The problem of racial populism in Cold War America posted by Richard Seymour

In Southern US political traditions, populism has many valences.  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there was a brief moment where populist political forces throughout the South seemed to be converging into an anticapitalist coalition.  Underlying this movement was the transition to capitalism in the Southern countryside.  Charles Post argues in his prize-winning history of The American Road to Capitalism that the US economy prior to the Civil War was an articulation of three modes of production: mercantile capital, petty commodity production, and slavery.  In this articulation, capitalism was the dominant mode of production, its imperatives shaping and determining the forms that the rival modes of production took; the relations between these modes of production also determined the forms of regional competition leading up to the Civil War.  Following the success of northeastern and midwestern industrial interests in the Civil War, the political power of capital was such that no restoration of pre-capitalist modes was possible.  Joseph Reidy's history of the cotton plantations describes how the Depression of the 1870s forced Southern planters to convert themselves into an agrarian capitalist class.

The populist movements arose when they did to a large extent over the defence of customary rights under assault from the capitalist transformation of the Southern countryside.  Over time, they developed into something considerably more than a reflux against capitalist modernity, connecting the Southern Farmers' Alliance, the Colored Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor in a coordinated leftist upsurge.  I will not go into detail as to the reasons for the failure of this populist moment.  Judging from Steven Hahn's work on the subject, I gather that among the key reasons were the segregated nature of the movement, the conservative influence of white property owners, and the co-opting of many populist thematics by the losing Democratic presidential candidate in 1900.  This is related to the story of the Anti-Imperialist League, by the way, a subject I'll come back to.  At any rate, the defeat of Southern populism allowed the planters to force through the capitalist transformation of the countryside by means of terror, and to completely colonise the local state formations where they did not simply create them.  As they were unable to wholly subsume the labour process under capitalist control, they resorted to extra-economic coercion - the Jim Crow system answered this requirement. This involved a dual movement of suppression and incorporation.  On the one hand, the exclusion of African Americans and many poor whites from the polity permitted the introduction of segregated controls on their movements and conduct which limited their ability to organise in their own interests. As a contemporary protagonist put it: "If the Negro is permitted to engage in politics, his usefulness as a labourer is at an end."  On the other hand, the obverse of such controls was the incorporation of white workers through paternalistic means, most evident in the plantations and the mill towns which emerged from the cotton industry.  This involved more extensive intrusion into the daily life of white workers, despite their greater liberty and access to public goods.  It involved white workers being addressed as part of a folkish Anglo-Saxon cultural and political community.  So, racial populism could become a recurring form of Southern politics thanks in part to the defeat and co-optation of turn-of-the-century Southern multiracial populism.

Before turning to the specific period of the Cold War, 1945-65, what I consider the 'classical period' of US anticommunism, I will make some attempt to specify what I mean by populism.  In a previous post, I gestured toward Ernesto Laclau's writing on populism in his pre-post-marxist writing.  While acknowledging some problems with the argument, I thought that one advantage of his interpretation was that it was neither purely descriptive nor is simply historicist, confining the interpretation of populism to a certain conjuncture or political space, but rather specified a conceptual core that could help make sense of the variety of movements and ideologies deemed populist.  I think this is a quality that any account of populism would need to make the concept workable.  The gist of Laclau's account is that while class 'interpellations' (or, if you prefer, identifications) relate to the antagonism between the ruling class and the proletariat, populist 'interpellations' relate to the antagonism between the 'power bloc' and the 'people'.*  Populism is thus an anti-status quo discourse that divides the political space into a simple dichotomy of 'the people' vs its other.  The 'people' is defined as sovereign yet powerless; the true owners of a polity that has been appropriated by an other.  The 'other' must in this sense be somehow an elite or bound up with elites.  Thus, racial populism might 'other' a 'Jewish elite', or a 'liberal multicultural elite', or a 'Federal elite' that was seen as 'soft' on racial others, 'loving' the other (rather than the people), or bound up with one-world conspiracies etc.  This step is decisive: the process of othering is what determines the positive content of 'the people'.  It is what simplifies the political terrain, uniting an array of class actors in (Laclau-speak) a 'chain of equivalents'.  Populism is not, then, a form of politics like socialism or liberalism, but rather a form of political identification which is tendentially versatile (Laclau would say 'tendentially empty'), and one which tends to arise when the social order and the system of identities that helps sustain it is in flux.  (There is an argument for treating populism in an historicist manner, as a transitional form of politics rooted in the absorption of previously resistant regions and populaces into capitalist markets.  We certainly see this with the populist movements in the South of the late 19th Century, where the strongest sources of populist support came from areas least integrated into the national or global markets.  Nonetheless, its recurrence in a variety of circumstances seems to weigh against this treatment, and so I think it's most sensible to see it as a kind of crisis politics.)

