Blood in the Face is a book and movie combo about white supremacy under the direction of James Ridgeway, who writes for the Village Voice in New York City.
The book covers general trends in white supremacy over the last century, while the movie documents a single white supremacist conference held in rural Michigan in 1990. Between the two, the creators paint a sketchy picture of these movements which offers a lot of good information but not much understanding of the roots of racism, national oppression and the material basis for fascism in Amerika.
Taking something of a zoo-goer's approach, these efforts tend to look at the masses of white supremacists as alienated deviants, manipulated and duped by greater powers. According to this romantic (and common) view, working class whites don't benefit from white supremacy, but are themselves victims of it.
For example, the book emphasizes the leadership of powerful monopolists such as Henry Ford, who was the "main publicist" of Jewish conspiracy theories in the 1920s. Ridgeway quotes Adolf Hitler as saying, "I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections ... We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America...... (p.43)
Although Ridgeway & Co. place too much emphasis on the demagogic leaders of white supremacist movements, they correctly warn of the increasing tendency toward openly fascist organization among white workers, most of them originally "normal" people, not freaks.
One Nazi tool-and-die worker from a Michigan auto Plant tells the filmmakers: "We're just common people, working class people, everyday all-American people ... and we've realized that the only thing we've got to thank for the position we're in is our white culture, and we're not going to let it be destroyed by any sub-human trash."
Theoretician Bob Miles--a former Republican party leader, insurance executive, and official in the George Wallace presidential campaign in 1968 (p. 22)-- explains in the Film that white supremacist converts "will come from the working class, and that's where our strength is even today. When we had 2,000 members of the Klan in Michigan back in 1970, the bulk of our people came out of the auto factories ... that's not the upper class, that's the working class."
The book includes a fairly complete genealogy of supremacist groups going back to the original KKK, which, although useful, serves to create an artificially sharp distinction between the open white supremacists and the mainstream of Amerikan politics.
George Wallace was "pro-labor" for white people, and the Southern white working class supported him almost entirely. He won 77% of all working class votes in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1968 election. (That support was echoed by David Duke followers in last year's governor's race in Louisiana.) The failure of white industrial unions in the South is in fact largely due to the national leadership's shift toward integrationism during the Civil Rights Movement(1)
When the Montgomery carpenters' union in 1956 erected a gallows in the city's downtown, and hung the NAACP in effigy, the structure bore the sign, "Built by Organized Labor."(2)
The effects of openly white supremacist movements on the political mainstream are important, and for that reason it's not useless to document the groups and leaders Ridgeway & Co. focus on. Counting 3,000 violent racist incidents between 1980 and 1986--including 138 attempted or successful bombings (p. 24)--is worthwhile, even the producers and writers of Blood in the Face arbitrarily leave out countless acts of police brutality and common exploitation.
Ridgeway does deal with supremacist splits, especially over the issue of "going mainstream" as practiced by Duke. Some supremacists see Duke as a hopeless liberal sell-out, while others see his incursion into electoral politics as good strategy.
The relationship between openly fascist groups and mainstream politics is usually ignored. In the mid-1920s there were 3-4 million Klan members.(p.34) Now there are less. But is white supremacy any weaker? Ask Rodney King. That's the link missing here.
Notes:
1.Robert J. Norrell, "Labor Trouble: George Wallace and Union
Politics in Alabama"; in Robert H. Zieger, ed., Organized Labor in the
Twentieth Century South. The University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville, 1991,
pp. 266-67
2. Ibid, p 254.
By a paleoanthropologist, this new book brings debates and discoveries about human evolution to a non-academic audience. Readable and informative, Evolution runs from Darwin, through eugenics and Nazism, right up to the Human Genome Project and the Violence Initiative. Still, it's not as good as Stephen J. Gould's (less current) The Mismeasure of Man, which has a better analysis for political purposes.
Her biggest weakness is a naive liberal quest for value-free science, and bemoaning the fact that biological theories get caught up in the politics of the day. For her, power struggles belong outside the realm of science, and scientists can't do good science if they are going to be held accountable for the political implications of their work.
Darwin Beats The Church
While Charles Darwin's The Origin Of Species (1859) struck a progressive blow against the hegemony of the Church, it did not undermine hierarchy among humans. It was falsely used (though not against Darwin's will) to explain differences in wealth and power between different human populations. Darwin himself thought non- Europeans were not fully human.(1)
One of the first widespread misuses of Darwinism was in its application to human society - for which Darwin had not offered any evidence, for there was none. In Germany this idea was developed by Ernst Haeckel, in Britain by Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and applied it to all aspects of social life. This thinking - Darwinian evolution reflected through bourgeois ideology - obviously continues to the present.
