Public Comment

To be Jewish, or even to have Jewish heritage, is for many of us to acquire a necessary sensitivity to ethnic antagonisms in connection to mass movements. The Trump campaign invites scrutiny in this regard. Exhibit A: the candidate himself famously indulges in racial and ethnic slanders. Exhibit B: the Trump candidacy is enthusiastically promoted by nazi revivalists who organize under the flags of a European "identitarian" movement that has acquired support throughout Europe and that now appears in the US at Trump rallies, on campuses, and in Sacramento stabbing queer communists. 

Our sensitivities to ethnic purists, born of long historic trauma, risks devolution into a kind of numbness and inattention to the real movement of society. To Trump's supporters and detractors alike, some of them anyway, he symbolizes the recurrence of a white-led cleansing. Does he actually herald it? What if the real threat is elsewhere? What if defeating Trump makes no real difference? Is Trump actually relevant? 

At the end of her essay "The Arc of History", Toni Mester expresses her fear of a Trump presidency in a curiously round-about way: As a warning and admonishment to Black activists: "The young activists who motivate the Black Lives Matter movement grew up with the slogan No justice, No peace. But October 2016 demands cool heads and no surprises or we may end up with the worst law and order president ever. Both cops and citizens need to cool it." (Mester does not explain why "cops" would fear a Nixonian "law and order" candidate.) 

Whites, Mexicans, African-Americans, blacks, and "I" 

Mester's "singling out" of Black people (to borrow a phrase) is peculiar. It comes at the end of an essay about Mester's personal account of race and class. In her essay, Mester marks the business savvy of whites (though they might sometimes set their prices too high), the work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit of Mexicans, and the utility and folksy wisdom of African-Americans. On the other hand, there are the "blacks".... 

In Mester's essay there is an interesting way she uses words to describe Black people. "African-American" occurs twice and each time describes people she has personally hired. On the other hand, she uses "black" many times, to describe people who are shot by the police, segregated, unemployed, shot by other "blacks", imprisoned, or guilty of militancy. In her usage, "black" also describes President Obama in his alleged capacity as a failed role model for other "blacks". Finally, "black" are the subjects of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

The essay, written in the first person, holds a special place for Mester's "I" as both employer and taxonomist of various other ethnicities. "I" hires "African-American" appliance repair and plumbing services, Mexican landscapers, white handymen, and an entrepreneurial Mexican painter (who underbid his "gringo" former employer). "I" is a cautious shopper, building wealth. "I"'s biggest fault, if any, is a tendency to work too hard. ("By the end of the year, tendonitis in my right hand required surgery.") 

Mester has thus laid out a kind of ethnic or racial hierarchy, each group characterized by its position as buyers or sellers of labor. This is, evidently, the story of race and class: "I", the successful propertied class and primary buyer of labor; whites selling their labor for the highest prices; Mexicans coming up next as the discount rate underdog; African-American sole proprietors -- all the successful races differing in their degree of success. And then there, on the other hand, are Mester's "blacks" -- the ones who are told to "cool it", lest Trump be elected. 

A Capitalist Just-so Story 

Mester offers to diagnose the plight of Black people this way: 

1. School desegregation, Mester ahistorically asserts, was expected to "inevitably lead to a more just society, but time revealed that desegregation was a necessary but not a sufficient cause for achieving equality".  

-- Nevermind that no civil rights leader ever viewed desegregation as anything but one battle in a much larger struggle. 

2. Like "crabs in a bucket", Mester tells us, Black people fail at selling their labor because they pull one another down out of envy. She writes: "my African-American accountant told me [...], a folksy explanation of how envy destroys initiative, like crabs pulling down those that attempt to crawl out of a bucket."  

-- Nevermind that when crabs in a pot pull at one another it is not out of envy and not a symptom of destroyed initiative -- it is the effect of a collective scrum to escape intolerable conditions. It is a reflection of ambition, drive, and effort deployed fruitlessly against an externally imposed, unwinnable scenario. 

3. Mester is confident that Black poverty must be the result of laziness because: "[the Mexican painter she hired] says in America, if you don't make money, you're lazy." In fact, Mester is confident poor blacks are leaving money on the table because "If homeowners have to wait six months to get a roof, there must be a shortage of roofers."  

-- There are two contemporary accounts of a supposed labor shortage of construction workers. In one account, there is a tiny nationwide shortage of around 200,000 workers - equivalent to about one tenth of one percent of the US workforce. In another account, there is no evidence of a shortage at all since construction wages are not growing particularly fast. Further, Mester doesn't explain how a Bay Area roofing contractor with no waiting list is supposed to remain in business for long. 

Overall the message is clear. In Mester's world view, a world of employment awaits Blacks who, alas, just don't try. The evidence against that view is no problem for Mester who is telling a just-so story: pinning Black unemployment largely on certain anecdotal accounts of Black morality that suit her fancy. 

Trump's Mirror 

A mirror shows the viewer a faithful self-image but reverses the chirality. In the image from a mirror, left becomes right, and right becomes left. 

Mester's view of race and class has an eerie degree of similarity to that of Trump's supporters.  

1. In Trump-land, whites are hard-working high achievers... 

2. ... but Mexicans enter white labor markets and drive down the price of labor ... 

