Posts tagged “Theory”

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.

On the Responses to the Ten Theses, Part 1

Posted on March 7, 2013

The following is the first part of a response to the many replies FNT received to Ten Theses on the U.S. Racial Order. Part 2 will be coming out soon.

By Ba Jin

I was surprised and pleased by the thoughtful engagements Ten Theses on the U.S. Racial Order received on the FNT site, and on reblogs on other sites. Not only were there responses from the different tendencies within FNT, but members of Miami Autonomy and Solidarity, May First Anarchist Alliance and the Kasama network offered critiques, as did the Signalfire and Northstar blogs. Thanks to all who shared their insights.

The critiques I received have pushed my thinking further that it would’ve gone otherwise, forcing me to discard elements I can’t uphold, and deepen my understanding of the parts I think are defensible. The critiques have also spurred me to continue studying theories of race and nation in the revolutionary left tradition and academic social science. At this point, I can offer some initial responses to the range of critiques the Ten Theses received. I’ve included these below, organized thematically.

It should become clear below that I accept many of the critiques leveled at the Ten Theses, but also refuse to discard the effort wholesale. I still think revolutionaries need to grapple with the changing racial order in the U.S—even if my first attempt to do so fell short—and I hope we can use parts of the Ten Theses as kindling for an adequate theory of race. I believe such a theory must do the following:

Examine “race” as a particular configuration of base and superstructure, which goes through periods of decomposition and recomposition;
Examine “nation” in the same terms, and describe how these configurations relate to one another (in other words, we need a unified theory of race and nation);
Describe how racial formation is affected by inter- and intra-class dynamics (racial conflict within the proletariat, proletarian solidarity across existing racial categories, conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie within racial categories, and cross-class alliances within racial categories);
Account for the necessary incongruity between base and superstructure throughout the process of racial formation (how the superstructure lags behind the base, while old categories from the former are always taken up to express new changes in latter);
Account for how racial formation influences, and is influenced by, the formation of gender in a given period;
Determine if / how the reproduction of capital necessitates the continual reproduction of what we experience as race and gender.

With this in mind, I’ll now respond to the critiques of the Ten Theses.

Part 2 of Developing Militants: the Left’s Minstrel Show and How College Educated Revolutionaries of all Colors Keep the Working Class Shucking and Jiving

Posted on February 20, 2013

The following piece was written by Will, a member of FNT. It examines the race, gender and authenticity dynamics on college campuses and in the left, especially in regard to study and theory, and grapples with the implications of these dynamics for working class people of color militants.

Part 2 of Developing Militants:
The Left’s Minstrel Show and How College Educated Revolutionaries of all Colors Keep the Working Class Shucking and Jiving

Introduction

The White revolutionary left is largely college educated young people. Whether they work at a cafe, wash dishes, teach in public schools, or drive trains, they share the common experience of a college education. Their experiences in college have profoundly shaped their politics in a variety of ways. Two particular sets of politics are race relations and relationship to revolutionary theory. These White College Educated Revolutionaries (WCER) have never broken from the experiences in college. Worst of all they unknowingly impose their particular college experiences on the revolutionary movement and particularly the working class whites and working class People of Color (POC)[1]. Lastly, People of Color College Educated Revolutionaries (POCCER) have played a crucial role in working with WCER in unknowingly preventing any working class leadership from developing.

This has resulted in a devastating consequence for potential POC working class revolutionaries. They are denied the very intellectual benefits which WCER have received. While WCER have all the best intentions, this is objectively white supremacy in motion. This results in the control of most organizations by WCER. The POCCER in particular are rarely in genuine leadership because of this dynamic and their own contradictory relationship to education and revolutionary theory. This results in a minstrel show where authenticity is defined by lack of knowledge of the past and the romanticization of someone’s experience. Fundamentally it says that theory, writing, and education is not for POC. White college educated revolutionaries control the movement and usually forefront only their experiences and expect POC and white working class people to conform to them.

I will expand on these points in this essay. This is one of the many crises of the revolutionary left today. Sadly, much of what I describe is done under the best of intentions. While it might sound like it at times, I do not believe there is a coordinated and evil plot to keep down working class people in the revolutionary left. I do not believe any of these WCER are white supremacists. They are serious revolutionaries. But they are revolutionaries who are the product of the general historical moment and their particular life experiences. Regardless of what they say and think, I am most interested in the objective results and process of their actions.

The White College Educated Revolutionary (WCER)

The category of WCER is very broad and needs some political refinement. While I cannot draw extremely sharp demarcations, some minimal ones will be helpful. I have noticed that WCER in Trotskyist and Maoist organizations do not display this problem. If anything the Maoists are the most serious about developing well rounded revolutionaries as far as their tradition understands it. WCER Trotskysts also display a fair amount of seriousness and fall outside the critiques I am making.

