On the Question of Benefit: Changing the ISO’s line on the Politics of Identity

The recent events that have unfolded in the British Socialist Workers Party have demonstrated a number of serious problems: 1. The increasing self-referentiality of the leadership of that organization is apparent from their response to the challenges from many members regarding their handling of sexual assault accusations within the party.

2. Questions of proper organizational process regarding things such as disputes/disciplinary actions, expulsion, and the role of factions, have been disregarded as the SWP has pre-emptively expelled members who were discussing forming a faction over the results of the disputes committee’s clearly faulty decision.

3. And last, but certainly not least, the SWP’s use of the term “feminism” as a de facto reason for pre-emptively expelling these members and disregarding the resulting factions’ grievances. It is a contention of the following document that this development illustrates an underlying current within the SWP of extreme sectarianism toward a variety of political/theoretical trends on the left, that are often referred to collectively as the Politics of Identity, or ID Politics.

The purpose of this document is to suggest that the ISO needs to re-examine some of its stances on ID Politics, many of which may have been inherited from the British SWP.

To put this in context, we should note that this process has already begun: Sharon Smith, the author of Women and Socialism, gave a talk on Marxism and Women’s Liberation at Socialism 2012, which argued that we in the ISO need to have a more nuanced approach toward feminism and the different brands/varieties of feminism that exist.

It should be mentioned that in her talk, Smith pointed to a debate within the SWP, between John Molyneaux and other leading members of the SWP, over whether men benefit from women’s oppression. While the language of Chris Harman’s article, which initiated the debate, suggests that “the benefits working class men get from the oppression of women are marginal indeed,” his argumentation seeks to minimize this benefit, and suggest that ignoring that benefit is the best political line that the SWP should take, presumably in order to emphasize how it is important that men fight for women’s liberation.

Harman goes on, Smith explained, to argue that “What the working class male gains directly in terms of labor from his wife can be roughly measured. It is the amount of labor he would have to exert if he had to clean and cook for himself. This could not be more than an hour or two a day (this sentence was accompanied by a raucous uproar of condescending laughter from the Socialism 2012 audience)--a burden for a woman who has to do this work for two people after a day's paid labor, but not a huge gain for the male worker.”

The content of the argumentation is misleading, because it seeks to minimize a recognition of, what Marxist economist Richard Wolff, among others, identifies as, the feudal relations of production/reproduction within the nuclear family. Thus John Molyneaux responded to Harman’s argument with this: "Harman tells us that this is 'a burden for the woman who has to do this work for two people after a day's paid labor,' so why is it not an important gain for the [male] worker not to have to do it?"

Later in the audio version of Sharon Smith’s talk, which comrade Bhattacharya’s SW response seems more than slightly out of touch with, Smith verbally emphasizes (by speaking the word “privelege” purposefully louder than the rest of the sentence) Lenin’s description of the typical Russian husband (both bourgeouis and proletarian) as maintaining his “privilege and dignity,” affronts to which he does not tolerate.

Thus, although Smith’s defense of Molyneaux as a committed comrade (again in the audio version only) may not equate to an endorsement of what Bhattacharya presumptuously calls “the ‘men benefit’ framework,” it begs the question why Smith mentioned it in the first place (particularly when there are many other problems with the SWP’s approach to ID politics that she could have picked, some of which we will discuss in this document). The fact is that what we are currently discussing in a number of pre-convention documents does not amount to anything that one could call the ‘men benefit’ framework. On the contrary, we are discussing how to get rid of the poisonous sectarianism toward ID politics that exemplifies the SWP leadership’s approach.

A similar conclusion can be applied to the question of whether white workers (some or all) benefit from systemic racism. As such, the authors of this document have some very serious disagreements with the line that the ISO has taken on this issue, that no white workers benefit from racism:

1. It is very important to distinguish between the conscious personal racism of workers and systemic racism, which is the system of racism that is upheld by the capitalist classes, their institutions, and the more immediate employers. In the opinion of the authors of this document, the current line that the ISO takes on this issue, that no white workers benefit from racism, inadvertently serves to obfuscate the fundamental difference between conscious personal racism and systemic racism.

