Tag: Civil Rights

David Roediger – Class, Race, and Marxism

Class, Race and Marxism

David Roediger – Class, Race and Marxism (Verso 2017)

I found this book to be quite trivial.  It pulls together previous essays that Roediger has written with some new material, and focuses its attention on a selected history of pro- and anti-“identity politics” commentators, together with extensive personal anecdotes.  The book’s major fault is that its central premises are disingenuous.  Roediger claims in the introduction to have undertaken self-criticism.  But on close examination that is not exactly what he does.  Rather, he carefully frames his self-criticism in order to advance certain underlying ideological presuppositions, and to signal that he identifies with certain groups and not others.  He claims that he is investigating the need to engage in both theory and action.  Yet this is just an alibi for conclusions already drawn up beforehand and independently.  He ends up not really questioning his theoretical assumptions, and instead dwells on action — in a way highly reminiscent of the discredited Alinsky Method.  So, for instance, he opens the book with a mild critique of David Harvey, only to immediately signal that his disagreements with Harvey and a few others are really minor and constructive and that they are really on the same side — by which he means they can both support “identity politics” and craft/trade union social democracy reformism.  He then mentions the anti-“identity politics” positions of Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., dismissing them as “simplistic”, and, later in the book, also dismisses the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant and others’ similar views.  And yet, Roediger’s dismissal of these contrary positions actually reveals much more about his own simplistic frame of reference than it explicates the supposed flaws of these other thinkers.  For example, Roediger argues from the vantage point that craft/trade union advocacy is of crucial importance, that “Marxism” is about “class” identity rather than a universalism of shared antagonisms, that such groups tend to have substantially consistent/homogeneous internal cohesion, and, crucially, that “ideology” is not an important framework.  Accordingly, his overview of the anti-“identity politics” position (which he clearly rejects) omits any discussion of many of the most prominent recent advocates of that position: Jodi Dean, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Sharon Smith, etc. While many of these other thinkers rely on psychoanalysis, it is psychoanalysis of an entirely different sort than what Roediger occasionally references.  This is significant.  It is possible to disagree with Roediger’s flavor of “class” consciousness and on that basis alone arrive at a different balance of class and race (and gender, etc.) concerns.  Much of the book explores a history of what amount to “tactical” considerations, without digging into deeper philosophical and theoretical underpinnings.  While some of Roedinger’s statements ring true, I tend to think a better and more far-reaching formulation of the theory and action dialectic that Roediger professes to apply in this book is stated by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, for example, or in Antonio Gramsci‘s “critical marxism”.  Adolph Reed’s criticism of Roediger and his ilk (echoing Walter Benjamin), that they are part of “a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations[,]” seems spot on — hardly something “simplistic”.  This is evidenced by the extensive bloviating that Roediger puts forth about academic appointments and the trials and tribulations of various race-conscious academics seeking prestigious university positions.  This recalls “lean in” boardroom (neoliberal) feminism, or Maresi Starzman’s critical statement, “Even if precariously employed academics may be, in economic terms, best considered part of the working class, their interests are aligned with the aspiring middle and upper-middle classes. At the end of the day, academic desires — for a career, for status, or maybe for some fame — ensure that even the ‘lumpen professor’ remains a professor, cash strapped but with a solid middle-class habitus.  The result is a seeming paradox: an impoverished workforce deeply loyal to the exploitative structures it is embedded within . . . .”  It all gets very tedious.  I was left feeling that Roediger is furthering a debate in what I consider a cul-de-sac of increasingly irrelevant non-Marxist discourse that panders to chauvinistic craft/trade unions, the university appointment system, and defeatist sentiments that the “communist hypothesis” must be tempered if not rejected. While no doubt, “identity politics” has become hegemonic in academic departments of late, Roediger too easily relies on that hegemony to proffer very superficial criticisms of anti-identity politics positions.  But, again, this is essentially a critique of the ideology that Roediger adopts, and Roediger is careful to bracket out ideology from his purview.  He also makes some dubious characterizations of fact.  For instance, in the introduction he claims that police unions actually have very little power.  This is borderline laughable.  Take for instance Minnesota, where in around 2011 the police union succeeded in having state law modified to shield them from disciplinary investigations by citizen boards.  When Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page released their widely publicized study of the impact of ordinary citizens and unions on government policy, they concluded that unions, as interest groups typically aligned with ordinary citizen interests, have very little influence.  These examples, taken together, tend to show that police unions have considerably more influence than other types of unions, calling Roediger’s claim into doubt.  In spite of his claim to be self-critical, he spends these pages mostly trying to rally allies to fend off criticism from the likes of Reed, Benn Michaels, Rob Urie, and a host of others he doesn’t bother to cite — something that is fundamentally populist rather than Marxist, and is not a problem unique to Roediger.  It is rather hard to see how this book is of any interest to anyone other than the “opposition” academics specifically mentioned, to the extent that they might wish to rebut specific claims Roediger makes.  Though this book is best ignored.

