Reparations

[Endomorphian]

I was reading the issues list displayed on the PSL website when I came across the call for reparations. I was intrigued, but the article was very vague about its intent. I wanted to get a comprehensive survey on the opinions of RevLeft users:

1.) Are reparations necessary? If so, in what form should they take (money payments, social services)?

2.) If so, to whom should they go towards, and who should pay?

3.) If so, should European and Latin American nations/companies who participated in the slave trade be forced to pay? Should Africans who participated knowingly in the slave trade pay?

Thanks for your time.

[red cat]

Yes, every bourgeois will have to pay with his ownership of the means of production.

[mikelepore]

The idea of reparations is positively the worst idea that anyone on the left ever concocted.

The oppressors and the victims of the slavery era (ended 1865) are all dead, so no action can ever do anything for them. The next question becomes: can we research the fact that a particular descendent of a plantation owner, after eight or ten generations, owes a calculated amount of money to a particular descendent of a slave, after eight or ten generations? Knowing that it's impossible to determine that, the plan would only amount to a tax imposed on all white people to transfer the money to all black people. But it's not true that all white people as a monolithic unit oppressed all black people as a monolithic unit, a generalization that's more racist than any of the modern effects that the suggestion is intended to correct.

Worse yet is the issue of why a leftist organization would adopt such an indefensible idea. It's nothing but an attempt to lure the modern victims of racism into applying for membership, as though members were to be recruited, not out of reasoned thought, but by dangling bait in front of them. It's along the same lines as the leftist groups that get members by telling college students that the definition of the socialist goal is the forbidding of increases in college tuitions. Do you want people to join because they understand something, or join because they don't understand something?

[syndicat]

lepore misunderstands what reparations are about. the effects of slavery didn't end in 1865. slavery wasn't just a legal status. it was a particular mode of production. as Marx says, "people are creatures of practice" and in particular, they are shaped by the activities they perform in different class roles in society. Thus people who manage and engage in planning work -- as does the bureaucratic class -- develop a certain sense of entitlement to be the people doing this, and the power of the dominating classes in general gets reflected in how it develops their personalities and various kinds of knowledge.

And on the other side, it gets reflected in the working class in a tendency towards low self-esteem, passivity, lack of knowledge in areas of control and planning monopolized by the dominating classes.

These effects on the consciousness and skills of people in different class positions is how a system of oppression is able to reproduce itself.

Now, slavery was a particularly vicious form of working class control system. The slaves were stripped of all rights, and were not educated, forced to do back breaking work on plantations. And this didn't end in 1865. As late as the 1930s the largest single portion of the African-American population were still working as laborers in the southern cotton industry (about 40 percent).

Throughout the late 19th century African-Americans were kept in bondage through systems of tenancy and sharecropping that amounted to debt peonage, plus they were subjected to persistent vigilante and official violence, and had very inferior educational systems available for their children.

Why is this still relevant now? The relative lack of advantages of parents in raising their children tends to persist structural disadvantages. So the relative lack of education, poverty etc of black parents then gets transmitted to relatively slower learning in their children, particularly in the younger years which are pretty crucial.

Actually this tends to be true of the working class in general, but it happens to be more severe in the case of the African-American working class, partly due to being segregated and their greater poverty and the disadvantages that attach to systemic race discrimination, such as higher levels of unemployment.

Now, this is why working class children in general happen to get lower scores systematically on the SAT and other standardized tests in school. For black students there is an extra barrier and to some extent SAT scores also reflect differences between black and white working class students.

So, reparations should be understood as the programs that are necessary to overcome these inherited disadvantages in terms of "social capital" through greater investment in education from the earliest years (such as pre-school) in working class communities in general but especially in communities with high concentrations of particularly disadvantaged "racialized" groups, especially African-Americans and native Americans. Also, through programs to ensure availability of employment and training in jobs.

You might say that such programs should be universally available, but that overlooks the fact that inherited differences in "social capital" and availability of decent work vary by 1. class, 2. whether one is from the lower or upper (skilled) working class, and 3. by whether one is from one of the disfavored "racialized" groups (blacks, American Indians, Latinos to some extent).

[RED DAVE]

The idea of reparations is positively the worst idea that anyone on the left ever concocted.Are you aware of the history of the demand for reparations.

RED DAVE

[Endomorphian]

Syndicat, you talked about investing capital in education and training networks. Are you personally against the suggestion of 'wealth transfer' (or 'retransfer') through direct payments to black families?

