Chris Wright is your typical white guy history professor. “I’m a Marxist, but the fact is that any far-reaching social transformation is going to be much more gradual than Marxists have traditionally thought.” He says stuff like this:
Fascist repression, it’s true, is very useful, but fascist regimes can hardly remain in power indefinitely in every country. Even just in the U.S., the governmental structure is too vast and federated, and civil society too thick and resilient, for genuine fascism ever to be fully consolidated everywhere, much less made permanent. Repression alone is not a viable solution for the ruling class…
The presupposition is that civilization will not destroy itself before the historical logic of this long social revolution has had time to unfold. There is no question that the world is in for an extraordinary era of climatic chaos, but—if for a moment we can indulge in optimism—it might transpire that the ecological changes serve to accelerate the necessary reforms by stimulating protest on an absolutely overwhelming scale. Maybe, then, humanity would save itself in the very nick of time. If not, well, we’ll have a grim answer to the old question “Socialism or barbarism?”
One implication of the argument is that there is a kernel of truth in most ideological tendencies on the left, and radicals should therefore temper their squabbling. The old debates between, say, Marxists and anarchists are seen to be narrow, short-sighted, crabbed, doctrinaire, and premised on a false understanding of the timescales in question.
I’m an Afropessimist doomer, so we’re not on the same page. I think his Marx needs more Freud…or at least more Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy):
With regard to these and other “false” distinctions we employ a method of argument that at first sight may seem unfair, but that is unavoidable and is itself an exercise of the gestalt approach. Let us call it the “contextual method,” and call attention to it immediately so that the reader may recognize it as we use it.
Fundamental theoretical errors are invariably characterological, the result of a neurotic failure of perception, feeling, or action. (This is obvious, for in any basic issue the evidence is, so to speak, “everywhere” and will be noticed unless one will not or cannot notice it.) A fundamental theoretical error is in an important sense given in the experience of the observer; he must in good faith make the erroneous judgment; and a merely “scientific” refutation by adducing contrary evidence is pointless, for he does not see what you see, it slips his mind, it seems irrelevant, he explains it away, etc. Then the only useful method of argument is to bring into the picture the total context of the problem, including the conditions of experiencing it, the social milieu and the personal “defenses” of the observer. That is, to subject the opinion and his holding of it to a gestalt-analysis. A basic error is not refuted—indeed, a strong error, as St. Thomas said, is better than a weak truth; it can be altered only by changing the conditions of raw experience.
Then, our method is as follows: we show that in the observer’s conditions of experience he must hold the opinion, and then, by the play of awareness on the limiting conditions, we allow for the emergence of a better judgment (in him and in ourselves). We are sensible that this is a development of the argument ad hominem, only much more offensive, for we not only call our opponent a rascal and therefore in error, but we also charitably assist him to mend his ways! Yet, by this unfair method of argument, we believe we often do more justice to an opponent than is common in scientific polemic, for we realize from the start that a strong error is already a creative act and must be solving an important problem for the one who holds it.
Naturally, Chris Wright tries to “temper squabbling” on the left by publishing “Race Reductionism” Threatens to Doom the Left. Let’s take his own advice and psychoanalyze the paper. After all:
It is one of the ironies of the twentieth century that the Bolsheviks both forgot and illustrate a central Marxian dictum: never trust the self-interpretations of historical actors. There is always an objective context and an objective, hidden historical meaning behind the actions of people like Robespierre, Napoleon, or Lenin, a meaning they have no access to because they are caught up in the whirl of events (and, to quote Hegel, the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, after the events). The fact that Lenin and his comrades were convinced they were establishing socialism is of no more than psychological interest. It is unfortunate that many Marxists today continue to credulously believe them.
Let’s start at the beginning:
The reparations debate is getting old. But it shows little sign of abating. Academic papers continue to parse the idea of reparations for slavery; books continue to be written on the subject, adding to the mountain of material that already exists; celebrated journalists give speeches to the UN advocating reparations. Democratic candidates in 2020 prominently and sympathetically discussed the issue on the campaign trail. The debate is not going away anytime soon. It is all the more unfortunate, then, that much of it is conducted in an unserious way.
