Posts from the “Writing” Category

Reflections on Care Work

Posted on April 21, 2013

The following piece offers notes on the place of care work in revolutionary organizing, compiled after a brief group study on care work, reproductive labor and prefigurative politics.

Reflections on Care Work
By Ba Jin

When militants talk about “care work,” the term is often left broad, vague, or undefined. It can mean many different things: talking about emotional stress with comrades, preparing meals for hundreds of people at a demonstration, changing a someone’s bedpan, taking your kid to the park, or taking someone else’s kid there for ten bucks an hour. I would define “care work” as labor that serves other human beings, and helps them survive and sustain themselves physically and emotionally. It can be done in private or in public, paid or unpaid. This piece offers a few thoughts on the role of care work in revolutionary organizing.

Part of a strategy, but not a substitute for one

Activists usually affirm the importance of care work in social movements. Without care work, they say, people burn out, and only the people with the resources/ability to get care elsewhere will join the movement. This is true. But if we stop the conversation there, we simply affirm the importance of care work in a general, moral sense. We still need to evaluate how care work can be performed within specific types of groups, and how caring can be best integrated with the other tactics a group does in the course of its activity. We need to go beyond asserting that “care work is revolutionary,” and start outlining how it can be revolutionary.

Take the example of food preparation: do small groups of activists cooking at their meetings help bring revolution about? How, concretely? If the answer is that it allows activists to sustain themselves and keep doing other work, then what is their other work? If it provides a model of new social relations that others can replicate, then how will the group judge if the model is spreading, and evaluate why it is or isn’t? And so on. In my experience, when groups don’t have clear answers to questions like these, it means they don’t have a strategy, and they’re substituting care work in place of one.

By “strategy” I mean the group’s best guess about its goal, what it will do to get there, and how it will evaluate its work along the way. As with any set of tactics, carrying out particular kinds of care work does not amount to a strategy. Simply feeding people every week can be just as aimless as smashing windows every time there is a demonstration. Groups that substitute care work for strategy can end up spinning their wheels, creating welcoming spaces and taking care of each other very compassionately, but with little effect in broader society. Because of this, I don’t think care work is inherently revolutionary by its very nature. Instead, I think it’s only revolutionary inasmuch as it contributes to a profound transformation of society (one aspect of which, for sure, is establishing new caring social institutions).

If we agree on this, then we are provided two different ways to think about, and implement, care work in revolutionary groups. First, care work is part of a group’s internal political culture, the manner in which it develops strategies and cooperates to carry them out. Care is part of how the group makes decisions, handles interpersonal conflicts, and keeps its members in good physical and emotional shape to keep doing political activity. Second, care work is also part of the group’s external political work, a component of the strategy that the group is testing in practice. Here care is integrated with other tactics, as part of the agitation, actions and events the group organizes in broader society. These two realms are closely related, but distinguishable.

Care within groups

Care is an integral part of how any group sustains itself. When you check in with another member emotionally after contentious discussions, or help a member overcome his/her insecurities about writing or public speaking, you’re doing care work that sustains and develops the group. Without basic practices such as these, no revolutionary group would be able to survive. However, internal care work always takes place with certain limitations and challenges.

First, there are always concrete limits to what kinds of care a given group can provide. Most revolutionary groups in the U.S. today are pretty small, and revolutionaries must have a realistic assessment of the capacity of their group to care for its members. In some cases, members will have to accept sacrifices, like eating crappy snacks at meetings because nobody has time to cook or money to buy good stuff. In other cases, the group may have to send its members to outside resources that the group can’t provide itself, like connecting a member with a work injury to a cheap physical therapist. This doesn’t mean the group is discounting care work. It just means the group is providing care within the scope of its size and resources. Revolutionary groups should regularly evaluate what kinds of care are needed in order for the group to serve its purpose, compare this with the group’s capacity, and provide as much as possible to its members.

