Chapo Trap House - Bonus - Unions: They're Good Folks! An Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara

Episode Date: September 23, 2018

Amber interviews Bhaskar Sunkara on the centrality of trade unions in socialism, and the role of organized labor in the fight against sexism and racism.

Hi everybody, it's Amber here, and I am doing a special interview with Bosker Sankara, the editor and publisher of Jacobin Magazine. We're talking about an article he wrote for The Guardian entitled, What's Your Solution to Sexism and Racism? Mine is Unions. Hi. So, Bosker, can you man-splain to us exactly why unions are so good at fighting sexism and racism? Well, just simply because unions are built on the idea that workers can't bargain individually. So, for example, for that Guardian piece, I was able to tell my editor, I don't really want to write this, you know, I'll do it for a little bit more money. You know, that's not

something that your average worker on the shop floor can do, because I'm, you know, a proud member of the professional class now, and I'm moving on up. You got the pink hats for a shirt? Exactly, yep. I dress like I'm a young college Republican, but you know, whereas an average worker on an assembly line, you know, or even, you know, a nurse or what, I can't do that, because your boss will say, no, we'll just find someone else, and the machines are doing most of the work anyway. That's the nature of unskilled labor, and even like a lot of working-class jobs that are skilled are replaceable. So, workers have to band together and bargain

collectively, and in that process of aggregating together all these different workers, the workers that are more skilled and more privileged, and the workers who are less skilled and less privileged, you know, together they're going to be able to set standards of pay and treatment and whatnot on the basis of equal pay for equal work. So, the individual workers themselves could hold all sorts of racist views. They could be misogynists in their own home. They could you know hold any sort of idea, but in the process of collective bargaining, most unions actually yield anti-racist outcomes and other progressive outcomes

just by nature of collective bargaining, and people, you know, the response to this piece is all about how, well, you know, I know some union workers and their racists, and unions have been racist, but you know, I cited empirical data that says this is the actual outcome, so that all might be true of unions, and they might have started doing this stuff reelectionally, but in the end they've served to level the playing field within the working class, not just to get more for the working class. Yeah, you draw a distinction, though, and this is kind of the elephant in the room between a consciousness-raising model of

anti-racism and an economistic model of anti-racism. You lightly criticized Tana Heesey Coates, who wrote a very long book that I think everyone is lying about having read, who believes that kind of racism is like an ahistorical, like there's like a racist gene in white people, and that it's just never going to go away. Do you find that a particularly productive theory? Well, I think it's kind of insulting, because if you think about like the Battle of Tours, or whatever that battle was that like Charlemagne lost, you know, if Charlemagne would have lost that battle, I think we would have been living

in like a more enlightened era. We might be already on Mars, we might already have socialism, because, you know, the Arabs, and they're more advanced, you know, science and mathematics or whatnot, would have controlled Europe, and you know, you probably would have some sort of like brown, you know, supremacy on the on the planet. So in other words, like the idea that it was just, I think it's an accident of history. Capitalism happened to arise in Western Europe and some soggy fields in England, because of an accident of history. Yeah, so I think there's this bizarre fixation. Well, I wouldn't say it's bizarre. Like when I

read Coates' work at its best, it's descriptive, and it's describing real oppression and whatnot. I think my problem with him is that when he seems to dismiss the actual solution to these problems, or the solution to a lot of it. I think there's a tendency, it reminds me of like the Israel-Palestine debate, where people are like, liberals, their line for years was, oh, it's so complex, you know, we have no idea how to solve this, there's two sides or whatnot, you know, it's not that complex. If you gave us state power and the actual mobilized forces to push through reforms, we could get rid of the vast majority of racist

outcomes. On Twitter, I said 80% of people got mad at me. I think that was actually lowballing it. I think you're lowballing it too. Yeah, well, I do think there's something too about the a-historicism of it, which kind of baffles me as well, because Tiny Easy Coates blurbed the field sister's book, Racecraft, and they think he is completely wrong. Yeah, it's very bizarre. People keep citing that book that completely disagree with their conclusions or their approach to it. Like Assad Haider, I think, relies on it in his book, and there's a lot of people who, you know, I'm not saying that they're