Obviously, the discussion continues because a great wrong was done to us and there haven’t been reparations. For Chris Wright the historian, it’s “getting old.” He’s tired of hearing about it. At the same time, he’s not bored with writing the Nth “class reductionist says identity politics is bad” article. He expects us to stay focused on class from now until revolution, which isn’t in the near future.
There’s more context for why he’s getting sick of black people stuff:
The New York Times’ 1619 Project gave yet another boost to the demand for redress, probably the most significant boost so far. As a systematic effort to interpret U.S. history entirely in terms of the oppression of Blacks, it was tailor-made to advance the reparations narrative. The immense resources of the Times, in collaboration with the corporate-endowed Pulitzer Center, went into designing and distributing a curriculum that schools could use to teach the 1619 Project. This massive nationwide campaign soon coincided, fortuitously, with the George Floyd protests in 2020 and the revival of Black Lives Matter. By then, Black identity politics was so deeply embedded in the nation’s culture that conservatives discovered they could capitalize on it by inventing a “critical race theory” boogeyman to frighten whites into supporting reactionary politicians and reactionary policies. The discourse of anti-racism and reparations continued to spread even as the right-wing backlash against it grew in intensity and effectiveness.
Wright is a Marxist. I’d think that a Marxist would normally be keen to draw a clear distinction between liberals and the left. Black identity politics is supposedly dooming “the left”, but the popular discourse appears to be driven by “corporate-endowed” liberals. It’s not very interesting that the New York Times wouldn’t make a strong case against capitalism itself, but he wants to make that seem interesting by associating it with “the left.”
You know who else isn’t very good at distinguishing liberals from the left? Republicans. For Republicans, Marxists are everywhere. As a Marxist, Wright knows that isn’t true. But for the sake of hating on black people, there’s a vast black left conspiracy.
As a historian, Wright should know that “identity politics” comes from socialists (the Combahee River Collective), not liberals. Socialist revolution is already an implicit goal of identity politics. It’s not from a group of black people who needed to be educated about Marx. But that’s exactly how Wright presents it:
A debate rages on the Left between the practitioners of identity politics and alleged “class reductionists,” but the latter seem to be decidedly in the minority. This is unfortunate, because in order to defeat the threat of the far right—whether it’s called white nationalism, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, neofascism, or proto-fascism—we’re going to have to build a movement on the basis of class struggle. This doesn’t mean denying the legitimacy of the grievances of groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, but it does mean incorporating them in a broader movement organized around the old Marxian dualism: the working class vs. the capitalist class.
In other words, white men can’t bear not to be the center of attention for 5 minutes. Capitalism is complicated. It’s a cliche, but fully understanding it means understanding how it intersects with racism, sexism, etc. He sees the debate with anarchists as “narrow”, irrelevant, etc., but for me it’s obvious that feminism, anti-racism, etc. are all implicit within anarchism. Oppression, domination, and hierarchy are bad, in all of their forms. For Wright, there has to be one movement AND that movement has to be the one that most centers his own problems. He himself isn’t just part of one decentered fight against the interlocking systems of oppression.
Anyway, he’s reviewing Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s book on reparations.
Apparently, the world is unjust not because capitalism is inherently oppressive, but because it began, centuries ago, in slavery and colonialism. We’re called to remake the world system, but the focus is on how horrible the past was, and, admittedly, how horrible the present is for non-white people because of their past. Capitalism as such isn’t mentioned; instead, as in all of the reparations discourse, it is slavery, the slave trade, colonialism, and racism that are emphasized. This fact, of course, is why the liberal establishment is comfortable talking about reparations and even invests enormous resources in propagating the narrative. It understands that it poses no threats to its own power and serves as a useful distraction from class conflict as such.
