Rev Left Radio - Unity & Struggle (Pt.1): Race & Capitalism, Unitary Theory, and Frantz Fanon

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

This is the first installment of our new and 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 first episode, Breht is joined by Eve and Chino to cover the foundational concepts and the methodology of Unity and Struggle's race study. 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: 'Make Change' by Bambu Check out and support Bambu's music here: https://bambubeatrock.bandcamp.com/ ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. So today is going to be the first installment of our ongoing sub-series with the organization Unity and Struggle, where we basically have an episode every month or so where we cover what they're doing in their race study. They're doing this comprehensive historical materialist analysis of race and how it sort of is co-instantiated with the development. of capitalism and this will be the first installment of that and it'll just be an ongoing project between rev left radio and unity and struggle i think it's incredibly important that they're doing this research and i just wanted to use our platform to help get the word out and their their ideas and their analysis out to more and more people so definitely check out unity and struggle and with

that said let's dive into this first installment of our ongoing collaboration with them enjoy My name is Eve, and I am with the national anti-state communist collective Unitarian Struggle, and I'm joined here with Chino, also from Unity and Struggle. Peace, yeah, thanks for having us. My name is Chino. I'm another member of Uniting Struggle, and I work in New York City with a group called Take Back the Program. Well, awesome. I'm very happy to be doing this project with you.

I really am excited about this research program that you're undertaking, Before we jump into the questions, do you just want to say a little bit about Unity and Struggle as an organization before we get into the topic of this discussion? Sure. Yeah. Unity and Struggle is a small national anti-state communist collective. We're interested in joining the Marxist Center Network. And we do a lot of local organizing. Most of our members are in the South, in New York City. Yeah, we do some organizing around, you know, anti-gentification work, migrant justice work. We've done a lot of stuff around student organizing, queer organizing. So we've just been around and been involved in many different ways over the years. And one of the things we like to do is, you know, take study and reflection seriously. So we're really excited today to be on the show to talk about some work that we've been doing around race and capitalism and some study and reflection we've been doing around that. Yeah, absolutely.

And we're honored to have you on. So let's go ahead and dive into it. These episodes for our listeners, they'll be shorter than our normal episodes, but it'll be a real. recurring sort of sub-series in our show. So going forward over the next several months, we're going to continue to have members of Unity and struggle back on to work through their big race study that they're conducting. And this is important for a million reasons, most of which I think our listeners should pretty much intuitively be aware of. So the first question to ask is just basic, like what is the purpose of this overall race study and what

are you hoping to accomplish with it? Yeah, so it's a really long-term race study. It's, you know, We're doing, from now until July, we're studying race up until Reconstruction. So it's a huge undertaking, a big project. But we really just wanted to take, you know, a serious approach to the relationship between capitalism and race. And I think, you know, this has practical consequences. We're living in a moment that saw the movement for black lives and international struggles related to race and colonization, imperialism. You know, so I think there's a lot of questions that are coming up for people about the relationship between race and capital. and how these struggles are unfolding relating to race.

So for us, you know, in sort of our day-to-day work, it's important to answer these questions systemically and, you know, really spend some time thinking hard about them. And maybe a thing that I think unity and struggle does pretty well give us some little props is we try to establish sort of a shared foundational understanding on a theoretical and almost philosophical level about how to approach the different, politics and phenomenonship that we're going to run into organizing, right? So we take pretty seriously, like, let's all get on the same page about understanding what

race is, you know, like in a capitalist society, what is race as a phenomenon, what happens politically with it. And we have a bunch of different internal studies that we do for different things, the basic Marx syllabus, so we know Marx's categories, you know, a gender syllabus. And this one is we're doing an even kind of a deeper dive into race, partly because the absolutely well it's it's incredibly important this sort of historical analysis of race and how it you know sort of co-developed alongside the development of capitalism is crucial to understand if we want to get a full picture of what capitalism is and then there's i think there's just a lot of confusion

broadly um with regards to to the connections between racism and capitalism and there are obviously plenty of liberals who like to downplay the role that capitalism plays you know and just emphasize identity sort of deconstructed or detached from the broader historical movements of capitalism and colonialism that really, you know, gave rise to it. So let's go ahead and dive into the first question today, and that is just maybe a foundational concept to start with would be that of like unitary theory. So can you talk about that, how it's related to feminist debates and then just maybe talk about the broader logical and historical framework? Sure. So we made a, like a Google doc, I don't know if we could repost that on social media for others to see, but kind of an open version of the readings that we're working through, right?