2. It ignores the economic reality that, as Melvin M. Leiman states in his essential text, The Political Economy of Racism (Haymarket Books, 2010), “Obviously some capitalists and some workers gain economically from racism while others lose.”

3. It relies on an over-specific, technical definition of the term “benefit” that is more likely to be found in the economics classroom than in the local activist community.

4. As a political line (read “something that would come up in discussion with new and potential recruits to the ISO”) It serves to perpetuate an incorrect caricature of white workers (that most white workers are crudely economistic and cynical, and that if they believe they benefit at all from racism, they will not want to join the struggle to end it). This suggests that our job as a small group of Marxists is first and foremost to convince the mass of white workers simply not to be racist rather than convincing liberal whites as well as black and all other workers to be actively ANTI-racist.

5. Maintaining this political line can tend to create a situation where good-hearted, idealistic ISO members go into political conversations with ideological “guns blazing” about how white workers don’t benefit from systemic racism, which creates a view of the ISO as out of touch with the black working class, and as resorting to ideological arguments as opposed to arguments based in material reality.

6. As such, it cannot be other than a laughable claim to many if not most black workers, as well as to many white workers, certainly to many or most of the white and Black workers who are close to socialist politics.

The goal of this document is to argue that we in the ISO should very seriously consider doing away with the political line that suggests that no white workers benefit from systemic racism, and open up the debates/discussions as to how to approach these questions, how to promote solidarity across racial/ethnic lines, and how to do away with the sectarianism toward ID Politics that some members may have inherited from the SWP’s very clearly disastrous approach.

Systemic racism and conscious/personal racism

In Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's document from the 2011-12 pre-convention season, the question of benefit is explained in this way:

“Is the cause of those disparities white workers beneﬁtting directly from the oppression of Black workers? That is, do white workers make more on average because Black workers make less? To accept this explanation is remove the biggest beneﬁciary of all in the disparity between wages —employers and bosses. That employers are able to use racism to justify paying Black workers less, brings the wages of all workers down and it is the employers who enjoy the difference. Moreover, it is an acceptance of the capitalists’ logic that there are limited resources in society and that workers are necessarily in competition for them. Of course, capitalism has created the riches to satisfy all of the needs of the working class as whole but our access and ultimate control of those resources is a political question of organization and social strength.

“Nevertheless, that the interests of the working class are collective, does not deny that white workers receive some advantages in American society because they are white in a racist society. If they did not get some advantage—and with it the illusion that the system works for them— then racism would not really work at dividing Black and white workers.”

While we agree with the general level of analysis (that employers use racism to drive down wages and living standards), we need to qualify these statements more clearly as an organization. The way we need to qualify these statements is not simply in the use of the term benefit, as some comrades will undoubtedly retort, but more importantly in the use of the term racism.

As the second paragraph quoted from Taylor's document implies, systemic racism (the racism of the capitalist classes, as opposed to that of some sections of the working class), particularly in the arenas of employment, education, wages, healthcare/mortality, and housing, gives “advantages” to (aka. benefits) many white workers, not necessarily all white workers. Those benefits are most clearly illustrated by the example of employment itself. Racism in employment still clearly exists. While it certainly doesn't exist to the extent that it did before the official ending of Jim Crow (although color-blindness and the mass incarceration system have shifted the form of discrimination), it still exists today, and significant numbers of black workers continue to find themselves in lower paid jobs, if employed at all.

Black job applicants are half as likely as equally qualified whites to receive a callback or job offer. In fact, black and Latino applicants who have not been involved in the “criminal justice” system fare no better than white applicants just released from prison (Pager, Western, and Bonikowski).

Similarly, the unemployment rate for Black people was double that of whites in 2011, at 7.9% for white people and 15.8% for Black people (from the United States Department of Labor http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat05.htm).

The situation for blacks with regard to housing is also instructive. The Pew Research analysis finds that, in percentage terms, the bursting of the housing market bubble in 2006 and the recession that followed from late 2007 to mid-2009 took a far greater toll on the wealth of minorities than whites. From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households.