I mean…if the revolution happened and we took the rich people’s stuff and made everybody equal, would there be a separate need for reparations? The idea is that the government did us wrong. If the government still exists, it owes us, but the goal includes replacing the government altogether. So the idea of reparations is also sort of reformist: we’re not getting rid of the government, it’s just going to write some checks to people.
Wright is annoyed with Táíwò for ignoring socialism, which is a fair point, but then it’s even less obvious what all this has to do with the “left.”
It’s important that Wright understands black people’s issues intellectually, just fine:
Much of Reconsidering Reparations is dedicated to reviewing the history of what Táíwò calls “Global Racial Empire” and how this beast led to the structural disadvantages people of color face today. A historian need have no quarrel with any of this. It is an incontrovertible truth that, for hundreds of years, people of color have been systematically exterminated, enslaved, exploited, massacred, forced off their lands, stripped of their cultures, reduced to peonage, denied the opportunity to own a home, denied a decent education, disproportionately imprisoned, disproportionately consigned to unemployment, and disproportionately subjected to police brutality. A large part of the literature on reparations is concerned with establishing these facts, and they certainly do need to be broadcast far and wide. Left critics of the reparations concept do not deny any of that horrifying history or the abysmal state of the present.
What they deny, first of all, is that reparation on a scale large enough to make a difference is practicable. As Coates wrote, “Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?”
Now that he’s paid lip service, he’s free to let the hostility out:
Whatever the moral merit of these and a myriad of other vague proposals, they face obvious and intractable obstacles. First, as mentioned, is the administrative and political nightmare of determining which individuals or communities will receive reparations, how they will be distributed, and how they will be funded. Second, and even more fundamental, is the question that Adolph Reed posed in 2000 and that has not been answered because it cannot be answered: “How can we imagine building a political force that would enable us to prevail on this issue?” It is a shockingly obvious problem with the whole reparations discourse, and so intractable that it utterly vitiates the latter. Are we to believe that in an age of resurgent proto-fascism, fueled in part by white fears of “critical race theory” and the very idea that racism has played a significant role in American history, a tiny minority of anti-racist activists will be able to build a nationwide movement so overwhelming that it could sweep into power a supermajority of legislators committed to radically restructuring society on the basis of reparations for slavery? Does any serious person find this scenario remotely conceivable?
“Whatever the moral merit.” What’s the point of morality if not to guide our behavior? How can he take such a dismissive stance towards morality itself? What is Marxism if not a moral stand?
Adolph Reed, patron saint of class reductionists.
It’s pretty clear that fascists don’t let a lack of popular support stop them from doing anything. Again, reparations itself implies not having a revolution, i.e., “radically restructuring society.” But certainly the fascists see this as a revolutionary moment.
Isn’t the role of the vanguard precisely to win people over to the left’s point of view?
Táíwò, like nearly all reparationists, scarcely even acknowledges these problems. Why are they so rarely discussed? A cynic would have a ready answer to this question: the politics of reparations is largely performative, a way of demonstrating one’s political virtue, of surfing the wave of elite liberal preoccupations and perhaps even boldly veering off to the Left, thus really proving one’s revolutionary bona fides. It doesn’t matter if ambitious national — much less global — reparations legislation is inconceivable: the point, if you’re an academic, is to have a trendy research project and to play around with various ideas for their own sake. Táíwò, for example, waxes philosophical on conceptual distinctions such as responsibility vs. liability,[8] and on the strengths and weaknesses of certain arguments for reparations, including “harm repair” arguments,[9] “relationship repair” arguments,[10] and his own “constructive view” that he considers the most defensible.[11] It’s all a waste of time. The most important question is ignored: How are we to build a massive political movement that will crucially depend on the altruism of white people in a country where whites have been consistently more than 70 percent opposed to the movement’s goals?
Sure, but what’s the point of being an academic Marxist (or this blog) besides being right in pointless ways that don’t change anything? I’m glad someone’s out there, thinking through the right way to administer reparations if the opportunity ever comes up.
