Comrades, not allies, of your struggle: On Black Lives Matter as a cause.

The current protests against the police violence against black people in some ways truly is, as some people have been saying, the most remarkable development on the left in American in a long time, maybe since the King assassination, which led movements of black people in this country to more militant stances but also often to a certain cynicism. Though it may also be that a certain rage about injustice is intrinsically undecidable between a despairing and individualistic cynicism and an activism that normally requires the activation of both a sense of community and one of hope. Indeed, Obama’s campaigns, in that now faraway near past, interestingly seized on this by marketing the idea of possibility (“Yes, we can”) and hope as such, as if detached from any substance.

The current protests also raise some important and interesting problems for the left. One is the possible role of ‘white’ people (or non-blacks) as ‘allies’. It is worth noting that historically this problem was manifest at least since the almost immediate aftermath of the high point of the black movement on the 60s that also marked the beginning of its decline and transformation into something else, that moment being the King assassination and the street protests and riots that occurred in its aftermath. Almost immediately: feminism as a movement involving protest and some very radical (left-wing and far-reaching, because aiming to go to the ‘root’—the meaning of ‘radical’) formulations emerged around 1970 and was, in America and Europe, partly not so much a concomitant of the 60s protests as an aftermath of them. And gay liberation, as it was then often called, is thought to have had its landmark even in the Stonewall riot in New York City in 1969. Soon people on the liberal-left were talking about ‘people of color’, and what came to be known as ‘intersectionalism’. This is basically the theory of multiple axes or indices of oppression, all of which ultimately were modeled on that of black people in America. This roughly coincided with a shift in left political theory from Marxism to positions based on such multiple oppressions, which would be derided, not unjustly, as both entailing ‘political correctness’ (because oppression by circumstance or situation was associated with, or even reduced to, offending others in speech by way of ‘prejudice’, the theory of which is the basic liberal approach to oppression of racial and other minorities, or minoritarian groups, one of which—females, is of course not a minority, but was treated like one, in a normatively masculine culture, which arguably we no longer have, however we theorize whatever has replaced it). The great landmark text of intersectionalism as an updating of or alternative to Marxism is undoubtedly Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s 1985 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In America, there was, as official policy as well as broad idea, Affirmative Action, which gives advantages on the grounds of historical disadvantage to members of a group to individuals in competitive bids for envied spots at universities or in the corporate and administrative elites. And yes, there were college, and corporate, speech codes, diversity trainings, and all that.

Intersectionalism as the politics of multiple oppressions was surely possible and is intelligible in America partly because our nation has always constructed itself qua imagined community, as a kind of sum of all the particularities, all of which indeed theoretically have their origin in seeking to overcome oppression, since that is how the American colonies were mostly formed. “E pluribus unum,” as national motto, or “out of many, one,” expresses this idea. It compares interestingly with France and its Revolution. French national subjectivity, which they call “republicanism,” is constructed as an abstraction from particularity. The French national census does not count ethnic or religious groups at all. A French Protestant, for example, or a French person of Polish, Italian, German, Spanish or other nationality, theoretically including Arab or African, is not publicly a Protestant who happens to be French or a French person who happens to be Protestant. He or she is a Protestant to those in his church and French only in the eyes of the state. (Theoretically: all such national myths are myths, half-truths that accord with ideological preferences that are enforced). America constructs universality not as abstraction but as a sum based on maximal appearance in public space itself. We are the people from Massachusetts + New York + Virginia + etc., or, now, the difference between states having disappeared through mobility so that they are just jurisdictions allowed separate laws, we are: “white” (or whatever series that composes, as in “ethnic whites,” meaning not from England, Scotland, and Wales, + black + hispanic + Asian + etc., or the ethnic groups plus genders and sexual preferences, or…. though all these groups are not arbitrary but are demographical categories that are thought useful for our government to recognize, and they are identities. The intersectionalist version of this simply groups all the minoritarian identities (all demographic minorities plus the formerly pseudo-minority of females). In any case, this is an ideological meme: Americans more or less since 1608 are supposed to be formerly oppressed, in a place (Europe) that they have left behind with its history (and maybe a sense of history as such, not the same as a heritage, which is the “roots” when is proud of and so merely asserts, but cannot have a problematic relationship to), and we are supposed to be assertive about our particular identity and clamor for its recognition. Of course, two groups were excluded as the background of this: the Native Americans, mostly exterminated, with a few moved to desolate ethnic Bantustans, and the Africans, enslaved. One way to look at the “people of color” idea is that it was an attempt to state a total inclusion on the grounds of the generalization beyond the former slaves to an inclusion of the excluded. And slaves were included as excluded. One can suspect that part of the purpose of all this was for a system of politicians that is unusually representative by geographical districts (now heavily gerrymandered) to get votes, since politicians in this country appeal to people by groups and not by classes through ideology.

