Racism and the Limits of Post-80’s Politics

In “Learning to Talk of Race” (New York Times Magazine: 8/2/92) Cornel West, chairperson of the Democratic Socialists of America and one of if not the most influential African- American intellectual activists on the contemporary scene, suggests that “the Los Angeles riots exposed an `us versus them’ mentality… in a country plagued by contempt for the common good.” In order to solve the extensive social problems associated with racism, he argues, we must go beyond the margins of mainstream discourse and the “worn-out vocabulary” of both liberals and conservatives. We must situate these problems within an interpretative framework that “begins not with the problems facing black people but with the flaws of American society — flaws rooted in historic inequalities and longstanding cultural stereotypes.” Secondly, we must affirm our underlying “humanness” and “Americanness,” as well as our inescapable “interracial interdependence” and realize that “if we go down, we go down together.” Thirdly, and in some ways most importantly, we must all take responsibility for the “common good” and reinvigorate the “public sphere” through “some form of large-scale public intervention to insure access to basic social goods — housing, food, health care, education, child care and jobs.” Lastly, we need to cultivate leaders “who can situate themselves within a larger historical narrative of this country and world,” invoke “ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality,” inspiring “all of us, especially the landless, propertyless, and luckless,” so that we might build “a freer, more efficient and stable America.” West concludes his essay by posing this prophetic ultimatum: “either we learn a new language of empathy and compassion, or the fire this time will consume us all.”

While West’s interpretation of the problems confronting African, Hispanic, and Native American communities is radical in tone, a critical examination of his essay reveals an essentially conservative political content to the social program he advances to solve these problems. West argues that we must go beyond the limits of liberal and conservative discourses. Nevertheless, the “beyond” he articulates does not in fact exceed the essential premise which unites and delimits both conservative and liberal interpretations of and solutions to the widespread poverty, drug addiction, illiteracy, hunger, homelessness, and unemployment now ravaging African, Hispanic, and Native American communities. That “sacred” political premise is: thou shall not supersede, compromise or even question private ownership of social wealth in order to solve these problems; in other words, all problems can and must be solved within the boundaries of capitalist society. Yet it is precisely West’s failure to question, compromise or even imagine superseding this essential premise, that makes his “radical” proposals share complicity with the political project of saving the very economic system that produces these problems.

West’s fundamental social proposal is large-scale public intervention to insure universal access to basic social goods. This is necessary, he points out, “after a period in which the private sphere has been sacralized and the public sphere gutted.” However, West leaves the very concepts of the public and private spheres and their inner connections uninterrogated, and proceeds on the assumption, common to liberals and conservatives alike, that the public sphere is the “outside” or “other” of the private sphere and therefore “escapes” or “transcends” domination by any particular social group. It is a democratic sphere within which problems and proposals regarding the distribution of society’s resources are rationally evaluated in order to arrive at that plan which best facilitates realization of the common good. The only substantial obstacles impeding this process are those forms of cultural discrimination and double-standards which sometimes make it difficult for some groups — e.g. blacks, women, gays and lesbians — to articulate their problems and proposals. This is why mainstream politics is often concerned with making sure that every social group has the opportunity to “speak for themselves.”

What remains hidden from view in this conception of the public sphere are the private interests which dominate and define this space, determining which proposals are “worthy” and which are “beyond” serious consideration, and which control the social resources necessary to implement whatever proposals are accepted. The ruling minority that owns and controls the vast percentage of society’s wealth and dominates the public sphere is able to remain hidden from view by representing their particular interests as equivalent with those of society in general. This is often accomplished by invoking moral, national, and religious metaphors: our common “humanness,” “Americanness,” and “destiny.” For example, last year George Bush represented the interests of the financial, petroleum and military capitalists by arguing that going to war against Iraq was “America’s ethical obligation” as leader of the “free world,” necessary to protect “the” American way of life and hence in the interest of every American citizen. In fact many black combat soldiers refused to fight when they saw Bush waving the flag of freedom in one hand and vetoing civil rights legislation with the other. “No blood for oil,” was their defiant reply to Bush’s jingoistic nationalism.

West makes his own contribution to concealing capitalist domination of social life when he invokes democracy, equality and freedom without examining these categories in relationship to the social totality within which they are situated — that is, as if they transcended class domination, racial and gender oppression. West does not investigate how the unequal distribution of social resources and cultural capacities determines which groups will and which groups will not be able to articulate their interests and actualize their freedom. Without considering the ways in which these categories are mediated by who owns and controls society’s wealth problems such as sexism and racism are often posed in an ahistorical and idealist manner. Racism and sexism can be overcome by removing restrictions barring blacks and women from fully participating in existing capitalist institutions and by deconstructing long standing sexist and racist stereotypes and cultural double-standards. Yet both of these strategies remain reformist as long as they are disconnected from any serious interventions against the economic foundation of gender and racial oppression.

