Letters Journal returns

Glad you are back! (And announcing your return on April Fool's Day causes me to tip my hat in your direction! Will we ever get off Plato's ship, in which, to go beyond Plato's authoritarianism, even the unrecognized 'true pilot' is, of course, another fool in waiting?)

The toil of an honest, as far as that can go of course, apprehensive, and doubting heart is always worth the endeavour of perusal.

We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people. (As Seneca wrote, ‘Let me convince you that it is a hard task to be always the same man [sic]’)

Michel de Montaigne, 1580

http://www.lettersjournal.org/matthew-2/

I can’t help but share what I’ve been thinking about lately re: our old politics.
...
There was a day when I realized that all the things my anarchist friends and I believed and wanted were the same things that the liberal journalists and bureaucrats wanted – and soon enough, the politicians too. It turns out we prefigured the next round of liberal cultural reforms. Our fringe sexual preferences, our hatred of the police, our anti-theism, our hatred of work, our speech codes, our consent workshops: all of it was taken up. This wasn’t “recuperation” but honest to goodness prefiguration. We weren’t co-opted; no, we were the obscure shock troops of the culture war all along. And this was true in the case of anti-racism more than anything else.

Anti-racism, like racism, is a state ideology. And like all state ideologies, it is a conspiracy theory. For a practical comparison of the two, look at Rhodesia (racist) and Zimbabwe (anti-racist). Theoretically, the two ideologies differ thus: racism is focused on the physical and repression; anti-racism on the metaphysical and extermination (in this, anti-racism resembles anti-Semitism).

The recent anti-racist movement opposes the police because police are racist (repressive towards physical bodies). The movement demands the policing of thoughts instead: the ‘idea of whiteness’ must be erased, prejudice and discrimination have to be removed. If that means destroying the bodies of white people, it is only because they happen to be the personification of the idea of racism. Coates comes close to expressing the metaphysical character of anti-racist politics when he writes about “people who think they are white.”

In truth, America, like most real existing states, is a sort of mixed regime of racism and anti-racism, with local and state governments (racist) in conflict with the federal government (anti-racist) – though both the local/state and federal governments are themselves split internally between factions and departments. This mixed regime of racism and anti-racism is what we call democracy. The anti-democratic turn in American political discourse concerns the end of the mixed regime. Like all political debates, the question is: whom shall we shoot or imprison? Should we exterminate racism or repress racial minorities? The beleaguered liberal is left calling for the unpopular compromise: we should do just a little of both…

It’s curious, isn’t it, how little any of this matters to the flow of capital.

Darkness and death all around, I’m afraid. And so it’s more important than ever not to take sides.

I don't know your political background, but that doesn't sound like a self-criticism of views you actually held, or a critique of particular class-struggle anarchists, but something that can be said (and you probably always already said) with regard to the Left, "this motley 'radicalism'", as Hillquit called it, which has "neither coherence nor substance, neither program nor material foundation."

It’s curious, isn’t it, how little any of this matters to the flow of capital.

The violent organisation of the proletariat into hierarchically separated communities based on racial identity has a profound effect on the 'flow of capital' - on the division of labour and the integration (or not) of certain groups into the economy and the labour market, not to mention the prevalence of not only bourgeois ideologies but actual war and conflict which is a concrete barrier to the extension of solidarity between different groups of proletarians who have the potential to bring the whole economy to a grinding halt.

The pretentious waffle quoted above looks to me like someone who is simply afraid of equality and who needs to dress that fear up in some bland dogma to avoid letting people see what they're really talking about - a lame excuse for the status quo. To be honest lettersjournal you strike me as someone who's self-criticism is in fact just a criticism of everyone but themselves.

If American States are a mix of racism and anti-racism already (thus precluding any necessary solidarity towards the struggle of black proletarians) then why is it black men being killed in record numbers by the police? Why is it men of colour filling up the overflowing prisons of the United States? Why are so many people of colour systematically excluded from the labour market? If I wanted to I'm sure I could dig up a mountain of fact and figures which document the special treatment US capital reserves for African Americans...

The truth is that while liberal anti-racist ideology might be mainstream amongst some sections of the ruling class (academia, democratic party, NGOs, some of the trade union bureaucracy, some lawyers and judges, etc...) it is well and truly overshadowed by the forces of racism.

