Racism and American Libertarian Thought

So the story of Ron Paul’s alleged racism is once more making the rounds.  First surfacing in 2008 as a result of James Kirchick’s reporting in The New Republic, its most recent iteration is an article by Jonathan Chait, a wretched corporatist Democrat whose motivation in rehashing Kirchick’s story was probably concern that Paul’s positions on the wars, drug policy and the like would embarrass Chait’s beloved commander in chief (Chait has recently written on how liberals are afraid of power, a phobia that his unrelenting sycophancy seems geared towards proving he does not possess).  Though the charges are old, their re-emergence is nonetheless a salutary development, as Paul’s star has risen in recent months with the eruption of class anger against Wall St and the perpetual implosion of the Republican primary field.  Given this (undeserved) street cred, it’s useful for people to be reminded of Paul’s entanglements with racism and other odious discourses.  The gist of the story is that Paul published a series of newsletters in the 1980s and 1990s (which ended up providing much of the seed money with which he launched his political career) that contained a whole host of rather nasty bits on pretty much every oppressed group in American society.  Chait gives us a small sample:

This “Special Issue on Racial Terrorism” was hardly the first time one of Paul’s publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled “What To Expect for the 1990s,” predicted that “Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities” because “mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white ‘haves.’” Two months later, a newsletter warned of “The Coming Race War,” and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, “If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it.” In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, “Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.” “This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s,” the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter’s author–presumably Paul–wrote, “I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.” That same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball game in which “blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot.” The newsletter inveighed against liberals who “want to keep white America from taking action against black crime and welfare,” adding, “Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems.”

Such views on race also inflected the newsletters’ commentary on foreign affairs. South Africa’s transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a “destruction of civilization” that was “the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara”; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending “South African Holocaust.” …

The newsletters were particularly obsessed with AIDS, “a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby,” and used it as a rhetorical club to beat gay people in general. In 1990, one newsletter approvingly quoted “a well-known Libertarian editor” as saying, “The ACT-UP slogan, on stickers plastered all over Manhattan, is ‘Silence = Death.’ But shouldn’t it be ‘Sodomy = Death’?” Readers were warned to avoid blood transfusions because gays were trying to “poison the blood supply.” “Am I the only one sick of hearing about the ‘rights’ of AIDS carriers?” a newsletter asked in 1990. That same year, citing a Christian-right fringe publication, an item suggested that “the AIDS patient” should not be allowed to eat in restaurants and that “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva,” which is false.

Going over the material here again, I found myself wondering how Paul’s supporters attempted to defend such rank filth.  This lead me to Julian Sanchez & Dave Weigel’s article, ‘Who Wrote Ron Paul’s Newsletters?’  Weigel is a libertarian writer, but someone I nonetheless respect as he has, in the past, shown himself to be perfectly willing to confront racism in conservative ranks.  He continues that work in this piece, which treats the newsletters as the abomination that they are, but also reveals that the question of their authorship is not straightforward.  Paul maintains he has no idea who wrote the offending pieces, and has repudiated the sentiments contained therein.  The smart money appears to be on one Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr, a mainstay on the libertarian right in the US for forty years and a longtime associate of Paul’s.  As Sanchez and Weigel point out, this doesn’t exactly exonerate the candidate.  Even if Paul himself is not a racist, he was undeniably willing to profit off of the vilest sort of racial obloquy.  However, they also contend that even if Paul has failed to come clean about his past, his current conduct, such as his willingness to call out the racism of the war on drugs, evince a clear repudiation of any association with racism.  To me, this is less than convincing.  I am not the least bit interested in what Paul believes in his heart of hearts.  His political conduct reveals that he is more than willing to draw on the language of white supremacy when he thinks it will benefit his cause, and equally willing to discard it when he believes it will not.  The best one can say of Paul after reading Sanchez and Weigel’s reporting is that he is a consummate opportunist.

