Jacobin Show: What Makes People Poor?

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

 

Adolph Reed has been around a long time and as we have reached a point where working class is a dirty word, it is refreshing to read and listen to his views and those of his son Touré on the Jacobin Show. Hearing him say that we shouldn’t use the term woke anymore as “woke belongs to the right” sheds a great deal of light in the darkness of today’s political narrative dominated by the middle class (petit bourgeois) liberals, particularly in academia and promoted by the white racist ruling class in the US.

 

Things have reached such a stage in the airbrushing of the term working class or class in general from the national dialogue that the leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) decided to cancel a meeting Reed was scheduled to speak on his views, held by some other black academics that we have reached a stage where there is a domination of the discussion about race and either not enough about class or the omission of it entirely.

 

I do not intend to defend all of Reed’s views here, I am not familiar enough with his long history of work in this field, but I am very skeptical of black American critics in academia who claim that he avoids race or as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor says, “Adolph Reed and his ilk believe that if we talk about race too much we will alienate too many, and that will keep us from building a movement,”  

 

This is similar to accusations directed at more right leaning critics holding views somewhat similar to Reeds, like John McWhorter or Coleman Hughes, that the motive for their views is that they don’t want to alienate whites or that, as Hughes has been accused of lately that he, “Wants to make whites feel better”. It’s standard faire from the “progressives” it’s cowardly and dishonest, basically the educated professional’s way of calling them Uncle Toms. A black worker would be much more direct. It also in not unlike the accusation of being a self-hating Jew or even being anti-Semitic that some Jewish critics of Israel are accused of.

 

I have written a lot about identity politics on this blog and also made a couple of videos about it on my You Tube channel (nothing fancy I’m video challenged but please don’t be critical it will hurt my feelings).

I am also reading Tauré Reed’s latest book “Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism” and only a third through it at the moment. It has some interesting stuff in it about the various struggles of black Americans against racism and all workers will find it useful for that purpose alone. I am no longer in the workforce or active in the labor movement and miss the union/labor world. I’ll link to a couple of books at the end of this commentary about Black American working class history that I read during those years. But Tauré like his father makes the same point about identity politics; a thoroughly reactionary concept. Tauré writes:  “Liberals use identity politics and race as a way to counter calls for redistributive polices.” The struggle for basic necessities, housing, food, education, health care and so on cannot be successful without class unity, this does not mean abandoning racism or pandering to white racists.Malcolm X was clear when he said that “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”

 

So we have to rid ourselves of capitalism and we, the working class, cannot do that divided along race, religion, sex or national lines. We must have class unity and racism is an obstacle to that. But the progressives (the liberal petit bourgeois to be honest) fear working class unity because for them whether white or any other color, it’s game over. This is why they are so hostile to it.

 

I have shared this personal history before but I am white with an English accent. I have worked in the streets of some of the more economically depraved communities and lived a black community (East Oakland) for almost 20 years. If we were sent o repair a damaged water main in an economically depressed are with maybe 40% unemployment among youth, I would walk toward the liquor store (they are prevalent in poor communities as the reader knows) and outside would be this group of young black males. Many of them were declassed in some ways, permanently unemployed, some dropped out of school and some sucked in to the world of drugs.

 

I walked up there for a purpose. Here were a crew of white guys with decent jobs and in general folks who didn’t live in Oakland and certainly not their neighborhood, and we were there to fix a water leak. I would address them and begin to explain what we were there for. Immediately I could see their expressions shift from an unfriendly somewhat suspicious glares as they tried to figure out where I was from? My whiteness it seems, played second fiddle to how I spoke.

 

A couple might ask me where I was from but when one of them asked if I was from England and I replied in the affirmative, I could see how proud the person was that they got it right. All of them treated me totally differently than if I had not opened my mouth. The natural inquisitiveness human beings possess came out. A white American co-worker would have had a harder time and without years of union activity alongside different people from different ethnic backgrounds, immigrant and women, and little or no delving in to labor history or racial struggles in the US, the barrier would have been hard to break through; one gets angry the other gets defensive. I am confident though, that with the right attitude (not liberal white guilt, black workers can pick on that right away it’s so condescending) and a sense of class solidarity, it’s not hard to overcome.

 

I am as white as my white co-workers but clearly not white American in their eyes. I am no social scientist but I got a break because I was not white American and therefore did not have the same historical role attached to me.  These experiences confirm to me that color is not the main issue, it is the historical role played by white America in its acceptance of the “poison bait” of white skin privilege and the absence of a leadership in the trade unions and the working class as a whole that can offer a united struggle against racism as part of the struggle of all workers against the capitalist offensive.

 

The present narrative about how racism is taught in school or how we deal with it in general is dominated by the middle class and in particular the middle-class (petit bourgeois) academics. Because of this racism and the history of the rise of the US as a colonial settler state will never be taught in a way that does anything but undermines and weakens working class unity.

 

Some reading I am familiar with:

 

Organized Labor and The Black Worker Philip Foner

Detroit I do Mind Dying Dan Georgakas Marvin Surkin

Indignant heart, a black worker's journal Charles Denby

 

Philip Foner wrote ten volumes on the history of the US labor movement Volume 4 is about the IWW and I remember it being a very exciting read and the IWW had a very different approach to racism to the AFL. Of course, there are many more sources out there.