[Peace-discuss] Organize!

Tue Jul 16 14:56:06 UTC 2013

David--

Have you noted the argument that capitalism through the 19th c. and into the 20th - the imperialism that Lenin analyzed - used racism as you say, to divide and conquer, but modern capitalism, particularly in its neo-liberal stage, actually employs anti-racism and multiculturalism ("equal-opportunity exploitation"), the better to extract surplus value? 

Note the following exchange between Bhaskar Sunkara and Walter Benn Michaels:

BKS: What’s at the heart of your work is that equal-opportunity exploitation is what we’re moving towards, or at the very least it’s an ideological goal of the ruling class. So, what explains the shift in the way capital has historically acted — using racial and ethnic divisions to better exploit the working class?

WBM: Well, I think there’s absolutely no question that is true. Capitalism throughout the 19th century and through much of the 20th was classically imperialist, which is basically impossible without racism, without a massive commitment to what amounted to European-American White supremacy. But one of the things that’s become obvious — leaving the racism question aside, leaving the discrimination question more generally aside, — is that the condition of capital changed fairly radically in the 20th century. Of course, people have different accounts of why that is. Even those on the Left who agree that the falling rate of profit is central don’t agree on whether it’s a structural necessity or a contingent development. But almost everyone agrees that neoliberalism involved internationalization in a way that cannot be reduced to what imperialism was before and that it involved, above all, a kind of powerful necessity for mobility not of only of capital, but of labor.

Stalin famously won the argument but lost the war over whether there could be socialism in one country, but no one has ever been under the impression for more than a millisecond that there could be neoliberalism in only one country. An easy way to look at this would be to say that the conditions of mobility of labor and mobility of capital have since World War II required an extraordinary upsurge in immigration. The foreign born population in the U.S today is something like 38 million people, which is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Poland. This is a function of matching the mobility of capital with the mobility of labor, and when you begin to produce these massive multi-racial or multi-national  or as we would call them today multi-cultural workforces, you obviously need technologies to manage these work forces.

In the U.S. this all began in a kind of powerful way with the Immigration Act of 1965, which in effect repudiated the explicit racism of the Immigration Act of the 1924 and replaced it with largely neoliberal criteria. Before, whether you could come to the U.S. was based almost entirely on racial or, to use the then-preferred term, “national” criteria. I believe that, for example, the quota on Indian immigration to the U.S. in 1925 was 100. I don’t know the figure on Indian immigration to the U.S. since 1965 off-hand, but 100 is probably about an hour and a half of that in a given year. The anti-racism that involves is obviously a good thing, but it was enacted above all to admit people who benefited the economy of the U.S. They are often sort of high-end labor, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen of various kinds. The Asian immigration of the 70s and 80s involved a high proportion of people who had upper and upper-middle class status in their countries of origin and who quickly resumed that middle and upper middle class status in the U.S. While at the same time we’ve had this increased immigration from Mexico, people from the lower-end of the economy, filling jobs that otherwise cannot be filled—or at least not filled at the price capital would prefer to pay. So there is a certain sense in which the internationalism intrinsic to the neoliberal process requires a form of anti-racism and indeed neoliberalism has made very good use of the particular form we’ve evolved, multiculturalism, in two ways.

First, there isn’t a single US corporation that doesn’t have an HR office committed to respecting the differences between cultures, to making sure that your culture is respected whether or not your standard of living is. And, second, multiculturalism and diversity more generally are even more effective as a legitimizing tool, because they suggest that the ultimate goal of social justice in a neoliberal economy is not that there should be less difference between the rich and the poor—indeed the rule in neoliberal economies is that the difference between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks—but that no culture should be treated invidiously and that it’s basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites. So the model of social justice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women. That’s a long answer to your question, but it is a serious question and the essence of the answer is precisely that internationalization, the new mobility of both capital and labor, has produced a contemporary anti-racism that functions as a legitimization of capital rather than as resistance or even critique.

