[Peace-discuss] ...AWARE and other local activist groups

[C. G. Estabrook]

In a good article on politics in New Orleans in the decade since the hurricane, Jay Arena makes the point:

"...the public housing fight in New Orleans — as well as other struggles around public services — was a social democratic fight. The question was not one of racial disparities per se; it was not one of equalizing the market’s inequitable distribution of housing and other resources across race (or gender, sexuality, ability, etc.) — that is, of equalizing the percentage of all races with none, lousy, decent, and luxury housing — which is how social justice has come to be defined under neoliberalism.

"Instead, the public housing movement demanded housing for everyone (as well as other essential needs), as a right that was the responsibility of the state to fulfill. In posing this demand, the public housing movement challenged core neoliberal principles.

"The New Orleans public housing fight was confronting, head on, the dominant neoliberal urban capitalist political economy, for which privatization of public services, particularly public housing, is central. Furthermore, the post-civil rights black political leadership — black elected officials and their allied contractors, NGOs, ministers, and layer of academics — have, for the most part, been fully incorporated into this political economy, in New Orleans and in cities across the country...

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/katrina-ten-year-anniversary-public-housing-charter-schools/

—CGE

> On Aug 29, 2015, at 12:08 PM, 'C. G. Estabrook' carl at newsfromneptune.com [sf-core] <sf-core-noreply at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> “...when people come [to AWARE] with an interest in racial justice, that we be clear about where our priorities lie.” But there are at least two things “anti-racism” means. As Bill <laborhour at yahoo.com> points out, one is properly revolutionary, the other is a pacification program.
> 
> The Democratic Party is this weekend adopting a resolution "expressing its support for the Black Lives Matter movement." The draft of the resolution mentions by name Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza, the founders of the Black Lives Matter organization. They are from “a generation of young African-Americans who feel totally dismissed and unheard as they are crushed between unlawful street violence and unjust police violence,” the Democratic party resolution reads <http://www.buzzfeed.com/darrensands/dnc-to-vote-on-resolution-supporting-black-lives-matter>.
> 
> Is that a victory for anti-racism, or a co-option?
> 
> Forty years ago, in their retreat from trying to change economic and social structures, US liberals turned to trying to change what people said rather than what they did, and that was called “anti-racism." 
> 
> Liberals vigorously condemned bad speech and bad thoughts about other races (and soon, about other "equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do,” as A. Reed says). But it did that while they capitulated to neoliberalism - the use of law and government (backed by force) to enhance the profits of the 1%, at the expense of the majority.
> 
> That’s a false anti-racism (‘affirmative action’), deployed in defense of the existing order. Is it really anti-racist to demand "a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources” but in which "12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people”?
> 
> A true anti-racism condemns the use of racial categories to convince the US population to support murder and oppression (Islamophobia, Zionism). It also condemns the use of racial categories to justify our capitalist history. (“Lincoln freed the slaves.”)
> 
> A generation ago Barbara Fields pointed out that it is "intellectually debilitating [to assume] that any situation involving people of European descent and people of African descent automatically falls under the heading ‘race relations’… as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco. 
> "One historian has gone so far as to call slavery ‘the ultimate segregator’. He does not ask why Europeans seeking the ‘ultimate’ method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa… 
> "No one dreams of analyzing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians. 
> "Nor does anyone dream of analysing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem of race relations, even though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American racists…” <http://newleftreview.org/I/181/barbara-jeanne-fields-slavery-race-and-ideology-in-the-united-states-of-america>.
> 
> Not so different from wage-slavery in the North, chattel-slavery in the ante-bellum South "is a large part of the basis for our wealth and privilege. Is there a slave museum in the United States? The first one is just being established now with a private donor. This is the core of our history along with the extermination and expulsion of the native population. But it's not part of our consciousness” <http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/3/noam_chomsky_on_black_lives_matter>. 
> 
> We in AWARE should "be clear about where our priorities lie” - not with the false anti-racism that’s the “left wing of neoliberalism” (as W. B. Michaels says), but with the true anti-racism of opposition to the neoliberal (and neocon) Democrat and Republican parties - and an accurate account of their histories <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/>.
