what it covers, in what my deductible is. It's either being paid for by someone or it's not and I have to live with it.
Options presented to you by a for-profit health insurance industry are not options. That's not freedom of choice.
Ok, ok. /rant
Monday, August 10, 2009
Lance Selfa Rip of the Current Health non-Reform
(via socialistworker.org)
In a way, I wish that Selfa was wrong about this but he's not. I can't tell you how many times I've heard from liberal friends that the problem is Max Baucus, Blue Dogs, Republicans, etc. Yes, they're all blowhards. Yes, they're doing their best to thwart reform. But they're not alone. Obama and friends are doing plenty to screw this up as well. I think most of Selfa's criticisms are right on -Obama didn't try to mobilize popular support, but tried to broker a deal among elites with the assumption that if he played their game that they would bargain, with the result that we get 'something' without having to start a fight with Big Pharma, the insurance companies, etc."Given this constrained vision--where the "progressive agenda" becomes increasingly melded with the White House's agenda--even liberal complaints about Obama's concessions to corporations and "centrist" politicians fall by the wayside. Perversely, of course, this gives even greater license to the White House to make concessions to business and conservative politicians.
Until there is independent pressure from a mobilized social movement, combined with a real political challenge from Obama's left, the type of reforms--even the prospect of reforms--are likely to follow the pattern we're currently seeing in the health care debate."
There's also the related issue of Obama's rhetoric: he speaks about reform in terms of technical points which are admitedly important in some respects, but he leaves the normative punch of why we need health reform largely out of the message.
I agree wtih Selfa. I think most liberals know all of this, but feel strongly that the Democratic Party is the best that we can do. If not Obama, then John McCain. If not Harry Reid, then Mitch McConnell. But where does this leave anyone remotely close to the Left in this country? Is there no other viable option other than to sit down, shut up and resign ourselves to health care 'reform' that's beginning to look less progressive than RomneyCare?
This is a serious dilemma, and its not hard to see where the liberals have a point here.
But its also not difficult to see that the meagre electoral Left (to the extent that there even is one) has no bargaining chips. They are marginalized in the Democratic Party. Its even worse for voters, who don't get to vote on legislation but only between a canditate from one of the two dominant parties. The voting Left is powerless; the Democrats never fear for a second that they won't get these votes, because they know that these people have nowhere else to turn. They know that anyone remotely progressive despises the Republicans and that that alone will turn them out. And it does, I've seen it. I've seen anti-war friends committed to mariage equality and social justice campaign for right-wing Democrats committed to war, homophobia and cutting funding for education. I'm hardly exempt here; I've helped out and cast many votes for 'centrist' and 'Blue Dog' Democrats.
Still, the ISO invocation to 'build an independent social movement' is appealing yet frustrating. The reason that many people don't join an independent social movement isn't that they don't agree with the ISO here; its tough work that pits one against a heavily-funded institution with shock-troops who themselves claim to be 'progressive'. Most media, 'pundits', etc. won't even take note of what you're doing- and if they do they'll just distort you. Meanwhile, they'll be playing up the next election like its the most important even of the century and making you look more and more irrelevant. Its not an easy struggle. Its not easy to see what an independent Left-wing organization should be try primarily to do -its not claer what the goal should be if the organization lacks the ability to threaten to take votes from the Democrats. Of course, building a separate party is another dilemma entirely. I'm not saying its not worth trying again -there are probably many lessons to be learned from the demise of the Green Party. Still, I'm not convinced that's the place to begin putting time and energy.
The thing that intrigued me the most about the EFCA, wasn't that the big unions would get more members. In general, I'd rather that they did, but this wasn't the most interesting part of the card check. Think of the political reverberations of having more people join a union and encounter some of the values (solidarity, community, equality) that accompany the experience of striking together, fighting for a contract, etc.
Alas, I don't know what the right way forward is. But I'm not getting sucked into the next round of elections where I am supposed to bite the bullet and canvass for Democrats (no matter how conservative).
Staying in Bed with Big Pharma
Some free market this is. From Robert Reich at Salon:
Last week, after being reported in the Los Angeles Times, the White House confirmed it has promised Big Pharma that any healthcare legislation will bar the government from using its huge purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. That's basically the same deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it's proven a bonanza for the drug industry. A continuation will be an even larger bonanza, given all the boomers who will be enrolling in Medicare over the next decade. And it will be a gold mine if the deal extends to Medicaid, which will be expanded under most versions of the healthcare bills now emerging from Congress, and to any public option that might be included.
