Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: Race and Class

this is David Harvey and you're listening to the anti-capitalist chronicles a podcast that looks at capitalism through a Marxist lens this podcast is made possible by democracy at work in the previous broadcast I was emphasizing the way in which it was vital to start to think about capitalism not as a solution of capitalism as the problem now you will think I'm a crazy Marxist for pushing that line but I was extremely surprised the other day to find that actually some other people are beginning to recognize I'm not in the language that I'm using but in recognized the facts of what we're talking about and there was an op-ed piece by Paul Krugman now cokeman is an interesting character I mean he he does some very serious things and I'm very glad he's got his position doing op-ed pieces in the new times and and he does on occasion get things written close to some rather critical perspectives on the nature of the economic system usually from the standpoint of the politics which are messing around with it he's an economist who believes in the economy as the economy but it's when politicians start messing with it and things go badly wrong given the situation which which is erupted after the killing and and the demonstrations and under like he wrote this he asked the question how did we get here you know the core story of US politics over the past four decades core story over the past four decades is that wealthy elites weaponized white racism to gain political power which they use to pursue policies that enrich the already wealthy at workers expense now that's the kind of thing I might have written and been very happy writing he then goes on that this was what was going on but we didn't really see it until Trump's rise it was possible barely he says for people to deny this reality with a straight face at this point however it requires willful blindness not to see what's going on oh this is a this is a very challenging perspective Republican that Quincy says and spent decades exploiting racial hostility to win elections despite a policy agenda that hurts workers but Trump is now pushing that cynical strategy towards the cons of apotheosis on one side he's effectively inciting violence by his supporters on the other he's very close to calling for a military response to social protest and at this point nobody expects any significant pushback from other Republicans now I don't think Trump will actually succeed in provoking a race war in the near future even though he's clearly itching for an excuse to use force but the months ahead and here I also agree with him are still likely to be very very ugly after all if Trump is encouraging violence and talking about military solutions to overwhelmingly peaceful protests what will he and his supporters do he looks likely to lose November's election now there's a lot of counter for discussion about you know what happens if Trump loses the election but refuses to leave the White House on the grounds that the elections are frauds and fakes most of it so never discussion about but the thing here about this argument really goes back to that opening sentence that the core story has been that wealthy elites robbing eyes wide racism gain political power I think there's no question agree that the Republicans have had such an important role in governance over the last 40 years that they have actually weaponized racist emotion fears elder Bush and woody Horton had all those kinda things Trump the course prefix blistered about this but then this idea that with that political power they pursued policies that we'd richly already wealthy workers experienced well you only got a look at the last tax bill and a tax so called tax reform which is a giveaway to corporations and the giveaway to investors and a giveaway to bondholders and a giveaway to everybody else and gay well there's nothing whatsoever to the mass of the population then will be as I often pointed out examples where if somebody will say oh they can afford an extra two cups of coffee a week and that's a big improvement on their condition yeah yeah it's a big improvement so yes we've got that kind of kind of problem now for me interestingly how we integrate class and race into this story is critical I would came to the United States I was just not like as I mentioned I was just not used to having the racial question right in front of me all of the time I was not used to having it in my back yard I wasn't used to living in a city where the racial segregation was chronic and no matter how hard you tried it was always difficult to somehow bridge that racial chasm existed city but one of the things that struck me was that whenever I was circulating with african-american audiences there was always this sort of a mixed reaction to class analysis very mixed to the edge very often particularly in the mid-1970s and so on the reaction was rather hostile we don't want to hear that we're not interested but then somebody said to me one day of course you realize that we live in a world where if you put race and class together you will have a revolution that the bringing together of race class is the one thing that the ruling class of the United States is incredibly fearful that's why they went after Martin Luther King and where they went after Black Panthers they dismantled Black Panthers because the Black Panthers were not only black nationalists but they also had an economic project one of the most successful programs that the Panthers had in Baltimore was breakfast program for kids it was very successful they also together with the American Friends Service Committee which is you know a very interesting sort of man mainly white but almost entirely white but progressive organization the Panthers and the American Friends Service community set up a free medical clinic and free freedom free breakfast free medical clinic the Panthers were about were about a lot of things and I think people are beginning to appreciate that more and more and of course the FBI went after them and showed up at Hampton and Chicago and then did all kinds of things to totally dismantle and there's somebody said to me you know if you get and you start a movement with race and class