Once the problems of democracy, freedom and equality have been separated from the reality of class domination a space is opened in which moral-ethical categories (e.g. care and concern) are substituted for political-economic categories (e.g. the state and class relations). West then weaves the socially abstracted categories of “the citizen,” “Americanness,” and “humanness” into a quasi-religious “narrative” in which Americans are depicted as having fallen from their original moral identity and strayed from their “common destiny.” We are being punished for our sins by a plague of “contempt for the common good,” and the curse of an “us versus them mentality.” Social change is conceptualized as a problem of moral-religious conversion. On the one hand, white Americans have been “weak-willed in insuring racial justice,” reluctant to accept the “full humanity” and affirm the basic Americanness of blacks. On the other hand, blacks are engaged in an “immoral” and “empty quest for pleasure, property, and power.” In order to recover our sense of moral purpose and to reclaim our common destiny we must work together as Americans and as human beings for the common good.

However, white Americans have not simply been “weak-willed in insuring racial justice” anymore than men have simply failed to be kind to women or capitalists have been uncaring to workers — though all of this is true enough. Social oppression is no more based on the way people are seen than its abolition is on Americans learning a new way of seeing. Rather, whites have a material interest in the continued subordination and domination of blacks, as men do of women and capitalists do of workers: the former groups all receive material benefits — privileges, power and property — at the expense of the latter, while women, blacks and workers have an interest, however insufficiently recognized, in abolishing the social conditions which guarantee the unequal distribution of these benefits. In typical postmodern fashion West turns the actual relationship between material conditions and their ideal representation on its head: oppression is reduced to the ways in which reality is viewed or culturally constructed (e.g. West says we need a new way of “viewing blacks,” a new “language of empathy and compassion,” a new “interpretative framework,” etc.).

But changing the way we look at reality does not, in and of itself, change reality. West’s narrative conceals the economic basis of the unequal conditions that structure the lives of black and white, male and female, and most significantly, working class and capitalist Americans. In short, real social inequalities are resolved symbolically or transcended ideally, while the material basis of these inequalities — i.e. the difference between those who do and those who don’t own and control the means of social production and basis of social life — remains unchanged.

Though West correctly notes that the public sphere has been savagely gutted of resources over the last ten years what remains untheorized is the fact that this gutting amounted to a massive transfer of social wealth from the public to the private sphere in a process of reprivatization that was facilitated first and foremost by the capitalist controlled state. Resources once under public control and marked for public use were reprivatized, placed in the hands of capitalist corporations and financial institutions through an economic program euphemistically called “trickle-down.” Hence, West’s “one essential step” of “some form of large-scale public intervention” in reality amounts to asking the very same capitalist corporations and financial institutions which have benefited from this transfer of social wealth to give it back because doing so would, presumably, demonstrate “how much [they] care about the quality of our lives together.” In short, West is calling upon the American ruling class to divest itself of a sizeable portion of capital in order to meet social needs: universal education, health and child care, affordable housing, decent jobs at good wages, and a safe and clean environment.

Yet those who own and control more than three-fourths of society’s productive resources are unlikely to be moved by moral invocations and nationalist platitudes as long as making profits is the “bottom line.” Maintaining and even extending control over any and all available resources is absolutely crucial in order for American corporations to compete with other capitalists in the world market. This is why the only social proposals and plans deemed “worthy” of serious consideration are those which link meeting social needs with making profits: e.g. establishing urban enterprise zones. West’s program assumes the capitalist class can and will be persuaded to give society a substantial portion of the resources now under its control in order to meet these social needs. Once they see the “immorality” of poverty, hunger, homelessness, illiteracy, unemployment, and environmental degradation, members of the capitalist class will redirect their resources in order to solve these problems. This amounts to Lee Iacocca inviting African, Hispanic, and Native American community leaders together, asking them how much cash they need and then explaining to stock holders why Chrysler corporation is going out of business because health and child care, housing, education, decent jobs, and a safe and clean environment are more important than making profits. It is this unsaid political presupposition that renders West’s “reasonable” social proposals, like those of both democrats and republicans, utterly and hopelessly utopian.