It is true that employers use racism to bring everyone's wages down, but this does not mean that white workers don’t receive relative benefit from the difference in wages. This is not to argue that white workers should have “white guilt,” but is to argue that the catch-all phrase “white workers do not benefit from racism” does not resonate very well with Black workers or Black activists (or with consciously anti-racist white workers). We should assume that our contacts know the difference between personal racism and structural racism. Most people close to us understand intuitively, and experientially, even if they have not studied it, that white workers are faring better under a racist, capitalist system than are Black workers. To not identify this as white workers “benefiting” from racism is ideological at best, manipulative and false at worst. In fact the ISO’s ideological line on this has likely harmed us as an organization, and we might consider ceasing to use ideology rather than concrete, well-analyzed facts to back up even our most well-meaning intentions in the future. People often see through such inadequate ideological lines.

The Political Economy of Racism

For this part of the document, we would like to refer to The Political Economy of Racism by Melvin M. Leiman, the newest edition of which was published by Haymarket Books in 2010. In this book, Leiman lays out a very sophisticated and complex portrait of how racism factors into the U.S. economy. He introduces two chapters with very useful critiques of other economists who have weighed in on this issue. In Chapter 3, he lays out a critique of radical political economists. His criticism, and a general criticism, of Victor Perlo’s Economics of Racism, a book that claims that no white workers benefit from systemic racism, is instructive for the purposes of this document. In examining Perlo’s claims, Leiman levels some important analytical critiques:

1. “A basic limitation to Perlo’s approach is that it treats capital and labor too grossly. Obviously some capitalists and some workers gain economically from racism while others lose. Perlo understated (or rather neglected) the economic advantages substantial numbers of white workers have received as a result of racial discrimination. His analysis avoided dealing with the intracapitalist and intralabor conflict involved in the discrimination issue. Perlo did not examine the interests of capitalists and black and white workers in relation to the structure of industry (the specific mix of competitive and monopolistic elements) embedded in a dynamically changing economy.” (p. 156)

2. He goes on to explain later in the chapter: “Unskilled white workers lose from discrimination regardless of the stage of the cycle, although less so as employment opportunities (and perhaps wages) rise during the period of expansion. Moreover, competition from discriminated blacks keeps wages lower than they would otherwise be. On the other hand skilled workers benefit economically from discrimination through artificial restriction of their supply... Upward cyclical shifts in demand combined with relatively inelastic supply bring about substantial increases in wages. Employment is more stable for the skilled worker than for the unskilled, although wages fluctuate more.” (p. 168)

Accordingly, in a further examination of Perlo’s Economics of Racism: USA (International Publishers, 1975), we found that his relentless insistence on proving that no white workers benefit from systemic racism leads him to arguments, often made by open and closet racists alike, that “Forcing Blacks to live in ghettoes also costs white homeowners taxwise” and that “the real estate tax burden is placed on the - largely white - small home owners” (Perlo p.176), a flow of tax money that - he makes no attempt to clarify - certainly does not go directly into Black workers’ pockets, and, in current terms, is often taken away from black communities. These are politically and ideologically confusing statements at the least. But even more idiotic is his insistence that white workers suffer from their choice to send their kids to expensive private schools to escape integration. White workers’ loss is precisely because the schools are expensive (pp. 166-167). This, of course, is an abysmal tangling of cause and effect, which further indicates a failure to distinguish between systemic racism and the personal/conscious racism of some workers.

It should be noted that the “no white workers benefit from racism” line has important historical roots, namely (at least) in the Communist Party USA and its history of success organizing black workers in the 30’s. We recognize that, given that the CP was an organization that was successfully mobilizing black workers, this political line made sense at the time as a way to directly contradict the arguments made by capitalists and management for why white workers should have racist contempt for black workers. But, we currently do not live in a political period where a resurgence of anti-black racism will likely assert itself in the same way as that of the Jim Crow south.