He writes about academics like he isn’t one, and he writes about white people like he isn’t one, instead of saying “we.” He seems to have great faith there are lots of white dudes out there like him: they hate niggers but not communists for some reason.
He just repeats how much we’ll have to get reparations from white people’s cold dead hands:
Most reparationists don’t consider themselves Marxists, but since some do, it is worth pointing out that the movement they advocate doesn’t make contact with Marxism. Eugene Debs was a true Marxist when he said, “Solidarity is not a matter of sentiment but a fact, cold and impassive as the granite foundations of a skyscraper. If the basic element, identity of interest, clarity of vision, honesty of intent, and oneness of purpose, or any of these is lacking, all sentimental pleas for solidarity, and all other efforts to achieve it will be barren of results.”[12] There is no shared interest or solidarity between white and Black workers when the latter demand from the former (and other whites) financial compensation for centuries of white supremacy. This is instead an idealistic appeal to mass altruism, which, given the motivating force of economic self-interest for most people (of which Marxists are well aware), is unlikely to get very far.
That framing…that it’s altruism and not what we’re owed. If it’s what we’re owed, it doesn’t matter of white people enjoy doing the right thing or not. In that framing, white people are still in charge by default and they magnanimously decide on reparations out of deep concern for black people. As a Marxist, he should understand that that’s not what happened in the civil rights movement. The USSR was making us look bad to the Europeans with propaganda about lynching.
He’s disavowing his own attitudes by attributing them to the mass of white people. He can’t see the obvious: his racial solidarity is trumping class solidarity. We know white people would sooner harm themselves than see their money help black people.
I see that he doesn’t believe reparations would be in white people’s enlightened self-interest. Any government that would consider reparations would realistically do things for poor white people before it got to reparations as an agenda item.
Is there a specific black thinker whose agenda includes reparations but NOT helping white people too? It seems like a straw man to me. It’s something Wright has made up to be divisive.
I guess Adolph Reed supplied the straw man, because of course he did. What we really need is to raise awareness of how the whites have suffered:
Therefore, it is not only the practicability of material reparations (on a substantial scale) that Marxists deny. It is also the revolutionary or socialist character of the program itself. As Reed, again, has argued, the program is profoundly anti-solidaristic, in that it pits Black workers against white workers. “We’ve suffered more than you,” it says, “and therefore deserve more, even at your expense.” It tends to minimize, in fact, the suffering and exploitation of white workers, so much so that even authors who consider themselves anti-capitalists, like Táíwò, are apt to recognize the systemic class injustice of capitalism, if at all, only in the mode of an afterthought. This is certainly true of Reconsidering Reparations. The book evinces hardly any awareness that capitalism in its origins, history, and present has been a horror story not only for people of color but for the exploited and immiserated of all races. Europe’s peasantry wasn’t exactly coddled during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which, lest we forget, required kicking them off the land and produced centuries of mass impoverishment in cities and the countryside. Popular uprisings were crushed again and again; vast numbers were massacred; millions were subjected to forced labor of some form; millions experienced the death-in-life of slaving away in mines and early factories.
All of that, and yet slavery was worse. It’s matter-of-fact, and Wright has the typical white emotional resistance to it. What about…? He’s evading the real sadomasochistic core of slavery.
Radical feminism and Afropessimism both insist on the importance of sexual domination, beyond economics. Those are the things he specifically doesn’t want to acknowledge, as a class reductionist. Marxism alone can’t account for rape culture.
After another paragraph on white suffering, what he imagines to be a reductio ad absurdum:
It isn’t hard to make a case, therefore, that working-class whites deserve “reparations” too. As a Marxist would argue, the wealth they’ve produced for generations has been stolen from them, and they’ve suffered immensely as a result. Why don’t we talk about reparations that the capitalist class owes to the working class? Why is the agenda framed in terms of whites vs. non-whites? Again, the answer is clear: this sort of “race reductionism” is, from the perspective of the ruling class that finances it, a fantastically useful diversion from class struggle, which in its implications leads toward the sort of race war that white supremacists advocate. We see, then, that a supposedly Left discourse effectively joins hands with the far right, and even provides it with excellent talking points. (“Those Blacks, lazy parasites, want to take all our hard-earned money! We already give them welfare, now they want even more!”) It helps the racists. This may be an unfair thing to say, but one recalls Marcus Garvey’s flirtation with the Ku Klux Klan. Black nationalism or anything like it — anything that treats the artificial concept of “Black people” or “the Black community” as denoting an entity with a coherent set of interests, as though it isn’t riven by its own class conflicts — is not a genuine Left politics.