completely wrong. I mean, I believe they're completely wrong, but, you know, they just are citing a book by authors who to completely disagree with them, but I think this is also very common to what people do to black academics who don't subscribe to the dominant kind of tropes of liberal anti-racism and identity politics. It's that, oh, you know, Adolf Reed is, you know, a couple years ago, people were saying, Adolf Reed, you know, he's bad, but he's not as bad as Walter Van Michaels. You know, I read both their books. I have slight criticisms of both of them. But what's the difference between Adolf Reed and Walter Van Michaels? Also,

they're like BFF. Yeah, it's kind of creepy, actually. I think it's adorable. I think it's like a buddy cop movie. Yeah. And one of them says, racist is now Gibson. I mean, I think, and I've probably like lost this book like 30 times from just like buying it and giving it to people, but racecraft does have sort of the best line on the construction of race in America as a concept. And people like it because like one, they're like very like eloquent writers, and it's a very interesting read. Two, I think they're really thorough historians. And three, they can then cite them and ignore everything they just said. But my

favorite fields quote was the probably a majority of American historians think slavery in the United States is primarily a system of race relations. As the the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. What was the name of that movie that came out a couple years ago? Was it 12 Years a Slave? That movie, I think, captured slavery better than any other movie I've ever watched because it's all about it could have been a movie about the Industrial Revolution or something. It's all about counting and labor productivity and like the

overseer is kind of watching the movements of the slaves to make sure that they're like moving as efficiently as possible early. Yeah, exactly. And I think that really captured what it's, you know, what it's about, you know, and the reason why slavery became unpalatable was because of political struggle. So like an economic system is broken because of conscious political struggle and that should give us pride. That's the reason why my family ended up in the Western Hemisphere is because, you know, slavery was impossible for the British to continue. So instead, they brought in indentured servants. And after seven

years, we got some land and there happened to be oil under that land. And now we're almost as blinged out as Persians. You know, I'm wearing the pink shirt. You know, I got some chest there showing. You're almost there. Yeah. You need a gold chain. Yeah. Yeah. But you also only, I think, ever saw and we have pretty good record of this because the discussion about slavery in American society were very open. They were on all the papers. There was always opposition to it from, you know, progressives and Christians and just people with kind of a basic revulsion to chattel slavery. And the development of what we would call like

scientific racism, the idea that black people are a different species, only became popularized when people are like, you can't justify this morally. And they're like, Oh, no, no, no, yeah, we can't. Actually, they're more like animals than people. That was literally an opportunistic scientific, you know, theory that they pulled out of their asses at the last minute to justify something that everyone was pretty opposed to. I mean, slavery was never like overwhelmingly popular. People do have kind of a knee jerk reaction to that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think part of it is people want to see these

things as trans historical because they often want to just make it some sin to tone to. And I think part of it has to do with who's the class basis of a lot of the left today. I don't know if the majority of the left, but I think a lot of it are white professional middle class people or people from those sorts of families who are like temporarily D classed. I think they are by, you know, their backgrounds probably less prone to see like the existence like the working class is still a very abstract thing for them. Whereas like working for a wage and trying to survive is a reality for most Americans. And also, I

think they're also from more segregated neighborhoods and areas to begin with. You know, a lot of the caricature kind of racist white people in the South that they would point to actually probably live next door to a black person probably has more serious content as far as like going to the same schools, having similar life outcomes and and whatnot than your average member of DSA. Yeah. The Juggalo protests was definitely more diverse than say a nation party. Whenever I go to the parties in those kind of circles, the wait staff is always like fresh off the board Irish. And I think I love those.