together you're asking for trouble and and you know Malcolm X and so on started to talk class as well as race and as soon as race and class get together it's it's dynamite and his aim is true I don't know how some of the black leaders have survived I mean I'm full of admiration for Angela Davis who is put together race class and gender in a very very particular kind of way and I mean the fact that she didn't she managed to keep going as long as she has and she's still going strong you know it's quite remarkable but but but this is this is the thing I want to try to put it together and and you can see how it will be put together for example take take something as simple as the healthcare universal health care system who would that benefit that would benefit everybody but of course it would particularly benefit African American populations they're the ones who by and large can't afford health health insurance they're the ones whom quote have the underlying conditions and if you want to cure the underlying conditions and not allow the underlying conditions to fester then you need to have an adequate health care system in low-income African American communities well how do you do that it's not going to happen through private action and it's clear also from the corona and story and again misses just going back to some of chromos Governor Cuomo's commentaries that in dealing with a corona virus you need a unified health care system when you had something like I don't know 50 or 60 hospitals or whatever or maybe 100 in either nominee this hospitals in New York state about there maybe 15 or 20 percent of them are public institutions and the rest of private institutions are doing their own thing and they're not so you needed to unify that system because the coronavirus could not be dealt with by simply having all of these fragmented so Cuomo is kind of saying we need to have a cohort in 18 since the healthcare system we need a public health system that is linked together and in which there are cross subsidies going on between the different the private and the public and between different private institutions we need to set that whole thing a whole thing up so he's talking about setting up a public health health system but you can see straight away that that health system would be much easier to put together and a coordinator if it was a single-payer system and everybody was caught up in the single-payer system and you have an effect an abolition of the privatization of healthcare but of course the privatization of healthcare is crucial because that's where a lot of money gets invested a lot of money gets married inand listed on the stock exchanges and most of it health care is that there is big business and if you interfere with big business you're interfering with one of the saintly part of what you know capitalism is supposed to be about so this is if you like one of them another big girl can't kind of questions so a universal health care system would to some degree be essential to take care of the underlying conditions which lead to the low life expectancy those zip codes which are dominated by African American populations and lead to underlying conditions which lead them to be vulnerable to things like the corona virus so here we've got a very very very simple calculation why does it not occur well pounded the course-level of the lobbyists and the health insurance companies against it etcetera etcetera cetera okay expect that but this is where Krugman's point comes in then actually Republicans don't want it and then and they find ways to resist it and then why is they used to resist it have nothing to do with health care whatsoever they have everything to do with something else which is going on what was the main thing that Republicans were complaining about in Obamacare which was not a universal system nevertheless went a little bit down and they they objected to the individual mandate and what they did was to say there is an America to have guv tell any individual what they should do and if we allow this mandate to stand God knows what will happen next I think it was Scalia who kind of said well the government could decide that everybody should eat spinach right so so individual liberty is for them the way in which you deny a collective good being delivered in such a way that you could deal with the inequalities which exist in health standards between affluent communities and impoverished communities and impoverished communities for the most part not entirely for the most part in the city like New York people of color Hispanic migrants some event so what do we do with a situation of that kind well one of the ways in which and this is of course then comes up with this whole kind of question of them are we going to wear masks you know and and and people turn up and they kind of turn up to a supermarket but they're not wearing a mask and they say it is my right as an individual to come in without wearing a mask if I want and you know at that point it has to say well but you can't do that because you know you may have an individual right not to wear a mask which you don't have an individual right to go and infect other people I'm not wearing a mask is like saying I have a right to infect other people and you don't have that right so other people gonna keep you out so this this argument about individual rights starts to come very very strong of course what was neoliberal ethical about it was about individual responsibility individual rights so on so interestingly right now we've all become neoliberal because we're all a bit caught up in that weird way of thinking but a universal program I mean I'm not I'm not against targeting particular areas with particular programs and so on but I've seen those things in Baltimore and the and it's great for for I don't know five years a program works very well because it's funded by you know by some grant from NIH or whatever then the more grant money runs out and the program withdraws and suddenly the people who were benefiting from all of his presented care and it's true things they've got suddenly finds themselves bereft I mean this was going on around Hopkins Hospital all at the time people will set up a program substance abuse whatever and there will be a ten