[Die Neue Zeit]

For a moment, I thought this discussion would degenerate into a Third-Worldist discussion on "bourgeois" imperialist nations making massive reparations to the Third World, a demand very common but phrased more moderately throughout the left.

Syndicat's post on education should be addressed soon when I finish off a key portion of my programmatic work with commentary on class-based affirmative action.


Worse yet is the issue of why a leftist organization would adopt such an indefensible idea. It's nothing but an attempt to lure the modern victims of racism into applying for membership, as though members were to be recruited, not out of reasoned thought, but by dangling bait in front of them. It's along the same lines as the leftist groups that get members by telling college students that the definition of the socialist goal is the forbidding of increases in college tuitions. Do you want people to join because they understand something, or join because they don't understand something?

Or because the recruiters themselves don't understand (too common on the "Agitate, Agitate, Agitate" Left)? Or all of the above?

I think you're exaggerating a bit here if you're implicitly critiquing Jules Guesde and that "theory of revolution" book you mentioned a long while back (the one mentioning reforms-as-bait).

In both your cases, you are correct about the baiting problem. Both are rooted in identity politics and other New Left shit, not in worker interests.

In my work, the only "bait" involved with the reforms proposed is the "lasting implementation" (sustainability) part in "consistent, preferrably simultaneous, obviously complete, and especially lasting implementation... can only be achieved by transnational class struggle." This is because "class struggle" includes on one of its extreme ends the conquest of ruling-class political power. ;)

[syndicat]

Syndicat, you talked about investing capital in education and training networks. Are you personally against the suggestion of 'wealth transfer' (or 'retransfer') through direct payments to black families?


I understand "wealth" to refer to assets, such as land, houses, businesses and so on. I think the movement to gain greater black land ownership in the south, for example, is important.

but what I'd suggest here is to do this through collective, socially controlled forms, rather than in price-unrestricted ownership of houses (which encourages making speculative gains on the market) or through private non-price-restricted ownership of land. That's because I believe the assets should be aimed at the black community. A problem with things like private ownership of businesses and land and such is that it can become a vehicle for class stratification. It doesn't ensure that black working people continue to benefit from the resources.

Community land trusts are very relevant for the kind of thing I'm talking about, if we're talking about this as a reform at present. There is for example a very old black town in Mississippi, founded by freed slaves in the 1860s, where there has been loss of land ownership by blacks and they formed a community land trust to try to counter this.

so one way reparations could be worked at at present would be through a program to provide funding for exactly this type of community controlled ownership in black communities.

we're actually sort of working on a project like this in the community land trust i helped to found in San Francisco. We're working with the tenants of a large black-majority apartment complex to work out a way for them to gain cooperative ownership of it. It's in the Western Addition which used to be a predominantly black neighborhood and this particular apartment complex is one of the few remaining places where relatively low rents are available for them, and the residents want to make sure it continues as a housing resource for their communtiy.

[mikelepore]

Syndicat, post #4

I don't accept that cliché explanation about the educational disadvantages imposed on black children. This isn't the 1960 environment anymore. The problem is of a new type today. I recommend the books by John McWhorter, an educator who investigates this problem. Now, the major educational disadvantage that is imposed on black children is the fact that parents who were victims of discrimination in the past tend to be less willing to tell their children sternly, "No, you may not go out with your friends tonight. You are going to sit down for four hours at the kitchen table and study your school books. And tomorrow you're going to to the library and get yourself a library card, and I expect to see you using it regularly." That is now the major way that the effects of years of racism continue to linger. It IS an unfair social disadvantage, and it IS imposed disproportionately on minorities who have been victims of discrimination for a long time, but this is the current form that it is taking. A payment of reparations is not the fix.

[syndicat]

i guess you're not familiar with all the evidence on how "social capital" is reproduced by dominating classes. See "Tearing Down the Gates" by Peter Sacks or "Unequal Childhoods" by Annette Lareau. your explanation won't work for the simple reason that the main differentiator is along class and sub-class (between less skilled and more skilled in the working class for example) lines. blacks happen to be more predominantly working class than whites.

for example, why do average scores on standardized tests (ACT, SAT, OLSAT etc) correlate with class position of the parents? also, there has been significant improvement over time in, for example, black rates of graduation from high school. Also, patterns of lower scores on tests among American Indians is similar to blacks. so it would seem it can't be a specifically black thing.

given the way that families transmit "social capital" from one generation to the next, not dealing with this in a socialist society would mean that you'll get another dismal bureaucratic class regime.