Second, much internal care work is part of intangible group “culture,” and is difficult to implement mechanically. When a member is absent for a while, is there another member who has a personal relationship with him/her, who can check in with him/her by phone or in person? Are all members developing a relationship with members’ kids, so everyone can take turns entertaining them when they get restless at meetings? These qualitative relationships can be nudged forward by group decisions, but they can’t be imposed by fiat. Sometimes specialized groups are appropriate for implementing care work—say, forming a committee to cook for meetings—but sometimes this can be awkward or bureaucratic. It can even be cultish, if it devolves into collectively managing member’s personal lives and emotions. A light-handed approach, such as pairing new members with a “mentor,” or making time for social hangouts after meetings, may help important relationships develop organically.

Third, groups must somehow strike a balance between rigorous and principled debate, and consideration for members’ emotional wellbeing. To evaluate and decide on strategies is an emotionally-charged, high stakes process. This is unavoidable. In order to develop a coherent analysis and strategy as a group, it’s necessary for members to challenge the holes in each other’s arguments, and highlight disagreements in order to resolve them. This process can be very challenging interpersonally—say, if two members have a romantic history with one another, or if a new member feels smacked down in the course of discussion by more experienced members.

Finding a way to manage this dynamic is one of the major challenges social movements face today. The left typically swings between the revolutionary party tradition, exemplified by Mao’s “Combat Liberalism,” and the consensus practices inherited from the 1980s. The former is an excellent guide to principled debate, but has almost nothing to say about feelings. The latter provides great ways to manage group dynamics, but often brushes over political differences for the sake of shallow consensus, and blurs together feelings and arguments in the course of discussion. Somewhere between these poles lies a new form of group praxis, which revolutionaries today must discover.

Women’s Liberation and Dialectics: One Divides Into Two

Posted on April 13, 2013

by Nat Winn

An important debate has developed that began with questions around women, liberation, and capitalism. It has landed us in the field of methodology, dialectics, and revolutionary strategy. What a great start and what a great destination!

Eve Mitchell and Tyler Zimmerman have written a response to my thoughts on a discussion around Marxist feminism which was started on the Fire Next Time blog by Zora B’Al Sk’a and Ba Jin. They have cited my criticisms regarding the lack of their discussion to engage politics (or better said: my criticism that they conflate all political potentials as developing rigidly from the point of production or capitalist reproduction). They argue that the criticisms which I extended to the larger body of Marxist feminist thought are indicative of a major difference in method.

I think that they are correct.

There is a real difference in method and understanding of dialectics. I appreciate the chance to delve into that further.

So let’s dig in.

Communist Stand

In our epoch, the oppression of women is being challenged globally and in fundamental ways that have never before been seen in history. Arranged marriage is being defied and politically targeted all over the world. Wife beating (and all similar forms of partner abuse, including date rape) are no longer considered acceptable or tolerable by hundreds of millions of people. In a truly world historic way, the female sex is claiming the right and means to reproductive freedom (birth control, abortion, and the right to say “no”).

We communists do not stand aside from this. We are not just nodding in verbal agreement. We see these profound changes (and more) as integral to what we call “the communist road” — which is not just the resolution of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction (socialized production and private ownership), but the ending of all oppression.

We communists are against all oppression. We are (as Lenin said) tribunes of the people — active militant opponents of all the ways that oppression appears. We are seeking to make a giant torrent of revolution out of the many rivulets that arise against oppression.

The struggle over the oppression of women is not a distraction from the resolution of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction. It is not some side issue. It is not even some “special” oppression (which implies it is subordinate and subsidiary, or off-in-a-corner). In this sense we agree with Eve and Tyler.

To put it another way: the great conflict of the fundamental contradiction drives socialist revolution to the fore. But what the socialist revolution accomplishes (and takes as its goals) are far more than just resolving that fundamental contradiction. We want to liberate humanity and end all the intolerable oppressions that have marked class society itself and the lives of the vast majority suffering in class society.

