Book Reports

The contradiction of prestige: Art as intellectual labour

If Art is thus banished by capitalism to this isolation and (resisting as it does outright colonisation by the ‘culture industry’) of such dubious usefulness to the ruling class, then how are we to explain the amazing prestige in which it is held?

In The German Ideology Marx argues that the division between mental and manual labour means that:

consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness ‘of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.

Separated not only from materiality, but from the general grubby process of capitalist production, Art occupies a position similar to that of “’pure’ theory, theology […] etc.”. Marx goes on to argue that:

The division of labour […] manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves.¹

Marx’s analysis also holds true for sections of the middle class hired out to play this role.

The division of labour which separates the producers of culture from the owners of capital (who more or less passively consume their ideas) and from the exploited classes tends to lead to idealism on the part of the cultural producers. That is, a belief that the ideas – which they themselves produce – shape and form the world, rather than the other way around². In part because specialised, or pure, intellectuals are usually responsible for the majority of social discourse, their self-importance can become common sense not only within their relatively narrow cliques but within society more generally.

This narrowness of outlook is characteristic not only of the intellectuals of the bourgeoisie but also of those pure intellectuals who have attempted in their way to support the workers’ movement. This is the explanation of Shelley’s famous vanity that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” – an aphorism that demonstrates both the idealism and the parochial attitude that the strict division of labour tends to engender. Why were poets, rather than artists or even writers generally, picked out? Only because Shelley himself was a poet.

This prestige is maintained not only by the social relations of professional intellectuals but by the fact that over all it has tended to devolve upon the class privileged to enjoy and consume the fruits of the other class’ manual labour. Hence the information revolution is not credited to the workers who actually built the computers but to the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Clearly, this privileging of intellectual labour also applies to high Art even if, as we have seen, its place in the process of “perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself” is a highly mediated and contradictory one.

Art and art: definitions, descriptions, determinations

In order to make this argument, it is going to be necessary to advance provisionally a definition of art, but also to make some (admittedly sweeping) generalisations about the mainstream of Art practice. I have been using and will continue to use ‘art’ to denote art in general, and Art to denote this subset.

I would suggest that art is any product of labour whose primary function is its aesthetic work. This is a ‘pragmatist’ definition: it depends on the development of particular social relations arising between the art and those who receive it – that is, on it being received as ‘art’. A photograph of a sunset, for example, might be taken to measure the level of pollutants in the atmosphere, in which case it is a scientific document. The same photograph may then be put to some aesthetic work – it becomes art. It is in the nature of pragmatist definitions that they are relatively loose. How, after all, do you judge with scientific accuracy that the ‘aesthetic work’ of an artefact such as an advertisement is its primary function when its aesthetic work is precisely and inextricably bound up with its function to promote a particular commodity? The same is true of all the distinctions that I am going to make – the categories are not hard and fast, rather they are organised around ‘family resemblance’. In that sense pragmatist definition is not definition at all but rather description.

This ‘definition’ works on the highest level of abstraction: it works for all such aesthetic labour, regardless of its nature and in any society. But of course, art under capitalism takes on distinct forms, particularly in comparison to the art of previous societies. Walter Benjamin’s description of the status of l’art pour l’art in many ways matches the conditions of those practices we normally think of when we think of Art.

Because his round-about route through the emergence of what he calls ‘taste’ is likely to be of interest to most people working in the crafts, it is worth quoting at length:

Taste develops with the definite preponderance of commodity production over any other kind of production. As a consequence of the manufacture of products as commodities for the market, people become less and less aware of the conditions of their production – not only of the social conditions in the form of exploitation, but of the technical conditions as well. […] The commodity is bathed in a profane glow […] In the same measure as the expertness of a customer declines, the importance of his taste increases - both for him and for the manufacturer. For the consumer it has the value of a more or less elaborate masking of his lack of expertness. Its value to the manufacturer is a fresh stimulus to consumption which in some cases is satisfied at the expense of other requirements of consumption the manufacturer would find more costly to meet.