Yeah. Because they don't want the optics of having like black people serve them. Therefore they're committing like labor market discrimination. Yeah. You also get in a little bit. I mean, you just touched on at the beginning, but at like corporate diversity training and stuff like that, which I'm really fascinated with. And that does seem to be it is very telling to me how quickly the corporate world and even the military has adapted to anti-racist trainings. Do you know the blue eye experiment? No, I don't. That sounds like a Nazi like like 1945 last-ditch attempt to win the war thing. Yeah. It's

creepy. So this school teacher, Jane Elliott, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, I think she's from Iowa, tried to do this sort of like social experiment, which I'm pretty sure by any kind of psychological standards is like incredibly unethical, where she divided the kids by blue eyes and brown eyes. And she said the kids with brown eyes were, you know, she nicely skirted what could be a problem by saying the kids with brown eyes were superior and she treated them differently or whatever. And you can see video of her doing it to adults and she's like outright abusive to the people with blue eyes. And I guess

the idea is that you can scream at someone until they're not racist anymore. But here's a list of the people that she has done consultancy work for. AT&T, IBM, the IRS, the U.S. Postal Service, GE, Exxon, the Department of Education, the U.S. Navy, and the FBI. You know, those like bastions of anti-racist, you know. Though I watched some of the Mississippi burning like two days ago and I must say that was a high point for the FBI. Oh yeah, everyone loved them then, because they were doing, yeah. I mean like that was always the thing during... They were just attacking socialist, communist, and clansmen. Yeah, that's literally what it

was. I don't think any other racist groups though, it seemed like their focus was like the new left and then in the clan. But I think it says something about like the ability of capital to kind of devour this kind of rhetoric because it doesn't conflict. Like that kind of anti-racism does not conflict with anything that, you know, the military or the FBI does. It also fits with a lot of people's moral sensibilities. I think a lot of people don't who are from this stratum or members of the elite actually don't want an unfair advantage on the basis of their race, right? They don't want people suffering on the basis of

their race. They obviously are just not questioning their position and the actual economy. Well, and the other thing is what Jane Elliott used to say to sell her wares was because at the time there were a lot of discrimination lawsuits that were becoming public. She said, well, it's a real money saver. The idea is like you won't get sued if you institute these trainings, etc. And I think anyone in any kind of professional managerial, you see it a lot now in media class stuff too. Yeah, I'd be fine with it if people knew they were running a hustle. Like in other words, like I don't have a huge problem. If like, you know,

maybe not the US Navy, probably not the US government, but if like a Mexican drug cartel wanted me to like teach some yoga, you know, like I'd be happy to be a cultural ambassador. Yeah, of course. You gotta rep Modi. But kind of back to the a historicism of all of this. We mentioned, you know, Heider's book and there was that really excellent review in Jacob and by Melissa Nashak. It does seem that people are very invested in this myth that the left was in decline because it was too racist and sexist. This is not to say that there wasn't racism and sexism in, you know, the left or whatever you whatever formulation of

the left you're imagining or whatever. But obviously, it was less racist and sexist than the right and the right has become ascendant and right. And also, I'm not sure how racist the organizations of the left were with regards to black liberation. I mean, the left was definitely, I mean, the socialist party had a really mixed record on anti black racism, but a really bad record on like Chinese exclusion and those those kind of things. But, you know, the post new deal left, I'm not sure really battled with had serious issues with with racism. Yeah, I'm trying to think of any examples. The things that they would

probably try to point to would be, you know, some trade union where some guy, you know, used the n word once or something. Yeah, I think I think definitely there was like the trade union movement. There had to be struggles within the trade union movement to make it more open to certain excluded groups to make it more open to black workers, more open to women and so on. But those are struggles within the working class. So obviously, I think there is a role for anti oppression politics. I think the goal should be to bring these politics into a broader worker movements. And right now on the left, I think there's an exception,

accepting of the idea that there is a kind of black community, right? And there's a community of women that have a shared group, you know, a bunch of interests, which is essentially, you know, it's a cross class form of anti racism and anti sexism. And I think we need to pose a social alternative that, you know, takes these issues seriously, but does it within the workers movement? Right. I mean, I do think also you risk a lot of things by positioning those those identities as like in some way coherent, because there's always going to be a group of people who will self appoint themselves as spokesmen or