The term "eugenics" (breeding to improve the human race) was introduced in 1883 by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. "Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?" he asked.(2)
By the time Darwin died in 1882, he was convinced of the necessity of eugenics; and he was rehabilitated by the Church: "Once berated as an enemy of morality and religion, Darwin was now sanctified and transformed into an icon acceptable to all aspects of society," writes Shipman. Darwin's son Leonard went on to be president of the Eugenics Society in England from 1891 to 1928.(3) Darwinism had "adapted" to capitalist society.
Eugenics got a big boost in Amerika and Germany just after 1900 with hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to research by big capitalists (Carnegie and Krupp).(4) Their goal was to collect records on individuals and families for the purpose of sterilization and matchmaking to improve their "race" (synonymous with nation, for them).
So they collected records for everyone they could find, on such "genetic" traits as: "insanity, epilepsy, alcoholism, pauperism, criminality, tuberculosis, goiter ... feeblemindedness ... nomadism, athletic ability, shiftlessness and thalassophilia (love of the sea)." All of these were assumed to have hereditary causes.(5)
This research in turn contributed to laws restricting immigration, and formed the basis for the first IQ tests, which were intended to identify the "intelligence" required for every different position in society - and then force children into those positions. Finally, the research led to forced sterilization, with the Supreme Court's blessing and laws in many states.
In both the United States and Germany, Shipman makes virtually no effort to connect these biological and medical theories to imperialism and the motivations of the capitalist class and patriarchy; without that analysis it becomes too easy to justify eugenics and genocide as "mistakes" based on primitive scientific understanding. In fact, the scientists were coming up with ways to justify actions that reflected the demands of the politically powerful at that time.
Why The "Races" Aren't
Visible (phenotype) traits used to define current "races" are not linked to each other at the genetic level. Someone can have the hair of one "race," the eyes of another, the skin of a third, etc. So "races" identified by visible features would be different from those based on blood types, for example.(6)
Evolutionary biology now recognizes that a species is any group capable of reproducing together, and "the action [of evolution is] at the species level," where genotype (underlying genetic traits), not phenotype, is what matters.(7) And contrary to popular belief, evolution is *not* the process of species becoming "more adapted" or "better" than they were before. While individual species adapt, life on earth is no better adapted overall.
In other species, races are frequently the precursors to splitting off new species; population separated geographically for long enough eventually develop enough differences to loose *interfertility* with the others. Since the early 1960s there has been a consensus in biology that, "Because the races are fully interfertile, because different races frequently live together in the same regions, and because humans are so mobile, pure races do not exist and the races cannot diverge into separate species."(8)
But genetic studies still threaten the oppressed in Amerika. The predominant recent example of this is the Violence Initiative, which tried to identify genetic "causes" of violent behavior, with the intention of identifying potentially violent children and "treating" them preventively. Shipman devotes the last part of her book to this controversy.
The proponents and followers of this research make the very common error of looking at a behavior that appears common in a certain group and assuming it has a genetic basis - rather than a social and economic one. If MIM behaved this way, we would be looking for a gene for imperialism or parasitic social behavior, and we would conclude - with strong circumstantial evidence - that white Amerikans have a genetic predisposition to oppress other people.
Frederich Goodwin, the highest ranking psychiatrist in the government (head of the Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration), said in 1992: "If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of it for males .... There are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the hyperaggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they copulate more ....
"Now, one could say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just a careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be more natural..."(9)
In other words, without proper "social control," Black males "revert" back to a "nature" of behaving like monkeys! Goodwin's statement was too outrageous (it wasn't even true of monkeys). So, after much protest, he was demoted - to director of the National Institute of Mental Health!(10)
A University of Maryland professor, David Wasserman, was among those promoting this research. He tried to organize a conference called "Genetic Factors in Crime," for which he received federal funding, which he advertised with this text: "Genetic research ... gains impetus from the apparent failure of environmental approaches to crime - deterrence, diversion, and rehabilitation - to affect the dramatic increases in crime, especially violent crime .... Genetic research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct ... and of treating some predispositions with drugs and intrusive therapies."(11)
Apparently, for Wasserman, "environmental approaches" don't include self- determination, employment, education relevant to Black people's lives, etc. So it can be concluded that these approaches have failed! This also raised enough of a stir (including by anti-psychiatric medication psychiatrist Peter Breggin, some NAACP chapters and others) to cancel the conference. But the research continues.