- See more at: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/

On Jul 15, 2013, at 9:01 PM, David Johnson <dlj725 at hughes.net> wrote:

> Well despite the quaint folkloric origins, it became a term of insult and derision, thus intended to be hurtfull to all people of African origin.
> They did  similar hurtfull propoganda to the Irish, depicting the men in cartoon illustrations during the 1800's and early 1900's as passed out alcoholics, and the women and children as ape like.
> Divide and conquer is the ruling class's traditional technique to keep us down and distracted, ignorant and weak. Hence no threat to their rule.
>  
> David Johnson
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森"
> To: Paul Mueth
> Cc: Rachel Storm ; C. G. Estabrook ; Peace Discuss
> Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 5:34 PM
> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Organize!
> 
> American history is very interesting and the affected reactions of people similarly interesting.
> Americans really are too sensitive about particular words.
> 
> Mencken writes [American Speech, vol. 19 (1944), pp. 161-74)], regarding the etymology of "coon":
> 
> Coon, though it is now one of the the most familiar designations for a Negro, apparently did not come into general use in that sense until the 80's; Thornton's first example is dated 1891 and the DAE's 1887. For many years before that time the term had been used in the sense of a loutish white man, and in Henry Clay's day it had designated a member of the Whig party. It came originally, of course, from the name of the animal, Procyon lotor, which seems to have been borrowed from the Algonquian early in the seventeenth century, and was shortened from raccoon to coon before 1750. "How the Negro Got the Name of Coon" is the title of one of the stories in a collection of Maryland folk-lore published by Mrs. Walter R. Bullock, Jr., in 1898, but all it shows is that the Negro who is the chief figure called himself a coon, and that the name was afterward applied to others. Why he did so is not explained, nor when. The popularity of the term seems to have got a lift from the vast success of Ernest Hogan's song, "All Coons Look Alike to Me," in 1896. Hogan, himself a colored man, used it without opprobrious intent, and was amazed and crushed by the resentment it aroused among his people. Says Edward B. Marks in They All Sang:
> 
>     The refrain became a fighting phrase all over New York. Whistled by a white man, it was construed as a personal insult. Rosamond Johnson relates that he once saw two men thrown off a ferry-boat in a row over the tune. Hogan became an object of censure among all the Civil Service intelligentsia, and died haunted by the awful crime he had unwittingly committed against his race. 
> 
> "All Coons Look Alike to Me" was followed in 1899 by "Every Race Has a Flag But the Coon," by Heelan and Helf, two white men, and in 1900 by "Coon, Coon, Coon," by two others, Jefferson and Friedman, and from that time forward coon was firmly established in the American vocabulary.
> 
> ****
> Note (ewj):
>  
> All Coons Look Alike to Me sold more than 1 million copies, 
> and was the first song of the genre called Ragtime,
> which name and type was originated by Ernest Hogan,
> who called himself the "Unbleached American".
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 07/16/13 2:09, Paul Mueth wrote:
>> This is wrong,
>>  "stand your ground" was referred to in instructions to the jury, ck Dem Now today. 
>> It may be standard op in FL, I guess particularly when the accused prep is the son of a judge, 
>> 
>> There should be an argument about whether Z used the word "coon" on
>> The 911 call or not.
>> Chew on this for a while,
>> Everything is fine in FL
>> http://mobile.alternet.org/alternet/#!/entry/black-woman-gets-20-years-for-firing-shot-at-wall,51b7609bda27f5d9d0dd3c29
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone 3GS, It doesn't chat!
>> 
>> On Jul 14, 2013, at 11:16 AM, "C. G. Estabrook" <cge at shout.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> '...State of Florida v. Zimmerman is a straight up traditional self defense case. It has never been pled as a Stand Your Ground defense case, irrespective of all the press coverage, attention and attribution to Stand Your Ground. It’s never been Stand Your Ground, and certainly is not now that the evidence is all in on the trial record. It is a straight self defense justification defense, one that would be pretty much the same under the law of any state in the union including that which you are in, and that I am in, now (so don’t blame “Florida law”)...'
>>> 
>>> - See more at: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/07/11/uncomfortable-truth-the-state-of-evidence-in-the-george-zimmerman-prosecution/#sthash.j89tcZbp.dpuf
>>> 