The doctrine of l’art pour l’art

and its corresponding practice for the first time give taste a dominant position in poetry. […] In l’art pour l’art the poet for the first time faces language the way the buyer faces the commodity on the open market. He has lost his familiarity with the process of its production to a particularly high degree. […] They have nothing to formulate with such urgency that it could determine the coining of their words. […] The poet of l’art pour l’art wanted to bring to language above all himself – with all the idiosyncrasies, nuances and imponderables of his nature. These elements are reflected in taste.

What is interesting about this is that it does not begin with the entry of poetry into the market as a consumer good, but with the poet’s relation to her medium of expression. For Benjamin, the poet has the same relationship with language as the flâneur has to the commodities on the market. The poet has no symbolic resources to draw on outside of her own frail and decentred subjectivity. Cast adrift, the poet has no need to worry about the “coining” of language because the final referent of her poem is simply the poem itself. The poet’s discriminating deployment of words – the display of the poet’s ‘taste’ in language – is its own end, just as in the artful selection of clothing.

How has the poet become such an egoist? Benjamin moves (rather too swiftly) from his high level of abstraction to a particular moment in French history:

the theory of l’art pour l’art assumed decisive importance around 1852, at a time when the bourgeoisie sought to take its ‘cause’ from the hands of the writers and the poets. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx recollects this moment, when ‘the extra-parliamentary masses of the bourgeoisie … through the brutal abuse of their own press’, called upon Napoleon ‘to destroy their speaking and writing segment, their politicians and literati, so that they might confidently pursue their private affairs under the protection of a strong and untrammelled government’. […] the cause of his own class has become so far removed from [the poet Mallarme] that the problem of a literature without an object becomes the centre of discussion. […] This, to be sure – and particularly in Mallarme – is the face of a coin whose other side is by no means insignificant. It furnishes evidence that the poet no longer undertakes to support any of the causes that are pursued by the class to which he belongs.¹

The peculiar disconnect in Benjamin’s analysis – which is after all only a small addendum to his monograph on Baudelaire² – should remind us that the relationship of the artist to class society is a shifting one. Compare the hostile attitude which Benjamin sees in the regime of Louis Bonaparte with the total administration of art under fascism and Stalinism.

Nevertheless, the aspects of bourgeoisie society which Benjamin indicates – the philistinism of the bourgeoisie, the creation of a market for objects of ‘taste’, the relative separation of the economic and the political spheres – to which I would add the shrinking of the official sphere of the state, especially in the realm of cultural patronage – and the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the capitalist class which is implicit in every Marxist analysis – do in fact tend to institute a divorce between the cultural producers and the capitalist class as a whole. It is just that the severity of the separation is not constant.

In terms of direct class relations, the professional artist is, in general, thus neither a worker nor a capitalist but a member of the petty-bourgeoisie whose cultural output is acquired by the ruling class via the mediation of the market. But the fact that Art can be commodified, is precisely the source of its relative freedom – or rather, the fact that it is possible to make a living selling art is the necessary condition for its existence because it is already freed from its direct links with the ruling class.³

This is clearly a double freedom: it disconnects the artist from the resources (technical and especially also symbolic) of her art production but it also frees art from the instrumental relations it had with previous ruling classes. As Benjamin indicates, this creates a situation in which Art can begin to peer back into itself – to acquire a formalism that appears to make Art about Art. This self-reflexivity should not be seen as mere navel gazing; Art’s relative separation from patronage it is also a space for genuine criticism. Or, as Terry Eagleton puts it, what art “gains in one direction, it loses in another”.⁴ Art for Eagleton “can now cease to be a mere lackey of political power, swearing fidelity only to its own laws” even if it is true that the “social conditions which allow this to happen – the autonomization of art – also” prevent this autotelic freedom from spilling into any other part of life.⁵

The hieratic spaces of the gallery is thus a kind of ghetto for aesthetic life in a world otherwise drained by alienation of art and autotelic activity in general. It is precisely the fact that capitalism has drained life itself of its art (at least for the vast majority of people) that conditions Art as a specialised and enclosed field.

Zionism vs the Jewish Labour Movement

Socialist Alternative’s Janey Stone has written a three-part series of articles on Zionist capitulation and accommodation to anti-Semitism.  The link is for the first part.  She has unearthed quite a bit of stuff and the three parts put together promise to be a valuable contribution to Jewish socialist history, as well as an antidote to Zionism.