And a bunch in the first section that's all, it's a little more theoretical, it's like foundational concepts, and a bunch of them were drawing from social reproduction feminism and different kinds of Marxist theories of gender, which are kind of ahead right now. There's been a lot of great thinking about that, and it gets to, through gender, it gets to some of the issues of how to issues of identity, how do some of the fundamental, like, inequalities in social life, gender and race, how are they reproduced under capitalism? So we're drawn on some of those readings to kind of give us like a foil to maybe draw on some of that thinking and social reproduction feminism to think about race.

And one of the through lines that we're drawing on is unitary theory, which could broadly be like, you know, like a body of theories that try to think race and gender and capitalism as logics that go together. They're constantly reproducing each other instead of like maybe a dual systems approach or something. We think of them as different systems that sort of overlap in certain times or contexts. Instead we're trying to think, how can we think of these as like a big unstable totality that's evolving at the same time? Yeah, and I think one of the things that we found helpful is using, kind of returning

to Marx and using Marx's method in order to understand race. And so one of the key texts that we're pulling from is a couple of pieces by Harry Chang from the 70s actually that looks at the way that Marx uses logical and historical categories

to explain phenomenon and social relationships. And so he uses the example of money and how the money form is expressed logically and historically. On the historical side, you know, money is based on gold and it has a historical trajectory that we can trace. But then on the logical side, it's, you know, it's a little bit more abstract. It's like a social relationship of mediating exchange, mediating all forms of our

social activity and giving the appearance of a material relationship between people and a social relationship between things. So it's this, you know, sort of like phenomenon that's reproduced through capitalist social relations. So we find that helpful in terms of understanding other types of social relations like race and gender. And that's, that's what unitary theory is attempting to take up. And there's been some interesting developments, particularly, you know, from people like FTC Manning and the end notes folks, to sort of reframe the debate in terms of these frameworks that Marx gives us. So, yeah, that's sort of where we're taking up some of the work.

Yeah, that's really interesting, and it certainly sounds very sort of dialectical, right? You're not treating things as if they exist as separate, discrete objects that just sort of overlap coincidentally, but that, you know, there's a dialectical relationship between these seemingly separate things that form a whole, and they really serve to sort of maintain different aspects. you know like the racial component maintains a certain aspect of capitalism etc so i like the historical materialism and the sort of dialectical reasoning that that is being employed here to understand the connections between race gender and capitalism etc so let's move on to another foundational concept here in your work which is that of fanonian marxism on our sister podcast

red menace we're we're currently working through the entire book of wretched of the earth and you know obviously that's one of, I think that's Phenon's masterpiece. And so this is very much, you know, in my wheelhouse currently and in my head a lot. So can you just go into detail about what that is and sort of the role that it plays here in your study? Yeah, absolutely. That's really exciting that you all are reading that. Yeah, we should definitely engage with that. We're going to read one chapter from Restead of the Earth Leader,

but actually a big sort of tenet of our understanding of race comes from black-skinned white masks. And there's one chapter called The Fact of Blackness. in that book, and then the conclusion that, you know, we also tend to pull from a lot. And for us, one key thing that Fanon does is he expands on Hegel's understanding of the master slave dialectic and offers sort of an emphasis on experience and how experience shapes social relations, both subjectively and objectively. So the way that people are shaped by social relations of race, you know, how race imposes on people. upon people is sort of like reproduced between, by the working class and sort of the activity