[CartCollector]

The big problem with reparations is, how much? How can you calculate the damage caused by slavery and structural racism in dollar amounts? And once you have, what's going to prevent the social capital deprived races from demanding more and more and more at the expense of another race? Once people find an easy way to get money, they aren't just going to stop, they're going to push for as much as they can get, and then they're going to demand even more. Your experiences with your employers should attest to this fact.

The other problem is that reparations actually help create racism, and with it divisions in the working class. I've seen it myself- whites in the US complain about how the blacks and foreigners can get scholarships and jobs easily, even if they lack good grades or necessary job skills, just because they're not white. They then complain about how hard white people have it and how hard they have to work because of the evils of affirmative action and liberalism. On the other hand, it encourages nonwhites to play the race card because that way they can get more privileges and money. In both cases we see a reinforcement of thinking in terms of race.

[syndicat]

I've seen it myself- whites in the US complain about how the blacks and foreigners can get scholarships and jobs easily, even if they lack good grades or necessary job skills, just because they're not white.

Except this isn't true. And not dealing with racism won't solve the problem. Besides, it's mistaken to think of it as "payback" for the past. That's not really the issue. The issue is current disadvantage. Americans who say they are against "affirmative action" will also say they suppiort programs for the economically disadvantaged.

[Endomorphian]

Except this isn't true. And not dealing with racism won't solve the problem. Besides, it's mistaken to think of it as "payback" for the past. That's not really the issue. The issue is current disadvantage. Americans who say they are against "affirmative action" will also say they suppiort programs for the economically disadvantaged.

Perhaps we could debate its theoretical merit with some resolve, but the pragmatist in me doesn't see white Americans accepting policy programs that will explicitly exclude poor whites. Cart pointed out that affinity for affirmative action amongst whites is increasingly hard to sell.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Syndicat, post #4

I don't accept that cliché explanation about the educational disadvantages imposed on black children. This isn't the 1960 environment anymore. The problem is of a new type today. I recommend the books by John McWhorter, an educator who investigates this problem. Now, the major educational disadvantage that is imposed on black children is the fact that parents who were victims of discrimination in the past tend to be less willing to tell their children sternly, "No, you may not go out with your friends tonight. You are going to sit down for four hours at the kitchen table and study your school books. And tomorrow you're going to to the library and get yourself a library card, and I expect to see you using it regularly." That is now the major way that the effects of years of racism continue to linger. It IS an unfair social disadvantage, and it IS imposed disproportionately on minorities who have been victims of discrimination for a long time, but this is the current form that it is taking. A payment of reparations is not the fix.

Well first of all, this is essentially the way that Denesh D'Sousa explains African American racial inequality; the same way Obama explains it too ("Black fathers need to turn off sports center, and read to their kids"); and the most popular way for racists to explain it as well (black culture is inferior to white and Asian culture).

Second, if you read things by Kozol, for example, you'll see that educational segregation is not something from the past, it has increased as many of the gains of the civil rights era have been pushed back. To make the new de-facto separate but unequal system complete, cuts to public education mean that rich people pull their kids out of the public schools, better-off working class parents have to organize fundraisers and buy more supplies (also teachers often do this) to make up for the gap, but if you are working-poor then public ed is just purgatory.

Third, if you are black and every day you see grown men sitting around with no job prospects, there's up to 50% unemployment for other young black people and 25% unemployment for black people in your town in general... is your parents advice going to change this daily experience that tells you that you are more likely going to end up unemployed than going to or being able to afford college?

Finally, the strongest tool of the US ruling class has always been oppressing specific groups in order to rule the entire working class. They demonize immigrant labor and use this to drive down wages altogether. They fear-monger with racist images of black and brown "super-criminals" in order to increase police power across the board and pass 3-strikes laws and so on. They de-fund public education and when the system fails they claim that black parents (and unionized teachers) are to blame.

In light of this, racism as a wedge for "divide and rule", reparations in the form of the transfer of public funds towards rebuilding schools, creating decent affordable housing and so on can be an important reform towards mending the divisions in the working class and forcing the ruling class to fund class-needs.

A lump of money divided up and distributed to individuals is worthless reparations in class terms, but reparations as they are generally advocated by the left is no "trick" to lure people of color. It's a reform that would benefit the entire working class because systemic racism and inequality within the working class is a barrier to class unity and solidarity.

