[lbo-talk] Allen, racism, fascism and beyond

(Chuck Grimes) cgrimes at rawbw.COM
Mon Dec 31 23:10:42 PST 2007


In his last years Allen was near completion of his final major work, a book length manuscript entitled `Toward a Revolution in Labor History,' which was to be a reinterpretation of United States labor history shaped by his understanding of racial oppression and its centrality to American history. In that work Allen challenges what he calls the prevalent assumptions of American labor historiography--that only free labor can be `proletarian,' that the African American workers' two centuries of struggle against slavery isn't `labor' history, and that `American labor history' is essentially the story of European-American workers with African Americans playing a marginalized, auxiliary role in `the class struggle.' `Toward a Revolution in Labor History' calls attention to ways in which the `white blind-spot' has led to ignoring or marginalizing the Black laboring class as a proletarian component in the history of the American working class and to disregarding the origin and nature of `white' identity. It further argues that the main barrier to class consciousness in the U.S. is `the incubus of white identity of the European-American workers.'[23]

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This was a great essay, btw, and it recalled many, many years of chewing on these issues. (It also dovetails with European Racism and its revelations for me---well because Allen is cited and used to great effect in that thread.)

I'd like to add a couple of observations generally along the same line. These are the kinds of insights into society that can only be seen or found from concrete experience at work, especially low class jobs where white and black (hispanic and asian) work side by side, interact and negociate their friendships and animosities, appraise each other's skills, family lives, the direction of their own lives together.

I say this because I very dimly remember reading Allen or maybe somebody else back in the 60s, and I didn't really agree with these ideas, as if they were something to theoretically argue over. I was a college student and only worked part-time---my life was not yet a working class life at that point. Through the 70s I was a quasi-white collar or `professional', because my university staff job title was a counselor in student affairs. The pay scale was middle class, I was in the union, and got full medical and retirement benefits.

When I lost all these, including the house, wife, kid, and studio---as I descended into lower economic ranks in the 80s, I began working more and more with, for, and around African-Americans. There was also of course a very slow raise in A-A economic rank here, so we more or less met in between, me going down, them coming up so to speak.

Well, after enough time, enough work friends and enemies, customers and bosses, I slowly began not to `understand' black people which is what I first thought I was doing---but I started instead to begin to `understand' white people--which sounds completely inside out. I started to `see' white people and white society as such. This is a very strange sort of experience for somebody who is white. Toni Morrison once said something to the effect that white people should study what it means to be white, and I dismissed this idea as just nonsense when I first heard it.

But I have slowly chewed on Morrison's idea over the years. The trouble is you have to able to `see' white identity first, before you can study it. And that kind of sight is hard to develop if you are white and middle class and are around by middle class white people all the time. You have to be different in context, in order to see your own identity---and it has to have somehow lost its hold on conscieousness along the way---that is treated, related to, engaged, laught at, worked with, or scorned because I am Chuck, and that has some baggage somehow that doesn't immediately follow from being White.

These work experiences which must have been something like those that Allen drew on, also come in very handy for seeing what's wrong with almost all western political philosophy, especially of course for my pet project on Strauss. That is, these concrete experiences at work are why or how I can call most US politics, identity politics with the rightwing leading the way to re-enscribe a white identity---so as to secure its privilage of place in the economy, politics, society, the country, the world, the universe itself.

In other words, this identity politics of whiteness, is the mode of continuing the `white blind-spot' that Allen talks about. It is specifically targetted at slowly marginalized middle to working class white Americans. When the rightwing sets up its political propaganda and that propaganda apparatus achieves the correct resounant frequency, then viola, they win public office. And in the constrasting case whenever the Democrats deviate from the correct frequencies, then they lose---they lose the same voters the right gains. And guess who those voters are? White, mostly male, the very social essence of what's also called the petite bourgeoisie. Or what the Viginia colonial history essays referred to as yeomen. Also what used to be called `the little guy'----which never signified African Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, or anybody else who was not white.

All of which reminds me, why do you suppose the primary elections always start in Iowa and New Hamshire? Well because they are among the whitest places in the country---they are supposed to symbolize that good old American Identity, the common man, who is smart enough to figure out how democracy works for himself and show the rest of us who's who, and what's what. Kiss my ass Iowa, and do yourself New Hampshire. .

(I absolutely never see the overly sincere Mexican guy with a cowboy hat, a hankerchief in his back pocket, and never hear his haulting English try to figure out if the candidate is talking about what worries him. I also never see the nervous young Chinese kid, not used to cameras or the spot light, trying to sort out the `message'. I never see the older black plummbing contractor, stroking his jaw and late day stubble turning white, with his big splayed hands, thinking out loud. In other words, I don't see the America I know. And it goes without saying I never see the old Jewish radical professor analyzing the class system re-enactment on commie lines, or old white, embittered wanabbe intellectuals like me, stuck in the working class calling all the candidates a bunch of stooges for the elite. What gives here? Where the fuck is the America I know and love? I see, hear, live, and am surrounded by all these apparent stereotypes in real life and never see them on tv.)

