academics and pro-revolutionaries

[black magick hustla]

i saw a thread about this in libcom and i thought the discussion was interesting.

what do you guys think about academics in general? i think particularly in the US, where the class is pretty weak there is a whole segment of "pro revolutionaries" that kiss the foot steps of many "pro-rev" academics.

first, and foremost i think the majority of academics (i.e. non tenure people) have it pretty bad and i guess technically they are proletarians. however, i do think that sometimes its not enough to get abstract everything into value and sometimes its important to look at power dynamics. academia is one of those "middle class" cultures, where people are proud of what they do and they see themselves as "socially useful". for example, a lot of academics and middle class people in general, see their job as part of their identity. for example, an academic might refer himself as a "revolutionary scholar", the fucker that works in the grocery store will never call himself a "revolutionary grocery worker", probably will just refer himself as revolutionary.

i also think academics, especially those who their trade is to be "progressive" by necessity (i.e. critical theorists), import some pretty reprehensible sociological practices to the discourse that i don't think help anyone. a lot of the culture in the US surrounding guiltripping each other and reifnorcing identity politics is supported by a lot of sociological wank coming out of universities. i remember i discussed with a friend how i find the "prorev" millieu in the midwest the less nauseating because a lot of the millieus in places like berkley and the bay area are full of university moonbattery that i find insufferable.

i think a lot of prorevs in general are also enamored with the idea of scholarship, "education", intellectuals etcetera. i find using my brain very rewarding and fun but i always found suspect the value judgement made by progressives in everything that is academic and "academic workers". this is another discussion that i dont wish to necessarily engage in, but i think that type of emotional impuse is the same behind a lot of leftists being completely uncritical about the teacher's role in policing and capitalist reproduction in public schools.


in short, i have nothing against academics in general but i do think the academic "prorevs" are rotten to the core and in general are more damaging than helpful. i am not being anti-intellectual, and i think academic discourse is useful in a lot of things, but definitely not in in the "pro rev" millieu. i also always feel extremely alienated, the way some leftists talk about "progressive scholars" and kiss their feet and shit. i don't know if i expressed myself clearly.

[Apoi_Viitor]

Not to long ago, I had to write a paper on Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. While I was doing research for my writing, a came across this academic paper written by a leftist that dissected the movie in Lacanian gibberish and then accused Herzog of being a 'capitalist stooge'. It then went on to show how the situationists, and the events of '68 were somehow related to Grizzly Man...

Now shit like this, is why Alan Bloom pointed out that most Marxist intellectuals have abandoned Marxism. Their work is full of psychoanalytical or postmodern nonsense, with Marxism added for aesthetic value.

[The Douche]

What kind of "reprehensible sociological practices" are you referring to?

[Mr. Natural]

Helen Keller: "College is not the place to go for ideas."

American academia is a reeking pile of bourgeois crapola, and is thus representative of global capitalism's systemic mental as well as physical envelopment of the human species. Educational and informational institutions are now capitalist institutions, and intellectuals in the US--most Marxists included--are consequently passive and conservative. So The System rules in mind as well as labor.

Karl Marx: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." (The German Ideology)

[black magick hustla]

What kind of "reprehensible sociological practices" are you referring to?

every time someone talks about <insert here some dumb identity> priviliege

[The Douche]

every time someone talks about <insert here some dumb identity> priviliege

You really don't think there is such a thing as straight/male/white privilege?

[Os Cangaceiros]

I agree mostly with the sentiment of the OP, except for David Graeber. Graeber's my boy.

[Rusty Shackleford]

you dont have to be an intellectual/academic to realize that there is a white supremacist legal & economic system that generally affords privileges to white workers in the United States. The point is recognizing that to better overcome national stereotyping and other perceived 'differences.' Sure it may sound a bit like 'wankery' or however you say it but it is a very real issue.

and don't tell me electing Barack Obama changed anything.

[Devrim]

You really don't think there is such a thing as straight/male/white privilege?

Only in America.;) It is a funny thing. Either the US is the only country which produces ideas like this because it is the most advanced capitalist country in the world and this is something that really exists, or it is an ideology created by the American left. It has a little reflection in the UK, but I have never heard the concept even referred to in other countries.

Devrim

[brigadista]

academics talk a good revolution ...

