[Peace-discuss] My letter & Marty MacMarty article

[David Green]

My letter, published August 9th:

https://www.news-gazette.com/opinion/letters-editor/letter-to-the-editor-black-lives-matter-promotes-flawed-agenda/article_4a3253ef-2344-559c-98b3-9ce8426f6843.html


The economic exploitation that has immiserated the working class for four
decades has disproportionately hammered the Black community, even while
many Blacks enter the neoliberal-enforcing Professional-Managerial Class
(PMC). Those PMC actors who most support “anti-racism” are least likely to
support structural economic changes that would aid the unfairly demonized
White working class and Blacks alike.

The astute Black political analyst, Adolph Reed
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624-017-9476-3>, labels
“anti-racists” as “anti-leftist.” Along the neoliberal ideological
spectrum, they are the Woke (dominant, identitarian) Left. Black Lives
Matter neglects fundamental egalitarian reform while feathering the nests
of directors, publicists, organizers, and affluent PMC adherents.

BLM is a fundamentally reactionary, petty-bourgeois
cultural/managerial/disciplinary Woke power play. Moreover, the violent
accompaniment to BLM protests by mostly privileged, White Antifa/anarchist
youth has wreaked permanent devastation on Black and minority communities
around the country, something one learns only through independent
media (Michael
Tracey
<https://medium.com/@mtracey/two-months-since-the-riots-and-still-no-national-conversation-12a7e3e4e006>
).

BLM promotes incoherent ethno-nationalist “liberation” while labeling Black
children as damaged at birth, once only done by White racists. BLM is
misogynist, exemplified by references to “Karens
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(pejorative)>.” BLM is anti-family in
standard, perverse PC ways characteristic of the Woke Left, promoting what
were once racist stereotypes of Black parental social pathology.

BLM will attempt to White-shame public school teachers into supporting its
agenda, including Orwellian “white fragility” and the wretched 1619 Project
<https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619/>. Teachers and union reps
should steadfastly resist this elitist, repressive, and reactionary agenda.
Citizens who genuinely care about social justice should stand behind
teachers and working-class children, who are faced by empowered and
fanatical BLM/PMC class enemies.


https://www.thebellows.org/the-new-cultural-revolution/

*The New Cultural Revolution*

*The protests that have sprung up across the world share a certain class
character with another famous uprising—the Chinese Cultural Revolution.*

*By Marty MacMarty*

August 14, 2020

The protest movements that have upended American life following the death
of George Floyd have stupefied both pundits and ordinary citizens. In some
ways, what we are witnessing is unique. But it is useful to compare this
civic upheaval to another one, the Chinese Cultural Revolution that began
in 1966. Though the ideologies and social context of the two movements
differ, the class forces driving them are similar, and a close read of
those forces can help illuminate the character and possible destinations
for this kind of politics.

*The class nature of the Chinese Cultural Revolution*

The Cultural Revolution was arguably the second great catastrophe of the
People’s Republic of China. It took place in the immediate backdrop of its
first great catastrophe, the Great Leap Forward, Chairman Mao Zedong’s
badly mismanaged attempt to rapidly industrialize a largely agrarian
society, which produced the greatest famine in human history and killed
tens of millions of people. In the fallout, Mao’s status within the Chinese
Communist Party was reduced to a more ceremonial role, making Liu Shaoqi
and Deng Xiaoping the President and General Secretary of the Secretariat,
respectively. Though formally diminished, Mao’s influence remained
significant as the founder of the state and Party Chairman.

However, by the end of the Cultural Revolution Mao had returned to a
position of de facto ultimate authority and his critics within the Party
were either expelled or politically neutralized. *It was not a “revolution”
in the sense of overturning an existing order to establish a new one, but
rather the return and reinforcement of a once-demoted regime. *

The Cultural Revolution famously depended on college students and the Red
Guards. The Red Guards began as an independent but politically-interested
group of university students who supported a broadly Maoist cultural
agenda. The formal alliance between Mao and the student movement began at
Peking University with professor Nie Yuanzi, at the time a 45-year-old
Party member in the Department of Philosophy. Nie vocally supported Mao’s
removal of the mayor of Beijing and linked this to the struggle to remove
bourgeois and capitalist elements from university administration. Once Mao
officially blessed her statement, students began to organize and revolt
against party authorities in universities across China. In this way, a
political alliance was formed between the recently disempowered elite and
educated youth and middle-class academics.

After the Red Guards had received official support, they expanded beyond
their original constituency of university students to encompass high school
students and more lower class youth generally*. They took control of
universities and engaged in purges and violence throughout the country. The
army and police did not significantly interfere for the better part of two
years, as the Red Guards were officially sanctioned by elements of the
national government.* Party journalist Chen Joda lended a raison d’être to
the Red Guards, the abolition of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture,
old habits, and old ideas. None of these were well-defined, but the
elasticity was the point. During the time in which this paramilitary group
operated, art, temples, and religious icons were destroyed, cemeteries were
desecrated, and university professors and intellectuals were persecuted or
killed. Most universities were closed for several years, and it arguably
took decades for China’s higher education system to recover.