>>> On Jul 14, 2013, at 10:31 AM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" <ewj at pigsqq.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> The Martin/Zimmerman incident is not like the 
>>>> Champaign Police shootings of young black men.
>>>> 
>>>> Zimmerman may be an asshole or not.  I am not sure.
>>>> Most but not all cops and wannabee cops are 
>>>> indeed quasi-assholes.  Not all.
>>>> 
>>>> But clearly Zimmerman was attacked, and on that basis he 
>>>> has been set free, because of the self-defense argument.
>>>> The cause of the dispute betwen Martin and Zimmerman
>>>> becomes irrelevant when Zimmerman is attacked.
>>>> 
>>>> It's not like Zimmerman just pulled out his gun and 
>>>> Oba-nam Style executed him because he was wearing a hoodie.
>>>> The law permits people to have encounters and disagreement.
>>>> When it erupts into physical violence particularly life-threatening
>>>> violence, then a line is crossed.  The situation was
>>>> examined very clearly.
>>>> 
>>>> Justice my ass.
>>>> It's not justice that they are crying for.  
>>>> It's blood.
>>>> They want an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
>>>> They want blood for bloodshed.
>>>> 
>>>> Well, actually what they want is Money.
>>>> 
>>>> But since there isn't any money available,
>>>> they'll settle for a few pints of blood,
>>>> and several ounces of testicular flesh if that
>>>> becomes available.
>>>> 
>>>> It is really a disgusting distraction for a noble movement
>>>> like Occupy! to get down and grub for cooties
>>>> with the blood-lust crowd.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On 07/14/13 22:02, Karen Aram wrote:
>>>>> Rachel
>>>>> 
>>>>> After today's AWARE meeting at 5:00, I will be attending the protest, bringing a neighbor as well. 
>>>>> Trayvon Marvin represents the many young black men from Emmet Till, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Robert Hall etc., etc. murdered because of their race, with the perpetrators so obviously being acquitted by unjust laws and or decisions.  
>>>>> 
>>>>> Karen Aram
>>>>> 
>>>>> From: rachelstrm at gmail.com
>>>>> Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 03:51:39 -0500
>>>>> To: sdas-current at googlegroups.com; sdas-list at googlegroups.com; occupyCU at lists.chambana.net; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net; peace at anti-war.net
>>>>> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Organize!
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hey folks---If anyone has heard of another demo being planned, I'm happy to send notices out, cancel this one, and redirect people there. I've contacted a number of African-American led organizations in town and can't seem to tell if something is already in the works. Either way, I'm happy to help try and get the word out and then redirect if need be.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Okay, here's what I got to start. https://www.facebook.com/events/206857249471575/?context=create
>>>>> 
>>>>> Please forward widely. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> No Justice, No Peace x Protest the Verdict
>>>>> Sunday, July 14th, 2013 | 6pm-8pm
>>>>> Douglass Park | 512 E. Grove St. Champaign
>>>>> "George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, igniting a national debate on racial profiling and civil rights, was found not guilty late Saturday night of second-degree murder." We will stand together in Champaign-Urbana to demand accountability, to stand against racial injustice, and to protest the verdict that proved the injustice of the system. We stand with Trayvon’s family and we know that we are called to act---to fight for civil rights and for the removal of Stand Your Ground laws in every state, and we will not rest until racial profiling in all its forms is outlawed. Today we mourn, but tomorrow we organize. #blacklivesmatter
>>>>> 
>>>>> Bring your friends, your family, your children, your neighbors. We stand together as a community--all of us. Art, protest signs, candles, and messages of outrage/hope/love/solidarity are encouraged. 
>>>>> Share on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/206857249471575/?context=create
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 2:36 AM, Rachel Storm <rachelstrm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> I think we need an emergency demonstration tomorrow in response to the Zimmerman verdict to show that Urbana community members/activists/folks in solidarity do not stand for this outrageous demonstration of injustice.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Can we plan to meet somewhere very public tomorrow (Sunday) at 6pm-ish?
>>>>> 
>>>>> WHERE?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Rachel
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Peace-discuss mailing list
>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
> 
> 
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