[Jimmie Higgins]

first, and foremost i think the majority of academics (i.e. non tenure people) have it pretty bad and i guess technically they are proletarians. however, i do think that sometimes its not enough to get abstract everything into value and sometimes its important to look at power dynamics. academia is one of those "middle class" cultures, where people are proud of what they do and they see themselves as "socially useful". for example, a lot of academics and middle class people in general, see their job as part of their identity. for example, an academic might refer himself as a "revolutionary scholar", the fucker that works in the grocery store will never call himself a "revolutionary grocery worker", probably will just refer himself as revolutionary.
Yeah I think this is correct, but I also think that these kinds of positions are easily swayed when there is class struggle. Being an academic is a professional position and one where people in the humanities generally work individually. All teachers have a degree of this and while less abstract about it, public education teachers also have a tendency to see their place for making social change in the classroom with their individual students - but due to attacks on their professional status and autonomy over the last generation as well as being very close to working class problems not faced by themselves because of their position in the community, public school teachers seem to be able to shake off some of that professional elitism in favor of union struggles etc. At any rate, because professors work with semi-individual autonomy and they work in the world of ideas, they tend to naturally see ideas as their arena of struggle. This is where a lot of the identity politics and post-modern word games and language-framing comes from IMO - oppression can be challenged if we re-frame how we see oppression or "take back" language, etc.

But like I said, in the face of more concrete struggles, academics have shifted more to the left in the past. So with civil rights and the anti-imperialism of the 1960s and 1970s, many academics took the history of struggles more seriously and actually fought for ethnic studies programs or directly got involved in struggles.

Since that time there's been a backlash and the movements have retreated and so academics were isolated again and tended to drift back into more abstract politics or became demoralized by organized attempts by universities and the right-wing to silence or at least marginalize left-wing academics and legitimize reactionary views of society and history in universities.

Out of this atmosphere came all the "post-" theories such as post-marxism, post-feminism, etc. It's also where concepts such as identity politics and privilege theory energed - in the context of low struggle and low solidarity and right-wing momentum. I don't think any of these ideas have been particularly helpful or even accurate when tested by history. Can people look at China and seriously say that capitalism is post-fordist now? Can identity politics people seriously say that only LGBT people can and will fight for liberation when the most recent upswing in struggle for LGBT rights attracted a lot of support and solidarity from all groups of workers?

On a cynical level, academics need to publish, need to have "original" niches and areas to examine in order to make a career and a name. Rather than hone in on social problems and seek answers, they re-invent the wheel and come up with 12 new ways to describe the same old problems of capitalist society - sorry, "Late capitalism" or "post-modernity" or whatever new term is used to describe the same old shit. So post-modernism has done a lot of talking without actually caring about the usefulness or effectiveness of their ideas - in fact they are opposed to such a goal. I think privilage theory is an example of this - it's all about understanding and examining how oppression works in society, but has no answers about how to do anything about oppression other than for the non-oppressed to aknowledge their privilage - i.e. more analysis rather than action. That's great if you need to write papers examining every nook and cranny of racial and sexual inequality in our society, but not so great for challenging these inequalities. And frankly, I don't think their analysis holds up either.


in short, i have nothing against academics in general but i do think the academic "prorevs" are rotten to the core and in general are more damaging than helpful. i am not being anti-intellectual, and i think academic discourse is useful in a lot of things, but definitely not in in the "pro rev" millieu. i also always feel extremely alienated, the way some leftists talk about "progressive scholars" and kiss their feet and shit. i don't know if i expressed myself clearly.Well I think the problem is really just the low level of struggle - they can't think their way out of capitalism. We need radical movements of workers and the oppressed that go from being "subjects" to "protagonists" of history and can teach the teachers a thing or two in the process.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

http://newsone.com/files/2010/12/homeless-people.jpg

Hi guys, we're privileged.

[The Douche]

I bet you those poor white male homeless people are still treated better by the police than a poor black female homeless person.

I don't see how acknowledging the fact that prejudice still exists and effects the way people are treated is the same as identity politics.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Maybe because this "privilege" shit stinks to the high heavens of the worst kind of white liberal guilt that could only really come out of U.S. academia and/or the New Leftovers?

In what world do you live? 'Cause here on Earth, where I am, it's beyond fucking absurd to suggest that anyone who sleeps in the streets, that anyone who works all day to fill the capitalists' coffers, that anyone who is exploited or oppressed is "privileged."