Within the terms outlined above, Joseph Lowndes treats George Wallace as a pioneer of racial anti-statist populism, emerging in the crisis of the Sixties as the 'New Deal' coalition fragmented over the issue of civil rights.  In fact, I think the crisis of the Southern system really began after World War II.  Manning Marable's account of the era in Race, Reform and Rebellion demonstrates that by this time, the economic basis for the collapse of Jim Crow had arrived.  He does not focus on the effective subsumption of labour in the South through new mechanisation processes, and the arrival of a 'New South' bourgeoisie for whom Jim Crow was desirable but not essential to their reproduction.  Rather, he shows that the beginnings of African American empowerment were in place by the end of the war (evident in FDR's de-segregation of the military, which appalled Southern politicians because of the implicit threat to white supremacy posed by a seeming capitulation to threats of black civil disobedience).  Politicians of neither party could afford to ignore black electors after the war, and many of the important Supreme Court decisions had been made by the early 1950s.  In the south, black political participation was gradually increasing - this is what the wave of lynchings was intended to stop.  Meanwhile, the colonial system was already disintegrating so that the 'colour line' was everywhere in peril.  Only the political practices bracketed under Cold War anticommunism prevented the crisis of Jim Crow from becoming collapse much earlier than it did.

So, I want to suggest that it is in the years between 1948 and 1964, the peak years of the Cold War, that Southern racial populism was developed and refined.  It began with the States Rights Party, which was the basis for the White Citizens' Council and the John Birch Society.  These groups were organised around a southern tradition of countersubversion, which has precedent in the terrorist campaigns by Ku Klux Klan and associated organisations following the US Civil War aimed at restoring white supremacy under Democratic rule.  Countersubversion is an ensemble of political practices, of which counterrevolution is a subset.  It has an especially long pedigree in the United States, where the presumed conspiracies of Freemasons, Catholics, Mormons, African Americans, the ‘yellow peril’, and of course ‘Reds’ have serially aroused movements in defence of Americanism. In addition to its racial and national connotations, countersubversion is intimately bound up with patriarchal practices and the masculinist ‘regeneration through violence’. The dominant form of countersubversion in US politics at the time of Jim Crow's greatest peril, however, was anticommunism.

Anticommunist countersubversion, specifically, is an ensemble of class practices whose product is the conservation of extant relations of dominance primarily, but not exclusively, on the axis of class. It is involved in the suppression of insurgent classes and fractions for this purpose.  In treating anticommunism primarily as a set of political practices rather than an ideology, what I am most interested in is the line of political demarcation rather than identifying a specific ideological operation shared by liberal anticommunists, white supremacist anticommunists, Fabian anticommunists, fascist anticommunists, and so on.  This line of political demarcation is between those who have at least a nominal anticapitalist commitment (communists, their allies and their anticapitalist critics) and those who are committed to defending capitalism.  But importantly, this line bissects a political scene unfolding within a concrete social formation, meaning that the defence of capitalism is not organised around a set of abstractions (the mode of production), but rather around concrete political blocs, local state forms, modes of rule, etc. which are not immediately reducible to capitalist imperatives.  This means that such struggles are contextual, and contested: whether white supremacy, 'free unionism', 'pragmatic segregation', or other policies or structures are considered essential to capitalism's efficient reproduction will vary.

The regional variations in US capitalism at the time of Jim Crow's crisis are quite clear.  In the north and west, Fordist production dominated, with workers incorporated by means of productivity agreements and wage rises (the material substratum of hegemony) and disciplined by anticommunism (loyalty oaths, the war against communism and the left in trade unions, etc).  In the South, the planters and the textile industry dominated.  The textile firms were small and poorly unionised.  Employers and state officials worked to isolate union activists as 'communists', beating or 'disappearing' them rather than trying to incorporate them in a class compromise.  Local state forces in the South had a long tradition of arresting large numbers of workers, especially African American workers, to bolster the cheap prison labour force for local employers - a practice which was incentivised by payments per arrest made, and which continued on a widespread basis well into the 1940s.  All of this class repression had a parapolitical, vigilante aspect to it, not dissimilar to the way the Klan operated in alliance with police to terrorise blacks and civil rights workers, or to the way the FBI organised illegal raids on suspected radicals' premises.  The murky boundaries of the capitalist state in this context should remind us that it is not an object, or an instrument, or an institution: rather, it is a set of strategic relations which facilitates the organisation of the dominant classes and fractions, and the disorganisation of the dominated classes and fractions.

