Your responses have been an embarrassment of riches – so many questions and suggestions for further blog posts! I shall certainly read Ray Geuss’s book when it comes out, and then I can comment on it as seems appropriate. I will also try to say something about C. I. Lewis, the professor who influenced me most deeply in ways that I tried to capture in my autobiography. But today, I will try my hand at responding to Fritz Poebel’s request that I address the subject of reparations. This is for me an unusually difficult subject to get my head around so these comments may not be as polished and coherent as I would like.
Human beings live by collectively (although not necessarily
voluntarily) laboring to transform nature so that it can meet our needs and
satisfy our desires. In capitalist
economic systems like those that now organize virtually every country in the
world (including China, of course, regardless of its nominal allegiance to
something it calls “communism”), there are two structures of systematic
inequality. The first, which is essential to capitalism, is the exploitation of
labor by the owners of capital, exploitation that results in ever greater
inequalities of wealth and income. The second, which is I believe not essential
to capitalism but nevertheless is found almost everywhere, is the relative
inequality of exploitation that make some subgroups of the population – women,
persons of color, and so forth – even worse off than those groups that are
favored in the system of exploitation.
Capitalists by and large are inclined to be equal opportunity
exploiters, although they are of course happy to use the biases, prejudices, and
resentments of white men to serve their interests. The demand that women or
persons of color be paid the same exploitative wage as white men, that women
and persons of color be given the same educational and employment opportunities
as white men and be advanced in the hierarchy of jobs equally as are white men,
does not fundamentally threaten the ability of capital to exploit labor. That
is why one frequently finds large wealthy powerful corporations filing amicus
briefs in support of such things as affirmative action programs at universities.
Indeed, the demand by women to be given equal opportunity in the labor market
serves the interests of capital by bringing more members of households into the
workforce and correspondingly making it possible to reduce the wages of those
employed by capital. When two adult members of a household enter the workforce
full-time, the pressure is taken off employers to pay a “family wage” to an
employed man.
Does any of this imply that there is no point in fighting
for women’s liberation, black liberation, gay liberation, and in general for
the removal of all of the differential disadvantages that have come to be built
in the American economic and social system? Good God, no! Of course not! Those
struggles, to which I have in small ways contributed over the course of my
life, are worthwhile on their own terms. Beyond that, I believe they are
essential in any larger effort to confront the underlying structure of
exploitation as a whole.
All of which amounts to no more than a clearing of my throat
before I address the subject of reparations.
The owners of capital would like nothing better than to have everyone
believe that the demand for reparations is a fight between exploited white workers and
the even more greatly exploited black workers. That was the great genius in the
“occupy Wall Street” movement. By casting the struggle as a fight of the 99%
against the 1%, it made clear that the real enemy was capital, not white
workers. (Never mind the percentages.)
What is needed is not to take away some of what white families have and give it
to black families, but to take away some of what rich families have and give it
differentially both to black families and to white families but in a way that
equalizes their well-being across racial boundaries.
Well, that is just an elementary beginning. Now I must get a
haircut to prepare myself for my upcoming zoom appearances. There is no need
for me to appear as both old and shaggy!
6 comments:
"the exploitation of labor by the owners of capital"
Unlike, for the most part, in Marx's day, at least some people who today sell their labor power also own some capital, either by owning some mutual funds or whatever or having an interest in pension funds that invest in the stock market. To that extent, these laborers, these sellers of their labor power, are, in a small indirect way, arguably exploiting themselves in their capacity as owners of some capital. (They don't actually run corporations, of course, but then neither does a super-rich person like Buffett).
This result was pretty much bound to occur as soon as capitalism, at least in certain countries, stopped being a system made up solely of (to paraphrase a paraphrase of Marx) workers who own no capital and capitalists who do no work.
"By casting the struggle as a fight of the 99% against the 1%, it made clear that the real enemy was capital, not white workers."
Would that it were so. "Occupy" was so successful that the majority of those workers have since then consistently voted for plutocratic lackeys. To many of these workers privilege culturally conservative tropes over their material interests. As in the UK, geographical distribution does the rest.
A considerable segment of the white working class never came to terms with the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement. The decision of the Republican Party to go after those votes while remaining reactionary on economics gets us to here.
Perhaps "capital" isn't the only/biggest problem.
I would think that Coates's widely read article on "the case for reparations" (published in The Atlantic in 2014) is one of the key references now. (I haven't read it.) And Boris Bittker published The Case for Black Reparations way back in 1972. (Again, haven't read it.)
Dear Robert, this is spot on analysis. And it's certainly clear and coherent. On a slightly tangent note, here in Australia our present Federal Coalition Government, along with the business community and its representatives, have been bemoaning the lack of surplus labour in the country due to COVID-19. Consequently, they've all been complaining about how this might drive up wages! Heavens forbid!
Stephen Darling
California has a reparations law:
https://oag.ca.gov/ab3121/members
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