year program and after ten years their money would run out and they would just then walk out have to leave the people on their own so you get these kind of insane things which don't contribute do to the health care of the mass of the population the same thing applies to things like public housing and all the rest of it and dreadful public housing situation in New York City and it has a lot to do with the fact that yes it's good idea to have public housing and a lot of people wanted to be in public housing and then of course along comes Congress and fails to fund it and takes money out and doesn't me a liberal gain kinda says why are we giving subsidized housing to those people who don't work hard and they're not prepared to you know take responsibility for themselves etcetera etcetera so you get this argument which is which is going on I want very much to say look we have to start to think about social policies which address the question of racial disparities and racial unevenness and all the rest of it but do it in a way through universal legislation kind of Universal legislation which is available for everybody like I said I'm not against specific targeted programs they're fine and good I'm not against reparations so I think those very good case to be made for reparations to be paid to an african-american community not only suffered under slavery but suffered after slavery from systemic discrimination so I'm not against those kinds of things so don't get me wrong but I think if you use those things if you do not use the universal kind of programs then at certain point they're going to fall back into the dominant practice a lot of things that seem to be happening after the after the the real reform struggles of the night late 1960s very early 1970s a lot of things that have happened since really been about the erosion of those things gradual dismantling of those things and while while the most important things we can do politically is to set up a situation where that cannot happen we see some of that right now through the programs that do persist it's very difficult maybe very difficult they rid of Social Security Republicans keep coming along and saying Social Security you'd be better off you know putting your money in the stock market or estimated and this mandatory system you know it should be individual responsibility bla bla bla bla but it's very difficult get rid of Social Security turns out it's very difficult to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid as well so if you start to universalize those programs it'll be very difficult to get rid of them what the Republicans want to do and why then the rich elite want to do is to gradually erode that is defunct bit by bit nor wipe the edges get them to the point where it become unsustainable there's no there's no problem with Social Security at all Social Security can last forever you just have to structure it right and do the right things and not allow the government to start raiding it for other reasons the same is true of Medicare and Medicaid they're very efficient systems for delivering house they're potentially universal and as universal so you do the job to do a good job of setting up the basics for a health care system which so-and-so it's relatively easy to imagine standing up for Public Choice initiative which gradually extend them or be more radical so universal healthcare system now this is this is the sort of thing that that seems to me we have to understand but we also have to understand how race and how white racism is being cultivated and utilized and how pervasive it is one of the things I had to confront when I counted to bought in a sense to sort of ask myself the question how racist am I and in what sense and I racist and and I was always kind of aware of that question and it seems to me we all should ask that question and one of the things I learned from my Baltimore experience was any person particularly a whiteness who says they are not racist is lie we live in a racially charged society we live in a society of all kinds and racial code exists it's very difficult even with the best will in the world to imagine living in somehow or other and not be touched by all of those codings I know that I feel that and I recognize it and it's very important to recognize because if you don't recognize it then you get the hidden racism which come up this was what came out in that incident in Central Park couple of weeks back well I'm a white woman took a dog let it off the leash in an area which birdwatchers blackton congregate and a birdwatcher who happened to be black came out and said put that dog on a leash they got into a bit of an altercation then suddenly this undoubtedly why neoliberal woman said you're threatening me and I'm gonna call the police he said okay you call the police and she calls the police and she said my life is being threatened by an african-american afterwards I think she just didn't know why she said it so she started to say office I tell me why I said that she lost her job she lost she lost her pet because when she finally decided to control the dog she's picked it up by them color strung it up more or less so but this is the point about the hidden racism IRA have to recognize that I have hidden racism and I can and I could suddenly turn up a racist thought so you have to be constantly aware and we all have to be aware because that is the sort of thing that gets played upon that is the sort of thing that leads people to say okay I'm going to vote for X because I don't like this guy blind but this guy why it's suddenly raised the fear some racial contamination all those Mexicans come rapists coming across the border who need to be kept out yes I'm on that war and suddenly in the voting booth instead of voting this is the this is the sort of thing that goes on in our thinking and it's one of the things that I I was constantly sort of fighting with in Baltimore because like I said I'd I I knew about the read about the racial problem and I read about this and I knew about it theoretically and so on that and and and I and I and I would try I would try to approach situations in a non racist way but I often found myself kind of being vulnerable and and and particularly vulnerable to something