RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 321 Class and/or Identity
Ep 321 of RevolutionZ considers the I believe false choice of class or identity. We want to understand the world to change it. Why must we choose one focus above some other focus to best pursue effective change? How do class, race, gender, and power priorities and concepts intersect? What if marxism, anarchism, feminism, and nationalism are each correct and yet also each wrong? Is there a way to think about social change able to combine the virtues of paying priority attention to gender, sexuality, race, culture, power, and class while jettisoning the debits that can accompany exclusive emphasis on feminism, anti-racism, marxism, or anarchism, each taken alone? If yes, do we need that approach to effectively combat fascism and attain a vastly better world? This episode addresses such questions.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 321st consecutive episode. Wouldn't it be nice if more people were relating? But alas, we do what we can. Thinking about what to focus on this episode, I considered what's going on out in the world? But what can one add to what's being said about what's going on out in the world that I haven't already added or entered or uttered in recent episodes? His edicts like a god of some kind, telling the country what it will and will not do in vile manner. But then you also have Musk tossing out two consecutive and I think it might have been three, because he might have turned it around and done it for another part of the audience Nazi salutes Very intentionally, very clearly, and you have to wonder at this point does the population not know what's going on? Is that possible?
Speaker 1:I spend a lot of time on media that isn't progressive left media, it's not mainstream TV. You know the news and stuff, but it's the kind of stuff that shows up on podcasts and on YouTube, and I'll tell you you can't be on that, and unless you're in a rabbit hole which hides everything, you know what's going on. That being the case, I thought maybe this time I would try and do something in another vein. So this time I want to take up the often forefront and, of late, rarely if ever absent issue of class and or identity. Class and or identity what does that mean? What issue is there? It's, of course, connected to what's going on, or at least to how to deal with what's going on. Yet I can perhaps address it with no mention of the orange blight that now spreads like a cancer on steroids all around us. Okay, so what is the issue at stake regarding class and or identity? It's not so obvious, I think. So a slight sidebar, a slight side trip to get a grip on it.
Speaker 1:Suppose we want to understand some domain to impact. It Could be anything, could be how the ocean moves, could be climate, could be biology, could be human health, could be, hell, my health. So what do you do to understand some domain? Well, you come at it with a set of concepts that have a long lineage and you believe are relevant to the task you have at hand, and different tasks may well require different concepts, require different concepts. So, if you're trying to understand ocean waves, or the weather, or human biology or your own personal biology. There are going to be various things that you think about. First, things that you focus in on. You don't focus in on the same thing for all these different domains. Physics doesn't help you understand why you feel bad in the morning, and why you feel bad in the morning is not going to help you understand well, maybe a little is not going to help you understand global warming. So you need tools, a kind of a toolbox of concepts, to help you with whatever it is that you're interested in doing.
Speaker 1:So in our case, what is it that we're interested in doing? The answer, I think, is understanding society in order to change it, understanding society in order to change it. So we can ask what kinds of focus, what kinds of concepts, what kinds of understanding of broad generalities do we bring to that task in a specific society at a specific time? Certainly, we don't look at the society and think about electrons and protons, or circulatory systems and kidneys, or even gravity and so on and so forth. Biology concepts, physics concepts not very useful. So what?
Speaker 1:This is what's at stake in the debate between, or the discussion between, or the conversation between, focusing on class and or focusing on identity. So consider class first. We could focus on class. We could come at understanding society in order to change it, by looking at how its economy divides people up into contending classes. We could do that. If we did, why would we do that? Well, it would be because we thought that, in order to change society, classes are an important concept. The way a class sees itself, sees the world, acts on the world, the way we can impact. That is critical and therefore central to trying to make change. We might even say we should understand pretty much everything else with respect to that Because, for example, the working class rising up and changing society is how society changes, and so when we're looking at other things like families or the state, or education or health care or what have you, we should look at it in terms of how it affects class relations and how it affects the likelihood of a working class, for example, rising up and making change.