Though racial inequality has reached all-time highs, the fact that Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” has been on the best-seller list for 36 weeks is just one sign that liberals and others on the left are acknowledging institutional racism as a serious issue, and do not actively want any part in behaving as racists themselves. Nonetheless, racism against African Americans and members of oppressed groups could assert itself more strongly as we go deeper into a great recession. And in such a period, political arguments would need to be weighed on the basis of their effectiveness in building movements and recruiting workers of various ethnicities-- while always keeping truth rather than ideology at the forefront of our arguments.

It should be noted that the authors of this document don’t pretend to be experts on political economic theory or the political economy of racism at this time. We are activists who deal with the situation on the ground in our localities. As such, we feel that the line that the ISO currently tows on “white benefit” represents a highly specific, political economic argument (with an over-precise definition of the term “benefit”), that is essentially over-intellectual, and has been applied without enough of a serious consideration of its consequences at the activist level.

Nonetheless, for the reasons stated above, as well as other reasons touched on further into this document, we consider Leiman’s Political Economy of Racism to be a much more precise and meticulous study than Perlo’s Economics of Racism: USA (and, for that matter, Callinicos’ Race and Class, but more on that later), if only for the reasons that Leiman’s book has the benefit of being more recent (1993) than Perlo’s (1975).

A Laughable Claim

One of the main arguments that is often levelled in this debate is that it has been an economic fact that white workers in the South have lower wages than black workers in the North (for example, this is argued by Perlo in his Economics of Racism: USA and criticized by Leiman in The Political Economy of Racism). We would argue that there are a few very serious mistakes in using this fact as an argument for the claim that no white workers benefit from systemic racism. First of all, it does not provide proof that no white workers benefit from racism. It does provide proof, however, of what we consider to be a separate (yet related) question, that the stirring up of racist attitudes and other aggressively anti-union tactics have succeeded in keeping the wages of both Southern black and white workers down. Also, to paint a picture that suggests that black workers in the north are comparing themselves economically to white workers in the south on a regular basis is quite naive. This notion can have the direct ideological effect of producing an image of black workers in the north as being satisfied with their economic lot, simply because they make more than southern whites - a LAUGHABLE notion indeed!

Let’s look at more appalling statistics to illustrate the context of why the “no benefit” line continues to be laughable when brought up in real concrete conversations with contacts:

Black median household net worth has always been dramatically lower than white median household net worth. While white people experienced losses between 2004 and 2009, their net worth has still risen since 1984, from $76,951 to $92,000 in 2009. Black net worth has actually dropped since 1984-- $6679 in 1984 down to $4900 today!

From http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2012/0112wicks-lim.html

These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago.

The Underlying Assumptions at Play

One of the arguments that we have encountered in discussions with comrades about this topic is that if white workers benefit from racism, then they will be (or remain) racist. To say that white workers will become or remain racist if they perceive the benefit they receive from systemic racism ignores not only the political gains that the civil rights movement made. It also ignores the gains that were won in terms of mass consciousness, namely the gain of making overt racism a deplorable offence in the minds of many, if not a majority of white workers (however much those workers may still have subconsious racist assumptions). The central problem with the way the ISO has formulated the question of “who benefits from racism” is that it assumes that if the proverbial “veil” is lifted and white workers find out that they are benefitting from systemic racism, then they will almost necessarily become or remain consciously racist.

The assumption that white workers will necessarily become consciously racist if they perceive a benefit to themselves is, in fact, a not-so-hidden central tenet of the ultra-left black nationalist version of the theory of labor aristocracy, which in turn assumes that white workers were/are racist because they more or less see it as in their interest to be so, and thus most, if not all, white workers are too bought off to fight against racism and capitalism. These are significant reasons why we in the ISO should do away with this political line (it is reductionist on the issue of white workers consciousness, and it is internally contradictory).

The assumptions of the current line on benefit are also deterministic in the core sense of the term, in other words, the notion that people’s ideas arise directly from their economic conditions without any other influencing/mediating factors, as if most white workers have taken the time to study the flows of capital in order to inform their ideological leanings. A more coherent theory of these influencing/mediating factors would be extremely challenging to undertake, but would possibly prove useful.