[...]I don't want to be puritanical about all this. Politics is a rough game in which means and ends often get mixed and melded. Perhaps the White House deal with Big Pharma is a necessary step to get anything resembling universal health insurance. But if that's the case, our democracy is in terrible shape. How soon until big industries and their Washington lobbyists have become so politically powerful that secret White House-industry deals like this are prerequisites to any important legislation? When will it become standard practice that such deals come with hundreds of millions of dollars of industry-sponsored TV advertising designed to persuade the public that the legislation is in the public's interest? (Any Democrats and progressives who might be reading this should ask themselves how they'll feel when a Republican White House cuts such deals to advance its own legislative priorities.)
We're on a precarious road -- and wherever it leads, it's not toward democracy.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Racism, Class Power and Democracy
Within the framework of neoliberal 'development' prescriptions, it is 'bad policy' to enact laws in a 'developing nation' which imposed higher taxes or regulations on foreign corporations operating in that nation. Imagine the following semi-true scenario: we're in South Africa in 1995. After decades of oppression and Apartheid, finally universal suffrage is extended and a Left-wing government promising to fight for universal health care is elected by a margin of 80%-20%.
In this case the democratically-elected government of a sovereign nation has an overwhelming majority and has the strong popular backing of more than 80% of the electorate. The Constitution of the country states that the legislative branch of government, backed by a democratic mandate, has the sole power to make laws as it sees fit within the limits set by the Constitution.
Unfortunately this isn't how it works under capitalism. Say the hugely popular government wants to impose a new corporate tax to fund a social program aiming to provide health services. Say they have more than the enough votes to easily pass the law.
We can imagine the companies who would be taxed saying in response: if you tax us heavily we will leave the country. Capital flight, massive job losses and economic turmoil will be the result. Still want to try and tax us?
Make no mistake: this is a threat. And it is one that no government could possibly ignore. As soon as the government heeds the threat, it becomes clear that the legislative branch is neither as sovereign or powerful as it would seem on paper. Despite overwhelming popular support, a small clique of capitalists, themselves accountable to no democratic vote, have an inordinate amount of leverage over what becomes law (and this is already assuming that they haven't done anything to game the process via lobbying). In this case political power is subject to democratic principles but economic/class power is not. The result is that undemocratic concentrations of economic power have bargaining clout and leverage over democratic political institutions. This is especially lopsided in 'developing' nations whose economies may depend very heavily on foreign investment.
But neoliberals see no problem here. They would merely comment that it would be 'bad policy' to raise the taxes on corporations. Instead the job of governmental institutions is to create a 'good business climate' and create conditions favourable to large accumulation of profits by business. This will bring jobs, investment, etc. Democracy may actually get in the way of this process, according to the neoliberal line, so it is not particularly useful in 'development' to have wide democratic participation. Let the capitalists and 'experts' organize and coordinate participation.
Now fast forward to Chicago in the early 1980s. The demographics break down roughly as follows: 35% black, 35% latino, 30% white. But you would never know this from glancing at Chicago's political institutions.
In 1976 Lord/His Majesty/Mayor Richard J. Daley keeled over dead while in office. By law, the man designated to succeed him was President Pro Tempore of the City Council, William Frost. But because Frost was black, he was literally locked out of meetings and deliberations set in place by the white-majority City Council to determine who would be acting-Mayor after Daley died. A couple of days later Michael Bilandic, a white man, was declared acting-Mayor.
A power-struggle was set off within the Chicago Machine over who would be the next Big Guy. Ruptures in the Machine opened up space for a challenge from below from Chicago's black and latino majority. Over 100,000 black and Latino voters were registered for the first time to vote by community organizers. Harold Washington, a U.S. Congressman at the time, surprised everyone when he eked out a close victory in the Democratic primary (which, in Chicago, is usually tantamount to winning the election; The Republican Party is meaningless here).
Harold Washington, Mayor 1983-87
The most frequently-aired argument against Washington was something like the following: if you elect a black man, Chicago will "become another Detroit". Jobs will go, High-rise public housing projects will be crop up everywhere, crime will sky-rocket, and another wave of severe White-flight will devastate the city's tax base.
