[Peace-discuss] Supremacy and murder

Fri Feb 16 04:22:12 UTC 2018

 The brilliant Pankaj Mishra writes a scathing analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates' book on Obama in the London Review of Books:

(excerpt) As early as 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois identified fear and loathing of minorities as a ‘public and psychological wage’ for many whites in American society. More brazenly than his predecessors, Trump linked the misfortunes of the ‘white working class’ to Chinese cheats, Mexican rapists and treacherous blacks. But racism, Du Bois knew, was not just an ugly or deep-rooted prejudice periodically mobilised by opportunistic politicians and defused by social liberalism: it was a widely legitimated way of ordering social and economic life, with skin colour only one way of creating degrading hierarchies. Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R. James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcending the parochial idioms of their national cultures, they analysed the way in which the processes of capital accumulation and racial domination had become inseparable early in the history of the modern world; the way race emerged as an ideologically flexible category for defining the dangerously lawless civilisational other – black Africans yesterday, Muslims and Hispanics today. The realisation that economic conditions and religion were as much markers of difference as skin colour made Nina Simone, Mohammed Ali and Malcolm X, among others, connect their own aspirations to decolonisation movements in India, Liberia, Ghana, Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Martin Luther King absorbed from Gandhi not only the tactic of non-violent protest but also a comprehensive critique of modern imperialism. ‘The Black revolution,’ he argued, much to the dismay of his white liberal supporters, ‘is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes.’

Compared to these internationalist thinkers, partisans of the second black president, who happen to be the most influential writers and journalists in the US, have provincialised their aspiration for a just society. They have neatly separated it from opposition to an imperial dispensation that incarcerates and deports millions of people each year – disproportionately people of colour – and routinely exercises its right to assault and despoil other countries and murder and torture their citizens. Perceptive about the structural violence of the new Jim Crow, Coates has little to say about its manifestation in the new world order. For all his searing corroboration of racial stigma in America, he has yet to make a connection as vital and powerful as the one that MLK detected in his disillusioned last days between the American devastation of Vietnam and ‘the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society’. He has so far considered only one of what King identified as ‘the giant American triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism’ – the ‘inter-related flaws’ that turned American society into a ‘burning house’ for the blacks trying to integrate into it. And in Coates’s worldview even race, despite his formidable authority of personal witness, rarely transcends a rancorously polarised American politics of racial division, in which the world’s most powerful man appears to have been hounded for eight years by unreconstructed American racists. ‘My President Was Black’, a 17,000-word profile in the Atlantic, is remarkable for its missing interrogations of the black president for his killings by drones, despoilation of Libya, Yemen and Somalia, mass deportations, and cravenness before the titans of finance who ruined millions of black as well as white lives. Coates has been accused of mystifying race and of ‘essentialising’ whiteness. Nowhere, however, does his view of racial identity seem as static as in his critical tenderness for a black member of the 1 per cent.

LRB · Pankaj Mishra · Why do white people like what I write?: Ta-Nehisi Coates

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LRB · Pankaj Mishra · Why do white people like what I write?: Ta-Nehisi ...

During the big antiwar protests in early 2003, Ta-Nehisi Coates was a deliveryman for a deli in Park Slope, Broo...
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    On ‎Thursday‎, ‎February‎ ‎15‎, ‎2018‎ ‎08‎:‎30‎:‎01‎ ‎PM‎ ‎CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:  

 Supremacy and murder

It's a fundamental and not always innocent mistake to say that the US is killing people in MENA (Mideast and North Africa) for white supremacy. We're doing so for the economic supremacy of the American one percent.

Racism can be a convenient cover story. (Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris - “it’s human nature to hate those you have injured.”)

In response to the assault of neoliberalism in the 1970s, American liberals shamefully chose to stop noticing the class basis of US imperialism, which they had painfully learnt in Vietnam:

'By 1969 about 70% of the public had come to regard the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” largely as a result of the impact of student protest on general consciousness. And that mass opposition compelled the business community and then the government to stop the escalation of the war.'

But the business community and then the government counterattacked in the 1970s, notably among partisans of Israel, who feared that US war weariness would interfere with US military support for the Zionist state. Thus neoconservatism was born.

The broader response was neoliberalism - the conscious, calculated campaign by US business leaders against the social democratic traditions that began in the New Deal of the 1930s and lasted into the 1970s. Social democracy from the 1930s to the 1970s in the US sought to lessen the rigors of capitalism for the majority by means of supports such as Social Security and Medicare.

The strategy of neoliberalism was to use the power of government to protect and enhance the return on capital; to free capital from government restraints, not to free the economy from government, as 19th-century Liberalism had proposed. Neoliberalism therefore depended on limiting democracy in government.

(See "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies," a 1975 report to the Trilateral Commission - the crisis being, in the eyes of this international business group, that too much democracy had developed in the capitalist world during 'the Sixties' and had to be reversed.)

The principal neoliberal tools, from the 1970s on, were (a) globalization (in search of low-wage platforms around the world, with the concomitant de-industrialization of the US economy) and (b) financialization of the economy (the balance of power shifting from industrial corporations to financial corporations).

The effects were immediate and lasting: wages in the US, which had risen along with productivity 1945-73, have been flat since 1973, although productivity has continued to rise. And the concentration of wealth has increased, and at an accelerating rate, while median household income continued to decline, throughout the Obama years.

—CGE
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