Shipman does a good job of presenting the debates, but her opinion of them is liberal and idealistic. She is upset that "objective" research is being stifled because of the "volume" of the debate and the knee-jerk reaction to anything that could have racist implications. Readers of The Evolution of Racism should be prepared for some annoying anti- "politically correct"ism, as well as a useful presentation of the facts and issues.
NOTES:
1. Shipman, p. 1.
2. Ibid, p. 111.
3. Ibid, p. 121.
4. Ibid, pp. 123-132.
5. Ibid, p. 125-6.
6. Ibid, p. 148.
7. Ibid, p. 154.
8. Ibid, p. 195.
9. Ibid, pp. 237-8.
10. Ibid, p. 238.
11. Ibid, p. 246.
If this were a work of fiction, the character of John Binns would, along with
other radicals, jump on the Jackson bandwagon when it made its first appearance
in 1822, and be rewarded by a government post through which he dispensed public
works jobs to working-class Irish while upholding the slave system and helping
to subjugate the free black people of the North.
-- How the Irish Became White, p. 70
Ignatiev's book is a positive contribution to white labor history which serves MIM in a timely way as we expand our work in Europe. Our readers will recall that J. Sakai has already explained in The Mythology of the White Proletariat why Andrew Jackson's name is synonymous with anti- First Nation pogroms and racial hatred. Ignatiev is not as clear theoretically as Sakai or H.W. Edwards, author of Labor Aristocracy: Mass Base for Social Democracy. How the Irish Became White reveals some confusion surrounding race, nationality, bourgeois democracy and the state; but these concepts are not really central to Ignatiev's book. MIM recognizes this work as an important contribution because Ignatiev did much of the research we would have wanted to do on the question of Irish integration into the white nation.
Ignatiev fills in the picture on how the Irish in Amerika maneuvered their way up out of the proletariat and in to the labor aristocracy. Some early Irish- Amerikan organizing was progressive. Later organizing was characterized by anti- Black chauvinism and opportunism.
Early Oppressed-Nation Consciousness Yields Split With White Chauvinism
Daniel O'Connell founded the Catholic Association, which Ignatiev says was the first mass political party. O'Connell toured making speeches against slavery, saying he didn't want any support for Irish nationalism that was not against slavery. Despite wavering on this commitment at one time, O'Connell remained fairly true to that idea until he died. Furthermore, 60,000 Irish in Ireland signed a statement opposing slavery in 1841.(p. 6) Thus while fighting for their own parliamentary government independent of England's, many Irish saw themselves as allied with other oppressed peoples.
O'Connell's dividing line, that Irish nationalism must be anti-slavery,(p. 24) was a high standard. As a result of this, organizations stopped their contributions to the Irish nationalist cause. One explained that "'as we must choose between Ireland and South Carolina, we say South Carolina forever!'"(p. 26) Lacking confidence in the possibilities of change outside the existing national institutions, many argued that Irish- Amerikans had to be more careful and couldn't afford to be seen as opposing U.S. government institutions with the wishes of foreign countries. Those making such reformist, assimilationist statements of strategy were outdone in the streets where Irish-American mobs attacked Blacks, as in Philadelphia in 1842.(p. 23) The mob "heroes" later became important politicians.
Slavery Question Reveals Assimilationist Treachery
After O'Connell died, a new generation of pro-U.S. leaders reflected what was going on in the United Snakes, instead of what was going on in Ireland. One such leader, John Mitchell, led a revolt in Ireland in 1848, only to fail and go to the United Snakes where he supported slavery and had a son die on the Confederate side of the Civil War. Irish nationalist organizations in the South and Midwestern United Snakes thought it wise to side with the slave owners and obtain their support for the Irish cause against England. Later, after the Civil War in a crucial moment of history, a congressperson put in power by Irish supporters ended the progressive phase of Reconstruction.(p. 173-4)
Irish-Amerikans made a deal with the Democratic Party to oppose Black people's rights in exchange for jobs and a pro-immigration policy.(p. 76) The labor unions were important institutions for the Irish: "From 1850 to 1859 the total was 2,700,000. Of these, the Irish formed the largest group, 41.4 percent of the total immigration. If the unions of the 1830s headed largely by native- born and British Protestants, functioned at that time as schools for teaching the Irish the meaning of whiteness, the unions later were to become to a considerable extent Irish institutions."(p. 116) Sadly, the major Euro-Amerikan labor unions famous for their assistance to the CIA in the Third World also created much of the chauvinist image of all oppressed nation people as strikebreakers.(p. 119)
It is true that the Irish arrived in North America by the millions at a time when the Irish themselves were starving in famine. A good portion died on the trip over to North America and another portion shortly after arriving. It has been pointed out that the Irish felt the whip to conform immediately in order to feed themselves. When the Irish first arrived many white Amerikans believed the Irish to be lower than Blacks, because they were more poorly dressed and were starving.
