[Peace-discuss] "Between the World and Me" as neoliberal identity politics

[David Green]

In a related and pertinent article, Toure Reed of ISU addresses the ideological underpinnings that informed the Moynihan Report in 1965:
The contrasting perspectives of economic and institutional structuralists played out in policy debates related to black poverty in the early 1960s. A. Philip Randolph’s and Bayard Rustin’s demands for full employment and public works via the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom presumed that high rates of African American unemployment and poverty were the product not just of racism but automation and mechanization. Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz likewise called for public works as an essential element of any serious plan to reduce black unemployment, arguing that proportionalism in Manpower Development Training Act (MDTA) and Area Redevelopment Act (ARA) training programs could not make a meaningful dent in black unemployment.   And both Senator Joseph P. Clark’s (D-PA) public hearings on fair employment practices law and Senator Hubert Humphrey’s (D-MN) S-1937 (an alternative to Title VII) proceeded from much the same economic structuralist perspectives.20By contrast, Walter Heller and the Council of Economic Advisers rejected the notion that redistributive policies—such as public works—were necessary to redress unemployment and poverty. Presuming that unemployment reflected economic cycles rather than shifts, the CEA believed that a multi-billion dollar tax cut would reduce unemployment in the aggregate and engender “full employment,” which was then defined as 3-4percent unemployment.21   Heller et al likewise argued that tax cuts would contribute to a reduction in black unemployment, claiming that wartime stimulus had played a vital role in the economic gains African Americans had made 1940-1953—a period in which black workers had actually begun to close the income and employment gap.   To be sure, CEA staffers like Robert Lampman understood that the most marginalized populations—a group that would be referred to as the “hardcore unemployed”—would be largely untouched by tax-cuts.22 Lampman thus turned to institutional structuralism to bridge the divide. In the weeks preceding the 1963 March on Washington, Lampman argued that antipoverty measures should center on “aggressive expansionist full employment fiscal policy” combined with “anti-discrimination efforts… better school and public facilities for low income children.” Lampman likewise called for retraining and relocation allowances and “improv[ing] environments of the poor by community development and public housing.”23 More to the point, his recommendations explicitly rejected redistributive programs altogether, casting them as not only unnecessary but counterproductive. Asserting that the poor should earn the American living standard “by their own efforts and contributions,” the Council claimed that “it will be far better, even if more difficult, to equip and to permit the poor of the nation to produce and to earn the additional $11billion and more.”24http://nonsite.org/article/why-moynihan-was-not-so-misunderstood-at-the-time
 


    On Saturday, November 28, 2015 5:10 PM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com> wrote:
 
 

 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n23/thomas-chatterton-williams/loaded-dice

Adolph Reed: "[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." 

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