What makes intersectionalism and the identity politics it is based on neoliberal is that these identities do not, unlike the Marxist idea of class, or the peculiar determination of African-Americans as a sub-class through slavery and its sequelae, link in any necessary way to a critique of “the system.” They connect instead naturally to the inclusion of formerly excluded or marginal groups, in the existing system, changing its “who” but not its “what and “how,” and doing so by representing identities. The identity links to a history, which is perhaps a heritage to be borne proudly plus a true story of the obstacles we overcame to our success (“oppression”), but this is not a class politics and cannot directly be linked to opposition to capitalism or the form of it we have.

None of that could really conceal the fact that African-Americans, as the descendants of American slaves (and sometimes those in the ‘African diaspora’ who of course look like them) have suffered much more from America’s racisms and oppressions of members of any group of any kind, than any other, and in ways that are rather unique. With Jesse Jackson’s 1984 “Rainbow Coalition,” left-liberals in the Democratic Party began understandably to take up the idea that theirs should be the party of all the marginalized and excluded. Of course, that leaves out many people, and pointedly. It was in the aftermath of the 2007-8 financial crisis, and particularly with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, that a different strategy for the left began to be articulated: the “99%.” This may be equally problematic as an idea if it is meant to represent a fact on the ground rather than an argument, or wishful thinking. It’s both. It is obviously a more hopeful idea of class conflict, than supposing that those who are on the good side of history are almost everyone, rather than imagining that societies like ours are divided between a professional and managerial class and a class of wage workers whose jobs do not depend on higher education, or the traditional bourgeoisie/proletariat thing. It is true that much of the workforce is now employed in managing or policing others, and this is a broad cross-class grouping that includes both psychiatrists and security guards. And people in occupations like teaching who may often have some disposition to be critical of their given involvements. Also, there is increasingly a new highly-educated working class that is characteristically underemployed, and that is surely one of the best explanations for Occupy Wall Street and the two phenomenally successful Sanders campaigns, which even though ultimately failing to win the nomination, did so much. America looks and feels differently now. The rapid and dramatic growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), on the heels of the Sanders’ campaigns, is a party based tacitly on a coalition of the traditional immigrant and (in theory) white working class groupings and this new group, which shares more or less the class situation, but with different formations in terms of thinking and different class-related expectations, theirs being often frustrated.

A group that I received an invitation to join advertised itself as for '“white allies” of black people struggling against policing and its violence. I replied by saying I am not an ally; I am a comrade. What I mean by that is that this is my struggle to, and for reasons that are material and not just moral. It is my belief that otherwise solidarity will tend to dissolve into charity, and politics in a strong sense will be reduced to a morality, with the result being that the movement will not aim to make radical changes in the society, and by definition throughout its various institutions of different types, which are all related. (There is a concept of totality necessary to a radical politics). This will then mean wanting more ‘black faces in high places” as Cornel West puts it. We will help people get in the doors they want to enter, and stop police from killing them or threatening to as they try. But this will in the end only change the “who” of what is done, and not its “what” and “how.”

It is helpful to look at how the situation is unlike the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement was all about Black people; our movement today is about them mostly, or just especially, centrally, but not only. And that is an important difference.

The Civil Rights Movement sought to end Jim Crow, the regime of official segregation. This was the laws on the books in the South that prevented black people from sitting where they choose on a bus, or at a lunch counter, or going to the same school, and thus getting the same quality education. Now there are echoes of this still (our cities and popular culture are still very segregated), as there are of slavery itself, but there is also a different, and that is key. This difference is key to possibilities that are revolutionary.