At any rate, if rising wages and productivity agreements worked to incorporate labour in the north and west, as part of the wider offensive against communism and the radical left, the South depended on different mechanisms of incorporation.  Here, the material substratum of hegemony was the relative advantage enjoyed by white labour over black labour: it was this which made white workers so resistant to unionisation, fearing that it would erode their racial position.  I hesitate to call this 'white privilege', because the system did not improve the wages of white workers in aggregate.  White workers had more access to skilled and supervisorial jobs as a result of segregation.  Their wages tended to be better than those of black workers. However, the overall effect was actually to reduce the bargaining power of both black and white labour, and to magnify income inequalities among whites - or, to put it another way, to increase the rate of exploitation of white workers.

This is where racial populism comes in.    From the late 1940s, as I say, the system of Jim Crow was endangered.  Washington's global empire-building was partially responsible for this, as it entailed a set of strategic orientations at odds with those of the South.  First of all, obviously, Washington needed to construct multi-racial alliances against communism - necessarily, given that most of the world was not white, and would no longer be ruled by whites.  The US could deploy considerable violence against opponents, but could not have ruled through force alone.  So, it was under constant pressure to address or mitigate white supremacy - a matter it took up reluctantly, because Washington politicians mostly believed in some form of white supremacy, and the South was a politically powerful and reliable component of the domestic anticommunist coalition.  Nonetheless, segregationists would have cause to complain that troops were being used against white Americans in Little Rock rather than communists in Peking.  Secondly, the international system that Washington set about creating was crafted under the influence of New Dealers, whereas the bulk of Southern capital was against the New Deal and particularly opposed to anything (Marshall Aid etc) that smacked of 'socialism'.  They had come to terms with the New Deal in the first place largely by ensuring that its provisions were 'racially laden' - e.g., containing exclusion clauses that omitted most African Americans in the South from wage and employee protection.  This dramatically accelerated the divergence in living standards between white and black workers.  So, the further entrenchment and global expansion of New Deal ideas could not but be perceived as a threat in the South. 

The states rights movement beginning in the 1940s founded its activities on the proposition that federal civil rights legislation was the culmination of global communist conspiracy.  This grammar of anticommunist countersubversion was one advanced first in Washington DC, of course.  The specific charges used by Southern bodies to attack human rights, civil rights and political organisations originated from HUAC, or the Justice Department, or the Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee (SISS).  HUAC under the Texas senator Martin Dies had always protected the South as far as possible.  But in the South, such countersubversion acquired a populist element during the Cold War in that this conspiracy was treated as one that involved elites - not just the federal government, but financiers, celebrities etc. - in a united effort with the riff-raff (criminals, protesters, blacks, militants) to undermine the people.  Civil rights legislation would merely undermine a fragile concord between racial and minority groups, spread misunderstanding and distrust, and hand agitators a weapon to divide the American people and soften them up for tyranny.  The States Rights Party warned of a "police state, in totalitarian, centralised, bureaucratic government" arising from Truman's civil rights legislation.  In general, the view was that foreign-controlled conspirators had infiltrated the federal government to promote an egalitarian agenda at odds with the venerable 'way of life' of the South, which was itself the most pure version of the American 'way of life'.  Strom Thurmond's major thematic in 1948 was the threat posed by "collectivism" to "economic opportunity" for Americans.  Echoing claims that were current in Washington DC, he asserted that spies and infiltrators were at the top of major strategic industries, as well as the political establishment, and that the Fair Employment Practices Commission had been introduced to "sabotage America".  Seeking the votes of a "racial minority", he said, the national parties had all adopted a programme that would "open the doors to eventual communistic control of this Republic".