What interested me most about their piece, however, was not their evaluation of Paul, but rather the peek they afford into the racial politics of American liberatarianism.  Lew Rockwell, it turns out, is no minor crank.  He is the founder and chairman of the board of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a think tank that aspires to be a sort of organizing center for right-wing libertarians and the most important institution for disseminating the ideas of Austrian economics.  Reading some of Rockwell’s publications, the likelihood that he was responsible for penning the words quoted above appears high.  Rockwell has a habit of publishing openly white supremacist material, such as this gem from Samuel Francis:

In the first place, the natural differentiation of the races in intellectual capacities implies that of the two major races in the United States today, only one possesses the inherent capacity to create and sustain the level of civilization that has historically characterized its homelands in Europe and America [note: this is level of civilization of which Francis is so proud]….And secondly, the recognition of racial realities implies that most of the efforts now deployed to combat racism…are misplaced, based on a profound misconception of racial capacities…Those policies and laws are the fruit of a discredited egalitarian mythology that animates the federal leviathan’s perpetual war against civil society and debilitates white resistance to the gathering storm of racial revolution that the enemies, white and non-white, of the white race and its civilization now openly preach and prepare. (Qtd. in Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment, 173)

This appeared in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, a publication Rockwell edited with Murray Rothbard.  Rothbard is the single most important figure, after von Mises and Hayek themselves, in the strains of libertarian thought that claim adherence to Austrian principles , and is the subject of breathless adulation by his followers (the account linked to reminds me of nothing so much as the old Stalinist mythology of Lenin, in which young Ilyich, upon hearing of his brother’s execution for populist terrorism, exclaimed ‘No, we will not follow that road.  That is not the road to take,’ and, presto! Bolshevism was born).  As would befit a man with such a reputation for individualism and creativity, Rothbard didn’t merely publish the racist views of others: he penned a number himself.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rothbard and Rockwell devised a political strategy for American libertarians that hoped to inflame class and racial resentments among white Americans in the hopes of turning them against the welfare state, the Federal Reserve, and all the other bogeymen of the libertarian imagination.  The fruits of this strategy are not pretty.  Take, for example, Rothbard’s manifesto for this orientation, the 1992 essay ‘Right-Wing Populism.’  In it, he laments the ‘massive scare campaign’ mounted against David Duke, the former klansman and inveterate racist who briefly rose to prominence in Republican politics in Louisiana.

For Rothbard, Duke’s ascendency confirmed the potential of a libertarian politics fused with racial resentment:  ‘It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke’s current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleo-libertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites: what’s wrong with any of that?’  (The notion that one must call for equal rights for whites, of course, implies that whites are currently oppressed, a proposition at the core of contemporary white supremacist discourse.)  Rothbard proposed that libertarians embark on a two-pronged strategy.  First, ‘build up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-government opinion-moulders, based on correct ideas’, and second, ‘tap the masses directly, to short-circuit the dominant media and intellectual elites, to rouse the masses of people against the elites that are looting them, and confusing them, and oppressing them, both socially and economically.’  This distinction between an esoteric and exoteric knowledge is, of course, a familiar one in conservative intellectual history.  In Rothbard’s case, the libertarian intelligentsia, imbued with the all-powerful understanding of Ludwig von Mises Thought, will use their correct ideas to shape society, while the roused masses will perform the work of tearing down the existing statist institutions.  For Rothbard, the arousal of the masses is best accomplished through appeals to racism.  Libertarians should remind the masses that ‘The reality of the current system is that it constitutes an unholy alliance of “corporate liberal” Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.’

He goes on to propose a list of eight programmatic demands for the new populist libertarianism, which includes items such as ‘Slash Welfare. Get rid of underclass rule by abolishing the welfare system, or, short of abolition, severely cutting and restricting it.’ ; ‘Abolish Racial or Group Privileges. Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire “civil rights” structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American.’ ;

Rothbard's agents of liberty

‘Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not “white collar criminals” or “inside traders” but violent street criminals – robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.’ ; and ‘Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is, move from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the productive members of society.’  As Rothbard’s fascoid rhetoric about the police reveals, he is more than happy to compromise on aspects of supposed libertarian principle to accomplish the goal of rousing the masses against the dusky statist parasites.  Appeals to tradition similarly trump libertarian theory, as Rothbard indicates a willingness to compromise on ‘such vexed problems as pornography, prostitution, or abortion. Here, pro-legalization and pro-choice libertarians should be willing to compromise on a decentralist stance; that is, to end the tyranny of the federal courts, and to leave these problems up to states and better yet, localities and neighborhoods, that is, to “community standards.”‘  Of course, as Corey Robin has argued, such private and local forms of authority have historically been the most important sources of authoritarianism in the US.