See the book When Affirmative Action Was White. The white middle class was self-consciously created by the government to exclude black people, after the suffering of the Great Depression. The present-day inequalities we see are a legacy of that. So much of the wealth gap comes from owning houses…It’s framed as black vs. white because the status quo was designed to be black vs. white, so we need to acknowledge that to address it.
It’s simply the case that every bad thing can’t be reduced to class. Again, he’s a historian. The idea that talking about this stuff is a ruling class agenda is absurd to me.
I think there’s pleasure for him in typing out the stuff about lazy parasites. He can say what he really thinks through the safety of quotation marks.
In other words, he has a problem with any politics that recognizes everything isn’t perfect for black people with money, that we’re all subject to racism. He has a problem with black politics as such, not just “nationalism.” Who are these nationalists and what do they have to do with the reparations debate?
Like we don’t know race is a social construction…we’re the ones who came up with CRT.
There is a widespread belief among leftists that the only way to defeat racism and thereby achieve working-class solidarity is to constantly talk about how terrible it is to be a person of color, how oppressed such people have been throughout history, and how saturated in racism society is. The thought is that we have to, as much as possible, draw attention to race rather than submerge it under the fact of shared class interests. For instance, in her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor chastises Bernie Sanders for “essentially argu[ing] that addressing economic inequality is the best way to combat racism.” This is an old argument, she says, from the pre-World War I right wing of the socialist movement, which was discredited when Communist parties around the world were able to recruit millions of non-white people by recognizing the legitimacy of their own distinctive, racially inflected and colonially determined grievances. In the U.S., thousands of Blacks joined the Communist Party because of the party’s attention to the scourge of racism. Moreover, their recruitment to the Left did much to energize it and, perhaps, radicalize it. Surely these facts validate a race-centered strategy?
“How terrible it is to be a person of color.” Obviously he means that dismissively, contemptuously. When he was talking about white people, it was all “death-in-life slaving away.”
It’s true that class reductionists have been wrong since Trotsky times or whatever.
Here, notice sudden, non sequitur shift to talking about masculinity.
What Taylor fails to see is that the situation today is very different. Today the Left has an imperative need to recruit Latinos and whites, who otherwise might join the far right. There is little danger of Blacks joining a white nationalist movement. If we want to drive economically insecure, socially unmoored, and politically despairing whites into the arms of the right, a great way to do that is by telling them, in effect, that their own suffering and anxieties are of little moment compared to the suffering of Blacks and that whites are almost universally racist. Similarly, we should tell men that their masculinity is toxic, that all of them are sexist oppressors and mansplaining chauvinists. As Steve Bannon said in 2017, “the longer [the Democrats] talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we [Republicans] go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.” Bannon, whatever else he may be, is a savvy political operator whose opinions on strategy should be taken seriously.
Just like the fascist white men, leftist white men tend to be anti-anti-racist AND anti-feminist. We should probably listen to Steve Bannon, whatever he says. There is that meme that he’s a Leninist. LOL!
This almost sounds reasonable:
The Communist Party in the 1930s had to overcome an incomparably more virulent racism among white workers and unionists than exists today. But it did so not by emphasizing race, and certainly not by calling for whites to pay enormous amounts of money for reparations. That would have gotten it nowhere, just as it has gotten the Left nowhere in recent years. Instead, it focused obsessively on the identity of class interests between the races. In essence, it followed the strategy of Bernie Sanders, the Marxist strategy (not that Sanders is a Marxist). It’s true that, in the effort to recruit Blacks, it also took up the cause of their distinct racial oppression, as with the Scottsboro campaign. But it didn’t take this racial advocacy to such a monomaniacal extreme that it would alienate the masses of white workers and obscure the fundamental message about “Black and White” having to “Unite and Fight.”
