Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Talking about Marx tomorrow...

...with Dr. Donna Lyons (Law, Trinity College Dublin) and Prof. Brian O'Connor (Philosophy, University College Dublin).  Details.

"Defund the police" drove voters to Trump

Not a surprise, really, but here's some data and analysis:

What we found is that Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.

This lines up pretty well with trends we saw during the campaign. In the summer, following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.

"Defund the police" is like "we need more charter schools" in urban areas:  it focuses on a symptom, rather than the causes of the problem (police violence, poor outcomes in urban public schools).  (Earlier discussion.)

Loury on "truths" about race in America

African-American economist Glenn Loury (Brown) has penned an essay that is generating, unsurprisinlgy, a lot of discussion.  As regular readers know, I think "diversity" blather is a fraud, and that racism, while obviously real, is mostly an epiphenomenon of the class politics of capitalism.   And while Loury has sometimes been scathingly accurate about the absurd posturing of the academy about race issues, this latest essay seems to me more deluded than illuminating, many of its "truths" being falsehoods, predicated on a quasi religious faith in autonomous or moral agency (no doubt this faith was important to his own recovery from personal traumas and missteps).  

"Wokism" and the theory of ideology

Yes.

America is doomed, part 478: Oligarchy edition

I can't find a lot to disagree with in this assessment, alas.  An excerpt (but read it all):

The death spiral of the American Empire will not be halted with civility. It will not be halted with the 42 executive orders signed by President Joe Biden, however welcome many are, especially since they can, with a new chief executive, be immediately revoked.

It will not be halted by removing Donald Trump, and the crackpot conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists and racists who support him, from social media.

It will not be halted by locking up the Proud Boys and the clueless protestors who stormed the Congress on Jan. 6. and took selfies in Vice President Mike Pence’s Senate chair. It will not be halted by restoring the frayed alliances with our European allies or rejoining the World Health Organization or the Paris Climate Agreement.

Which of the "top 25" PhD programs in the U.S. have Black faculty in tenure-stream positions?

Philosopher Jason Stanley (Yale) recently remarked on Twitter that in 20+ years, he had taught at four leading departments--Cornell, Michigan, Rutgers, Yale--and had only one Black colleague on tenure-track during that time (Howard McGary at Rutgers, who is now retired).   I'll return to the question of causation and racism (which seems to have overwhelmed the online discussion [and here]), but the facts are indisputable.   Very few of the leading PhD programs have any Black faculty, and even fewer have African-American faculty.  I list below the "top 24" PhD programs with the names of their Black tenure-stream faculty, when there are any.  Please e-mail me with any corrections.

NYU:                 Anthony Appiah

Rutgers:            Derrick Darby

Princeton:        ---

Michigan:        ---

Pittsburgh:       ---

Yale:                ---

MIT:                 ---

Ideology watch: the NYT on Milton Friedman, or how to whitewash the actual logic of capitalism

One of my sons called my attention to this New York Times essay purporting to commemorate and analyze a famous popular piece by Milton Friedman in which he suggested that businesses should have as their only objective what is, in fact, their only objective, namely, maximizing profit.  This can be their only objective on pain of extinction:  that is how capitalism actually works, as a German philosopher noticed in the 19th-century.  Friedman's error was to state openly the actual and entire raison d'etre of capitalism, something that the NYT, as the mouthpiece for the prudent wing of the ruling class, could not possibly commemorate without a full ideological whitewash.  Kurt Andersen, the author of the lead piece (linked above), is clueless (he did better work at Spy back in the 1980s!).   The NYT can't permit telling the truth about capitalism to occur without suitable moralizing illusions (including the new favorite one of the ruling class, "stakeholder capitalism"), and so it rounds up a bunch of them (and one or two outliers).

The Frankfurt School in exile in America

Interesting interview with the historian Martin Jay (emeritus, Berkeley), that also touches on Walter Benjamin, and the post-WWII return to Germany.

Why are the American stock markets elated with the election outcome?

Readers may recall they were also elated after 2016:  unified Republican government meant give-aways to corporations and the rich, and stock markets love that.   There was the downside that Trump was somewhat erratic and unpredictable and liked trade wars, all of which was bad for business.   Now the stock markets expect the best of both worlds:  a stable guy at the helm, Biden, who will be paralyzed from raising taxes by a Republican Senate.   Hence the booming markets.  Ain't capitalism grand?

A ballot initiative in a blue state and what it reveals about the electorate (plus a telling anecdote)

California voted for Biden over Trump by a 2-1 margin.  And yet California voters decisively rejected a ballot initiative that would have restored affirmative action in public employment and college admissions by at least a dozen points.

One might have thought that affirmative action (or "diversity" as it is now wrongly called) is a staple of the Democratic brand in American politics, yet voters can overwhelmingly prefer the Democratic candidate and yet also overwhelmingly reject this policy.  What might we learn from this?

Affirmative action is deeply unpopular, even with many Democratic voters, because admissions and employment are zero-sum games, and the outcomes of those "games" are perceived to be life-and-death matters, which to some extent they are:  under capitalism, everyone the market doesn't need is disposable, so not getting a job or a spot in a prestigious university can seem a serious matter.  And any perception of according an advantage in this life-and-death struggle to a whole group that one is not part of is, perhaps not surprisingly, quite unpopular with those adversely affected.

1987 NYT editorial appeals to a "consensus among economists" that there should be no minimum wage

A good reminder for whom the NYT really speaks. 