It reminiscent of the race-to-the-bottom mentality the petty-bourgeoisie push in the states. When a transit worker makes $50,000 a year, they scream and cry... "Don't you lower paid workers see how greedy and privileged these transit workers are?! You only make $25,000 a year, and you have no benefits! They make double what you make, and have healthcare coverage!! Help us slash the wages and benefits of these privileged workers!!"

Or the talking heads that are always ready to tell any minimum wage worker in the U.S. who complains about their conditions how much better off they are than all the poor and starving people in Africa. They're "privileged" to live in the U.S. of A, you see?

And of course it's usually the people who really are privileged, the petty-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie and their hangers-on, who promote this shit the most.

I mean, really?

Let's ignore class. Let's ignore the Oprahs, Obamas, Cains, Slims; the Powells and Rices; all the black and brown cops; the huge black and immigrant petty-bourgeoisie; let's ignore the tens of millions of white workers and poor on welfare and food stamps; let's ignore places like Queens where the average income for whites is lower than blacks.

Who does that benefit? Certainly not the black and immigrant workers and poor folks who are bombarded with this "promote black business" & "elect black leaders" bullshit nonstop from all directions. How does it help them? Really it only helps some white weirdos feel better about themselves and get a few more winks of sleep each night.

What kind of sane person wants to get into a discussion about which of the scum of the earth are "better off." Comparing degrees of foul treatment? What is the benefit of that? What kind of concrete action comes out of that? Another 250 sociology books? More self-important professors ranting at college kids?

I'm more interested in examining reality.

The reality is that race is a social construct, not a biological reality. It serves a specific purpose in society.

"If you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness—if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason—you know that it was a trick, and it’s worked brilliantly. You see, prior to the mid to late 1600s, in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race. Those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term really ever before then." - Tim Wise, The Pathology of Privilege

"Historically, 19th century Europeans classified peoples in their colonies into a hierarchy of categories which placed northern Europeans at the top of a pseudo-evolutionary scale. They saw the dark, primitive peoples of the colonies as suitable for enlightenment by the civilized nations of Europe which often translated into economic and social exploitation and sometimes genocidal policies." - "Race" as a Social Construct

If we recognize that the concept of race is a pillar of this system, that it both originates from and helps prop up class society, then why would we help promote racial division?

Of course racism is a very real thing. No one outside of a few hairbrained scumbags with ideological motivations would deny that. But the question should be: where does it come from, why is it here, how do we get rid of it.

Is it more effective to uproot the causes of racism, to fight for full human integration and the abolition of racial division through the creation of a human community, or to scold white people for their supposed privilege?

Do we join the black bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie in their campaign to join the illustrious ranks of their white counterparts and enjoy the "full benefits" of exploiting working people -- of all shades? (The results of a success in that regard can be seen in modern South Africa, where workers now rejoice on a daily basis that the people exploiting and oppressing them have the same skin tone).

Or do we join the class struggle; do we fight for the only real possibility of eliminating racism?

Our goal is to free the new society from the constraints of this one. Our goal is to break free from the global capitalist prison and shake off all the muck of ages (classes, exploitation, nations, nationalism, race, racism, etc.). Not to sit around pointing fingers at each other and blaming our woes on skin tone.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

BTW:

"You know, a lot of people have hang-ups with the Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class.... Those that don't admit to that are those that don't want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they're dealing with a race thing, they'll never be involved in a revolution.

"We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means, through historical fact, that racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a byproduct of that." - Fred Hampton

[Jimmie Higgins]

I bet you those poor white male homeless people are still treated better by the police than a poor black female homeless person.Probably.


I don't see how acknowledging the fact that prejudice still exists and effects the way people are treated is the same as identity politics.Privilege theory is one theory for explaining inequality and oppression in society, you can recognize these very real things without also subscribing to the specific ideas and explanations of the privilage-ists(?).

Usually I've had the best versions of the theory explained to me as: the ruling class privileges the experiences of some people to create divisions in society which then help them rule the whole of society. In many ways this is very true. In the US before ridged racial codes, European servants were used more than African slaves - because life-long slaves were a poor investment considering the life expectancy of servants at that time. After rebellions, the colonial rulers began to grant more rights to white servants while restricting black slaves in order to convince the whites that they had a stake in the colonial order. This would back up privilege theory on the surface, but what this theory leaves out is that the "privileging" (rights, actually) was not voluntarilly done, it was forced by the actions of the white and black servants fighting together. Privilege theory treats workers and the oppressed as objects, not subjects able to fight-back and win rights or respect for their rights.