‘Right-Wing Populism’ was far from Rothbard’s only venture into race-baiting.  In the sickeningly titled ‘Their Malcolm…and Mine,’ Rothbard expostulates on Malcolm X and the legacy of Black nationalism.  Engaging in the venerable white supremacist tradition of complaining about the injustice of a holiday for Dr. King, Rothbard raises the spectre of a holiday for Malcolm and cries out in anguish, ‘Isn’t “Dr.” King for Heaven’s sake, enough?’ Later, he exalts Malcolm at King’s expense, writing ‘he was not a fraudulent intellectual with a rococo Black Baptist minister style, like “Dr.” King.’  The Tea Party’s obsession with the credentials of a certain prominent African American is, it appears, not a new phenomenon on the American right.  But even worse than Rothbard’s contempt for King is his praise for Malcolm: ‘He carried himself with great pride and dignity; his speaking style was incisive and sparkled with intelligence and sardonic wit. In short, his attraction for blacks was and is that he acted white. It is a ridiculous liberal cliché that blacks are just like whites but with a different skin color; but in Malcolm’s case, regardless of his formal ideology, it really seemed to be true.’  Rarely have more offensive words been offered as approbation.

Most peculiarly, Rothbard, who was himself Jewish, appears to have been something of an anti-semite.  His own self-description of himself was as ‘a pro-Christian Jew who thinks that everything good in Western Civilization is traceable to Christianity’ (paging Anders Breivik).  His defence of Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan contains the unpleasant assertion that ‘Rosenthal’s [one of Buchanan's Jewish foes] proboscis tells him that Pat is an anti-Semite.’  An essay of his on Origins of the Welfare State in America evinces a disconcerting interest in the Jewishness of many of the players in the story.  An associate of Rothbard’s, who wrote a piece entitled ‘Why must Christians routinely grovel and apologize for crimes against Jews which they never committed?’, recounted that ‘It is not Christian anti-semitism, but, as Murray Rothbard used to note, Jewish goy-bashing which has become the characteristic act of tastelessness in our time.’

Rothbard’s apparent anti-semitism has provoked the expected response from his acolytes: He’s Jewish!  This is hardly a serious defense.  Anyone who believes that Jews cannot be anti-semites is obviously unacquainted with the writings of Gilad Atzmon.  More generally, Rothbard and his supporters have argued that it is impossible for him to be a racist, since racism is a ‘collectivist’ ideology, and Rothbard was a principled individualist.  This is roughly on the same level as a misogynist arguing it is impossible for him to hate women, because his mother was one.  Rothbard was undeniably willing to spread racist ideology to further his political ends, at the very least.  Moreover, even if we accept the questionable assertion that libertarianism and racism are logically incompatible, there are a multitude of ways the two can still co-exist.  Rothbard could simply be an inconsistent libertarian.  Or, he could fail to recognize his own beliefs as racist.  Regardless of its insufficiency, however, this defense at least has the virtue of raising the issue of the relation of political theory to racist canons of knowledge.  For as profoundly as the ideology of white supremacy appears to have suffused the American libertarian movement, I would at least be willing to grant that there is no necessary logical connection between libertarianism and racism.

Why, then, have the two had the relationship they have?  One answer is suggested by Rothbard’s own writings.  In his review of that infamous tome of racist pseudo-science, The Bell Curve,  Rothbard raves about how the book has scientifically established the ‘almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.’  For Rothbard, this is a development to be celebrated.  Why?

Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and “discriminatory” and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.

‘An operation in defense of private property.’  I doubt that racialist science has ever received such an honest description from one of its partisans.  Here, it seems to me, lies the crux of the affinity between libertarianism and racism.  By arguing so strenuously that markets are the most efficient and most just form of social organization, libertarians tend to be unwilling to attribute the continued racial stratification of American society to the operation of markets.  With this explanation unavailable, others must be found.  Now obviously a belief in Black inferiority is not the only other option here.  Some libertarians argue that, ironically, it is anti-poverty programs themselves that perpetuate racial stratification, as they eliminate the incentives to work hard, save, etc, and thus hurt the very people they were implemented to help.  But even this genteel version of the argument has inbuilt tendencies towards racist scapegoating, as  this sort of talk inevitably seems to descend into descriptions of a ‘culture of poverty’ and other ugly tropes.  What begins as a structural explanation slides all too easily into an argument about the deficiencies of racial minorities themselves.  As Rothbard’s example shows, however, some strains of libertarian thought embrace racism full stop, arguing that racial stratification is simply the expression of the genetic superiority of the white race.  The market simply articulates what is written in our genes.  Thus, while considered as abstract propositions, there may be no necessary relationship between libertarian thought and racism, in the historical conditions in which both exist, there does exist an elective affinity between the two.