SWP discusses the recent French elections and the strength of the fascists (The Front National).

give me liberty! or give me television!: redbookreports: So am I the only one who thought that apart from the...

culturalmarxist:

…okay, but the thing is? It’s a really terrible article. It doesn’t understand what white privilege is. It doesn’t understand what people mean when they talk about racism in the context of privilege. It criticises itincredibly badly (I already mentioned how this para:

But there are problems with these explanations that should make us stop and think twice. To start with, white people often oppose racism—while some black people partially accept racist ideas. Theories of racism that blame white people in general, or decry their alleged privilege, struggle to make sense of these cases.

is completely contradicted by the authors own description of privilege). Most of the article is not a critique of privilege, in fact, but just an explanation of What Racism Is—okay this isn’t a bad thing but by implication it’s saying that the theory of privilege (as if this is something separate from “The Benefits That Even Somewhat Subtly All White People Gain From The System Of Racism”) fails to explain them…which is bollocks because privilege isn’t counter to any theory of racism. So if this article has received particular vitriol then I’m unsurprised because it is 100% PURE-GRADE BALLS. And, frankly, responses like yours can explain it, because look:

Of course white people do not suffer from the oppression that black people do and although I do not think it is right to call this a PRIVILEGE (is it really a ‘privilege’ not to be shot in your own neighbourhood for wearing a hoodie?) this is not really the immediate question.  The immediate question is How do we relate to these white folk who are trying to show solidarity and fight against racism?

Now having seen the rest of your tumblr I’m going with “benefit of the doubt” but man I hope you hadn’t slept for three days or something before writing that. a) Yes! It is actually a privilege! At least, it’s a privilege to be able to where a hoodie without being characterised as a thug who thus isn’t an equal under the law! and b) No! The immediate question is How do we stop our young boys from being murdered in the streets?

I mean apologies for speaking for people of colour…but yeah I’ll take the risk on that one. And as a white folk who is trying to show solidarity and fight against racism? I don’t need them to “relate to me,” it’s uhh…it’s called solidarity? There shouldn’t be a need to “relate to white folk,” those white folk should relate out of human empathy, and I think the idea of privileges is important in this.

Privilege essentially highlights the unnaturalness of Whiteness: it is not “normal”, the blank slate, the starting point: it is a construct, and it’s construction bestows on it certain attributes not given to other race constructs in our system of racism. Which is why pengaling’s criticism of the Trayvon Martin hoodie thing is so good (and more than that an actual counter-suggestion, unlike the article). A white man in a hoodie with a sign saying “I am Trayvon Martin” is erasing colour: it’s suggesting that it was the hoodie that got Martin shot; and surely we don’t believe that at all. Aamna’s suggestion, on the other hand, effortlessly shows solidarity with Martin while retaining the important criticism of the racist systems which caused Martin’s death.

Conceptualising oppression in terms of privilege almost inevitably leads to the position that the most important political step “privileged” people need to take is to recognise their privilege and struggle against oppression basically out of the goodness of their heart. As a way of tracking the political movement of middle class liberals, it’s spot on. As a political perspective for the working class it is idealist and moralistic.

Do we deny that racism does give privileges to white people? And if you are denying this very basic fact, are you then therefore not denying how racism actually works? And as such how can we be expected to combat it effectively? (And is an ideology that says “Racism is wrong” and “We can stop racism” not inherently idealistic and moralistic? Is pretending that white people don’t have privileges, and racism doesn’t create differences that white people can be blinded to purposefully by the State, not more idealistic?)

I mean this, as in all meta-conversations about white privilege, which invariably are from the critical perspective of “hey! “privilege” sounds kinda mean!”, is basically trying to struggle with the contradiction between knowing that race is an artificial construct, but also knowing that racism affects others in a very real way. In the case of identity politics and how the SWP critiques it/neo-liberalism adopts it, it’s very important to look how how privilege is actually interacting with “colourblindness.”