Yet it was really following Brown vs the Board of Education and the censure of McCarthy that the articulation of racism and anticommunism in a populist inflection emerged in its most energetic form.  McCarthy had never gained as much support in the South as his authoritarian anticommunist politics would lead one to expect.  In fact, southerners were the least likely to back McCarthy despite their increasing propensity to back Republicans in national contexts.  This was perhaps, as Wayne Addison Clark argues, because McCarthy's basic orientation was toward creating a local power base and maintaining conformity on issues relating to foreign policy rather than defending a racial caste system.  Nonetheless, he used his power to disseminate ideas - communist infiltration of government, industry and Hollywood, a lack of sufficient vigilance against communism by American leaders - that the defenders of white supremacy would find very useful.  He also had personal influence in a number of political fights against supposed crypto-communists in southern states such as Texas, where he forged alliances with oil plutocrats.  Following his personal political demise, the ideas of McCarthyism took on a new life in the South, among the Southern rich as well as small businesses, journalists and 'patriotic' organisations such as the American Legion, Minute Men and so on.  Senator James Eastland was the South's McCarthy in many respects, expressing a hatred for the New Deal, liberalism, and concessions to labour that southern Democrats shared with conservative Republicans, in a distinctly Southern idiom.  Eastland worked through SISS to gather and disseminate (dis)information about civil rights organisations and to organise the harrassment of white supremacy's opponents, as well as organised labour and the left in general.  Similarly, the publications of the White Citizens' Council were remarkably similar in tone and content to those of HUAC, albeit with the emphasis falling on race and identity.

Wallace represented a defiant last stand, as it were, in respect of this form of racial populism.  His early background had marked him as a critic of the most egregious forms of white supremacy but, having lost the primary in the 1958 gubernatorial contest to a candidated backed by the KKK, he vowed not to be "out-n****red" again.  By 1962, he had become and out-and-out Dixiecrat, using populist identifications to establish himself as a defender of the white southern people against the seemingly unstoppable egalitarian tyranny.  "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth," he said on being sworn in as governor of Alabama, "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."  This speech, written by a former Klan member, invoked the shades of the Confederacy.  Though promising 'the greatest people' (the superior southern white) protection from the clanking chains of tyranny, from a regime that reviled them, despised them, and trod on them, he also staked the South's claim to true Americanism.  "You are Southerners too", he told the whites of New England, the Mid-West and the far west.  However, like many of his predecessors, Wallace preferred not to focus his discourse chiefly on race.  And when he did address race, he often addressed it through codes and a richly symbolic language often tapping the region's strongly Protestant religious traditions.  But it was through race that he could unite the suburban white middle classes with urban white workers: to the middle classes, he could arouse fear of the threat to property rights posed by civil rights legislation; to workers, he could cite a putative threat to job security.  It was through the same language that he could speak to Polish northerners as much as 'Anglo-Saxon' southerners.  It was a spurious white racial victimhood that could fuse these disparate class, religious and ethnic groups into a 'people' in opposition to an elitist tyranny.

Throughout the period from 1945-65, Southern elites sought to protect white supremacist capitalism by forging a populist alliance against communist conspiracy.  Their efforts were not merely repressive, but actively sought to alert and mobilise popular forces to the threat to their racial advantages. They were not simply conservative, but actively sought to direct an oppositional force against the Washington power bloc - not to overthrow it but to recompose it in the interests of Southern white supremacy.

* The 'power bloc' is a concept from Poulantzas, who argues that such a bloc arises as a logical form of class dominance under capitalism because the ruling class and its allied classes are "constitutively divided into fractions" such as rentier, finance, commerce, industry, etc. A power bloc comprises the "coexistence of several classes, and most importantly of fractions of classes" in a "contradictory unity".  The 'power bloc' is thus an alliance of dominant classes and fractions under the hegemonic direction of the leading class or fraction.  It is not important for this argument, but it is worth saying, that the power bloc is unified by the capitalist state in this account, because the bourgeoisie and its fractions are held to be incapable of either unifying themselves or assembling a coherent system of class alliances - so wrapped up are they in competition.

Labels: anticommunism, populism, racism

Not mourning Vaclav Havel posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: anticommunism, eastern europe, noam chomsky, stalinism, US imperialism, ussr, vaclav havel, warsaw pact

Military Wives and the sickening sentimentality of the serial killer posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: culture industry, imperial ideology, imperialism, military-industrial complex, Pop Culture

From the clutches of (partial) victory posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: class struggle, labour, liberals, public sector workers, strike, tories, trade unions, working class

The late Christopher Hitchens posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: british empire, christopher hitchens, islamophobia, liberal imperialism, thatcherism, the liberal defence of murder, US imperialism

Shut it down posted by Richard Seymour

Obstructing the profit system:

Labels: american working class, capitalism, class struggle, occupy oakland, occupy wall street, profits, us politics, us ruling class

Fear of a red planet posted by Richard Seymour

“Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

“This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic."” – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Labels: 'socialism', anticommunism, capitalism, marx, marxism, revolution, ruling class, socialism, working class

The Unilever strike, pensions and structural adjustment posted by Richard Seymour

An article for The Guardian about the Unilever strike:

Unilever workers have embarked on the first national strike in the company's history, over the company's attempt to close the final salary pensions scheme, which will result in a 40% reduction in retirement income for many of its workers. The company, in a stunningly inept move, decided to punish the strike by cancelling Christmas parties and bonuses for the workers. Thus, Unilever, a blue chip company that takes pride in its philanthropic past and "responsible" industrial relations policy, found itself branded Scrooge.

Unilever is one of the companies to have weathered the global crisis in robust fashion. In February 2011, its profits were up 18% on the previous year, at some £5.2bn. Labour productivity has always been reasonably high, in part due to negotiated productivity deals with trade unions. Yet, the company is on the offensive against its workforce. Why is this?

Unilever will say that the current pension system is impossible to fund. This was the argument it used in 2008 for closing the scheme to all new entrants, only three years before closing it to existing members as well. The workers argue, though, that the pension fund is financially robust, and that the company itself admits there is no immediate financial imperative driving the cuts.

This is taking place in the context of a record number of firms shutting final salary schemes and replacing them with much less generous settlements. The GMB's negotiator argues that Unilever simply saw an opportunity to follow the trend. But there is probably more to it than that...

Labels: austerity, class struggle, militancy, pensions, ruling class, strike, tories, wealth transfer

For a people's inquiry into the summer riots posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: education maintenance allowance, metropolitan police, neoliberalism, police brutality, police shooting, riots, tories, tottenham, tuition fees

That's a nice blog you have there. Shame if something were to happen to it. posted by Richard Seymour

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On Democracy Now about Nov 30th posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, class struggle, public sector workers, strikes, tories, trade unions

Cultural materialism and identity politics posted by Richard Seymour

  If it is possible to have a cultural materialism, of the kind fashioned by Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall, is it also possible to have a materialist politics of identity?  Is it even advisable to try?  To answer the first question is to think through the meaning of Marx’s concept of the social formation as a unity in difference; to answer the second is to explicate Lenin’s thinking in saying that the person who waits for the ‘pure’ revolution will never live to see it.

  In many respects, identity became an obsession in the UK over the last ten years.  Were it not for the global economic crisis, we would be dealing mainly with the fall-out from New Labour’s crass attempt to pioneer various formats of ‘Britishness’ – from the sleek, neoliberal cosmopolitanism of ‘cool Britannia’ to the socially conservative, defensive nationalism of the ‘war on terror’.  Within that garrisoned territory existed several sub-debates and struggles over Islam, immigration, gypsies and Travellers, ‘Englishness’ and the question of the Union, the north-south divide, and of course over whether the questions of LGBT and gender rights can ever be posed adequately within the framework of the nation (versus its ostensibly intolerant enemies).

  Precisely how the left should conduct its operations within such a topography has been the subject of controversy.  Much of the left is reproached with abandoning the ‘bread and butter’ of politics (jobs, welfare, housing) in favour of ‘identitarian’ concerns with Islamophobia, Gaza and so on.  This criticism may well accept the importance of anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics, but argue that the priority given to these ‘identity’ issues that is the problem, representing both a shift in emphasis and in the locus of operation: from the workplace to the campus, from bread and butter to bruschetta and olive oil.  Naturally, this trope is far from novel.  Its pedigree has origins in the perplexed reaction to the ‘new social movements’ – those struggles oriented toward environmentalism, LGBT and women’s liberation, anti-racism and so on – by a variety of people on the social democratic and revolutionary left.  Before exploring the consequences of this view, it’s worth saying that the argument is itself usually conducted within the very cultural and identitarian terrain that is seen as problematic.  One of the better known advocates of the general perspective I’m describing is Owen Jones.  (I better spare his blushes by explaining that I’m not attributing every particular of this view to him, merely the broad outlines.)  His book, Chavs, is among other things a cultural counterblast against an emerging reactionary common sense that vilifies working class people.  The ‘community politics’ that he sees the BNP exploiting, and argues that the Left should learn from, is formed by a politics of identity and a valorisation of the ‘local’.  So, although this general style of argument introduces a division on the left between those who orient toward culture, and those who orient toward class, and although it is prefaced by a certain ‘economistic’ materialism, it necessarily occupies a decidedly culturalist problematic.