This historical reality of the predominantly lower- middle class Irish who made it to North America reinforces the thesis of the difficulty of maintaining a proletariat where there is a larger mass of workers influencing them towards assimilation. It is difficult for a pocket of exploited workers to maintain its identity and uniqueness as a class. When the Irish arrived they were indeed proletarian, but as they looked around they saw adequate examples of why they should conform to the white ethnicity. Ignatiev's book demonstrates that they also found adequate opportunity to assimilate.
The National Criminal Justice Commission is a progressive though liberal group that produced this book to counter the pro-prisons, anti-"crime" mania sweeping Amerikan politics. The group includes some big names like law professor Derrick Bell, representatives of the NAACP and similar organizations from other oppressed nations.
The great service of the book is its concise publication of lots of important and recent information that anti-prison activists need. All the facts in MIM's Amerikkkan Lockdown Index (published in this issue of MIM Theory and available at MIM's Internet Web site) are from this book. If you need references to show that more police do not lower "crime" rates, or the details of bias in application of the death penalty, and so on, it's all there in accessible form. So, as a useful reference, MIM recommends this book (although much of the best information from it is in our Index). On the other hand, the book shows the pitfalls of liberal thinking, even when applied to a progressive cause such as opposing the prison system.
First, the writers repeatedly stress that they think violent criminals do belong in prison, and their criticism is only of the unfairness of the system and the hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders in prison. MIM agrees that there are some people who have committed crimes against the people for which they need to be held accountable, and they need to engage in extensive self-criticism and rectification. But much more important than that, for revolutionaries, is that the greatest criminals of all are not only not in prison--they run the government and economy! So given that fundamental fact of imperialism, MIM does not dwell on the need to lock up some of the people who happen to already be in prison. Suffice it to say that if the people came to power in North America, almost but not quite all of those people locked up in jail and prison would be released although some would have rectification to make; and some would stay behind bars until it was clear they no longer posed a threat to the people.
These people would undoubtedly be outnumbered in prison by imperialists and various agents of oppression and repression, who would themselves have bottomless debts to pay to the people. In fact, we could imagine self-criticism and rectification involving both street criminals and imperialist oppressors, in which street criminals were able to show the imperialists a thing or two to the benefit of both groups. In most cases we believe the street criminals would be more likely successfully engage in the work needed to join a socialist society than imperialists and other genuine oppressors; the latter group would find themselves opposed to the new system, while the former would be more interested in joining it.
Another major flaw with the book is its attempt to find better and worse ways for police and courts to reduce "crime," defined in the very narrow legal sense of the current system. They endorse "community policing," for example, and devote large sections of the book to "model" ways of reducing violence and "crime," such as alternative forms of sentencing. Some of these practices may be better for the oppressed than others, to be sure, but their emphasis is on reforming and saving a system that revolutionaries know is beyond such measures. With the very definitions of crime and violence controlled by the hegemonic bourgeoisie and its imperialist-system supporters, the very terms of the debate need to be overthrown before improvements can be made. Maoists may support some local practices as better than others, for example--and in some cases we actively work for reformist demands--but we only do so in the clear and explicit context of opposing the very system in which they operate.
The Commission produces a "Pathway to a Safer Society" with 11 recommendations. Some of these are progressive even though the motivation behind them are pro-capitalist. Good recommendations include a moratorium on building new prisons, and eliminating "racial and ethnic biases" in the system (uh-huh). Obviously either of these would be improvements.
