[lbo-talk] Are Conservatives Racist?

Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Sat Aug 20 12:27:01 PDT 2011


Miles wrote:


> People of color diligently schooling individual well-intentioned white
> activists is not going to address racism in our society.

Nowhere did I say that. Racism is going to be abolished by the struggle led by the people historically crushed, directly oppressed by racism. The abolition of racism cannot depend on the disposition of the oppressors to stop oppressing the oppressed or to switch sides and join the oppressed. If that's the case, then racism is not going to be abolished. Ever. What I was addressing there was the issue of how to join the struggle of the oppressed productively, particularly if you are not of the oppressed by racism.

You seem to want to misrepresent my views.


> Racism is a social formation, not an individual psychological characteristic,
> so any interventions that focus on changing individual minds are ineffective
> political strategies.

Non-sequitur. Specifically human social change is always, of necessity, mediated by human consciousness, by human subjective activity. Otherwise it wouldn't be human change; it wouldn't be social change or -- to be more precise -- it wouldn't be social *progress*. It would be spontaneous, natural change. Unless I'm doing yoga or trying to be very mindful of it, my usual breathing -- like my daughter's cat breathing -- is not mediated by much consciousness. It is mostly regulated by my autonomic nervous system.

That's a part of nature that we have inside. But fighting racism, just the conceptualizing the very notion of racism, requires specifically human consciousness, language, etc. How can you fight racism if you don't even see or know or can articulate what racism is?

Try to build a house without having the vision of some house in your mind to start with!

Please read what I wrote here: http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20110725/008317.html

There's nothing new there. Please read carefully the first few paragraphs of Capital 1, chapter 7, section 1. Read them in their full generality. These are the passages where Marx describes the process of production of goods ("use values", the material content of wealth). Suppose the period of production is the whole span of human history. Think of the product as the concrete producers themselves. (Hint: Marx doesn't say that the purpose or idea with which the producer begins its engagement with the rest of nature will be exactly matched by the final product; there's room for unintended consequences.) If you construe these passages in general, then the production of history (historical agency) is exactly what Marx is describing there. It is an increasingly conscious process. We are not going to bump into socialism. We are going to plan it or it won't happen.

Again, do not interpret Marx's description in the narrow sense of production of ordinary wealth, but as including also the production of social structures (i.e. intentional social structures, such as social structures that preclude or make it unlikely for racism to emerge) and, ultimately, the production of us as concrete individuals.

Hope this helps to clarify matters.



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