Speaker 1:It's a perfectly consistent kind of approach if its assumptions, underlying assumptions are right. What follows from the assumptions makes sense. But do the assumptions make sense? We could instead start with gender. We could say gender is most critical. What's going to create social change that's lasting and profound is if a gender, women rise up and transform social relations and institutions. And that can happen, we might assert, if there is an increasing consciousness and increasing militance on the part of women and male supporters and we can call that feminism. And that approach, too, makes sense if we start with the assumption that gender is the heart of everything, that we should understand economy and we should understand race and we should understand the government and we should understand everything else insofar as it impacts gender male and female and, nowadays, other gender designations.
Speaker 1:Maybe we would say, wait a minute, they both make some sense, let's do class and gender. That's not impossible. We could take up both those focuses as being central. In fact, 50, 60 years ago, socialist feminism emerged with just that kind of inclination. Feminism emerged with just that kind of inclination. They were the people who brought that about, attentive to class, they were attentive to gender and they decided to be attentive to both. It's also possible to put race first, or cultural designations, community designations, and then you could have race and gender, or you could have race and class. You could put power first and have power and class, or power and race or power.
Speaker 1:What's going on here? Well, the distinction is that we have a different set of assumptions, which may or may not be verifiable. At the root of each One assumption says the economy is immensely important. Everything depends on the existence and the operations of the economy. It provides that with which we do things. Our role in the economy impacts us. It affects us in profound ways. It can divide us into classes, where one class has one set of interests and another class has a different set of interests, opposed, and they are in conflict. That set of assumptions that that can hold for a society, or that that does hold for a society, or that that must hold for a society, for any society tends to provide the foundation we could call it for the emergence of that kind of class approach to understanding society in order to change it.
Speaker 1:We could say instead just as equally, wait a minute. Everything rests on gender kinship. The relations between men and women, the relations in generating the next generation, in bringing up children, in affecting the population, the relations there that occur around nurturance and procreation, impact people, certainly true, profoundly true and impact us into constituencies with different interests and inclinations Men and women and trans, and gay and lesbian. It causes the demarcation of people in ways that can put them at odds with each other and that can cause some to dominate others. It sounds rather like what the economy can do. Except now we're talking about something else kinship, the relations of reproduction of the race, of the society, of its population. What about the way in which people identify themselves culturally? How about if that's something, if the way in which people form into cultural communities has profound implications which of course it does? And what about if the way that we arrive at public decisions, at collective decisions, or at decisions that affect the collective because they may not be very collective, what if that demarcates people and affects people's lives mightily?
Speaker 1:The point is, as we approach this problem now, without any sophisticated backdrop, without using piles and piles of books and schooling, we see that maybe it makes sense to say there are four parts of society that are all profoundly important. The economy things get produced and consumed, distributed. The polity decisions get made, adjudication occurs, legislation happens. The culture, or community relations, in which things like religion and ethnicity and racial designations all arise and lead to conflicts and or solidarity among different constituencies. And then kinship, and the importance of procreation and nurturance and education and the impact that that has. And we might say wait, instead of trying to claim that one or another is perfect, more important than all the rest, and that we should understand the rest in terms of that one. What if we say that we should understand each in context of the others, that we should recognize that they are entwined. Why are they entwined? Well, imagine you have a society. You have an economy.
Speaker 1:The economy produces stuff that we use in all sides of life. We use it in homes, we use it at work, we use it at play. We use it all over the place. So what happens in the economy impacts people. So people go from the economy into the family. They go from the economy into their community. They go from the economy into the family. They go from the economy into their community. They go from the economy into the government, as we've seen recently. They go from the economy into all sides of life, and thus the dynamics of the economy tend to spread. The economy has a kind of force field which spreads its influence throughout the whole of society. But the same is true for kinship. When men and women go into the workplace, different things happen when men and women, gay and straight, trans go into the workplace or go into communities, or go into places of worship or go into schools. There can be, don't have to be, but there can be very significant differences and relations and so on for the others.