White people around us who understand that many white workers experience a relative benefit from racism are still motivated to fight racism for at least 1 of 3 reasons-- 1. Even a white person who does not yet see that she would benefit more from the abolishment of racism and capitalism than she benefits from the current system of racism still wants to fight racism because she believes it is morally wrong and vile, 2. She sees that the system of racism hurts all workers-- it is used by capitalists to bring down everyone’s wages, or 3. she understands that the fight against racism is part of the fight against capitalism.

The Effects on Political Organizing and Internal Discussion

The assumptions discussed above are also related to a fear that is sometimes used as a false basis for downplaying or ignoring the fact that relative benefits for white workers do exist. When new comrades and others around us bring this up, usually using the term “white privilege” from whiteness theory, many comrades often quickly and completely discredit this theory. Many comrades often stop listening to what the person is trying to express and go into “stock answer” mode upon hearing “white privilege” or other key words from identity politics. While there is much for Marxists to disagree with in academic whiteness theory and identity politics (though some of the original authors of these theories have shifted their views), what most people around us are simply expressing is that white people experience relative benefit in a racist society. This is a material reality that no Marxist should deny.

We have also observed comrades being afraid to express their disagreement to other comrades about the ISO’s line. We have seen comrades and people around us decide to leave because they think we in the ISO are wrong and making ineffective arguments on this issue. One of the authors of this document was in the ISO’s periphery for a year before joining, in part because she felt the ISO’s analysis on Identity Politics was wrong and felt ignored politically -- that her reality (an obvious reality of all Black working class people) was being denied, as was the understanding of oppression she brought to the table. She did join despite not being won to the line on benefit because she believed the actual work the ISO was doing on racism was strong, even if the ideology was somewhat off and underdeveloped.

As such, in order to make the claim that white workers don’t benefit from racism in a discussion with radicalizing black workers, a comrade has to:

1. be very naive,

2. be ready for that contact to never come around the ISO again, and

3. be assuming that those workers will not tell him/her to fuck off!

An approach to Identity Politics

The authors of this document consider the “no white workers benefit from systemic racism” line to be an over-”bending of the stick” against the politics of identity. We understand it to be this over-bending of the stick rather than an attempt to reintroduce the type of color-blind rhetoric that characterizes the politically stagnant liberal and centrist narratives about race in the U.S. Nonetheless, on taking a deeper look at this political line, it certainly resembles the color-blind liberal politics just mentioned, and it’s maintenance as part of the ISO’s politics on race continues to be a serious mistake.

We also disagree, for increasingly obvious reasons (as events in the SWP unfold), with the characterization of identity politics that Alex Callinicos perpetuates in his book Race and Class, as an ideology pitting “blacks of African origin versus Asians, black women versus gentile white women versus Jewish white women, gays versus lesbians versus bisexuals.” (Callinicos, 1993). Although Callinicos’ book provides a basis for understanding the coordinates of the debates around race and class, it is flawed in a number of important ways. His lines on white benefit, and ID politics generally, were developed from the vantage point of the U.K. - the vantage point of clearly not having much contact with the African-American working class.

Those around us who use the language of identity politics are often much closer to us than we think, if not in agreement with us on the effects of racism on all people and how to fight it. In fact, at a session in Socialism ‘08 on identity politics, many people stated that identity politics were what first radicalized them.

Conclusion

So our argument is that, at the very least, we in the ISO should do away with the sectarianism toward ID poitics that we have inherited from the SWP. Part of this approach has to be one of complicating and developing economic and other areas of inquiry as to how white workers benefit from systemic racism. We need to delve into the history of our current political line, weigh its significance, and seriously consider doing away with it as a line that is repeated in many of the basic educational books written by leading comrades.

Meanwhile, the debates and discussions around this political line, the causes of racism in the working class, and our approach to ID politics should be discussed on theoretical, organizational, and practical levels, and we should do away with the tendency to hammer contacts and new recruits with sectarian, ideological invective against any small statement that reminds us of ID politics.