On the other hand, reactionary recommendations include increasing economic efficiency of the criminal injustice system, developing broader anti-"crime" strategies combining all levels of government, reducing "poverty" (a goal MIM supports, but not for Amerikans at the expense of the victims of Amerikan imperialism, who are not mentioned), the collaboration of police and public health officials to reduce drug use problems, and so on. Without changing the terms of the debate, these proposals amount to developing greater levels of collaboration with the state for its repressive anti-"crime" ends--In other words movements toward fascism, even if in a less openly violent guise.
This book represents the better side of some liberalism--the ability to oppose state repression and blatant inequality imposed by the dominant groups in society. Readers of this book who like the analysis may very well be receptive to MIM's revolutionary arguments, especially when they hear the important criticisms of this type of political line. On the other hand, some supporters of this line will look at revolutionaries as "impractical," or as militants who want to replace one bad system with another--in other words, they may see MIM as raining on the liberal parade. These people are committed to the system and ultimately don't want to see it threatened.
Many progressives in North America, members of oppressed nations as well as some Amerikans, are coming to oppose the reign of prison terror here. MIM has been out front on this work for years, and we need to struggle with all revolutionaries and potential revolutionaries to make sure that such well-founded opposition leads to higher levels of struggle rather than sinking into the troughs of reformism.
The 1995 edition of this 1978 classic has lots of handy statistics updated to demonstrate that the criminal injustice system does not exist to fight "crime," but to perpetuate the dominance of already powerful groups. The author, Jeffrey Reiman, is a social democrat who uses Marxist analysis in some interesting ways, without claiming to be a communist.
The central thesis of the book is that the Amerikan criminal justice system operates with a policy of "Pyrrhic defeat." This term is derived from the notion in the academic study of war of a "Pyrrhic victory," a victory in one battle that cripples the winning army to such a degree it cannot win the war. The "War on Crime" is a Pyrrhic defeat because it is designed to lose against its professed targets but it "yields such benefits to those in power that it amounts to a success."(1)
Although the book talks a lot about the economic structure of society and its use of force to protect the status quo, it is more interested in the superstructural role of criminal justice. It focuses more on the "ideological function" of criminal justice than on the "repressive function." That is fine as a compliment to materialist analysis of the structural inequality, and even the author does not uphold it as a substitute.
Reiman leans on the social theory of bourgeois sociologists such as Emile Durkheim to talk about the function that "criminals" serve in creating a sense of social solidarity among everyone else. When a society rallies together in attacking those who have been defined as deviants, it enforces a sense of solidarity among them and charts out the limits of acceptable and unacceptable behavior in the society.
However, Reiman does not accept this notion of the function of crime wholesale. Durkheim did not realize that there are divisions in the society that make different members have divergent interests. Thus, as Reiman points out, the consensus about what behavior is acceptable and what is not is not pre-existing but is rather created in constant struggle of ideologies. The bourgeoisie gets to decide the ideology for the most part, and the criminal justice system it controls enforces that. Thus it creates a sense of solidarity for one part of society's solidarity--those in power.
In challenging the definition of crime and exposing it as not objective, Reiman statistically compares the harms due to occupational hazards and bad health care to those due to "crime." This is one illustration, but nowhere near as compelling as what he could of produced with an internationalist perspective. It is true that the laxity of enforcement of pollution restrictions causes injury and death to many people in the" united states. But by focusing on this country, Reiman ignores both the unequal harm toward different nations of people and the shear scope of the harms inflicted. Pointing to corporate-inflicted hazards within U.S. borders without reference to the Third World could lead Amerikans to a not-in-my-back-yard approach to corporate crime, which harms the world's majority.
MIM has often demonstrated one of Reiman's subheads: poverty kills. If you look in Amerikan prisons, you'll find almost exclusively poor people. But these are the very people who are on the receiving end of most crime. One example of murder of the oppressed: In 1989, black infant mortality (during the first year of life) was 17.7 per 1,000 live births compared with 8.2 for whites. In short, black mothers lose their babies within the first year of life more than twice as often as white mothers.(2)
Meanwhile, Amerika does not provide immunizations for the oppressed. Reiman does not fully grasp the ramifications of what he is saying here. It is true that Blacks in poverty are not receiving the immunizations they need, and are dying as a result. Plenty of other statistics are provided to illustrate the same thing. He also gives U.S.-Europe comparisons, but he does not see that one reason for the difference between Amerika and European countries is national contradictions in the United Snakes. Amerikans do not want to stop this crime against national minorities because of the larger benefits of national oppression.
Reiman demonstrates that even within the definition of crime tailored to exclude the bourgeoisie's crimes, there are further ways that the privileged are weeded out of prison.
