Rev Left Radio - Unity & Struggle (pt. 4): Race, Alienation, & Double Consciousness

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

This is the fourth installment in our ongoing collaboration with Unity and Struggle. This Rev Left mini-series will trace and engage with the development of Unity and Struggle's deep study of race through the lens of Marxist historical and dialectical materialism. In this fourth edition, Breht is joined by Eve and Wren to cover colonized racial dynamics and its relationship to alienation.  Here is our Red Menace episode on Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in which he lays out his complete argument regarding alienation: https://redmenace.libsyn.com/economic-and-philosophic-manuscripts-of-1844-karl-marx Check out, and contribute to, Unity and Struggle's study here: http://www.unityandstruggle.org/2019/11/racestudypart1/ Check out more from Unity and Struggle here: http://www.unityandstruggle.org/ Follow them on twitter @unityandstrug Outro Music: 'Gloomy Sunday' by Billie Holiday ------ LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. For today, we're doing the fourth installment of our ongoing sort of collaboration with unity and struggle, and today's topic is going to be centered around race and alienation. On our sister podcast, Red Menace, we recently covered the philosophic and economic manuscripts of 1844 by Marx, in which he lays out his entire theory of alienation. So if people want to go hear that theory and that text, I'll link it in the show notes of this episode to get a fuller view of the Marxist concept of alienation. But today we're going to be talking about the intertwining of that concept of alienation with race. And today we have on Eve and Wren.

Would you both like to introduce yourselves before we dive into the question? Yes, thanks so much for having us back. I'm excited to be here. I'm really excited to talk about this racing alienation piece. So again, I'm Eve and we're with unity and struggle. It's a small anti-state communist collective. And we're doing this long-term study on race and capitalism. So this is just one part of that.

So thanks again for having us here. Hi, I'm Wren. This is my first time on Rev. Left Radio. Thanks for having me. And, yes, also excited to talk about racing alienation. I feel like these questions are very essential to sort of the organizing we do. Awesome to have you on for the first time, Ren. And yeah, alienation is one of those topics that, for whatever you may think about it,

or whatever your critiques you may have of it, is really, really good at sort of connecting with people that might not be steeped in theory. So regular working class people, when you sort of articulate the theory of alienation, they sort of intuitively relate to it. And so for recruiting and sort of meeting people where they are, I find focusing on alienation to be really helpful.

So intertwining that with race and expanding it, I think will be even more helpful. So with that said, let's go ahead and dive into the questions. Again, for those who may not know, these are a little shorter episodes because they're sort of an ongoing collaboration. So again, this is the fourth installment. If you want to hear the first three, we'll link to that in the show notes as well. But for alienation, the first question, I guess to ask is sort of what is alienation?

And is there any difference between the concept between Marx's rendering and France Fanon's rendering? Yeah, thanks for that. I appreciated the way that you sort of frame this as something that everybody can relate to. and I think Phenon makes some interesting arguments around that that we can kind of unpack as well. I think alienation, like you said, it is something that people sort of intuitively understand. I guess my like one line understanding of it is the act of giving your powers over to something else. And so Marx discusses this, as you said, in the 1844 manuscripts and a few other places as a process where under capitalism we sort of give away our powers.

So, you know, we're creating the world around us. We're creating everything that exists in our world, but yet it appears to have this sort of power over us. So we're compelled to go to work every day. We're compelled to have this sort of like one-sided existence under capitalism. But yet we are sort of creating those conditions through our social relationships and our everyday activity. But this process is sort of obscured and it appears as natural. So in applying this to race, we can cut this a few different ways. One of the most important ways is to look at experiential narratives from people of color and black people in particular.

