Antiracism Can’t Overcome Capitalism — Adolph Reed & Walter Benn Michaels

i think that we often hear on the left this line we must do both which is of course fight racism and fight capitalism and walter in some of your earlier comments you had sort of alluded to this uh and and i think you know on the one hand this statement is pretty unhelpful because as you said walter like in a way it's very obvious of course we're going to fight racism and we're going to fight capitalism but i think you know uh on the other hand it doesn't really tell us much about what to do so i wonder what you guys make of this is this the right way to think about our political commitments and then adolf to borrow a line that you used why can we not split the difference between anti-racism and anti-capitalism okay well yeah i'll start out um because i'm talking about this kind of lately anyway um in the first place there's like no such thing as a race class dichotomy right and there's no such thing as being class reductionist or if there is such thing as being class reductionist what it means ultimately is recognition that race is um a species of a genus of ideologies of a scripted difference that is um notions of difference based on what what you supposedly are rather than what what you do uh that's a version of what i mentioned in my uh white supremacy comment um and i mean here's the deal higher or hierarchically organized societies sustain themselves just based on coercion right um well some people like to think that but but it just doesn't work that way so you need to have like some consensus right some some some popular understanding that things are the way that they are because the way that they are and that's nature what these ideologies of ascriptive difference do is as a said kind of earlier is they sort people into these uh taxonomies right uh these taxonomies of arbitrarily constructed groups right races religions like whatever uh and assign them or construct around them sort of just show stories about why everybody seems to ought to be where they seem to be in the system of hierarchy right um race um emerged and evolved as such a category you know sometime over the last three four hundred years depending on on how you want to count and where you're looking at the moment um and and it's worked to justify um the emerging sociology and cultural or sociological and cultural order of capitalism as a political economic and cultural system right so in that sense you can't really conceive of race or it makes the most sense certainly because you can people can conceive of anything right but historically speaking race has emerged out of developing capitalist political economy and a social control dynamics so it's not separable from it and see this is one of the reasons that it's that that i think it's worth challenging or rather i don't know if it's worth challenging one of the things that's problematic and insidious about the stuff that people like candy and the afro-pessimists and other primordialists right um you deploy about the race idea is that they want to disconnect it from the historical and social processes in which it's always been embedded because uh because those have been intrinsically linked to to to the development of global capitalism from the very beginning but the irony as walter and i both have pointed out many many times is that making the move that they make right that is the move of insisting that racial hierarchy or race ideology is trans-historical and trans-contextual and primordial even though some of them don't want to admit that they're saying it's primordial so well it's only been around 500 years so i'm not saying right like in your dna um but the move that they make is exactly the move that victorian racists like madison grant and william z ripley and others made right they they read by reading race uh as a discourse of inequality or a system of inequality um above and across um your particular social structures of accumulation might be one way to put it what what you're doing by definition is is reading race into nature uh and that and that's the way that you get you know a race class dichotomy right but if you don't uh take a primordialist view about what what what race is and take a view as walter and i both um devised quite independently of each other i think before we even knew each other seeing race as much more the equivalent of unicorns right than of anything concrete that actually lives within history then you don't see a race class dichotomy and you see race as well as other um discourses and practices of of segmenting populations right into artificial taxonomies as as intrinsic mechanisms of capitalist uh i mean legitimation dynamics so who's going to say it often i agree on virtually everything we talk a lot about this stuff obviously we write together we and this stuff together but there are sort of two points of i don't know potential like difference one is the history thing which maybe we'll get to but the other is to end up being by saying there are not such things as class reductionists so i don't know you know i'm feeling i'm feeling like i might be coming out as a class reduction you know i'm at least class reduction class reduction is curious you know i'm not there all the way i'm like moving in that direction so and i think it's relevant to you know what what's the source of this curiosity i mean no doubt it has like complications that i can't quite you know take psychoanalysis or deal with but really math house yeah right and part of