At the same time, Rothbard’s writings also evince a deep libidinal investment in white supremacy.  His fantasies about police violence being unleashed on vagrants and muggers reveal a real sadism, a desire to see non-white bodies broken.  This emotional connection to the politics of white supremacy is connected with, but not reducible to, the elective affinity described above.  Here, Corey Robin’s recent writing about conservatism seems relevant.  Robin argues that conservatism is always a defense of threatened hierarchies.  It is ‘a meditation on–and theoretical rendition of–the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.’  For Robin, this is the unifying thread linking family values, the free market, imperialism, and racism.  Clearly not every strand of conservatism embraces all of these causes, but what links all of them are a defense of a certain hierarchy – be it in the workplace, in the family, or between nations.  Libertarianism fits in here as a defense of  the subordination of employers to bosses, but also more generally as an endorsement of a hierarchical society.  Libertarian polemics narrate a heroic tale of productive entrepreneurial ubermenschen and their parasitic antagonists.  In these stories, those at the top of society deserve everything that has come to them, as do those on the bottom.  Hierarchy is valorized a moral good.  This gesture is generalized from economic life to life in general in Rothbard’s beloved essay ‘Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.’  Here, in the course of arguing that Leftist egalitarianism is morally abhorrent, Rothbard slips into a long excursus on the inferiority of women, arguing that the universality of women’s oppression is itself the greatest proof of male superiority.  The emotional attachment to hierarchy in libertarian polemic, though it may originally center on the workplace, seems easily extendable to other forms of hierarchy as well.

Ron Paul’s newsletters are thus not an aberration in the political tradition with which he is affiliated.  American libertarian thought has some deep entanglements with racism, a fact which is unsurprising when one considers the origins of many of the movement’s favorite tropes in the defense of the slavocracy.  Even if some strains are less enamored with white supremacy than the American Austrians (reason magazine seems quite committed to racial egalitarianism, while the CATO Institute tends instead to promote the sort of historical revisionism that counterposes Martin Luther King and the ‘good’ civil rights movement against the ‘bad’ movement for things like affirmative action), the veneration for the market that is always at the heart of libertarian thought contains real affinities with the tradition of white supremacy.  Taking a long view of American history, it does not seem too much to say they were made for each other.

Negroes with Guns: Robert F. Williams and Black Power

Art Preis – Stalinists on the Waterfront

In 1947, Art Preis, author of Labor’s Giant Step, wrote a polemic against the record of the Communist Party in the National Maritime Union, one of the most militant left-led unions in the CIO. Stalinists on the Waterfront calls out the CP for its record of strikebreaking during the war, and for its slanders of the revolutionary program being put forward by the Trotskyists during the same period.

Art Preis – Stalinists on the Waterfront

NYC Slutwalk

Iran: Three Essays on Imperialism, The Revolutionary Left, and the Guerrilla Movement

For a while now, I’ve  been wanting to start a side project of digitizing obscure and hard to locate texts from the history of the Marxist movement.  What else are Marxist grad students good for, right?  Well, the first installment has finally arrived, in the form of A.P. Pouyan and M. Mani’s Iran: Three Essays on Imperialism, the Revolutionary Left, and the Guerilla Movement, which I first found referenced when chasing down Fred Halliday’s footnotes about a Soviet republic set up in the north of Iran in Arabia without Sultans.  I haven’t been able to find much about the authors, who appear to have been participants in the guerrilla movement fighting the shah.  Pouyan in fact died fighting the shah’s police in urban guerrilla warfare in 1971.

Iran – Three Essays

Justice for Troy Davis

In NYC yesterday.

Premature Thoughts on David Graeber and Debt

I’ve always liked the way the hard left has described ideological differences as ‘deviations.’  There’s something almost sexy about it, either from the near-homonymy with ‘deviant’ or the way the language seems to slide easily into a Freudian diagnosis.  Alas, as a Marxist of at least what I like to imagine as near-Jesuitical orthodoxy, I have been something of a late bloomer in developing my deviations.  Recently, however, I’ve been doing some experimenting, and I think I’ve found one at last, in an intellectual infatuation with the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber.  What follows may simply be the result of over-excitement, but I wanted to get some initial thoughts down before diving into his big new book.

I’ve known about Graeber for some time, first encountering him in this piece at Lenin’s Tomb.  Recently, his book on debt has been getting a lot of press, and I noticed his spat with (really, thorough demolition of) Austrian economists posted at Naked Capitalism.  From there, I’ve been watching a number of pieces of his on youtube, and just yesterday I went to his event at the Brooklyn Book Festival, where the impeccably yuppy crowd tittered predictably upon his introduction as ‘an anarchist.’

Graeber’s presentation there was something of a precis of his new book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years.  Graeber argues that debt has played a whole variety of complex roles in human societies, and that our current understanding of debt as an inviolable, calculable obligation, while not exactly new, is at least somewhat peculiar.  In fact, debt structured human sociality in a multitude of ways long before the rise of money, and thus before the rule of any sort of quantifiable principle.

