I am fascinated by a rec-list diary entitled Anti-Capitalism and Intersectionality: Race Class Gender Meet-Up.
soothsayer99 ends the diary with this
Resist.
Build upon this rich body of work.
Create coaliton around the common ground.
Let our difference become our strength.
What I find myself pondering is where we have common ground. Is there really a desire for our differences to be our strength?
Let me back up.
In Real Life, I'm a business-educated middle class white suburban midwestern protestant straight omnivorous male. My favorite description I've heard is aggressive moderate. But frequently in policy discussions, I'm mistaken for the radical leftist, looking to overturn the system and expecting ponies and unicorns and whatnot, because I point out obvious things, like maybe we should prosecute financial crooks and war criminals instead of drug users and whistleblowers, and maybe banning Medicare from negotiating volume discounts is, like, stupid. This situation really fascinates me, and I think at least partly it's a result of the US being unique in having an almost complete void of actual 'leftists' (as worthless as the left/right spectrum is, of course).
Well the diary from Sunday certainly serves as a vehicle for some of these perspectives. In fact, it's to the point where I have difficulty engaging in dialogue because our constructs are so vastly different.
Hence my pondering. Is there a way such vast differences can become a strength?
Take an issue I really care about, ending the drug war. To me, the economics are one of the prime reasons to get rid of our drug laws. Imprisoning people is one of the biggest affronts to capitalism imaginable, second only to direct violence and killing. A market-based economy, where recreational drugs were treated like M&Ms or iPods, would be much better. It would weaken the prison-indusrial complex, it would reduce racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it would allow us to shift to a model of public health, it would reunite families and stabilize communities, and do a whole bunch of other things. Even Milton Friedman, one of the iconic conservative luminaries in political economy of the 20th century, opposed the drug war.
But there's a perspective in the diary comments that declares the opposite - it says that imprisoning people is actually what capitalists do; that's capitalism working at its finest, you might say. Here's what soothsayer99 remarked
the prison industrial complex is not (3+ / 0-)
under-mining capitalism - it is furthering it
Prisons are now a vast source of neo-slave labor and corporate profit
Quite clearly, we have the same view of the prison-industrial complex; it's not positive, shall we say. But we have nearly exact opposite definitions of capitalism. Our language and framing and context and meaning is so different, we can't communicate with each other. We are literally at a loss for words to exchange ideas.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I hope that dialogue and exchange of ideas helps.
But I do want to offer a counter-narrative that capitalism is not the issue here. Describing the acts of our government in helping consolidate wealth and power as capitalism is like describing the acts of the Politburo in the USSR as socialism. It's such a vast stretch that the power of the language itself breaks down to convey the idea. A market-based economy requires individual rights whose undermining rests at the heart of oppression and injustice along racial, gender, sexual preference, sexual orientation, religious, and other lines. Denying these rights to oppressed groups is inherently anti-capitalist. Capitalism requires the biggest bully on the block to be forced to recognize the rights of the smallest, weakest, most marginalized person. If a rich person can simply take a poor person's property, or a white person can keep a black person from having standing in court, or a christian can get a jew locked up in prison, or the government fails to enforce labor laws on the books for privileged employers, that's not capitalism.
Now, I would note one irony in that, at least. Perhaps part of revolutionary thought is in rethinking language and communication itself. My interest is in preventing revolution, and to the extent that language is involved, I would certainly have a bias toward defending the 'status quo' definition of words, including capitalism. Smith and Ricardo and Hayek are obviously white dudes, but so are Marx and Hegel and Engels. If the end goal is reaching other people, persuading people who don't share that linguistic background, how are we going to bridge the divide? How can we work together where we have common ground?
We may have differing views about whether capitalism should be enhanced or replaced, but I would argue, we have much common ground when it comes to ending specific policies of oppression and injustice. Capitalism is of course only half the equation of political economy; the governance of society is intimately linked with the economic system. The more authoritarian forms of governance in places like Indonesia contrasts markedly with the more social Democratic nature of places like France or Norway. Countries handle crises in different manners. When the Swedes had a financial problem, they resolved it differently than the Japanese. Looking back, now, most Japanese policy makers wish they had done more to clean up the banking system and less to bail out well-connected banks. You can call our American efforts of privatized gains and socialized losses capitalism if you wish, but there are others of us that wouldn't understand what that means. However, we are in agreement that supporting the entrenched oligarchy is bad for workers, bad for marginalized and disenfranchised groups, bad for citizens, and bad for our country.
Our challenge is that I call those policies of oppression anti-capitalism, while you call those policies capitalism. Hopefully that's a difference that we can leverage. There's no direct action or specific issues in play here. Sometimes, I hope, just contemplating our language, what we mean with words we employ, can help us understand ourselves and each other a little better. At any rate, happy Labor Day to all. Perhaps we can at least agree on that.