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- Jan 31, 2019
Excerpts from:
https://jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/
Though he might not appreciate the cliché, Walter Benn Michaels is no stranger to controversy. In the early 1980s he wrote a series of articles with Steven Knapp entitled “Against Theory,” in which it was argued that literary works meant only what their authors intended them to mean. He created a stir beyond the Ivory Tower with a 2006 book, The Trouble with Diversity, premised around the idea that a focus on cultural diversity at the expense of economic equality has stunted resistance to neoliberalism.
-----------
Neoliberalism is often presented as a unified, homogenous ideology, but you differentiate between “left” and “right” neoliberalisms — what’s the difference and which one dominates American politics today?
The differentiation between left and right neoliberalism doesn’t really undermine the way it which it is deeply unified in its commitment to competitive markets and to the state’s role in maintaining competitive markets. For me the distinction is that “left neoliberals” are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things. [...]
What’s at the heart of your work is that equal-opportunity exploitation is what we’re moving towards, or at the very least it’s an ideological goal of the ruling class. So, what explains the shift in the way capital has historically acted — using racial and ethnic divisions to better exploit the working class?
Well, I think there’s absolutely no question that is true. Capitalism throughout the nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth was classically imperialist, which is basically impossible without racism, without a massive commitment to what amounted to European-American White supremacy. But one of the things that’s become obvious — leaving the racism question aside, leaving the discrimination question more generally aside, — is that the condition of capital changed fairly radically in the twentieth century. Of course, people have different accounts of why that is. Even those on the Left who agree that the falling rate of profit is central don’t agree on whether it’s a structural necessity or a contingent development. But almost everyone agrees that neoliberalism involved internationalization in a way that cannot be reduced to what imperialism was before and that it involved, above all, a kind of powerful necessity for mobility not of only of capital, but of labor.
Stalin famously won the argument but lost the war over whether there could be socialism in one country, but no one has ever been under the impression for more than a millisecond that there could be neoliberalism in only one country. An easy way to look at this would be to say that the conditions of mobility of labor and mobility of capital have since World War II required an extraordinary upsurge in immigration. The foreign born population in the US today is something like 38 million people, which is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Poland. This is a function of matching the mobility of capital with the mobility of labor, and when you begin to produce these massive multi-racial or multi-national or as we would call them today multi-cultural workforces, you obviously need technologies to manage these work forces.
In the US this all began in a kind of powerful way with the Immigration Act of 1965, which in effect repudiated the explicit racism of the Immigration Act of the 1924 and replaced it with largely neoliberal criteria. Before, whether you could come to the US was based almost entirely on racial or, to use the then-preferred term, “national” criteria. I believe that, for example, the quota on Indian immigration to the US in 1925 was 100. I don’t know the figure on Indian immigration to the US since 1965 off-hand, but 100 is probably about an hour and a half of that in a given year. The anti-racism that involves is obviously a good thing, but it was enacted above all to admit people who benefited the economy of the US. They are often sort of high-end labor, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen of various kinds. The Asian immigration of the seventies and eighties involved a high proportion of people who had upper and upper-middle class status in their countries of origin and who quickly resumed that middle and upper middle class status in the US. While at the same time we’ve had this increased immigration from Mexico, people from the lower-end of the economy, filling jobs that otherwise cannot be filled — or at least not filled at the price capital would prefer to pay. So there is a certain sense in which the internationalism intrinsic to the neoliberal process requires a form of anti-racism and indeed neoliberalism has made very good use of the particular form we’ve evolved, multiculturalism, in two ways.
