Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
These are posts on race from the blog Base and Superstructure. Race is one of the most important issues of political and social power. Topics include the relationship between race and class, racism in the United States and the rest of the world, and the relationship between race and political movements.
The trick to reading a Robert Caro biography? He writes about places more than people. And, above all, he writes about power. I pointed to this feature in a post on Caro’s book series The Years of Lyndon Johnson. But before Caro wrote about LBJ, he wrote about Robert Moses and New York. I’ll say a word here about The Power Broker: a book about how one builds (and then loses) power in a major US city.
By now I’m sure many of us know that the choices we make are far more complex than popular debate suggests. Almost everyone agrees on the need for consent, on at least some notion of ‘consent.’ But whether and how we consent – and what kind of consent we need – remains less clear.
I might approach these issues in a million ways. But here’s one way. I recently re-read a blog post on Feministing. The post covered a 2014 study in Psychology of Women Quarterly on gender and choices about body hair. It turns out that a woman’s decision to remove (or not remove) body hair is a pretty complicated one. In particular, the social pressures involved cloud the matter of whether and how women consent and make choices.
Lots of leftists – and people within racial justice spaces – discuss reparations. I’ve had some thoughts on it for awhile. And I revisited a solid article in Jacobin by Brian Jones. It’s called “The Socialist Case for Reparations.”
Jones gets one big thing right. He points out that as socialists we don’t need to adopt an either/or approach to issues of race and class. We don’t need to argue for either a broad social democratic vision that excludes race or a vision for reparations that caters to the black professional classes, ignores the role race plays in capitalism, and precludes a multiracial working–class coalition.
I’ll say a few things here about what I consider the best socialist case for reparations. In doing so, I’ll mostly leave open what, exactly, ‘reparations’ means. In the end, I think that adds up to the best socialist stance on the topic.
In the last few years, ‘liberal white women’ emerged as a common point of departure for very different sorts of politics. Some of those politics connect to the far right. But I’ll set those politics aside. Here, in this post, I’m interested in two narratives about liberal white women that appear on the left and center-left.
I’ll argue these two narratives share more in common than many think.
Some time ago, I posted an analysis of fascism. And then I applied that analysis to Trumpism – both in a post and an eBook. The short version of all that: I consider Trumpism a movement of nationalist (or populist) white-identitarianism, a term I coined. I don’t mean to deny that work. I’m satisfied with it and consider it complete, as far as it goes.
But I’ve found some confusions out there on the left. Some leftists set up a false dichotomy. Here’s how it goes: either leftists use the term ‘fascist’ for all far-right viewpoints, or else they’re not taking far-right views seriously as a threat.
This false dichotomy carries the implication that people who don’t call all the far-right ‘fascist’ aren’t taking the far-right seriously. Of course, I don’t think Trumpism is a fascist movement. So it’s time to say a bit more about taking white-identitarianism seriously as a threat.
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