Solidarity When?

Late last week, I happened to be listening to a popular YouTube broadcast of the left when a listener from Florida called in hoping to make a point about how one of the "biggest obstacles to left-wing power in this country" was its "antagonistic relationship with working class people like me and what I believe is a racist anti-white culture within the left that is driving this antagonism "   He came prepared with a 2019 academic study from Colgate University and a personal anecdote to support his premise.  The Colgate Study measured attitudes of those who identified as either liberal or conservative toward a story about the life circumstances of man named Kevin who "lived in NYC, was raised by a single mom, struggled with poverty his whole life, and was currently receiving welfare assistance" but whose race was varied along with whether or not the subject was first given information to read about white privilege.  The researchers found that while conservatives seemed to look down on poor people of either race with or without the benefit of receiving information about white privilege, and liberals who were not first given information about white privilege expressed sympathy toward a poor man whether he was described as black or white,  self-identified liberals who had read about white privilege before hearing Kevin's story were more sympathetic to his present circumstances if he was described as black than if described as white, even to the point of blaming the white Kevin for his own poverty or agreeing with the proposition that "White people deserve to be poor in a kind of moral sense." 

As an illustration of the application of the study to his own experience, he related the story of how when he was a teenager in Florida in the 90s his single mother, working her way through school behind the cash register at a liquor store for little more than minimum wage unknowingly and absent-mindedly neglected to ask for an ID before selling a 6-pack of beer to a woman who turned out to be an underage undercover agent.  Weeks later, the lapse came back to her tenfold when the bust came down.  His mother was subsequently humiliatingly arrested on the job for it for which she was fired on the spot and "frog marched" out of the store to be charged.  Unable to raise bail she was jailed overnight without a chance to let her teenage son know where she was and what had happened to her. Saddled with legal expenses and court obligations for months and no longer on an income she was forced to go on public assistance.  The police and "by extension the lawmakers had nothing better to do with their time and taxpayer money than to publicly humiliate a poor white woman and drive her life into the ditch."  The caller used this as an example and not the worst of how poorly white people are treated by the police and yet at a leftist rallies he had attended  in support of Black Lives Matter following George Floyd's murder by police he had gotten the message that "poor whites have no skin in the game" and their struggles with the police did not matter.  As he told it, he was there in support and solidarity but came away from it disillusioned when one of the speakers reportedly said apropos of nothing that had been said before, "Poor white people, you all need to understand that your problems are not important right now" and then "went on to plug her small business."  The last part of his point was drowned out by one of the hosts mocking his sense of insult.   

Declarations of victimhood for being white have a tendency in leftist circles to raise suspicions along with eyebrows.  (Mine were raised.)  And of course as bad as poor people as a class have it at the hands of police, black people have it the worst .  But I think somewhere in there, the caller (who was not after all raining on a Black Lives Matter protest in progress, but merely trying to air his experience from one to illustrate an assertion on a leftist call-in show) had a valid point which I don't think he perfectly expressed-- not entirely through his own fault, although the responses he excited from the presenters of the broadcast which made it difficult for him to lay out his argument without protest may have to some extent made it for him. His framing of his mother's experience and of the results of the Colgate study as a case of anti-white racism, aside from doing him no favors with the audience he was addressing, is a mischaracterization of the problem that obfuscated matters, provoked a defensive response from the broadcasters and prevented the landing of what I think is actually a very important point.  

"There is without a doubt a class struggle but there is no white people's struggle." the host of the broadcast said accurately in support of his objection to the caller's story and it echoed my thoughts about the fault in the caller's presentation.  But to say that the caller's experience at the rally was an example of narcissistic extrapolation that has no bearing on leftist power seems to me to be missing the crux.  As the caller said, "If we're talking about winning power in this country, we need as many people on board as we can get so when the left alienates poor white people it's not just me the guy in the crowd who got his feelings hurt it's sort of a ripple effect."  Like it or not, and who the hell likes it, there is a problem building solidarity on the left (and has been at least since the time of Marx) which is very much exemplified by the readiness with which many poor whites are prepared to abandon class solidarity at the moment their own very real struggles are discounted by those who should be comrades due to the lack of a racial component to them (which if there is anything to the Colgate study seems to be the point of it).  The anomalous speaker at the George Floyd rally so hasty to draw a boundary of race on whose experiences were permitted to be brought to the table was tellingly a member of the black bourgeoisie according to the caller (or at least that was the perception) -- did she have skin in the poverty game?  Truthfully, how attuned to the pain and humiliations of poverty that doesn't fit the liberal mold are the hosts of the broadcast?  What the caller was talking about is the kind of pocketing of aggrievements that the left is lately so brilliant at festering and fostering but that only manipulators of the right seem to be capable of corralling to their own benefit.