> 
> —CGE
> 
> > On Aug 29, 2015, at 9:56 AM, Stuart Levy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > We can look forward to a world in which wealthy white people are killed by our police at the same rate as poor black people.
> > 
> > And one in which a job applicant named Taneesha is as likely to get an interview as one named Sara.
> > 
> > We're not in that world, and despite our name, AWARE's work has not aimed toward it. I recently told Mark Enslin, who had proposed the name, that I appreciate the continuing reminder and associated guilt. I'm not suggesting that AWARE should change either its name or its work - only when people come with an interest in racial justice, that we be clear about where our priorities lie.
> > 
> > On 8/29/15 9:36 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> >> Yes, and 'affirmative action' is a pacification program, designed to secure talented and vocal recruits "for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class” (as Adolph Reed says below).
> >> 
> >> What would revolution, instead, look like? Noam Chomsky gave an apparently casual but insightful answer 40 years ago:
> >> 
> >> "Personally I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy. In this sense, I would describe myself as a libertarian socialist -- I'd love to see centralized power eliminated, whether it's the state or the economy, and have it diffused and ultimately under direct control of the participants. Moreover, I think that's entirely realistic. Every bit of evidence that exists (there isn't much) seems to show, for example, that workers' control increases efficiency. Nevertheless, capitalists don't want it, naturally; what they're worried about is control, not the loss of productivity or efficiency."
> >> 
> >> (It’s important to note that when Chomsky says that he’s a “libertarian socialist,” he’s using ‘libertarian’ not in the American sense of, say, Ron Paul, but in an older European sense in which Lenin attacked it in "'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder” [1920]. "Lenin attacked assorted critics of the Bolsheviks who claimed positions to their left; most of these critics were proponents of ideologies later described as left communism” - i.e., democratic rather than authoritarian. Chomsky has always been a critic of Marxism-Leninism - but from the left, not the right.)
> >> 
> >> —CGE
> >> 
> >>> On Aug 29, 2015, at 8:35 AM, laborhour <laborhour at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> We needed a revolution but we got affirmative action.
> >>> 
> >>> From: C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com>
> >>> To: Stuart Levy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com>
> >>> Cc: Elise Dunham <emd2727 at gmail.com>; aware at anti-war.net; peace-discuss <Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>; sf-core <sf-core at yahoogroups.com>
> >>> Sent: Friday, August 28, 2015 2:57 PM
> >>> Subject: Re: [Aware] Meetings on Sundays? (AWARE and other local activist groups)
> >>> 
> >>> AWARE was founded after the attacks of 9-11-2001 by people in C-U who saw that the US government would use those crimes as an excuse to continue to kill people in the Mideast, in continuation of America’s longstanding demand to control the energy resources of the region, for the benefit of the US 1%.
> >>> 
> >>> AWARE’s goal was to help people in C-U become ‘aware’ of the real nature of the US government’s murderous policies in the Mideast, and their attendant racism. That racism was particularly anti-Arabism and Islamophobia - propaganda used more or less covertly by the US government, in spite of the fact that its principal ally in the region (after Israel) was - and remains - the most repressive Arab/Muslim state in the world, Saudi Arabia.
> >>> 
> >>> At least some members of AWARE are nevertheless properly skeptical of the sort of 'anti-racism’ that forms part of ‘identity politics.’ Forty years ago, under the assault of the American business class on the reforms of the New Deal/Great Society period, US liberals in a rather cowardly fashion abandoned the class politics that animated those reforms, from the 1930s to the 1970s. Desperately casting around for a cause that would restore their bona fides as reformers, US liberals seized upon discrimination (racial and otherwise) - surely an evil, just not the one that the US 1% was particularly concerned to perpetuate.
> >>> 
> >>> For an account of this Great Refusal, see Walter Benn Michaels’ 2006 book, "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality."
> >>> 
> >>> The result is described by Adolph Reed, Jr.:
> >>> 
> >>> "...race politics [= identity politics] is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do ... within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people. It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class.”
> >>> 
> >>> AWARE actually split on this issue ten years ago, and many concerned AWAREists left the organizations because they thought other members (who stayed) did not sufficiently appreciate that Barack Obama (because of his racial background?) was an anti-war candidate. Of course he wasn’t, but he did mendaciously mobilize antiwar sentiment and identity politics to get elected.
> >>> 
> >>> —CGE
> >>> 
> >>>> On Aug 28, 2015, at 9:42 AM, Stuart Levy via Aware <aware at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> >>>> 
> >>>> ...anti-racism is in AWARE's name, but we don't do much about it...
> >>>>