AHISTOICAL “IDENTITY POLITICS” AND THE LEFT NEWSMAGAZINE IN THESE TIMES

 

Normally I like, and am impressed by, articles in the left news magazine/website In These Times (ITT).  However, four articles which appeared in the February and March 2014 issues have raised hackles with me, hackles insistent enough to move me to write this riposte.  For all four show a tendentiousness and “identity politics” lack of clarity that I consider destructive to the further development of the left in our present time—and in their essentially non-class, ahistorical approach both illuminate a severe fault in present left analysis, and through their critique, present ways to overcome it.

The four are:  Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s “Where Obama’s Class Speech Failed,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16121/where_obamas_class_speech_failed, and Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16113/the_pope_vs._capitalism, in the February issue; and Susan J. Douglas’ “Grand Old Race-Baiting,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16260/grand_old_race_baiting,

and Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16275/a_canon_without_balls, in the March issue.  While each of the articles does have some merit (in a publication of such caliber as I consistently find ITT to be, it would really be surprising to find an article within that completely lacked merit), this merit is very much attenuated and truncated by the essentially non-class, ahistorical “identity politics” approach that runs through each and all.  An approach that is fundamentally problematic in itself, and only creates more problems when the authors above try to use it.

 

Yamahtta-Taylor’s and Douglas’ articles are about race, and while Yamahtta-Taylor’s does give a gloss of social class and its importance to her argument, she seems to argue more for the irrelevance of class in relation to race and presents an argument that is more a variant of a “new revolutionary working class vanguard based on race” that was once in vogue in left circles, but hasn’t materialized in fact.  This is evident in her noting that blacks and Latinos make up 40% of the low-paid workforce, which, by simple arithmetic, means that a clear majority—60%—of the low-wage workforce is white and “persons of color” generally excluded by the left as such from the “persons of color” distinction—persons of East, Southeast, South and Central Asian descent.  She also omits noticing that often blacks and Latinos fight ethnically and racially with each other over the fruits of labor and entitlements, that they aren’t this homogeneous category of “blacks and Latinos,” even in both constituting major sectors of the low-wage working class.  Also excluded from consideration is that the CEO of the epitome of low-wage labor, McDonald’s Don Thompson, is himself African American—a problem for a race-based analysis, but not so for a class-based analysis, especially one that incorporates Lenin’s understanding of the comprador bourgeoisie.

Susan Douglas notes perceptively how the Republican Party has successfully used race-baiting to divide white workers from feeling affinity with workers of color, especially blacks and, more recently, from Latinos as well, but the illustration accompanying her article contains a photo of Bill Cosby, himself African American and a vigorous critic of what he sees as major dysfunction among his fellow African Americans—an indication in itself that more is involved that simply a black-white dichotomy.  Of course, the real kernel of truth in Douglas’ analysis is that the Republican Party and the Tea Party within have been very successful in the so-called “culture wars” in dividing white workers, especially white male workers, from their counterparts along racial lines, disingenuously channeling white economic populist concerns into racial resentments, into support for policies that go against the needs of white male workers themselves.  Further, this policy has been very successful, and has created a fertile base of support for Republicans and Tea Partiers that has enabled the absolute stymying of progressive efforts to change the political and economic status quo.  But this successful polarization that is so much part of US politics today should give progressives and leftists real concern, because changing demographics that are empowering more and more racial minorities, women and youth to support progressive politics are not in themselves going to end the political impasse that we’ve experienced so frustratingly these past few years, and could well continue for many more years to come. 

Yes, that small but fanatical minority that encompasses the Republican and Tea Parties, and that can also mobilize resentful white male workers as part of its base (a significant part of the Tea Party/Republican base, to be sure, but far from being its entirety, or even its majority), has demonstrated a real political staying power so far unmatched by anything the left and progressives can muster; something clearly demonstrated by the politics of inaction that has plagued the Obama Administration almost from its beginning.  This politics of paralysis has certainly proven its force—another good reason not to abandon the white male working class in favor of a supposedly triumphant future demographics.  Because racial resentment is against the real wishes and needs of the white male working class itself, a nuanced left politics of both race and class could have a positive effect even in the short run, which is as soon as the upcoming 2014 elections—elections which should make all of us progressives and leftists nervous.  But  the progressive and left forces will have to stress commonalities of interest, not triumphalist notions of non-white race-based “vanguard workers,” to bring white male workers back where they belong—in a unified populist movement that stresses social and economic justice for all, while also addressing residuals of past societal racism in a constructive, not divisive, way.

Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism” strikes this ex-Catholic left writer as too much a gushing, teenage-crush love letter on the new Pope instead of a sober analysis.  Truth is, the new Pope is far more ambiguous and even doctrinally reactionary than Coday portrays.  And the Pope’s first encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, not only critiques capitalism sharply, as Coday correctly notes, it also upholds the Catholic Church’s traditional opposition to birth control and abortion, insists on the male-only Catholic priesthood, and when discussing women and their concerns, has a distinctive air of patronizing about it.  A patronizing further demonstrated in a later interview with the Jesuit magazine America, September 30, 2013,  http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview, in which the Pope dismissed women’s concerns over equality in the Church as “female machismo.”  Further, even Pope Benedict XVI spoke in opposition to “unbridled capitalism” (during his Papal visit to Brazil in 2007; see “In Brazil, pope assails capitalism, Marxism. Sees decline in church influence,” Victor L. Simpson, Associated Press, May 14, 2007), so Pope Francis’ economic message isn’t completely novel, though certainly his tone and his broader sweep are—and are enough to cause the political right to mistake him for an actual Marxist! (Give credit where credit is due.)   However, on the issue of Catholic priest-pedophilia, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires Pope Francis sent very conflicting messages on this, as he hardly moved decisively against priest-pedophiles in his own diocese.  (For further reading on these matters see Adele Stan’s dissection of Evangelii Gaudium in AlterNet, December 6, 2013, “Killing Them Softly: Pope Francis Condemns Income Inequality, Sanctions Gender Inequality,” http://www.alternet.org/killing-them-softly-pope-francis-condemns-income-inequality-sanctions-gender-inequality; the British National Secular Society’s provocative October 31, 2013 blog by Terry Sanderson, “Are we being bamboozled by this charming Pope?” http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/2013/10/are-we-being-bamboozled-by-this-charming-pope;  and Catholic investigative reporter Jason Berry’s December 31, 2013 article on GlobalPost which examines the new Pope’s ambiguous record on priest-pedophilia as bishop in Argentina, “How Pope Francis took 2013 by storm,” http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/italy/131231/how-pope-francis-took-2013-storm.)  As for the Pope’s establishing a Commission to “study” the priest-pedophilia issue, noted by Coday and now operational, wouldn’t it be far better to just turn over suspected priest-pedophiles and their personnel records over to the civil authorities for investigation and, if warranted, prosecution?  And same with covering-up clergy and bishops—turn them and their personnel records, correspondence and e-mails over as well to the civil authorities for investigation and possible prosecution of child endangerment or obstruction of justice?  Shouldn’t that be at the top of the new Commission’s agenda for “study”?  I believe a lot of people, Catholic, non-Catholic and ex-Catholic alike, would agree!

When I read Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” the first thought that entered my mind was how it reminded me of feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon’s Andy Warhol fifteen-minutes-of-fame during her speech before the Harvard Law School in the early 1990s advocating censorship on feminist grounds, dismissing works of “literary or scientific merit” with a cavalier “If a woman is involved, why should it matter?”  For what Doyle seemed clearly to be proposing was a feminist litmus test for deciding if any work of literature was “politically correct” or not.  Indeed, her screed harkened me back to my reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s powerful dystopian novel We, and how it had run afoul of militant “political correctness.”  Zamyatin, a Soviet writer in the 1920s, had written We as a science-fiction extrapolation of disturbing trends he’d already found apparent in the fledgling Soviet Union; and in 1923 the reading of his manuscript elicited vigorous and indignant attack from the new commissars of Socialist Realism, i.e., literature that conformed to the “needs” of Socialist Revolution, at the meeting of the All-Russian Writers Union.  My impression of Doyle’s essay is that she is reading literature in the spirit of these Socialist Realism commissars—more concerned with “correct political line” than with quality literature as such.  But all quality literature, whatever its ideological bent, is a contribution by the best of humanity to the best of humanity as its audience, and of course that includes within it that half of humanity which is female. 

