Gordon wrote:
> >There's still a good deal of "objective racism", that is,
> >racist practice without overt profession of racist theory.
> >Most of it occurs at lower economic levels, which is nothing
> >new, as in, for example, police practice and public education.
> >Racial distinctions are also essential in real estate.
Wojtek Sokolowski:
> I just cannot believe I'm getting drawn into this crap again.......
>
> Yes, there is plenty of bigotry in this country and elsewhere - racism,
> anti-semitism, male chauvinism, or simply foreigner-hating, I encounter
> that crap quite regularly. But to admit its existence is one thing, but to
> link evry imaginable evil to it is something much different.
I think racism (objective and theoretical) is linked to not every imaginable evil, but specific social evils, through class war. I doubt if anyone is making much wider claims, although they may correct me.
Where people are continually competing for power over one another, it seems inevitable that they will use whatever differentials they can find or create to get advantage for themselves and disadvantage competitors. Hence, I think, the creation of race and its employment -- its _continued_ employment.
> As I said to
> Carrol, I spent my formative years flashing my finger at vanguard party
> luminaries, but I forget to add "and grievenace manufacturers." I was
> surrounded by unpublished writers and penniless academics eager to blame
> "the system" for their own failures and lack of initiative. Truly
> nauseating - can't help to show my disgust each time I see it.
Previously you said,
> ...
> My point, however, was not to deliberate the virtues of a dead philosopher
> but to reflect on a more contemporary issue - the poverty of the US left.
> It is painfully obvious to me that the US left does not have much to offer,
> esp. along the lines what Marxism was able to offer in the past.
> Consequently, it retreated to three tactics:
>
> 1. Reaction to social changes brough by captains of industry, defence of
> the past (welfare state, New Deal, "democracy," etc.), opposition
> government policies, etc.
>
> 2. Retereat from the real world to the world of ideas and text exegesis;
> diverting energies from sction to discourse. This is a sign of impotence -
> switching back from changing the world to interpreting it differently, or
> what is often the case, mere bitching about it.
>
> 3. Espousing Robin-Hoodism, identity politics, noble-savage mythology in
> lieu of critical science. This strategy heavily relies on grievance
> manufacturing, uncritical embracing of social groups labeled as "oppressed
> minorities," and claiming to represent their interest. At best, it is a
> niche-seeking behavior to market intellectual commodity, at worst - it is a
> signs of the last stage of intellectual degeneration.
I believe the poverty of the Left -- not just the U.S. Left, but the Left in general -- derives from the abandonment of anarchism in favor of various State models of top-down reform, in a desire to at once efface and make profitable use of opportunities for class advantage.
Since the State is constituted through some mixture of the class-war relations of patriarchy, slavery, feudalism, and liberalism-capitalism, that is, systems of oppression and exploitation, the Left projects which employ State power are evidently diverted or degraded by the methods which that power offers. As it happens the tactics you mention above are mostly bourgeois, especially the part about looking for a market niche, whereas in other times and places self- supposed leftists have reverted to the methods of feudalism and slavery with more notorious results. This doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the archaic principles of the Left, to wit, freedom and equality. The problem is the one- foot step over the two-foot ditch.