This is not exactly the focus of this section. And I just want to acknowledge that Ren and I are two non-black people. So we didn't feel that it was super appropriate for us to be representing this question in that way. But one thing we do draw from is the rich history that Phenon lays down around a psychological approach to alienation. So this is more of an abstract analysis of how racial alienation functions as an essential part of capitalism and how it appears as natural through the fetishization process. So Phelan argues that it's almost impossible under racialized capitalism for him to have a subjectivity. So he spends a lot of time in black-skinned white masks, sort of unpacking what it means to be a racialized person, a black person under capitalism. And his racialized subject is both trapped in this existence.

So he's a super exploited other. He's viewed as a monster and he's subject to death at any moment. But yet he also finds liberation through this blackness. And this is something, these are like two sides of a contradiction or an unfolding process that I think will unpack. a little bit more as we as we talk. But one other thing I wanted to highlight and putting into conversation what you had said earlier about how everybody sort of understands intuitively this alienated experience is Phenon's arguments with Sartre, who was a French philosopher.

So the debate that he points to is Sartre's explanation of the universal subject. So he argues that, you know, communism, freedom is found with. within this like universal proletariat. Some people might read as a colorblind dictatorship of the proletariat. And Phenon pushes back on this a lot. And the Afro-pessimist traditions really dig into this question of this universal subject and whether this is even possible. So that's one major area that we wanted to discuss today.

And it relates to questions about humanity and freedom as well. Yeah. And so, you know, kind of thinking about the Fanonian expansion of alienation. It's like a double alienation. There's the Marxist alienation for the worker under the sort of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist workplace. But then for workers of color, for colonized workers, there's an extra layer of alienation stemming from the sort of the racialized component of that broader capitalist system.

And I definitely think that's absolutely true. But let's go on to the next question then, and you sort of hinted to it in your last answer, which is what does freedom and humanity mean for black people? and for enslaved people. So I think before we get into sort of an understanding of humanity, I think we have to understand how these thinkers conceive of alienation. And in our study, who we looked to were Du Bois and Sadiah Hartman as historical precedents in the black philosophical tradition

in sort of trying to understand where Afro-pessimism situates itself, right? And so, you know, for Du Bois, he understands alienation as this veil that isolates the black subject from the white worlds. which does not allow the subjects to have true self-consciousness, right? As Du Bois is famous for, his conception of the double consciousness, he understands the black subject is always looking at himself or herself through the white gays. And we see echoes of that in Phnom, right, as how Eve described.

And so for him, alienation is overcome by the incorporation into the white world. That's the only way you can attain true self-consciousness, right? That's how you attain your humanity. And so we just wanted to look at Du Bois as kind of a, foil to how Hartman and Boulderson might conceive of alienation and humanity and freedom, right? And so jumping into Hartman, who Sidiah Hartman, who is a scholar, who looks at sort of the historical lineage of alienation from slavery into the post-bellum worlds. Some people see her as sort of like a precedent to the Afro-Pessimist tradition, so that's kind of

why we looked at her. And so she sees alienation and slavery as like the terror slaves were subjected to. Slaves were excluded from the category of human and with it entitlements and universal rights. And so there is a selective recognition of humanity under slavery and the recognition of a slave's humanity is actually, she argues, you know, it seems quite intuitive, unintuitive, or like contrary, that that recognition of humanity is an oppressive force. So this is important sort of drawing out her argument about alienation under slavery. She argues that these similar forms of alienation continue for the free black subject, right? Like the terror, the selective recognition of humanity.

Humanity is actually an impressive force. And so that's sort of what's important from her argument for us. And she further elaborates on this alienation as inhumanity that's inverted almost. So, you know, it seeming echoes to what we're talking about with Marx and Phenon. she describes it as quote the travesty liberation castigated agency and blameworthiness of the free individual

so to go on while you know black folks are legally recognized they're still subject to a certain subjugation and subordination through state racism right it's like the you know the appearance of equality and freedom but actually there are a lot of hierarchical