"For the same criminal behavior, the poor are more likely to be arrested; if arrested, they are more likely to be charged; if charged they are more likely to be convicted; if convicted they are more likely to be sentenced to prison; and if sentenced they are more likely to be given longer prison terms than members of the middle and upper classes."(3)
These charges are demonstrated statistically. For example, in the 1991 National Crime Victimization Survey, 28% of people victimized by violent crime perceived their assailants as Black. Meanwhile, 37.8% of those arrested for those crimes were Black. Even forgetting that people are more likely to go to the police about a Black assailant, Reiman calculates that pigs are going after Blacks 30% more frequently than their perceived criminal activity.(4)
Because Reiman understands that society is divided, even as he is ambivalent whether race or class is most important, he can ask the question: "Who is Winning and Losing the War Against Crime?"
Reiman rejects conspiracy theories as impossible to prove and untenable. According to him, a conspiracy theory "would argue that the rich and powerful, seeing the benefits derived from the failure of criminal justice, consciously set out to use their wealth and power to make it fail." This is often what those with a radical critique of the power structure get accused of: reading some malice into the heads of the rich. Actually, radicals have a critique of what those in power do even when they are doing things they honestly believe are just right (which is as hard to believe as a conspiracy theory).
Reiman identifies three aspects of the failure of criminal justice, which are its Pyrrhic defeat. First, things that might actually decrease crime are not done: drugs are not decriminalized, poverty is not ameliorated, education is not provided, and so on. This results in a high rate of crime. Second, crimes of the rich and powerful are not identified as crimes. This criminalizes the poor. Third, the bias in all levels of the criminal justice system of nation and class is not addressed. This ensures that only certain groups are arrested and imprisoned. "In short, the effect of current criminal justice policy is at once to narrow the public's conception of what is dangerous to acts of the poor and to present a convincing embodiment of this danger."(5)
The question Reiman addresses is not how this came to be, but instead why it persists. He correctly recognizes that first, the system is benefiting those who could change it if they wanted to, at the expense of those without power. But his second reason gives too much credit to the Amerikan middle classes. "Because the criminal justice system shapes the public's conception of what is dangerous, it creates the impression that the harms it is fighting are the real threats to society--thus, even when people see the system as less than a roaring success they demand more of the same: more police, more prisons, longer prison sentences and so on."(6)
Reiman thinks that the "real" threats to society are the rich, who are oppressing the Amerikan middle classes, including the working classes. Actually, the Amerikans' gut instinct is more correct: the toppling of Amerikan society will be done by the oppressed internal colonies with the help of those external. Reiman expects them to discard their conservative impulse toward disparities of wealth, but MIM expects no such thing.
Reiman does at least recognize that "those who are mainly victimized by the 'failure' to reduce crime are by and large the poor themselves." This is true both because they are more likely to have crimes committed against them and because they will be victimized by the criminal injustice system.
Reiman argues against the implicit ideology of criminal justice on two counts. First, it concentrates on individuals and thus "diverts out attention away from our institutions, away from consideration of whether out institutions themselves are wrong or unjust or indeed 'criminal'." Second, "the criminal law is put forth as the minimum neutral ground rules for any social living." That means that after diverting our attention from the injustice of our social institutions, it "bestows on those institutions the mantle of its own neutrality."(7)
According to Reiman, the individual guilt approach of criminal justice puts exclusive focus on one half of the justice equation: whether the individual has fulfilled an obligation to society. "It is to look the other way from the issue of whether the fellow citizens have fulfilled their obligations to him or her."(p. 155) MIM has said over and over that there is no reason for individuals to rehabilitate themselves to a society that never habilitated them in the first place, and Reiman makes the same point. "Justice is a two-way street--but criminal justice is a one-way street."(8)
The fact is, whether the society will call something a crime depends on the circumstances under which it occurred. Criminal justice's sleight-of-hand is that it decides which of those circumstances is important.