For example you talk of “common and heightened class struggles” raising class conciousness. But what are you talking about? Suffragettes didn’t limply appeal to men. They asserted themselves on the strengths of their arguments and direct political action. Ditto Stonewall. Ditto MLK and Malcolm X. Ditto Gandhi. Note (maybe you don’t need to note this redbookreports but for my argument’s sake) that for a least a couple of these you’re thinking that they did preach colour-blindness or something similar; that is not the case; that is part of the process whereby the bourgeois adopt and accept the progression of anti-discrimination in order to legitimise and consolidate State power. It of course cannot accept actual criticism of the State/Whiteness/Maleness as this would too fundamentally undermine it’s foundations. More than that, by omitting these critiques it encourages the normalisation of whiteness which has other ripple-effects like appropriation, submerging of racist policies; transphobia/anti-queerness stems from this too (note that trans- individuals were pretty important in combating homophobia but the critique of the gender binary is just too much for the State to handle as it can’t consolidate them with the normalisation of gender constructs).

If your argument is that “the meme of ‘Privilege’ runs counter to the concept of solidarity,” then I can, in some senses, agree—because solidarity has all too often been the anti-establishment answer to normalisation. Because a culture that insidiously presents CSWM as a blank slate encourages a sort of egotism whereby I as a white man presume that my view of the world is “untainted” (linked to another narrative whereby it is presumed if I am not completely knowledgeable, I at least have the best opportunity to be knowledgeable and to change the world). Privilege, by foregrounding the oddity of whiteness, is a reaction to liberal thinking that systematic discrimination is essentially over and that ‘racism’ is either outright hatred or singular acts of violence caused by hatred; that in a sense, racism is only important in the lives of Others.

The SWP, in this article at least, could come from a somewhat justifiable place where maybe some people/movements are being too separatist…but I don’t believe this is such a big thing we need as much fuss about it as there is. If it seems to be a big issue then it’s because it’s in the interests of liberalism to discourage such radicalism. How many articles about the privilege-meme attempt to understand it as a cultural process? How many more are meta-articles justifying the appropriation of political anger by media sources? As far as I’m concerned, the danger of separatism is the danger of white people loving their privileges too much to accept criticism. Very, very rarely do we get articles criticising the privilege-meme from the perspective of people of colour (and I wouldn’t really count this as being one). It may be that in order to achieve solidarity white people will have to put in some work too!

From “It is necessary for socialists and radicals to understand oppression as an absolutely central issue of the class struggle” onwards I think we’re basically in agreement…but hopefully it is clear by now why I think the privilege-meme is actually an essential part of doing that. A summary would be that I don’t think we live in a time where most people are, crudely, “KKK racist” but are in denial over the nature of racism itself, and to bring attention of how white identity is just as much shaped by the systems of racism is an important part of, if you will, purging those elements of the self so that solidarity may flow freely. (And the fact that people respond with such indignation to the idea that racism benefits white people is proof enough of its necessity…)

RHIZOMBIE, RHIZOMBIE, WHERE ARE YOU? RHIZOMBIE YO PAY ATTENTION (trying to get rhizombie’s attention b/c I think the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari and becoming- is really important when it comes to the contradiction I outlined above but I also don’t feel like I fully understand their response/arguments and rhizombie is way more read up on that).

So since you disclosed your subject position, I guess I may as well do the same. Getting that out of the way: I am a Filipino living on a student visa in Australia. My class position back home (ruling class) means that my father, who exploits workers, can give me the revenue from that exploitation, meaning that I am relatively shielded from financial worries. I think this is straightforwardly a position of privilege. On the other hand, immigration rules being by nature racist, and Australia being particularly bad, I am required to study full-time and risk deportation for failure and there are serious limitations on my ability to actually get work making me entirely dependent on that privilege. I also will be unable to stay in Australia after I graduate. Being a student at a dorm in a reasonably prestigious University who doesn’t have a job, I don’t really have to venture out to the ‘real world’ more than I want to, on the other hand, I am charged more for interstate travel, and if I am out late at night, particularly if lots of other (esp white) people are out drinking, I quite legitimately feel insecure and have had to deal with racist shit for being slanty-eyed and having brown skin. Although again, this does not compare with the kind of crap Indians or Pakistanis have to deal with. There are other things about myself which I cannot disclose on the Internet because that would have potential and significant consequences back home. If we admit that these various oppressions and my class privilege interact in complicated and possibly contradictory ways, I am quite willing to say that the concept of ‘privilege’ is capable of making some sense of my position.