social relations as we know and what is interesting about her argument is that she she characterizes those the strategies of state racism as emotive and libidinal, and this is something that, you know, the Afro-pessimist tradition draws on sort of arguing that, you know, the reign of terror is one that is not rational. And it's like different than how, you know, like the white proletariat is subject to. It's like a different relationship. I'm just going to continue on about Wilderson or about Afro-pessimists, the Afro-pessimist tradition now. And, you know, I think for me,

this is my first time reading Afro-pessimism, and even before this, I heard a lot of, like, you know, talk about it, and I think some people kind of dismiss it as something that's, you know, not important for struggle. You know, and I would argue that I think it's important to look at this tradition because, like, Phelon and, like, other thinkers, it offers, like, a very rich examination of the particularities of racialization and black alienation. And I think it also challenges theoretically, you know, some forms of Marxism, you know, like Eve described earlier. So for the Afro-pessimist tradition, we looked at Frank Wilderson III and his work, and, you know, we see him sort of continuing on arguments that Hartman makes. He argues that the violence

towards the black body through slavery is the foundation of the modern bourgeois state, with its bifurcation of political society and civil society. He argues that this violence is ontological, meaning it's at the essence of, at the crux of our social worlds. I'm going to say this in a couple of different ways because it's, I think, super important for his argument is that he's basically saying he posits that black death is what defines both civil and political society. To say it another way, the black subject's alienation

is intrinsic to our society and we see it manifested through death, through the specter of the killings of unarmed black men through incarceration and its capitalist accumulation, of black bodies. So another way to describe it is, you know, in his description of the ontological nature of the violence towards the black body

is basically the incompatibility of the black subjects in incorporating into civil society into the modern bourgeois state. This is super important, so let's just like hold this idea that, you know, we'll come back and revisit it. And, you know, in his argument, he offers a critique of Marxism, particularly a Gramscian Marxism.

He critiques that Marxism interprets racism to be derivative of political economy, and he kind of unpacks Gramchie's strategy of the war of positions, basically. And what the war of positions is is basically Gramsci argues that the Poetariat attains freedom by appropriating civil society so that a political revolution can occur. As you can surmise, you know, following Wildersen's logic on the ontological placement of black suffering or death, we can see his critique of Gromji and the social movements that draw on that whose work centers on the expansion of civil society, such as like movements for rights, entitlements, or sovereignty. Because he sees that expansion of civil society actually as one

that, you know, predicates on on black death. Just to sort of connect that to what's going on currently, we see that same sort of dynamic playing out under a pandemic where the racist, you know, U.S. bourgeois state is directing its state violence disproportionately against black and brown people for not social distancing or not wearing masks. Video after video is coming out of black people and brown people being brutalized for not social distancing while, you know, white spring breakers can amass by the thousands and right-wing reactionaries can carry AR-15s to the steps of capital buildings and threaten to kill governors and literally nothing happens, but if black people aren't social distancing, they get absolutely brutalized.

And then, of course, the spectacle of black death really being concentrated recently around the Akhmud Arbari case in Georgia, where, you know, he was gunned down by white vigilantes, and it took over 10 months for even charges to be pressed against these white killers. And, you know, it's almost cliche at this point. But to think if those racial positions had been reversed, and it was black men, you know, chasing down a white jogger and slaughtering him. in the street, how very differently that would have played out. And then while we're all in pandemic, we just get these images being forced fed to us.

And reactionaries clearly take some sort of libidinal, psychosexual joy in the domination and brutalizing of the other. So these concepts can really be sort of concretized and understood through what's literally happening all around us as we speak, you know. Absolutely. And on top of that, you know, capitalism cannot move forward without the accumulation of labor that is done by, mostly black and brown people. I had a conversation with a black UPS worker the other day. I asked him how long they were going to continue to make him work. And his response was, they're sacrificing us. You know, this is something that everybody sees very, very clearly,

that there's just a racial domination happening in the streets, but also, you know, on every level of capitalism. Yeah, and the one thing that you just made me think of is the New Orleans sanitation workers. They went on strike, and the state of Louisiana, I don't know if they went through with it or just threatened it. I haven't kept up with that particular story, but they were going to use prison labor as scab labor

to compensate for the sanitation workers, largely black men going on strike in New Orleans. So on every fucking imaginable level, this shit is playing out. Yeah, exactly. Is there anything else you wanted to say about Afro-pessimism or a black subjectivity before we move on to the strategic implications? Yeah, I think I had a couple more thoughts if that's cool. I think to add on to what I was saying earlier, I feel like there are, you know,