Besides, from a working class perspective the problem with oppression is not the absence of particular forms of oppression on some workers ("privilege"), it's the existence of specifically targeted oppressions on parts of the working class (racial/sexual/gender oppression). Our goal should not be to "recognize privilege" but to point out the inequality and specific oppressions in the class and fight to eradicate those oppressions. I don't think privilege theory adds any meaningful clarification or strategies for how to do that.

[Jimmie Higgins]

BTW:

"You know, a lot of people have hang-ups with the Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class.... Those that don't admit to that are those that don't want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they're dealing with a race thing, they'll never be involved in a revolution.

"We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means, through historical fact, that racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a byproduct of that." - Fred HamptonGood quote.

Yeah, the point of slavery was not to produce white supremacy (why import a bunch of people you hate if racism was really the motivation for slavery) - the point was to produce cotton and tobacco and sugar etc. White supremacy and racism were the ideologies to justify slavery.

[The Douche]

Unfortunately I woke up this morning with the flu, so I'm having a hard time concentrating through these posts, and even harder time formulating coherent responses.

I don't think I would call myself a "privilege theorist" (unless of course, we're talking about class privilege). I don't think oppression is based exclusively on things like gender/race/sexual orientation or anything like that. I just think that these things do exist.


I mean, for instance lets look at two organizations which existed at the same time in similar movements within the US.

The Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party, both organizations were militant in imagery, analysis, and action. But the WU was engaging in actual guerrilla actions against the state, the BPP was not. The WU documentary speaks a lot to the existence of privilege in this situation. BPP leaders and members were being assassinated by police/intelligence services while WU members were only facing harassment/imprisonment.

White people plant bombs and get harassed, brown people hold shotguns while handing out food and get killed.

And if we look at another movement, the BLA or Black Liberation Army, and offshoot of the panthers, who had tactics more similar to the WU, their militants are still in prison, whereas WU militants are in community organizations with the now-president.

[OHumanista]

I find it funny when some people think "privilegies" mean a person has to be rich and powerful. But then again the word "privelegies" to describe the situation of a ethnic group in most places is quite misleading. A better way to say it without the exagerated conotations of that words would be saying they are treated like average citizens while some groups may be treated as less (such as blacks or whoever it may be in your country).

But in the end nothing of this means much, we are talking about capitalism and as in any system of exploitation there will be some groups who are even more opressed than others. It's not worth doing anything about it, better to just end the reason behind these prejudices.

As for academics, I have nothing against most of them, their role is to be an academic so that's what they do. It's not like we're in the middle of a revolution and they refused to take arms. Having said that, respect is good and even admiration but idolising is stupid and harmful.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I appreciate you putting up with this debate despite feeling ill - that sounded sarcastic but it wasn't meant to be.

Very true that the BPP and black militants in general got ruthless treatment - but, frankly, they were more popular with workers and more of a threat than the WU. Also the US ruling class had a two-pronged attack on Black militancy and radicalism. It was repression on the one hand and co-option on the other. So middle-class black reformers were able to gain political office and even some black militants willing to play along were rewarded and former militants are actually involved in governments in cities in the US today.

[Devrim]

I bet you those poor white male homeless people are still treated better by the police than a poor black female homeless person.

Really?


I don't see how acknowledging the fact that prejudice still exists and effects the way people are treated is the same as identity politics.

Prejudice exists. Racism exists. Sexism exists. There is a difference between acknowledging that and buying into the whole 'privilege ideology'.

Devrim

[Alexander_the_Gangster]

I'm not sure that it is helpful to separate theory and practice and to insist upon the use of a single, revolutionary paradigm to the exclusion of all else. We need theory for its own sake and there is still plenty of room left for revolutionary theory and politics, assuming that you can get anybody interested in the latter. One of the big beefs I have with so-called socialist societies as they have existed in the past and present is the degree to which the party elite feels the need to dominate the thoughts of the people through the lack of a free press. Can revolution take place with a free press or is the free press always destined to become the tool of the military-industrial-governmental status-quo?

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Maybe because this "privilege" shit stinks to the high heavens of the worst kind of white liberal guilt that could only really come out of U.S. academia and/or the New Leftovers?