the feeling is that you know you want to say um in terms of solving the problems of inequality and solving the problems inequality including the racial problems the kind of basic intuitions not even intuition it's obvious point um that doing it universally is more effective both for black people and for white people for all people of color uh and for white people than it is to do it by the anti-racist route it's kind of obvious i mean and the way i always think of this is just um and i don't know maybe jim we talked about this a little bit way a year ago and i can't remember the last happened since then if you take if you look at you know where the race class where the imposition of the race class dichotomy shows up and you look at a profession like cnas who make like 23 000 a year and cannot live in what they do and do a very hard job but not a job that requires a lot of education of a certain kind um and they tend to be overwhelmingly women and largely women of color and you think well look the anti-racist program is and it's obviously true these people are funneled into these really bad jobs because they're women that's sexism and because they are women of color and that's racism so what's the happy ending one version of the happy ending is that we should have more white guys doing those jobs but you know it's not like a better world when white guys are being paid twenty four thousand dollars a year to do these back breaking jobs no it's a better world if like no one's paid 24 000 a year to do these jobs people are paid a living wage to do these jobs under satisfactory working conditions under ways in which instead of our goal social goal being able to create the possibility for people to escape jobs or bad jobs we're trying to take the bad jobs and make them good that seems to me pure class reductionism you don't even need to have the concept of race to work that one through and and if you look at the actual practical problems now if you look at the problems of who's getting promoted like in in uh at gold goldman sachs goldman sachs they think well people of color don't get promoted as often as the white people do that's not a problem i've got interested in solving who cares who gets promoted at least as a kind of a so left social project at goldman sachs that's a problem of discrimination no doubt it's the wrong thing they shouldn't do it but everything they do at goldman sachs is the wrong thing they shouldn't be doing it so i'm if i say i'm kind of like increasingly tempted by a kind of class reductionist way to think about this and the kind of class reductions i'd be interested in is precisely when we say when we're doing in terms of employment and labor markets let's stop worrying about who has which jobs let's start worrying about the jobs and we can describe our ideas about justice in terms of the jobs without ever thinking about who has it right oh well i'm with you all the way on that man i mean i don't see um because even when you make the point that these women are funneled into these jobs because they're women and their pocs like the picture that popped into my mind is okay well why didn't melody hopson get funneled into this job uh and the answer is because she had class resources that saved her from it so it all comes come comes back to class and political economy and and and the impulse to kind of um leave the immediate and empirical realm for explanation right and to go instead to you know reach for the legacy of some right like well right i mean the trinidadian woman uh who uh who is probably documented but who is here uh you know work in a nursing home is a victim of centuries of brit colonialism in the west indies uh right no matter you know what composition of you know african or south asian right uh she's her parentages that's a that's a hypothesis you don't need right like you don't need to parse um the historic legacy of slavery i'm sorry i just had that's one of the good things about hanging out with adults there's certain things that i deeply deeply want to say but i'm just not allowed to say within 10 minutes i can be pretty sure he's going to say himself one of the things about that would be that is that um and that goes to the history stuff which is that you know i mean reparations is the obvious version of this but there are lots of them you know if you if you if you think about so i live a little bit south of evanston and there is a kind of limited form of reparations for people who've been unable to get into the housing market or redline in the past but if you're committed to like you know universal decommodified housing the account of why you don't have housing now is completely irrelevant you know if you don't have housing because your great great great grandmother was a slave and you've got the legacy of slavery and if you don't have housing because your great great great great grandfather was a slave owner but like he blew it all on women wine and more slaves and selling left left everything it doesn't matter you don't have housing the public good requires you to have housing if we're committed to the public good we don't primarily care about the causal account of why it is you don't have enough for a mortgage what we're not committed to is getting you into the mortgage market by returning to you essentially private property which you ought to have owned or committed to the public part of it the public part socialism in general makes the history of how you came to be um unequal irrelevant what we want to do is make everybody