I have noticed Anarchists are some of the poorest in this sense. While there are exceptions, those who I can point out are exactly that, exceptions. Then there are those coming out of the Johnson-Forest tradition which have most in common with the problems of the white Anarchists and WCER. Lastly, there are the independent activists who are radicals or revolutionaries, but most importantly have not joined any revolutionary organizational form. The core of my critique is centered around independent activists, those influenced by the Johnson-Forest tradition, and Anarchists, with all of them having in common their college education. When using WCER, I will tend to refer to this layer as a general rule.

Most of the WCER left has had minimal contact with POC working class and unemployed. They come out of the suburbs or small towns and go to fairly elite private or public university. They rightly developed a moral anger against the white supremacy geared towards many communities in the USA and around the world. They learned about Marxism in the university and often it was discussed as Stalinism. Marxism was paraded around as completely male, Euro-centric etc. What was missing was any mention of Walter Rodney, Rosa Luxemburg, Grace Lee Boggs etc. Or how many movements in Asia, Latin America, and Africa were marxist/ communist, although of highly Stalinist-Maoist varieties. Nor do they study in college the Grundrisse, Johnson-Forest Tendency, Socialism or Barbarism, etc.

What first developed for these WCER as a critique of Marxism, led to a criticism of theory and universal ideas as destroying oppressed groups’ particular experiences. Theory and universalism became a stand-in for the white straight man. While there is a strain of truth to it, it does not explain any of the women and POC militants and movements I have mentioned so far. What stood in its place was the romanticism of the individual experience of Queers, women of color, Trans-people, men of color, etc. The class dimensions of these identities were usually hallowed out because class also became the bogey man for Marxism. Sociological academic words like intersectionality, privilege, and positionality came to fill in for the revolutionary past. Bourgeois thought had once again defanged revolutionary theory.

If revolutionary theory was not totally hollowed out, what was learned at best was an incomprehensible academic Marxism. Giving certain insights to many WCERs, it also left them unable to speak plainly to anyone outside of academia. As soon as WCERs stepped out of school, they discovered no one understood a word they spoke unless they spoke plain. This further deepened the idea that revolutionary theory was not for the working classes. This created a private versus public distinction of where revolutionary ideas are discussed.

Back on the college campuses, the WCER did some organizing where the only POC they encountered were their class counterparts. The political experiences and relationship developed on college campuses had a definitive impact on how both of these groups imagine politics, organizing and race relations to be. And these POC had been waiting their entire life to give it to the man and they found a group of WCER who were only too happy to oblige their POC counterparts. Both the WCER and the POC revolutionaries had a sickness of revenge, guilt and an inner cowardice.

Authenticity + Representation: Attack on Revolutionary Theory

Everyone on college campuses recognized that there was a profound difference between their class reality and what people outside the campus were experiencing. Usually this was understood in some shallow-sociological form of class. That no one was able to make deeper connections with those outside college campuses was a reality no one could ignore. This is part of the material basis of the politics of representation which came to fill such a role in the contemporary revolutionary left. WCERs needed representatives to play a fill-in role since none could be found outside of college campuses. These representatives were almost always POCCERs.

But to be representative of something, you need some claim to authenticity. No discussion of authenticity can happen without discussing the problems of race which are inherent to the concept. We can expose the problem by framing it in terms of a question. Who is an authentic POC? What kind of music does an authentic POC listen to? How does an authentic POC talk? How does an authentic POC dress? Where does an authentic POC live? What does an authentic POC eat? What are the politics of an authentic POC? The list is endless. But this line of questions exposes the racialist/ white supremacist thinking which are the very foundations of the questions themselves.

No one in the WCER would openly ask such questions. Their white skin prevents such public statements. But the way WCER behave in college, exposes their method of thinking. This is where the POCCER enters. I will not forget when I recently heard a POCCER claim that he sagged his pants low so he could make a political statement, connect with the hood, and remind others of his true origins. This is a classic moment of authentic representation. The WCER sees someone who they believe has an accurate understanding of the POC working class.

The authentic representation combination leads to an attack on revolutionary theory. The authentic representative is someone who hates revolutionary theory. The following things are essential for this authentic representative to say: a) people in the hood do not read or care about books; b) people in the hood worry about the police, wages, or rent; c) people in the hoods’ experiences are enough to politicize them.