"Killing someone is ordinarily a crime, but if it is in self-defense or to stop a deadly crime, it is not. Taking property by force is usually a crime, but if the taking is retrieving what has been stolen, then no crime has been committed... This means that when we call something a crime, we are saying that the conditions in which it occurs are not themselves to criminal or deadly or oppressive or so unjust as to make an extreme response reasonable or justifiable or noncriminal. This means that when the system holds an individual accountable for a crime, it implicitly conveys the message that the social conditions in which the crime occurred are not responsible for the crime, that they are not so unjust as to make a violent response to them excusable."(8)
Reiman uses the example of the law against theft to show that the neutrality of criminal justice is in fact biased toward the present social structure. Even under socialism there will be laws against theft, but the thing is that the law here and now is protecting those who have property now from those who don't. (9)
Reiman includes lots of polls to demonstrate that most Amerikans prefer more criminal injustice to a just social order. He uses them to illustrate his contention that they are duped by the upper classes--that the masses are asses. "It is clear that Americans have been successfully deceived as to what are the greatest dangers to their lives, limbs, and possessions."(10) Actually, it's Reiman who's been deceived, and he should have caught on by now.
MIM recommends this book for its good information and some good analysis. With knowledge of MIM's line on the labor aristocracy as a backdrop, this is very useful book.
Notes:
1. p. 5
2. p. 88
3. p. 101
4. p. 102
5. p. 150
6. p. 151
7. p. 155
8. p. 156
9. p. 157
10. p. 161
reviewed by MC5, October 31, 1999
This is not a book of jokes or hard-hitting responses to conservatives. It's a journalistic account of the Republican Revolution 1994-1996 in which the Republican party won control of the u.$. Congress. The two authors are Washington Post reporters, the first of whom has a Pulitzer prize.
Rarely does MIM find a book so unremarkable. Hewing tightly to the conflict between Democrats and Republicans, the book is just not very interesting to MIM. When we speak of the "Republican Revolution" we speak in the terms of the u.$. bourgeois democrats. In MIM's view, this is barely a shift from one arm of the imperialist bourgeoisie to the other; it is certainly not a revolution in the true sense of transferring state power from one class to another.
Completely politically unaware readers may find this book useful for explaining how lobbying works. Various corporations give candidates money for eliminating government regulations regarding health and the environment. The Republicans since 1994 have made much money in this way, but the two authors admit that it was the Democrats making the most money that way before 1994.
The Democrats appeal to the proletarian-minded to support them by saying they are only compelling the corporations to give them money while not selling out the interests of the public. Yet, the obvious limit to such a tricky strategy is that at some point, corporations stop giving them money if the Democrats do not support them and if the Democrats have no money to spend, they lose their campaigns.
Prior to the Newt Gingrich-led victory of 1994, Republicans had not controlled the House of Representatives in 40 years.(p. 8) They came to power promising blatant Amerikkkan chauvinism on everything from English-only to attacking affirmative action to ending welfare. Once they arrived in power, they had to patch together a coalition of special interests that would be big enough to let Republicans obtain a majority just with Republican votes. By now the public is aware of this process and "special interests." Yet, because conditions are too comfortable economically, Amerikans do not rise up to change the system to socialism to keep the richest special interests from running the government.
Historian David Roediger has contributed to the trend in academia to identify the creation of racism as twofold, with the white working class helping the bourgeoisie to make it happen. For Amerikan academics, this is a pretty big leap, which leads them to give themselves labels such as "post-marxist," based on their false interpretations of Marxism as static and reductionist.
The step is important to escape the mis-notion that "bad" ideas adopted by relatively subordinate groups are the product of simple domination by the ruling classes. It begins to get beyond the "false-consciousness" interpretation of history. The book goes along with recent work to emphasize the active movement of oppressed groups in creating their own ideologies and forms of resistance--to see culture and ideology as the dialectical creations born out of class struggle, not just imposed by rulers.
But Roediger keeps the "false consciousness" myth alive. He assumes, but can't prove, that white workers in the nineteenth century were hurt by racism. To Roediger, the highest price paid by the white working class for racism was "the wedding of labor to a debased republicanism." He describes the tendency of "the payoffs of whiteness ... to prove spurious," because racism supposedly undermined white working class efforts to eliminate wage labor altogether.(p. 55)
He can't accept that white workers in Amerika simply got paid enough to come around to see that capitalism wasn't so bad (for them) after all. When they stopped the attack on wage labor itself, they fell in step with budding imperialism and started fighting for a piece of the pie. Ignoring this reality, The Wages of Whiteness is typical settler-leftist day-tripping, and not based in fact.
Roediger and his academic cohorts are stuck in what is really a reductionist theory based on false Marxism. Under imperialism, there is not just one working class, "falsely" divided by race. Instead working classes are by necessity allied with their nations--the international proletariat has split from the First World scabs who make up the labor aristocracy in oppressor nations like the USA.