(I saw this gem via Alex Gourevitch's FB page.)

Trump offends the professional classes...

...but he is in most respects "business as usual" for the imprudent wing of the ruling class:

Accusations of fascism and assertions that “This is not normal!” belong to the hysteria of professionals, those for whom Trump’s poor taste and political incorrectness finds its criticism in late show monologues and The New Yorker cartoons. For them, a return to normal is merely not being forced to look at Trump’s spray tan. It is the return of feeling safe enough to not have to care. So long as they know the captain is competent, they can stop worrying about the ship going down and get back to reading White Fragility.

The reality is that Trump’s presidency has been anything but “not normal.” It has continued the same brutal worldview of his predecessors, albeit with unorthodox theatrics that has made the mockery of our two-party system transparent. This became evident when the neutralization of Bernie Sanders’s social-democratic message was celebrated even more by Democrats than Republicans, the former of whom could never get beyond Sanders’s fatal error of using the term “working class.” Unsurprisingly, these same people have nostalgically pined for the “decency” of George W. Bush and rallied behind Joe Biden, a man whose entire political career has been spent championing the very policies that made a figure like Trump appealing to so many in 2016....

There's obviously something to this, but like some on the left (I mean the actual "left," not the neoliberal-identity-politics-pretend-left), he underestimates the real threat posed by Trump's authoritarian instincts.  One would not want to repeat Ernst Thälmann's world-historic mistake of identifying the "social democrats" as the bigger threat!

Class and responses to Trump's rudeness and Biden's gaffes

In 2016, Democrats made the mistake of focusing on Trump's rude, crude and vulgar mouth (on display, I gather at last night's "debate" [sic], which apparently some sentient people actually watched!).  Alas, Democrats may be doing it again.   Many people don't care (and those who do aren't on the fence), which is rather important in an election!   This NYT piece from about a week ago, focusing on Biden not Trump, is instructive.  (Law professor Joan Williams addressed related issues a few years ago.)  It addresses the "cultural sensibilities" of voters in those "working-class Democratic communities that put Donald Trump over the top in 2016. They include more than 200 counties that supported Barack Obama twice before voting for Mr. Trump."  What these working class communities have in common--call it the "New Yorker sensibilty"--is that they respect those who stand up to insults and abuse, and punch back and punch hard ("don't take yourself so seriously" is foreign to those who have self-respect):

In the communities we visited, some of their most beloved Democratic politicians have a Trumpian sensibility: They are macho, quick to engage in political conflict and relentless counterpunchers. One is Ottumwa’s Jerry Parker, a former mayor and a current county supervisor. He supported Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primaries; during one local primary meeting, he threatened to take a conflict with a Bernie Sanders supporter “outside.”

Similarly, Mayor Joe Polisena of Johnston is popular even though he is a self-described political “street fighter.” Mr. Polisena doesn’t hesitate to verbally rough up citizens who openly criticize his rule — during Town Council meetings, for example, he calls them “malcontents” and “misfits.”

People in these communities admire the president because he seems familiar. As someone in Johnston told us, Mr. Trump seems “more human, more like us, the working person.” Mr. Trump’s incessant counterpunching, called a sign of a thin skin by many observers in professional circles, is often interpreted as common in many working-class communities.

 

Breonna Taylor and George Floyd

The media, unfortunately, have linked these cases of police killings, even though they have almost nothing in common.  And now, unsurprisingly, a Louisville grand jury has failed to indict any of the officers involved in the no-knock raid that led to Ms. Taylor's death (by contrast, the officer that killed Mr. Floyd was quickly and rightly indicted, although he is planing an aggressive defense).  The failure to indict any officer for the killing of Ms. Taylor is unsurprising because:  (1) a judge had authorized the raid and the warrant to search the apartment because of Ms. Taylor's sometime-boyfriend, a suspected drug dealer, and (2) when the police entered the apartment, a different boyfriend (then at home with Ms. Taylor) fired on the police (he did not know they were police), wounding one officer; the police returned fire, resulting in Ms. Taylor's death.  On these facts, it's hard to see how any officer was culpable for Ms. Taylor's death.  Louisville subsequently banned no-knock raids, which undoubtedly contributed mightily to the cascading calamity resulting in her death.

"The Microfoundations of Marxism"

Philosopher Jaime Edwards (St. Norbert College) talks with philosopher Robert Gressis (Cal State/Northridge) about some of the ideas and arguments growing out of his important dissertation on this topic.  (Edwards and I are writing the volume on Marx for my Routledge Philosophers series.)

Why the right needs to pretend the "left" is more powerful than it really is

Political philosopher Lea Ypi (LSE) comments.  Her point about the Gramscian pedigree of the right's rhetorical strategy is amusing.  (Her focus is Britain, but most of the points apply in the U.S. too.)

Introducing Marxism and critiques of capitalism to high school students

A high school teacher writes:

I'm a longtime reader of your blog and former philosophy student. I teach advanced high school students in English, debate, and philosophy at a public high school. 

I'm curious if you or your readers have any recommendations for essays or books I could excerpt that would (i) help the kids take Marxist thought seriously and/or (ii) help them appreciate why one might see so much infighting on the left between those supporting race-based identity politics and socialists. I plan on teaching some of Reed's articles and a few other articles you've featured on your blog, but many of those pieces don't do the more basic work of unpacking capitalism's flaws. I've taught some of Chomsky's On Anarchism and a few other short essays with some success, but they are all a bit too complicated given the straightforward and relatively easy task of outlining capitalism's flaws. 