Speaker 1:So to get change, we need to address what. Suppose we say that the radical feminists were right we need to address kinship, we need to address it. Suppose we say the Marxists were right we need to address class, we need to address kinship, we need to address it. Suppose we say the marxists were right, we need to address class, we need to address it. And the anti-racist, the nationalists, were right. We need to address culture. And the anarchists were right, we need to address power and the polity. Suppose we say they're all right and they're all wrong. They were all right about the importance and the significance and the centrality of what they featured, of what they focused on, but they were wrong when they said that the rest was subordinate, that to understand the rest you had to do it by way of their priority. Suppose we say they're all right and they're all wrong and we can fix the wrong part by all of us agreeing and understanding that all are important, that we have to pay attention to class, race, gender and power, and that we have to do it in an interactive way. We have to see their mutual and inter-armed effects. We have to see how they bend each other. They cause each other to accommodate. So the family has to accommodate to class relations and to race relations and to power relations and vice versa. The workplace has to accommodate as well, and so on. So to get change, we need to address all of these four domains.
Speaker 1:What's wrong with highlighting just one? The argument for highlighting just class is if we do so, we'll all be paying attention to it and it's really important, and we all do need to pay attention to it at least at some level. And so that's a plus, and it will, of course, reveal many true things about society and about the levers of change to have an effect upon society. What's the argument against? The argument against is that, while highlighting class is excellent, dismissing, disregarding, relegating to a lower level of concern across all of society, across collectively, gender and power, and race and ethnicity, is not good. It causes us to give too little attention collectively, our whole movement, our whole effort to create change, to give too little attention to certain focuses while properly focusing or sufficiently focusing or even unduly excessively focusing one area.
Speaker 1:The same exact argument applies to gender, to paying attention to gender categories and kinship. The argument for it is it's critically important. If we ignore it, we're ignoring something that is profound and that impacts people mightily and that also impacts people's inclinations and dispositions regarding social change. But the argument against it is if we pay attention just to it or if we put it on a pedestal above everything else, then we're doing a disservice, that is, we are insufficiently attending to other domains. And the same thing goes for the rest.
Speaker 1:So, for example, you could imagine paying attention to race and class, not explicitly necessarily, but your background and your history is such that that's the way you're oriented. You're oriented primarily around race and class. And so you talk about racialized capitalism and maybe you talk about, say, prison abolition and police abolition, and when you do it, somehow gender disappears, even the state disappears and all that remains is race and class, or maybe even just race. And it's not that the focus on race is wrong, it's right, it is profoundly important and it does reveal critically important truths. But exclusively it has the problem of obscuring and diminishing attention to other important factors.
Speaker 1:So we have this fourfold approach and we can understand that the dynamics of each of these areas sort of has to accommodate to the rest. You can't have the family producing the next generation of workers and coordinators, I'm going to say now, but in any case the next generation of economic actors in such a way that they won't fit the economy. You have to have a family and nurturance and socialization and education that prepares people so that they fit in the economy or else they're going to rebel against it. So in a society that's relatively stable, that accommodation will occur and vice versa, causes, let's say, men and women to go through it and to come out each day, such that when they go into the family, when they go into nurturance and socialization, they have attitudes and beliefs and interests that are contrary to those of sexism and kinship and misogyny. There will be conflict. So the workplace will start to accommodate itself to the requirements of the family and vice versa. And similarly around racial communities and religious communities and around power.
Speaker 1:What's more interesting, arguably because that seems like it's so obvious that it should be self-evident to everybody, and I think it is. But something more can happen. Evident to everybody, and I think it is, but something more can happen. It can become the case that the institutions that are central to one area of life, let's say the family, can be so immersed in the field of force of other areas of life that they come to co-reproduce, to reproduce those other phenomena. So class relations and race relations get reproduced inside the dynamics of the family, and likewise sexism and racism get reproduced inside the dynamics, for example, of a corporation. And so what we have is these four sides of life each having their own sort of intrinsic logic, but also having imposed on them by the needs of the other aspects of society, a parallel logic. It's not the case that economics has to produce racial differences or gender differences. You can imagine an economy that's race and gender-implied. How can you imagine that? All you have to do is imagine a society in which there's no races and there's really no genders. Everybody, you know it's just one kind of person around, culture and gender. The economy could still be an economy, a capitalist one or a socialist one or a feudal one or whatever. It just hasn't been impacted by those other dynamics.
