On Dec 16, 2009, at 10:37 AM, Ted Winslow wrote:
> It this is to be judged "terrific", isn't it necessary to explain
> why "class" hasn't worked, as Marx claimed it would, to develop the
> degree of enlightenment required to imagine and create socialism and
> why, in spite of this, it might do so in the future?
Class consciousness doesn't happen spontaneously. We've had dreadful unions in the U.S. that have done little or nothing to promote class consciousness.
One of the main points of the recent diversity kerfuffle that got lost in concentrating on what a bad guy WBM is - and this is one that Adolph Reed brought out - is that focusing on difference and discrimination suggests no real political agenda. That doesn't mean that you deny the existence of difference and discrimination, of course. But if you promote programs that aim to help the broadly defined working class, you have the potential for getting people to work together in an effort that can also transform consciousness.
<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html>
> And here’s a practical catch-22. In the logic of antiracism,
> exposure of the racial element of an instance of wrongdoing will
> lead to recognition of injustice, which in turn will lead to
> remedial action—though not much attention seems ever given to how
> this part is supposed to work. I suspect this is because the
> exposure part, which feels so righteously yet undemandingly good, is
> the real focus. But this exposure convinces only those who are
> already disposed to recognize.
>
> By contrast, examining, for example, the contributions to historian
> and civil rights activist Rayford Logan’s 1944 volume What the Negro
> Wants, one sees quite a different picture. Nearly all the
> contributors—including nominal conservatives—to this collection of
> analyses from a broad cross section of black scholars and activists
> asserted in very concrete terms that the struggle for racial justice
> and the general struggle for social and industrial democracy were
> more than inseparable, that the victory of the former largely
> depended on the success of the latter. This was, at the time, barely
> even a matter for debate: rather, it was the frame of reference for
> any black mass politics and protest activity.
>
> As I suggest above, various pressures of the postwar period—
> including carrots of success and sticks of intimidation and witch-
> hunting, as well as the articulation of class tensions within the
> Civil Rights movement itself—drove an evolution away from this
> perspective and toward reformulation of the movement’s goals along
> lines more consonant with postwar, post-New Deal, Cold War
> liberalism. Thus what the political scientist Preston Smith calls
> “racial democracy” came gradually to replace social democracy as a
> political goal—the redress of grievances that could be construed as
> specifically racial took precedence over the redistribution of
> wealth, and an individualized psychology replaced notions of
> reworking the material sphere. This dynamic intensified with the
> combination of popular demobilization in black politics and
> emergence of the post-segregation black political class in the 1970s
> and 1980s.
>
> We live under a regime now that is capable simultaneously of
> including black people and Latinos, even celebrating that inclusion
> as a fulfillment of democracy, while excluding poor people without a
> whimper of opposition. Of course, those most visible in the excluded
> class are disproportionately black and Latino, and that fact gives
> the lie to the celebration. Or does it really? From the standpoint
> of a neoliberal ideal of equality, in which classification by race,
> gender, sexual orientation or any other recognized ascriptive status
> (that is, status based on what one allegedly is rather than what one
> does) does not impose explicit, intrinsic or necessary limitations
> on one’s participation and aspirations in the society, this
> celebration of inclusion of blacks, Latinos and others is warranted.
>
> But this notion of democracy is inadequate, since it doesn’t begin
> to address the deep and deepening patterns of inequality and
> injustice embedded in the ostensibly “neutral” dynamics of American
> capitalism. What A. Philip Randolph and others—even anticommunists
> like Roy Wilkins—understood in the 1940s is that what racism meant
> was that, so long as such dynamics persisted without challenge,
> black people and other similarly stigmatized populations would be
> clustered on the bad side of the distribution of costs and benefits.
> To extrapolate anachronistically to the present, they would have
> understood that the struggle against racial health disparities, for
> example, has no real chance of success apart from a struggle to
> eliminate for-profit health care.
>
Back to Ted:
> I take it, by the way, that you don't judge Zizek's alternative idea
> of the world's slums as the likely future source of the required
> revolutionary practice as "terrific".
No. People in the world's slums are marginalized and powerless. This is a variation on the way liberal foundations in the U.S. love to focus on the very weakest and not the core of the domestic working class. You can appear generous at the same time you don't threaten the social order.
Doug