Thanks for any help.

I'll open this for suggestions from others, but here are some thoughts of my own.  A colleague elsewhere told me he used to good effect my opening remarks at a recent debate about capitalism, socialism, and social democracy with undergraduates in an introductory PPE-type course at his university (here is a typescript version of my remarks:  Download Capitalism social democracy socialism).  Less basic, but generally accessible, is Jonathan Wolff's Why Read Marx Today (Oxford, 2002)--you'd want to pick some selections.  The essay by Randall Collins in Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford, 2013) is also useful, and free of Marxist jargon although making essentially Marx's point.

Suggestions from readers?

Ibram Kendi eviscerated

This is a somewhat wild polemic, alternately perceptive and then baffling, but quite amusing as well.  An excerpt:

Ibram Kendi reasons through conservative ideologies such as Evangelical Christianity and Afrocentrism. His theories are a confused kaleidoscope of sociological nonsense and unverifiable historical claims.  His assertions have no resonance in the long history of antiracism scholarship, research, commentary and writing. Kendi fills the book with definitions. However, his definitions are not definitions at all, but mere tautologies, where he uses the term he’s defining in the definition, sometimes several times. He makes empirically unsubstantiated claims such as we’re all racists, including most Black people and Frederick Douglass and W.E.B Du Bois. He disconnects power relations from his understanding of racism; he separates racism from its economic foundations and from the exploitation of labor for profit; he uses the term inequity over structural, systemic and institutional racism....

Kendi was raised as an Evangelical Christian. Thinking through absolutes of, for instance, good and evil, God and the Devil, organizes his understanding of phenomena. Confession, the practice of atonement, admission of sin, recognizing you are a sinner and rejecting denial are Evangelical Christian tropes he draws on to understand racism. He applies these tropes to teaching others how to be anti-racists. While perhaps good for conservative Christian eschatology, it’s really bad for anti-racism scholarship and research.

How does this play out in Kendi’s intellectual practice? He says a racist is “One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” And on the other side an antiracist is “One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their racist action or expressing an antiracist idea.” Stated in another way, good people are people who do good things and bad people do bad things....

Kenan Malik on "white privilege" and class

Sensible, as usual (he is responding to Chris "I make things up" Bertram:  in this case, Bertram invented a straw man position that no one holds, as Malik rightly notes).

Anti-racism is not what's needed in America

Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels take another stab at countering the mass delusion that has gripped the nominal "left" in America over the last few months; as they argue (correctly), " because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, antiracism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it."   An excerpt (I've put a few bits in bold):

What we’re actually saying every time we insist that the basic inequality is between blacks and whites is that the only inequalities we care about are those produced by some form of discrimination—that inequality itself isn’t the problem, it’s only the inequalities produced by racism and sexism, etc. What disparity discourse tells us is that, if you have an economy that’s getting more and more unequal, that’s mainly generating jobs that don’t even pay a living wage, the problem we need to solve is not how to reduce that inequality and not how to make those jobs better but how to make sure that they aren’t disproportionately held by black and brown people....

Complaints about disproportionality are liberal math. And a politics centered on challenging disproportionality comes with the imprimatur of no less a Doctor of the Church of Left Neoliberalism than economist Paul Krugman, who asserted in his role as ideologist for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign that “horizontal” inequality, i.e., inequalities measured “between racially or culturally defined groups,” is what’s really important in America and dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ elaborate program for social-democratic redistribution as “a pipe dream.”3

It’s the fixation on disproportionality that tells us the increasing wealth of the one percent would be OK if only there more black, brown, and LGBTQIA+ billionaires. And the fact that antiracism and antidiscrimination of all kinds would validate rather than undermine the stratification of wealth in American society is completely visible to those who currently possess that wealth—all the rich people eager to embark on a course of moral purification (antiracist training) but with no interest whatsoever in a politics (social-democratic redistribution) that would alter the material conditions that make them rich.

"Democratic Socialists of America" is not a Marxist organization...

...as the recent Reed Affair showed.  (Earlier coverage.)   Even so, DSA should do better.

Informative piece on the history of police unions in the U.S....

...in The New Yorker.   I did not know that it was the victory of the teachers' union in the early 1960s in NYC that paved the way for the police to finally unionize effectively.  But I was particularly struck by this observation (which brought to mind something written a few years ago):

According to Paul Hirschfield, a Rutgers sociologist who has written about international law-enforcement practice, the difference [in rates of police killings in the U.S. vs. Europe] is partly in the basic work environment. “American police encounter conditions that are more like Latin America than northern Europe,” he told me. “These vast inequalities, the history of enslavement and conquest, a weak social safety net. The decentralization. Police are more likely to encounter civilians with firearms here...."

Discussion of "police reform" is a bit like the blather about "urban school reform," it largely avoids the actual issue that drives the problems (police killings, poor performance in urban public schools), since that actual issue would demand systematic changes that neither ruling class party cares to tackle.

On the aesthetic seductiveness of Nazism

This essay makes some important points:

Knausgaard attempts to reconstruct the thoughts and emotions of those who were attracted to National Socialism, under the principle that it is impossible to understand the emergence of Nazism—“the last major utopian movement in the west”—without understanding what moved the people of Germany, and later of other European countries, to embrace it. And what moved them, in Knausgaard’s view, was not the Nazis’ promise to redistribute income, or Hitler’s analysis of world affairs, or even, initially, their hatred of the Jews. What moved them was, rather, the joyful feeling of togetherness and community, of being able to transcend not only the fragmented democracy of the Weimar period but politics altogether.