First, there isn’t a single US corporation that doesn’t have an HR office committed to respecting the differences between cultures, to making sure that your culture is respected whether or not your standard of living is. And, second, multiculturalism and diversity more generally are even more effective as a legitimizing tool, because they suggest that the ultimate goal of social justice in a neoliberal economy is not that there should be less difference between the rich and the poor — indeed the rule in neoliberal economies is that the difference between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks — but that no culture should be treated invidiously and that it’s basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites. So the model of social justice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women. That’s a long answer to your question, but it is a serious question and the essence of the answer is precisely that internationalization, the new mobility of both capital and labor, has produced a contemporary anti-racism that functions as a legitimization of capital rather than as resistance or even critique.
You just identified the problem, increasing social inequity and heightened class exploitation in recent decades, but you also did something that you didn’t do as much in your book, which is give credence to objective economic forces — the crises of social democracy, stagflation, capitalist restructuring, union busting, etc.
Well, I wrote the book four or five years ago and I know more about it now than I did then. So yeah, that’s true, the book is in a certain sense a response to what seemed to me very visible on the surface, but I had much less of a sense of how that situation came about. One of the things that’s been useful — I know it’s been useful for me, but I think it’s actually be useful in general for at least some people on the Left in thinking about these issues — has been the popularization of the concept of neoliberalism, which has given us a better ability to periodize the history of capitalism and especially of events since World War II. You get a different vision of what postmodernism, for example, is when you begin to see postmodernism as the official ideology of neoliberalism and that’s a vision you can’t have until you have a kind of sense of what neoliberalism is. Others, of course, were alert to this long before I was.
Speaking of the postmodernists, you focus a lot on academics and academia in your book, but one could argue that correlation doesn’t equal causation. An academic might be spending too much time writing about hybridity and difference and identity movements might be marching in the streets, but is this actually preventing class based movements from emerging . . .
I don’t know if it’s preventing it. My thesis was never that it prevented class based movements from emerging. I mean I never meant to present a theory about what has prevented class-based movements from emerging in the US and I certainly didn’t mean to imply that what people do in English classes did it. Although, of course, given the class position of the students in those classes, it’s probably right to say that English departments and elite universities more generally do a very good job of providing the upper middle class with its impressively good anti-racist, pro-gay-marriage conscience. But the more striking thing here is that when it comes to respecting difference, the academic world is hardly very different from the corporate world. The kind of distinctions and divisions that academics have learned to make in various identity categories are absolutely matched in sophistication by the ones that are made by any major US corporation.
There do things that corporations would do that academics would never think of. I’ve never been in the worst bullshit cultural theory class that actually took seriously the idea that we really should think of first born children and middle children belonging to separate cultures, but there are corporations that do indeed have organizations designed precisely to deal with the cultures of first born and middle born and youngest children, so I don’t think that business America should be at all ashamed of its performance in relation to academic America.
It’s true, we in the university are in some sense the research and development division of business, but in this regard business has also exceeded us. So I think actually there is a whole lot of continuity between ways in which Americans think of these issues both in the academy and outside. And then beyond that if you get to the core of it, anti-discrimination — which is after all something we are all, including the general American public, committed to — has become the almost exclusive criterion of political morality. American society today, both legally and politically, has a strong commitment to the idea that discrimination is the worst thing you can do, that paying somebody a pathetic salary isn’t too bad but paying somebody a pathetic salary because of his or her race or sex is unacceptable. That is, in some sense, built into the logic of liberal capitalism, but it has reached new heights in the last thirty or forty years. And from that standpoint the American academy is really only following along with what is been central to American society more generally.
The most vivid image of that is going to be same sex marriage. I mean Stonewall was, what, in 1969? So, it’s almost exactly forty years ago, and the idea that gay rights would include or should include same sex marriage was seen as . . . I don’t know if anyone even had that idea, I mean I’m old enough to have been around then, and I might have missed it, but I don’t know if that was on anyone’s agenda even as a utopian fantasy. Today it’s going to be a reality; it is in five states, on its way to being a reality in six states. That’s not been produced primarily by academics, that’s due to a shift in American society itself. And it is on one hand a completely admirable shift, I don’t think there is any doubt that you have a freer, more just society if you allow same-sex marriage, but on the other hand it is a shift that is in no sense oppositional to capitalism.
