Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Race (Page 9 of 12)

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.

Two Concepts of White Privilege

July 3, 2019 /
white privilege

Source: Philip Cohen (https://www.flickr.com/photos/philipcohen/38444249116)

The concept of white privilege is central to contemporary social justice movements. And though there are disagreements, there’s a broad consensus on what white privilege amounts to. Roughly, white privilege is a set of benefits one gets merely in virtue of being white. Society confers these benefits not due to wealth, effort, or any other feature, but merely from whiteness. These benefits might be economic, political (e.g., citizenship status), or something much less tangible.

But this idea that white privilege is a benefit to whites was not always central to the concept. There’s an older concept of white privilege complicating this picture. On that older concept, white privilege often had short term benefits for whites. But those came at the expense of long term harm to working-class organizing that hits both whites and non-whites.

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The Socialist Manifesto

June 10, 2019 /

socialist manifesto

Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara recently published his first book, The Socialist Manifesto.

He’s trying to do a lot with the book. But here’s the main goal as I see it. Sunkara wants to distinguish between social democracy and socialism. He draws this distinction primarily in terms of the political methods people use in their pursuit. And he argues that the best political vision for our times is one that helps us move from the former to the latter. He does this via a historical project, covering everything from the feudalist roots of capitalism to German and Swedish social democracy to the Soviet Union and China to the history of leftism in the United States. Again, quite a project.

I’ll lay out some of Sunkara’s key arguments in The Socialist Manifesto. And I’ll offer some agreement and criticism along the way.

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open borders

Open Borders and the Left

June 3, 2019 /

In the US, leftist attitudes toward immigration vary. At least, they did for much of the 20th century. Now, ‘open borders’ is an idea on the table across the US left in a way it hasn’t been previously. Much of the reason for this is reaction to the US’s increasingly draconian immigration policies since 9/11.

But there are also key issues of leftist theory and practice involved. Suzy Lee’s recent article in Catalyst provides a helpful frame for thinking about this. You can find the article here. I’ll sketch out Lee’s leftist argument for open borders before laying out some of the further issues and challenges.

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class-identitarianism identity

Is Class an Identity? On Class-Identitarianism

April 29, 2019 /

Lots of people now think about class in terms of identity. But this is a peculiarly modern idea. We find it in terms like ‘Nascar Dads’. And we find it in weird, quasi-ideological attachments to Carhartt products. We might call the politics of class-as-identity ‘class-identitarianism.’ It’s an ugly term, but let’s not shy away from ugly. At least not yet.

I’m working on answering two questions in this post. First, is class an identity? And, if it is, does class-identitarianism offer an explanatory framework that helps us make sense of the world and/or formulate a better political path?

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