of the working class as well. So it's not just something, like race is not some sort of like object that's like imposed upon people, but something that's actively reproduced on a daily basis within the working class. So this is something that Fanon sort of unfolds in his fact of blackness chapter about, you know, what is this experience of race and how is this reproduced sort of on a daily basis in interaction between the individual and, the world. So yeah, we just find that really important. And then, you know, there's questions raised throughout black-skinned white masks about what, what that expression of race, what sort of form it takes. So, you know, he talks about expressions around black nationalism and what liberation

looks like through race. Earlier, I think in the beginning of this, you mentioned, you know, sort of liberal understandings of race, setting aside class. But I think, like, the flip side of that is sort of a class reductionist framework that doesn't grapple with the lived experience of blackness as a path to liberation. And Phenon discusses that a lot. So, yeah, we think it's an important element in just understanding race in general. Fanon's such a great thinker to get it all that stuff through. I think in the first section, we had a Peter Huda's piece, right? Yeah. Yeah. So Peter Hood, he's kind of like a political cousin, you could say, like we're coming out of a C.L.R. James tradition. He's coming out of a riotous.

and I have Skaia tradition, but he has a great article that we pulled from historical materialism that's looking at Phenon. And so he hits on like the black-skinned white masks stuff, which is like master-slave dialectic, like how race is experienced and then how it unfolds, the struggle against it unfolds. And then the second half of it is all about wretched and like beyond sort of the individual or phenomenological experience of race. How does that experience and the struggle unfold on like a mass level and how did it unfold, like in practice in Algeria when Phelan got caught up with shit. And so there's a few aspects emphasized, right? There's the like, if in classic master slave dialectic, the master and the slave have to mutually recognize each other because the master

needs like recognition from the slave that doesn't exist in the world of the colonized and the racialized. So the only way you regain agency and recognition is like a being in the world is the colonized people turn toward one another and recognize one another and then stab the colonizer. And Fenon talks about that on an individual level, what it's like to experience that as a person, you know, and the turning toward oneself and identity and the shouting back at the world when they're like, oh, you're a beast, and you're like, yeah, fuck you. But also he talks about that on the level of like the anti-colonial struggle. What is it for our colonized people to turn toward one another and then wage a struggle against the colonizer? And how through that

process do you begin to break down the racial categories and like make possible some sort of what phenomenon calls a new humanism but like what you're figuring out what it would mean to be a full human being you know the being a humanism is like only exists in a mutilated form beforehand and it's only made possible through the struggle against race and colonization yeah it's almost like the only way you know a full human can really develop as if that contradiction between you know in Hegelian terms, the master and the slave, but in Fanonian terms, the colonizer, the resolution of that dialectic is like the prerequisite to the development of a full human and Fanon's sense of the term, right?

For sure, for sure. And then within that, there's all the tensions, like the Fanon's thing with Sartra, like how much do you know what the new humanism looks like before you go through the period of turning toward one another and violent struggle, you know? and that's why there's so many different readings of Fanon. How much is he a nationalist and how much does he totally hate the national bourgeoisie? I think you need to go broader. How much is he an identitarian and how much is he a universalist?

You read one chapter of black skin. It's one way. You read the other chapter. It's another. Same with Wretched. Yeah, absolutely. And I really found in Wretched of the Earth when Fanon is talking about the base and superstructure in the colonized context, he sort of flips Marxist orthodoxy.

He sort of like messes with it a bit. I think in the book he calls it like slightly stretching the Marxist analysis because in the colonial conditions he's like it's not that an economic base comes first and then there's a superstructure of racism but he says the base is the superstructure in the colonial context your race is the determining factor of how the the sort of colonial economic system is then built right if you are if you are you know brown or black in a colonized situation you don't need the the operations of capitalism to be going on before that racism exists but it comes in and it already sets the table, that racial difference sets the table for the economic

development of the colonial society as a whole. So, yeah, just absolutely fascinating and interesting to think about. Phenon is, I think, an absolutely essential thinker. I don't see, the base superstructure thing is interesting because our group takes a slightly different tack on it, which maybe connects to some of the unitary theory stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, I don't know, like the way that some people have conceded with the base and superstructure stuff is kind of like a pyramid, right, where there's the base at the bottom, and then that sort of informs the superstructure. So you have the economy and then the different other social relations, you know, the state or race or cultural expressions, etc., that are the superstructure that are sort