On the Claim of Dualism

Eve and Tyler criticize my claim of the failure of Marxist Feminism on the following basis:

In Nat’s comments, we observe an unnecessary antagonism being drawn between two completely valid arenas of struggle; the content and form of reproductive labor on the one side and reproductive freedom on the other (there is no coincidence in the double use of “reproduction” here which we’ll expound further down). The origin of this antagonism is located between a splitting of the subject and object. This is done through a dualistic reading of ”economics” and “politics,” or, to use the terms Marx employed in the “Preface” to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, “base” and “superstructure.” But there is an immanent unity between subject and object as well as between base and superstructure and what Marxism represents is precisely the unification of these categories. The tragedy of orthodox Marxism is that it represents a reification of them; that is, regarding an abstract duality of the subject and object as a real thing that plays out in the real world in terms of forms of organizing and concrete political orientations.

This criticism goes deeper into questions of dialectics when it is posited:

The base/superstructure concept adapted by orthodox Marxism has reified the subject-object split. It sees the “base,” or economy, in a structuralist/sociological manner that exists independently of human initiative and which determines all activity and thinking. So capital, wages, and money are mere objects. On the other hand, “superstructure,” or politics, is understood as subjective and confined to ideas or an abstract kind of activity that isn’t metabolic with nature but divorced from it and determined by the base.

Marx never had a dualistic understanding of these categories and posited quite conversely that “economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production.” (Poverty of Philosophy, MECW 6, 165)

When Eve and Tyler say I am creating an abstract duality between reproductive labor and reproductive freedom or between base and superstructure, I understand them to be saying that I am creating a sort of absolute division between them and neglecting their relationship to one another.

This criticism is a misinterpretation, though it does reflect real differences in how we look at reality in motion (or dialectics).

The notion of dialectics being put forward by Eve and Tyler is a closed dialectic. It emphasizes the unity of a process while failing to speak to the most important aspect of dialectics, which is contradiction and struggle. For example Eve and Tyler say:

For Marx, capital, wages and money are the various phenomenological forms of alienated labor; they are subjective and objective social relations in disguise, not ahistoric things as political economy conceives. The economy and politics, or capital, wages and money can only be separated logically because concretely and in the real world they exist as a social and dialectical whole…

The splitting of the intrinsic unity of the subject-object and the dualistic reading of base/superstructure creates a dynamic where struggles around work are seen as narrow and economistic.

This approach fails to grasp the central role of contradiction within dialectics and the many-sidedness of complex phenomena and thus attempts to combine things that are necessarily in the process of division and thus resolution and transformation.

On the Responses to the Ten Theses, Part 2

Posted on April 5, 2013

The following is the second part of a response to the many replies FNT received to Ten Theses on the U.S. Racial Order. You can view Part 1 here.

On the Responses to the Ten Theses, Part 2
By Ba Jin

Critiques of method from Noel Ignatiev

Two lengthy responses, from Noel Ignatiev on the FNT site and Neftali on the Signalfire blog, critiqued the method I used to try to analyze the racial order. To get Noel’s views across, I will reproduce my summary of his argument here, which I believe he felt was pretty adequate:

I understand Noel’s critique to be about what methods revolutionaries should use to analyze society and develop strategies. Noel writes: “racial oppression, like gender and national oppression, is a specific form of oppression; its hallmark is the reduction of all members—not some or even most but all—members of the subordinate group to a status beneath that of the most degraded member of the dominant group.” If I’m reading his comment right, Noel upholds this definition of racial oppression, and believes no oppression in the U.S. today conforms to this definition; he thus thinks that if we try to understand oppression and resistance in terms of the racial categories we’ve inherited from the past, we will end up confusing ourselves and failing to develop a good strategy, because the racial categories we use will fail to map onto material reality. Instead, Noel suggests that we “start at the other end” and undertake a class analysis to identify, say, the stratum of the proletariat that we think has revolutionary potential. Once we’ve identified a stratum, we can then examine how different parts of that stratum have different racial or national labels for historical reasons, what strengths and weaknesses they bring to the table due to this history, and how to work with them. He believes this method is better than “reading” the present reality with racial categories that have become fairly incoherent.