Countries in the "New World", unlike European countries, have a much more problematic issue with race because of the fact that the "Third World" was not being exploited abroad but largely within their own country, and this is still the case. The land, 100-200 years ago, was largely inhabited by native Americans who still live today in deep poverty. Black people have been exploited as a cheap and expendable labor source since the times of colonization. And immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala are today exploited on a large scale for agriculture while facing serious discrimination. Exploitation by European empires IMO was more alienated from the popular culture because it was largely happening overseas, and it wasn't until the past few decades that a substantial "non-White" population came into being. Because of that, racist and bigoted assumptions about non-whites have become more culturally entrenched in places like the USA, Mexico, Brazil etc. Even Cuba still has problems with racial discrimination.

I think the issue of "white privilege" has to do with overcoming the notion that whites are superior and natural leaders which has always been prevalent in the culture. Good evidence of the existence of the phenomenon was work done by sociologists regarding whether black children saw white dolls or black dolls as more physically attractive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_and_Mamie_Clark#Doll_experiments). They found the black dolls to be ugly, which indicates that racial prejudice had become so ingrained in the culture that even children from the marginalized races internalized the bigotry.


The reality is that race is a social construct, not a biological reality. It serves a specific purpose in society.

A lot of the academics I have encountered speaking on the topic of race are actually applying the idea that race is a social construct and contrasting that with the norms and assumptions prevalent in our society. They contrast the absurdity of a modern society which claims to be "color blind" with the fact that there are a large number of racial and sexual stereotypes pushed by the media and more generally the culture. So I don't see how they would disagree with that.


BTW:

"You know, a lot of people have hang-ups with the Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class.... Those that don't admit to that are those that don't want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they're dealing with a race thing, they'll never be involved in a revolution.

"We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said that the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means, through historical fact, that racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a byproduct of that." - Fred Hampton


Good quote.

Yeah, the point of slavery was not to produce white supremacy (why import a bunch of people you hate if racism was really the motivation for slavery) - the point was to produce cotton and tobacco and sugar etc. White supremacy and racism were the ideologies to justify slavery.

White supremacy was used to justify slavery. But notions of racial difference and supremacy predated Capitalism. Arab and Mediterranean European society both seem to have been quite racist at times, though they were feudal or proto-capitalist societies. The story of early New Spain and the Caribbean indicate that too. You had a feudal society (Spain) which suddenly had a large potential labor force which it saw as racially inferior. This gave it the opportunity to develop a more commercial capitalistic economic system. In fact, there is a chicken and egg argument-assumptions about the nature of racial inferiority created a ready-made labor source for the early Capitalists and allowed them to drastically grow their capital, but in the process that reinforced assumptions about race. Granted, racism and religious intolerance were more interrelated back then, as most Whites were Christian and most non-Whites were "Pagan", Jewish or Muslim, and most Arabs were Muslim while non-Arabs were largely Dhimmi or Kafirs, however there was a racialized element to it too, especially with the swarthier peoples who were viewed as "savages". One famous Dominican priest argued that natives in the New World lacked souls.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gin%C3%A9s_de_Sep%C3%BAlveda)
It always seems too easy to blame every social problem on Capitalism, as if there is no possible genealogical relationship between the modern forms of a phenomenon and pre-capitalist relations. Certainly, after the advent of capitalism, racism developed into something far more pernicious and dangerous than it ever was before, with the development of pseudo-sciences like phrenology or the legal superstructures to maintain slavery, but racism as such was still around before Capitalism.

[black magick hustla]

But like I said, in the face of more concrete struggles, academics have shifted more to the left in the past. So with civil rights and the anti-imperialism of the 1960s and 1970s, many academics took the history of struggles more seriously and actually fought for ethnic studies programs or directly got involved in struggles.



but this is with all forces and institutions in general, including the "left wing of capital". i don't think academia in general has ever been able to break with social democracy or "offical CP" mentality. its hard to because their function in the capitalist system is that of management and the reinforcement, ultimately of their own specialized endeavours. 1968 is a particular example of this. groups like the enrages spent writing so much vitrol against professors and the academic millieu in general. i think the communist movement would ultimately have to pose itself against universities and negate them.

[black magick hustla]

As for the modernist pseudo-thinkers of the critique of details, these leftovers of militancy who had established themselves in the so-called Humanities Departments and who were thinking for all the weekly magazines, it's obvious they were incapable of understanding — let alone foreseeing — anything whatsoever, eclectically weighed down as they were with almost every aspect of the old world's camouflages. They found themselves too attached to the bourgeois state, to an exhausted Stalinism, to a revitalized Castro-Bolshevism, to psycho-sociology, and even to their own miserable lives. They respected everything. They lied about everything. And we find them around today, still ready to explain everything to us!

rene vienet on academia after may 68

[Os Cangaceiros]

I bet you those poor white male homeless people are still treated better by the police than a poor black female homeless person.