Well, it didn’t really have to take it to a monomaniacal extreme. It just had to take black people’s side at all, ever, and that was enough for racism to do its work of dividing the working class. It seems labor unions weren’t enthusiastic about ending discrimination without prodding. That was part of the NAACP’s agenda.
You can tell something weird is going on psychologically. On the one hand, he’s aware of an ongoing fascist movement. On the other hand, he sounds just like them, talking about CRT, cancel culture…:
In truth, whatever leftists who have been steeped in critical race theory or Afro-pessimism might think, racism today isn’t anything like the obstacle to working-class unity it was generations ago. Decades after the historic achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, overt displays of racism are wildly socially unacceptable and are easily shamed through iPhone videos and social media. But even if we accept the very dubious premise that a deeply rooted anti-Black racism is still a major hindrance to building an anti-capitalist political movement, it makes no sense to think we can overcome such racism by expatiating endlessly on the suffering and oppression of Blacks. If people are as racist as we’re supposed to think, they won’t care! These appeals will leave them cold, or rather will alienate them from the political organizations that are trumpeting the message. The Communist Party was more intelligent: you overcome racism by bringing people together, and you do that by ceaselessly educating them on their common interests against the ruling class.
LOL “wildly socially unacceptable.” Overstating the case is another sign that we’re dealing with some repressed bullshit here. The idea of anti-blackness is very dubious, extremely so. Haha. The oppression of blacks is boring. Blacks. The communist party was intelligent (like him!). Not like black people.
He’s saying class reductionism is a caricature that nobody actually believes, except he just said he wanted to “submerge [race] under the fact of shared class interests.”
This obvious strategy, the Marxist one, doesn’t mean adopting the caricature of “class reductionism” that no sane person actually believes, according to which only class matters or every form of oppression can be solved through an exclusively class-based politics. The absurd, bad-faith nature of the charge of class reductionism is shown by the fact that one of its alleged exemplars, Adolph Reed — whose Marxism (i.e., emphasis on class) is so controversial in DSA that he had to cancel a talk to its New York City chapter in 2020 — has written a beautiful, poignant book on his experience growing up in the oppressively racist Jim Crow South. He is hardly blind to the significance of racism — which makes all the more striking his insistence that racism is fairly trivial today compared to what it was sixty years ago.
I haven’t read the book. Is it really so interesting that Reed, a professor emeritus, thinks black people have it so much better now? Wasn’t Wright the one saying we need to pay attention to class distinctions among black people?
It’s notable that the trans movement, which is a men’s rights movement, gets a free pass:
Racism still has to be challenged, of course, as do sexism, xenophobia, and transphobia. But, in general, “telling people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere,” says Alana Conner, a social psychologist at Stanford. “It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is that when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.” To quote another writer, Margaret Renkl, “somehow you need to find enough common ground for a real conversation about race.” One way to find common ground is to talk about common interests. That can help dissolve people’s defenses against hearing what you have to say. It’s also useful, Renkl notes, to remember that you yourself are hardly innocent, so you shouldn’t be too condemnatory of basically decent people who, like you, are unaware of their prejudices. “Prejudice is endemic to humanity itself.” There is no such thing as purity, much as the woke mob may disagree.
In so many words, this is where he declares that he’s unwilling to contemplate his own racism, because white fragility. It’s black people’s responsibility to make him feel comfortable about our shared class interests before complaining about how dickish this entire essay is. It’s human nature! Don’t throw stones in glass houses! Don’t expect white people to ever act right. They’re decent people, though, who don’t know any better. But don’t tell them!