I think it's what's challenging, you know, even to me personally about Wildersen's work is that as someone who's like appreciated the Marxist humanist tradition is that, you know, Wilderson and, you know, the Afro-pessimist tradition offers a very rich critique of, you know, Marxist humanism and offers a critique in pointing out that like the historical and legal distinctions have always excluded blacks from this category of human, you know, pointing to SARS, right? And then I think, you know, Afro-pessimism posits sort of interesting conclusions about what needs to happen, basically. Wilderson argues that because of the black subjects sort of being outside of the category of human or outside of the modern bourgeois state, that the strategic

conclusion he comes to is that like civil war or insurrection needs to happen. And, you know, for me, I feel like there's a way to synthesize this with like certain, you know, traditions of Marxism, you know. I think as revolutionaries, we can all agree, like we, we do like a radical dismantling of our society needs to happen. You know, speaking to what Eve said earlier, like, you know, we do not want to be trapped in this fetishization process in which we all reproduce capitalism on a daily basis. And so I think we can sort of imagine when he says like Civil War, we can imagine like an elaboration of that as like a dismantling and reimagination of the way the world is organized. And, you know, I think some Marxist traditions look at the overcoming of the dialectic

and overcoming of obfuscations under capitalism, you know, kind of between the particular and the universal like we're talking about, but also between, you know, civil and political society speaking to the Afro-Pasimist tradition. Absolutely. So what are some strategic implications of this overall framework? What are some like sort of strategies we can derive from this sort of conversation broadly? Yeah. So one of the pieces of feedback we've gotten about this is that it's hard for people to kind of connect it to everyday struggle.

So we want to do that a little bit more, moving forward. So one of the things that comes to mind around this, one of the thinkers that we actually didn't read, or we haven't discussed at this point, is Jared Sexton, who's also an Afro-pessimist thinker. And one of the things that he argues is that he lays out this elaborate critique of indigenous struggle for sovereignty. And he says that essentially for black people in the U.S.,

there is no before to return to, and there is no land to claim. And so he sort of like arranges black struggle and indigenous struggle in a bit of a moralistic hierarchical way. But it's also rooted in the, you know, the lived experience of blackness in the U.S. as a way to kind of argue that struggles for sovereignty from indigenous folks is inherently anti-black and doesn't incorporate a potential. struggle for freedom for black subjects. But we found this to be a little bit contradictory to the actual lived experience of indigenous people. And we think that, you know, there are a lot of

positives to gain, to, you know, sort of synthesize from the Afro-pessimist tradition, including this very particular unique experience that needs to be at the center of struggle in the way that Phenon argues. But we found it helpful to think about, to look at the lived experience of indigenous racialization as not only wrapped up in sovereignty and tied to a specific place and time. You know, I think one example of this is just the way that people in on reservations right now are given body bags instead of medical and basic needs support. So I think that sort of like gestures at a continuing genocide project that, you know, settler colonialism is still unfolding. Also, the struggles in Standing Rock were contradictory, but in their most radical expressions,

they were fights for resources and land and freedom from the state for everyone. And in inviting people from outside the region to join in the fight, and by making connections to the Flint water crisis, for example, these struggles argued for full self-determination for all. And, you know, they use the Dakota Access Pipeline as an example for how fights like that can happen over and in many contexts. similarly I think that there's a long-standing tradition within chicanismo that views Atslan as an ancestral home but as a form of cultural or spiritual commons that don't argue