It is also straightforwardly useful when describing the ‘labour aristocracy’ – sections of the working class whose wages come from the hyper-exploitation of other sections of the proletariat (e.g. white workers in South Africa during the days of apartheid). And, as I said, for the middle class.

I agree with you that the SWP article was pretty bad – they all are at the propaganda level that Socialists Worker stays in. The position seemed to be that the concept of ‘privilege’ was entirely useless, as I say, that isn’t my position. However, I also don’t think that it is simply unproblematic. Someone like zedweiller for example admits that there are flaws in the theory, but did not (as far as I could tell) go on to even point towards them. It seems to me that this is a conversation that the left needs to have and simply focusing on the crudeness of SWP propaganda misses an opportunity. This does not excuse the SWP for its various (and oft repeated) crudenesses, of course, but their crudeness shouldn’t give us an alibi to behave as though there were simply nothing to their objection.

I don’t think I’m able to present all this systematically, so I’ll just try to highlight some of my issues with the concept.

So, in Australia, they’ve instituted what is essentially apartheid in the Northern Territories. One aspect of this is that aborigines there do not receive welfare in the form of money: they receive coupons that they can exchange for items that the state thinks they should have at stores authorised to take their coupons. This is an almost unprecedented level of state control (at least since citizenship was recognised), and even constricts their movements as not all states or cities have stores where they can use their coupons.

The ruling class has been so impressed with itself that it has proposed and actually experimented with extending the system to other Australian citizens. The rhetoric here on the part of the State is telling: the dole is a privilege, you cannot be trusted with it, you lazy workers have it too good, etc.

Now having access to the dole might be thought of in terms of privilege – after all immigrants don’t have it, refugees don’t have it. But actually, welfare is not a privilege granted from on high (although evidently they can take it away!), it was a victory won for both the indigenous and non-indigenous populations during a high point in working class struggle. The response of the left on to the ruling class’ attacks has not been “defend dole privileges” but rather “defend welfare rights”

An uneasiness that I share with the SWP regarding ‘privilege’ is that the ruling class WANTS us to think that the achievements that we have won are ‘privileges’ rather than lines we have drawn on the sand against exploitation and oppression. Although not itself unproblematic, the concept of ‘rights’ implies an ENTITLEMENT and a confidence about our claims which is much more unsettling for the ruling class. Whites and blacks alike ought to have the right to walk around their neighbourhood at night without people assuming they are dangerous criminals, its just that only one set of these actually enjoys that right. It seems to me that the word ‘privilege’ doesn’t quite capture that. I think that the SWP article was trying to make that point: the word ‘privilege’ itself is simply not always (or even often) apt.

Objecting to my claim that my immediate question was, “How do we relate to these white folk who are trying to show solidarity and fight against racism?” You wrote:

The immediate question is How do we stop our young boys from being murdered in the streets?

By which I am sure you meant black boys. If it wasn’t clear, by “we” I meant the anti-racist left. At first your objection seems quite powerful, but honestly I think it’s a bit superficial. Asking how the murder of black kids can be prevented, we may as well ask, how can the unofficial segregation in US cities or the education system be ended? How can the criminalisation of being black be ended? How can the income disparity between POC and whites be destroyed? In other words, “How do we end racism?”

I’m going to have to make the same apology you did and risk telling you what you already know: All capitalism, but US capitalism in a particularly intense fashion, is NECESSARILY AND INEXTRICABLY RACIST. American capitalism feeds off of the cheap labour provided by immigrants and POC, its position as an imperialist power makes it necessarily at the forefront of anti-Muslim and anti-African racism (and anti-Asian in the days of the Vietnam and Korean war), its relationship with Mexico and South America obliges its ruling class to foment anti-Latin racism, its continuing history as a colonial settler state makes it necessarily anti-Native American to the point of genocide. These are not accidental features of US capitalism, they are as fundamental to its nature as the wage-labour relationship.

Asking “how do we end racism in the US?” is therefore IDENTICAL with asking “How do we end US capitalism?”

This is why your examples (the suffragettes, MLK and Malcolm X – we’ll leave aside Gandhi as just TOO problematic) don’t quite hit the nail on the head. African Americans are no more capable of ending US capitalism than women or the Latin population. (Now really I am telling you something we both know) The entire working class must be involved in that. So the question I raised before (“How should we relate to white folk etc.?”) is key because it amounts to: “How de we build a broad movement capable of combating racism and struggling against US capitalism?” I seriously doubt that you would call this an irrelevant question for the left.