“In National Socialism,” writes Knausgaard, “philosophy and politics come together at a point outside the language, and beyond the rational, where all complexity ceases, though not all depth.” Riefenstahl’s film communicates the pleasure the people experienced—how “good” it felt to them—at having escaped the quotidian chaos of their shabby republic and their trivial private lives, at being liberated from the restrictions of rationality and deliberation, at being on the brink of achieving something large and lasting, deep and simple....

In their focus on the emotional pull of Nazism—its promise to liberate citizens from the frustrations and banalities of an alienated, lonely existence, to connect them with a mass of like-minded souls in “unconditional joy”—the works of Malick and Knausgaard expose us to aspects of how fascism works that it would be laughable to think could yield to academic analysis, no matter how accessibly arranged.

“Establish a private life,” warns [historian Timothy] Snyder. “Listen for dangerous words.” Do we really imagine it was advice such as this that interwar Germans lacked?

"[E]xtant racism isn't what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won't eliminate it"

Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels are, of course, exactly right, and it explains why corporate America and the ruling class have gotten squarely behind anti-racist pablum.  More from Professors Reed and Michaels:

If the objective is to eliminate black poverty rather than simply to benefit the upper classes, we believe the diagnosis of racism is wrong, and the cure of anti-racism won't work. Racism is real and anti-racism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn't what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won't eliminate it. And because racism is not the principal source of inequality today, anti-racism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it....

It is well known by now that whites have more net wealth than blacks at every income level, and the overall racial difference in wealth is massive. Why can't anti-racism solve this problem? Because, as Robert Manduca has shown, the fact that Blacks were over-represented among the poor at the beginning of a period in which "low income workers of all races" have been hurt by the changes in American economic life has meant that they have "borne the brunt" of those changes. The lack of progress in overcoming the white/black wealth gap has been a function of the increase in the rich/poor wealth gap.

In fact, if you look at how white and Black wealth are distributed in the U.S., you see right away that the very idea of racial wealth is an empty one. The top 10% of white people have 75% of white wealth; the top 20% have virtually all of it. And the same is true for black wealth. The top 10% of black households hold 75% of black wealth.

"Racial capitalism" explained...

...by two philosophers no less.   Illuminating, short essay--I had associated the term with Cedric Robinson, but they paint a fuller picture.

Adolph Reed couldn't speak at a meeting of the DSA

I'd heard rumors about this, and now the NYT has an account.  It's description of Reed's views is not particularly nuanced (it's understandably hard for the official mouthpiece of the prudent wing of the ruling class to present Marxist views, although Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor from Princeton [quoted in the article] doesn't have that excuse), but it has some good quotes from Professor Reed:

None of this surprised Professor Reed, who sardonically described it as a “tempest in a demitasse.” Some on the left, he said, have a “militant objection to thinking analytically”....

He finds a certain humor in being attacked over race.

“I’ve never led with my biography, as that’s become an authenticity-claiming gesture,” he said. “But when my opponents say that I don’t accept that racism is real, I think to myself, ‘OK, we’ve arrived at a strange place.’”

Professor Reed and his compatriots believe the left too often ensnares itself in battles over racial symbols, from statues to language, rather than keeping its eye on fundamental economic change.

A much longer interview about Marx

The philosopher Matt Teichman, who runs the Elucidations podcast, has now kindly made available a transcript of my interview with him and Lawrence ("Dusty") Dallman about Marx.

How the capitalist west rewrote the history of 1989 and after

A useful and interesting corrective; an excerpt:

Mass democratic mobilisations have, in fact, existed at the heart of these regimes: workers’ riots in June 1953 in Berlin, workers’ councils in Poland and Hungary in 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 (prolonged by the birth of the Czech workers’ councils), the revolutionary trade unionism of Solidarność (Solidarity) in Gdansk, Poland, in 1980. It is this history that the liberal interpretation of 1989 obliterates or falsifies — and tries to appropriate by presenting it as anti-communist. These popular movements fought, not to re-establish capitalism, but on the contrary in the name of socialist ideals....Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership.....

"The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration"

This is quite interesting, a plausible alternative to the account popularized by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow.

(Thanks to Chris Lewis for the pointer.)

ADDENDUM:  From the essay:

Race is relevant because it is our best explanation for the absence of a working-class movement on the American continent, and thus the persistent underdevelopment of American social policy.⁷⁷ American slavery and then Jim Crow delayed the proletarianization of African Americans, with the result that they arrived in Northern cities after the first wave of American industrialization, in urban environments in which pivotal, scarce resources (jobs and housing) were hoarded by the first and second generations of established white ethnics. This was an environment destined to yield working-class disunity. Black Americans strove to penetrate well-protected labor and housing markets. It was no surprise that established incumbents would craft caste-based remedies to exclude them. Such strategies were rational, even if suboptimal in the long run.

In this sense, partisans of the standard story are not wrong to link American mass incarceration to American slavery. But they are connected not because slavery established some transhistorical imperative that America be always a land of white domination. Rather, they are connected because the plantation economy tied African-American labor to the land until 1940. Blacks were thus bypassed by America’s industrial boom. They are connected also because slavery was largely responsible for an American federalism which assigns law enforcement to those parts of the state least capable of paying the higher costs of redistributive remedies.⁷⁸ In the final reckoning, the story of the twin exceptions that have been the subject of this essay starts with this history.

