Saturday, January 22, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
Confusions About Class/Race/Gender Intersectionality
No honest, reflective person would tell you that the relationship between race and class, or gender and race, etc. was a simple and straight-forward matter. It doesn't mean that there aren't better and worse views about how different oppressions are related to one another. It doesn't mean that there are "no right answers" here, or that things are so difficult that there's no hope of making headway. But it does mean that things are often more complex than a simple slogan or one-liner would have us believe.
Now having said that, I think there is something that should be extremely obvious, politically speaking, even in the absence of a fully articulated theory of how racial subordination, class exploitation, gender domination (and other modes of oppression) are interrelated.
In order to even be on the Left at all, you have to oppose unjust subordination and oppression wherever you find it. There is no excuse for anyone on the Left to be sanguine about racism or sexism. To be on the Left is to oppose class domination, sexual oppression and racism all at once, even if you lack a systematic understanding of how these are all interrelated.
Thus, there should be no confusion or hesitation about why Leftists must defend even people like Sarah Palin from sexist attacks. The reason is simple: the problem with Palin is quite obviously not that she's a woman, the reason to criticize her is that she stands for reactionary politics. Leftists cannot sit comfortably while she is criticized merely for her gender. To tolerate sexist attacks against her is to tolerate oppression, something no self-respecting Leftist could do.
Similarly, no Leftist could sit calmly while someone leveled racist slurs at Thomas Sowell or Michael Steele. Again, the problem with Sowell and Steele is that they are Right-wingers, not that they are black! No genuine Leftist could possibly sit calmly while someone called Sowell racist slurs. Confusing criticism of his politics with a criticism of his qua black person is an ugly mistake indeed, one which absolutely brushes entirely against the grain of what Leftist fight for.
Finally, consider a poor, White racist man. It is obvious that Leftists must criticize such a person for his racist views. Poor or not, racism as such can never be tolerated. But a Leftist should feel uneasy about criticisms of such a person which impugned him only insofar as he is poor. Snickering about holes in his clothes or his malnutrition is not material for a Left-wing critique. Likewise, it would certainly not be a Left criticism of such a person to say that his low wages and long hours at, say, Wal-Mart were entirely his own fault. The problem with such a person is just that he is a racist, and no apologies whatsoever should be made for criticizing him as such. No socialist would deny that sections of the White working-class have been quite racist and xenophobic indeed. What socialists could not tolerate, however, are bourgeois slanders to the effect that some are born to be poor and exploited and therefore deserve their lot.
Even in the absence of agreement on a systematic theory that explains the relations between sexism, racism and class domination, the need to avoid the above confusions should be obvious.
Obama lurches even further to the Right
SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — President Obama, sending another strong signal that he intends to make his White House more business-friendly, traveled to this industrial city on Friday to appoint a prominent corporate executive as his chief outside economic adviser, and to spotlight his efforts on job creation, in advance of next week’s State of the Union address.Read the rest here.
I'm fine with saying that this is a lurch to the Right, but let's be clear about one thing. The Obama Administration has not really done anything, ever, that seriously brushed against the grain of the "business friendly" agenda. His entire cabinet was packed full of Goldman Sachs from the very beginning. It seems, rather, that he is just packing it full of people from different factions of the ruling class. They've been ruling class all along.
Still, the post-November shakedown in Obama's cabinet has represented a further right-ward shift. Whereas before Obama might have at least paid limited lip-service to the idea of challenging Business, now he refuses to even do that. The Administration now appears to want even its public identity to be staked on a high-profile love-affair with Big Business. Whereas before Obama talked big about change (while doing his best to prevent it from happening), now he doesn't even do the big talking.
This makes the Tea-Baggers' tendency to moan and whine about "socialism" even more absurd. Obama's Administration has so much continuity with Bush's, it's obvious to anyone with their head on straight that the heaving and hawing about "excessive change" is complete bullshit.
But we know that the Tea-Baggers' refrain about "socialism" has nothing much to do with socialism as such. It is merely an empty signifier for them, used for the purposes of saying what some of them don't want to say in public. What precisely is this content that they want to pack into the empty pejorative shell that "socialism"? I suspect that the content they have in mind is, basically, every racist slur you can imagine. Like I say, some of them use the charge of "socialist" against Obama as a round-about way of saying "(n-word)", but others are comfortable coming out and make their racist fantasies explicit. I also suspect that when they accuse him of being Muslim, precisely the same motives are in place. They take labels that they think everyone should find pejorative (e.g. being a "foreigner" or an immigrant, being a Muslim, being a socialist, being against colonialism, etc.), and then use them to underhandedly assert racist filth.
The frustrating truth is that what we desperately need is a robust socialist politics in the US, but the most high-profile figures accused of being socialists are, in fact, capitalism's most devout defenders who, any rational person can see, pursue virtually identical policies to those pursued under previous Republican Administrations.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Robert Pollin: "Back to Full Employment"
Read his generally excellent Boston Review article here.
This is a much-needed corrective to the consensus among Democrats and Republicans regarding the "need" for austerity and tax gifts for the rich. Pollin also does nice job of ridiculing the heinously flawed neoclassical analysis of employment (e.g. the neoclassical view that "it is a fundamental posit of our theory that all unemployment is necessarily voluntary").
But there are problems. He rightly notes that the obstacles to full-employment aren't merely technical or economic, but political. That is, he rightly says that the class compromise needed to make Keynesian social-democracy work is politically unstable, because capital eventually gets upset and breaks the pact as the political and economic confidence of workers increases.
For me, this is the single most important objection to social democratic politics. Yet, having made this important point, Pollin strays from it and suggests elsewhere that "healthy profits can be made" under such an arrangement. There is a question of how to read this claim: is he merely making certain kinds of moves to try to win over those who aren't yet ready for the claim that capitalism as such is the problem?