It seems to me that couching it in those terms highlights some of the problems of using a movement like that of the suffragettes as a point of reference. The suffragettes were able to unite a large proportion of WHITE women behind them in the struggle for the vote not because they successfully moralised to them, but because all women suffered from that same instance of oppression. That in itself highlights the limits of the suffragette movement – precisely where moralism became relevant as a tactic, it proved entirely inadequate. Why did the suffragettes not take on the demand for the vote for black women or wider issues like maternity leave, access to contraception and free abortion? Because it was a cross-class movement that depended for its cohesion upon keeping the peace with (that is capitulating to) women whose social position made them direct beneficiaries of racism against blacks or the sexism that denies women easy access to reproductive control. Could such women have been moralised into supporting those demands? Perhaps one or two, but on the whole, certainly not. If a class based movement had been organised around the demands of women workers, white women may have taken up the demands of black women simply because this would have been a condition for their mutual victory.

Now I don’t actually think that the theory of ‘privilege’ necessarily implies that people in positions of privilege benefit from the oppression of those not in the same level of privilege – but some people who hold to the theory do put it in that way, and that is what the SWP imputed to the theory. But it (as far as I can tell, necessarily) does tend to say to those ‘privileged’ workers “this isn’t really your fight, really upstanding of you to come along though.” Again, this is more or less fine for the middle class who for socialists are really just fellow travellers anyway, but for in terms of making arguments within the working class, I think it falls flat.

Much better to say (for example) the struggle for better wages for black workers improves the ability of ALL workers to fight for better wages. Or, our struggle against the impunity of the police against black people improves the struggle of illegal strikers against police brutality as well.

Finally, I suspect that an emphasis on awareness of privilege is potentially sectarian. (Concretely, it’s probably sectarian sometimes, and important in others, and I would have to be involved in the actual struggle to hazard more than than my suspicion). The suggestion that hoodies for white people could have read “This society wants me to be George Zimmerman” is interesting and potentially quite powerful, but most white folk already came to the movement after it had been “branded” with the “I Am Trayvon Martin” hoodies. Certainly it might have been better if some clever white folk had printed the alternative, but the movement itself set the standard for how solidarity was to be shown. In the interest of building a broad anti-racist movement, I think the fact that white people were taking part at all (and in fairly impressive numbers) is far more important than the incorrectness of the slogan. And I cannot see that it particularly weakened the movement?

My issue here is actually fairly measured, and possibly no one is really guilty of this, but I get the impression that correct consciousness is seen almost as a condition of participation for white folk in anti-racist struggles (or straights in anti-homophobia struggles, men in women’s liberation, etc.). My own organisation has been guilty of something like this on occasion (at a rally, some of us tried to boo a speaker off the stage from Labor for Refugees [labor is Australia’s social democratic party] for basically apologising for his party after they had passed a particularly atrocious position at their conference). Obviously the left needs to avoid opportunism, on the other hand, is the struggle against racism really so strong that we can afford such high minded purity? Of course, keeping that in mind certainly doesn’t obviate the necessity of criticism.

(Man alive these are getting long)

servile-masses-arise:

(according to twitter)

These pricks are trying to silence the radical left in Britain by force, and they re getting cockier and cockier. People in Britain that don’t want that to happen need to put differences aside, come together, take the gloves off and deal with these scumbags, just like we did the last time.

We broke them then, we’ll break them again. They just put some poor fucker in hospital for selling the Socialist Worker for fuck sake. 

give me liberty! or give me television!: pengaling: zedweiller: t aight so ima come out and say it. yes, white...

pengaling:

zedweiller:

t

aight so

ima come out and say it.

yes, white people enjoy a position of comparative advantage in their class position, compared to people of color. you can extend that comparison to men vs. women, straight people vs. queer, etc. 

but the problem is, one has to decide whether these advantages will be seen as worth defending, and by whom. working class vs. upper class makes the difference, here. if one’s white privilege is worth defending, then one won’t fight racism unless morally persuaded to do so. but you don’t have to rely merely on “it’s the right thing to do”, because there is an economic incentive for all workers to end racism. 

so while SWP doesn’t put it in language that is clear to y’all, ‘cause you speak the language of the academy (and i don’t? haha no way bebe i speak the language of pretentiousness), they’re basically saying, “hey, so, uh, we think white workers should recognize that their privilege isn’t really making their lives all that great, even if it gets them out of a lot of abuse and bullshit; they should fight to end racism too ‘cause it’ll be better for all workers when racism is gone.”

flame. on.