spokeswoman for some kind of movement. And those people usually have garbage politics, historically speaking. Right. And they're generally from the privileged layers of whatever these these these movements are. So I think there's a difference in other words between let's say if there's a rash of like working class, black political activity, and it's coming from below, and it's taking like a black nationalist hue, like I think socialists should properly work with that, you know, we should probably like participate in those movements and so on. So there's that, but then there's also this kind of broader

politics is talking about community leaders or how, you know, the left should never question the black church or its leadership over the black community, which I think is just, you know, just a bizarre reactionary kind of way of approaching politics. I don't know if you've ever read this book top down the Ford Foundation black power and the reinvention of racial liberalism. I have not. Oh, it's real good. It's real good. I mean, basically it's about how that kind of community politics movement and sort of ethnically oriented community politics in particular was kind of a Trojan horse for a lot of horrifying

liberal policies. Like, for example, the model for school decentralization, which took place in New York first, but it's kind of been exported to major urban areas. And the argument is like, well, we should give these communities control of their own school systems and the communities can run them. And, you know, it's very people love the word community, even though it's reactionary. And so people were very excited about like, oh, we could do well. And they didn't realize actually the problem is like that they're being prevented from accessing resources. So now we have a public urban school system in many

cities that are, you know, terrible, despite the fact that they're in the same cities with all of the wealth. Right. And, you know, when the left says, oh, well, we kind of don't like social democracy because it's it's racist. Like they're ignoring the fact that, you know, obviously the way in which black Americans have made massive advances have been through state intervention has been through, you know, black Americans. There's no doubt that if you're you're born black America, you're probably gonna have access to the worst schools. You're locked at the bottom of a bad labor market. But the problem is the labor

market is really difficult for anyone to advance out of. So we need just massive redistributions of wealth investments in education investments in the jobs programs, healthcare and things like that. And the solutions are actually fairly simple. And yes, beyond that, it's gonna be there's complexity about how do you execute it? How do you get rid of the residual kind of difference? But, you know, let's say if I was a, you know, white employer somewhere, and I was given three employees kind of brought before me for the same job, and they have the same basic skills in education. There's still that racism and sorting that would

happen. And that if one of them is white, one of them is Asian, one of them is black, you know, they might be coded in such a way that I would say, all right, the black worker might cause trouble at the workplace. The white worker is gonna be lazy and might quit and find another job in a couple, couple months. The Asians probably gonna keep their head down and be hard-working. And I think there is that gap that once you adjust for skills in education, you could still see. And that's that's definitely, you know, racism. That's definitely this sorting. But, you know, that gap is six, seven percent, something like that. The question is, how do we get

to that point where that gap is the last thing we have to combat? And how would we combat that gap, by the way, if not for massive state oversight and regulation? Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about this is that there are all these kind of feminist economic theories that float around now about, you know, like reproductive labor and social reproduction. It's like there's this whole, first of all, you're not an Italian peasant. So let's not act like you're out there beating rugs. But second of all, we already know how to close the gap. We've seen the gap closed in a few countries. You know, you want large

investment in, you know, public sector jobs is huge because that's the situation when you can do things like affirmative action programs that, you know, prevent either racial or sexual discrimination. You need things like parental leave. Maybe you even need a little bit of a little bit of an affirmative action on making men take care of children as well. And also basic things like technology have really been keeping the house much easier. I mean, having like a washing machine in your home, like it's, frankly, it's more useful than a dutiful husband. Yeah. I was just in India and you still see household servants in middle class

households, hand washing, everything because labor is still cheaper than technology. Right. Right. Yeah. And like you just, that's one of the things that like electrification plus Soviet, I mean, like that's how you get out of it. Or rickshaws, you know, people like, in most Indian cities, they've gotten rid of the like old school, like Calcutta style, like rickshaws, where they don't even have bicycles. They just like run on the street and with the thing behind them. But I saw one of those guys by Times Square. It's got to be like some novelty value to it, I guess. Maybe, maybe. I feel like I would feel like I don't, I don't