He is also a bit naive about Sweden I think. He basically gets things right, but underestimates the role of capital in thwarting the class compromise and he misses a more general point. That point is this: an inherently unstable system that only functions when capital is happy with it's rate of profit is a recipe for disaster. Even if capital continues to play nice for a while and maintain the class compromise, there are other sources of instability that threaten to upset capital. Inflation is only one example. To be sure, Pollin does point to the global political pressure on Sweden to adopt a neoliberal model, but the fact that such a move looked reasonable to Swedish policy makers speaks to an unjust configuration of class power on the one hand, and the contradictions of premising all economic well-being on decent profits for capital on the other. In other words, Pollin appears to have an unduly sanguine picture of what's possible within the confines of the capitalist state on the one hand, and doesn't take seriously enough the internal contradictions of capitalism as a system on the other.
Still, this is the kind of debate I'm happy to see in public as compared with what we usually have to stomach (e.g. Democrats asking each other "how much should we screw workers and cut services?"). We should be having more debates like this: between Keynesian left-liberals and more radical critics of capitalism. So it is more than a little frustrating that the "forum" put together by Boston Review to discuss Pollin's argument appears to have no serious Left critics at all. Though Pollin spends time discussing Marx and the left-wing arguments against achieving full-employment under capitalism, it doesn't appear that any of the participants in the forum will be defending such a position. This is a shame.
The Right response to the Pollin piece is nauseating and not even worth responding to. Reihan Salam's response is typical neo-classical garbage. He begins by acting skeptical about the idea "neoliberalism" suggesting that it is not a real historical phenomenon but a bit of a left-wing boogey-man. He is so far off-base in understanding how the world works, it's hardly worth reading what he thinks should be done to fix it. His argument seems to be that we need to "remove barriers" so that workers will get up off their "lazy" butts and go get a job. I don't really know what to say to that. Where does one begin? I sort of just want to ask Salam if he's ever heard of this place called "earth". Seriously, how many times over does this tripe have to be refuted and discredited before we stop wasting our time. To put it in a slightly klunky Marxist way, the only reason it still gets a hearing is because of its functional utility in maintaining unequal relations of power.
Thus, the best way to make sense of the neoclassical stuff is not to take it as a set of serious arguments, because in many ways that's not what it is. The best way to make sense of it is to understand it as an ideology, in the Marxist sense. There are numerous dimensions in which such an approach is fruitful: from remarks in the Grundrisse regarding ideological types of abstraction, to arguments to the effect that neoclassical economics merely expresses the point of view of the capitalist, i.e. that neoclassical economics is merely a commentary on a capitalist firm's financial accounting practices. Allowing the neoclassical view to assert itself as a "reasonable" participant in the debate is a bit like tolerating "intelligent designers" in scientific discussions.
Tunisian Ruling Party Was a Member of the SI
As though we needed more reasons to think less of the tepid, soft-neoliberal Socialist International, it has recently come out that the repressive ruling party of Tunisia, Ben Ali's Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) was a member of the organization until they were recently expelled. I find this unsurprising, given imperialist, neoliberal tilt of other member parties like Labour Party in Britain, the German SPD, the French PS, etc.
Sarkozy and the French Right, of course, are already trying to use this to deflect (entirely legitimate) criticisms of their own imperialist stances toward Tunisia. Though the deflection is clearly an illegitimate move on the part of the French Right, there is more than a grain of truth to their accusation that the French "center-left" is similarly guilty. This is no stain on socialist politics as such- on the contrary, this is just another indication of what we already knew: that the neoliberal French Parti Socialiste is a bankrupt and politically conservative force in France. Their perpetual triangulating overtures to the Right make it hard for one to even make the case that they ought to reasonably included within the socialist tradition at all. The genuine socialist tradition consists neither in the opportunist, class-collaborationist politics of Social Democracy, nor the bureaucratic, top-down trajectory of Stalinism.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Two Correctives on China
There's a lot of "clash of the superpowers" talk amidst Hu Jintao's visit to Washington (e.g. see here). The anxieties about "decline" and the dispassionate matter-of-factness with which global domination is discussed in the articles is sickening. The confusion about how the US has "democracy", but may, in fact, be worse off for it is equally sickening since it both distorts the meaning of democracy (suggesting that the US already has it in full) and then proceeds to devalue it (e.g. "maybe democracy isn't important since China is doing fine"). So here are two correctives (I'm sure there are others) to all of this non-sense:
First, see this interview with Noam Chomsky. Below is a bit of what he had to say:There’s a lot of talk about a global shift of power: India and China are going to become the great powers, the wealthiest powers, and so on. Again, one should be pretty reserved about that. For example, there is a lot of talk about the U.S. debt, that China holds so much of the U.S. debt. Actually, Japan holds more of the debt. There have been occasions when China passed it, but most of the time, and right now, Japan holds most of the debt, which shows you just how powerful a weapon it is. The sovereign wealth funds of the Emirates, when you put them together, they probably hold more debt than China.
Next, see this excellent LRB piece by Perry Anderson. He nicely skewers the complimentary imperialist ideologies of "sinomania" and "sinophobia". Here's an excerpt:
Furthermore, the whole framework of discussion is misleading. We’re sort of taught to talk about the world as a world of states, which, if you study international relations theory, there’s what’s called “realist international relations theory,” which says there is an anarchic world of states, and states pursue their national interest. It’s all mythology. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. There are a few common interests, like we don’t want to be destroyed. But for the most part they have very different interests. Part of the doctrinal system in the U.S. is to pretend that we’re all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that’s radically false...
...So it’s not a novel insight to say that power—now it’s not in the hands of the merchants and manufacturers, but in those of financial institutions and multinationals. But it’s the same. And they have an interest in Chinese development. So if you’re, say, the CEO of Wal-Mart or Dell or HP or whatever, they’re perfectly happy to have very cheap labor in China working under hideous conditions and no environmental constraints. If they have what’s called economic growth, that’s fine.