The thing is, I completely agree with what you are saying, but this is just such a poorly written article. Its arguing that

• White privilege theory is based on individuals

This is clearly wrong, and shows the lack of understanding the author has on critical race theory. White privilege is not a critique on individuals, it attempts to understand how white supremacy has systematically oppressed people of colour for 300 odd years and the effect it has on people today. 

• Racism does not benefit the working class

He suggests that it is in the interests of all people in our society who aren’t members of the ruling class to end capitalism and racism, and that therefore working class white people do not benefit from racism. But there is a confusion here. White privilege analysis does not say that working class white people are better off under racist capitalist heteronormative patriarchy than they would be under an alternative system like socialism; it says rather that within our current system of racism, white people in all classes are given real privileges that people of color are not.

• Divide and conquer

Racism is obviously utilised by the ruling class. Racism is necessary to drive a wedge between workers who otherwise have everything in common and every reason to ally and organize together, but who are perpetually driven apart to the benefit of the ruling class.

Whiteness does not only make white people feel that they are better off than black people, but it makes them actually better off. It gives them privileges—privileges defined in relation to the real circumstances of non-white people, and not in relation to the ideal circumstances of people in a fair and just society.

• White people, Trayvon Martin and solidarity

You are not Trayvon martin. You do not experience the blood curdling fear that POC when they are  approached by racists. This does not mean you cannot protest in solidarity with him, but if your solidarity means you refuse to acknowledge the privileges you have been given in this racist society, than you are doing anti-racism wrong. 

You can walk down your street and not worry about being SHOT because of your skin colour. You do not live in constant fear that people of other races will see us as dangerous when we are doing the most innocuous things.

Why don’t you wear a hoodie and hold a sign saying: I can walk down my neighbourhood dressed like this and not worry about being executed.That speaks volumes. It is easy to say “I am Trayvon Martin” and have the meaningless words ring through; it’s much harder to say “This society wants me to be George Zimmerman.” 

• Isolating Black Activists

Its disappointing that the problem the author had with the Trayvon Martin case is that ‘not all white people’ are like that. Ignoring the legitimate concerns that black activist have against marxists. 

• POC and Internalised Racism

POC who have internalised racism exist, this does not suddenly debunk the white privilege theory. 

• White privilege theory and Marxism

 The white privilege theory is only one aspect of racism and how POC are oppressed.  There are flaws with the theory, I agree, but the author is looking at this from the wrong way. 

The question is not whether anti-racism is possible for a white person who takes seriously the idea of privilege, but what kind of anti-racism follows from this analysis. 

I am a marxist. I believe any serious discussion about Black liberation has to take up not only a critique of capitalism, but also a credible strategy for ending it. For Marxists, that strategy hinges on the revolutionary potential of a unified, multiracial and multi-ethnic working-class upheaval against capitalism.

I hope I’m making sense? :D

or pengaling can just make a much better criticism of the article during the time where i’m throwing up the second half of that mars bar. hungover marxism has it’s downsides too.

So am I the only one who thought that apart from the two posts above, the discussion on the Socialist Worker article on privilege was a bit snarky? There are all sorts of plausible criticisms of the SWP’s position but unless people genuinely think that we have found the perfect and most politically productive way to conceptualise oppression, surely, surely, the questions and debates the article was trying to raise (however clumsily) ought to be addressed?

Socialismartnature some time ago wrote what I thought was a very good post critiquing the concept of “privilege” that got several likes but sparked zero debate as far as I could see.  I’ve also written on the issue, although given that I have all of 40 followers or whatever that didn’t make any noticeable ripple.  I’m going to try again.

As was pointed out above, Anindya Bhattacharyya’s article starts off wrong.

But when some white people wore T-shirts with the solidarity slogan “I am Trayvon Martin”, others replied that they had no right to—because as white people they were part of the problem.

