A longtime reader sent me the following e-mail:
As I wrote you once before, you do follow Nietzsche's rules for warfare (Ecce Homo, Why I am so wise, 7) Kaufmann translation.
"First: I only attack causes that are victorious; I may even wait until they become victorious.
Second: I only attack causes against which I would not find allies, so that I stand alone....I have never taken a step publicly that did not compromise me: that is my criterion of doing right."
That takes cojones. Especially on the left. Admirable!
The funny e-mail was prompted by this post and this earlier one.
I have the actual privilege of not caring whether I have allies or not, although I know many readers share my concerns about the moronic condition of putatively "left" discourse in the United States (witness the cancellation of a talk by Adolph Reed by the Democratic Socialists of America because he has the "wrong" view about the causes of police violence).
I do not see evidence that the primary explanation for police killings in the U.S. is racism; the focus on racism as the cause is a distraction. (This is not a comment on the killing of George Floyd in particular or the role of race in that killing: like almost everyone else, I do not know enough to say.) The crucial fact is that the police overwhelmingly kill poor and economically marginalized people in poor and economically marginalized neighborhoods (Mr. Floyd is an instance of that). 20-25% of the victims of police killings are Black in a given year in the U.S., but far more than 20-25% of the poor and economically marginalized in the U.S. are Black. If one starts with the more plausible hypothesis that the poor and economically marginalized are disproportionately victims of police violence, then one arrives at a different diagnosis: police violence arises from the role police must play in sustaining capitalist relations of production, the latter being the primary threat to human well-being. Or as Professor Reed put it:
What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion of police violence all along, that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working class populations produced by revanchist capitalism....[T]he shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is...in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments.
And that demand--which comes from Black Lives Matter and the bourgeois academics who populate my social media feeds--is both pernicious and reactionary.
If you then add in the situational factors the sociologist Randall Collins notes, you get precisely the toxic stew of rampant police misconduct that has been repeatedly recorded and shared widely over the last week in particular.
None of this means that racism isn't real: it obviously is. Many pernicious ideologies have long lives, beyond the conditions that gave rise to them. The ideology of American racism, which was crucial to sustaining chattel slavery and then Jim Crow for several centuries, is part of the explanation for why Black people in America are disproportionately represented among the poor and economically marginalized--although Jim Crow and other institutional forms of discrimination (e.g., those restricting home ownership) have played an even bigger role. But based on the historical evidence, racism is an ideology that is primarily an artifact of economic relations, and it arises and is sustained because of its role in legitimizing those economic relationships. There are pernicious attitudes with deeper psychological roots that will outlive capitalism (sexism is a likely candidate), but racism is probably not one of them. I share that belief with two of the greatest American labor leaders and activists of the 20th-century, A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. The fact that the current "race industry" in elite opinion circles has forgotten this is hardly surprising: moral outrage about racism is now mandatory for the ruling classes and their ideological appendages, and of course, it is easy to muster. Moral outrage about capitalism, and the policing practices that are required to sustain it, is not nearly as easy or acceptable, even, ironically enough, among those who think of themselves as "progressives."
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