Vanessa B., Philadelphia

Jesse P., Champaign-Urbana, IL

Resolution

We submitted a document (“On the Question of Benefit: Changing the ISO’s line on the Politics of Identity”) with the intent to observe any constructive discussion or criticism that comes out of it in the remaining pre-convention period.

We hope it goes without saying that we believe the ISO’s anti-racist work both historically and currently is crucial in building anti-racist movements and we are proud of our work and participation as an organization in every area of anti-racist work we participate in.

Given the majority of the content of our previous document, we feel that we have only established enough theoretical clarity to propose that the ISO drop the line that suggests that white workers do not benefit from systemic racism, and to potentially adopt another one. Although we would like to touch on the question of male benefit from women’s oppression, we have been under the impression, given Sharon Smith’s talk at Socialism 2012 and other articles and pre-convention documents, that this process is already under way.

We would like to make one important clarification from our previous document, regarding how socialists should or shouldn’t operate in the activist community. We realize that our statements could have inadvertently painted a picture of black workers as being monolithically cynical and pessimistic toward activists or, on the whole, ideologically influenced by ultra-left black nationalism. Rather, we think that NO monolithic caricatures of black workers (or anyone, for that matter) are adequate in explaining those workers (or in explaining anything for that matter). We do think that the “no benefit” line creates some incorrect caricatures of all workers, caricatures that we will go into at a later time, if appropriate.

Although we have been talking with other comrades for some time about this issue, this is the first time we have written something for the entire organization about it. So our documents may appear abrupt, given how much research we did for them. So, in order to better develop a political perspective on these questions, we will also be researching and writing an article for the ISR regarding these political questions, coming out of the convention season.

We would like to emphasize that, on a very specific level, the ISO needs to examine all of its uses of the word “benefit” with relation to all forms of special oppression and do away with the highly technical definition of the word “benefit” that is found more often in the economics classroom than the activist community.

Besides the economic analysis that Melvin Leiman provides in his book The Political Economy of Racism, there should also be an ideological analysis of the word benefit and how it is used in an ideological sense (rather than strictly in an economic sense). In this sense, the word benefit is always a relative term. People undoubtedly wonder, “benefit relative to whom, to what set of circumstances, or to what time period?” These questions can be explained in further in-depth discussion with people, but on a surface level, as a political/ideological line, saying that “no white workers benefit from racism” has all of the defects that we outlined in our last document.

Note: It should be noted that we are also, implicitly proposing that the ISO should do away with any ultra-specific definitions of the word “privilege.”

As such, we would like to propose that the ISO simply drop the line that says that “white workers do not benefit from racism” for all the reasons we have stated in our previous document (and one more point #7, which we just added):

3. It relies on an over-specific, technical definition of the term “benefit” that is more likely to be found in the economics classroom than in the local activist community.

4. As a political line (read “something that would come up in discussion with new and potential recruits to the ISO”) it serves to perpetuate an incorrect caricature of white workers (that most white workers are crudely economistic and cynical, and that if they believe they benefit at all from racism, they will not want to join the struggle to end it). This inadvertently may create the impression that our job as a small group of Marxists is first and foremost to convince the mass of white workers simply not to be racist rather than convincing liberal and radicalizing whites, blacks, and other workers to be actively ANTI-racist.

5. Maintaining this political line can tend to create a situation where good-hearted, idealistic ISO members go into political conversations with ideological “guns blazing” about how white workers don’t benefit from systemic racism, which creates a view of the ISO as out of touch with the reality of life for many black workers, and as resorting to ideological arguments as opposed to arguments based in material reality.

6. As such, it cannot be other than a laughable claim to many if not most black workers, as well as to many white workers, certainly to many of the white and Black workers who are close to socialist politics.

7. It inadvertently perpetuates an abstract notion of a non-racist, economically egalitarian society (which we have no realistic reference point for in U.S. history) as, itself, a reference point from which - many in the ISO expect - people should judge the question of whether white people benefit from racism - instead of acknowledging the facts of what Michelle Alexander calls the racial caste system in the U.S. and the economic facts regarding race under capitalism as a reference point from which to actually fight racism.