Furthermore, China’s economic growth is a bit of a myth. China is an assembly plant. China is a major exporter, but while the trade deficit with China has gone up, the trade deficit with Japan, Singapore, and Korea has gone down. The reason is, there is a regional production system developing. The more advanced countries of the region, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, send advanced technology, parts, and components to China, which uses its cheap labor force to assemble it and send it out. And U.S. producers do the same thing: they send parts and components to China, those guys assemble it, they export it. Within the doctrinal framework, that’s called Chinese exports, but it’s regional exports, including the United States exporting to itself.
Once we break out of the framework of national states as if they’re unified entities with no internal divisions within them, then there is a global shift of power, but it’s from the global workforce to the owners of the world, transnational capital, financial institutions, and it’s global. So, for example, the share of working people in national income has by and large declined in the last couple of decades, but apparently in China it’s declined maybe more than anywhere, more than most places. There is certainly economic growth in China and India, hundreds of millions of people live a lot better than they did before. But then there are another couple of billion who don’t. In fact, it’s getting worse for them in many ways...Too far away to be a military or religious threat to Europe, it generated tales not of fear or loathing, but wonder. Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay, fixed fabulous images that lasted down to Columbus setting sail for the marvels of Cathay. But when real information about the country arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries, European attitudes towards China tended to remain an awed admiration, rather than fear or condescension. From Bayle and Leibniz to Voltaire and Quesnay, philosophers hailed it as an empire more civilised than Europe itself: not only richer and more populous, but more tolerant and peaceful, a land where there were no priests to practise persecution and offices of the state were filled according to merit, not birth...
I think Chomsky is right to say that "the who framework of discussion is misleading". Almost every article I read encourages me (as a citizen of the US) to adopt a "hard" realist conception of international relations and cheer for "my team". And the "soft" view is every bit as nauseating. Often, those who defend China from superpower chauvinism in the US merely accept this whole misleading framework and side with the other "team". This is often how the "sinomaniac" position gets articulated: "China is the future", "we [i.e. the US ruling class] have a lot we can learn from China [i.e. the Chinese ruling class]", etc. If we refuse to look critically at how power is actually configured in China, if we refuse to see the exploitation lodged at the heart of economic system, then we dull our capacity to see it everywhere else as well. It's entirely possible to reject the imperialist gaze cast by Washington without identifying with the ruling class in China.
...Respect gave way to contempt, mingled with racist alarm – Sinomania capsizing into Sinophobia. By the early 20th century, after eight foreign forces had stormed their way to Pekin to crush the Boxer Uprising, the ‘yellow peril’ was being widely bandied about among press and politicians, as writers like Jack London or J.H. Hobson conjured up a future Chinese takeover of the world.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Equality, Not Civility
In the wake of the horrifying shooting in Arizona, there seems to be a wide mainstream consensus that we need to "clean up our political discourse" and try to be more "civil". Civility could be the word of the week.
Terrible though the shooting was, it would be naive to think that it caused any serious shifts in the ways that our system functions. Obama and the Democrats, who've favored narratives about "coming together", "bipartisanship", and "reaching across the aisles" for many months, have now found the perfect opportunity to trumpet their favored ideological maneuver. Make no mistake- when this awful event happened, somewhere there was a meeting called about how Obama should respond to the event, what "narratives" he should lean on, how he should sell himself, etc. Nothing he says on Television is random. It's all manicured and fitted to the political strategies agreed upon in the Administration.
Likewise, the Republicans responded in a similar fashion. They thought long and hard about what they should say in mass media outlets, and crafted their rhetoric accordingly. The interpretation of this horrific event is political.
To be clear- my beef is not that such moves were political. I'm not decrying the "politicizing" of putatively apolitical phenomena. My point is that such moves cannot but be political- the only questions is: which politics? In other words- who are the interested parties involved? what are the relations of power among them? what is their narrative about how their present power is legitimate? in light of this what do they aim to accomplish? and so forth.
Now, when someone tells you that something is apolitical, look out. That is a classic way of trying to cover up latent conflicts and unequal social relations while silencing the grievances of the oppressed. Let us not forget why the feminist slogan "the personal is political" was so important: it confidently rejected the patronizing dismissal of patriarchal definitions of what politics is and isn't, and declared that a large (hitherto unscrutinized) sphere of modern life was worth thinking about politically. The point was that "personal" relationships, the family and gendered divisions of labor were part of a political system, they were part of unequal power relations that were institutionalized at home, in workplaces, churches, etc.. As such, the feminist claim was that they weren't merely "individual problems", problems with particular women "not being able to cope", or whatever. They were social and political problems that required collective solutions. In this way, feminists began to undermine the dismissive patriarchal refrain that such "private" issues were not political, that they did not deserve to be discussed publicly, etc. Light was thus thrown upon previously hidden domination and hierarchy.
Something similar is going on right now. We're being asked to forget about everything political and embrace a putatively apolitical injunction to be "civil". But what is civility? Why is it supposedly important?