I responded to Noel’s comment (one of the first to come in) on the original post on the FNT site, so I won’t duplicate it here. One thing I definitely take from Noel’s response, however, is that it is certainly essential to base any analysis of race on a fairly robust understanding of where class composition is at, and what the dynamics of class struggle are, in the U.S. Without this, it’s possible you will guess at the material forces reshaping the racial categories at work in society, but have an inaccurate understanding of these forces based on your own limited, individual impression of them.

Critiques of method in the Maoist Response

Neftali’s post on the Signalfire blog is by far the lengthiest response, and the one that most strongly questions the place of nations and nationhood in the Theses. I will respond to Neftali’s piece, but first I have to deal with his insinuation that I am engaged in “‘identity politics’ of a Brown/Yellow guilt type in relationship to Black oppression.”

This seemed the only part of Neftali’s piece that was truly uncomradely. Nowhere in my piece did I use the term “yellow,” but Neftali inserts it because he knows that I am Asian (yes, some militants on the internet know each other in real life.) His use of the term could imply two things: either the politics put forward in the Theses will instill guilt among “brown/yellow” people, or, more damningly, my analysis is ultimately driven by some guilt I feel as an Asian person toward black people.

In my experience, comments such as this, which insinuate that the argument one puts forward is actually a manifestation of a deep psychological need / hangup / guilt (etc) is a cheap shot. It’s a way to undercut the validity of an argument without addressing its content, by placing doubt in the reader’s mind as to the impetus behind it. After all, if an argument is really the product of individual guilt, why argue with it? Why bother engaging with an argument that has no rational basis? This is why Neftali inserts this barb early in his piece. However, for this jab to have any substance Neftali would have to do more than insinuate it; he would have to prove it. First, he would have to prove that my argument in the Theses is without substance. Then he would have to prove, using examples from my past writing and practice, that I display a lot of guilt toward black people. Short of this, Neftali’s insinuation remains petty slander, which has no place in principled political debate.

With that caveat, I can now address Neftali’s argument in his Maoist Response.

The main thrust of Neftali’s argument is that my Theses are fundamentally misguided, because I seek to understand race and not nation. Race, for Neftali, is part of the “superstructure” of society, while nation is part of its “base” or “structure.” In Marx’s terms, the “base” of a society is made of the social relations people enter into in order to produce the wealth of society, and the forces of production set in motion through those relations. The “superstructure” is comprised of things like religious, political and cultural organizations and ideas. While each influences the other, the base determines the superstructure in the long run. Marx offers a much fuller description of these terms in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and The German Ideology.

For Neftali, “race” refers to ideology, the superstructural ideas about racial difference that people have in their heads, and which disguise reality. “Nation,” by contrast, refers to a distinct entity within the base of society that really exists, and which is obscured by ideology. When I seek to understand the U.S. in terms of the former rather than the latter, I draw misguided conclusions, like a physician analyzing a patient’s condition in terms of “bad humors” instead of viruses and infections.

Pamphlet on the Flatbush Rebellion

Posted on March 25, 2013

A new pamphlet entitled The Flatbush Rebellion is currently being distributed in Flatbush following the events of the past two weeks. It includes a brief account of the murder of Kimani Gray, the rebellion that occurred, and the social causes contributing to such rebellions. You can download it from the image on the left or the link above.

The pamphlet opens with an a quote from Frederick Douglass, from a speech in 1857:

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.”

On Liberal Racism: A Response to ‘Being White In Philly’

Posted on March 12, 2013

Ron, a member of FNT, as well as of Free the Streets (Philadelphia based radical group), picks apart an article recently published by Philadelphia Magazine entitled ‘Being White In Philly.’ Ron argues that the liberal racism in the article is not exceptional but is instead reflective of the overall white supremacist configuration.