Admittedly, I don’t live in the US, but I doubt there are any serious anti-racists who would adopt this position so crudely.  The objection (as voiced by pengaling) is rather that when a white person says “I am Trayvon Martin” it’s just untrue and suppresses the fact that white people do not suffer from the racism that killed Trayvon.  Hence, white people who wear the hoodies are “doing anti-racism wrong.”

Of course white people do not suffer from the oppression that black people do and although I do not think it is right to call this a PRIVILEGE (is it really a ‘privilege’ not to be shot in your own neighbourhood for wearing a hoodie?) this is not really the immediate question.  The immediate question is How do we relate to these white folk who are trying to show solidarity and fight against racism?  

Conceptualising oppression in terms of privilege almost inevitably leads to the position that the most important political step “privileged” people need to take is to recognise their privilege and struggle against oppression basically out of the goodness of their heart. As a way of tracking the political movement of middle class liberals, it’s spot on. As a political perspective for the working class it is idealist and moralistic. Firstly, what are often called “privileges” – say for example the fact that the existence of gays and lesbians is recognised and even to some extent validated in a way that is not true for trans-people – are actually victories hard won by struggle. But more importantly, for workers,consciousness of issues like racism generally proceeds from common and heightened class struggles. In other words and in practice bonds of solidarity and struggling together are built on the basis of what workers have in common. Precisely for this reason, anti-racist consciousness rarely starts off as perfect – the most likely way in which it will be perfected is through the praxis of the class struggle itself.

So the critique, formally correct, that the forms of consciousness and slogans adopted by white people have missed the point or ignored the very real and important differences itself misses something very important. The ruling class has generally been successful in playing its divide and rule game: the fact that white people are struggling with POC against racism at all needs to be encouraged. At this point, the movement is not drastically weakened by the fact that the slogans on the hoodies that white people wear are the same as those on POC. A balance needs to be struck between being correct and being sectarian.

This is not to say that consciousness and concepts are not important, they are. But the criterion for judging them within the struggle of the WORKING CLASS is simply this: what helps build solidarity? The concept of privilege almost always reduces the role of the “privileged” section to near passivity and in fact easily allows people to excuse themselves from the struggle by saying “this is not our fight”. In fact it is hardly distinguishable from identity politics which the SWP has been critiquing for a very long time and which is really just the obverse of the ruling class’ own strategy of divide and rule.

It is necessary for socialists and radicals to understand oppression as an absolutely central issue of the class struggle. Unless the divisions of race, sex, gender and creed can be broken the class struggle will never be victorious; on the other hand, the class struggle is itself the key to breaking down these divisions. On pain of defeat, we cannot risk denying the realities of oppression, the concrete struggles that it creates, or the differences in the positions of various section of the working class. The fact that such an understanding is necessary to actually knowing the terrain of the class struggle is not even the most important reason for this. If solidarity is founded on what we have in common, it is also broken by a failure to recognise difference. Almost inevitably this would mean that the struggles of white, straight, able men will predominate while those of POC, queer people, Muslims, and women would be either ignored or else considered as too divisive and somehow detrimental to the over all struggle (since the “struggle” is falsely conflated with those of the least oppressed!). I have seen this happen.

But the the truth is, particularly when oppressed groups are going into struggle (and given the generally flat political climate) themselves, slogans which emphasise the common enemy, the common exploitation, and even which simply forge bonds of common feeling can be a step forward.

So what slogans and political positions are most productive to that struggle. What is more useful, white guilt and self-flagellation or the convictions behind the slogan, “One World. One Pain. One Fight.”?

Source: pengaling

An intimate look at the Marxs

Mick Armstrong reviews Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, Little, Brown & Company, 2011.

Have You Heard About CeCe McDonald?

From my sister:

A transgender woman named CeCe McDonald is being charged with 2nd degree murder. That’s the same charge facing the man who killed Trevon Martin. You should read this article. http://www.transadvocate.com/have-you-heard-about-cece-mcdonald.htm

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2010/83

Andrew Chitty and Martin Mcivor (eds)
Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy
Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2009. 288pp., £50 hb
ISBN 9780230222373

Reviewed by David McLellan

… Damn this website to hell!  So much procrastination on book reviews for books I probably will never even have the opportunity to read!