If we take the mainstream media at its word, civility is merely a way of talking. The injunction to be civil, then, means don't talk in a "mean" way towards others. Given the apolitical character of this injunction, it could very well be interpreted to mean: "Sure, be a racist in private if you like, but just talk in a friendly way when in public". "Tolerance" is another buzzword here: but what is it we are supposed to tolerate? Universal tolerance is itself an incoherent idea: surely endorsing it means you can't tolerate intolerance. After all, those pedaling the virtues of tolerance and civility have some target in mind when they pedal it, that is, there is some element of our discourse that they see as intolerable. For my part, I agree with them that the violent, racist fantasies and metaphors commonly used among the Right are intolerable. I agree that our society should not take lightly the fact that the xenophobic, racist Right believes that Obama isn't "American", and I'm given chills by the fact that gun sales jumped up 50% upon Obama's election victory in 2008. As Gary Younge notes:
Polls last year revealed that a majority of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim and a socialist who "wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one-world government" while two-thirds of Republicans either believe or are not sure that the president is "a racist who hates white people", and more than half believe or are not sure that "he was not born in the US" and that he "wants the terrorists to win".Or, as Richard Seymour has put it:
Palin is often quite explicit when she wants an enemy of the 'real America', the pristine white America of lore, to be assassinated. So is Pat Robertson, you may recall. Assassination is as American as the hackneyed patriotic schtick that often seems to motivate it. This isn't about the gallows humour of the Republican right which consists precisely of knowing, wink-wink in-jokes (gun-sight imagery, 'Reload', and so on) about the barbarism that already exists, and which they have done so much to cultivate. It's about what the jokes advert to. The problem is not whether and how to domesticate political language, as some have wrongly assumed, but how to fight back against the political forces that are fomenting this bilious filth.The rise of this hard-right, racist and nationalist political tendency in the US is a social/political phenomenon that must be taken seriously. It is not a matter of the words used in our political culture. And neither is it a matter of excessive "polarization" that a vague call for unity could mitigate. This is an institutionalized, well-funded political movement that is built on racism, prejudice, "gun rights" and "angry white man" furor. The problem with this movement isn't that it isn't sufficiently "civil" in how it expresses itself. The problem with it is that it exists at all. The problem is that it is built upon racism and hatred all the way down. If we lack the public language to articulate this fact politically, we leave racism and far-right hatred unchecked and unchallenged.
Imagine you are a Muslim-American, or that you are an undocumented immigrant, drawing the fierce ire and hatred of these violent Tea-Bagger-type groups. How would you feel if you were told that the problem was simply that you weren't civil enough towards such right-wing elements, that you should seek to tolerate such hate? How would you feel if you were told to tolerate and embrace the quasi-fascist Minutemen vigilantes and the politicians who back them? Surely such tolerance would most certainly fall under the heading of Marcuse's felicitous phrase: "repressive tolerance".
I want no part of this. I believe in full equality and solidarity, not civility. I don't want more civil and friendly oppressors, I want for there not to be oppressors lording over us at all. I don't want a more friendly ruling class that speaks in more compassionate tongues, I want for there to be no ruling class above us at all. What I (and the socialist Left) stand for is a robust notion of equality. The kind of equality that resists anyone placing their boot on someone else's neck. The kind of equality that brushes against the grain of the most unequal society on the planet. The kind of equality that stands opposed to all forms of domination, oppression, exploitation and intimidation. The kind of equality that is only possible when power is distributed widely and equitably, when the groundwork is laid for relations of reciprocity and respect (as against the competitive, atomized, antagonistic social relations encouraged under capitalism). I'm talking about the kind of equality based on the belief that an injury to one is an injury to all. When we say "no human being is illegal" and stand uncompromisingly with every single person "sin papeles", we do so on the basis of a strong belief in the value of equality. When socialists say "another world is possible", this is what they're talking about. None of this has the least bit to do with bourgeois civility. I'll be civil once we have genuine equality. But as long as some subordinate others to their arbitrary will, whether its through racist oppression, sexism, neo-colonial ventures, international financial institutions, or class domination, I don't think there's a good reason to mince words when describing such phenomena for what they are. If you stand for reciprocity and solidarity- you can't be silent or neutral. You have to stand up for those who can't stand up for themselves and demand that they be liberated.
As Harold Pinter once put it:
There exists today widespread propaganda which asserts that socialism is dead. But if to be a socialist is to be a person convinced that the words "the common good" and "social justice" actually mean something; if to be a socialist is to be outraged at the contempt in which millions and millions of people are held by those in power, by "market forces," by international financial institutions; if to be a socialist is to be a person determined to do everything in his or her power to alleviate these unforgivably degraded lives, then socialism can never be dead because these aspirations will never die.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Palin and Right-Wing Violence
Dave Zirin has a chilling piece at SW about Sarah Palin's defense of using violence in political rhetoric from last March. He quotes an online piece she wrote about the March Madness basketball tournament last year in order to point out how common violent metaphor is in sports. Apparently, this is justification for using violent metaphor in politics.
To the teams that desire making it this far next year: Gear up! In the battle, set your sights on next season's targets! From the shot across the bow--the first second's tip-off --your leaders will be in the enemy's crosshairs, so you must execute strong defensive tactics. You won't win only playing defense, so get on offense! The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons--your Big Guns--to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win. Focus on the goal and fight for it. If the gate is closed, go over the fence. If the fence is too high, pole vault in. If that doesn't work, parachute in. If the other side tries to push back, your attitude should be "go for it." Get in their faces and argue with them. (Sound familiar?!) Every possession is a battle; you'll only win the war if you've picked your battles wisely. No matter how tough it gets, never retreat, instead RELOAD!Zirin points out how overstated these metaphors are. Though he concedes that there is often military-language in sports, notably football, he notes that he has never seen such an array of metaphors before to describe college basketball. He also points out how much white privilege she has to invoke violent imagery in politics. If she were a Muslim woman, he remarks, nobody would tolerate this from her.
I would also add that it is patently absurd that violent metaphor in sport would excuse violent metaphor in politics, since, you know, politics are really serious business that people have historically been moved to violence by. This happens much more rarely in sports, especially American sports.
Yesterday, Palin defended herself against accusations that these metaphors of violence have been causes of the massacre in Arizona. Most absurdly, she declares, "Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them." Now certainly this cannot be true. She would certainly never say that the acts of 9/11 hijackers begin and end with them. No, rather, they begin with something called Islamofascism and end with the invasion and occupation of multiple countries. How can any act of violence begin and end with the invidual who committed it? We're not allowed to note any social context that may have made the violence possible or even encouraged it?