Robert Huber’s front page Philadelphia Magazine article entitled ‘Being White In Philly’ says a lot about the values and sensibilities of the bourgeois press in this city. Some might wonder how such a spiteful and ugly article made its way not only through the editing process but onto the very front page of a “prestigious” Philadelphia magazine. We should, however, not be surprised by this. We must recognize that this article fits perfectly into a pattern of color-blind racism which has become the dominant form of racism in our so-called post racial society.

Huber claims that “white people never talk about it” – the “it” being race. Will simply talking about race solve deeply entrenched social problems? Of course not, but in actuality, white people are in fact already engaging in tough and necessary conversations about race amongst themselves and with people of color as well. Those who are having these conversations usually understand that the issues often attributed to culture and superficial physical characteristics have more to do with class and power dynamics, something Huber totally fails to grasp. Despite his claim, thoughtful discussions on this topic are taking place all the time, but because they do not seem to be occurring in his social circles we’re meant to believe that these conversations are not happening at all.

‘Being White In Philly’ begins on a decidedly sour note which sets the tone for the entire piece. Huber uses the opening paragraph to bemoan the “dangerous” and “predominantly African-American” neighborhood near his son’s campus. He notices that there are “a lot of men milling around doing absolutely nothing” but he never asks the important question – “why?” What is being implied is that black people “milling around” is scary. In reality, Huber has no idea what those people were doing. White people socializing in groups is fine, but when black people living in poor neighborhoods do it, it’s scary. Granted, crime may be a problem in that neighborhood, but it’s all to easy to see the surface manifestations of problems and assign blame; if we’re serious about addressing problems we will look for their root causes.

The reasons for high levels of unemployment in poor and working class black neighborhoods are multifaceted, but let’s take a look at one explanation for the current situation that directly involves Temple university, the school Huber’s son goes to.

Temple university is rapidly expanding its campus; as of February 2012 planned construction projects were estimated to be at least $400 million. Most of these construction jobs are going to out of state unions comprised mostly of white men. Regular protests have been held by women union organizers and union members of various ethnic groups in an attempt to pressure Temple University to end its unfair labor practices. I’m sure many of the men Huber saw “milling around” near his son’s apartment building would love to have one of those construction jobs. Unfortunately, the system has been set up to exclude them while favoring men like Huber.

Not too far from Temple University we have the Fairmount section of Philadelphia. Huber’s decision to conduct the bulk of the interviews in this area of the city was an interesting one given its current struggle with the forces of gentrification. For people living in urban centers with substantial populations of people of color, gentrification is one of the most pressing, complex and contentious issues of our day – but not for Huber.

Gentrification is presented as the de facto solution to the damage poor blacks have inflicted upon themselves and their own communities. To drive home the point of how poor blacks brought it all upon themselves Huber enlists the help of an elderly racist man who refers to an alleged home intruder as a “nigger boy”. Shocking, yes, but Huber’s extremely unflattering portrait of poor black people up until that point basically legitimizes the words of the man he’s interviewing. According to the N-word dropping old man, “blacks from the South with chips on their shoulders…moved North.” Huber continues: “They moved into great brownstones above Girard [avenue] and trashed them, using banisters and doors to stoke their furnaces instead of buying coal. Before long it looked like Berlin after the war. Whites moved out.”

So there you have it. Angry black people moved north, trashed a once beautiful neighborhood and forced whites to move out.

By the time Huber declares that “the inner city needs to get its act together” naïve readers would probably wholeheartedly agree after being barraged with one unflattering stereotype after another. A Russian immigrant going to law school here in Philadelphia comes to the brink of basically calling black people porch monkey’s with no comment from Huber except remarks about how physically attractive he finds her.