*“Struggle sessions” dominated much of middle-class life in this period.
People would be accused by Red Guards of anticommunist thought or action,
adherence to one of the hated Olds, and subjected to intense questioning
and forced confessions. *These confessions, whether genuine or strategic,
were no guarantee of safety: one might be kept for a period of repentance
and hard labor, then later beaten or killed anyway. Once the paramilitary
movement spilled out of universities, it targeted party headquarters and
bureaucratic offices. The youth wing of the revolution became a
para-governmental enforcement arm of the elite class (explicitly, Mao).
This class alignment produced an inevitable outcome: the targets of this
“revolution” were not the uppermost elites, but middle management,
bureaucrats, and systems of social control that intermediated between
elites and the populace.

The Red Guards were eventually disbanded and suppressed by the government
and the People’s Liberation Army. Despite occasional and even significant
Red Guard-PLA clashes, the military was never replaced as the ultimate
power in the country. Many of the eager young ex-Red Guards were sent into
the countryside on an extended mission of spreading Maoist thought, far
away from the centers of power and where they could do less damage, Nie
Yuanzi, the Peking University professor who began the movement, among them. *In
a way, the Red Guards had served their purpose: the middle management of
the country was properly chastened and afraid of their elite masters. The
bureaucracies that mediated between elites and ordinary people were either
in tatters or so cowed as to make direct control frictionless. In sum, an
alliance between a disempowered elite and a mostly-young and educated
lower-middle class (using the still lower-class youth as enforcers) upended
the middle section of society’s bureaucracy, to long-lasting effect. *



*The character of modern social movements*

*The class forces of the Cultural Revolution were wielded by Mao in a bid
to return himself to power. The class alliance we see in the civil unrest
today is similar, but without a central leader or organization. In fact, it
is hard to say who the leaders of Black Lives Matter are. The movement,
such as it is, was begun as a twitter hashtag by Alicia Garza, Patrisse
Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Yet none of these women have been visibly present
in the current protests, nor have they been active in directing protests
toward any particular goal. Ms. Garza has said that she is not interested
in “policing who is and who isn’t part of the movement,” and also that, “we
don’t control the movement.” *

Over the years a number of groups have proposed various policy goals for
BLM and have debated its efficacy (going back years). Critics and
counter-critics alike have found themselves carving this or that section of
the movement to try and lead, but any island of leadership never lasts long.

*Leaderless movements have not yet been capable of restructuring political
economies, but they have influenced how societies manage their populations.*

*The Civil Rights Movement could hardly have been more different.* The
individual leadership from Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, A. Philip
Randolph, and the organizational leadership of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership
Council, and the Congress of Racial Equality lent both structure and
strategy to the national movement.

*But something in the fabric of society has changed between then and now.
Among the many leaderless movements of the modern era–BLM, Tahrir Square,
the yellow vests, the Hong Kong protests, and more–social media has played
a central role. *Once upon a time it took a list of names and activists
physically going door-to-door to amass people in, say, Zuccotti Park. Such
limitations forced the formation of organizational structures and
individual leaders. But now it is possible to create mass events before
developing any such organization. In fact, such a structure can be a
liability, slowing response time and leaving formal organizations
vulnerable to rapidly assembled social media counterevents.

*These fluid, leaderless movements have not yet been very capable of
restructuring political economies, but they have had and will continue to
influence how societies manage their populations. *The Egyptian revolution
is probably the most powerful example, where two presidents may have been
ousted, but military rule over the country is just as entrenched as it was
before.

*A Cultural Revolution without a Mao*

It has been two months since the nation erupted in protests and riots
following the death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement. In
that time, the movement has spread beyond its initial motivating incident.
Chicago experienced its deadliest day on record, prompting fear and alarm
from city officials. *A portion of the city of Seattle was abandoned by
police to protesters, who established a form of alternate society where
several young people were shot and killed within a month. In Portland, a
battle continues to rage over a federal courthouse. The police have
withdrawn from some sectors of society, leaving people to plaintively put
up signs “Black owned business” and “children sleep here,” hoping the mob
will pass them by. *Across the country, businesses are shuttered and long
stretches of American cities have been destroyed. Even if the movement
began that way, these actions cannot be described honestly as protests over
police brutality, despite staggering popular agreement on the injustice of
the inciting incident. These are, rather, revolts against the government.

Meanwhile, public monuments have been removed or defaced by protesters—from
the toppling of statues of confederate general Robert E. Lee, to the
beheading of Christopher Columbus, and even the dismemberment of the statue
of an immigrant abolitionist who died fighting for the Union. Preempting
any similar action, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City
is voluntarily removing its statue of a horse-mounted Teddy Roosevelt
flanked by a Native American and African man. Not even the great
emancipator is spared: the Emancipation Memorial in Washington D.C. has
become a flashpoint, with proposals for its removal, while a copy of the
statue in Boston is now officially slated for removal.