Cedric Johnson on "Black Lives Matter"

This is worth reading; an excerpt:

While a slim majority of Americans now believe police are more likely to use excessive force against blacks than other groups, millions more do not share the most militant calls to defund or dismantle police departments voiced by some activists.1 Most Americans are upset by police killings, but they also want more effective policing. Over the last five years, satisfaction with police has strengthened among all ethnic and racial groups, including African Americans (from 50% “at least somewhat satisfied” in 2015 to 72% now).

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus, all developments that have adversely affected black workers and communities. Sure, some activists are calling for defunding police departments and de-carceration, but as a popular slogan, Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. And the ruling class agrees.

Nietzsche's rules for warfare...and the question of race and class

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). 

The sociology of police violence (racism isn't the real problem)

This is informative (much more so than the "cops are racist" blather on social media), from the always insightful Randall Collins (Penn); it sheds lights on both why people dislike the police, and the situational and social variables that incline the police towards violence.  Some excerpts:

[3] Police dislike defiance. Jonathan Rubinstein (1973), a sociologist who joined the Philadelphia police in order to study their everyday life (similar to Peter Moskos in the Baltimore PD 30 years later), found that their number-one priority is to be the person in control in all encounters with civilians. For the most part, a cop is out there alone, or with a single partner; they are almost always outnumbered by civilians. Particularly in areas where they know they are unpopular, they feel it is imperative to not let things get out of control. They want to be the one who starts and ends the encounter, who sets the speaking turns (micro-sociology of conversation), who sets the rhythm of the interaction. Acts of defiance, whether micro-actions on the level of voice and gesture, or more blatant words and body movements, will cause a cop to increase their own aggressiveness in order to maintain dominance (Alpert and Dunham 2004). This a reason why trivial encounters with the police can escalate to violence far beyond what seems called for by the original issue.

[3a] Inner-city black code of the street emphasizes defiance. Elijah Anderson’s ethnography of black street life (1999; also Krupnick and Winship 2015) point out that in dangerous areas, where the police are distrusted, most people adopt a stance of being hyper-vigilant about threats and disrespect, and portray themselves as ready to use violence. Anderson says this is mostly a Goffmanian frontstage, a pretence at being tough designed to avoid being victimized. When dealing with the police, this leads to another vicious circle. Black people, particularly on their home turf, are more defiant of police than are whites; often this is no more than a confrontational way of talking, but these are micro-interactions that arouse police aggressiveness. Anderson notes that one reason people in the ghetto are wary of calling police is that they themselves may end up being arrested, because of the tone of these micro-interactions. Donald Black (1980), who pioneered observer ride-alongs in police cars, found that police arrested black suspects more than whites, but this happened when black people were defiant, which was more often than whites....

Racial disparity does NOT help make sense of patterns of police violence

Unfortunately, this essay by Adolph Reed is timely again.   "Black Lives Matter," as I've noted before, identified a real phenomenon--police violence--and then consistently misdiagnosed it, as Reed demonstrates:

Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl) indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by police that is nearly double their share of the general American population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of the general population....[T]he evidence of gross racial disparity is clear: among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding exercise called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright, prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the pursuit of public revenue.”3

This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that “racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.

But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%. However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29 people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case....[N]o black people were among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in 2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of police killing.

How to study COVID-19 and racial disparities

This is sensible; from the concluding parts of the essay:

In addition, when SES [Socio-economic status] is controlled for and does not explain all Covid-19 racial disparities, we should clearly state why that might be the case. One possible explanation is the role of stress and what public health researcher Arline Geronimus has termed “weathering,” or advanced aging caused by bodily wear and tear from fight-or-flight responses to external stressors, especially racial discrimination. Weathering has been linked, in turn, to cardiovascular disease and diabetes, two conditions that have been associated, in preliminary research, with elevated risk for severe Covid-19.

Finally, to counter territorial stigmatization, one can highlight place-based risks and resource deficits that might explain spatial distribution, along racial lines, of Covid-19. Examples include the uneven geographic distribution of preventive care services or the concentration of respiratory hazards and toxic sites in low-SES, minority-heavy areas.

In sum, to mitigate myths of racial biology, behavioral explanations predicated on racial stereotypes, and territorial stigmatization, Covid-19 disparities should be situated in the context of material resource deprivation caused by low SES, chronic stress brought on by racial discrimination, or place-based risk.

"Statement of Academic Solidarity"

This petition has been making the rounds, and has been signed by a number of philosophers and other scholars whom I respect (it's also been signed by some hypocrites, mindless ideologues, and clowns, but that's OK! [amusingly, Avital Ronell, Ms. Solidarity with graduate students, signed]).  I encourage readers to take a look.  Here's the core of the statement:

In recognition of the profound disruptions to faculty’s personal lives, their research, and their teaching, hundreds of U.S. universities have offered year-long extensions of the tenure clock to assistant professors. This is a welcome and indeed unprecedented step. But its uneven application across academic ranks is inequitable and unfair.

Without extending the same measures to non-tenure track (NTT) faculty and to graduate workers, universities leave unprotected the most precarious academics, including those who shoulder the greatest teaching burden. NTT faculty and graduate workers are facing the same challenges as tenure-track faculty: adapting to remote teaching, massively increased caretaking responsibilities, lack of access to libraries, labs, and archives, and the forgoing of professional opportunities. They are also faced with an anemic job market that will only get worse as universities announce hiring freezes for the coming years.

