IDENTITY POLITICS

It was not my intention to endorse identity politics as opposed to politics with an economic orientation. I was responding to what I considered an important point made by Amato in a comment. It is this: To forge an effective political movement, it is necessary to achieve what in the old days was called solidarity. An objective coincidence of interests is rarely enough, nor is an agreement on abstract ideological principles. If people are to work effectively together, and to expend the energy [and even take the risks] required for successful action, they must develop a sense of shared commitment, a set of bonds that tie them to one another when things get difficult -- or merely boring -- as they always do in any political movement. This sense of comradeship is more difficult to achieve among people who come from different ethnic, religious, national, regional, or economic circumstances and backgrounds. I am not saying it is impossible to overcome these obstacles, just more difficult. When people come from the same neighborhood, or work in the same workplace, or worship at the same church, or celebrate the same ethnic holidays, or speak the same language, they find it easier to develop and sustain these ties of comradeship. The entire history of activist politics on the left testifies to this simple truth.

Therefore, when we find that there are large social, educational, religious, or other gulfs between groups of people who otherwise might find it possible to work together, it is worth thinking about this problem, and not ignoring it.

Let us recall that one reason for the absence of a major socialist party in the United States [the only major industrial nation inn the world without one] is the fact that after the end of the Civil War, white workers turned their backs on black workers, whom they saw as competitors for their jobs, and struck deals with their employers to maintain labor peace in return for the employers not hiring black workers [who were just as skilled] Let us also recall the antagonism between Protestant and Catholic workers that made union organizing more difficult in the early decades of the twentieth century.

There is, or ought to be, a natural coalition of working class African-Americans, working class Latinos, White manufacturing and service sector workers, young people, and highly educated people of all races and ethnicities, as well as the growing ranks of former middle class workers being oppressed economically by joblessness, home foreclosures, and the systematic driving down of average wages -- a formidable collection, if it could be forged into an effective movement. It would not be a revolutionary movement -- at least not yet -- but it would move the center of American politics significantly to the left. For a brief moment, Obama was successful in assembling such a coalition. The right has responded by playing identity politics in a successful effort to dismantle this coalition. Ignoring the elements of identity in this dynamic is, I believe, a mistake.

That is what I was suggesting. Now, let us cool the rhetoric and discuss this calmly and seriously. I am really getting very tired of having each of my posts treated as evidence that I am the enemy. Give me a break!

IDENTITY AND LEFT-WING POLITICS

Amato makes, and then develops, an interesting and important point about the need to attend to identity as well as ideology in the development of a left-wing politics. He references the Pan-African movement [quite interestingly], but I should like to address the point with regard to American politics.

In contemporary America, there are very sharp class lines that are deeply rooted in conceptions of self-identity rather than merely in wealth or one's relationship to the social relations of production. Three-quarters of Americans do not have college degrees, and most of the quarter who do have earned them at what might reasonably be called declasse institutions. The roster of colleges and universities that confer status on their graduates is rather long, but in a country with four thousand or more tertiary institutions, they are very much a minority. Like it or not, people are extremely conscious, and self-conscious, about their educational attainments and the associated stigmata [the sort of coffee they drink, the television shows they watch, their relationship to organized religion, and so forth].

The fact is that there are two economies in America -- one with generous rewards and, in the old phrase, a "career open to talents," the other full of dead end jobs, limited prospects, and grave economic uncertainty.

A fundamental problem those of us on the left have is that even, or perhaps especially, the most radical of us tend to have educational and other identity markers that sharply distinguish us from the people with whom we wish to make common cause. They know that as well as we do, and fancy education or no, can smell someone from the other America at a hundred paces.

This divide fuels resentment that finds expression in the demagoguery of the Palins and Becks and Limbaughs. When the Republicans smeared John Kerry by pointing to the fact that he windsurfs and knows French, we all protested loudly, but we knew perfectly well what they meant, and they were of course right. The only politician in recent American public life who has successfully bridged that gap in pursuit of at least nominally progressive politics is Bill Clinton. [Jack Kennedy, oddly enough, also managed that.]