3. ... and while you can find respectable, well-spoken African-Americans, in the eyes of many Trump supporters the bulk of Black people are shiftless and incorrigible. 

Mester differs with Trump's most alt-right supporters on two key points: 

Difference 1: The place and role of Jews in the race/class hierarchy. If the alt-right crowd places Jews near the top of the hierarchy, it is of course only to repeat vile conspiracy theories. 

Difference 2: While Mester would try to preserve but humanize the present by deploying Black labor for affordable and timely rooftops, Trump's alt-right fans would happily expel Jews, Mexicans, and Blacks, then get on with such work on their own. 

In a sense, Mester and the alt-right largely agree on a diagnosis. They differ on the prescription. 

This is especially bad because in neither case is the prescription really grounded on a scientific, historical, factual basis. If we accept as a starting point those claims which both Mester and the alt-right believe, we have no convincing -- which is to say truly arguable -- reason to pick one over the other. Mester's ethnic liberalism and the alt-right's white nationalism are equally plausible responses to a faulty way of parsing "race and class". 

"Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?" 

In pre-capitalist history, the divisions of people into peoples proceeded on the basis of language, familial relations, history, intra-group social practices, geography, and appearance. Relations among these "races" were understood in terms of territory, dominance and subordination, conflict and trade. 

One of the revolutionary transformations of capital has been the recasting of "race" as an economic demographic within a universal population. From at least the time of plantation slavery, race has been socially managed primarily as an object of ledgers, census rolls, sub-populations, and comparative economic assessments. Races today are a problematic of concerns such as market access, household wealth, education credentials, proportional representation.  

So alien was that shift from prior pre-capitalist concepts of race that whites had to invent the "orient" and the "negro" to implement their patterns of trade, extraction, war, and enslavement. In the 20th century, racial "identity" -- race at the heart of the self -- had to be newly invented to establish both segregation and the struggle for civil rights, separatism and integration, nazism and multi-cultural capitalism.  

Capital has thoroughly integrated disparate concepts of "race" without needing or bestowing any internal coherence to those concepts. We might say one day that race is a biologically false category and on another that race is a medically essential category. The degree to which society is successfully "race blind" is said to be determined by observing, measuring, and comparing racial differences. We're led to unanswerable questions of innateness vs. inequity to explain the performance metrics of capital: property and crime, income, wealth, credentialization -- all as applied to demographic sub-populations. 

It is within that incoherent, fundamentally capitalist story of race that both Mester and the alt-right stake their strikingly similar claims about Jews, whites, Mexicans, and "blacks". Each of them assert the same demographic "facts" as central to understanding our collective state of affairs. Both factions in this dispute share, in the end, the same uncritical view of capital. 

The approach the two of them use is as old as fascism itself. We can say, not too arbitrarily, that the fascist governance of race and capital found its perch in the U.S. during the Great Depression, around the time of racially separatist New Deal policies, and the judicial reform of those vagrancy laws which suddenly threatened large numbers of unemployed whites. Not long after that, the U.S. built its first concentration camps for expulsion of Japanese. In subsequent years, the U.S. would go on to practice eugenics, apartheid, ghettoization, and mass imprisonment.  

Capital can't -- and doesn't need to -- get its story straight. We can't expect Mester or the alt-right to carve out a coherent position when they are both using the incoherent "race" pastiche capital has produced. When promoting racial difference is useful for the exploitation of labor, capital promotes racial difference: slavery, vagrancy law, barriers to immigration for poor people. Conversely, when erasing racial difference is useful for exploiting labor, capital does that instead: union-busting, block-busting, affirmative action. Race flexibly serves capital as both problem and solution -- whichever is needed to perpetuate and intensify the exploitation of the proletariat. 

Black Lives Matter but Trump doesn't 

There is one more thing upon which Mester and the alt-right apparently agree: Black Lives Matter activists ought to "cool it". For Mester, the rebellions associated with BLM threaten to usher in a Nixonian law-and-order candidate (Trump) and, anyway, are a dubious tactic. For the alt-right, BLM should cool it because they are on the wrong side of history in ethnically European territory. Nevertheless, both Mester and the alt-right wind up siding with the elected officials and the chambers of commerce in their view of BLM rebellion. 

Whatever their flaws and risks, BLM rebellions are -- at least in the short run -- bad for capital. History tells us that negative relation of rebellions to capital determines their repression. With or without Trump, barring the overthrow of capital, race will either be produced or be erased in political fact -- whichever helps to support profit at the cost of laborers. BLM, on its capitalist face, is already a multi-faceted, self-contradictory brand, useful in fashion, media content, expenditures on repressive policing. 

I can't say whether BLM should "cool it", "intensify it", or do something else entirely. I don't mean it is not my place -- if I knew the answer I would say. I just don't claim to know. 

I can say that no matter whether Trump or Clinton is elected makes no difference for the working class: it is the imperatives of capital, not the rhetoric of politicians that dominates us. 

"I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished i could save her in some sort of time machine
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are" -- Jeff Magnum ("Oh Comely"). 

This essay is in response to Toni Mester's "SQUEAKY WHEEL: The Arc of History", published in the Daily Planet on September 30, 2016)