  In response to the culturalisation of class, then, is it possible to counterpose a materialism of culture and identity?  The grounds for a materialist approach to culture were outlined in Hall et al’s (Gramscian-Althusserian) Resistance Through Rituals:

  “In modern societies, the most fundamental groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations will be, in a fundamental though often mediated way, ‘class cultures’. Relative to these cultural-class configurations, sub-cultures are sub-sets—smaller, more localised and differentiated structures, within one or other of the larger cultural networks. We must, first, see subcultures in terms of their relation to the wider class-cultural networks of which they form a distinctive part. When we examine this relationship between a sub-culture and the ‘culture’ of which it is a part, we call the latter the ‘parent’ culture. This must not be confused with the particular relationship between ‘youth’ and their ‘parents’, of which much will be said below. What we mean is that a sub-culture, though differing in important ways—in its ‘focal concerns’, its peculiar shapes and activities—from the culture from which it derives, will also share some things in common with that ‘parent’ culture. The bohemian sub-culture of the avant-garde which has arisen from time to time in the modern city, is both distinct from its ‘parent’ culture (the urban culture of the middle class intelligentsia) and yet also a part of it (sharing with it a modernising outlook, standards of education, a privileged position vis-a-vis productive labour, and so on). … Sub-cultures must exhibit a distinctive enough shape and structure to make them identifiably different from their ‘parent’ culture. They must be focussed around certain activities, values, certain uses of material artefacts, territorial spaces etc. which significantly differentiate them from the wider culture. But, since they are subsets, there must also be significant things which bind and articulate them with the ‘parent’ culture. The famous Kray twins, for example, belonged both to a highly differentiated ‘criminal sub-culture’ in East London and to the ‘normal’ life and culture of the East End working class (of which indeed, the ‘criminal sub-culture’ has always been a clearly identifiable part). The behaviour of the Krays in terms of the criminal fraternity marks the differentiating axis of that subculture: the relation of the Krays to their mother, family, home and local pub is the binding, the articulating axis.”  (pp 13-14)

  Firmly domiciled within class formations, culture forms and divides them along multiple planes and down as many hierarchical vertices.  Of course, it would be mistaken to see cultures as merely class-bound, either in their parent- or sub-cultural form.  The practices that comprise a culture or subculture are often available to and accessed by members of more than one class.  These practices, and the ‘maps of meaning’ that express the lived relationship of one class to its life situation may be appropriated and reconfigured by members of another for its own purposes, in what one might call ‘trench raiding’.  The military analogy is chosen to convey the fact that such raiding crosses a line of antagonism and struggle, not of mere difference.  This accounts for the resentment toward those crossing such lines – ‘hipsters’, for example.  A greater degree of complexity arises where lines of difference become antagonistic in oppressive situations.  Suppose you’re a white person who is considered to be ‘acting black’.  In most cases, this would be a deeply weird suggestion.  It is unworldly to think of a given set of cultural practices as being exclusively ‘black’.  But for racists, ‘blackness’ is a pathology passing through the vectors of music and popular culture to white youths, who are then said to have become ‘black’.  That is the basis for a certain folk racist explanation of the summer riots, memorably articulated by David Starkey.  At the same time, from a different perspective, such ‘acting’ can be seen as a form of racist parody and condescension, or a simple theft in a cultural war - albeit perhaps not without buying into a certain cultural essentialism and the attendant idea that culture is something that can be policed.  Whatever judgement we reach on those criticisms, however, what is important for the purposes of this argument is that we notice the line of antagonism and the ways in which this structures the processes of transmission and appropriation.

  Where does ‘identity’ fit into all this?  It is common to address the subject in the terms of particularism, in contrast to the universalisms that form the basis for rival political projects such as socialism and liberalism.  This would suggest that identity is bound to a specific culture or sub-culture, its political radius extending no wider than the boundaries of cultural form in which it is embedded.  Even more scandalously from a certain perspective, the notion of identity seems to be bound to the bourgeois individual, the self-sufficient, self-sustaining Cartesian subject.  Yet identity is a much more slippery concept than this would imply.  It is not distinguished only by its affirmation of the culturally, or politically proximate, but also by the process of identification which involves the perception of, for example, shared interests.  And interests are interesting things: they can be expansive, or narrow; inclusive, or aloof.  Identity politics is a ‘politics of location’, certainly.  But where one is situated in the social formation has consequences for how far one can see.  I seem to recall from somewhere that it was Angela Davis who urged readers to imagine the capitalist system as a pyramid, with heterosexual white male capitalists at the top, and black, gay women prisoners at the bottom.  Each struggle by those at the bottom would also lift those further up, such that the more subaltern one’s situation, the more potentially universal one’s interests are.  The marxist understanding of the working class as the ‘universal class’ hinges partially on this strategic insight.