You can get a sense of the antiquity of debt, and its importance, in its presence in early religious discourse.  Graeber notes that in many ancient religions, the word for sin or guilt was the same as that for debt.  The Lord’s Prayer originally went ‘forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.’  This is because debt played a crucial role in structuring human relations, which in many pre-capitalist societies formed a complex and subtle web of mutual obligations.  Indeed, in some societies, one habitually paid either slightly less or slightly more than own owed – to pay your debt exactly was to signal to your creditor that  you desired no further relationship with her.

This structure of debt changed with the rise of money, which is at the center of the debate at Naked Capitalism.  Graeber argues that, contra Adam Smith and basically every other economist, money did not arise out of a previously existing barter economy.  Such a thing never existed.  Instead, money first arose as a means of exchange between people coming into contact at the edges of societies, such as long distance traders who only came into contact intermittently.  As Graeber argues, such socially incidental practices could hardly serve as the basis for the emergence of a full-blown money economy.  Instead, precise quantifiability seems linked up with the threat of violence.  If someone commits violence against someone else, the penalties tend to be enumerated precisely, introducing practices of quantification previously absent.  Additionally, money seems to come from the practices off non-state bureaucracies, such as temples, in accounting for the needs of their workers – in other words, it comes from practices that are the opposite of the kind of barter system predicted by economists of various stripes.  For Graeber, these two institutions – the law regulating violence, and non-state bureaucracies, are the key to understanding the emergence of money.

However, money economies were not a done deal once they emerged.  Graeber argues that history has seen an oscillation between what he calls a ‘virtual credit economy’ of the type described earlier and a money economy.  Most recently, the key turn came in the early modern era.  At this time, non-monetized credit was the animating force behind about 95% of all transactions.  As a new round of imperial wars got under way, however, the state turned to money to pay its soldiers, and money became a more important feature of social relations.  Correspondingly, the law concerning debts became more precise and punitive, and suddenly debt became a weapon everyone could use against everyone else.  Graeber calls this ‘the Hobbesian moment,’ and argues that the resulting chaos helps explain the ambivalence early political economists felt towards debt.

Moving forward a bit, Graeber argues that neoliberalism represents in some ways a new social role for debt.  While the Keynesian social contract of the postwar years had tied rising productivity to rising wages, and the social struggles of  that era largely concerned the extension of this contract to excluded groups, under neoliberalism workers were promised not raises but credit.  Debt thus replaced the social wage as a force for social pacification.  Of course, as the last few years have amply illustrated, this arrangement contained within it the seeds for even greater social chaos than that of the postwar years.

Though Graeber is deliberately non-prescriptive in much of his argument, he does argue for a certain broad political orientation towards debt.  All debt is, he says, are promises we make each other, and if democracy means anything at all, it surely means the ability to continually renegotiate those promises.  After all, we’ve seen that certain people and institutions are quite easily able to renegotiate their debts if they suddenly find them onerous.  If AIG can write off its loans, why can’t I?

As a point of critique, this seems to me unassailable.  But I think it falls somewhat short of being able to provide a strategic orientation.  For while Graeber emphasizes that most of us live our daily lives in ways that are closer to the virtual credit economy than to neoliberal man (he likes to joke that if you took Milton Friedman out to a nice dinner, he’d probably feel obliged to do something nice for you, even though his economic theory says he should just take the lobster and run), it remains true nonetheless that there are powerful social groups in our society who will do everything in their power to stop us from achieving our Jubilee.  If we are to have any hope of actually clearing our books, we have to have a serious accounting of the strengths and weaknesses of these groups or institutions, as well as our own.

There’s another point at which a semi-orthodox Marxist such as myself could find something to question in Graeber’s argument, and that’s his emphasis on state and non-state bureaucracies in the rise of money.  It seems to me that this argument could be presented in an extremely anti-Marxist fashion, emphasizing the causal primacy of institutions and processes not related to social relations of production, and vindicating a sort of Weberian explanatory pluralism.  Though I haven’t read Debt yet, I doubt very much Graeber takes this path, though I would not be surprised to see others use his work in such a way.  I want to suggest, though, that Graeber’s emphasis on these points does not necessarily contradict Marxist hypotheses about the causal primacy of social relations of production.  After all, as Ellen Meiksins Wood, amongst others, has argued, it is only under capitalism that ‘the state’ and ‘the economy’ become separate realms of social life (paging Dr. Lukacs).  In pre-capitalist modes of production, the state and non-state bureaucracies are intimately connected to the process of production, even if they are not organizing the labor process itself (though sometimes they are).  Thus, the centrality of these institutions is not necessarily a refutation of historical materialism.