The difference is that what is done to many of “your” people (I put it this way because I myself am white, not black) could be true almost anytime of any of “ours,” though it usually isn’t. This is an inequality and an injustice, of course, but it is a different situation in this way: In the one case there were two sets of people, both of which, as in classical set theory in mathematics, were distinct and separate. Segregation made that possible, and segregation’s being made illegal as a result of the success of the Civil Rights Movement changed it so that: Black people in America, especially poor blacks in parts of our cities where they are heavily policed, almost literally as if by a foreign occupation army that treats them routinely as presumed enemy combatants even if they are women, infants, or in their pajamas. It can mean they are shot and killed at point blank range, or choked to death, even while unarmed, or even handcuffed and completely incapacitated.

Something in the explicit and very real violence of a police state like ours disposes people executing power and enforcing law, order, or simply command, to imagine themselves as victims of a violence analogous to what they intend or want to do to the actual victims before then. This is why in our society, and this has of course long been the case, though I believe it has become more so, people can be officially harassed, punished, incarcerated, or killed, because they “raised their voice” (wouldn’t you like to about this very matter? Shouldn’t we?), or said something someone else did not like, or found insulting, perhaps a criticism, or even a word said in anger, and all these things and much more can be called “violence.” I call this imaginary and symbolic violence. It is imaginary if someone imagines someone else as being “violent” and feels an affect of fear or some other intuition that disposes them to react in the (usually punitive and indirectly or directly violent) way that that seems to authorize. Much of our culture is like this. It relates to the “national security state,” at war against foreign rebels and people whose politics is rooted partly in “absolutist” religious beliefs. And it shows up in all kinds of things, including parents worrying more than parents used to about whether or not their kids are safe. When I was 12 years old, in a moderate-sized American city in the midwest, my mother got the idea that because some boy had been “molested” somewhere in the city and, more importantly, the news, she was nervous about my wanting to walk to the 7/11 store. And at universities, where lucky young people are given four more years to adjust themselves more subtly and with the aid of interesting things learned by studying arts or sciences in books, or late night conversations over cappuccino in the study hall, there were “safe spaces,” and young women and men alike were supposed to worry that they would be “unsafe” in any place where anyone might be capable of touching or speaking to anyone else. As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, we developed a culture of fearing harassment in all social interaction, and wanting everything to be like coffee without caffeine. No more safe sex (merely), but safe hand holding and talking. Anything could offend and be called a “micro-aggression,” and then the putative offender is to be “called out,” taken out (of any group or other situation), and given a lecture by self-appointed authorities who have the movie Western town’s intolerance, speaking for the God fo the chorus, forgetting that the chorus in classical Greek tragedy does not represent truth but its presumption in the common sense. Common sense, of course, is ideology wrapped nicely.

The logical or mathematical principle is this: Black is the primary but non-exclusive identity of the victims of American policing. At the risk of making a comparison with something that would appear to insult American patriots, since the comparison is obviously with a far more horrible extreme, Jews in the Holocaust occupied a comparable. The Holocaust is not an exclusively Jewish event. Even though it is widely treated as such. In fact, calling it that is a kind of Holocaust denial, even when it happens out of ignorance. By one count about 11 million were killed in the Nazi concentration and death camps and mobile killing units and other circumstances of people being killed for policy and not strictly as an act of war, fighting people trying to kill them. And 5.7 million of them, approximately, were Jews. Though the numbers are not what decide this, so much as the fact that the Nazi also targeted homosexuals, the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, Poles and other Eastern Europeans in some cases, Communists, dissidents, and Gypsies (or Roma). Of course, having an identity that can be a marker of hatred and murderous violence does not consecrate anyone, unless God is a murderer and nothing more, and few people quite believe that. In any case, the Holocaust is not an exclusively Jewish event. In fact, even the U.S. Holocaust Museum recognizes this. When I visited it 30 years ago, among the identity cards given as a gimmick to all visitors, mine was that of a Polish Catholic. (He died at Auschwitz). But while the Holocaust is not an exclusively Jewish event, there are some good reasons to consider it a mainly or primarily Jewish event. Jews had the dubious privilege of being its principal targets, and the death camps probably would not have existed otherwise. Hitler and his party did indeed want to create a Jew-free Europe.