In short, the left has a Solidarity problem.  It will not be solved by alienating anybody for deficiencies in their place on the hierarchy of grievances.  True, the gentleman's story had a huge element of subjective hurt to it.  Whose doesn't?  When someone tells you they are feeling excluded unfairly, believe them first.  Then defend them.  Then march forward together.

Proxy Wars

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At the start of Putin's war on Ukraine in February, President Joe Biden made telling statements that revealed the attitude of the US toward the impending invasion of Russia's neighbors to the West -- a conflict undertaken on the part of Russia to assert its dominance over a country and people that outside of a few pockets had exhibited a troubling tendency-- openly and clandestinely encouraged by US and other Western alliance officials and operatives-- to list westward in its orientation for most of its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992 while Russia, in contrast, was increasingly marginalized.  The day that Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden explained gratuitously that sanctions imposed on Russia prior to its invasion were not intended to prevent the war but to send a message to those most hurt by them, not the oligarchs or those planning for the invasion but the Russian people, that Putin by being the cause of the sanctions was the cause of their misery.  The war was not a thing the US was determined to avoid -- it was the point.  

"For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power," Biden said of Putin in remarks in Poland a month into the Russian president's war against neighboring Ukraine over the latter's suppression of pro-Russian factions in the Donbas region and its stated intentions to join NATO.  As an opinion, Biden's remarks are unremarkable, but as executive of the American project, his thoughts are the seeds of history.  As it turned out they were more intemperate than the national security establishment was prepared for and had to be walked back in an op-ed column signed by the president in the New York Times Many Americans I'm sure share the sentiment as Biden originally expressed it-- I've had it myself once or twice.  But why Putin and not Netanyahu or Muhammad bin Salman?  The answer is obvious considering the sameness of US national security apparatus objectives at least since the end of World War II-- because Israel and Saudi Arabia do not threaten or reject the dominance of America and its closest  and most similar European allies over global affairs like Putin and Russia do.

Is Ukraine fighting a proxy war against Russia for the US and its NATO allies?  Since at least 2015 the CIA has trained Ukrainian special forces in undisclosed locations of the south -- not southern Ukraine, but Southern USA--  on countering a Russian invasion.  Is this evidence of incredible foresight or has something else been going on?  

To Ukrainians and Russians immiserated by it, the war is immediate and real.  To the US military and diplomatic apparatus which did little to prevent it and has done virtually nothing to try to bring it to an end, it is a boon to munitions suppliers and military advisers, whose bread and butter for once comes without a cost of American lives, and therefore with even less friction than usual from the yard sign contingent.  If Russia won quickly as many in the American establishment claimed to believe would happen or if Ukraine could muster a protracted resistance to drain Putin's treasury as long as possible, what did it matter to the US?  Considering the entrenched apparently unconditional involvement of American interests in Ukraine leading up to and since the February invasion, why does no one in the American national security establishment seem able to articulate what we envision as a satisfactory end of the conflict-- and why do so few Americans seem to care?

I wonder if others who have tried their hand at writing about the Ukraine war as critics (and not as journalists) have like me struggled to get beneath the surface of what can be gleaned by the most carefully worded google searches, or discussed at high volume at a depth of mere inches on 24 hours news channels, or pre-digested and regurgitated to us from the pages of newspapers and magazines and joked about on late night talk shows.  Do they know that Boris Johnson talked Volodymir Zelensky into abandoning productive peace talks with Russia mediated by Turkey in April in spite of a substantial list of agreed upon points reportedly because "Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end"?  Do they recall  US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time those talks ended stated American objectives in Ukraine as being to prolong the war to the point of exhausting Russian conventional military capabilities? Are they aware that Amnesty International has reported that Ukraine is violating International humanitarian law by placing military installations in heavily populated civilian areas and launching attacks that endanger those populations from Russian artillery responses?    Are they aware that since April, 66 UN member nations representing most of the world's population have called on those involved to end the war; that events on the ground reflect Biden's off the cuff remarks and  contradict the words of his May editorial?  Are they aware that the narrative of the war is being cleansed in real time by those reporting on it (if it even breaks through the wall of what is officially allowed to be said)?  As Patrick Lawrence says in the Scheerpost essay linked to above:

All correspondents bring their politics with them... This is a natural thing, a good thing, an affirmation of their engaged, civic selves not at all to be regretted. The task is to manage your politics in accord with your professional responsibilities, the unique place correspondents occupy in public space. There can be no confusing journalism and activism. You do your best to keep your biases, political proclivities, prejudices... out of the files you send your foreign desk.... We are not getting this from the Western correspondents reporting in Ukraine for mainstream media. You may associate the error of mistaking journalism for activism with independent publications, and ... [i]t happens. The truth here is that almost all mainstream journalists reporting from Ukraine are guilty of this... They are effectively activists in the cause of the American national security state, its campaign against Russia, and Washington’s latter-day effort to defend its primacy.

Putin's war is unjust and brutal; ordinary Ukrainians have no choice but to raise resistance to it, and yet, the war could have been avoided, and failing that the US -- whose response has been to provide virtually unlimited and unconditional material and strategic support to Ukraine in the conduct of their resistance-- could have been and should now be engaged in efforts to bring the war to a conclusion. We should be skeptical of the motives of a national security apparatus that enables genocide in Yemen, cultivates repression in Haiti, ignores apartheid in Israel, sides with anti-democratic forces in country after country in Latin America, that is known to have trained and supported anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan only to have to war against them 20 years later and in keeping with the pursuit of a hostile course intended to surround and economically isolate its former cold war adversary Russia, has had its fingers in Ukrainian affairs ever since that country's independence.  The fact that we are not yet actively engaged in hand to hand combat with Russians is not reason to unqualifiedly support our efforts materially or advisory in the present conflict.  While Russia's actions in Ukraine are a travesty and must be stopped, 1)  What exactly is the problem with proposing peace talks as a way to do that?; and 2) While waiting for the moment when negotiating for peace is actually ok to hope for, why should we not engage skepticism about the aims of US involvement and about the further extension East of  unlimited American hegemony?

Weaponizing Ukraine because we are not there is seen as the right thing to do when technically what we are doing is having Ukraine do our battle for us. Which is fine with Russia since they would rather kill Ukrainians as substitutes for us since there are few consequences risked than there would be killing Americans.  Similar wars take place daily online. Occasionally they spill over into the real world as when right cultish hecklers show up at town halls of congress people to voice histrionic opposition to votes taken or not taken.  But these are done for the cameras of social media and the effect they have is proxy flame wars online.

People fight each other on social media in place of making actual change.  This is an excellent way the system has devised to keep us on our asses in front of our computers at odds with each other instead of in the streets making noise together.  But while we are engaged online, we believe ourselves to be doing something.  Occasionally, in the cause of something bigger like Medicare for All, someone might urge others on line to tweet at a famous politician, preferably of the left, ideally of a squad in order to threaten them into action toward a long dreamed for policy change-- say a force of a vote on Medicate for All.  The tweet starts out as being about Medicare for All but rapidly degenerates into a battle between ostensible allies over tactics. Actions taken in the flesh and blood world are done for twitter ratios. 

AOC was publicly challenged on her votes to fund US military and advisory support of Ukraine and she needed to be, and her recent confronters at a town hall meeting in the Bronx had me with them until they mentioned the very problematic and non-voting ex-congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (the opposite of a model of purity) as a counterpoint.  They turned out to be adherents of the very bizarre, necrophiliac cryptofascistic LaRouche movement. Why must everything nowadays be filtered through some sectarian lens?  Why must we establish our corners before we can even hope to come to common cause on issues that should be accumulating solidarity rather serving as prisms of our differences?  Why is so much effort on the left from every corner expended on how correctly the most progressive members of Congress behave, and not at all on those who will never behave?  I suspect it's because we are too close to a tipping point for the neoliberal order.  We thwart our own progress because we are terrified of success.

Not all proxy wars are bad.  Two climate activists in London startled the world by tomato souping Van Gogh's very pricy piece Sunflowers and then supergluing themselves to the National Gallery walls to protest Big oil production. What did Sunflowers have to do with anything?  As a solitary act it was shocking and seemed unnecessary. On the other hand, was it?  Compared to the crisis we are facing that no one seems to be doing anything about?  As a solitary act, a single world famous very expensive painting assaulted with tomato soup seems anomalous and paltry and unfair.  But imagine if this became a daily thing.  Imagine if painting after paintng, Guernica, the Mona Lisa, American Gothic, Whistler's Mother, Stuart's portrait of George Washington, preferably those in private collections-- every day a new familiar bauble were to be splashed.  Would capital start listening?