Now, rhetoric like Zirin points out from Palin is being cited by many as a potential cause of the Arizona shooting, as contributing to a political atmosphere in the state that leads to a violent massacre. I think it's fair to say this rhetoric has contributed to a heightened state of aggression in U.S. political discourse, and whether there are connections between Palin's rhetoric in particular and this Loughner guy's decision to shoot people is yet to be determined by deeper investigation into his political views and motives. But to claim that the violent actor in this case is solely responsible for his violence defies logic, as well as her own previous assertions about terrorism.
Reject austerity, tax the rich
At least one state seems to be recognizing the screaming logic of dealing with budget crises by raising taxes, as the NYT reports, "Illinois Legislators Approve 66% Tax Increase":
Under the legislation, the income tax rate would, at least temporarily, rise to 5 percent from its current rate of 3 percent. Lawmakers had talked about an even steeper increase, but set that aside as the hours went by and the debate grew increasingly emotional. The rate for corporate taxes would rise to 7 percent from its current rate of 4.8 percent. As part of the deal, the state’s spending growth would be limited from one year to the next over the next four years.
Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, a Democrat whose signature would be needed to make any rate increase final, has indicated in the past he believes a tax increase is necessary.
The tax hike irked Republicans in Springfield, the state capital, and business owners around the state. Again and again, Republicans argued that the state needed to make significant spending cuts to solve its deficit before it even began considering a tax increase.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Equality, Hierarchy and Political Organization
Socialists are egalitarians. They put heavy emphasis on the value of equality. But what exactly does that mean? It means that socialists oppose social relations that are exploitative and oppressive. It means that socialists aim to bring about conditions in which all people can interact on terms of equality and respect.
Being a socialist means being prepared to struggle against class domination, gendered hierarchies, racial subordination, the oppression of LGBT people, and so forth. Socialists aim to secure equal freedom for all persons by liberating them from the arbitrary will of an oppressor (whether it's a capitalist, a colonial administrator, a Stalinist bureaucrat, a racist police officer or an abusive, patriarchal head of a family).
This means that for socialists there is a presumption against social hierarchies. But, anarchists will complain, socialists do not believe in completely horizontal forms of organization when it comes to political activism. The classic anarchist complaint against socialists who organize themselves in a roughly "Leninist" or "democratic centralist" way is that socialists aren't radical enough in their assault on hierarchy since "democratic centralism" is itself hierarchical in certain respects. Some more resolutely "horizontal" alternative, usually consensus-based decision making, is then typically held up as a more egalitarian and democratic way of organizing.
But is this objection sound? I don't think so. I think it is motivated by values that I share, but it fails to make crucial distinctions that any plausible theory of liberation must make.
As Elizabeth Anderson has argued, egalitarians, and socialists in particular, are hostile to at least three types of social hierarchy: (1) hierarchies of standing, (2) hierarchies of esteem, and (3) hierarchies of command.
(1) Hierarchies of standing are those in which oppressors are entitled to make claims on the oppressed, "to enjoy rights and privileges, while those below are denied rights or granted an inferior set of rights and privileges, and denied voice to make claims on their own, or given an inferior forum in which to make their claims." (2) Hierarchies of esteem are those in which those at the top "command honor and admiration, while those below are stigmatized and held in contempt, as objects of ridicule, loathing or disgust". (3) Hierarchies of command obtain when those at the "top issue orders to those below, who must defer and obey."
But this is not the whole story. As Anderson points out, whereas it seems reasonable to absolutely oppose hierarchies of standing, the same is not true of the other two types of hierarchy. After all, it doesn't seem inherently unjust to hold different persons in different degrees of esteem. We tend to think that there are cases in which some persons are praiseworthy and deserving of high esteem, whereas others are not. Some people are rightly worthy of contempt and loathing.
Moreover, though socialists believe in equality, would not say that all participants in a bicycle race are equally entitled to win the gold medal. So we need a further distinction here. What socialists really oppose is not hierarchy of esteem as such, but unjust hierarchies of esteem. That is, socialists oppose hierarchies of esteem based on race, class or property ownership, birth right, caste, etc.
Hierarchies of command are tricky as well, and getting clear on them is particularly relevant for adjudicating between socialists and anarchists on the question of organization. Where socialists and anarchists can agree is that there should always be a presumption against social hierarchy. That is, hierarchies are never self-justifying, are always prima facie suspicious, and we should want to have as little of them as possible. But whereas some anarchists would draw the problematic conclusion that no hierarchy is ever justified, socialists would again draw an intuitive distinction between just and unjust hierarchies.
What exactly is suspicious about hierarchies of command? According to Anderson,"to be subject to another's command threatens one's interests, as those in command are liable to serve themselves at the expense of their subordinates. It threatens subordinates' autonomy, their standing as self-governing individuals. Without substantial controls on the content of legitimate commands, subjection can also be degrading and humiliating. Even when superiors permit subordinates wide scope for acting, the latter may still live at the mercy of the former. Such a condition of subjection to the arbitrary wills of others is objectionable in itself, and has further objectionable consequences: timidity and self-censorship in the presence of superiors -or worse, groveling and self-abasement".
I think Anderson is right on target here, and I think anarchists would agree. But, and I'm with Anderson on this point, she doesn't think that all hierarchies of command are unjust. It depends on the function of the command:"Where commands regarding a particular action are not needed to coordinate conduct among different persons, egalitarians hold that adults should be free to make decisions for themselves, without having to ask anyone else's permission... But the solution of letting each choose for herself, however, cannot be generalized to the case where commands are needed to coordinate conduct among different persons. Anarchists hoped that it could be generalized. They hoped that effective coordination would arise from the spontaneous mutual aid of independent persons (Kropotkin 1906). Anarchy, however, has not proven to be a reliable arrangement for securing stable, peaceful cooperation on terms of equality among large numbers of people... some command relations are needed to secure cooperation."