8. It represents an over-bending of the stick against one aspect of identity politics - a particular over-bending-of-the-stick that is not relevant for activist work on the ground.

The authors of this document should add that we still do think it is necessary to educate ISO members and other activists about the detrimental aspects of ID politics. But we are adamant that the ISO’s line on white benefit is detrimental to the furthering of the ISO’s goals as a socialist organization committed to fighting oppression and toward building a larger, stronger, multiracial organization representative of all workers.

We do propose adopting the line that, as Melvin Leiman points out, at least some workers benefit from systemic racism but that most workers do not benefit economically from being racist (although there are, of course, historical examples of racist craft unions maintaining the good wages of their workers, partly by excluding Black workers).

Also we propose opening up the debate in the ISO’s regular publications (SW and ISR) and internal documents, as to the causes of racism in the working class, how to promote solidarity across racial/ethnic lines, and our approach to ID politics.

Finally, we propose removing the “white workers do not benefit from racism” line from the New Members’ Packet, until this debate is clarified further, and a more precise political line can be formulated.

As such, we formally propose that the ISO

1. Drop the line that suggests that no white workers benefit from racism, because it is neither correct nor effective

2. Remove this line from the New Members’ Packet, and edit the New Members’ Packet accordingly (see below).

3. Research and adopt a line that reflects an analysis that at least some workers receive relative economic benefits from systemic racism, yet the benefits that even white workers would gain from the elimination of racism, and capitalism with it, are much more substantial than the benefits they gain from the current system of racism.

and

4. In order to help further create a context of understanding the real situations black workers face in the U.S., and as long as it does not overstep the organizational bounds between the ISO and CERSC - we propose that members of the leadership invite Michelle Alexander to give a talk on color-blindness and the racial caste system at the Socialism 2013 conference, in the biggest room that we can give her (if, by chance, this hasn’t been done yet).

Five sentences from the new members’ packet would be changed in order to adopt resolution #2. The italicized sections are the parts that would be changed or omitted. The bolded sections are the changes we propose:

In the article “Marxism and Oppression”:

Under the section “Who benefits from oppression?” it says:

“Likewise, Black nationalists and academics influenced by “identity” politics tend to view racism as a system where all whites benefit from the oppression of Blacks.”

and

“But while it is true that individual workers may hold sexist or racist ideas, it is not at all true that workers benefit from it, even if they think that they do. In fact, when one part of the working class is kept down, it helps the bosses to keep the entire class down. Rather than benefiting from oppressions, all workers are hurt by it.”

Under the section “Centrality of the working class”:

“The working-class struggle cannot be successful unless workers are able to throw off the yoke of oppression that divides them. That is why, as a class, workers not only do not benefit from oppression, but also have a common class interest in fighting oppression.”

Under the article entitled “The Roots of Racism”:

“Similar to the slave societies of antiquity and of the early U.S., under capitalism today, a small, wealthy minority exploits and oppresses the immense majority of people. Racism is the main division among workers today, and it provides a convenient scapegoat for problems created by the system. But ordinary people–regardless of their race–don’t benefit from racism.”

We formally propose that these sentences/paragraphs say, respective to the order in which they appear above:

“Likewise, Black nationalists and academics influenced by “identity” politics tend to view white workers as too privileged to overcome racism - a line that is a political over-emphasis of the benefits that a layer of workers receive from structural racism.”

“But while it is true that individual workers may hold racist ideas, they would benefit much more from the elimination of racism (and capitalism with it) than they do from the system of racism. In fact, when one part of the working class is kept down, it helps the bosses to keep the entire class down. As such, the possibility of achieving working class unity is hurt by oppression.”

“The working-class struggle cannot be successful unless workers are able to throw off the yoke of oppression that divides them. That is why, as a class, workers have a common class interest in fighting oppression.”

Vanessa B., Philadelphia

Jesse P., Champaign-Urbana, IL