The effects are predictable. The gulf between secure and precarious academics will deepen; countless promising academic careers will prematurely end, depriving the world of knowledge they would have produced. Thousands of scholars and their families will be stripped of economic security just as they need it most. Without employment, NTT faculty and graduate teachers will not have healthcare in the midst of this devastating pandemic....

We therefore call on all universities that have offered extensions of the tenure clock to include all academic workers employed for fixed terms in this extension—and regardless of institutional position on the “employee status” of graduate students. Whether it is the “guaranteed” package of funded years for graduate employees or the capped terms of lecturers and preceptors, all academic workers deserve the relief of knowing that they have job security  and the opportunity to complete their projects in more favorable conditions....

We, the undersigned, will not accept invitations for speaking engagements, workshops, and conferences at named institutions [that do not extend these measures to NTT faculty and graduate students]. By signing we commit to observing this policy for the 2020-2021 academic year. We will reassess pending future developments.

A couple of observations:

(1)  A threat to decline "speaking engagements, workshops, and conferences" during 2020-21 is a rather idle threat, given that there are unlikely to be many of these.  Why not a serious threat:  decline invitations for the next five years, decline to do tenure and promotion and departmental reviews for the next five years, etc.?   I think I know the answer.

(2)  Assuming there are such engagements, whether live or via Zoom, the threat will end up being carried out primarily against schools with fewer resources, since those schools will not have the financial resources to commit to the benefits proposed.

A Marxist perspective on the pandemic and the "response" to it

I don't agree with all of this, but I do agree with the basic point:

[T]he Times asserted that it will become necessary to accept that there is a “trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy.” While in the short term the two goals may be aligned, in “the longer run, though, it’s important to acknowledge that a trade-off will emerge—and become more urgent in the coming months, as the economy slides deeper into recession.”

In its analysis of the “trade off,” the Times proceeds from the unquestioned premise that economic interests can only be those of the capitalist class. The profit system, private ownership of the productive forces and vast personal wealth are unalterable and eternal. Therefore, the “trade off” requires, inevitably, the sacrifice of human life, specifically, the lives of working people.

If productive power were rationally organized to meet human needs, we wouldn't be facing this particular trade-off (there might be others).  (As an aside, I was amused to see Simon Critchley described in the article, rather generously, as an "academic blowhard"!)

Allegory for capitalism?

German zoo may have to feed some animals to others.

(I owe the post title to a friend on FB.)

"Precarity capitalism"

Helpful review of what sounds like a worthwhile book.

Reaction formation watch: orthodox Israeli minister who said the coronavirus was "divine punishment" for homosexuality...

...has now tested positive for the virus.  At least his secret is now out in the open!

UPDATE:  It looks like that story was based on a confusion between the minister, who did test positive, and another orthodox rabbi who did make the outrageous comment about the cornavirus.

"Capitalism, Social Democracy and Socialism: Which is Right for America?": the debate video is now online

Here.  (I noted previously that the texts of the opening statements were available here.)   I haven't watched the video, but I do recall one mistake I made:  I should not have seemed to agree with Professor Caplan that social security should be means-tested.  Social security is a social insurance scheme, everyone contributes, and everyone collects from it.  It is not charity, but insurance. The fact that everyone collects from the insurance scheme they contributed to is another reason it is such a popular political program, a point I did make.

One curious bit during the Q&A was a fellow who was quite incensed that I pointed out, correctly, that the capitalist ruling class in Germany supported Hitler because they were afraid of genuine socialists (not social democrats).  My point--which alas Professor Caplan steadfastly ignored--is that a serious discussion of the merits of capitalism or socialism should not be based on the bad behavior of self-proclaimed capitalists or socialists. 

It was striking that Professor Caplan did not have any real reply to my basic point about the logic of capitalism:

[C]apitalist producers must reduce their costs, for if they don’t, their competitors will do so and then drive them out of business.  Since the logic of capitalism demands reduction of production costs, and since the wages of most people under capitalism are simply “production costs” to be reduced or eliminated, this cannot end well.   The only humane alternative is socialism, that is, ultimately taking collective control of the immense productive power that capitalism generates, so that its purpose is not the endless pursuit of profit, but producing what human beings need to live and flourish.

ADDENDUM:   During the debate, Professor Caplan responded to my observation that Pinochet was also a huge fan of "Chicago School" free-market economics.  (My point, again, was that the professed allies of capitalism and socialism are irrelevant to a serious discussion.)   Professor Caplan offered the rather ghoulish response that Pinochet only killed about 3,000 people during his reign of fascist terror.   Defense-by-body-count is not really my cup of tea, but if you go that route, the population of Chile at that time (about 9 million people) is relevant:  by way of comparison, it would be the equivalent of murdering more than 90,000 Americans for political reasons (and more than 750,000 tortured--see below).   S. Wallerstein, a longtime reader from Chile, also wrote with some useful additional information:

The official figure is 3,227 killed and disappeared and 28,459 tortured.  Those figures underestimate the total because in order to be listed family members had to file a report (for which they received a small pension,   which is an incentive of course) in the case of those killed and disappeared, and the victims of torture also had to file a report (for which they received a small pension too), but in many cases,  especially that of women who were almost always raped or sexually abused during the torture, no report was filed.   