In Anderson's view, and, I think, in the view of genuine socialists, the solution is that "when commands cannot be eliminated, the idea is to ensure that command relations are reciprocal, with everyone participating in making the rules that govern" such relations. That is, when commands are functionally required in order to coordinate actions, such command relations should be determined democratically. Those in a position to issue certain sorts of commands must be democratically elected by all and recallable at any moment. Also, what Anderson calls the "person/office distinction" must be respected. That is, command relations only mean that "subordinates owe obedience to their superiors in virtue of relations of office (as documented, say, in an organizational chart) rather than in virtue of obligations of personal loyalty to named superiors. Individuals thus enjoy powers of command only in virtue of their office... when a superior acts outside the color of her office, she has no authority over subordinates...off-duty in civil society, superiors and employees meet as formal equals...". Also, command relations should be granted only on the basis of merit, not because of nepotism or cronyism. Such positions cannot ever be "for sale". Finally, the command powers granted to such an office must never be unlimited. They must be constrained by a publicly agreed upon and democratically sanctioned set of rules (e.g. a constitution or platform).
For example, consider the sorts of relations necessary to run an effective rapid transit system in a major city. We would need certain hierarchies undoubtedly, but it's not as though the mere fact that you occupy a certain office in the transit system entitles you to boss people around in the grocery store or in a public park. No, your command powers would only be legitimate within a certain specific institutional setting, and even then such powers would be circumscribed by rules of various kinds.
Importantly, we must be able to prove that need for certain command relations is strictly speaking necessary. But are any such relations really necessary? I think it's rather difficult to answer this question in the negative. I'm with David Harvey, for example, in being uneasy about the prospect of power plants being run by consensus-based anarchist communes. Moreover, I'm with Anderson in thinking that the production of the sizable social surplus we need to have a just society requires the coordination of many wills by means of some limited hierarchies of command (e.g. some division of labor and coordination within, say, a factory would be necessary even in a worker-controlled and governed system). The existence of some such relations will be necessary in any large, complex society in which the productive forces are highly developed. After all, "the infeasibility of large-scale, fully-participatory democracy led Rousseau to insist that republics remain very small... but this restriction comes at grave costs".
One of those costs, I would argue, is that going small in all cases means squandering some of the potential of highly developed productive forces to eradicate all sorts of need and poverty. Socialists are thoroughly modern: we do not aim to turn the clock back to pre-agricultural societies. We want to use the high development of the productive forces to create a sustainable system that meets human needs, rather than a destructive, wasteful system that subordinates human beings and the natural environment to the iron laws of profit accumulation. All sorts of poverty and suffering are not objectively necessary in the way in which they were in, say, the Bronze Age. The technological advances we've made since then create the possibility of eradicating all poverty and want if put in the service of the public good, rather than private greed. Moreover, the high development of productive forces in modern societies has made possible all sorts of cultural production and creative expression that would not otherwise have been possible.
So where does this leave the question of political organization and the debate between anarchists and socialists? It should be clear by now that the inflexible anarchist prohibition on all hierarchies is implausible. The question, given that some hierarchies are necessary, is which hierarchies are just and which are unjust. To be sure, it might be difficult to know whether specific hierarchies are necessary or not. The only way to know is to experiment and see. Thankfully, history provides radicals with some evidence here about what works and what doesn't.
For socialists, the question of whether some hierarchies are needed must always be answered contextually. Sometimes consensus-based decision making is the best way to go. Sometimes, for instance when a strike is about to be called, consensus-based decision making is not appropriate. Similarly, in the context of a very small, local struggle, perhaps the best form of organization is one in which there are no institutionalized offices or hierarchies of command. But when you talk about putting together a national, or even international, struggle against exploitation and oppression, you need ways of coordinating action that are quite different from those required in smaller struggles. In order to be effective against a highly organized and potentially brutal ruling class, socialists must be organized and able to coordinate widely and generalize from local struggles.
In advanced capitalist societies, electing leadership and dividing up labor and roles is essential. The only question is how best to do it, and what constraints need to be in place to prevent abuses, unnecessary bureaucratization, ossification, and all the rest of it. Here, I'm inclined to think that the best way of combating these problems is to keep leadership fluid and to cultivate leadership capacities in everyone. In the context of a political organization, this means giving newer and less experienced members opportunities to lead so that they can develop the skills and experience necessary to grow and develop. It also means opposing stable, inflexible divisions of labor that leave someone, or some group, perpetually in a subordinate or relatively powerless roles. The expectation must be that every single member in a socialist organization is a potential leader, and that expectation must followed through. Anything less is a disservice to the socialist tradition.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
What would we lose?
House Republicans are already talking about repealing ObamaCare. Now, as any reader of this blog is well aware, I am a staunch advocate of single payer. So I ask you: if you really care about genuine health care reform, what do we stand to lose if ObamaCare is repealed?
What will we have lost if the Republicans have their way? Why should progressives be disturbed about the repeal of a bill that did more in the way of disorienting the Left than it did in fulfilling progressive ideals?
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Rick Wolff: Calling Time on Capitalism
Excerpt:
Like someone convicted of murdering his parents who demands leniency as an orphan, corporate America demands conservative government and austerity on the grounds of excessive budget deficits. Mainstream media and politicians take those corporate demands seriously, reminding us who controls whom.Read the rest here.
From the Archives: Feminism or Feminism(s)?
One more, from 2009. This argument is still relevant in light of the somewhat recent controversy in the feminist blogosphere regarding Jessica Valenti's refusal to speak on a panel with an anti-feminist right-winger. Enjoy!