It is possible to construct a narrative around racial injustice if one only
pays selective attention—after all, it is hard to muster up a moral defense
for Christopher Columbus or the Confederacy. However, these targets exist
alongside Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, and various religious
statues. *Something strange is at play when both monuments to the
Confederacy and to the emancipation of America’s slaves by the Union are
under equal threat. That is, unless one considers what unites them: they
are both public testaments to an old regime.*

Beyond the struggle over public symbols, elite institutions have also been
overturned. The New York Times was witness to an internal coup. The NLRB
has loosened regulations on firings (to combat racism). A bevy of
unorthodox employees (or merely those perceived as unorthodox) have been
fired, including one data analyst who published research arguing that
non-violent protests in the Civil Rights era were more effective than
violent protests. *Many academic, upper class, and government workplaces
have held mandatory racial sensitivity trainings, sometimes segregated by
race. For the managerial class this movement has ushered in a changing of
the guard and a new set of (constantly-shifting) rules.*

These events parallel the chaos and class character of the Chinese
Revolution, but without a clear elite figure whose interests the chaos
serves: that is, without a Mao. *It’s worth noting then that tech and
retail corporations were among the first to vocally support the BLM
protests-cum-riots.* While the first fires were being lit in Minneapolis/St
Paul, corporations were tweeting their support of the movement, and
releasing public statements. Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM announced they
would discontinue services to American police forces (not ruling out other
state forces, domestic and foreign), while other companies made Juneteenth
a paid holiday. All this has occured at the same time as massive layoffs
due to the coronavirus economy, coupled by an expansion in corporate
ability to fire people.

Why would corporations support this movement, and why these corporations in
particular? While President Trump has not had many keystone achievements,
his presidency has frustrated the interests of certain economic sectors.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership was scuttled as a result of the 2016
election, and Trump’s tariffs and trade war have harmed profits for many
American businesses, even drawing the ire of Apple, the world’s largest
corporation by market cap. Corporations like Apple operate under a business
model that relies on cheap manufacturing labor, primarily in China, and a
large external market, primarily in America. Businesses operating under
this model have had their profits decline under Trump’s tariffs. *For these
corporations, this revolution is more about returning transnational capital
to a place of unquestioned primacy than it is about protesting the abuses
of police power. If Trump can be cowed (or better still—removed), then his
policies that have ever-so-slightly slowed capital accumulation in the tech
and retail sectors (which have become deeply intertwined) can be reversed.*
Occasionally, this alliance is elevated from subtext into text: Upon
disbanding, some members of the Seattle CHAZ/CHOP anarchist zone called for
the revolution to continue by electing Joe Biden, a strange plea if read
literally (police abolitionists asking us to elect the author of the 1994
Crime Bill), but entirely intelligible as one sector of class society
trying to reinstall an elite class as their patrons.

*Capital, then, is our Mao; these sectors of capital are the disempowered
regime leaping at the opportunity afforded by the middle and lower-class
youth revolt.* They wish to return to a position where they can make
decisions unfettered by even mild rebukes to their interests (here in the
form of tariffs), *and the educated but stagnant middle class want to
improve their own position by toppling bureaucrats above them in the
hierarchy. In other words: antiracism and police abolition for the
managerial and lower classes, free markets and unimpeded supply chains for
the corporate boardrooms.*



*From formation to aftermath*

*The American Cultural Revolution is a movement that looks like it has come
from nowhere, but it began in academia, where it has been fomenting for
some time.* A professor in Seattle was already subjected, over the course
of six months, to struggle sessions by students and a formal investigation
into his public opinions on a ballot initiative. The managers and
institutions that have crafted the new cultural orthodoxy are currently in
such a state of ascendance (backed as they are by capital) that they feel
no need to hide their ambitions. *Nikole Hannah Jones recently admitted
that her Pulitzer-winning New York Times’s 1619 Project is not factual
history, but rather always intended to be propaganda.* If one cares about
the integrity of history this is a travesty, but if one’s goal is creating
a movement to chasten the educated middle class and reinstall a class of
elite patrons, then this is fine.

The upcoming presidential election offers no off-ramp here: Trump does not
have a policy agenda so much as a series of instincts, most of which are
directed toward his own self-aggrandizement. *Biden on the other hand, in
his current state of cognitive decline, will merely be the face worn by the
forces of capital within the now-unambiguous party of the rich, the
Democratic Party.*

As in China, *once this union of elites and the upward-looking managerial
class wins the cultural revolution, its dogmas will become enshrined in the
functioning of the state.* *Capital could hardly ask for a more fitting
ideology for working class exploitation than the woke/BLM theory that has
been developing for the past decade:* that society is just and good so long
as people are materially deprived at racially equivalent rates. As such, *the
new cultural revolution is not about the dismantling of social power
relations, but rather about their renewal.*

Like the Red Guards before them, the radicals behind this new cultural
revolution will find themselves sent to less troublesome corners of the
country once they have served their purpose. The aftermath will create a
new orthodoxy and new financial and workplace precarity, legitimated
through a new ideology.

The only consolation for those of us unwilling to bow to transnational
capital and its petit bourgeois enforcers is the fact that the same
accelerated communication speed which allowed the swift formation of such
horizontal, leaderless movements will cause them to burn out just as
quickly—and much faster than in 1960s China. Perhaps in the aftermath, we
can hope for and begin to work toward a true working-class movement.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20200814/03bbb3d9/attachment-0001.htm>