Speaker 1:I hope I'm not going too fast. There's nothing rocket science-y about this, it's all straightforward. It really is, I think, if you think it through. So do we just add feminism and Marxism, a class perspective, an anarchism, a power perspective, and nationalism or anti-racism, a cultural community perspective. Do we just add them? Do we just take the concepts of each of them and put all of those in our toolbox and use that toolbox instead of just using Marxism, or just using radical feminism, or just using anarchism, or just using whatever I left out nationalism? No, there's a problem when we do that. We are taking three that are good, that have been developed over time and embody a lot of wisdom in their concepts that we need in order to think about things, whether it be the prison system or the school system, or the hospital or what have you. But the fourth one, marxism, I think, has a problem, and while I don't want to spend too long on this, I'll just at least mention it, as what we're trying to do is get at this question of class and or identity. What do we choose?
Speaker 1:Well, the class problem for Marxism is, ironically, that, while it highlights class which is totally warranted, justified and necessary if we're going to talk about understanding society in order to change it which, by the way, comes from a quote from Marx we do have to pay attention to class. And we have to pay attention, for example, in our society. Nowadays. Most places in my society in the United States, we have to talk about the owning class or the capitalist class that owns the means of production, it owns the workplaces, it owns the resources and so on, and we have to talk about the people who work in those workplaces and who produce the stuff that we need. But a problem arises If we say that all the people who work are workers, then we have two main classes that we can key in on the owning class, the capitalist class and the working class.
Speaker 1:But what if that group of workers now let's call them employees aren't really one class? What if it's two classes? What if it's partly workers, meaning people who are denied by their position in the economy much control over their own lives, are relegated to taking orders, to obeying, to carrying out agendas and so on. And another group, who I want to call the coordinator class, who, by virtue of their position in the economy, by virtue of the fact that they have empowering tasks, that they have a kind of monopoly over empowering tasks, that they set schedules, they do arrangements, they figure out policies, etc, etc. They manage, they engineer, they lawyer, they doctor, they do things, things. They're not owners, but nor are they workers in the sense of being entirely subordinate. They have some considerable degree of impact on what goes on in the economy, of control over it, and they use that power to give themselves more income and more status and so on. I won't go on too long about these things that I've talked about a lot elsewhere.
Speaker 1:So now, coming at this from scratch, we have a possible perspective. We want to combine a modified approach to class, which includes three main classes. Modified approach to class, which includes three main classes the owning class, the working class and, in between, what I call the coordinator class, the Ehrenreichs called it the professional managerial class, for reasons that, again, I don't want to bother with now. I don't think that's a perfect name, but whatever, three classes. And we want to combine that with feminism, including broadly in that area issues of sexuality and of procreation and of nurturance and of the social relations of courtship and all the rest of it. And we want to include also attention to cultural community, to celebration, to identity, to language, to the way that communities form.
Speaker 1:And we want to include polity, all with comparable levels of attention. Polity meaning adjudication and execution of collective functions and legislation. That's the way it's described when people take courses on the government, and it's not bad, that's you know. What they come up with next is often ridiculous, but that's not bad. Those three functions are the functions of polity.
Speaker 1:And now the question arises well, does this mean we all have to always do everything? Does this mean you have to simultaneously address all this stuff all the time, equally? No, it doesn't mean that. Why not? Well, because we come at society from different places in it. We have different agendas, we feel the circumstances of life differently, depending on what, ah, depending on what class we're in, depending on our position vis-a-vis kinship and culture and the state, the polity, depending upon, if you will, our identity and how. It is a function of those various impacts.