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In the feminist blogosphere, I sometimes run across the following argument.
"There isn't one, monolithic feminism. There's always already feminism(s) and there are as many diverse feminism(s) as there are people. Feminism(s) mean different things to different people"
I find this kind of patronizing, for one. This line is always laid down as though it said something profound, but the fact of the matter is that it is a half-baked platitude. It's one thing to take note of the political dynamics of the disagreements and contestations coming from the margins, which were aimed at the (largely) white, liberal, middle-class, straight feminist projects that had come to present themselves as the only game in town. But it is quite another thing to propagate the facile conclusion that feminism really just means whatever individual persons want it to mean.
In fact, you can't really understand what those very contestations and interventions (e.g. from black feminists like Angela Davis and bell hooks, revolutionary lesbians like Monique Wittig, feminists writing the wake of colonialism, deconstructive feminists like Butler, etc.) were about unless you unequivocally reject the idea that feminism can mean whatever certain individuals want it to mean. For if it were true that feminism just is the plurality of existing views, norms, and relations of power regarding gender and sexuality, then there wouldn't be much point at all in contesting the way that mainstream feminists were paving over forms of oppression that didn't form a central part of their own experience. If "feminism" just means whatever individuals want it to mean willy-nilly, then the practice of criticizing white liberal feminism from the margins couldn't be intelligible.
That is to say, according to those who sing the timeless praises of "singularity" as such, difference as such, and pluralism as such, etc. it would appear that bell hooks, Monique Wittig, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and many others did something seriously wrong. How dare they, you might think, contest or launch political interventions aimed at dismantling certain mainstream feminist theories and practices, when they ought to have left well enough alone and let those myopically white and middle class straight feminists "express their individuality and difference"? How dare they tell those white, middle class feminists what to do! Uh oh, its the 'feminist police'!
This is, of course, preposterous. There is a world of difference between making the totally valid sociological observation on the one hand that there is widespread disagreement about what feminism is and should be committed to doing, and on the other, claiming that there is an endless plurality of things feminism can mean for different people. The latter only obscures the actual concrete political dynamics of what gets to count as feminism by whitewashing important disagreements as simply 'different expressions of plurality'. When Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble, I doubt very seriously (for more reasons than I can count) that she would have said that she was merely expressing her individuality and adding yet another brand of feminism to the endless shelf of pluralism. Her book caused such a stir because it was a trenchant critique of a certain way of thinking about feminist politics, it expressed disagreements and offered arguments aiming to undermine what others thought feminism entailed.
Notice also, that if the 'endless pluralism' story were right, there would be absolutely no way to identify cynical imposters who called themselves feminists disingenuously. For instance, imagine that Rush Limbaugh decided, without changing anything about himself whatsoever, to simply call himself a "feminist". (This is already happening with Sarah Palin, btw). Could anyone who grasps what the tradition of feminist politics means actually take him at face value? Could we really bear to label his political commitments as 'solidly radical feminist' just because he claims we should? The problem here, of course, is that the 'many feminism(s)'-'endless plurality' story would have no way to contest Limbaugh's claim. For if they were right, they'd have have no reason to want to contest Rush's claims at all. Think about it. He'd simply be expressing what feminism meant to him and proving their point that there really are only feminisms and a wide plurality of views. They'd have no grounds for understanding the politics of what is and is not feminism.
If feminism has to do with liberation from oppression, it cannot mean whatever individual people want it to mean. Meaning is never a matter of individual whim. Pretending that it is, however, is hardly a subversive move, but a thought-act wholly welcomed by contemporary consumer culture. This faux-individualist megalomania is encouraged by existing relations of power, and it is a powerful narrative running through ideological "arguments" about social mobility, debates about redistributive taxation, into the ways that people are encouraged to think of themselves in terms of the various consumer preferences they have, and so on. Buy, buy, buy! Consume, we're told. Give in to your consumerist fantasies and lust after immediately gratifying fixes! And shame on you if you stop to think about what this whole individualist, consumerist picture might amount to... that's to commit the sin of "telling others how to live their lives". "The personal is political" is a feminist slogan. "Everything is personal and nothing may be criticized" is not feminist or radical at all, this is the conservative message of contemporary capitalism. Banal also is this notion of 'if it feels good do it', 'live and let live', etc. These are not emancipatory anthems, but hackneyed advertisement jingles for the status quo.
But in reality, even superficial critical engagement with our culture and society quickly reveals that we are constantly told how to live our lives, how to think about our bodies, how to think about gender norms, how to dress, how to behave, etc. Feminism is a project aiming to uncover and ruthlessly submit these features of contemporary culture to critique (with a view to overturning them).
Feminism is an unremittingly critical political project. At its best it leaves no cultural, social or political phenomenon uncriticized. But pulling this 'just let women do what they want' line is dishonest. Should feminists condone what Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and the Anita Bryants of the world say? Is Sarah Palin a feminist? Of course not. And we have a name for people who say otherwise: post-feminists.
Feminists who say "just let people believe what they already believe" are no feminists at all. Feminism is supposed to be about criticizing and challenging existing relations of power. It's supposed to be about shredding oppressive norms that have come to appear to many as 'natural'. Anything less is complicit with oppression.
From the Archives: Private Interests Masquerading as Universal
From 2009:
Imagine if the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had said the following about why they uncompromisingly opposed the EFCA ("the card check"):
"We the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, represent the interests of a small group of financial and business elites who own large capitalist enterprises. We care, first and foremost, that we are earning as much money as possible. Take note of the "we" in the last sentence, for if someone else were to reap the returns of the institutions we own and control, this would be unacceptable.If they had said this, most people likely would have said: "Shove it, you rich assholes."