that I talked about earlier which is vulnerable to the vehicle the question of blaming the victim as somebody who has a lot of privilege at night yeah take care of myself physically reasonably well and so on and they're nice to the last 84 years as a result of that yeah I can look and I kind of say well if life expectancy in those communities is just 60 then they're not taking care of themselves as much as they could that's where I come back to this whole kind of question the racial coding is the citation of underlying conditions racially coded it was interesting in the decision the initial discussion about what happened to George Florida there was this kind of thing that the question of did he have underlying conditions as if that justified his death when he had underlying conditions which was a subtle way of saying he was part of the problem of his death and I it was there hasn't been mentioned just just just just recently but initially this whole question with the underlying conditions oh well he had an underlying condition and the officers didn't mean to provoke him how could they know he had an underlying condition if he died he died because of the underlying condition not because of the children or a knee on the neck there would be a very easy and and and for all we know if it goes to trial that will be something that will be raised in the defense and is a racist way of thinking and again racist coding is very very significant I'm not so sure that underlying can to mention under my conditions is purely a racist coding bad it has or markings racist coding and that's why I think one of the reasons why I'm very suspicious about many other things that are are being said but this brings us back then to the question of the protests and one of the protests going to do nor what's it going to be about right now I have to say the protests are very encouraging in a number of number of ways to begin with a lot of people are braving the virus to engage in a certain bravery involved secondly a lot of the protests are of white populations this was not true back in the uprisings of 68 this is a multiracial protest and I think that particularly with the younger generation you have a different situation a different kind of thing now what I want to do is I'm gonna have to rescue you and I are gonna have to rescue the whole population from all those errors which I mentioned in kind of moralizing you all in this together and rescue by insisting that the people start to take into account the underlying process that produces these nefarious conditions what that underlying process is about so that people start to see very clearly that capital is not the solution capital is the problem and until we actually rein in that problem and we rein in the power of capital until we deal with with what everyone talks about this core story of US politics in which wealthy elites weaponized white racism just to gain political power and that's what Trump is trying to do no question about it and it's then used to pursue policies that enrich the already wealthy and they do it at workers expense the workers have not benefited from Thompson not at all he likes to scan they have and says those dents but they haven't who's benefited well those people were benefited from the tax reform and it does become obvious but that is what's going on which is why this is terribly important to phrase one's argument and a politicized hug programs Argos now it was interesting yeah when one gets picked up and used this argument that he puts out here seems to mean to be dynamite and it's interesting that it's not being taken up by the liberal left at all we have to push the liberal left and we have to push all those people demonstrating to understand where capital is the problem capital cannot be the solution and by capital we're talking about wealthy elites and their manipulations and their manipulation of white racism is not to say that white racism is simply their construct but the manipulation of it and their suckering of it it seems to me to be something that we need to take very close very very close attention to this is a very difficult time I hope that some of these observations are helpful I don't I'm not sure I've got it right I'd really really really will be distressed if we come out of this conjuncture this key moment where real change is possible if we come out of that and make all of the mistakes that were made back in the 1960s which made into the 1970s in the disempowerment of working people and all of us today if that happens it will be a disaster and we've got to stop that history repeating itself and unfortunately what that means is we've got to be absolutely critical of some of those people who are sounding like they're very progressive Ray Dalio been talking it's the progressive wing of the capitalist class the gates and Switzer even the Bloomberg's that wing and it's interesting Cuomo is sounding very progressive right now but his mentor and the person who he really looks up to is minor and my name seems to me to bear a big burden for saying okay this situation is intractable the black family and all of it it's intractable so we'll just do benign neglect which took this right into neoliberal ethic in the neoliberal solution if that happens again and I think that the United States will not be a place worth living in with that we'll have to take up this theme again because it is critical for the future of all of us it's critical for the future of the country thank you thank you for joining me today you've been listening to David Harvey's anti-capitalist chronicles a democracy at work production a special thank you to the wonderful patreon community for supporting this project

Channel: Democracy At Work

Views: 18,657

Keywords: Richard Wolff, democracy, work, labor, economy, economics, inequality, justice, capitalism, capital, socialism, wealth, income, wages, poverty, yt:cc=on, Marx, social constructs, pandemic, epidemic, virus, exploitation, protests, George Floyd, Minneapolis, David Harvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., race, class, racism, wealthy, elite, politics, elections, Trump, race war, class war

Id: Na7LQDSVNIs

Length: 32min 48sec (1968 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020