equal we don't need to do and this is exactly what angel is saying there is give people have good and bad accounts of how that inequality worked out the good and bad accounts about the inequality worked out is exactly what chicago neoliberal economy economics began with that's kind of at the core of it and the whole point for us as socialists is we don't give a whatever however whatever caused inequality we're interested in getting rid of it not in figuring out who deserves it and who doesn't deserve to have a mortgage who deserves to ask who does it walter i 100 agree and i want to dive more into the history for and against in a little bit um but i have a really quick follow-up question for adolf which is that um you know i i think that i of course agree with your remarks on kind of the false dichotomy between race and class but i have noticed that um recently or maybe not so recently there's a kind of bastardization of that uh where you know people will say like well like race and class like you can't really separate them or like they're you know you you you can't distinguish racism from capitalism which of course as i think walter you know the last time we spoke you pointed out means that you get a formulation like racial capitalism right or this idea that if you are attacking racial disparities you're somehow also challenging capitalism um what do you make of this or actually like to invoke history again how far back does this argument go um and how do we respond to it oh that's interesting um well i know that argument goes back at least to the early 1970s right and it was um kind of um around the new communist movement right uh that max elbom has written about um there was a lot of um chatter right about uh you know multiple oppressions uh sometimes triple oppression of uh you know black black women for instance uh and attempts to um formally um elaborate but how the multiple oppressions came together and who has it worse and whatnot uh uh whether it's older than that i don't yeah i don't know i'm not sure i mean um um the uh i mean my sense about it and this just might might not reflect anything more than the trajectory in which i experienced it but there was a little tiny nodule that came out of the meltdown of sds at the end of the 1960s sort of ultra left the marxist types who argued against you know separate black movement divides and working class separate women's movement divisive working class and more than a principle right uh it uh i mean that stance um reflected a kind of tone deafness about uh the way things were going on in the world at that point and left a number of portals open uh for a version of a michael lind version of marxism basically and then that and we started to see that like in the late 70s and the early 80s too um around what was then called the white ethnic uh near revival um but within the marxist left in the u.s the emergence of this solar system of sort of maoist marxist leninist and imperialist um the anti-racist politics was the first was was i think where at least in you know modern memory uh you know both uh both both andism emerged and that's why um a number of the icons who contemporary both andis cite and point to uh from back in the day are people who who were involved in the first wave of i'm gonna i'm not gonna mention any names but people who were um in involved in that 70s uh dynamic but but but a big problem with all that right is that all that kind of discussion actually uh it reverses the intellectual trajectory right of how we should go at questions like that right i mean i think we need to start out always from the empirical relations uh and then uh sort of um draw a theoretical generalizations from from those or at least let let empirical facts on the ground and you know and dynamics that that are unfolding around us suggest to us how it makes sense to try to establish causality instead of coming in as as all these people do right and i mean you know the uh the multiple oppressions people a half century ago and the both and people now they basically have have a catechism right that's constructed somewhere to satisfy some more or less i mean sophisticated that lean toward less most of the time um criterion of internal consistency right that they then go out and try to impose on the world you know what i mean so um both andism i mean just like intersectionality right i mean the first time i read the intersectionality stuff which was a long time ago then my first thought was okay well how do you imagine these um bounded and rounded off identities that the intersectional theorists describe as coexisting inside the heads and the lives of a given individual in the present like civil maybe until sybil was exposed to what sybil was but that's just you know people don't go from their woman-ness to their blackness to the to the lesbian-ness uh to whatever so it's like i don't know um this this way of thinking about social structure right seems seems to me to be wrong-headed fundamentally right from the very beginning you know as a marxist i think it's fundamentally well especially as a marxist i think it's fundamentally wrong-headed you know if you just think about both end i don't think there is a general theoretical answer to that which is why i keep something asked but does always get asked but you think about what it means when it's asked so like someone's talking about you know really is true both black people and women are like unbelievably underrepresented um among like ceos and major american corporations and so i