All struggles, including the economic class struggle of the workers, can have a tendency toward modernizing and rationalizing the system, making it not only more efficient but also more conforming to this or that ideology. But sometimes struggles reach a point of bursting their own banks, of shaking capitalist society to its foundations and posing new questions and new possibilities for the recomposition of working class power. I think its total hubris to believe that revolutionaries are so clear-sighted they can predict before hand what struggles might erupt beyond their previous limitations and what others will be captured and recuperated by the dynamic forces of capitalist modernisation. Those who have tried to do so have usually been shown by events to simply have their heads up their own arses.

LJ writes:

I would say that anti-racism is not good for black people, and racism is not good for white people. In the same way, anti-Zionism is not good for Palestinians. Et cetera. The populations supposedly served by these ideologies are, in fact, the primary victims.

Whoa! Does this mean that we can’t oppose racism?

No, it doesn’t. We can oppose it in any scenario we find ourselves in. Just as we can support any industrial struggle, for example, without signing up to the ideology of the Union that might effectively be in charge of it.

What the recalcitrant LJ means is that if we are engaging in a critique of this world - this world that we want to change radically and leave behind - then it is illogical that we throw our lot in with the praxis of anti-racism.

But WTF?? What does this really mean?

Well, to gain a foothold here it is useful to look at what some writers have written on anti-fascism:

Bilan/Bordiga:

As far as the problem of anti-fascism is concerned, its numerous supporters are guided not only by a contempt for theoretical work, but by the stupid mania for creating and spreading the confusion necessary to build a broad front of resistance. There must be no demarcation which might put off a single ally, or lose any opportunity for struggle: this is the slogan of anti-fascism. Here we can see that for the latter confusion is idealised and considered as an element of victory. Here we should remember that more than half a century ago Marx said to Weitling that ignorance has never done any service to the workers’ movement.

https://libcom.org/library/anti-fascism-formula-confusion-bilan-1934

Troploin on fascism/anti-fascism:

https://libcom.org/library/5-fascism-anti-fascism

Gilles Dauve:

The essence of anti-fascism consists in resisting fascism by defending democracy: one no longer struggles against capitalism but seeks to pressure capitalism into renouncing the totalitarian option… It is all too obvious that anti-fascism renounces revolution. But anti-fascism fails exactly where its realism claims to be effective: in preventing a possible dictatorial mutation of society.
From the section:
Not “Fascism Or Democracy” — Fascism And Democracy
Here: https://libcom.org/library/when-insurrections-die

It is also useful to look at a very pertinent critique of nationalism:

The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/perlman-fredy/1984/nationalism.htm

It might help to get into this short essay by reading the last few paragraphs first.

Finally, it is worth watching this short explanatory video below on the ideas of Roland Barthes. In this video Barthes shows how impulses to radicality are contained and commoditised within capitalism through the depiction of how the image of a ‘revolutionary’ can be turned into a commodity. If/When you watch the video replace the notion of the ‘revolutionary’ with the ideology of anti-racism, or the ideology of anti-fascism, or the ideology of anti-imperialism. Are these all aspects of bourgeois ideology that serve to contain us? Have we been fooled again?

Barthes on modern myths:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GCzq8we-bI

So, instead of arguing my case, which would involve a lot of writing I have pointed to texts that I think are useful. Make of them what you will.

I’d like to finish with a couple interesting pieces on the construction of Blackness and Whiteness in modern society, that kind of follow up LJ’s reference to Ta-Nehisi Coates in the piece put up by Noa Rodman.

