I love the idea of public housing. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of you who have spoken with me about it. But many people don’t love it at all. Why? Sometimes they display racism, white fear or fragility, et al. I’m not going to spend too much time on that. At other times, they worry about crime, livability of neighborhoods, et al.
To be clear, it’s tough to disentangle the latter from the former. But sometimes people who live in public housing themselves – or who live nearby – express those concerns. That’s worth taking far more seriously.
As leftists, we have a short term agenda: Medicare for All and other social democratic programs to meet basic needs, tenants unions to fight landlords, et al. But we don’t yet know how to get from there to full socialism – a democratic system of ownership and control over economic resources. While the topic has gotten long overdue attention on the left recently – see, for example Bhaskar Sunkara’s book The Socialist Manifesto – major issues remain. One of these issues is the ‘transition trough.’
John Steinbeck wrote about two thefts of the land in The Grapes of Wrath. As readers, we know Steinbeck as the classic author who wrote eloquently about the second theft, the banks’ theft of the dying Oklahoma countryside from its tenant farmers. But many of us know less than we should about the first theft.
The political left doesn’t know what to make of Venezuela, just as it doesn’t know what to make of a lot of foreign policy issues. Ken Livingstone asserted Hugo Chávez should’ve killed the oligarchs. That’s one view. George Ciccariello-Maher, a more carefulanalyst, also lapses into overheated rhetoric. But if there’s anything like a left consensus, it looks like this: vague critique of the current administration standing next to critique of any US-backed war. As Michael Walzer would surely say, it’s the vague consensus at work.
I’d like to get less vague. I’ll give an overview of the situation in Venezuela, and I’ll honor a bit of the spirit of Livingstone’s flippant remark without reproducing its content. What’s the insight here? It’s this: the Bolivarian Revolution, ’21st Century Socialism’ in name, recreated many of the problems of 20th century socialism in practice. And I’m talking here about the social democratic varieties, not the Leninist or Stalinist ones.
But all things in good time. First there’s our point of departure. Everyone agrees things are fucked up in Venezuela, but they don’t agree how or why. What’s fucked up? Why did it happen? Will Venezuela fix it?
I’ll tackle some of these questions on the way to our destination.
Most conversations about race and capitalism quickly degenerate into a chicken-or-egg discussion. You know the one. Which came first, racism or our beloved ‘free enterprise system’? I say we’ve had enough of that. The debate is played out. It’s monotonous and tired. But there’s a Marxist term from the debate still relevant to us. I’m referring to ‘primitive accumulation‘.
Does ‘primitive accumulation’ solve these issues? If so, how far does it take us? More broadly, does primitive accumulation account for the role of race in the capitalist system? Or if you approach these issues like, say, Ta-Nehisi Coatesapproaches them, does it account for the role of capitalism in the racial hierarchy?
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