The divide between the two Americas places obstacles in the way of serious left-wing organizing. This is why the labor movement is so important. The Civil Rights Movement bridged that divide as well, since race trumps even class in America.

What to do? I confess that I do not know. Pretending to be someone you are not is a total loser. Americans can smell a phony a mile off [which may be one reason why Palin, despite her media success, has extraordinarily low approval ratings among Americans.]

I thank Amato for raising the question, and look forward to comments.

A SOBER RESPONSE

I am very much in sympathy with the long, thoughtful, intelligent two-part comment by English Jerk [I really have trouble adjusting to the weird names perfectly sensible people adopt on the internet. It is, I am sure, a sign of age.] The distinction between the two forms of union action is very valuable. I am not above nostalgia for the Wobblies [and, as an educator, for the once vibrant tradition of worker education.] I have two responses.

First, as I have a number of times argued, I think -- following Marx's example -- it is valuable to spend some time trying to understand the direction in which modern capitalism is developing all on its own. As I suggest in my paper "The Future of Socialism" [on line somewhere], the inner logic of capitalist expansion leads it not in the direction of small, autonomous economic units, but rather in the direction of huge internally planned aggregations of capital, whose inner decision processes, in their structure but not in their aims, looks very much like a planned economy. This happens because it is necessary to capital accumulation and profit, and can therefore be expected to continue, even in the face of efforts by the state to limit the potentially destructive consequences of such aggregation. We emerge from a financial crisis with bigger banks, not smaller ones, for example. What conclusions can we draw from this observation, assuming that it is true? I fear that in this case, the old Scottish proverb, "many a mickle makes a muckle," does not apply. The world economy is now so enormous that it has plenty of room for collectives, worker owned firms, and other small-scale experiments in non-capitalist economic organization, but I simply do not see how bringing such experiments into being and making them work, for all that it is a worthwhile effort in its own right, will move us toward the replacement of global capitalism. I very much fear that the more likely result is that some enterprising capitalist will find a way to market the effort and make a profit from it [think Whole Foods].

The second response is this: despite all of that, English Jerk's impulse is, I believe, right. The only thing we can do is try, as imaginatively as we can, in our daily lives, to search for ways of being that embody as well as proselytize for our ideals and dreams. I am old, and not likely to start a collective or much of anything else, but many of you who read this blog are young, and have lifetimes in which to make this idea real.

A caution, born of that long lifetime of experience. Thinking is easy, so we tend to think big, since it takes no more energy than thinking small. Acting is hard, and it takes all the energy we have to do just a little something. Now changing the world will take the actions of scores of millions of people, no one of whom will be the crucial actor in all of this. So find a way of embodying your ideals in your actions that you enjoy. If you do, you will keep at it not only during the exhilarating times when things seem to be on the move, but also during the long winters of discontent when everything seems to be going the wrong way. There are lots and lots of things that need doing: helping to organize a union, writing pamphlets, standing on street corners, raising money, making bombs [well, maybe not making bombs ;) ]. All of them are necessary. I, for example, like writing books and I like raising money, but I hate standing on street corners or taking part in marches. So I do what I like and can do reasonably well, hoping that in some small way it will advance a larger cause.

I think of social change as being like an avalanche, not like brain surgery. In brain surgery, one slip or false move and the patient dies. In an avalanche, rocks and trees and dirt are tumbling down a hillside, helter skelter. If you are one of the little clots of dirt [as almost all of us are], what matters is that you are rolling down the correct side of the hill, and thus adding your tiny weight to the avalanche. In this life, we really cannot ask for more than that. With luck, you will meet some nice people rolling down the hillside with you.

LAST GO-ROUND

I am going to make one last comment on the series of rather angry posts that have been prompted by my support for Obama's budget deal with the Republicans. Then I am going to move on to something else. Let me explain why. There is a long tradition, started by Marx himself, of fratricidal in-fighting on the left. [As young men, Marx and Engels started things off with their boisterous fights with the Bauer brothers and others on the left.] This visceral anger is focused on those actually relatively close to one's own position, while the real enemies are passed over more or less in silence, as though it is not even necessary to get angry at them.