want to do both and i want to solve the problem there not being enough you know black heads of major american corporations and i want to solve the problem of there being american corporations those two things are not like a both end situation right and what you want to do is solve the second one if you're a socialist you won't get rid of the corporations right you know so it's a secondary thing yeah as long as we have the corporations no doubt it's better that they are gender equal or gender more representative more proportional same thing was true with race and everything else but one of those things is more fundamental than the other and the one that's more fundamental is getting rid of private corporations not making sure that women are 51 of the heads of private corporations so when you're doing both and if you really are trying to do the first part of your both what you're doing is nothing the to do with the second part of it you know you're not doing both and you're talking both and but you're doing no no no what i really want is like it's really bad that people are discriminated against so it's really bad people are just coming against no one's denying that but if you're focusing on that the other part of the end which is that the whole job structure is the problem actually is ruled out right from the start so i think it's a matter of like when people raise both and and i want to say it is the single thing people like most to say i have never been in a room talking about this where people didn't ask about it and that's why i sort of started to think that no general answer can satisfy them but particular answers sort of can and well i'll say one more thing about that two walls just i mean pick up on your last point which is obviously correct it's even worse right uh in the sense that if you argue that both objectives are equally worthy well you can it's a lot easier to and especially now since 1965 to realize the first objective that is you know the becca right objective right with the becca right uh uh view of social justice that then is to realize the second one but what's at least implicit in pursuit of the first one is that um that this there's something about getting more blacks or more pocs and women uh um um in your in into decision making positions in corporations or say on the supreme court or whatever that automatically will lead us bring us a little bit closer to the bigger objective and what happens of course is that that's not the case but what but when such people do uh you get the brass brass ring then they they their minority status right becomes part of the arsenal that they and their confereers can use to combat i don't know the unionization of amazon right or or or or or or an abolition of the corporation so it's even worse i think yeah no i think that's right and you could actually make a more plausible version right that people would that even we might be you know thought to accept we're thinking about police stuff and police violence police brutality so in chicago so think we're gonna have more black policemen and it makes complete sense we should have more black policeman it's you know where uh uh it should be more in touch with the population and then you can make the kind of arguments that adolf is just making they'll have better relations to community there'll be less police violence but of course and that may well be true right that there would be less police violence be more but it's not as if like white cops have never killed white people right if we go back to like 2020 and look at where we have full numbers of of unarmed people killed by the police uh the largest number of unarmed people killed by police as we know are white but of course if black people were disproportionately killed by the police you want to say well the real problem we solved by getting more black cups is not exactly the problem of people getting killed by the police is the problem no black people getting disproportionately killed by the police but that's like you're saying you know we got a problem this guy he beats his kids and he beats his son every day twice and he beats his daughter every day once and someone's saying we gotta solve that man we gotta make sure that he beats them each just once a day you know that'll be fair that's not the problem that he's beating one of them too often the problem is that he's beating the kids so there's a kind of superficial plausibility you know with the sort of moral black op thing and actually maybe even a real plausibility proportionality is in some sense better than disproportionality but if the fundamental problem is the distribution of property and the role the police play in defending a distribution property what color skin they have is not going to be fundamental to determining how that one comes out if you like this video from the jacobin show please hit like and subscribe you can also watch the full episode and catch our future live streams by clicking the join button below and becoming a jacobin youtube member thanks

Channel: Jacobin

Views: 18,493

Keywords: adolph reed, walter benn michaels, antiracism, black lives matter, racial justice, racial disparities, anti-capitalism, jacobin, jacobin magazine, jacobin show, socialism, democratic socialism, what is socialism, socialism explained, bernie sanders, labor, labour, working class, social democracy, marxism, capitalism, politics, economics, neoliberalism, populism, left wing, leftist

Id: QYuzFZfsxEY

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021