In fact there is little evidence to suggest such a response will be forthcoming. On the contrary there is much evidence to suggest that the capitalist class is willing to employ any means necessary to maintain its continued domination of global life. In the past ten years the capitalist controlled state has, among other deadly activities, armed a mercenary army to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, invaded Panama and Grenada, slaughtered a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians, and, as Sandy Thompson points out, pumped “deadly drugs into the African American community and then used the existence of an illegal drug economy as political justification to impose a constant state of martial law, with indiscriminate sweeps, mass arrests and illegal detentions and the turning of schools and housing projects into occupied camps surrounded by barbed wire fences.”1

The L.A. riots were not a trans-class phenomenon even if they were multiracial and multiethnic. The mostly Anglo, mostly wealthy Beverly Hills and Hollywood communities looked on with fear as mostly poor African and Hispanic communities vented years of frustration at their ever worsening conditions of existence. Upper middle class and wealthy Americans in Los Angeles and around the country became increasingly hostile toward the rioters as the rebellion spread toward their once secure neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the media played its part by reinforcing ethnic and racist stereotypes and fostering white fear. While 25 African-Americans, 19 Hispanics and ten Anglos were killed in the riots, only the attacks on Reginald Denny and Matthew Haines received continuous attention: that is, ‘black-on- white’ attacks. After the riots subsided, mainstream public discourse quickly turned from the question of what were the social problems that fueled the riots to why the apparatuses of repression did not operate more swiftly and with greater force to crush the rebellion and restore “law and order.”

The police and national guard are not the only forces busy restoring and maintaining law and order. Indeed, there is an emerging post-80’s, political discourse which is playing an increasingly important role in formulating strategies which are capable of effectively managing and differentially integrating various sectors of the American working class within the new international division of labor. This discourse seeks to find a “reasonable” middle-ground between the “liberal” extremes of the 60’s and “conservative” extremes of the 80’s. In a recent speech presidential candidate Bill Clinton argued that we must move beyond liberal and conservative labels in order to find political programs that will solve America’s problems. Since 1988 Jesse Jackson has been appeasing the ruling class with his “it takes two wings [a conservative and liberal] to fly” rhetoric. Now Cornel West, one of the leading representative of the Democratic Socialists of America, points out that while the “private sphere has been sacralized and the public sphere gutted” we must not “make a fetish of the public square” and “need to resist such dogmatic swings.” However, neither Jackson, Clinton, nor West “move,” “fly” or “swing” beyond the limits of capitalist society in their strategic formulations and hence none attack the basis of the very problems they seek to solve. In short, the post-80’s, post-liberal, post-conservative politics represented by Clinton, Jackson, and West is actually a pro-capitalist politics disguised behind pragmatic phrases, moral condemnations and invocations, and quasi-religious and nationalist narratives.

The problems revealed by the L.A. riots were not, as West argues, the existence of “an `us versus them’ mentality” or that American is a “country plagued by contempt for the common good.” Rather they reveal an underdeveloped and uneven comprehension of who the “us” and “them” actual are and a pervasive political and ideological tendency to mystify and resolve antagonistic class interests by calling upon all Americans to work together for the common good. It is not the presence but rather the absence of a rigorous and critical comprehension of these opposing interests that remains one of the most significant problems for radical politics today. To develop such a comprehension it is necessary to combat every attempt to resolve social contradictions without grasping, let alone working to transform, their economic basis. In order to advance the cause of African, Hispanic, and Native American self- determination it is necessary to grasp fully the real material interests that capitalists have in maintaining the existing mode of organizing the distribution of privileges, power and property; that is, in preserving the very system that has left African, Hispanic, Native American and many other American communities in ruins.

I want to conclude with several suggestions regarding what can be done to advance the struggle for African, Hispanic and Native American self-determination and to solve the widespread social problems confronting the majority of Americans. First, we must work to elaborate, along the lines suggested above, an “us versus them” mentality and develop a critical contempt for pro-capitalist concepts such as: “common good,” “common destiny,” “Americanness” and “humanness.” This includes resisting any attempt to postpone the crucial question of the legitimacy of private possession of society’s resources and pointing out how such postponement, while often defended as necessary to preserve an “open society” and to “keep the democratic process alive,” shares complicity with closing off radical change and keeping a system of oppression in place. In connection with this we can work to foreground the irreconcilable contradictions between a system based on profit-making and a system based on satisfying social needs, and demand that any discussion of political change be linked to this contradiction and to its material supersession. It is also important to reject republican and democratic agendas that call for beefing up police forces and building more prisons in order to maintain, what is in actuality, a system of organized social oppression. Finally, we can support organizations like the National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, African People’s Socialist Party and the African People’s Solidarity Committee which all agree that the oppression of Africans, Hispanics and Native Americans “will only stop when they are once again in control of their own communities, lives and destinies.”2

Footnotes

1 See her “In Defense of the Democratic Rights of the African Community/In Support of the Post-King Verdict Rebellions” in the Syracuse Peace Council Peace Newsletter: August, 1992.

2 For more information on these organizations contact Sandy Thompson at (215) 727-3114 or Bill Mazza at the Syracuse Peace Council: (315) 472-5478.