I realize this is a somewhat hamfisted attempted to deal with an argument I don’t even know that anyone is making.  But people always say silly things about their crushes.  I’m looking forward to getting to know him better.

Gesichte und Katzenbewußtsein

Ruling Class Blues

A passage from Eugene Genovese which may be of some assistance in adjudicating recent debates about the riots in the UK:

Should the slave revolts, then, be viewed as increasingly futile, pathetic, or even insane efforts doomed to defeat and historically productive of no better result than the inevitable ensuing repression? Should we say of the slave revolts, as Marc Bloch did of the peasant revolts of medieval France, that they qualified as disorganized outbursts which counted for little or nothing when weighed against the achievements of the peasants in building their own communities? The question, however compelling, must be turned around: What could the slaves have accomplished if their masters had had no fear of getting their throats cut?  (Roll, Jordan, Roll, 595)

Class Politics in Israel

Note: What follows is my attempt to work through issues involving the current struggles in Israel, particularly in light of arguments presented at a meeting on that subject I attended last Friday.  Many of the claims below thus originate with contributions heard there, though I of course bear ultimate responsibility for their explication here.

The series of protests that have swept Israel in recent weeks have presented a difficult question for those of us committed to Palestinian liberation.  On face, they appear a clearly positive development.  They have decisively tripped up Benjamin Netanyahu’s bellicose swagger, reducing his approval rating by 20 points in a very short time and leading various Likud ministers to distance themselves from the PM.  The protests have also grown rapidly, with 150,000 Israelis participating this weekend, and throwing up some quite punchy slogans, such as ‘the market is free, but we are slaves.’  As such slogans suggest, the protesters consciously see their role as confronting neoliberalism in Israel, which over the last thirty years has produced a society which, while free of the massive unemployment confronting many European economies, is one of the most unequal among the developed nations, subject to a dangerous combination of low wages and rapid price growth. In light of all this, the housing protests have been associated by many commentators with the Arab Spring and resistance to austerity more generally.

However, there also seem to be clear differences between the protests in Israel and the Arab Spring.  For instance, the National Union of Israeli Students, which has been one of the most prominent organizations in the struggle, has an appalling record on the question of Palestine, gaining headlines last year with absurd talk of organizing a counter-flotilla to expose Turkey as a ‘rogue state’  and working with adorably earnest StandWithUs Zionist propaganda outlet.  With such forces playing a leading role, it is unsurprising that the protesters have done nothing whatsoever to connect their own struggles with those of the Palestinians, despite the clear links between skimpy social spending and the promotion of settlements.

Given their contradictory character, the proper response to these struggles is unclear.  Israelis opposed to the occupation have seized on the opportunity to make the connections between military spending and cuts to social services, but it is not at all obvious that they are finding any significant audience within the protests.  Despite these limitations, some leftist groups have been quick to hold up the protests as evidence of the potential for working class unity in the Levant.

My own political background is in a tradition, that of the International Socialist Tendency (specifically the ISO in the US), more skeptical about the possibilities for militancy on the part of the Israeli working class.  Drawing on Tony Cliff’s own experiences as a Trotskyist in Palestine under the Mandate, and the writings of the Matzpen group, the IST has argued that the Israeli working class is, because of its position in the Zionist colonial project, not a revolutionary class, and that Palestinian liberation can only come through the efforts of the Arab working classes.  This perspective is admirably summed up in the saying ‘the road to Jerusalem runs through Cairo.’

This was the perspective presented at the meeting Friday, where the speaker pointed out that the levels of class struggle we are currently seeing in Israel are not exceptional even in Israeli history.  In 1951, 1962, 1969, and 1971, Israel saw a series of wildcat strikes by key workforces such as seamen, dockers, and postal workers.  None of these periods saw any substantial challenge to Israeli colonialist endeavors, let alone Zionism itself.  Given the historic failure of the Israeli working class to challenge Zionism, even at its most militant, our expectations for a significant but clearly less potent struggle such as this should remain modest at best.