even like the ideas of pedicures. The idea of someone pulling you along in a rickshaw is a little bit, I don't know, man. It's very un-Midwestern. It's a little too big for your britches. But why do you think though that that kind of a historicism exists and persists at the very least? We know how to fix these problems. We have lots of empirical data on how to, at the very least, fix the 90 percent of the way. But you still have people repeating, like for example, like social security. That's one of the great myths that so many leftist believe is that like black people were intentionally excluded from the social

security program to appease Dixie Cracks. When actually they just found it really hard to track down domestic and farm laborers. This is like on the books, but for some reason this idea that there was this like intractable racism within every progressive movement that hobbled it and that, you know, social democracy is kind of a trick where you can sneak in all of these horrible social bigotry. And most sure croppers and other people at the time were affected negatively by this were white, disproportionately black, but in raw numbers white. And in other sectors, other countries, low-wage agrarian workers

were excluded from the first wave of universal programs unless they're brought about by a social democratic party like in Sweden in partnership with the agrarians. So yeah, I mean I think it's, I think part of it is ignorance, but I mean I just, I base it down to the fact that we don't have a social base or isolated from the experience of an actual movement and from the experience of most working people. So our rhetoric just kind of floats and it floats in different directions. So I'll admit that, you know, I think people I disagree with on the left, I think their

rhetoric floats in this kind of professional middle-class directions. When I try to pull back in the other direction, my rhetoric is coming from, you know, another member now of the professional middle-class. You know, I occasionally go home and see my family, most of whom are are working class, but that's my only, you know, my only experience. I'm like, oh, that's what most people do. All right, now I'm gonna bet, about to take a train back to Brooklyn, you know. And I think that there's this mystification of who ordinary working

people are and what they want. You know, if you look at the top five kind of needs and desires and polling of black workers, Latino workers, white workers, like they're more or less the same. Like people want the same things. If you were to ask me... Yeah, but no one wants to, you're not allowed to ever say that. You're only allowed to talk to women about being women. You're only allowed to talk to black people about being black, you know, etc. etc. Yeah. It's a fascinating thing and I think it's

more to do with, I think it's more to do with, yeah, like a separation from a working class base because you can actually, and you're probably gonna have better luck talking with people who are different from you about money. It is a much more universal experience. And the thing a lot of people share of course is like aspiration, right? It's like people want to like be in stable, secure jobs, and maybe they want to start their own

business or whatnot. So there's contradictions the left have to deal with, but it's those kind of, you know, contradictions. It's not people kind of having this kind of view where they say that the only thing that, you know, we're concerned about is, you know, not being in kind of diverse workplaces or or whatnot. Well, worrying about a diverse workplace is a very middle-class PMC thing. And it's true, I worked before I moved to New York, I had a much more diverse workplaces when I was working

in catering and restaurants and things like that. It does seem that the middle class has different kind of concerns in particular when it comes to gender and you hear like a lot of women sort of talk about domestic labor, you know, again, social reproduction is really popular among women who I'm pretty sure could afford maids and nannies. But, you know, again, technology being a big one, time off being a big one, we are completely aware of how to close, say, the domestic labor gap.

We've seen it basically happen in the investment in public sector jobs, in, you know, an expansive welfare state, etc. And yet it's kind of treated like this this secret mystery and the idea is we have to do consciousness raising with men. And I think maybe a lot of people don't want to accept that there's a certain limitation to socialism, which is that it won't yell at your man for you and you have to yell at your own man. But also it's about power, it's about, I mean,

like it just, the answers are so simple in that generally people treat other people worse if they have less power and less leverage. It's easier to, yeah. So we negotiate a different household, you know, contract, right? Like my girlfriend has always earned more money than me. Therefore, I normally come home early and like cook, but then she plays a light bill. And while I'm cooking, I have that AC on 63. Yeah, you earned it. Who's getting over? Yeah, and I think also there's a sense of