Major social changes have taken place in the past 40 years with remarkable rapidity, but not any in any sense inimical to capitalism. Capitalism has no problem with gay people getting married and people who self-identify as neoliberals understand this very well. So I think the main thing to say there is that, maybe in the book a lot of the examples tend to be academic examples, but I think you can find examples in American society everywhere of the extraordinary power, the hegemony of the model of anti-discrimination, accompanied by defense of property, as the guiding precepts of social justice. You can see this in the study that people have recently been making fun of — the one that shows that liberals are not as liberal as they think they are. What it showed was that when people were asked about the question of redistribution of wealth they turned out to be a lot less egalitarian than they thought they were. People who characterized themselves as “extremely liberal” nevertheless had real problems with the redistribution of wealth. And someone pointed out, I think he teaches at Stanford, that that’s the wrong way to think of this, because yes it’s true that especially as people get more wealthy they tend to become less committed to the redistribution of wealth but there are lots of ways in which they become “more liberal” — with respect to gay rights, antiracism, with respect to all the so-called “social issues,” as long as these social issues are defined in such a way that they have nothing to do with decreasing the increased inequalities brought about by capitalism, which is to say, taking away rich liberals’ money.
The truth is, it’s hard to find any political movement that’s really against neoliberalism today, the closest I can come is the Tea Party. The Tea Party represents in my view, not actually a serious, because it’s so inchoate and it’s so in a certain sense diluted, but nonetheless a real reaction against neoliberalism that is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist Right. It’s a striking fact that what the American Left mainly wants to do is reduce the Tea Party to racists as quickly as humanly possible. They’re thrilled when some Nazis come out and say “Yeah, we support the Tea Party” or some member of the Tea Party says something racist, which is frequently enough. But you can’t understand the real politics of the Tea Party unless you understand how important their opposition to illegal immigration is. Because who’s for illegal immigration? As far as I know only one set of people is for illegal immigration, I mean you may be [as a Marxist], but as far as I know the only people who are openly for illegal immigration are neoliberal economists.
First of all, neoliberal economists are completely for open borders, in so far as that’s possible. Friedman said years ago that, “You can’t have a welfare state and open borders,” but of course the point of that was “open the borders, because that’ll kill the welfare state.” There’s a good paper you can get off the web by Gordon Hanson, commissioned by whoever runs Foreign Affairs, and the argument is that illegal immigration is better than legal immigration, because illegal immigration is extremely responsive to market conditions.
So it’s quite striking that you have all this protesting against illegal immigration, and especially at a time when it’s down. So why are people so upset about it? They are upset about it not because it has gotten worse, it hasn’t, but because they somehow recognize that one of the primary sort of marks of the triumph of neoliberalism in the US is a very high tolerance of illegal immigration, and that illegal immigration is the kind of ne plus ultra of the labor mobility that neoliberalism requires. I mean that’s why for years — even though it’s a kind of contradiction in terms — as a policy it’s worked well. The Bush administration did everything it could to talk against illegal immigration but leave it alone and I’m sure the Obama administration would do the same thing except its hand’s being forced by the Tea Party. So you get these people who are saying illegal immigration sucks, and even Glenn Beck will say “immigration good, illegal immigration bad” and, what he’s reacting against is not, as he thinks, socialism but currently existing capitalism, but he has no clue.
In fact, he’s become obsessed in an interesting way with communism though as far as I can tell we have zero communists not only in the US, but almost anywhere else in the world. But you can sort of see it, because they recognize in illegal immigration a form of capitalism that has finally begun to emerge as a threat to the middle class and even a little bit to the upper middle class, but the only way that they can conceptualize it is as “communism.” They are so committed to a kind of capitalism, which neoliberalism is in fact destroying, that when they see neoliberalism in action they just identify it as “communism.”
[....]