I don't see how acknowledging the fact that prejudice still exists and effects the way people are treated is the same as identity politics.

There probably isn't really a point in arguing about whether a poor homeless person is treated marginally better or not than a poor homeless person of a different race, because I'm not sure if there are statistics to go on. But from my own anecdotal experience, the police view all homeless as basically the scum of society, and treat them accordingly. It doesn't matter that much if they're black or white.

for example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Kelly_Thomas)

[workersadvocate]

When people engage in the "worse off then thou" games, I get suspicious, and listen closely for their offered solutions (if any). Solutions are rarely forthcoming, and even more rarely are these proletarian revolutionary solutions.
So, what is their point? Watch your wallets, comrades, buyer beware, when these folks don't argue for proletarian revolution and socialism.

[Jimmie Higgins]

but this is with all forces and institutions in general, including the "left wing of capital". i don't think academia in general has ever been able to break with social democracy or "offical CP" mentality. its hard to because their function in the capitalist system is that of management and the reinforcement, ultimately of their own specialized endeavours. 1968 is a particular example of this. groups like the enrages spent writing so much vitrol against professors and the academic millieu in general. i think the communist movement would ultimately have to pose itself against universities and negate them.Yes the present education system has to be totally replaced by a system of actual learning run by educators and students, but I think that in the face of working class uprisings that can present an alternative way of running society, many academics will actually be won to supporting working class hegemony over society. Like all professionals, they are sort of caught between their professional elitism and the demands of the system which actually interfere with their ability to do their job as they see it - doctors, teachers, profs, etc.


I think the issue of "white privilege" has to do with overcoming the notion that whites are superior and natural leaders which has always been prevalent in the culture. Good evidence of the existence of the phenomenon was work done by sociologists regarding whether black children saw white dolls or black dolls as more physically attractive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_and_Mamie_Clark#Doll_experiments). They found the black dolls to be ugly, which indicates that racial prejudice had become so ingrained in the culture that even children from the marginalized races internalized the bigotry.The women's lib and black power movements challenged these sort of culturally internalized ideas about darker skin being bad or curly hair being ugly or of women "naturally" being nurturing/disinterested in sexual pleasure/passive without privilege theory. It was struggling and eking out some power and rights though their own actions that gave people the confidence to challenge these internalized ideas about themselves which then spread as others from non-oppressed groups also realized that these "common sense" notions were more or less propaganda, not reality. The way privilege theory seems to suggest things, you'd think that black people would only stop straightening their hair when white people acknowledge that straight hair isn't better.


A lot of the academics I have encountered speaking on the topic of race are actually applying the idea that race is a social construct and contrasting that with the norms and assumptions prevalent in our society. They contrast the absurdity of a modern society which claims to be "color blind" with the fact that there are a large number of racial and sexual stereotypes pushed by the media and more generally the culture. So I don't see how they would disagree with that.Yes, these ideas need to be combated and privilege theory does at the very least point out that inequalities exist and that's much more advanced than the more common arguments presented by politicians and the media which claim that such problems have been overcome. But again, privilege theory is an explanation for why this is the case, but you don't have to believe in this theory to know the blatant reality of this society - in fact you don't need Marxist or anarchist theory for that knowledge either. I just think that contemporary radical Marxist and anarchist ideas, based in an understanding of class society, actually have a better analysis and ideas about how to end such inequalities inside the working class. Class reductionism is an issue, but for class-based revolutionaries who don't use marxism in that way, generally there is a much clearer sense of what oppression is and how to fight it than you find in privilege theories.


White supremacy was used to justify slavery. But notions of racial difference and supremacy predated Capitalism. Arab and Mediterranean European society both seem to have been quite racist at times, though they were feudal or proto-capitalist societies. Classical and feudal societies definitely were not "tolerant" and had their own problems. But typically the notions of superiority in these societies was not race-based. "Barbarians" for Romans had nothing to do with race, just inclusion in their system.