If you want to use the figures, the sources are two "non-partisan" commissions, one on deaths and disappearances and the second on torture (headed by a Catholic bishop), called the Rettig Commission  and the Valech Commission  respectively.  Looking a bit more, I see that since the original commissions, they have found 30 new cases of deaths and disappearances and 9795 new cases of torture.  

"Critical theory" is dead, dead, dead, and Habermas killed it...

...and this review just confirms it.   The Rawls-Habermas normative theory mash-up that now constitutes so-called "critical theory" is so far removed from Horhkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, not to mention Marx, that even associating this exercise in Kantian ethics with the Frankfurt School or Marxism should give rise to a defamation action (not sure who the plaintiff would be, though!).   Folks are free to do Kantian ethics, or Hegelian ethics, but it has nothing to do with diagnosing capitalist modernity or strategies for liberating human beings from its iron cage.  A real critical theory now needs to start with the political economy of the academy that produced this collapse of Marxism into bourgeois ethics, i.e., irrelevance.

Ruling class media v. Bernie Sanders

This is a pretty good video:

ADDENDUM:  By the way, that's Mimi Rocah who said Bernie "makes her skin crawl" and she doesn't know why.  I have an idea:  maybe she's an anti-semite?  They do tend to have that reaction to gruff, assertive Jews like Bernie.

 

The pernicious class politics of "diversity blather"

The President of Oberlin College, in order to save perhaps $2 million per year, proposes to fire more than 100 dining services and custodial employees represented by the U.A.W. in order to hire outside vending services which "are better able to reach economies of scale based on their size and expertise."   Translation:  these services will pay lower wages with fewer benefits, so will cost less--since the unionized workers being fired no doubt enjoy better salaries and benefits.   "It is our hope that many employees will be given the opportunity to interview for jobs with the newly selected vendors," reports the magnanimous President, without any irony.   "Hope"?   Surely Oberlin could make it a condition of a new contract with vendors, but they obviously won't.

Oberlin is hardly alone in making moves like this, it's a tried-and-true way of reducing labor costs at the expense of the lives of a hundred-or-so working class people.  But in case someone might actually care about the lives of working-class people, the President assures us that "we have kept sacrosanct our commitment to financial aid to ensure diversity."  Well, that's a relief.  I bet that financial aid adds up to a couple of million dollars as well.   But since diversity is more important than the ability of unnamed working-class people to live minimally decent lives, we can all rest easy knowing the college has its priorities straight.

ADDENDUM:  Here's another benefit that the fired employees will lose:  tuition benefits for their children (see pp. 5-6).  But at least there is financial aid still for "diversity"!  (Thanks to Paul Weithman for calling this to my attention.)

On Althusser

This author doesn't like him (I don't either), but he points out some things I did not know:

He’d done precious little of the donkeywork required of a professor of philosophy. As he admitted in that posthumously-published memoir, though he’d been the École’s go-to guy for counsel on the most abstruse philosophical ackamarackus, he’d actually been winging it for years. He hadn’t, it turned out, read all that much. “I knew the work of Descartes and Malebranche well,” he wrote, before descending into a more confessional mode: “Spinoza a little, Aristotle not at all . . . Kant not at all, Hegel a little.” A little is right. For his thesis on Hegel, Althusser actually made up quotations that were never spotted by his tutor, Gaston Bachelard.

Above all, though, Althusser was unfamiliar with the bulk of Marx’s work. That’s right. The guy who found fame with books called For Marx and Reading Capital, had read about as much Marx as Margaret Thatcher had. Though he followed Bachelard in arguing that The German Ideology represents an “epistemological break” in Marx’s thought (as it does: it’s the book in which Marx abandons Hegelian idealism), Althusser later admitted that he was unsure how he’d arrived at that conclusion because the only bits of Marx he’d glanced at all predated The German Ideology.

Alas, the author of this anti-Althusser polemic doesn't realize that Marx did indeed understand his theory as a scientific (wissenschaftlich) one, the aim of which was to explain social and economic transformations through history.   "Positivist fealty" is thrown around as a term of abuse, and Popper is actually mentioned as someone who actually had an interesting objection to Marx (Popper understood even less about Marx than Althusser).   So most of this essay is garbage, but the facts about Althusser (if that's what they are) are interesting.

(Thanks to Paul Horwitz for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Christopher Byron, a PhD student at the University of Georgia writing on Marx's theory of exploitation, writes with a useful point about the preceding:

I am not an Althusserian, my thesis rejects most of his work, but nevertheless, we need to be careful here. It is true that Althusser confessed to being a fraud at the end of his life. However, he was also clinically mad at that point, so how reliable is that confession? I reached out to professor Warren Montag who has done a lot of good scholarship on Althusser and has visited his archives. He informed me that in fact if you go through Althusser's books, it's transparently clear he read Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc etc., closely, with copious notes, manuscript drafts, marginalia comments etc.  Moreover, if you read reports by his students like Derrida (Yes I know Derrida sucks!) and Foucault, among others, they all praise him for being consummate in his knowledge of the canon. Moreover, if you read some of his manuscripts that are now being published (e.g., how to be a marxist in philosophy) it's clear he's well read. So although Althusser said he hadn't read Vol I-III, he lied, or forgot, or lost his mind. Montag says his handwriting is all over his copies of Vol I-III. Although he said he never read Kant, or Hegel, he lied, or forgot, or lost his mind. I'm not defending Althusserian theory, but I do want to defend him from the claim that he got away with decades of lying and fakery.