Firstly, this, “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” by James Baldwin:

http://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Baldwin_On_Being_White.pdf

And this from “Critique of Black Reason,” by Achille Mbembe:

Fanon was right, however, when he suggested that the Black Man [sic] was a figure, an “object,” invented by Whites and as such “fixed” in their gaze, gestures, and attitudes. He was woven “out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories.” We should add that Whiteness in turn was, in many ways, a fantasy produced by the European imagination, one that the West has worked hard to naturalize and universalize. Fanon himself said of the two that Blackness did not exist any more than Whiteness did. In reality, there exists no human being whose skin color can be strictly described as white… […]

In settler colonies like the United States, “White” was a racial category constructed over time as the institutionalization of legal rights encountered the regimes of labor extortion. [Mbembe writes elsewhere that the term ‘race’ is a “useful fiction” though, “In fact, race does not exist as a physical, anthropological, or genetic fact.”] Nearly half a century after the creation of the colony of Virginia in 1607, for example, the distinctions between the Africans and Europeans subjected to similarly brutal conditions of exploitation remained relatively fluid. The Europeans were captive labor, temporary and exploitable, considered “superfluous” in the metropole. Their status was similar to that of Africans, with whom they shared certain practices of sociability: alcohol, sex, marriage. Some emancipated Africans gained a right to portions of land. On this basis they demanded rights, including the right to own slaves. The subaltern community, then, went beyond race. From the 1660s on, it was responsible for a series of revolts, including the Indentured Servants’ Plot of 1661, Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, and the Tobacco Riots of 1682.

The Royal African Company was reorganized in 1685 in response to the threat of ongoing insurrections carried out by subaltern classes united across race. With a steady supply of African slaves, more and more of the workforce in the colony was composed of enslaved people. During the last years of the seventeenth century the figure of the slave became increasingly racialized. By 1709 the composition of the labor force had shifted so that Africans enslaved for life far outnumbered indentured laborers of European origin, who were forced to work only temporarily and freed at the end of their terms of captivity.

[…] Sexual relations between races were outlawed. The mobility of slaves was drastically reduced, and the “low Whites” were given the task of patrolling them. Blacks were prohibited from carrying weapons, while each former indentured labourer of European origin was given a musket.

The problem this fascinating history leaves us with is that there is no way of starting over again at 1660 (!) and, more importantly, anti-racism argues for equivalence in a system based on inequality rather than objecting to the system itself. Indeed, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and anti-sexism (all the ‘equal under the law and economy’ praxes) are all components developed within the democratic structure (bourgeois ideology) that help keep capitalism functioning – they are all democratic factors that serve their purpose in the accumulation of wealth. The election of Barack Obama revealed the meaning of anti-racism, just as the election of Margaret Thatcher revealed the meaning of anti-sexism, just as the creation of Franz Fanon’s Algeria, or Zimbabwe, revealed the meaning of anti-imperialism, self-determination, and decolonization. The meaning being, for all these cases, that there was no real meaning.

Anti-racism, like racism, is a state ideology. And like all state ideologies, it is a conspiracy theory. For a practical comparison of the two, look at Rhodesia (racist) and Zimbabwe (anti-racist). Theoretically, the two ideologies differ thus: racism is focused on the physical and repression; anti-racism on the metaphysical and extermination (in this, anti-racism resembles anti-Semitism).

A capitalist state is a capitalist state whether it is run by blacks or not. Black people are capable of being racist, just as white people are capable of not being racist. It seems to be believing in that correlation that leads you to this odd conception of racism and anti-racism.
Also racism is just as much about mental repression as it is physical. A good control system is one that makes people oppress themselves. Honestly I think that your problem is that you don't really understand racism, it isn't cops murdering blacks. It's the entire structure of a system that teaches people to believe in racism and in the case of what you might call the ideology of anti-racism it is the way of convincing people that they are not racist (bad) while allowing them to still be racist and in fact encouraging it.

The recent anti-racist movement opposes the police because police are racist (repressive towards physical bodies). The movement demands the policing of thoughts instead: the ‘idea of whiteness’ must be erased, prejudice and discrimination have to be removed. If that means destroying the bodies of white people, it is only because they happen to be the personification of the idea of racism. Coates comes close to expressing the metaphysical character of anti-racist politics when he writes about “people who think they are white.”

Again this is ridiculous, or at least terribly expressed. To get rid of 'whiteness' is a goal in so far as it is a constructed identity built around repression, this does not entail exterminating people with white skin nor any identity they may have beyond holding racist views.

Darkness and death all around, I’m afraid. And so it’s more important than ever not to take sides.

If you are talking about inter-bourgeoisie fights, then yes, but anti-racism is a non-negotiable communist principle, it doesn't work if we divide ourselves with prejudices.