My point is in fact essentially a logical one, in this sense: The protests against the police violence against black people need to be “essentially” that, yet not exclusively that. I have shown why that is different than the Civil Rights Movement. In the Jim Crow South, being white, or at least not black, was the necessary and sufficient condition of being able to sit at that lunch counter (and not be arrested or told to leave) or go to the local school that was by intention relatively well-provided with books, materials, and good teachers. It was a strict line of separation, and it was upheld by the law. Now there is still segregation, and different rules tend to apply to black people, but this is de facto and not de jure, it is what tends to happen, happens by systematic “tendency,” but since it is not the law, we need both to call attention to the lie in this (the factual situation belies the official line) and take proper advantage of the fact that now the boundary lines, as is the case generally with identities, polities, and other social entities, are more blurry, vague, porous, and uncertain.

That uncertainty means: it could happen to me. And that is important. I am not sure how much that moralism vs. materialism thing as determining a possible political stance matters politically today, but it certainly is a stronger position for the revolutionary standpoint that wants something different than the way things are. Because it could happen not only to you but to me. Of course, the universality of humanity, and if you like of God, and the divine’s immanence to all of humanity in what is ultimately different manifestations of a singular power that theoretically unites us all ultimately in a sameness of condition, this is an ontological truth that must always be affirmed, and it means that in principle “if they come for one of you,” at the very least, there is no ultimate or reliably sure principle by which they might also come for me, or one of my community or family. That is obviously true because of the arbitrariness of all of the social distinctions that people might want to police. But more than that, practically it is the case today that anyone can be killed by cops. The cops have the weapons to do so, including their hands and knees, and often, too often, want to use them, and then they often do, and lives are lost, or greatly damaged.

I myself have been the victim of police harassment and forms of harassment and violence by others in various contexts that I will not go into here. That includes a particular bugbear of mine, which is the violent and oppressive character of the mental health system in this county in particular. Much can be said about that, and much has been, though it is a cause and object of the radical left that was big in the 1960s and 70s and that seems to have almost completely been forgotten, as social democratic narratives about the need for more care taking government allow themselves often to be indifferent to the barbarisms and deeply compromised and problematic character of forms of social control that are a bit softer, usually, than violent policing. All of this I must continue, as I have, to write about elsewhere, here just indicating it as a promissory note for that. It also is, of course, one reason why I make the argument that I do.

For of course, what we must be against, if we really are against militarized and violent policing and mass incarceration, is all of the other things that it is linked to. Again, revolutionary change, and eliminating policing as Minneapolis has now begun to do, requires the perspective of totality: the society as a whole must be changed, in what the German student activist Rudi Dutschke in 1968 called a “long march through the institutions.” Schools, the media, the health care and mental health system, housing, and everything else must be looked at from this perspective. We need to ask how are these things connected, and assert those connections as arguable in practice.

Two names seem relevant here: capitalism and neo-liberalism. Racism, as the legacy of the form of colonialist capitalism that was American slavery, is the most peculiar and problematic feature of American capitalism, and this must be said. We have the kind of racist policing that serves a society that is based on inequality and cannot continue without this violence. This is related to international events and adventures of our nation’s military, as M. L. King insisted in the case of Vietnam.

Of course there is substantial room for useful re-thinking of how we relate to each other, but the focus should be less on changing our attitudes, and certainly as an end in itself, which would then be purely ethical and not political at all. But the focus is on what oppressed enough of us enough of the time that we can say: It oppresses us too much. Indeed, the question of the “who” we are may be best left uncounted when we say “we.” This is like when tenants who join a rent strike strike in solidarity with their neighbors even if they themselves can afford to pay the rent. They say “we” and affirm this collective subject as everyone standing here together. Ultimately, of course, the question of organizing and understanding our struggles as orient to and by us as an identity is the question of the subjectivity of those who need to be standing and marching and saying “No” to what we must reject and demand that it stop. This is a question of involvement and engagement, purpose and motivation. It may be good to get this right. We certainly want it to be as inclusive as possible, for strategic reasons. There is no revolution by people representing 10% of the population. All that could be achieved then by a radical movement would be inclusion. We need to remind ourselves that we are “interpellated” or called, to respond, to think, to act. And it would be denial of injustice as the evil it is to either say it is not “essentially” or principally about African-Americans, or that it is “only” about them. My argument about the material and not just moral grounds for construction of a more inclusive “we” in this struggle is in the end perhaps just that it is facilitating. It is also true.









cap

A materialist politics, in the Marxist sense, will always base itself on the interests that people have because of their economic situation, which for Marxists is not income (which alone would mean not class but strata: it would be a theory of a single class with some people having more of what everyone wants) but ways in which people are related by their position in the economy to

anxiety about this

raises some interesting