STEP ONE

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!