tied to the base and then expressed. A helpful visual that we find that we've used is to think of it as actually like a sphere, like two sides of a sphere. So it's, you know, the two are sort of, you can't have one without the other and the two are sort of like mutually reinforcing and um creating a totality together right yes it's not so much as dividing it between what's more fundamental and less fundamental but it's like you can't really make that division at all exactly yeah it's as if it's two different ways of seeing the same phenomenon right one is primary in the sense that it's something exists subjectively and then uh you can decide what to do based on that objective existence but it doesn't cause the base doesn't cause things to happen and

the way that like you think of things causally or one pinball hitting another causes it to move in a certain direction. Right. Yeah, fascinating. I like that a lot. Okay, so again, this is going to be a shorter episode. So I'm going to sort of wrap it up here in a second. But before I move on to the end here, is there anything else you wanted to say about this

part of the study before we close it out? Maybe one last thing that we didn't really get to touch on is just the way that Marks understands the fetish. And this is something that I hope will return to. And again, you know, we find Marx's method really helpful. And so we're actually, the study is organized into sort of logical and historical sections. So next time we'll be discussing primitive accumulation, and it's a little bit more historical and concrete. But in the future, we might touch back on the fetish, because I think this is one sort of gray area.

And we're, you know, this, through the study, you know, we're not professing to know everything. We're not, you know, coming with, like, super clear answers. but it's an exploration. So we're hoping to kind of fill out a little bit more of, you know, using Marx's conception of the fetish in order to understand race. And this is an area that hasn't really been explored very much. So we're hoping to kind of experimentally, you know, work on that through the podcast and the race study. But, yeah, just, you know, the way that Marx discusses social relationships between material objects.

We see that as a helpful framework for also understanding the way material bodies, are given a social life and a social objectivity beyond its material flesh. So, yeah, that's something that hopefully we can kind of fill out a little bit more in the future, but wanted to touch on a bit. Check out that Harry Chang piece. Interesting dude and also his bio. He has a little biographical piece. Someone wrote about him on monthly review.

He was an interesting independent thinker in the new communist movement, very philosophically astute, and he uses this money metaphor, which is really interesting. money is a relation reaching out to be embodied in a certain substance which is gold and you could think of race the same way a certain kind of relationship within capitalism that has to seek out certain types of bodies to be symbolized in or embodied in and you get a situation where all money is gold but all gold is not money in the same way that all slaves are black but not all blacks are slaves fascinating all right well that's going to wrap up the discussion for today and as eve said next time We'll be tackling primitive accumulation. But before we end this, can you let listeners know where they can find your organization and your research online, how they can interact with this stuff outside of just this program? Yeah, absolutely. So we're posting the study openly and a Google doc that people can edit and comment on to give us feedback on the study.

We're at unity and struggle.org. And then we're on social media on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Unity and Strug. So that's Unity, U-N-I-T-Y, and A-N-D, Strug, S-T-R-U-G. One-G or two-G? Just one-G. Just one-G. Awesome. Yeah, we'll link to as much of that in the show notes as possible.

And thank you both, Eve and Chino, for coming on and doing this first installment of this ongoing series. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this plays out. And already, just in a short, like, 20-minute conversation, we put so many things on the table that are just utterly fascinating. So thank you both for coming. on, and I'm really looking forward to continuing this collaboration. It's so much, great. It's like to you see.

What do you think of this world now, when they promise love and peace? Then you see around you hatred, strife, and racial hypocrisy. It's I'm telling you how things are some going to be. You wonder what the future will truly hold. Politicians can speak so bold and promise to lead the way if you give them your vote today, then you're open brain. Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern,

once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude, Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern. And then you go on into some action. And you and I have to make a stop. And the best place to start is right in the community where we live. I'm going to be able to be.