So it's not just about labor history here. The way this white identity politics works to erase awareness of the material and concrete circumstance of class among the white working class, is to re-inscribe them as a well cleansed `middle class' identity, the common man, the little guy who shares economic interest with his own bosses---because they are both white---that is the created identity they both believe they share. This positions working class whites to see non-white workers as `working class' because they are not white, even if they make roughly the same pay, hold the same relative positions on the job---which of course they rarely do.

Now all of this sounds like old guard commie paranoid conspiracy theory stuff, mainly because the ruling elites are well known not to be all that smart or powerful for that matter. True enough. But the ruling elite do have one thing that most of the rest of us don't and that is, money. And money can buy technocrats and experts of all orders. So it's the technocratic-managerial class who are put to work to figure this stuff out---only they are not all that clever either. But they do get paid to practice up and get pretty good at the sort of intellectual interpretative arts that make all this social, economic and political machery work, that is make the ideology, media, laws, institutions, structures of the society work for the good of their bosses. When the bosses are happy, the technocratic class get rises and breed new ways to make money for their bosses. Go dog, go.

Okay, now for a quiz. [I won't pretend I saw this at first either. It dawned on me in a flash, so I thought up this quiz to illustrate it after the fact.]

Notice something missing in the above paragraph on technocrats? Bet you didn't see it. Almost the entire technocratic-managerial class are white and male, and practically speaking the very epidome of white identity---and are often typified as the so-called swing voter. Furthermore, they individually and collectively strongly resist any encrouchment on their turf by any individual or collective who is not perceived as part of their identity envelop. If you missed that missing point, then you have just experienced what Allen called the white blind spot. This may seem too cute by half---but it is also (I hope) a powerful illustration of what I am trying to describe. We all are wearing blinders.

And now for the final question. Notice anything odd about this whole essay? Hint. It's something I mostly haven't done? I haven't been discussing black people or African-Americans. I've been writing about European-Americans or white people. Why is that? Because I think I have finally figured out that to understand how racism works and helps to dissolve class conscieousness in whites, following Allen, you have to figure out how race conscieousness works and is made central to white identity.

This approach seems counter-intitutive because the political and legal problems of race first present themselves (to most whites) as a problem with what to do about black people. But think about that for a moment. Most African-Americans I've met don't have a problem with concepts of integration or equality. Why should they? See? In more blunt terms, white people have this problem and see it this way. And the reason for that view, is because that is how almost every discussion, media format, or what have you, starts the interrogation with the premise, what to do about black people? It's like tic, tac, toe---the result follows from the premise, the first step.

In what I think of as an objective view, this premise is a complete inversive transformation of concrete socio-economic conditions. Because the problem is how come there is an identifiable group of people who are not proportionally distributed through out all classes of society in the first place? (You have to perform a kind of mind flip here to get it.)

So, under this mind flip the answer as to why it has taken so long for integration to `work' as promised and appears to be an intractable task, is because the problem is and was designed as a problem from a white identity perspective. This is how power is manifested in the discursive realm and molded by our ever busy technocratic-managerial class---who for the most part are completely unsconcieous of what they are doing, while making up and selling the American dream which in toto is a class obscuring, racialized system par execellence.

[I want to continue these thoughts on the next post, because they de-construct the idea that fascism is somekind of mysterious vast machine that is impossible to reproduce in America---and the corollary which Chip Bertlet keeps championing, that American fascists are completely reducible to a few Ayran-nation weirdos with tatoos and motorcycles. (And believe me Chip I want to you to argue me out of this idea.)

The short form is that the whole basis of a white male American identity, then again the consumate Christian---identity in question---is the seeding ground of Nazism. No I don't exaggerate. I found a presentiment of all that in Leo Strauss, as Strauss tried to interrogate his `Jewishness', and discovered his deep affinity with vehement anti-semitic writers like Paul de la Guard and Karl Schmitt, while finding something in common with Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky has to be seen as the architype weirdo with tatoos, posing on his motorcycle, trussed up in leather, sporting a cock ring as a signifier of submission---while pretending to be Lawrence of Judea. Well if that doesn't do it (and you don't remember Shirley Stoller in Seven Beauties), then just look at Vlad's clinched jaw muscles in his British army uniform portrait. Now, ask yourself, this is a democrat? Well, no boys and girls, this is a fascist.

But then, Jabotinsky is exotica, or orientalism or something so beyond the Amercian experience that he disappears as irrelevant. He was a Jew from Odessa, a hundred years ago, and how far from Indiana or Ohio, or the heart land of America can you get?]

CG



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