As for “bad,” “harmful” and “reactionary” ideas, the purging of them “to protect the innocent” from the “offensive” has always been the rationale of censors, whether overt, or more “benign,” as through “ideological criticism.” Yet it has been censorship or tendentious “criticism” that has more often than not given such “bad” ideas their attractive force—and yes, there are indeed “bad,” reactionary and chauvinist ideas in many great works, and yet—while they may give “offense” to some readers, has anyone been harmed by them who read them as literature should be read, with a critical yet open mind, a mind capable of separating the wheat from the chaff?  In just my own particular case, did I become a neoliberal because I read Wealth of Nations and the popular works of Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose?  Was I made susceptible to sadism because I read the account of God-sanctioned genocide in the Book of Joshua?  And haven’t feminists themselves been more harmed by censorship than by exposure to “male chauvinist” writers such as Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac?  To ask the question is to answer it.

Just as an updated footnote to the above, we can also pointedly note what the Atlantic, in May 2014,  termed “empathetic correctness,” http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/empathetically-correct-is-the-new-politically-correct/371442/, the new push for “trigger warnings” to preface readings and films shown in academic settings that might—just might, not necessarily would, even among the most  squeamish and vulnerable—set off emotional reactions of unease, discomfort and panic.  Which we should invidiously dismiss as just another unfortunate example of our contemporary left’s penchant for protecting people—from fundamental reality itself!  Of course, this is just another “benign” form of censorship, and is patronizing itself to the 3% of the population (according to the Center for Disease Control) which suffers from PTSD, “concern” for whom motivates the “trigger warning” advocates to embrace yet another variant of censorship.  But just as censorship is no substitute for therapy, it is also no preventative of panic, or any other “disturbance”—although it does encourage, even directly cause, disturbance, disruption, and even elimination of the capacity for critical thought!  Truly a “cure” far worse than any disease it supposedly prevents.

 

 

  

Blunt Talk on "Privilege"

This post is cross-posted as well on Daily Kos, which I also write for, on June 14, 2014; my user name there is GeorgeFishDisgruntledLeftist--GF)

 

Tal Fortgang, the Princeton freshman become famous overnight as the “Poster Child of White Privilege” because of his published screed defending his exalted socio-economic status as his natural right due to merit, has brought the issue of privilege vs. just rewards of individual merit once again forcibly into our consciousness, as he has been embraced by conservatives and vilified by liberals/persons of the left as exemplary on both sides of “That’s exactly what I’m talking about!”  Even down to Fortgang’s claim that his fortuity to be born of already socio-economically exalted ancestry was somehow even a special merit of his which he earned through hard work himself!  Never mind, of course, the recent talk at Princeton’s commencement by a Princeton graduate, Class of 2012, Michael Lewis, where he emphasized that success invariably has a strong element of luck and advantage about it, and that it is a duty of those who are become successful not to feel selfishly entitled to it, but to help others not so fortunate.  Lewis’s notable speech provoked an interview with him on PBS that was posted on the web-sharing site Upworthy:  http://www.upworthy.com/did-a-famous-guy-just-tell-a-whole-ivy-league-school-to-take-it-down-a-notch-with-their-entitlement?c=upw1.

 

Fortgang took special umbrage at those who’d admonish him to “Check his privilege,” certainly among them being his fellow Princeton classmates.  Which is sardonic in itself, as anyone able to attend Princeton in the first place came to be there because of privilege.  Princeton is not only an elite, hard-to-get-into school, it is also an expensive one, and unless one attends solely on the basis of full scholarship, well beyond the needs of most families of college-age children to afford.  Those at Princeton who admonished Fortgang to “Check his privilege” were able to do so because, same as Fortgang, they were the beneficiaries of socio-economic privilege themselves!

 

Which brings up another “ism” in the discussion of “privilege,” one that deserves equal status as a factor in determining “privilege” vs. “un-privilege” along with racism and sexism, but sadly, is missing from most discussions of “privilege”: classism.  We in the U.S. like to think of ourselves as a homogeneous “middle-class” society where sharp rifts and cleavages due to socio-economic factors such as one’s parents’ occupation and income didn’t consign one to a similar socio-economic status regardless of hard work or even being able to attend a state university.  We in the U.S. supposedly all have a chance to live the American Dream, and this is especially true if one is a white male—and now, due to the relaxation of barriers imposed formerly by race and gender, is increasingly true for African Americans, Hispanics, and women as well.  We can all be upwardly mobile, so the American Dream myth goes.  And by singling out for redress barriers still imposed by race and gender, we can make the American Dream even more of a reality for those of darker skin color and of female gender.  Never mind barriers still imposed by socio-economic class, because in the U.S. they hardly exist in the first place, and in any case, are definitely not insuperable.