Undoubtedly the most interesting and challenging aspect of the meeting came in explaining the reason for this failure.  The traditional explanation in IS circles has been that put forward by Haim Hanegbi, Akiva Orr, and Moshe Machover in their 1969 article, ‘The Class Nature of Israeli Society.’  Machover et al offer three primary lines of explanation for Israel’s unique class politics.  First, they argue that the fact that Israel’s working class is primarily composed of immigrants has distorted class consciousness, leading Israeli workers to hold higher hopes of social mobility, and consequently less investment in strategies of class struggle than working classes in other nations.  As the authors note, this alone cannot explain the persistent conservatism of Israeli workers.  If it were only Israel’s immigration patterns that distorted working class consciousness, one could reasonably expect second and third generation Israelis to demonstrate more traditional patterns of class conflict.  This has not happened.

The second factor Machover et al describe is the uniqueness of Israel’s ruling class.  Unlike ruling classes in other capitalist countries, the Israeli ruling class has historically not been composed of capitalists and their retinue.  Rather, Israeli history has been characterized by the dominance of capital by the political institutions of Zionism, such as the Histadrut and the Jewish Agency.  In Mandatory Palestine, the Histadrut in particular played a key role in subordinating Jewish capital to the Zionist project, organizing strikes, boycotts, and physical attacks against Jewish employers who hired Arab labor.  After the nakba, these institutions retained their predominance in the new state, as the Histadrut emerged as a majr employer, and a significant amount of the economy was controlled by the government, which was dominated until the mid-70s by Labor Zionism.  Israeli society has thus been characterized not by the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, but by that of the Zionist bureaucracy.  In particular, the role of the Histadrut as the only legitimate representative of the Israeli working class goes a long way in this account towards explaining the commitment to Zionism evident in Israeli working class history.

The third factor figures most prominently in the IST’s account of Israeli class structure, and that is  Israel’s unique role in imperialism.  As the Zionist propaganda outfit FLAME put it, ‘Israel is indeed America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East and the indispensable defender of America’s interests in that area of the world.’  The imperial powers support Israel because of its ability to punish misbehaving Arab regimes and guarantee continued imperial control over the most important strategic commodity in the world – oil. In return for this service, the imperial countries agree to subsidize Israeli society with foreign aid, guaranteed loans, and various incentives for private contributions to the Zionist project. The result of all this is, as Machover et al put it:

The Jewish worker in Israel does not get his share in cash, but he gets it in terms of new and relatively inexpensive housing, which could not have been constructed by raising capital locally; he gets it in industrial employment which could not have been started or kept going without external subsidies; and he gets it in terms of a general standard of living which does not correspond to the output of that society. The same obviously applies to the profits of the Israeli bourgeoisie whose economic activity and profit-making is regulated by the bureaucracy through subsidies, import licences and tax exemptions. In this way the struggle between the Israeli working class and its employers, both bureaucrats and capitalists, is fought not only over the surplus value produced by the worker, but also over the share each group receives from this external source of subsidies.

Up until Friday evening, I thought this was a very persuasive account of Israeli working class conservatism.  However, the speaker in the meeting pointed out that the inspiration for these protests, neoliberalism in Israel, complicates this analysis.  The living standards of working class Israelis have been falling for almost thirty years, with no appreciable increase in political challenges to Zionism.  This itself seems a prima facie falsification of the thesis that subsidies from imperialism work to buy off the Israeli working class.  Upon further consideration, there are additional problems with the thesis.  For one thing, it is highly reminiscent of the labor aristocracy thesis put forward by Third Worldist groups that argue the American working class is bought off by the super-profits of imperialism (this thesis has been subjected to devastating critique recently by Charles Post).  This resemblance is particularly ironic given that Tony Cliff was one of the first to reject the theory of labor aristocracy as an explanation for the prevalence of reformist ideas.  Finally, the  growth of the Israeli economy in recent decades has been such that the aid it receives from imperial nations is simply too small a part of its national economy to be a significant explanation of working class consciousness.

Where does all this leave us?  First, I think it’s worth recognizing that Israeli working class conservatism itself is a fact.  In the United States, for example, income is a fairly good predictor of support for imperial endeavors, and has been for at least fifty years.  The American working class has the most to lose from American wars, and their class consciousness is reflective of this.  In Israel, support for aggression against the Palestinians and neighboring countries has enjoyed almost unanimous levels of support, with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon consisting of the only significant exception.  This is indicative of a real difference between the Israeli and American working classes.  (Unfortunately, many Trotskyist groups are unwilling to recognize this difference, with the Spartacists arguing that ‘If successful, [BDS] would hit the Israeli proletariat the hardest, causing mass layoffs and weakening its social power that could and must be mobilised to defend its Palestinian brothers, and the peoples of Lebanon, and to smash the Zionist state from within through socialist revolution’ and the US SWP even going so far as to accuse BDS activists of anti-semitism.)