Suja Thomas & David Lopez – Why Judges Routinely Dismiss Sexual Harassment Cases

Suja Thomas & David Lopez:

“Why Judges Routinely Dismiss Sexual Harassment Cases”

 

This article makes an excellent example of why nearly-correct commentary is dangerous.  While it is helpful that the authors cite a 2015 study about a divergence between decisions made by a judge (from the bench) as compared to those by juries, that argument boils down to drawing a line in the sand as to how much judicial decisions must match those of juries.  The authors clearly feel that juries agreeing with judges 75% of the time, in the study sample, is insufficient; they do not articular their minimum acceptable threshold: 80%? 90%? 99.999999999%?  And they side-step the issue of bias in juries — perhaps the views of bigoted juries should be curbed by judges?  Are juries selected in a way that is more fair than judicial selection (obviously, yes, though the article leaves the extent of that and limitations of jury selection unexplored).  The study is limited to situations in which appeals judges overturned a lower court judge (in other words, the study of divergence between judge and jury views is limited to a sample in which judges disagreed).

Anyway, turning to the main thrust of the article, it has some troubling features.  From a legal realist standpoint, it is clear that the authors are peddling a liberal “identity politics” platform, and are dredging around for facts that look like they support the authors’ preferred “identity politics” solutions.  What do I mean by that?  Well, for starters, the key to this article is its reference to “structural reasons”.  This is invoked as the proper explanatory frame for judicial bias in a very specific way:  the accusation is that judges are disproportionately white men, compared to the general population.  While avoiding explicitly saying it, the authors are suggesting that if judges were made up of a racially/gender/etc. diverse base, then the problems they discuss would disappear.  This is certainly better than the “implicit bias” framework.  But nonetheless this approach has been tested in other contexts, and it fails.  In particular, police departments have been exhorted to “diversify” for some time, and departments that have done so have not shown hoped-for reductions in discrimination.  This is because the “identity politics” frame overlooks the role of ideology.  Minorities can accede or succumb to hegemonic ideology, and thus act as collaborators in a biased system.  Elaine Brown in her book The Condemnation of Little B referred to this as “New Age Racism” in a similar context.   Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr. have been hamming this point home for at least a decade too.  Merely appointing more minorities to judgeships won’t solve the problem of a discriminatory ideology unless those judges are willing to challenge the hegemonic ideology.  They might, or they might not — although more racial/gender/etc. fairness in such judicial appointments would undoubtedly be a good thing.  The point is that the authors have offered an insufficient analysis.  Their version of a “structural” analysis is flabby.  To be sound, and come closer to being sufficient, it would need to take more account of power and something like ideology and class, though they do hint in that direction by saying that judges “may want higher positions in the judiciary or elsewhere, which can influence their decisions”, which is perhaps a passing reference to hierarchies of power, economic bases, and hegemonic ideology.  A much more probing set of questions was raised in another article questioning how alternative dispute resolution arose to stifle discrimination suits — though this other article was offered by an independent scholar.  Could it be that Suja Thomas and David Lopez themselves “may want higher positions in [academia] or elsewhere, which can influence their [theorizing]”, and therefore limit the scope of their criticism?  Social science is only valid if it is reflexive and its intellectual weapons are also turned on those who create and wield them.  Thomas and Lopez’ article does not seem to meet such a standard.  It masks an adherence to a hegemonic worldview premised on inequality behind seemingly benign and well-meaning advocacy for minor technocratic improvements, thereby depoliticizing the underlying struggle and reinforcing the ideology that sustains bigotry at its very roots.  In other words, a version of this quote by Frantz Fanon applies: “What matters is not so much the color of your skin [or, your gender] as the power you serve and the millions you betray.” (Black Skin, White Masks).