Near the end of his article, in what may be an effort at mitigating some of the earlier damage, there’s a clumsy attempt at showing a neighborhood’s racial harmony. Instead what happens is Huber accidentally gives us a chilling glimpse into how gentrification works. A middle class couple decides to send their child to a majority black school in their neighborhood despite the fact that their neighbors send their children to a more prestigious school in the nearby money drenched Rittenhouse section of Philadelphia. Ignoring reservations about their choice, these trail blazers pressed ahead and insisted on keeping their child at the mostly black school; eventually they convinced ten other families to take a chance and enroll their kids there as well. Heartwarming.

We learn a bit later on the real reason for the sudden interest in the mostly black neighborhood school: the prestigious school in Rittenhouse is in fact becoming crowded; spots are limited. As Huber explains, “the city is naturally expanding outward”. Jen, the woman being held up as a sort of reverse Harriet Tubman admits, “People in the neighborhood are now getting nervous whether there’s a spot for them here.” Who exactly these nervous people are is not made clear, but it’s fair to assume that Jen, her architect husband and their fellow well to do neighbors are not one of them.

In a city with so many social issues that need resolving, one wonders why the feelings and emotions of white people warrant a front page spread on the cover of Philadelphia Magazine. Or, too be more clear, the thoughts and feelings of specifically middle to upper middle class white people. From the article it appears that white people in Philadelphia are overall doing quite well, though this could be misleading since Huber did not bother to interview people living in predominantly white poor and working class neighborhoods.

The dynamics between whites and non-black ethnic groups were not even important enough to merit a passing mention. An article about race where only middle class white people and police officers are interviewed leaves much to be desired. The truly frightening thing is that perhaps Philadelphia Magazine knows its audience; perhaps they are telling their privileged, bourgeois readers exactly what they want to hear.

One cannot talk about race without addressing the realities of class, privilege and white supremacy, things Huber barely mentions in his article. This is unfortunately not very surprising. Liberals often view attitudes and beliefs as sources of oppression rather than taking the radical view which tends to focus much more on dismantling concrete systems of power. Financial assets and easy access to opportunities have accrued disproportionately to those populations who have historically been closest to systems of power. We cannot talk about race relations in an urban environment like Philadelphia without acknowledging and exploring the implications of this imbalance.

Easy access to centers of power and material resources allow the privileged to create their own realities, and as Huber shows us, those with privilege often resist having their carefully constructed world views threatened by pesky little things like facts. Huber essentially does what many people of his class do all the time: he enables a process of selective blindness by choosing to downplay history and the enduring historical structures of white supremacy. He eschews historical context and essentially tells his readers that white people need to muster the gumption to “tell it like it is”, i.e., tell poor black people that the problems they face are all their own fault. This is one of the main reasons why his article is at its core quite troubling and why it needs to be addressed and strongly denounced.
Huber’s claim that middle class white people in Philadelphia need to be more outspoken about their grievances with poor black people is utterly ridiculous. Unless gentrifiers are calling for abolishing capitalism and reparations to long neglected communities, I’m not sure what they could have to say that poor blacks would need to hear.

Liberal solutions to social problems often involve personal lifestyle changes, dialogue for the sake of dialogue and copious amounts of soul searching, but rarely do they strike at the structural core of the issues they claim to want to address. Huber’s analysis of the white person’s dilemma in Philadelphia is no different. Institutional racism and the effects of capitalism on vulnerable populations received very little and no mention respectively. At no point does Huber suggest that his readers question a system that fosters and promotes criminal behavior, poverty and inequality within certain populations. Instead, his presumably white audience is called upon to be more vocal in expressing their moral outrage, and to not shrink from giving those wayward Negroes a good tongue lashing if necessary. Liberal racism may be less virulent than the Rush Limbaugh/Glen Beck variety, but at their core lies one major theme: the oppressed are always to blame, and it’s up to white people to somehow save the day.

We should, however, perhaps thank Huber for putting on display what many of us have known all along to be true: to get beyond race we must work harder towards building a classless society. The bourgeois, capitalist classes created and sustained our current (scientifically debunked) notion of race and they continue to perpetuate these fantasies. For the privileged classes, worrying about the color of someone’s skin is much easier than questioning the very foundations of a system that benefits them.