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    Adolph Reed - What Materialist Black Political History Actually Looks Like Archived Message

    Posted by johnhol on February 16, 2019, 2:05 pm

    Begins:

    This rumination is sparked most immediately by reflection on the roiling debate within the academic left and the academic left dressed up as a political left that has taken shape since the 2016 election. The debate initially centered on how to interpret “white working class” support for Donald Trump, specifically, whether we should understand white people’s votes for Trump generically as indicative of their essential commitments to racism, patriarchy, homophobia, nativism, transphobia, etc. or whether some of that vote should be understood as a consequence of Democratic liberals’ failure to address working people’s concerns with economic insecurity, because of the Democrats’ commitments to the dynamics of neoliberalization that have intensified economic inequality across the board nationally and have undermined access to public goods and social supports for poor and working people generally. The practical stakes of that argument have to do with what strategic lessons “progressives” should draw from Trump’s victory with eyes on the 2018 mid-term elections, 2020, and beyond.

    In early iterations of the debate, various antiracist commentators and official Democratic operatives and their propaganda apparatus at MSNBC, theroot.com, and elsewhere on the internet-chattering and posing left have insisted that Trump’s victory exposed the extent to which a deep vein of white Americans of all classes (except maybe the “woke” elements of the urbane professional-managerial strata) are committed to “white supremacy” before and beyond all else. The strategic takeaway from that view is that those Trump voters—even the estimated just under 7 million to just over 9 million who had previously voted for Sanders and at least once for Obama1—are hopeless reactionaries and cannot be relied upon as potential allies because their deepest commitments are anti-egalitarian, that their support for Trump reflected anxiety over perceived loss of status in relation to nonwhites, women, immigrants or others.2 This conviction has underwritten a contention that the lesson from Trump’s victory is that it’s not practical, or moral (the two are difficult to distinguish in this argument) to focus on increasing economic inequality and intensifying upward redistribution as the basis for left political appeals and instead that the necessary strategy should center on intensified mobilization of nominally oppressed groups, mainly nonwhite, and women as a generic category on the basis of opposition to the disparate distribution of goods and bads in the society among groups so identified and in support of the principles of diversity as generally understood in left-of-center political discourse.

    As the argument has progressed, a de facto alliance between ostensibly progressive identitarians and Wall Street Democrats has come together around asserting, along with Paul Krugman and others,3 that “horizontal inequality”—i.e., inequality between statistically defined racial/ethnic groups—is a more important problem than “vertical inequality,” characterized as inequality between individuals and households. That distinction instructively makes class and class inequality disappear, which is consistent with the trajectory of American liberalism across the more than seven decades since the end of World War II. Moreover, in a sort of mission creep, opponents of what they decry as a “class-first” position increasingly have come to denounce any expressions of concern for economic inequality as in effect catering to white supremacy. This tendency, which Touré Reed has argued rests on a race-reductionism,4 has surfaced and spread within the newly revitalized Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), as even many among those who consider themselves socialists object to the organization’s selection of Medicare for All as its key political campaign on the ground that pursuit of decommodified health care for all is objectionable because doing so does not sufficiently center antiracist and anti-disparitarian agendas. I submit that there’s clearly a problem when anti-socialism is defined as socialism.

    The race-reductionist argument is propelled by a combination of intense moral fervor and crude self-interest. I’ve argued in 2018 articles in nonsite, The Baffler, and Dialectical Anthropology, that, as it has evolved, the post-2016 debate has thrown into bold relief the class character of antiracist and other expressions of identity politics.5 That could be a salutary product of the controversy. It’s good in this sort of debate for the mist of ideology to burn off and the material stakes involved to be clear and in the open. However, many people who have followed or even participated in the debates have not connected the dots to see that obvious point or to acknowledge its implications. One reason for failure to do so is summed up pithily in Upton Sinclair’s quip, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

    Not only would pursuit of an agenda focused on addressing “horizontal inequality,” if successful, disproportionately benefit upper-status, already well-off people—as Walter Benn Michaels and I have noted tirelessly over the past decade at least, the reality of a standard of justice based on eliminating group disparities is that a society could be just if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the one percent featured blacks, Hispanics, women, lesbians and gays, etc. in rough proportion to their representation in the general population; also, advocacy of defining the only meaningful inequality as disparities between groups is itself a career trajectory in the academy, as well as in the corporate, nonprofit and freelance commentary worlds. There’s no point trying to communicate with those whose resistance stems from such material investment; no matter what their specific content, their responses to class critique always amount to the orderly Turkle’s lament to McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—“This is my ####ing job!”

    Continues:
    https://nonsite.org/editorial/what-materialist-black-political-history-actually-looks-like

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