Ed Rooksby – Review of Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History

Link to a review by Ed Rooksby of Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005; 2011 trans.).  Losurdo’s counterpart book War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (2015) should also be considered here, because it is arguably a better written (or better translated) book with a better exposition of its central argument.

“Liberalism: An Ideology of Exclusion? (Part 1)”

 

Selected quote:

“How do we make sense of this paradox at the heart of liberalism – the simultaneous invocation of liberty on the one hand and the justification and promulgation of severe forms of oppression on the other? The key to all of this, Losurdo argues, is to grasp that liberalism is founded on an implicit logic of exclusion. Only once we have understood this can we start to resolve the seeming inconsistencies. Liberalism has always pivoted, Losurdo argues, on drawing a dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – those who are worthy or capable (morally, intellectually, biologically/racially) of the gamut of rights and liberties we associate with liberalism and those who are not. Liberalism was always, of course, centrally concerned with the condemnation and limitation of despotic power and the corresponding assertion of rights to self-government, autonomy and so on – but this struggle was always waged by, and on behalf of, an exclusive section of humanity – what Losurdo terms ‘the community of the free’. The history of liberalism is thus in great part a history of how the particular specification and location of the boundary line between ‘the community of the free’ and the excluded has evolved and shifted.

“With this exclusionary logic in mind we can make sense of the paradoxes of liberal slavery, liberal empire and liberal authoritarianism towards wage labourers and the poor. In each of these three apparent paradoxes we are, in fact, confronting particular instances of the opposition between the justly free and the justly unfree. It is not that the brutal world of slavery, for example, represented a failure or negation of proclaimed liberal values, or revealed the hypocrisy of contemporary liberals, it is that the ‘community of the free’ in which the sphere of liberal rights and freedoms applied did not, and was not intended, to encompass black people. Liberalism, for Losurdo, was never a doctrine of moral universalism. We can see now, how racism and class contempt operated as necessary ideological supports for this system of exclusion. Slavery and colonial expropriation and domination was justified on the grounds that non-white peoples were by definition uncivilised, in a condition of ‘nonage’ (Mill), not fully human or even ‘savage beasts’ (Locke) and were thus rightly excluded from the ‘community of the free’. Similarly, workers and the poor in the metropolis were not intelligent, morally developed or, again, human enough to be admitted into the sacred space of the free community of liberals.

“It is not just that liberalism was long characterised by exclusion for Losurdo – it is also that, to a great extent, the liberty of the community of the free has depended on the exclusion and oppression of the unfree. That is, the relationship between the community of the free and the excluded has been one of exploitation in which the privileges of the former have been rooted in the expropriation and coercion of the unfree. It is here that class relations come into play.”

 

Bonus links: “Domenico Losurdo: Classical German Philosophy, a Critique of Liberalism and ‘Critical Marxism'” (“The political criticism that Losurdo directs towards liberalism is based upon a precise philosophical analysis: he exposes the lack of universalism in this train of thought: its inability to go beyond representing the special interests of the strongest classes.”) and The State and Revolution (“In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favorable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.”  “in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority.”) and Critical Moral Liberalism: Theory and Practice (“liberal theories often serve as ideological cover for oppression of one group by others.”) and “Soviet Power and the Status of Women” (“Bourgeois democracy is democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, exuberant promises and the high-sounding slogans of freedom and equality. But, in fact, it screens the non-freedom and inferiority of women, the non-freedom and inferiority of the toilers and exploited.”) and “The Spectre of Ideology” in Mapping Ideology (“In order to combat these new forms of organicist populism effectively, one must turn the critical gaze back upon oneself and submit to critical scrutiny liberal-democratic universalism itself — what opens up the space for the organicist populism is the weak point, the ‘falsity’, of this very universalism.”) and “What Is the Left Without Identity Politics? – Walter Benn Michaels” (“identity politics is not an alternative to class politics but a form of it: It’s the politics of an upper class that has no problem with seeing people being left behind as long as they haven’t been left behind because of their race or sex.”) and “The Open Letter and the DNC” (“If fascists and / or racists are ‘born that way,’ then they can either be controlled or annihilated, because changing their circumstances won’t affect their nature (goes the theory).”) and Malcolm X on White Liberals and Free Jazz/Black Power and Against Liberalism and “François Furet, 20 ans après” and “Horizons Needed” and “When Liberal Democracy Means Plutocracy” and “Liberal Tyrannies” and “Traditional and Critical Theory”

Joseph Ramsey – Does America Have a Gun Problem… or a White Supremacy Capitalist Empire Problem?