[syndicat]

in regard to whether whites would accept programs that benefit poor non-whites, polls indicate a substantial majority of Americans support programs on the basis of economic disadvantage. now, i think it's possible to build broad support for initiatives that would in fact benefit working class non-whites if they also will benefit poor whites. structural racism works through the class system in the sense that it pushes African-Americans, native Americans and Latinos to the bottom of the working class. That said, it's still true that a majority of poor people in the USA are white.

in regard to styles of parenting, I would recommend Annette Lareau's boook "Unequal Childhoods." She's a left sociologist who has studied the very question that mike lepore raises. Her study did not find differences in parenting styles between white and black. What she did find are class-based differences in parenting styles.

The pressure to do your homework, to succeed in school, and providing opportuntiies for extracurricular activities like music lessons...this is a universal trait of parents of the affluent classes, both African-American and white. Lareau found that there is a diversity of partenting styles among working class parents. Some took a very laissez faire approach. they were against pressuring their children, because they say they will be soon enough out in the rat race, and these parents know about pressures at work, pressures to survive.

On the other hand, there are some working class parents who do favor assisting their children in learning and organized activitieis like music lessons...but they are often unable to do this because of lack of finances and rigid work schedules. But in Lareau's study these differences in working class parenting styles exist among both white and black parents.

In "Tearing Down the Gates" Peter Sacks gives some examples of white and Latino/a teenagers who struggle to do well in school despite getting essentially zero help from their parents. He gives an example of a Mexican immigrant girl's problems in explaining school to her father, who when she talks about going to college, expresses skepticism, "Why do that?" Or to take another example, a white teenage girl who lives in a trailer park. Her father is an over the road truck driver who is rarely around. there are no books or internet connection in her home. Her parents don't have a car. so it's hard for her to get to the library. Her home provides zip support to her learning or trying to make the best of school.

[mikelepore]

I misstated my own argument. I'll add this modification. I see that there are some corporations that still exist today which have roots going back to profiting from slavery. The Morgan-Chase bank is one of these. A good case can be made for requiring such a corporation pay a large sum, and then using those funds to set up an anti-poverty or educational foundation. When I said I was against reparations I meant I was against allocation of general government revenue for the purpose of paying financial sums to certain individuals, which would be perceived as any tax hike is perceived, one more deduction from every worker's paycheck.

[Denver]

In a previous thread a comrade asked me the PSL's position of reparations to blacks in the USA. Wasn't sure but I did some research. Jeannette Cáceres, from PSL, argued, in Eradicating the scourge of racism from U.S. society, that blacks are owed $97 trillion for 222,505,049 hours of unpaid labour between 1619-1865 in the USA. The federal government promised blacks "40 acres and a mule" and that a socialist revolution would promise those reparations. I'd venture out to say that they support a black nation within the USA, similar to what Stalin promoted, Marxism and the National Question, that, "regional autonomy is an essential element in the solution of the national question." Harry Haywood also aruged that similar line with promoting a black nation (black belt in the USA) in The Struggle for the Leninist Position on the Negro Question in the United States. That seems to be what most radicals promote but another idea was promoted by Eugene Debs, in Danger Ahead, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.” I actually disagree with PSL on this issue and agree with the International Communist League on "the black question." Roughly it is, “the Negro people have been an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at the bottom of society.” (The Legacy of Richard S. Fraser: Revolutionary Integrationism: The Road to Black Freedom). Whereas in the Russian Empire minorities were forcibly assimilated, in the United States blacks are forcibly segregated; therefore, a separate black state is not applicable. Furthermore that “Anti-black racism is the greatest obstacle to working-class unity in the U.S., providing an illusion of common interest between white workers and their class enemy, the white capitalist exploiter.” The capitalists in this country have proven that they are uncapable of eliminating racism from society (perhaps where other bougeois democracies are capable of fullfilling their historic tasks); therefore, “the unfinished tasks of bourgeois democracy can only be completed by proletarian socialist revolution.”

This is a quote from a member on another forum that better outlined the motives and methods of reparations. For me, reparations seem ideal, but unmanagable, unlikely, and even a bit reactionary. A man should not be praised nor scolded for the actions of his father, and the same goes for the ancestors of one race over another.

[syndicat]

yes, you're right, altho it was technically the American state that failed at the time of Radical Reconstruction, and thus one can say the state itself owes the debt.

what I suggested, as a different approach, is to look at the contemporary affects of the legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism, in terms of lack of educational opportunities, lack of resources of parents, highly unequal funding for schools, and the effects of that on people who grow up in that environment.

