[lbo-talk] new spirit of capitalism

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 9 10:54:17 PDT 2007


--- Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:


> What she said (referring to Doug's post below).
>
> I think what Yoshie and LT are saying is simply
> this: for capital to
> have moved into the (American) South and for the
> third world to be
> weaned from Communism, the civil rights movement was
> mandatory, and
> in fact supported by the Courts, Foundations and the
> elite media.
> Just too cumbersome to set up a factory with two
> sets of bathrooms
> and counters, Adolph Reed argued back in the 1970s.

Vulgar economism and dead wrong. The South already _had_ segregated bathrooms, and in fact de facto segregated factories, and they weren't going North. A more plausible explanation for the qualified elite support for desegregation is suggested by Mary Dudziak in her now-classic Cold War Civil Rights:

http://mdudziak.com/cwcr.aspx

Racial discrimination made the US look bad compared to official Communist policy of equality and racial integration (despite de fact rabid Russian racism and antisemitism) in the Cold War. And the moral factor cannot be overlooked. The Bull Connors, George Wallaces, Orville Fabus' etc., firing-hosing peaceful demonstrators and turning dogs loose on them in TV, the dignity of the Little Rock Nine in the face of howling crowds of epithet spewing bigots, the licensed KKK murders and lynchings, with the obvious aid of a pig-ignorant southern state judiciary and racist juries, revolted the nation. And from a constitutional point of view even someone as lukewarm on racial equality as Eisenhower found Southern Massive Resistance to federal authority intolerable.


> So civil rights
> was not a bottom up movement but an elite led change
> of legal
> conditions for the purposes of capital accumulation
> and system
> legitimacy in general.

Utter rubbish. Tell it to MLK and the organizers of the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Riders and SNCC, to the leaders of the sit-in-movements. Elite support was halting and qualified. Brown I had no enforcement. Brown II's "all deliberate speed" left the schools I went to in Virginia in the 60s and early 70s still segregated. JFK had to be dragged along screaming and kicking. In the end, LBJ strong-armed the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress by using every ounce of power and every dirty trick he knew, which was a lot.

The Cold War forced capital
> to realize that it
> accumulates best anyway on a juridical foundation of
> abstract
> individualism, equal right, tolerance and diversity.

Too abstract. The Cold War forced some more progressive elements of the US elite to recognize that segregation was going to fuel national liberation movements among the newly decolonizing nations and push them into the Soviet orbit.


> Our ethics are
> the depoliticizing ethics of the market.

This is, among other things, an insult to LBJ, who said, when he signed the CRA, that he just handed the White House to the GOP for a generation. It's an insult to Ike, who showed the spine to occupy the South with the US Army when the Southern elites supported segregation. It's an insult to the tens of millions of Americans, North and South who were repulsed and angered by the images of violence from the South (and in fact the North -- like Chicago), and many thousands of whom risked (and some lost) their lives in a collective effort to win voting rights and enforce desegregation/

The
> legitimizing of what
> Andie touts as competitive elections also put a halo
> on the political
> form through which capital manages its own internal
> plurality while
> achieving the consent of the governed.

Better fucking believe it. Of course the alternative to competitive elections is dictatorship of one party, and that's just SO attractive in comparison. Obviously I recognize the limits that money and class power imposes on competitive elections in capitalist democracy. That's not a reason to abolish them, but to struggle for the elimination of classes and the limitation, so far as possible, of the influence of money on elections.


>
> Feminism also only justified the competing down of
> wages to the point
> where the couples' wage equals that of the old male
> breadwinner,
> doubling the rate of exploitation. It's not that
> these movements made
> things worse; they just made capitalism as a system
> of self expanding
> value possible.

Oh, this is charming. "Feminism," a unitary block. Never mind radical, socialist, and Marxist feminism, never mind that no liberal feminist EVER demanded that men's wages be REDUCED.

What economist, reactionary, claptrap.

Of COURSE you are saying that these movements made things worse. Don't pretend otherwise. On you account, civil rights and feminism were mere bourgeois liberal traps that drained off support and organization from anti-capitalist struggle (like we really have had that in this country since the 30s), and cemented the power of capital.


>
> So identity politics

Oh yeah, right. Civil rights and feminism are mere "identity politics."

are not forms of resistance but
> of entrenchment
> of the juridico-political forms of capitalism whose
> system of
> domination is abstract, dis-simulated and
> paradoxically collective.
>
> Rakesh

Rakesh, I have no idea what is happening to you, You are starting to suffer from arteriosclerosis of the ideology. This is the worst kind of backchat from the mid 1970s. I mean really, this is the way the OL, the RCP, the RWM and the CWP used to talk.


>
> "And just what are these hard lessons? If it's that
> feminism, the
> civil rights movement, and The Gay International
> have scored only
> partial victories that have left capitalism in
> place, I'd say, yeah,
> sure, I sorta knew that already and didn't need 50
> gigabytes of
> alleged proof that Iran doesn't hang same-sexers and
> stone adulterous
> women because back in the 16th century every poet
> had a loverboy. If
> it means that those movements have in some sense
> made things worse by
> legitimating capitalism or some such, I'd have to
> say "horseshit."
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