Views in brief

What wasn't concrete?

JOE ALLEN'S April 21 letter ("We need concrete demands") is off the mark in its criticism of the April 16 editorial "Confronting the epidemic of police murders."

According to Allen, the article is "liberal in formulation" because it failed to "mention capitalism," didn't offer any "concrete demands for the movement," and asks readers to "imagine" an alternative. Allen then offers some possible demands, such as elected civilian review boards, the prosecution of killer-cops, and the demilitarization of police forces. All three criticisms don't hold water.

The criticism of an article for not mentioning the c-word is hard to take seriously. The article is written on a web site that routinely runs anti-capitalist material and is clearly publicly identified as an anti-capitalist publication. Moreover, the article itself is clearly anti-capitalist, without using the word. One example will suffice: "The police as an institution don't exist to 'serve and protect,' but to uphold a racist justice system and protect private property." Is Allen really arguing that this is "liberal in formulation"?

There are plenty of liberal writers who use the word "capitalism" in their works--Thomas Picketty comes to mind. So let's not use that as a litmus test for what is and is not "liberal in formulation." Liberals, moreover, would never argue, as the article does that individual police who murder are not "bad apples," but rather "part of a whole rotten barrel."

The article does discuss demands, expressing support for demilitarizing police forces and spending the money on the community, compensating victims of police violence, and prosecuting killer cops. The demands that Allen offers don't appear to be an improvement on the ones mentioned in the SocialistWorker.org piece.

But the SocialistWorker.org piece, again in a highly un-liberal manner, also discusses the limits of some of the demands being put forward, such as police body cameras and civilian review boards, concluding that "even if reforms can be made effective, they won't alter the nature of the police--which is to act as a special body of armed men in service of the state and private property." Again--hardly a liberal framework!
Paul D'Amato, Chicago

Privilege theory and white entitlement

IN RESPONSE to "Privilege and the working class": This statement represents this article's central pathology: "[T]oday's popular symbols of anti-racist resistance (hands raised in the 'Don't Shoot' stance, hoodies, and 'I am Trayvon Martin' signs) are sometimes argued by privilege advocates to be inappropriate for whites."

The author invokes measures proposed by Black activists while studiously ignoring the actual on-the-ground situations from which these measures arose, as well as the behavior and tacit everyday white supremacist ideology to which they are a direct response. In effect, she jumps to the conclusion that today's young Black activists are slavishly mouthing stupid shit that white Maoists invented in the 1960s and are "just being divisive." I don't need to tell you how problematic and (and you know...racist) this is.

So why are the angry Black kids being so "divisive"? Why is it that Candace Cohn might not be Trayvon Martin after all? It has nothing at all to do with the all-pervasive influence of Chairman Bob Avakian--an influence that only Candace Cohn and Bob himself actually believe in. It has everything to do with the "All Lives Matter" mindset.

The discourse around what certain slogans and gestures mean at an anti police/vigilante violence protest when they are chanted/made by white people is a response to a demand--sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit--that white protesters make to "be included" in a way that actually denatures the message of the protest. When some white protesters say "I am Trayvon Martin," what they are saying is "it could have been me"--when one of the central points (perhaps even THE central point!) of the movement is that, no, Trayvon Martin was killed because he was Black. And unfortunately, this is a mindset that does not simply stay in the heads of clueless white people, inert and irrelevant. It gets out into the world. It sort of rules the world, actually.

These measures did not arise in a vacuum. They are a direct response to the white erasure of the specificity of how Black people experience police violence in the U.S. But instead of analyzing the specific politics of the situation, the author prefers to simply flatten all of these things out into her construct of "privilege politics."

The author seems to think that it strengthens her argument. It does the opposite, however, as it shines an unforgiving light on her ideological blinders--blinders that could ironically be loosened by a thorough application of these much-maligned "privilege politics."

It is thus that the author does her rather obvious point about the importance of talking about class an enormous disservice--making it look like little more than a convenient dodge in order to make the reader forget that what she's actually been doing throughout most of the article is telling us to, in effect, stop thinking about race.

She also states: "Furthermore, the privilege theory of causation--Black workers get less because white workers get more..."