Now, for the past two years, our politics have been dominated by the instransigence of the Republicans, who have used the device of the filibuster to hold every Democratic proposal hostage. But the anger for failures and compromises seems to be focused almost entirely on Obama, who is, after all, a great deal closer to the left than are the Republicans, or even the Blue Dog Democrats who have themselves held the Democratic proposals hostage.

Are Obama's politics mine? No, but then I never thought they were. Would he have preferred a larger stimulus package? I think clearly yes, but he knew he could not get what he wanted, and he very nearly did not get the cut down package he was willing to settle for. Would he have liked a public option in the health bill? Pretty clearly yes, but what does it matter? There was no chance at all of getting that past the Republicans, or even past many in his own party. Does Obama want to end the tax cuts for the rich? yes. Can he get that? No. Does he want to end DADT? Yes. Can he get even that? Judging from last night's vote, maybe not.

Who is to blame for all of this? In the first instance, the Republicans. Surely that is obvious. But those Republicans were elected by constituents. So why is there not more anger on the left at the people who put Jon Kyl and Jeff Sessions and John Boehner and the egregious Susan Collins and all the others in office?

One commentator cited a poll, which I have also seen, purporting to show that the "American people" are farther to the left than Obama. Really? Take a look at the results of the recent election. Is the time ripe for revolution? Give me a break. To be sure, the future is always harder to predict than the past, but on my reading of the current political situation, America is a good deal riper for fascism than it is for a proletarian revolution.

Now, I don't like in-fighting with those who are, or ought to be, my comrades. In this respect, I dislike Marx's mentality. I do not choose to go that route, so I am going to stop responding to angry posts about "Obama and the other demons" and focus my energies on things I can do to make the situation a tiny bit better. And I will continue to keep at the forefront of my awareness the simple fact that the Republicans, and the Americans who elect them, are the real problem.

LET'S ALL BACK OFF

OK. I am sorry, Chris, if I seemed to make this personal. I apologize. I don't like it when I feel pushed, and I push back. The truth is that we are all on the same end of the political spectrum, where there are all too few of us, in fact. So let us not reproduce the fratricidal in-fighting of the historical left. That is why I like the labor movement -- it always remembers who the real enemy is.

I shall return to my philosophical postings, and we shall see how things work out. If anyone has an idea how to change the fundamentally reactionary orientation of American politics, speak up.

ON THIS ONE I AM WITH OBAMA

On this one, I am with Obama. The deal cut by the President with the Republicans is enough to make one sick. Extending the unjustified tax cuts for the super rich is appalling, and my in-box is filled each day with messages from left-liberal political groups urging me to do this or that to help block the deal. [Full disclosure: I also have somehow gotten onto the Republican national Committee's database, and I receive endless postal appeals and robo-phone call "surveys" designed to get me to say whether I prefer Palin or Huckabee or Romney. I am ashamed to be on their list, but I have chosen to leave myself on it because it costs them something to contact me, and every little bit helps.]

NEVERTHELESS: I think it is preferable to a political standoff in which all the Bush tax cuts would end. Let me spend a little time explaining myself, before you remove the link to this blog from your list of favorites and conclude that Wolff has gone over to the dark side [or alternatively, has simply gone senile -- always a threat at my age.]

Since I am a strong believer in making politics personal, I shall begin with some facts about myself. I was awarded tenure at Columbia University in 1964. For the next forty-four years, until my retirement in 2008 from the University of Massachusetts, I had an assured salary that rose steadily, either because of cost of living increases or because of genuine raises, from the $11,000 I received from Columbia in '64 as a tenured Associate Professor to roughly $180,000 that I was earning at the end of my career, thanks to an eleven month administrative salary. [By the way, the CPI calculator tells me that the 2008 equivalent of my 1964 salary is $76,400, so my real salary more than doubled over my long period of tenure -- not bad for an atheistical anarchistic Marxist on the public payroll.] Like countless others in my social and economic class, I have been completely protected from the vagaries of inflation, recession, job layoffs, outsourcing, and the rest. National politics has been, for me, a deadly earnest spectator sport, roughly on a par, emotionally, with college basketball here in Chapel Hill. One of the reasons that I have trouble remembering which years have been boom years and which recession years in America is that I have experienced no noticeable alteration in my personal circumstances as a consequence of the one or the other. There were a series of terrible budget crises at UMass during my thirty-seven years there, but although they resulted at one point in the phones being removed from our faculty offices, and though there was never money for travel or research, the simple fact is that I coasted along happily as though I had an independent income.

