When the left cut its throat in the eighties, the mainstream
media analysis was that the left had outlived its purpose. Walls were coming
down, and the story went like this: after an unpleasant interregnum during
which the liberal interdiction on state interference in the economy was
universally despised and contravened – bringing about those natural moral
scolds, inflation and the decline of productivity – the old values robustly
reasserted themselves. They took on the entrancing form, too, of a revolt for
freedom, which couldn’t help but entrance the kids. We were now primed to
resume our world historical broadcast from the place it had been interrupted in
the Gilded Age, and this time we’ d democratize the Gilded age, as whole
populations would become investors. The state would move aside, confining its
role to a provider of morally uplifting action movie reality shows hosted on
various military theaters around the world. As in a high concept movie, the
State, a bad guy domestically, would turn out to be a hero abroad, always
intervening for the sake of humanitarianism, and thus making the bystanders –
the populations of those military theaters – eternal grateful as the troops
marched down the streets of their neighborhood or village.
This story explained the left’s demise in terms of a milk toast
Hegelianism devoid of Marxist taint – the spirit of history would become a sort
of CEO Holy Ghost again. History was all about ideas. It was ideas that made
history.
This was a story that, after some initial hesitation, the
leaders of the leftier parties throughout the old developed countries rather started to like. Freed from the
obligation of having to represent the worker – or, God knows, listen to one –
the party leadership decided to switch
constituencies. The leadership became even more friendly with the New Economy
tycoons, who bloomed as the financial sector took on an imperial heft. At the
same time, the Left was digesting the lessons of the great Civil Rights
movements of the sixties, reshaping itself in an image of the progressive
bourgeoisie of the new Gilded Age.
Two oppressed groups in particular were championed: women
(gay or straight) and gays. I don’t think it is a coincidence that these two
groups are seeded across the class spectrum. They are as likely to be
represented in the ownership class as in the wage earner class. This is not the
case, however, with races. It is much less likely for an African American in
the U.S., for example, to be represented in the ownership class, whether staight
or gay, male or female. By a sort of unconscious natural selection, where the
leftist parties broke with their old constituencies, the working class, they
also broke, as was in the nature of the economic structure, with the oppressed
ethnic groups or races. However, it was easy to absorb the Civil Rights
leadership into the ownership or managerial class, so to the leftist
establishment it looked like they were realizing the entire agenda of the Civil
Rights movement, even as, behind their back, they were at least compliant in
the big story of the new Gilded Age – the criminalization of the unfavored
racial or ethnic groups. This, as it
happens, was also the story in the old Gilded Age, at least in the States, as
the Reconstruction gave way to the Reconciliation and Jim Crow was preceded by
that crude but efficient modality of surveillance, prison. In other countries, such as Britain and
France, this process worked a bit differently, outside the “homeland”, among
the colonized, where the necessity to destroy the resistance of the native and
to lure into compliance the native elite also used prisons in a mix of
processes – the major one being the monetizing of the economy – that had a
different shape than the American one.
This, by the way, is not a sneaky ploy to identify racism
with class struggle. I simply want to understaned the effect of the latter in
reproducing new forms of the former. Another story could be told about the
processes in the “interregnum” in which white dominated organized labor and the
state operated in tandem to create a regime of discrimination against select
races and ethnic groups. There’s a certain nostalgia on the part of older lefty
survivors for the fifties and forties – why can’t we, for instance, mount
infrastructural projects and employ people like in the old days? This ignores
one of the major effects of those projects, which were directed broadly against
racial communities. The old slogan –
they built white man’s roads through the black man’s home – was true about that
time, whether or not the “man” sticks
out here like a sore thumb. The destruction of urban neighborhoods through
urban renewal and highways was not a just a “bug”.
Revolutionary changes in the political form of a society don’t
have to exert themselves in sudden and overt events – however, they will lead,
in time, to changes in the socio-economic from of a society. There’s no
substructure superstructure, there are only sifting sands, and the houses built
thereupon. So here we are.
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