universalism that is very misleading when it runs along kind of identity lines. Like I've been a woman without money and I've been a woman with money and I got to say being a woman with money is not that bad. I don't think anyone thinks that, you know, the kind of, and when I say media class, I'm referring to established people who have a nice desk and everything. We all know the majority of people who work in the media now are slinging content for like, you know, 28,000 years for 60 hours a week, but

really established people who we've elected to talk about being Latino or being black or being a woman. They're not particularly representative of the, you know, the major concerns of those identity groups, which are largely material. And for me, the feminist project and sort of with relation to men in kind of a heterosexual context, it's like, you know, socialism gives you the power to leave. And when you're able to leave, they got to be a lot nicer to you. Right. And also, I mean, the old

demand of the independent labor party in the 1930s, their title, their first manifesto, was socialism in our time. And, you know... Oh, that's cute. I mean, that, like, that, you know, optimism, I think, is missing from the left. And I think it makes a lot of sense just on messaging grounds, right? Like, if we really want to combat racism, we really want to combat sexism. Let's say, like, we're going to have a society without racism or without sexism in our time. I think what sexism actually might take a little bit longer at them with racism and existed

for longer. But we've actually seen that in Scandinavia, you know, the equalization of a lot of these levels of household work just by the combination of state intervention and women having high labor market participation and whatnot. And today, you know, when people ask me, you know, why you're so critical of, like, X, Y, Z, like, Doray by now is discredited. But a couple years ago, even, it was like, right, give him a break. He's just... Did you see his latest book?

No, I haven't. He came out with a book, author photo, wore the vest. Oh, that's nice. That's nice. I read that right after I read the Akomei book. But, you know, I think that, like, with a lot of these people, I mean, like, if I really want to defend a flawed institution because it is anti-racist, like, I'll defend the U.S. Post Office. Like, providing, like, hundreds of thousands of black Americans, like, good, unionized jobs and stability and rights,

you know, and it also is flawed, but, you know, it's better than FedEx. Well, and I think the left needs to stop the self-flagellation and just be realistic. And in some ways, maybe we need to get better at celebrating our advances, because I don't know what the resistance is to the idea that things, especially socially, have gotten better. They've been on an upward trajectory. It's better to be gay. It's better to be a woman. It's better to be,

like, any kind of racial or ethnic minority on average in America than it literally ever has been. And that was done through a lot of work, and there's still a lot more work to be done, obviously. But, I mean, it's not, it's not some permanent state. Things changed. There was a time before the kind of American manifestation of anti-blackness. There will be a time after. You think about the rapidly constructed, like, anti-Semitic myth of, like, the pre,

like, Third Reich. That got wiped nearly clean pretty quickly. They really overplayed their hand, you might say. And that's just, you know, people, that's no longer, it's not like there aren't still anti-Semites, but it's no longer enmeshed into sort of like a comprehensive ideology. I mean, things go away. People's minds change, like, think of something like gay marriage, which, you know, again, minor reform, but it is an indicator of, like, a major progressive shift in

popular opinion, and that's good. Yeah, the civil marriage stance was really brave in, like, 2004. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like you're admiring the bravery for being for civil, civil marriage. But, yeah, I think it's really good for our side to just be optimistic and confident without being, having, like, blinders on about progress or whatever else, especially because I think we have a window to make advances in the next 10, 20 years, but with climate change looming, with all these other things, I

actually think that... We're really racing the clock. Yeah, the terrain's gonna be much better for the right in 20, 30 years. Certainly. But, I mean, I think we've got a real shot, but I do think we need to acknowledge progress, and we need to acknowledge the fact that this stuff isn't complicated. We know what works. We know that, you know, you, whatever, people raise their consciousness by doing collective work with one another, and, you know, the trade union movement is arguably,

you know, the most anti-racist institution in American history. All right. Well, thank you so much, Bosker. Thank you for having me. You can check out his article in The Guardian. We will have a link to that. Also, we'll go ahead and have a link to Melissa Nashak's book review, and you can see that at the end of the up. All right.