You might say that allowing the government of Chicago to actually reflect the make-up of the people who live there would be 'bad policy'.
Now I see a lot of similarities between the imagined South Africa case and the Chicago case. In both cases, we see that when political democracy is actually extended enough to pose a threat to existing relations of power, counter-threats from elites follow. And they are in a position to make threats because of disproportionate concentrations of power outside the political realm. What I mean is that if whites didn't have the economic power, wealth, ability to move to the suburbs, etc. that they currently have, they wouldn't be in a position to make these kinds of "this city will become Detroit" threats. Can you imagine the black population threatening 'black flight' and telling white elites that they'd better listen up and change their ways? Of course not, because the black population in Chicago is not in the position of power that white elites are.
This is an unbelievably unjust state of affairs. In effect, the black population is told the following: either you stay in your place and accept that the majority-white Machine is in charge, or you can feel the wrath of disinvestment, job loss, white flight, and economic turmoil. Either we run the show, or you can have another Detroit.
What's interesting is that the "Detroit card" isn't really a cynical threat for many whites in Chicago. They believe it. They are scared, paranoid and worried that the "urban crisis" of the late 1960s/early 70s could happen again. And this is why so many whites who have qualms about Daley and the Machine vote for it again and again. But whether or not whites vote, a 30% sector of the population should not be able to even cast a veto on potential mayoral candidates. Yet the reality is that this 30% constituency largely calls the shots. Democracy? I don't think so.
Friday, August 7, 2009
GritTV: Rep. Weiner puts Single Payer on the Table
I'm not sure I understand the logic of getting a vote on Single-Payer. I think I'm sympathetic to the argument that Single-Payer should be part of the discussion to give the Left leverage over the conversation, in effect, pushing the entire debate to the Left. But what will an up or down vote do? I'm not sure I see the point. I suppose any publicity is better than none, and perhaps forcing a discussion by any means necessary is what's going here, but I'm not clear if this is the motivation or not.
I must say, as disgusted as I was with the modesty of Obama's plan and the way in which Single-Payer was locked out of forums purporting to 'put all options on the table', I am ready to start struggling just to get Obama's plan passed. Faced with the prospect of yet another right-wing foot-dragging assault on reform, I think I am ready to table medicare-for-all demands for the moment and start struggling against these kooks who watch Glen Beck or whatever. Perhaps the best way to participate is to air the medicare-for-all argument in order to balance out the complete morons who are whining about 'stalinism', etc.
Thoughts?
Thursday, August 6, 2009
G.A. Cohen (1941-2009)
The Canadian-born political philosopher and author of the 1978 Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense, Gerald Allen Cohen, died yesterday of a stroke. My encounter with his work as an undergraduate was an important part of my intellectual and political development, and I regret that I never had an opportunity to meet him. Despite having never met him, I was pained by a feeling of loss when I read of his death last evening.
I read KMTH as well as If You're an Egalitarian How Come You're So Rich? and History, Freedom and Labour at a time when I had come to believe, as a result of the general trajectory of Anglo-American political philosophy, that Marxism was an intellectual dead end. Cohen's sharp critical writings and intellectual rigour changed this considerably. It wasn't that I'd read and been dissatisfied with other radical thinkers on the Left at that time: I simply hadn't read them for the reason that Left politics had little voice or presence in the mainstream philosophical literature.
I recall reading Robert Nozick's defense of right-wing libertarianism in Anarchy, State and Utopia and feeling really disturbed by the position it put me in. On the one hand, I've never had any sympathy for Nozick's pro-capitalist libertarian conclusions, but many of the arguments he put forward against egalitarianism were formidable. The eye-opening thing for me was that the replies from the liberal-left, primarily from John Rawls, always left me wanting a more forceful and fundamental rejection of the trajectory of Nozick's project. It seemed to me at the time, given the way I felt about Nozick's brand of bare-knuckles capitalism, that Rawls shared too much with Nozick for me to feel comfortable with his arguments against libertarians. I was left with a series of questions: What about capitalism itself? What about racial oppression? What about the wage system as such? What about ownership of the means of production? What about class power?