The story of early New Spain and the Caribbean indicate that too. You had a feudal society (Spain) which suddenly had a large potential labor force which it saw as racially inferior. This gave it the opportunity to develop a more commercial capitalistic economic system. In fact, there is a chicken and egg argument-assumptions about the nature of racial inferiority created a ready-made labor source for the early Capitalists and allowed them to drastically grow their capital, but in the process that reinforced assumptions about race. Granted, racism and religious intolerance were more interrelated back then, as most Whites were Christian and most non-Whites were "Pagan", Jewish or Muslim, and most Arabs were Muslim while non-Arabs were largely Dhimmi or Kafirs, however there was a racialized element to it too, especially with the swarthier peoples who were viewed as "savages". One famous Dominican priest argued that natives in the New World lacked souls. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gin%C3%A9s_de_Sep%C3%BAlveda)These ideas developed over time, but it was the material circumstances, not ideas about superiority or inferiority which drove the development of these ideologies. Spain fighting arabs comes out of a fight for dominance of the area - the Spanish inquisition wasn't about race, it was about the ruling class re-enforcing it's dominance against foreign competitors as well as the threat of a rising bourgeois a class they identified with town-dwelling Jews.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gin%C3%A9s_de_Sep%C3%BAlveda)
In the Caribbean and parts of central and south America, there were more imported African slaves than Europeans, so those rulers developed a complicated system of racial equations - creating a racial caste out of how much native, African, or European ancestry someone had.


It always seems too easy to blame every social problem on Capitalism, as if there is no possible genealogical relationship between the modern forms of a phenomenon and pre-capitalist relations. Certainly, after the advent of capitalism, racism developed into something far more pernicious and dangerous than it ever was before, with the development of pseudo-sciences like phrenology or the legal superstructures to maintain slavery, but racism as such was still around before Capitalism.As Malcolm X said, you can't have capitalism without racism - he wasn't a socialist but he got the connection. It's not that capitalism is the sole cause of all social ills, it's that every ruling class has various ways to maintain their dominance and they way these societies oppress people in not pulled out of thin-air, it is based on the relations of production and how that society is organized.

So feudalism was a ridged society that had no need for theories for why whole groups in society were inferior - it was a social hierarchy just based on God. No one said, "why are aristocrats always at the top of feudal society" - there was an explicit ranking of various castes and so there needed to be no explanation. Classical societies generally had an "us and them" sort of approach where people in the next town could be considered savages and people across the Mediterranean could be civilized and it was based more on who is part of the same system or not, not race.

Capitalism on the other hand - particularly more developed capitalist societies without as many holdovers from feudalism - is based not on caste and inherent social ranking, but on "free labor" and supposed social mobility. So how does slavery get justified in that kind of Enlightenment thinking - well all men are created equal, so people who are unequal must not fully be men - they must be quazi-men who are alternately either to be taken care of by real men or beaten into submission.

Bigotry, stereotyping groups, etc. all existed before, but modern racism - as an ideology - was developed out of the needs and economic relations of capitalism.

[black magick hustla]

Yes the present education system has to be totally replaced by a system of actual learning run by educators and students, but I think that in the face of working class uprisings that can present an alternative way of running society, many academics will actually be won to supporting working class hegemony over society. Like all professionals, they are sort of caught between their professional elitism and the demands of the system which actually interfere with their ability to do their job as they see it - doctors, teachers, profs, etc.


i think individual members from different classes will be won over because of different circumstances. while academia has been traditionally "left wing" it always had a management mentality, hence all the weird sandbox grand blueprints of future society from autistic academics (Parecon is one of them). Official Communist Parties appealed a lot of academics and technocrat types because of the idea of a rationalized planning of the economy. Fuck, I knew this old higher up PRI (one of the mexican ruling parties) econ guy who talked about Stalin as "Great Father" and he had an econ phd.

I am not one of those "class determines being" blahblah guys because i think class anaylsis breaks down at the individual, but in terms of grand social forces in general, i don't think academia has in any way the ability for "revolutionary subjectivity" unless it is willing to self-negate too (the communist revolution is about proletarian self-negation too, but there is everything to win for those who work to negate work). My point is that we should try to stop wasting our times in winning academia, instead of treating it as a priority (some leftists really spend a lot of time about this). let them do what they do.

[Jimmie Higgins]

i think individual members from different classes will be won over because of different circumstances. while academia has been traditionally "left wing" it always had a management mentality, hence all the weird sandbox grand blueprints of future society from autistic academics (Parecon is one of them). Official Communist Parties appealed a lot of academics and technocrat types because of the idea of a rationalized planning of the economy. Fuck, I knew this old higher up PRI (one of the mexican ruling parties) econ guy who talked about Stalin as "Great Father" and he had an econ phd.