But in this case it's worth noting that this applies to the working class in general, and especially its poorer part, but more so to the groups who have been discriminated against historically, blacks, American Indians. so if resources are invested in proportion to current need, the greatest investment would be in black and native American communities.

Thus the idea would be to focus resources for job creation, redesign of jobs for worker control and meaningful work, and education to bring people skills, and changes in education in working class communities, emphasizing things like high quality all day pre-schools for 2 to 4 year olds, and small classes in the primary and secondary grades.

[MarxSchmarx]

To be perfectly honest, a lot of this seems to be saying is that we need to expropriate the wealth generated by the working class from the parasitic class. And in so doing we need to allocate resources to the most underserved communities and correct historical legacies of inequity. On this nobody (here) disagrees.

But honestly I do not see what is gained by couching it in terms of "reparations", which some people take as code for, rightly or wrongly, to believe that Michelle Obama gets a check for 5000 USD, her husband 2500 USD and her kids 3750 USD and we are done with it. The matter is too deeply entangled with one of individual, as opposed to class, entitlements.

Worse, as I see it that plays into the hands of dividing us and plays into the interests of the ruling class. THEY are the ones that say that white workers will gain little from expropriation while those with slave ancestors (for exampe) will gain the most. And to their credit, we have failed to counter this argument by presenting the view that the descendants of slaves do in fact deserve direct payment while not dealing with, for example, the payment owed to descendants of share croppers, much less braceros, as well.

No, these are debts owed us as a class, period. They are not owed any particular subpopulation of our class. And there has to be an understanding that wiping out the historically contingent, institutionalized racism can only be attained by liberating the working class as a whole. Whatever its merits, the calls for reparations have gone too far down the road of dividing working people to the point where they are seen as at best dividing working people, and have actually IMHO become reformist and even counterproductive.

The short way of saying this is that slavery is yet another injustice against the working class that will be rectified when capitalism is abolished.

[Jimmie Higgins]

No, these are debts owed us as a class, period. They are not owed any particular subpopulation of our class. And there has to be an understanding that wiping out the historically contingent, institutionalized racism can only be attained by liberating the working class as a whole.Very thoughtful arguments on the whole, but I think that in order to unite the working class as a whole we also need to win reforms that give people confidence to take on the system and also attempt to ease the measurable inequalities WITHIN the working class.

As you said, these inequalities can not fully be rectified until the source of the inequalities, the system, is smashed (and replaced by a system of working class mutual cooperation whatever form that takes). But this is the case with all reforms, so the question is, is this a reform that will help build consciousness and the working class movement.

So part of arguing for reparations, imo, is making the argument amongst white workers (or non-black workers anyway) that A) systemic racism is still an ongoing reality of the system and experienced daily by working class blacks among others. B) That racism hurts the entire working class, not just the group directly under attack C) that using government funds for reparations (not individual reparations like a $2,000 check for Bill Cosby) is more in our interests than using government funds to give corporations tax cuts or more money to the pentagon (as both institutions are prime promoters of racism historically).

Socialist Worker just printed an Op-ed about Prof. Gates arguing against racism (after all, he lives in a post-racial society where racial profiling can be solved by a beer with the President:rolleyes:).

Why Gates is Wrong About Reparations (http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/06/why-gates-is-wrong-on-reparations)


The recipients of reparations shouldn't be the black elite, but working-class Blacks whose slave forbears were the systems victims and who today suffer under the legacy of slavery in the form of racism and poverty. As Earl Ofari Hutchinson argues
Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and other mega-rich blacks will not receive a penny in reparations. Any tax money to redress black suffering should into a fund for HIV/AIDS education and prevention and underfinanced inner-city public schools; should expand job skills and training, drug and alcohol counseling and rehabilitation, and computer access and literacy training programs; and should improve public services for the estimated one in four blacks still trapped in poverty.
Internationally, Africa, Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan--to name just a few--all deserve reparations from the U.S. and Europe. The struggle for reparations is a part and parcel of a larger fight to redistribute money from the bloated Pentagon budget and super-rich to the majority of society here and around the world.

If we can win reparations for slavery and imperialism, we can raise everyone's aspirations to take the money back from those who have stolen it from us through exploitation and oppression. Contrary to the sophistic arguments of Professor Gates, the demand for reparations is therefore a key element in the fight for a whole new society that puts people's needs before profit and empire.