It was at this time that I read Cohen's book Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality in which he took Nozick seriously and gave a sharp socialist response to many of the central premises of Nozick's neoliberal tract. What was most influential for me was that Cohen didn't take for granted that 'capitalism is the best we can do'. I felt like this opened up an entire universe of possible political options that had hitherto been unfathomable within the horizons of the language of "liberal vs. conservative" that dominates so much of the narrow discussion of politics in the US. In a way I suddenly felt like politics Left of 'liberal' was a live option.
I've always found Cohen's writings to be tightly argued, refreshingly Left-wing, readable, as well as acerbic and witty to boot. His most recent effort, Rescuing Equality and Justice, is no exception. This is a serious loss.
(PS: keep an eye open for the book pictured above "Why not socialism?" which will be coming out this month in a similar format to Harry Frankfurt's popular "On Bullshit".)
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Racism and ambivalence
In an earlier post on "what racism is" I concluded that race is a social/political concept whose meaning and deployment has varied. Race is obviously not a concept that can be cashed out entirely in terms of biology or genes; on the contrary, thinking that it can is tantamount to a rather potent form of racism. There I drew on some of Ali Rattansi's excellent Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2007), which I'd like to share more of below.
Opening a discussion about Columbus's 'discovery' of two Caribbean islands, Rattansi points out that: "One of the lessons of the history of 'race' is an appreciation of the extent to which European colonizers saw not the cultures of the colonized as they were, but as they expected them to be."
Of course, the occupants of the islands were sophisticated peoples with deft agricultural, maritime, fishing and many other skills. But when Columbus showed up (who, incidentally, believed in 'one-eyed men with tails, mermaids, and wild tribal monsters), he saw "a primitive people, unclothed and dark, and therefore close to nature and uncivilized."
Nonetheless, Rattansi points out, "contrary to much of the writing about early encounters (with the occupants of the islands), Columbus's reactions were by no means entirely negative." Indeed Columbus's reaction tended to be expressive of a deep ambivalence about the native peoples of the islands: "he oscillated between seeing the natives as either completely and extraordinarily good or essentially wicked".
This ambivalence, we should take note, has persisted in different forms throughout the subsequent history of racism. As Rattansi puts it: "for the subsequent history of racism, it is vital to note this constitutive duality and ambivalence, and to understand its characteristically tangential relation to what these strangers might really be like".
I found this to be extremely poignant. It seems to me that this kind of ambivalence is always an aspect of the way that racism manifests itself. Think of the "noble savage", or the "positive good" ideology backing Slavery in the early 1800s. Or alternatively think about myths like "asians are good at math" or "black men have large penises". All of the above are no less racist for propagating supposedly 'positive' judgments instead of 'negative' ones.
I also find Rattansi's comment interesting because of the "tangential relation" that he takes note of: this ambivalence is always from the perspective of the dominant group gazing at the marginalized 'Other', and whether it assigns 'good' or 'bad' predicates it is nonetheless already estranged from the 'Other' people in question.
To link this ambivalence up with something else I've read recently, consdier how one of Studs Terkel's interviewees puts it in Divison Street (1967): "The average white person, you ask him about integration, is the Negro equal? He wants to scream NO. But he thinks back and he's a Christian. Now he knows in his heart that he doesn't believe he's equal, but all this Christian training almost forces him to say yes. He's saying yes to a lie, but he has to come face to face with the truth some day."
This seems to ring true even today in many respects. Many white people still feel, in some sense, that the answer is "NO", however, they also have many other commitments that do not jibe with that judgment. For example, many 'average' white people also take themselves to be committed to universal suffrage, belief in the humanity of all peoples, equal rights, etc. Peoples' commitments are rarely if ever without tensions and contradictions and racism is no exception.
Another way that this ambivalence expresses itself is in the fact that racism is not often about particular people, qua individuals. Someone can 'have minority friends' or may genuinely admire non-White individuals, while at the same time expressing racist views in many other ways (I've observed too many cases of this phenomenon to count). Or think of people who are genuinely kind to people they interact with, but nonetheless can be heard uttering racist remarks about this or that group. Racism hardly ever expresses itself as an all-encompassing worldview wherein the racist person categorically hates or looks down upon all individuals of a given 'race'.
Very often I hear character defenses for people who are accused of racism: "but he can't be wholly rotten since he's done so many other good things and has lots of non-White acquaintances!". But if we understand racism as a social phenomenon with some measure of ambivalence built into it, this kind of defence is no longer relevant.