Now, with these personal reminiscences on the page, let me turn to the deal that Obama struck with the Republicans. Bad stuff first: The handout to the super rich will continue for two more years. In light of what I have said on this blog in recent months, I am going to take it as given how I feel about that. So what did Obama get in return? Well, all the attention is on the extension of the tax cuts for those referred to as "middle class," which, since it includes households with net taxable annual income of less than a quarter of a million, means, by my way of thinking, a great many rich people as well as "struggling middle class families." This is, all by itself, a good thing for the economy, since taking all of that money out of the economy in the form of higher taxes would have an anti-stimulus effect. But Obama got two other things as well. He got an extension of unemployment benefits for two million out of work Americans for another thirteen months. These people are hurting, and those benefits are desperately needed to put food on the table and clothes of peoples backs. All of it, we can assume, will be spent right away, providing a maximum amount of stimulation to the faltering economy.

And -- in many ways the biggest gain of all -- Obama got a one year reduction in the FICA or social security tax levied on the paychecks of working Americans. Let us please remember that for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, many of whom pay no income taxes, the payroll tax is a huge regressive bite into their meager incomes. If I understand what I have read, that tax will be cut roughly a third or a bit less, for a period of a year.

These people have been completely forgotten in all the political talk about "the middle class." To have secured some benefit, however short-lived, for them is in my eyes a political triumph.

Now, how will this play out politically? I do not think there is any doubt that it will help the Republicans, who will be perceived as having faced down the President. The appalling Mitch McConnell will gloat. John Boehner, the George Hamilton of politics, will preen himself and probably weep. We on the left will gnash our teeth and take antacids to counteract the bile in our stomachs. But millions of poor and middle income Americans will get a break when they need it.

Worn down teeth and a bilious stomach seem to me a small price to pay for forty-five years of secure comfort.

So, on this one, I am with Obama.

SOME COMMENTS ON THE BOOKS

Herewith a few comments on the books I recommended dealing with the modern mathematical reinterpretation of Marx's economic theories. The comments make it clear that there are many other more recent works that I have failed to keep up with. All additions and comments gratefully accepted.

1. Piero Sraffa, PRODUCTION OF COMMODITIES BY MEANS OF COMMODITIES This is an extraordinary work, totally different from CAPITAL in tone and style, but fully as compelling and distinctive. Sraffa writes as though he were a monk who, after forty years of meditation on the scriptures, now begins softly, without haste, to speak. The first sentence of the little book is: "Let us consider an extremely simple society which produces just enough to maintain itself." As I remarked, the math is dead simple, but Sraffa, like many theorists, omits intermediate steps quite often, with the result that it sometimes took me hours to read a page, reconstructing the steps and refusing to move on until I understood exactly how each step followed from the one before. Reading the book was an intellectual [and dare I say it, spiritual] experience for me quite like any other.

2. Michio Morishima, MARX'S ECONOMICS I found this a difficult book to work through, and you might want to move on to some of the others, but it played an important role in the development of the movement.

3. Luigi Pasinetti, GROWTH AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION and LECTURES ON THE THEORY OF PRODUCTION. I found Pasinetti very helpful. His writing is quite accessible, albeit rigorous. He is especially good at making the connections between Marx and his predecessors -- most notably Ricardo and the Physiocrats. He even includes an appendix in which he presents the elements of linear algebra.

