Wednesday, March 04, 2020

Note to Sanders camp: read Invisible Man, chapters 17-19, by tomorrow.


Biden, according to one exit poll, took 60 percent of the black vote in Texas. The same story is writ large across the South.

It is a story with a moral, and the Sanders people better quickly get the punchline here. My suggestion to whoever is advising Sanders: read the section in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man about organizing for the Brotherhood in Harlem. The Brotherhood has a “scientific plan” (it is Ellison’s proxy for the Communist Party in the 30s). And the Invisible Man, with his experience of racism, and his own skin color, is an activist, with a sense of what the “scientific plan” means. But he comes against the limits not of the plan, but of the planners.

The planners, like the Sanders people, seem to have decided to repress difference – the real history of African Americans in this country – for their “own good”. It isn’t that Sanders doesn’t denounce racism, but he is averse to the whole symbolic universe around that struggle, partly because he seems to think that it is hypocritical – a buncha neoliberals celebrating the civil rights era while collaborating with the immiseration of the black working class. But just because a buncha neoliberals celebrate the civil rights era – for instance, by attending the ceremony in Selma to commemorate the 1965 march – doesn’t mean the civil rights era shouldn’t be commemorated. And it certainly doesn’t mean that the black politicians that have inherited, and in many ways squandered, the symbolic succession of that era should be treated with contempt, or kept at arm’s length. That can only lead to disaster.

Universal healthcare will make our lives better, but it is our lives, with all the symbolism and poetry of them, that are the dominant party here. The “scientific plan” should serve the people, not the other way around. Sanders campaign will fatally err if it doesn’t make a very forceful correction here. Do not come on like the social worker who knows better, cause that is only gonna lead to defeat.

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