It really doesn't matter whom the Democrats nominate, as long as they beat Trump and take the Senate

On this, I fear Krugman is correct.  A Democratic Senate will not go along with a lot of what a President Sanders or Warren want; a Democratic senate will make progress on healthcare, guns, and other issues even under a President Bloomberg or Klobuchar.   No Democrat can win without huge African-American turnout, so we can only hope that Mayor Pete goes away (quite apart from his vacuity).  A Bloomberg-Abrams ticket surely has as good a chance as a Sanders-Abrams ticket, and maybe better, because lots of Repugs might vote for Bloomberg.  But I do hope Democrats don't forget that ousting the Mafia Donald is important.  Global capitalism will continue to eat everyone alive, but even Bernie Sanders isn't going to change that:  he would just plug a few more holes in the dam than Bloomberg.

UPDATE:   This post certainly pissed off some Sanders fans on Twitter!   Warren and Sanders are the only presidential candidates I've ever given money to.   I wish I were as confident that Sanders can win as some others are:  the evidence is mixed.  I certainly hope he can (Warren is fading at this point, my guess is it comes down to Sanders and Bloomberg, who will pick up the Biden and Mayor Pete votes as Mayor Pete gets destroyed in the South).

Historian Victoria Bynum (Texas State U) responds to editor of AHR

Her response, to the AHR editor's sneering, is very strong; an excerpt:

Despite your disclaimer that “in principle” being white should not “invalidate” the views of 1619 critics, in fact the skin color of historians critical of the 1619 Project has been scorned (and far worse) over and over again in the Twitterverse—by historians as well as the general public—as the preeminent reason for discrediting our views. In my case, not one of them has bothered to note (if they knew or bothered to find out) that my entire body of published works over the past thirty years has analyzed the effects of class, race, and gender on the nineteenth-century South. It’s not simply that my skin color matters to certain historians and others. It now appears that it’s all that does matter (with my age a close second)....

Perhaps it’s not surprising that racial essentialism forms the basis of much of the public reaction against historians critical of 1619, since the same essentialism underlies the Project itself. My understanding of class deeply informs my analysis of race, both of which I addressed in my interview with the WSWS, and my essay, “A Historian Critiques the 1619 Project,” published on my blog, Renegade South, and by the WSWS. In both the interview and the essay, I dismissed pseudoscientific theories about separate races and argued that such beliefs predispose one to embrace a theory of hypodescent (i.e., the “one-drop-rule” of race), which posits certain ancestral “bloodlines” as more powerful than others. From there emerges the assumption, implicit throughout the 1619 Project, that only “black” people in North America were enslaved. Yet, anyone familiar with the history of U. S. slavery knows it was a multiracial institution. We know that many enslaved women gave birth to the children of white men (often their enslavers), and that those children were decreed by law to be slaves. Yet, these children were at least as white as they were black.

How often does the NYT run articles highlighting ads attacking particular candidates....

...other than Trump, of course.  Not that often, but the prudent wing of the ruling class no doubt deems this newsworthy.   Can Sanders beat Trump?  Who knows?  Could Trump get the Republican nomination in 2016? Who knew?  Could Trump be elected President?  Who knew?   But the ruling class knows what it can't abide and their indoctrinated lackeys at the NYT do their duty!  I've corresponded over the years with various NYT journalists who read this blog:  aren't you folks appalled by this?  I'm sure you are, but speak up!

 

Historian specializing in white supremacy responds to critiques of the NYT 1619 Project

Alex Lichtenstein (Indiana), the current editor of the American Historical Review, has penned a response, of sorts, to the various critiques of the 1619 Project.   Professor Lichtenstein's "work centers on the intersection of labor history and the struggle for racial justice in societies shaped by white supremacy," which may explain his embarrassing sneering throughout at the Marxist interpretation of history in which class trumps race.  But putting that to one side, even Professor Lichtenstein admits:  " Frankly, I wish the AHR had published these interviews, and I hope they get wide circulation. Not for the critique of the 1619 Project itself, but because collectively they insist on the significance of historical context, the careful weighing of evidence, the necessity of understanding change over time, and the potential dangers of reductionism. I would urge anyone to read them."   His defense of the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is a bit feeble, as anyone who compares his selective recounting (dare one say "spin"?) of the interviews with the actual interviews will see.   (Here, e.g., are the interviews with Oakes, McPherson, and Wood).   The one useful takeaway is that, at least according to Professor Lichtenstein, the teaching materials prepared by the NYT are not as one-sided and inaccurate as Hannah-Jones's lead essay.

Hillary Clinton really is an appalling shill for the prudent wing of the ruling class...

...as this makes clear.

ADDENDUM:  Some useful context.

Another entry for the Black Book of capitalism...

...rising deaths by suicide and substance abuse in the working class.   As this account appears in the NYT, no discussion of actual causes and effects is permitted, thus we find this:

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

But that's because "both political parties" have been operating in the shadow of the Reagan Revolution from the neoliberal right that began in 1980, and that has gradually destroyed the FDR Presidency (and its consensus shared by both parties) that lasted from 1933 until 1980.  In 2016, we had the first real challenge to the neoliberal consensus in Bernie Sanders's candidacy for the Presidential nomination.  The future of this benighted country will depend upon whether Reagan's long reign is finally brought to an end.