Debates on Consciouness

Posted on January 31, 2013

The following series of writings were sparked by Mike Ely’s critique of an FNT flyer. The flyer, “Wildcats, Worker’s Power, and Lesson for Today,” is being distributed to striking bus drivers in NYC. The debates deal with questions of how to engage in popular struggles and what is the nature of revolutionary consciousness.

ISH:

Thanks Mike for a challenging piece. This gets to something that has been at the core of my own questions since re-engaging with the left in the wake of Occupy. I go to FNT meetings, and while I didn’t contribute to this leaflet, I thought it did I good job of trying to inspire workers toward more militant action than they might actually be conceiving by referring back to something that actually happened, was actually done by a previous generation of school bus drivers. And yet, I see your point, and I completely love the Kasama leaflet you refer to. So obviously the presumption here is that intersecting with workers engaged in actual struggle is a way to build solidarity, class identity, build toward a victory that inspires generalizing the struggle. I hear you saying that is a fundamentally flawed approach. To me passing out a flyer talking about revolution and communism makes a lot of sense in something like Occupy, given the issues and the people involved. I’m trying to imagine how that would work here, in a struggle that is much less politicized. I don’t mean this to sound flip, but are you suggesting something like “You Might Think You’re Just Trying to Save Your Job but You’re Really Starting on the Road to Revolution”? Or are you suggesting that intervening in these kind of workers struggles is poorly conceived?

………………………………………………

NPC:

I think this is an important question, and a very immediate, very pressing one for those of us who are doing workplace organizing. In most cities it also seems like much of the fresher, more vital workplace organizing is actually being done by groups that might also be categorized as “left communist” or syndicalist — with the rest mostly eaten up by the labor bureaucracy. With these political trends, I think it is a claim often leveled against them that they see workplace struggle as the be-all-end-all of organizing. This is somewhat enhanced by these trends themselves as they write about their own histories — syndicalists writing histories of revolutionary Spain, for example, emphasize the CNT but sort of ignore the immense number of affinity groups, community assemblies, social centers, libraries, free hospitals, peasants’ collectives/communes, independent armed brigades, etc. etc. that contributed to the revolutionary break — and most of whom were engaged in decidedly non-‘economist’ forms of agitation. Still, it’s something that is always a risk when you’re doing ANY kind of worplace organizing.But I want to problematize one of the claims made above:”Just to be clear: FNT is making a strong statement against the idea that we (as communists) have a central task to bring key revolutionary elements from outside people’s everyday experience.”I think this is unfair. Now, I admit, being from the west coast I don’t know as much about their organization or organizing styles, though I have read their website. From reading their materials, it does not at all seem like they fit into this category or that the statement above (from them, cited in the article) stands AGAINST the idea that one of our central tasks ought to be to bring revolutionary elements from outside people’s everyday experience.The issue here is twofold:

1. Saying that people DO often come to revolutionary or semi-revolutionary (or at the very least anti-capitalist) attitudes through workplace struggle and “everyday experience” is certainly correct. It’s clear that there is a latent rejection of the system, especially among the younger generations today. On the west coast, it literally seems like everyone under 30 who you talk to holds either SOME sort of “revolutionarY” view (though often a reactionary one) or a collapsist one. Either way, there is no real conception that the system as such can continue — there is a general understanding that another world is not possible, but INEVITABLE.

This does NOT mean that it’s immediately translated into a “good” anti-capitalism. It can just as easily turn into myths of techno-salvation, ecological apocalypse, or even fantasies of fascism. Particularly dangerous are the trends of “national anarchism” developing in certain cities, which argue for a racialized, decentralized form of “stateless” communitarianism, meshing elements of decolonial thought, bookchin-style libertarian municipalism, and national self-determination — but all of course resulting in something that is basically nazism by another name. Now it’s of course not that bad frequently. Many people have a very latent, very lite view of how “socialism would be better,” with socialism basically seen as some sort of social-democracy welfare state, and they think some large non-violent civil society “revolution” will be required to get there. All of these options are still far to the right of communist, revolutionary thinking — but they are still relevant leverages that exist, and which environmental and economic crisis are enhancing in people.

The difference, I guess, is that I do NOT think that groups like FNT are saying that this sort of internal, every-day or workplace-struggle experience is at all SUFFICIENT to make revolution or communist consciousness. It seems instead like they are pointing it out as an apt place to begin engagement with folks in a workplace–and that is honestly correct, it works very well to leverage these things in agitation, even if they are people’s negative “collapsist” views of the future.

At the same time, I of course agree that a lot of “external” elements are necessary — and I think the role of communists in workplace struggle is to act as a sort of enzyme, catalyzing contact between two previously segregated molecules (the workers’ inherent presumptions, often anticapialist of some sort, on one side, and specifically communist, revolutionary thought on the other).