  ‘Identity politics’ is usually treated as an unwelcome narrowing of horizons, a reduction of the political field to competing particularist fiefdoms – in a word, the identitarianisation of politics.  But it is also possible to arrive at the same subject from the opposite direction – the politicisation of identity.  The tendency of capitalism is to multiply the number of lines of antagonism.  And if certain identities are goaded into being, or take on a politicised edge, because the system is attacking people then it is clear that ‘identity politics’ is not a distraction, or an optional bonus.  The fact is that ‘identities’ have a material basis in the processes of capitalism.  And just because they are constructed (from that material basis) doesn’t mean that they are simply voluntary responses to the life situation they arise in, which can be modified or dropped at will.  Thus, it is not realistic to tell people – “you have the wrong identity; you should think of yourself as a worker instead”.  To speak of capitalism is to speak of a system of unity in difference, a complex unity structured by antagonism.  In any concrete capitalist formation, the forces that emerge to support oppositional and leftist struggles will usually be coming from some identity-position; and usually more than one identity-position, as the lines of antagonism intersect and the fields of politicisation overlap.  As Judith Butler argued in her essay, ‘Merely Cultural’, the Left can respond to this in two ways.  Either it can try to construct a unity which is based on the exclusions of what I might call, for convenience, a pre-1968 Left: a unity which suppresses or demotes gender, race, etc as being of secondary, derivative importance.  But this will not work: the genie will not go back in the bottle, and all such efforts would result in would be a divided and more defeasible Left.  Or it can try to construct a unity in difference, negotiating between identities, acknowledging them as starting points which give rise to certain forms of politicisation and which can potentially be the basis for accession to a universalist political project.

  Of course, the objection to this might be to remind me of what I only just said (or quoted) a few paragraphs ago: the fundamental division in any society is class (ie, not gender, not race, not religion, etc).  And if that is the dominant antagonism, then it must follow that class struggles have a strategic priority over other struggles.  It is morally satisfying, but stupid, to pretend that all identities – class, race, gender, religion, etc. – are equivalent.  This means that some must be ‘of secondary, derivative importance’.  But such an objection, were it offered, would be prestidigitation.  First of all, it inserts the essentialist approach that it seems to argue for in its precepts.  To say that a form of oppression is derivative of a more fundamental class antagonism is to fall back on that animating illusion, the ‘expressive totality’ in which all the phenomena of a social formation are collapsible into its essence.  Secondly, more importantly, we recognise explanatory hierarchies, and thus strategic hierarchies.  From the perspective of socialist organisation, some identities are pernicious; some are indifferent; and some possess valuable resources.  That’s a hierarchy.  But what is at issue, and what is being illegitimately conflated with the above, is the claim that the injustices of oppression are not ‘bread and butter’ as it were; ie somehow less ‘material’, or less ‘fundamental’ than class injustices.  Because they are seen as not partaking of the same processes of material life, as not contributing to the reproduction of productive relations, then their resolution can be seen as extraneous to class struggle, as desirable but ultimately not part of the material base in which real politics is conducted. 

  This is a tendency, to put it no more strongly than that, which we can see creep back into certain left (mainly social democratic) discourses.  It is one whose logic, which many of its advocates will resist due to their better nature, tends toward a racially and sexually ‘cleansed’ class struggle, in effect a narrow struggle of straight white men in the imperialist core over their living conditions – ie, not a class struggle in any recognisable sense. It would be a rather parochial form of identity politics.  Not only is this rebarbative on its own terms, but it’s actually useless to the people it would seem intended to help, the ‘white [straight, male] working class’.  In the concrete struggles arising against cuts in the UK today, quite often the starting point is some form of political identity that isn’t simply ‘socialist’ or ‘liberal’.  Those signifiers may designate a wider political-strategic divide that forms the terrain in which political identities work.  But quite often, people will join a protest “as a student”, “as a trade unionist”, “as a black woman”, “as the mother of a jailed rioter”, and so on.  Their political identities will reflect sectional interests, cultural formations, particular experiences of oppression, etc.  But these are, as I say, starting points.  And a creative, politically intelligent response to identity politics has to begin, to some extent, where the forces on our side begin. 