4. Andras Brody, PROPORTIONS, PRICES, AND PLANNING. I found this a fascinating book for two reasons: First of all, Brody was writing in Hungary, during a time when the government was engaging in economic planning, so, unlike all of the other authors, he is actually concerned with the application of the theory to practice; and Second, in total contrast to all the other authors, Brody worries about whether the units in an equation are compatible. This may seem like a rather minor matter, but I found it quite helpful and refreshing.

5. Abraham-Frois and Berrebi, THEORY OF VALUE, PRICES AND ACCUMULATION. A difficult but important book, that includes a very helpful discussion of joint production, a problem in linear production models on which a lot of ink has been spilled. One of the curious and interesting things in the book is an extremely arcane analysis of a special case in which one of Marx's central propositions holds true. Roughly speaking, the story is this: In explaining why prices deviate from labor values in the general case in which there is not equal organic composition of capital in all industries [the case analyzed in Volume One of CAPITAL], Marx argues that the identity of profit and surplus value is maintained in the economy as a whole. It turns out that this is not true generally, but is true, remarkably enough, just in case the economy is embarked on a von Neumann balanced growth path. [This involves there being no luxury consumption, all profits being plowed back into capital expansion -- "Accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and the Prophets to the capitalists" as Marx says in one wonderful passage.] It had been thought that this was the necessary as well as the sufficient condition for Marx's claim to be true, but Abraham-Frois and Berrebi show that there is a very obscure situation, having to do with the maximal eigenvalues of the unit input matrix, in which Marx's claim also holds. For the specialist!

6. Ian Steedman, MARX AFTER SRAFFA. This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. It is, if I may put it this way, a furiously angry work of mathematics! Steedman is [was?] a British communist who was fed up with his traditionalist colleagues in the Party who insisted on holding to the old bedtime stories about surplus value and all, even after Sraffa had shown that one needed a new, cleaned up version of the critique of capitalism. He plays out all manner of supposed ridiculous conclusions one can draw from the old Marxist story, such as the fact that with joint production, some labor values turn out to be negative. He surely must have been a young man when he wrote this book, and he just cannot contain his scorn for those who hew to the old ways without knowing any math. It is a great read, and lots of fun. By the way, I think he is essentially wrong, but that is a long, long story.

7. John Roemer, ANALYTICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MARXIAN ECONOMIC THEORY. This is a simply terrific book, difficult in its math parts, but absolutely clear in its exposition. One of Roemer's many important insights [which he urged against me in a comment on a paper I wrote and published] is that exploitation is possible even in the absence of a labor market, by way of structures of debt that effectively enslave and exploit workers or peasants. If you are going to read only one book on this list, and are willing to do the work, this might be the best choice.

8. Walsh and Gram, CLASICAL AND NEOCLASSICAL THEORIES OF GENERAL EQUILIBIUM I don't really recommend that you read this, but I include it for two reasons. First of all, when I started reading all this literature, I became very excited about it. At the time, I was very close to Sam Bowles, Herb Gintis, and the other radicals in the UMass econ department. It seemed to me that the success of this alternative approach to economics would require a way of teaching it at the intro level as perspicuous and elegant as that created by Samuelson and others with their familiar little supply and demand curves. I knew I could not do it, but I hoped against hope that Sam would try, since he was [and is] the smartest of the radicals. But he and Herb got interested in Game Theory [which I thought was a mistake] and went in another direction. Anyway, Walsh and Gram attempt a geometric representation of the linear programming models underlying the classical and Marxian approach, so I read their book with great anticipation [but eventual disappointment]. The other reason is a funny story. I had met John Kenneth Galbraith in the senior common room of Winthrop House at Harvard, although of course he did not remember that. Anyway, I was on a plane returning from a talk in Ohio, and in those days the American Airlines jets were configured so that in the first two rows, six people sat, three and three, facing one another across a table. I sat down in one of the seats, and catty-corner across from me was none other than Galbraith, crammed into the seat [he was 6'7"]. I had the Walsh and Gram with me on the table, reading it, and at one point Galbraith reached a long arm across the table and took the book to look at it, without so much as a word. I told him what it was about, and he looked at it and handed it back. He was at that point traveling and campaigning for Teddy Kennedy, who was making an unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was the next to the last time I met Galbraith.