[lbo-talk] Noam Chomsky is losing it

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Sep 28 09:47:51 PDT 2011


On Sep 28, 2011, at 12:04 PM, Eric Beck wrote:


> Because it's incoherent? I think Reed's argument is ultimately
> idealist (for lack of a better term): He wants us to pretend that the
> racial stratifications of capitalism don't exist, that they can
> abstracted from a pure capitalism that can do without them. And he's
> probably right. But who cares? He's assuming a phantasm, he's positing
> a world that doesn't exist, while people who dispute his take are
> arguing with the world in which, for example, as Miles points out,
> black children are more than twice as likely to be poor as white
> children.
>
> This notion of targets is very interesting. For one, it seems to
> reject the economic and focus exclusively on the political:

This is not merely wrong, it's the opposite of the truth. Why do you think Adolph has spent years trying to organize the Labor Party? Why he's pushed for living wage laws, free college tuition, single-payer health insurance, better labor laws, things like that? That's not rejecting the economic at all. Because of the structure of U.S. society, such things would disproportionately benefit black people, though of course they'd benefit just about everyone but the bourgeoisie. And they'd do a lot more than just identifying racial disparities and intoning the word "racism" to reduce racial disparities. But they don't have the morally self-aggrandizing effects of intoning the word "racism," or ranting Cox-like about Malcolm X's grave.

Really, where did you get this from?

Apropos all this, here's the epigraph from a piece by Adolph and his graduate student Merlin Chowkwanyun forthcoming in the Socialist Register 2012:


> A Harvard University study of more than 2,500 middle-income African American families found that, when compared to other ethnic groups in the same income bracket, blacks were up to 23 percent more likely. ‘Our data would seem to discredit the notion that black Americans are less likely’, said head researcher Russell Waterstone, noting the study also found that women of African descent were no more or less prone than Latinas. ‘In fact, over the past several decades, we’ve seen the African-American community nearly triple in probability’. The study noted that, furthermore, Asian-Americans.
>
> - The Onion, 30 November 2010



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