If Lewis Powell told you to jump off the Empire State Building . . .

I've finally come to the understanding that there really is no such thing as an American left.  It's not my own idea; it's just that after spending a great deal of time reading and listening to discussions about the state of the left in this country from those whom I have come to trust on these matters, it has finally sunk in that while leftist sentiment and thought is alive and well and manifold in its forms and manifestations, and is embodied in a proliferation of leftists, The Left as a relevant sector of American society is not so much a specter as a phantom.  The key ingredient that is missing is labor-- at the moment a defeated and divided plurality (although the past year has seen promising stirrings).  Those who claim the mantle of the left tend to be clever, academic, disconnected voices (not unlike a certain numerically nomenclatured blogger I could name) who paradoxically proclaim their leftness while connected.  Hence the predominance of conflict and cancellation as the mode of online leftist discourse, and more importantly, the rarity of actual tangible political victories that could be claimed by the left-- not so much because leftists do not participate in the process, as that their campaigns, despite the demonstrable popularity of their platforms, rarely make it beyond the pupal stage since their entrees into electoral politics are for the most part successfully squelched by the superiorly funded and organized efforts of democratic party operatives and their donors who have a knack for destroying the field when it comes to primaries but a decided cluelessness about winning general elections.

Speaking of Virginia...I saw a Lewis Powell quote the other day on one of these leftist videos.

...one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups... that political power is necessary; that such power must be [assiduously] cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

 In Richmond, Virginia, late summer 1971,  US Chamber of Commerce president Eugene Sydnor reached across the back yard fence to his neighbor, Richmond attorney and soon-to-be Nixon Supreme Court appointee Lewis Powell to request a "secret memorandum" concerning what to Sydnor, head and chief stockholder of a chain of department stores was a disturbing trend -- namely the capturing of the public discussion by decidedly anti-free enterprise and anti-establishment voices.  Herbert Marcuse and other exponents of the Frankfurt school diaspora, for instance, were selling books and capturing the imagination of military draft age college youths and others of their cohort, inspiring campus unrest, causing widespread skepticism among youth of the American "establishment", and seducing them away from service in what had become a very unpopular war in Southeast Asia. DC policy wonk and attorney Ralph Nader had written a best seller- Unsafe at any Speed--  about the epidemic of highway deaths that were avoidable but for the recalcitrance of the US Auto industry in making safer automotive designs, raising awareness and widespread support for an overdue and, as it turned out brief, era of government regulation of American businesses.  Concomitant with these, a growing planetary consciousness inspired by humanity's civic forays into space inspired an environmental awareness that had seized the public, engendering a clamoring for accountability from the businesses whose profligate way with waste in the pursuit of greater and greater profits had visibly taken a toll on the natural beauty of the country and was threatening the future of the Earth.  So it's not like there wasn't cause for the owning class to worry.  In response, Lewis drafted up the confidential memo whose main point was "business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late."  The memo called for an aggressive response to growing fed-up-ness with American Enterprise-- a greater presence on campuses, aggressive pursuit of legislation, relentless counterattacks to criticism of business with editorials, advertisements and media of their own.

There was something to it.  I don't know that the Powell memo was ever delivered publicly, and yet, it's not at all hard to imagine the receptive audience for Powell's remarks being the paunchy, horn-rimmed, white haired set, commerce bank patrons, fat cats and glad-handers setting down their white napkins dabbed with béarnaise sauce from the corners of their mouths to applaud the pep talk from one of their better boys.  The beauty of Powell's vision was that it was purposely co-opted from the enemy.  It would inspire a wildfire of aggrievement on the right as a counterpart to the call on the left for justice-- fire fighting fire. 

The memorandum was leaked to Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson who made much of the clandestine plan to combat public distrust in American Business with propaganda, legislation, jurisprudence, and stealth commandeering of the discourse through media, print and academic infiltration.  The outing from a feared journalist did nothing to dampen the rallying of the well-heeled troops. On the contrary, fifty years later, here we are.

The question I have to ask is, so Lewis Powell said power was essential and that it had to be used.  Did it necessarily follow that the right would dig in to power and exert it?  What motivated the men who already had everything? More to the point, what would those on the ostensible left be able and prepared to do with a counterpart document?