  A materialist politics of identity is one that recognises the corporeality of identities, their involvement in the metabolic interactions between humanity and its environment.  Acknowledging that they are part of a lived, material process yields the further acknowledgment of their durability but also of the versatile ways in which they can be operationalized.  It means treating identities as forces to be cooperated with, negotiated with, argued with, learned from, and ultimately (one hopes) fused into a universalist project, that being a revolutionary assault on capitalism.

Labels: class, class and race, class consciousness, class politics, class society, class struggle, culture, culture wars, identity, multiculturalism, multiculture, racism

Nov 30th posted by Richard Seymour

My ABC article explaining the background to tomorrow's strike:

The public sector strike on November 30 will be the largest strike in the UK since the general strike of 1926. 

Two to three million workers could take part. Unlike our continental counterparts, coordinated strikes of this kind are extremely rare in the British trade union movement. As such, its political importance, if the action is successful, will be much greater than in the continent. 

Why has it come to this? In a sense, the answer is obvious. 'Austerity' involves the most serious attempt to restructure the economy, to the detriment of working class living standards, in decades. It involves reducing wages and pensions, diminishing bargaining rights, cutting jobs and reducing the bargaining power of labour. Everywhere that these measures have been introduced, whether in Wisconsin or Greece, there has been resistance. 

Yet, there was no guarantee that the British trade union movement would respond in the way that it has. Decades of declining union composition since the serious defeats inflicted on organised labour – notably, on the miners and the print workers – have left unions in a weaker position. 

The orthodoxy among trade union leaders since then has been a form of tactical conservatism known as the 'new realism'. This approach involved unions avoiding confrontation in favour of bargaining with the government of the day. Every sign until last year was that the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) would adopt this approach in dealing with the government's cuts, negotiating to mitigate the effects of cutbacks rather than seriously attempting to obstruct them. Indeed, before grumblings from the shop floor scuppered the plan, union leaders had intended to invite prime minister David Cameron to address congress last year. So, what changed?

Labels: austerity, class struggle, cuts, militancy, public opinion, public sector workers, strikes, tories, trade unions

Strong public support for strikes posted by Richard Seymour

The government has lost the argument:

An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.

More than two million people are due to walk out on Wednesday.

The research also indicates differences between men and women in their outlook on the strikes and the economy.

The polling firm Comres interviewed 1,005 adults by telephone across England, Scotland and Wales one week ago.

The poll indicates greater sympathy for the industrial action among women - at 67% - compared with men, at 55%.

Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.

Labels: class struggle, coalition, labour, liberals, militancy, public opinion, public sector workers, strike, tories, trade unions

November 30 posted by Richard Seymour

Just a quick note.  The political class knows that this strike is going to be huge.  For a while, I detected an attempt to play it down, to say that it wouldn't be as big as planned, or to suggest that it would be welcome because the disruption would drive people into the arms of the coalitions and its cuts agenda.  But the results from all of the unions have been unambiguous.  In most cases, the vote for strike action has been in excess of 80%, and in all cases over 70%.  That's an overwhelming mandate for a fight, right across the organised core of the working class.  Now the stories of the scale of disruption anticipated are starting to pile up.  Worse, the government fears that the strike itself will harden the attitude of the workers, making it more difficult for the union bosses to sell them a duff deal.  Now, mark this.  Labour, whose leader has repeatedly turned his rhetoric against the strikes, is starting to sound a slightly different note.  Alan Johnson, the leading Labour right-winger (and a likely successor to Ed Miliband) came out and defended the strikers, saying: "If they can’t [strike] over an issue as important as their pensions then what can they take industrial action over?"  Now, the shadow chancellor Ed Balls has felt compelled to add his "huge sympathy" for the strikers, and blamed the government.  The political class are beginning to take note: as Mark Serwotka points out, this is the beginning and not the end of the struggle, but Britain will be a very different place on the day after November 30th.

Labels: austerity, class struggle, cuts, labour, liberals, public sector workers, tories, trade unions, working class

Red Hunters in the Deep South posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: anticommunism, cold war, hegemony, historical bloc, marxism, populism, racism, socialism, tea party, US imperialism