The question, then, is how to explain this difference, if imperial subsidies are clearly not plausible.  At the meeting, it was argued that the commitment of the Israeli working class to Zionism has so thoroughly shaped class consciousness that Israeli workers cannot conceive of themselves as anything but a Jewish working class in a Zionist state.  Ultimately, I don’t buy this argument.  It’s a bit too close to the positions advanced by whiteness theorists, who hold that white working class consciousness is so tied up with whiteness that it will never mount a serious challenge to capital.  This seems to grant the ideological-political aspect of class formation undue causal power in explaining very broad patterns of class conflict.  For me, at least, a sixty year history of Israeli working class conservatism calls for an explanation more deeply located in the class relations of Israel.

Such an explanation is, I think, visible in outline at least in the article by Machover et al.  First, while the argument about imperial subsidies clearly cannot explain Israeli history since the 1980s, it fairs somewhat better for the earlier period.  During this time, capital inflows from imperial nations really did make up a significant portion of the Israeli economy.  from 1949-1965, Israel had a savings rate that averaged around zero percent, yet the rate of investment was nearly twenty percent of  GNP.  This meant Israel was both able to spend substantial amounts on both capital formation and consumption during this period.  As Machover et al explain, ‘the growth of the Israeli economy was based entirely on the inflow of capital from outside.’  In this period, then, it seems quite plausible that capital from the imperial nations subsidized the Israeli economy to a degree that does have explanatory power.

This explanation becomes even more compelling when combined with their argument about the uniqueness of Israel’s ruling class.  Because of the volume of imperial investment, the Israeli ruling class was able to hold as its main class project the colonization of Palestine, rather than the extraction of surplus value from Israeli workers (though of course this remained an important concern).  This assortment of labor bureaucrats, settlement agency directors, and Histadrut officials pursued a class strategy which did not bring them into as direct a confrontation with Israeli workers as other ruling classes.  Though I lack the data to substantiate such a claim, it seems plausible that the Zionist bureaucracy’s hegemony over Israeli capitalists was premised on their ability to guarantee a certain level of labor peace by subsidizing the costs of the reproduction of labor power.  Imperial subsidies thus made the victory of the Zionist bureaucracy possible, retarding the development of class struggle in Israel, and ensuring the hegemony of Zionist consciousness in the place of class consciousness.

If this combination explains Israeli working class conservatism before neoliberalism, what explains its continued hold?  Here immigration seems to play an important role.  Over the last twenty years, nearly a million Russian Jews have immigrant to Israel (Israel today has a population of seven million).  Fleeing first Stalinist stagnation and then the savagery of Russian neoliberalism, these immigrants have found in Israel significantly higher standards of living than they had previously.  Immigration as an explanation of conservatism is further supported by the fact that Russian Jews are one of the most conservative sectors of Israeli society, forming the prime support base for Avigdor Lieberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu.

It’s not exactly clear how unique character of Israel’s ruling class continues to play out.  Much of Israel’s economy has been privatized, and the Histadrut no longer plays anything like the role it once did in organizing either capital or labor (unionization rates have been sliced in half since the 1960s, and most of the industries it used to own have been sold to private owners).  Capitalists play a much larger role in Israeli society today than in the 1960s, and the housing struggles are partially a reflection of this fact.  To be clear, these capitalists are no less committed to the Zionist project than their predecessors, but they are also subject to market discipline in a way the bureaucracy never was.  This market discipline has led them to undertake their attacks on the Israeli working class.

Admittedly, this leaves my account in a lame position, as I am forced to rely on some kind of ideological intertia or hangover to explain the persistence of Israeli working class conservatism since the 1980s in the face of increasing capitalist attacks, precisely the kind of explanation I dismissed as insufficiently materialist earlier.  Two replies.  First, I think immigration is a significant factor, and is actually invaluable for explaining the rise of the far right in contemporary Israeli politics.  Second, it’s important to emphasize that the combination of Zionist bureaucratic hegemony and imperial subsidies is a good explanation for the pre-neoliberal period, and that this significantly reduces the period of conservatism to be explained by ideological factors.  I find it a good deal more plausible to explain thirty years of conservatism as a result of previous class formation than to explain sixty years on the basis of politics alone.

In conclusion, I’m not sure my argument here is necessarily incompatible with the perspective laid out at the meeting.  The struggles over housing will almost certainly not develop into a generalized challenge to the regime, because their participants remain committed to the Zionist project.  Though it’s possible that the struggles will create splits in the ruling class Palestinians can put to good use, neither they nor their supporters should expect much from the tent cities.