There is nothing false about it. The white working class went where the money was, tying themselves to imperialism in the process: to imperialist profits, and ultimately to imperialism's collapse.
Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America
by Cynthia M. Duncan
Foreword by Robert Coles
Yale University Press, 1999, 235pp.
review by MC5
In 1999, Bill Clinton made a tour of various U.$. counties in poverty. The media recalled similar tours by Robert Kennedy in the 1960s.
Likewise, Cynthia M. Duncan's book found inspiration in Robert Kennedy. However, from MIM's perspective, the book is not very interesting.
Consisting of data from 350 interviews of mostly poor people, Duncan attempts to give readers an idea about poverty in the words of the rich and poor living in two poor counties. The interview details and investigations are called qualitative research.
Most of the interview details may suggest ideas, but nothing adds up to a story of "why poverty persists." Hence, we blame the publisher for using such a subtitle, probably to give the book some marketing appeal.
From Duncan's point of view, the poor should not be blamed for their attitudes as causing poverty. Nor does she accept Marxist views. Instead she points to a lack of community spirit in counties that are poor. The peoples of different races do not mix; the upper class seeks to prevent other businesses from coming in and people are trusted or not trusted with credit based on family history in Blackwell (of Appalachia) and Dahlia of the Mississippi Delta. In contrast, a northern New England rural county is blue- collar but solidly middle-class, because it mixed well and always had a business elite that was socially outward looking and tolerant of other business elites to move in and set up economic growth. In other studies she points to something as simple as a choir group that may be the basis of social interaction and community prosperity.
For what it is worth, Duncan may be correct to some extent. Like MIM, she seems to presume a middle-class United $tates is a possibility, so she wonders about these pockets of poverty. MIM is interested in how they relate to the international situation, but Duncan is wondering why these pockets of poverty do not escape. She concludes advice is necessary along with formation of community institutions.
Although Duncan does not say it, the real lesson of her book to the poor should be: "move!" Some of the rich crackers are quite simply both reactionary and dumb. The positive example of Gray Mountain that Duncan holds out does not have the question of national oppression in the community to anywhere near the extent it exists in Dahlia and Blackwell. Hence there will be a minority of places where the ruling class is terribly incompetent relative to ruling classes in other counties. They will also attract others of like-minded stupidity and chauvinism. When the people stay in one place out of excessive fondness of a locality, they are guilty of "provincialism." We Marxists encourage people to think more broadly and to aspire beyond their localities.
Often times we Marxists are told that we should go organize the Appalachian poor for their economic demands. Duncan gives us some up-to-date evidence on why that is a silly idea. Between 1980 and 1990, Blackwell county shrunk in population by 12%. That is the real social movement of Appalachia. Yes, there is a shortage of jobs, so people move. That is why there is no class solidarity or class consciousness that arises in Appalachia, no matter how many Marxists bang their heads on the wall there. To the extent that Marxists do influence or awaken anyone, they simply move or succeed in their middle-class ambitions. We do not need Marxism for that and hence we find the subject matter of Duncan's book boring. It is about how to integrate people into middle-class life. There is no other possibility when poverty is only in isolated pockets and not a generalized economic condition within a country's borders.
"Between 1930 and 1990 the population of Dahlia shrank from over 45,000 to around 20,000 while the number of employed dropped from nearly 20,000 men and women to just 6,000. Every black person I interviewed had relatives who had left the Delta for northern and midwestern cities, as well as a few southern cities like Birmingham, Memphis, Little Rock, and St. Louis. Usually at least half the siblings in a family would be gone."(p. 94)
Even if Appalachia had closed borders, it would only then be equivalent to some of the poorer European countries. At $15,321, central Appalachia's median income would still be more than 10 times higher than that of the median for the international proletariat.(p. 212) Between 1980 and 1990 meanwhile, Gray Mountain's income literally doubled.
Both the Mississippi Delta and central Appalachia are shrinking in population. Already in 1980, the two infamously poor regions combined had only a population of 1.8 million in a country of 226.5 million with open borders internally. In other words, they are less than one percent of the population and it was ridiculous to expect any class formation there. By 1990, the two regions combined shrunk to less than 1.7 million, or less than the number of people in prison today.
The trillions in super-profits sucked out of the Third World make it possible for whole countries to be rich like the United $tates. Although inequalities continue to exist within the United $tates, they are not nearly as central or as important to Marxists as those on a global scale.