Speaker 1:And so what we do is that sometimes we focus in on one. We focus in on talking about, say, the economy and work, or families or education, education or criminal justice system and policing and imprisonment and so on. We focus on something and we do prioritize some factors. Where's the problem that this overcomes, the problem that this broader approach overcomes, the problem that this broader approach overcomes? It doesn't prevent us from talking about the economy and talking overwhelmingly about class when we do, because we're emphasizing that, but it does stop us from acting as though the economy is all class, no gender, no race, no political power. It stops us from asserting that we're doing everything. When we key on one thing Collectively, we need to do everything Collectively.
Speaker 1:Our movements need to be attuned to all of it, an individual person not so much, but they do have to avoid acting as though, and beginning to think as though, they're dealing with all that's important, when they're not, when they're dealing with only a part of what's important. So, for example, I can put forth participatory economics as an economic vision. It's not about, and it doesn't significantly address issues of, say, sex or child rearing or on and on all kinds of things that it doesn't address. That's okay, unless I assert that that's the only vision we need, that that's the only thing we need to talk about. That's not okay, so I don't. That's the only thing we need to talk about. That's not okay, so I don't. And the reminder has to be there at all times that we're doing something partial, if we're doing something partial and if we're not okay.
Speaker 1:And there's no reason to create some kind of hierarchy, as if everything has to be understood in terms of one thing. Does any of this really matter beyond if we dolled it up more in academic classrooms? Yeah, I think it does, for the reason I just said. It can create a mindset, an approach which removes the tendency of different orientations to conflict with one another, to feel like if we pay attention to class, we will ignore race or gender, or if we pay attention to race or gender, we're going to ignore power and authority. It gets rid of the inclination of these different, different priorities, of the fact that a given individual feels one or another more in their life or is more attuned to one or another because of their investigations. It removes the tendency for that person to feel that the rest are somehow in competition with them, somehow trying to draw away their attention from what they are attending to. No, it generates the possibility of greater solidarity. It generates the possibility of a more complete understanding instead of an understanding of part, an understanding that takes into account the whole.
Speaker 1:What about mattering to individuals? That's how it matters to the collective, to movements, to a movement of movements which needs to address it all and which needs to not see these orientations as having to in some way compete with each other. For you know a spotlight or something. They all are primary. They all want the others to be primary. But what about mattering to individuals? Here, I think it's a little different. I don't think an individual has to simultaneously become equally expert in everything or equally attentive to everything. It's just not necessary and it's not human. But what this does is it says to people when your personal background and your training and your feelings that is what you endure in daily life orient you in one direction. This conception, this approach strengthens your inclination to respect and pay attention to the other directions, and that matters. I think it matters a lot. It again generates the possibility of mutual respect instead of mutual suspicion, instead of thinking well, that other approach has one banner and it wants us all to get behind that one banner. And if we all get behind that one banner, my priorities will disappear. That goes away if we all understand that the one banner is really a collection of other banners, a collection of focuses.
Speaker 1:So what about the initial issue, class and or identity? Well, about class, what I'm suggesting is it's important that we do pay attention to it. It's a priority importance. In fact, nowadays, among many leftists, it's getting so, it's dismissed, so it isn't paid enough attention to, I would say. But I want to make clear that I think class is more than just owners on the one hand, and workers on the other hand. There's also this other class between labor and capital, called in my parlance the coordinator class.
Speaker 1:But what about identity? Well, why isn't class an identity? I don't understand that Identity politics. If we say we're paying attention to identities, what does it mean? It means we're probably paying attention to how people identify themselves. So people may identify themselves by class, they may identify themselves by gender, they may identify themselves by their sexuality, they may identify themselves by their religion or by their race, and they may identify themselves by their position in the polity, in the political. Are they order givers or order takers, for example? Or do they hold an office or not hold an office, and so on.