I am not one of those "class determines being" blahblah guys because i think class anaylsis breaks down at the individual, but in terms of grand social forces in general, i don't think academia has in any way the ability for "revolutionary subjectivity" unless it is willing to self-negate too (the communist revolution is about proletarian self-negation too, but there is everything to win for those who work to negate work). My point is that we should try to stop wasting our times in winning academia, instead of treating it as a priority (some leftists really spend a lot of time about this). let them do what they do.

Good points. I think a lot of it basically comes down to their daily work being relatively individual and that people who work in ideas often tend to see ideas as more important than material reality - so their default, and the default of most professionals, is to seek idealist and individualist solutions to social problems.

I'm not really worried about fighting hard to win academics - maybe if worker's were radicalizing by the tens of thousands already, then there'd be some room to think about what allies should be won to the working-class movement. Right now, rebuilding independent working class radicalism really needs to be the focus. At the same time, someone like Howard Zinn or Chomsky at this point in the struggle (actually moreso a few years back in the absence of struggle) are useful for us because it makes it a little harder for the ruling class to dismiss our ideas outright. But it will be social and worker's movements that create space for intellectuals to come to our side (Zinn was radicalized by both the 1930s movements and his involvement in the Civil Rights movement - Chomsky with the anti-war movement) and radicalize, not intellectuals who spread ideas that then lead people to radicalize and build movements.

[Ocean Seal]

Are we discussing whether or not privilege exists on revleft? Of course it does, privilege is not some abstraction like what NHIA posted where every white person has privilege over every person of color nor is the absence of class politics. Privilege occurs systematically. When you show the picture of the homeless white people and ask whether or not they are privileged you are asking the wrong question. No, they are not privileged, individuals do not have privilege: groups do. Why are people of color overrepresented in the prisons, in the homeless, in the poor and so on? Yes, it happened originally because of class, but race has been used to create a permanent underclass and has given certain sectors of the working class privilege over others in order to make capitalism more appealing to the privileged sectors. Its divide and conquer, and the best way to fight that is by empowering women, by empowering people of color, and by fighting homophobia. As leftists this should be trivial.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Why are people of color overrepresented in the prisons, in the homeless, in the poor and so on?
Systemic racism.

Yes, it happened originally because of class, but race has been used to create a permanent underclass and has given certain sectors of the working class privilege over others in order to make capitalism more appealing to the privileged sectors. Its divide and conquer, and the best way to fight that is by empowering women, by empowering people of color, and by fighting homophobia. As leftists this should be trivial.
It's not just that it happened originally because of class, it's that these oppressions - often supported by people from non-oppressed groups as well as internalized by people from targeted oppressed groups - only help and privilege the ability of the ruling class to maintain its rule.

White people aren't the direct targets of certain forms of racial oppression, but they are not privileged for simply not being targeted. How has increased ability of the police to repress people "privileged" white people since white people also get caught up in mandatory-minimum sentancing and so on - they certaintly don't get target as much and may get lighter senstances, but not lighter than if we had a judicial system which hasn't been beefed up under through the racist propaganda of the drug and crime "wars". How have white people as a whole benefited from the anti-black and anti-latino fear-mongering which was the pretext for the state cutting education funding in favor of building the biggest prison system in US history? It's also the same anti-(minority)-youth ppropaganda that is also being used to dispose of the whole idea of public education: "public ed is a failure because some (poor minority) kids just 'don't want to learn' so we should focus on those who do want to learn and give them all the resources". Again, poor working class minorities face the brunt of this, but it's designed as an attack on the whole class - scapegoating part of the class to attack rights won by people in the past.

Or look at welfare-reform. The media and politicians explicitly used racist concepts to get rid of welfare - well numerically more white people used welfare than any other single group, so there's an example of anti-black racism hurting more poor whites than blacks.

Privilege theory seems to assume that the ruling class gives out "privileges" in order to win support from part of the working class. This ignores the struggles that people fought for to win those rights - the fact that the ruling class granted those rights to some but not the whole class, just shows some of the historical weakness of struggles in the US past. But the ruling class never willingly doles out rights if it doesn't feel it has to - these rights were fought for by working class and oppressed people, we shouldn't be concerned with people "recognizing privilege" but in eliminating inequality and the differences in the ways our rights are respected.