“Woke mob.” Again, how Republicans talk. I think what happens is that he Googles “identity politics bad” and reads stuff on Republican websites and the attitude rubs off. I can see how that could happen to a person, since I’m anti-trans from the left and it’s mostly the right who’ll publish TERFs.
Notably, “transphobia” is acknowledged, but not the fact that moral panic around trans has eclipsed the CRT stuff, and everything the trans movement does is like a gift to the Republicans. If the trans movement didn’t exist, they’d invent it like they did the CRT panic. Steve Bannon would love it if all we did was talk about trans stuff too, but Wright maintains solidarity.
He quotes the liberal Mark Lilla, friend-in-arms against the blacks:
In short, even if it is only racism and the oppression of Blacks you’re concerned about — for some reason being uninterested in class oppression as such, which, today, is exactly what’s responsible (rather than racism) for most of the deprivation Blacks experience — you should still situate your discussion of race in a broader, consistent emphasis on the capitalist-engendered suffering of all races. This is especially advisable if you actually want to get policies passed, including those relating to “identity politics,” since, as Mark Lilla reminds us, you first have to get people in power who share your values. “You can do nothing to protect black motorists [pulled over by police] and gay couples walking hand-in-hand down the street if you don’t control Congress and, most importantly, if you don’t have a voice in state legislatures.” You have to get your people elected, and you do that by showing you relate to voters’ shared concerns — about the economy, wages, healthcare, housing, unemployment, working conditions, wealthy tax cheats, and the like.
Marxist and liberal white men agree! Vote for Democrats!
Again, who are these black people who don’t care about class oppression?
Since such programs are also, as we have seen, incomparably more politically viable than reparations — unless you think a majority of ostensibly racist whites can be convinced in the near future to give up large amounts of their income to people they hate — it is very puzzling that identitarians are often unmoved by the idea of class-based legislation. In effect, their political practice sabotages the only realistic ways of realizing their goals.
You can use Google Trends to see that reparations isn’t really a big topic. It spiked in 2019-2020 and it’s currently back to its usual low level. Even if there’s more discussion of reparations than there used to be, this idea that there’s a popular base for “reparations uber alles” just isn’t true. I don’t think anybody was expecting reparations before student debt reform.
When he finds that we “identitarians” are “unmoved by the idea of class-based legislation”, it’s not because we don’t understand why giving everybody money is popular. It’s because those class-based solutions are being proposed with a bullshit ulterior motive, mainly to avoid “doing the work” of trying harder not to be racist.
It’s not what he says here:
Reed is right, evidently, that “some on the left have a militant objection to thinking analytically.” Race-based politics tends to be grounded in feelings: outrage that racism still exists and that people of color are disproportionately oppressed. These are understandable feelings, but a politics of self-expression is an unintelligent and nonstrategic politics that risks handing victory to one’s enemies.
He wouldn’t come right out and say that we’re less evolved, that we need more of his objective white man rationality. People shouldn’t express outrage through strikes and riots and stuff.
In general, the political terrain of the twenty-first century, everywhere in the world, promises to be dominated by various types of populism. People everywhere are bitterly resentful toward the “elite,” however they define the term. It is the essential task of the Left to channel this populism in the right direction, focusing ire on the class elite rather than the supposed cultural or “racial” or “ethnic” elite, the cultural outsiders. That way lies fascism, which is becoming an increasingly threatening global phenomenon. If we want to stop fascism, we have to be Marxists.
Yes, but the psychological appeal of hating Jews and black people isn’t the same as hating capitalists. It’s not obvious that one can substitute for the other. His big strategy is basically…elect centrist Democrats who can appeal to the white working class. We’ll get to revolution….slowly…black people better wait in the meantime. What was it MLK said about white moderates again?
Wright understands solidarity intellectually, but spends his time quoting Steve Bannon in communist magazines. He warned us not to trust people’s self-interpretations. He was telling on himself.
“Afropessimism” is just the name for recognizing that Wright really gets something out of feeling better than black people, which thwarts any egalitarian project he’s a part of.