Is that really even a thing? I thought that the crux of privilege theory wasn't so much that Black workers get paid less because white workers get paid more, but that the fact that Black workers get paid less because they are Black means that white workers get paid more because they aren't Black.
Eugene Lerner, New York City
Editor's note: This Readers' View was edited to remove an offensive sentence.

Tarring himself

IN RESPONSE to "Tarred with the same brush": Sylvestre Jaffard may claim to be a fan of Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race, but he would do well to be a more careful reader of Allen's and Ignatiev's actual writing (I will treat them as co-authors of the whole pamphlet for simplicity's sake). In his letter complaining that Candace Cohn's illuminating article on the origins of privilege theory ("Privilege and the working class") was unfair to Allen, he egregiously misquotes White Blindspot to make it seem more reasonable than it is.

Specifically, Jaffard quotes portions of three paragraphs, the first two of which read:

White workers today are generally better off than the Black people, who are engaged in a militant struggle for more jobs, housing and full political rights. But even today, where white workers are fighting for the same demands, they are also ruthlessly wiped out, like the unemployed coal miners of Hazard, Kentucky, or the 80,000 laid-off white railroad workers, victims of the Johnson-bosses-union gang-up or the Teamsters shot at in a recent Tennessee strike.

They, too, meet up with violent repression at the hands of the ruling class...

Of these lines, Jaffard says, "I see nothing but the classical Marxist analysis of oppression, as a weapon of the ruling class to divide the working class and turn it against itself."

The problem for Jaffard is that these are not Allen and Ignatiev's words, but a quote from the Progressive Labor magazine, which White Blindspot explicitly argues against, excoriating these ideas as "incorrect formulations" and "evasions."

As for the last part Jaffard quotes, those are indeed Ignatiev and Allen's words, but the full paragraph demonstrates their main point:

The ideology of white chauvinism is bourgeois poison aimed primarily at the white workers, utilized as a weapon by the ruling class to subjugate Black and white workers. It has its material base in the practice of white supremacy, which is a crime not merely against non-whites, but against the entire proletariat. Therefore, its elimination certainly qualifies as one of the class demands of the entire working class. In fact, considering the role that this vile practice has historically played in holding back the struggle of the American working class, the fight against white supremacy becomes the central immediate task of the entire working class.

Here, Ignatiev and Allen employ the language of Marxism to explicitly subordinate united, inter-racial class struggle to a (vague and undefined) notion of "repudiating their white-skin privilege."

To be fair, Jaffard can be forgiven for confusing what Ignatiev and Allen were actually arguing. Throughout the pamphlet, Ignatiev and Allen twist familiar Marxist arguments to argue for the exact opposite. For instance, the authors state on one hand that white-skin privilege is not in the material interests of white workers, that these privileges are just "fancied interests." But then they also define that privilege as including higher pay, social mobility, and better jobs, schools, housing and health care, which most definitely are material benefits in workers' interests. They routinely say one thing, say the opposite at another point, and then a third thing contradicting both somewhere else.

However, it's not simply the case that the pamphlet is a scattershot collection of wildly contradictory and ignorant arguments (though it is that, too). It's that these are marshaled in order to construct an argument that manages to be both sectarian (towards white workers who may and often did have racist attitudes) and opportunistic (uncritically tailing Black Power groups, whatever their class make-up or political ideas) at the same time.

Jaffard may be right that Allen's The Invention of the White Race is a valuable book. But the White Blindspot pamphlet he and Ignatiev authored 30 years before that book was published is a poorly argued piece of political poison that rejects the practical possibility of building a united, multi-racial working-class struggle against the 1 Percent in favor of one group of workers denouncing another.

That's not tarring Allen unfairly. That's recognizing his writing for what it was and is.
Dave C., Atlanta

Lessons of the IWW

IN RESPONSE to "Syndicalism's lessons": The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was organized in response to narrow craft unionism's racist division of the working class, the need to abolish the wage system and to begin thinking and acting seriously to form the new society within the womb of the old. Any socialist party worth its revolutionary salt would do the same. To say that organizing such a union is tantamount to separating syndicalist workers from the working class is similar to the notion that non-revolutionary unions separate themselves from non-union workers.

One of IWW syndicalism's lessons is that without bringing up the question of wage labor, the working class becomes a plaything for its dominators amongst the capitalists, landlords and bureaucrats of the political state.
Mike Ballard, Queens Park, Australia