for a return to an indigenous past it's not concretely tied to land but instead it blends the past with the present in a more metaphorical and symbolic sense so this is an interesting response to Wildersen's problem and Jared Sexton's problem of not having a past or a land to return to we find these helpful examples absolutely is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap this a wonderful conversation up yeah sure um like thinking about strategy i think for me the race and alienation readings we did spoke to um you know just uh you know my experiences and what i learned from organizing in the incarcerated workers organizing committee in new york city around 2016 with um you know the men and their loved ones

that were directly impacted by the quote-unquote gang raids that the NYPD and other agencies did on certain neighborhoods in the Bronx. And a lot of that organizing took the shape of prisoner rights and the need for the recognition of humanity of black and brown incarcerated people by sort of like the prison, like by COs, as well as by the state.

And I think, you know, like, maybe perhaps some people see that as sort of like not revolutionary or just like sort of like a like a liberal struggle but I think that struggle was very important because I think through the process of like collectively organizing and collectively you know recognizing each other and struggle a different consciousness is like created in that process and I think it spoke to sort of like the potential for like revolutionary struggle around like you know when you when you begin with the the question like, oh, like, you know, we need to be recognized as human while incarcerated, then the question can shift easily to like, why do these prisons exist, you know? Like, so I think it speaks to how like sort of, I don't know, like the lines between fights for recognition as well as like, you know, fights for a different society or intertwined and sort of these things are in flux, right? Yeah, totally. They're all intertwined. They're all interdependent. They all inform one another and at the very least what we can pull out of this conversation is that

at least in my opinion and I don't think this should be controversial but you know Marxism stripped of decolonial theory of prison abolition of black liberation theory of even stuff like Afro-pessimism which isn't directly related to Marxism but can inform it is really a weak and nonsensical form of Marxism and it can easily turn in to just another vehicle through which to express white chauvinism, which we see very often on the white settler left. And so you can really see the dangers of having a Marxism stripped of these dynamics and these theories and these lenses. And it's not a Marxism worth having. So I really hope people that might not be as up to date on their decolonial theory as they are in their general Marxist orthodoxy would take that seriously

and do the necessary work to expand their political understanding and their political imagination. And they're really their political theory. So with all of that said, thank you so much, Ren and Eve, for coming on for this fourth installment of our ongoing collaboration. Would you like to let our listeners know what we have on slate for next installation

and maybe some shoutouts and where people can find Unity and Struggle Online? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again for having us. This is great. So our next installment is going to be on wage labor and white supremacy and we'll be back in a month or two on that.

You can find us online at Unity and Struggle.org and we're on social media platforms at Unity and Strug, U-N-I-T-Y-A-N-D-S-T-R-U-G, just one-G. And I just want to give a quick shout-out to some of the folks who have joined us in our study group, Malika and Robert, and then a special shout-out to Dynan, who helped us fill out the Afro-Pessimism section on this, which we didn't know a ton about,

and we were really excited to learn about. So thank you so much. Totally, that's awesome. And yeah, hopefully one, someday soon, we can do a full episode just exploring Afro-pessimism because that's a whole line of thought that I have not really been informed on and I really am interested in. So, yeah, thank you both so much for coming on today. We'll do it again in a month or two.

In the meantime, stay safe out there. the shadows I live with are nonetheless. Little white flowers will never awaken you. Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you. Angels have no thought of ever returning you. Would they be angry if I thought of joining you? Gloomy Sunday I spend it all. My heart and I have decided to end it all. Soon there'll be candles and prayers that are said I know. Let them not weep, let them know that I'm glad to go. Death is no dream. For in

death i'm caressing you with the last breath of my soul i'll be blessing you gloomy sunday dreaming i was only dreaming i was only dreaming I wake and I find you asleep In the deep of my heart dear Darling, I hope that my dream never haunted you haunted you my heart is telling you how much i wanted you gloomy sunday