 

Never mind that discrimination against persons on the basis of race, skin color, or gender almost always have a strong class component about them.  Never mind that such persons fighting the barriers of race and gender invariably find themselves up against the “invisible” barrier of class origins, and class status as a working adult, even one college-educated.  After all, anyone can now do it, once race and gender barriers are eliminated, or at least attenuated, for after all, the good ol’ U.S.A. always was, and still is, a classless society, not one with major socio-economic rifts and cleavages due to occupation and income (those nasty Marxist “relations to the means of production”!).

 

But the fact is, socio-economic class does matter, and matters very much, even where racial and/or gender discrimination is the supposedly causative factor.  It does indeed make a crucial difference whether one is born African American into a family that is already financially successful, or whether one is the daughter of parents already financially well-established.  And whether such families are able to afford the tuition at Princeton, or whether their children must attend a cheaper, less-renowned, college or university for their higher education.  And that certainly means it does matter whether one’s father is a factory laborer or a factory manager, and it does matter where one does graduate with that college diploma.  And that means it will indeed matter what one will be able to do with that education, and whether one will work at Wall Street or pound the streets looking for work on some Main Street in some middling city or town.  This is the class reality of the U.S. today, though we don’t like to even acknowledge it, much less own up to what it means: stagnant or downward mobility, massive income disparities and ever-increasing inequality, the pervasiveness of class structures and norms throughout our society, from the organization of work and its rewards through media images and the nature of schools and who gets to attend them—and was analyzed extensively in a very seminal book, The New Class Society, written by two able sociologists, Robert Perrucci of Purdue and Earl Wysong of Indiana University Kokomo, published in 1999 by academic publishers Rowman and Littlefield. But this important book was given little attention when published precisely because it was so penetrating, and its message so disturbing to the orthodoxy that we are all in an essentially classless “middle class” society.  An orthodoxy also called into question by a book that has become the surprising best-seller of 2014—Thomas Piektty’s Capital in the 21^st Century. 

 

All this, of course, has a direct bearing on notions of “privilege” and “luck,” this latter bringing us right back to Michael Lewis’s interview on PBS where he recounted his luck, as he called it, at landing his first job after graduation as a Wall Street derivatives trader: he’d been invited to a dinner party where the woman who sat next to him was the wife of the head of a Wall Street investment bank!  A double luck of Lewis, for surely only a graduate of Princeton would be invited to that kind of dinner party in the first place.  Certainly I, a white college-educated male, and thus supposedly “privileged” beyond my own capabilities, would not be invited to such a party, what with my living not on the East Coast but in lowly Indianapolis, and having only attended Michigan State University and eventually graduating from Indiana University.  My “luck” would simply not be of such empyrean sort—because of the different sort of “privilege” I would have as a college-graduate male with an entirely different kind of class status and origin!

 

And though I’m a nationally-published writer and poet, especially in left and alternative publications where I’m among a very small number of writers who does not have a Ph.D. and is not connected to academia, I must relegate this side of me to mere hobby status and make my living as an unskilled laborer in Brain Drain Indiana because that is how I’m officially classified by Indiana’s WorkOne “state employment agency”—as an unskilled laborer with no relevant work experience because I haven’t spent years driving a forklift or have a CDL license, merely a university degree in economics!  And at present, I earn $9.50 an hour in a warehouse job through a temp agency—and ever since September 2001 have been able to find work only through temp agencies.  And yet I’m a supposedly “privileged white male college graduate;” but does what I’ve indicated above even remotely sound like real, palpable “privilege”?  And yet, I’m far from alone in being a white college grad so “privileged.”  For my lot is very much the same as several other white college grads I know—which makes all this traditional, non-class, abstract talk about “privilege” on the left and in liberal circles sound very much indeed like cant.

 

Which means “privilege” itself always has a strong class component, that classism is every bit as relevant as racism or sexism.  And yes, while there may be psychological components to any sense of “privilege,” “dis-privilege,” sense of entitlement or of discrimination, at bottom for any meaningful concept of privilege is the socio-economic, or class, status of the persons feeling so fortunate, meritorious, or aggrieved.  What on the left is aptly called the intersectionality of race, gender, and class.  And means that “privilege” and “dis-privilege” are class factors as much as they are psychological, racial, and gender ones; and indeed does mean that white maleness in and of itself does not automatically consign one to a pedestal of “privilege.”  That, by looking at class as a significant factor in determining and defining “privilege,” it does indeed mean that not all white males are equally “privileged.” Not by a long shot.