Speaker 1:It seems to me that these all involve identity, that what's important is when the identity is such class or gender or race or whatever that it occupies a significant position in the dynamics of society and, in particular, in how we go about trying to change society. I don't understand why this conflict let's call it ever arose. I do get why, at a point in time, some would feel a Marxist approach gives too little attention, too little priority to race, gender and power, and I understand why, at a particular point in time, people might feel that a radical feminist approach gives too little attention to class and race and power and so on, around the cycle. So I understand that, but I don't understand why people's solution tends to be to pick one and exaggerate it at the expense of the rest, to do what they were afraid others would do. Think about that. The women and the blacks are afraid that the class perspective is going to ice them out of central attention, justifiably so. But then why would you want to ice out of centralized attention class or power? So I think that the class identity conflict is real and false. It's real at the level of we have to pay attention to all of them. It's false at the level of paying attention to any one of them requires that we diminish our attention to the rest. That's just not the case. It might be a case for an individual. If you're going to start to study and pursue and be an activist around, say, sexual issues or gender issues or race issues or class issues, you will be doing less of the other. That's true. That's just the way it is. But so what? As a whole, a movement can be paying attention to all of them without prioritizing one. That's at least what, to me, makes sense and how it is that we can get past this kind of peculiar approach.
Speaker 1:Let me just suggest one last element of this discussion. There's a tendency, or there can be a tendency in how we look at the world that causes us to think in terms of individuals and their feelings to the exclusion of collectives and their situations, and vice versa. We might pay attention to collectives, groups, constituencies and their circumstances and ignore individuals and their feelings, or downplay individuals and their feelings. It's rather like what we described with respect to the different priorities. There's no reason to do either and it's wrong to do.
Speaker 1:Either we're not going to have as good an understanding of society in order to change it if we downplay the feelings of people, the thoughts in individuals' minds, the motivations that they have, but we're also not going to get any place, or we're going to hurt our prospects if we pay attention to that and we do not pay attention to the collective dynamics, the dynamics of whole constituencies. These polarities are just unnecessary. It's not either, or it's both and, or even more than both, many and, and we ought to be able to be secure enough I think that's the word I'm not sure to be able to see things that way Not so defensive that we have to elevate our own priority, whether it's individual over collective or vice versa, and whether it's one area of oppression over another or vice versa. We should not have to do that, trump, and much more than Trump, in approaching dealing the unfolding threat of fascism, of real, serious fascism, because that is what is threatening us now. In dealing with that, we are going to need as much collective unity, as much multi-issue focus, as much multi-tactic focus as we can generate, and we're going to have to not see others who are potentially engaged in changing society as enemies or competitors instead of allies. We're going to have to get to that point, Even to the point, dare I suggest it, of being able to realize that a lot of Trump supporters are as mad at, are as angered by, are as upset with, the state of current reality as many leftists, reality as many leftists, even more than some leftists, and so they too are potential advocates of change, if we can couch it right, if we can communicate about it well. And so, all that said, I hope this wasn't a bit on the abstract side, but I'll tell you in all honesty, dealing with the specifics doesn't seem to have any impact. Nowadays, it just doesn't.
Speaker 1:I can go online and see liberals, mainstream folks, uttering things which 10, 20, 30 years ago they would have been drummed out for doing. They are talking about fascism. They are talking about the danger of grotesque authoritarian control. So it's all on the table. What is probably key to dealing with it is how we think about it, how we address it, how we move to confront it, which is why last time, I talked about raising social costs and how we do that, and this time I'm talking about mindset.
Speaker 1:I suppose you could say that we need to bring to the task. And the last thing that we need to bring to the task is that. How do I put this without irritating a whole lot of people? Yes, we're under assault, yes, there's danger ahead, but to constantly harp on that and to constantly talk about our individual need to improve our lives or the lives of our family and to weather the storm is not going to provide the mindset, the militants, the focus, the commitment that's going to be needed to deal with Trumpism and fascism. We have to think in terms much larger than protecting ourselves. We have to think in terms of understanding society in order to change it. And that said, this is Mike Albert signing off until next time.