Link to an article by Joseph Ramsey:

“Does America Have a Gun Problem… or a White Supremacy Capitalist Empire Problem?” (and later version of the same article)

I find it much harder to look past the problems with Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine, but Ramsey offers some extremely interesting observations that don’t really depend on even seeing the film.

 

Bonus links: “The Rifle on the Wall” and “When Liberals Go Wrong” and Painting & Guns (“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”) and “Blood in Our Eyes” (“Just as gun makers are ignored in the gun control logic, so are cops. The anti gun lobby seems ok with the idea that only steroid crazed racist policemen can carry guns. I have to tell you, I’m not so OK with that.”) and Liberalism: A Counter-History and …And the Poor Get Prison and Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance and The Sublime Object of Ideology

Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn – King of the Hate Business: Inside the Southern Poverty Law Center

Link to a reprint of an article by Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn:

“King of the Hate Business: Inside the Southern Poverty Law Center”

Bonus quote: “PC anti-racism is sustained by the surplus-enjoyment which emerges when the PC-subject triumphantly reveals the hidden racist bias on an apparently neutral statement or gesture”

Good Social Science

A major contribution of (good) social science is to uncover and articulate implied meanings, as well as to refute false denials of meaning.  This is to say that human beings are often disingenuous in their explicit statements.  While that statement is hardly shocking (or original), it nonetheless stands in marked contrast to the work of a large swath of academic studies that rely on surveys and take all survey responses at face value, for instance.  More useful is an analysis — often statistical — that largely disregards (or diminishes) stated intents and rationales and instead draws out hidden motivations and benefits.  Take for instance accusations of discrimination, like racism.  Many racists deny that they are in fact racist (often because they rationally understand that such admissions are treated with derision and, sometimes, are prosecuted/redressed), frequently relying instead on a professed mantra of individual choice (or “states rights”, etc.).  These are often subtle attempts to re-frame the discussion away from the kinds of statistical analyses that would show how those purportedly benign personal choice in fact rely upon and support discriminatory “social constructs”.  In a broader sense, this ties in to reliance on a very binary analytical system of individual subjectivity vs. scientific/observable fact that is overly simplistic.  More pernicious are things like “implicit bias” theorizing, which is really a characteristically Liberal response to this issue, and which still accepts the basic individual choice framework (largely side-stepping analysis of “social constructs”) but admits to errors of isolated individuals in order to leave the pre-existing (and unexamined) “social constructs” in place.  Well, and the outright hostility to the very idea of “social constructs,” to wit Margaret Thatcher’s infamous quip, “There is no such thing as society.”

Selected illustrative links: See “A Southern City With Northern Problems” and “Marx’s ‘Capital’ at 150: History in Capital, Capital in History”

Edward S. Herman – Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies

Link to an article by Edward S. Herman:

“Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017”

 

Bonus links: “The Fallacy of Post-Truth” and “Evidence of Google Blacklisting of Left and Progressive Sites Continues to Mount” and Inkywatch and New York Times eXaminer and Liberalism: A Counter-History and War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century and “How the ‘Fake News’ Scare Is Marginalizing the Left” and “Twitter Bans RT and Sputnik Ads, Who’s Next?” and “NYT Prints Government-Funded Propaganda About Government-Funded Propaganda” and “Who’s Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO?” and “The Rise of the New McCarthyism” and “Century of the National Security State: A New Subversives List?” and “A Left Critique of Russiagate” and “The Grammar of Russiagate” and “The Cult of Authority” and “Do U.S. Oligarchs Exist? Not in Mainstream Media” and “Folktales of Russiagate” and “Dictator: Media Code for ‘Government We Don’t Like’” and “The Third Red Scare: Neoliberal’s Effective Framing of 21st Century Populist and Progressive Movement” and “The Unanswered Questions in the Latest Russian ‘Meddling’ Allegations”