Even in the extreme case of post-WWII Germany we find that this sort of ambivalence is part of what sustains racism. Adorno argued in the late 1950s that little could be accomplished in the way of fighting anti-Semitism by means of "community meetings, encounters between young Germans and young Israelis, and other organized promotions of friendship. All too often the presupposition is that anti-Semitism in some essential way involves the Jew and could be countered through concrete experience with Jews, whereas the genuine anti-Semite is defined more by his incapacity for any experience whatsoever, by his unresponsiveness". What he means by "incapacity for experience", is that to be able to carry out the horrors of Auschwitz one cannot just hate certain people, one must be unresponsive and hollow, mechanically precise and numb, incapable of seeing people as human beings. In the Marxist tradition, of which Adorno's work is an important contribution, this social pathology is called "reification", that is, seeing human beings as exchangeable objects and social relations as relations of exchange.
The point of Adorno's observation is that the problem was not a lack of 'good' concrete interaction with individual Jews: anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Jews as individual people, it's precisely the opposite. Anti-Semitism, like other forms of racism, often amounts to failing to see the hated group as fellow human beings. We misunderstand what racism is (and where it comes from) if we think that it has only to do with an individual's assessment of other individuals.
Adorno also mentions, in the 1959 radio address from which the above was quoted, a "story of a woman who, upset after seeing a dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank, said: 'yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live.' To be sure even that was good as a first step toward understanding. But the individual case, which should stand for and raise awareness about the terrifying totality, by its very individuation became an alibi for the totality the woman forgot".
The point here is that racism is not overcome in the instance when a racist empathizes for a moment with an individual 'Other' as a fellow individual human being. Adorno points out that the experience of empathy for a fellow human being should, in fact, lead us to conclude that the entire phenomenon of racism as such is bankrupt. But unfortunately it doesn't always work like that; instead empathy for a particular individual may end right there at the individual level, and the constitutive ambivalence of the racist remains intact. The bigger picture remains opaque.
I agree totally with Rattansi when he argues in the introduction to his book that "one of the main impediments to progress in understanding racism has been the willingness of all involved to propose short, supposedly water-tight definitions of racism and to identify quickly and with more or less complete certainty who is really racist and who is not".
To wrap up this post, I'd like to make one more point. I don't mean to 'let racists off the hook' by claiming that they are really all just torn about whether to be racists. This is not the view I've examined above at all. Instead, I've rejected a straw-man account of what racism is (a thoroughgoing, uncompromising hatred of everyone who falls under the hated group in question) because it seems to me that this straw-man account shuts down many discussions about race among whites arguing over whether someone is 'really' a racist. Once we reject the idea that the object of discussion is whether a person 'really is a racist', where the set 'racist' is defined by precise and succinct necessary and sufficient conditions, there is no more need to put up with character defenses when discussing race. Many on the Right respond to accusations of racism by distorting the character of the accusation: "well, if you think he's a filthy, racist hatemonger who's never helped a non-White person in his life, then you're wrong!". They make it sound as though charges of racism are tantamount to charges of being a Nazi, with the result that those who call racism for what it is appear to be 'overreacting'.
It is precisely here that the point about ambivalence is helpful. When I notice that a family member or a co-worker says something really racist, I don't think: wow, this person is a horrible human being and they must hate everybody who isn't white. I do think, usually, that they've got some really fucked up views about race and that those views should not be tolerated. I think about how their social pathologies perpetuate injustice. I think about how disturbingly common those sorts of views are. I also think about how they can be changed and also how they came about. I think about how they are in a position of privilege to even be so blasé about race, given that they don't have to confront its oppressive character.
But none of these important thoughts that I have are helped along or illuminated by the facile attempts we often hear about whether or not someone gets the 'racist' sticker. I'm not sure I see the political payoff.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Sacha Baron Cohen: Liar
From the Guardian:
"The non-profit worker from Bethlehem who was branded a terrorist by Bruno
• Christian activist plans to sue Sacha Baron Cohen
• Interview was filmed in hotel, not refugee camp
For a supposed terrorist, Ayman Abu Aita is remarkably easy to find. It takes one phone call to set up a meeting with the man described in the hit movie Brüno as a "terrorist group leader".He sits alone at a long, white table in the gardens of the Everest hotel and restaurant in Beit Jala, a mountain village near Bethlehem. This, he says, is the "secret location" where he met Brüno, played by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen."