Now it seems to us that if the EFCA passes Congress there is a very good chance that more workers will form unions, which means that we will have to cede some of our profits because unions will require that we pay better wages, benefits, pensions and so forth. Moreover, they will curtail our ability to most efficiently manipulate workers (e.g. arbitrarily terminate employees or downsize to maintain profit margins) in our quest to maximize our profits.
At the end of the day, we as extremely wealthy and powerful capitalists will lose measures of our wealth and power if this bill passes. Hence our uncompromising hatred for the bill."
So of course, they cannot simply assert their narrow interests as capitalists in making a public argument about policy. To be heard, they have to make up some story about how their interests are in fact not really their interests, per se, but universal interests. That is, generalizable interests that at least appear to have some relevance to the lives of the 99% majority of the population who aren't part of the ownership of a massive private corporation. Hence all of the endless drivel about 'secret ballots' and so on.
Now fast-forward to the "health care debate" that's ensuing over the so-called "public option".
Anyone familiar with the AMA's history, recalls that they pulled every stop out in the late 1940s and early 1960s when health care reform was on the table. That is, they went apeshit and started babbling about 'totalitarianism' and employed Ronald Reagan to do commercials claiming that Stalin was coming to eat America's babies. This is what they said about Harry Truman's post-WWII plan to institute single-payer:
"all forms of security, compulsory security, even against old age and unemployment, represent a beginning invasion by the state into the personal life of the individual, represent a taking away of individual responsibility, a weakening of national caliber, a definite step toward either communism or totalitarianism"Who is the AMA? They are a large, influential political organization who represents the interests of the most powerful, wealthy and politically-connected doctors in America. They do not represent all doctors. See, for example Physicians for a National Health Program, who see the interests of the private insurance industry as fundamentally opposed to the role doctors ought to serve in a just society. They are staunch supporters of Single-Payer.
Now its not hard to see what the AMA wants. This organization, as the representatives of the most powerful and wealthy doctors, exists primarily to defend the power and high earnings of those whom it represents. So, its not difficult to take them seriously when they come out and say that they don't like paying Medicare rates (they can exploit markets to get even higher rates, so why should they settle for such lackluster earnings?).
But we would be making a seriously obtuse mistake if we thought that the AMA sincerely cared about things like:
-Whether our health-care system is well-ordered and just
-Whether profiteers run insurance institutions and routinely deny claims
-Whether everyone is getting the care they need
-Whether access is universal or guaranteed
-Whether everyone can afford healthcare
-etc.
We have no reason to think that they care for anything of these things in themselves. And, as Ezra Klein points out, we have very strong reasons to think that they would oppose any of these considerations if they conflicted with the material interests of wealthy and powerful doctors. The class dynamics underwriting their Association notwithstanding, the history of the AMA's political interventions speaks for itself.
So what role does the AMA play in public debates? Of course they can't make public interventions that lay bare their narrow, strategic interest in manipulating discourse so that they can maximize their earnings. So they have to say stuff like this:
“The A.M.A. does not believe that creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs. The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans.”Interestingly, they opened this statement by saying that care ought only to be "provided through private markets, as it is currently." Can anyone say 'dogmatic'? If they really cared about "the best way to expand health insurance coverage" why all the whining about the need to have "private markets" and "private insurers" front and center?
My, these business types are so big on the rhetoric of "choice". You can choose to be either insured by some moronic for-profit institution, or you can choose some other such firm of the same ilk. Or you can fucking wither and die. You pick!
To bring this post to a close, I want to tie this thought about narrow, stategic private interests into recent discussions of the 'power plays' being made in the debate over the "public option" bill in Congress. I sometimes hear, as on this Ezra Klein vs. Libertarian 'blogging heads' thing, that "the Democrats really want single payer, but..." or that "liberals really want SP but...". Nevermind the question of who these 'liberals' are and where one finds them. But if the Democrats, i.e. the party who has control of both chambers of Congress and the White House and has trounced the opposition party in the last two elections, want single-payer I find it hard to see what's stopping them.
But let's entertain the fantasy of liberal bloggers about how our government works for a moment. Let's say that the Democrats really do, deep down, get all warm and fuzzy when they think about single-payer. Why can't they just get it done? The answer can't be that the Republicans will oppose it. They already oppose the current reform. They opposed Obama in the last major election. They suck, that's why they keep getting hammered at the ballot box. So the answer can't be that the Democrats just don't have the votes.
What, then, is the holdup? Well it can't be, as Ezra Klein claims it is, that the problem is just that there is "status-quo bias" and "people don't want to lose the health insurance plan they have". That may be some small part of it. But this ignores the 50 million Americans without any insurance; surely they aren't biased towards the current situation. Moreover, this 'status quo bias' hypothesis contradicts Klein's frequently-made (and correct, in my view) point that "health insurance corporations are among the most hated institutions in America".
The pink elephant in the room here has got to be the entrenched, extremely profitable, powerful private health insurance industry who would cease to exist under a single-payer plan. The powerful class in charge of (and profiting from) these massive institutions are the biggest reason why reform would be so difficult to achieve. They aren't going to go down without a fight. They aren't ever going to play nice without being forced to. And we know they aren't going to put their eggs all in one electoral basket; they're going to hedge their bets. That's why the give millions to Democratic members of congress.
In short, we can't ever forget that these industrial giants uncompromisingly hate single payer, since they wouldn't be industrial giants any longer if the plan were adopted.
So why isn't this obvious fact ever discussed in the 'public debate'? Why is it so hard to believe that if the narrow interests of those who profit from the status-quo were nakedly asserted in the public sphere, most people would balk? Why not simply discuss, incessantly, the amount of money these assholes make a year? Why not place our moronic system in a global context and rank our performance against virtually every other major industrial capitalist country in the world (all of whom do not have profit-driven commodified insurance the way we do)? Why not ask why it is that people in those countries would NEVER accept the insecurity, uncertainty, and inhumanity of the sort of system we have?
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