You mention Tea Party angst, but if we are moving towards an “equal opportunity exploitation” with the ideal of a more diversified elite, wouldn’t that naturally cause a degree of white male status anxiety . . .
People always bridle when I say this, but I really doubt that the main issue here is white male status anxiety. Obviously I’m not in a position to say there aren’t people who are experiencing it. What I’m saying is that people in the Tea Party movement have a problem that is realer than “white male status anxiety,” that the economic shifts that are taking place, the more and more extreme inequality, the more and more going to the top, no doubt some people may be unhappy because of loss of status, but many millions more are going to be unhappy because of the loss of actual money. So my point isn’t really to deny the phenomenon of status anxiety, it’s just to point out the extraordinaire eagerness of American liberals to identify racism as the problem, so that anti-racism (rather than anti-capitalism) can be the solution.
On the relationship of the academic Left to the white working class, do you see it one of neglect or outright contempt?
You know it is kind of striking that universities think of themselves and are thought of by their opponents — gratifyingly for the universities themselves — as the most liberal institutions in America today. You have a vision of social justice in which it consists of nothing but basically non-discrimination and no university faculty is outraged by that. But I don’t think it’s because professors are psychologically indifferent to the working class, I think it’s because they’re indifferent to the phenomenon of exploitation. Professors don’t really worry about any form of inequality that isn’t produced by discrimination. We worry a lot about whether women are treated fairly in math classes but we don’t worry at all about that the salaries of the women who clean our offices. More often than not I would guess we feel like those salaries are what those women are worth.
Victimization that does not take place through discrimination is invisible and that’s why it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of poor people in the country are White. After all, the country is about 70 percent white and if you look at the bottom quintile of income it’s about 61 percent white, so it’s an absolute majority. Sure, some will acknowledge “Appalachia” at least, but it’s 61 percent and there aren’t that many people in Appalachia. They are in Chicago, they are in Washington, you don’t have to go that far to see poor people and the minute I say something like that the Richard Kims of the world say “See all he’s worried about is the injustice being done to poor white people,” but it’s obvious that that’s not the point. It’s obvious that the utility, as it were, of poor white people in this discussion is that they are poor not because they are the victims of prejudice; they are poor because of other structures of exploitation.
The fact that most of our poverty is not produced by prejudice should suggest to us that if we are actually concerned about poverty, no matter how much anti-discrimination work we do we are not going to take care of the poverty problem, certainly not in our little test group, the 61 percent of the country who are poor and White. So there are two ways to deal with that; one you say “Okay maybe it’s true that we should focus a little less on discrimination and a little more on other forms of dealing with this inequality,” or, two, the state of the art thing which is to say, “No actually it’s false. White people have been the victim of discrimination, because the lower class is itself a victim of discrimination.”
I wrote a piece on this last year based on the Gates episode for the London Review of Books, a review of a book that had just come out in the UK about extending anti-discrimination to deal with the white working class, as if the problem with the white working class was that it was insufficiently respected and that if you could only get a few more White working class guys up at the top . . . basically just treating the white working class as if it were an identity. That’s cutting edge neoliberalism.
https://jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/
Though he might not appreciate the cliché, Walter Benn Michaels is no stranger to controversy. In the early 1980s he wrote a series of articles with Steven Knapp entitled “Against Theory,” in which it was argued that literary works meant only what their authors intended them to mean. He created a stir beyond the Ivory Tower with a 2006 book, The Trouble with Diversity, premised around the idea that a focus on cultural diversity at the expense of economic equality has stunted resistance to neoliberalism.
-----------
Neoliberalism is often presented as a unified, homogenous ideology, but you differentiate between “left” and “right” neoliberalisms — what’s the difference and which one dominates American politics today?
The differentiation between left and right neoliberalism doesn’t really undermine the way it which it is deeply unified in its commitment to competitive markets and to the state’s role in maintaining competitive markets. For me the distinction is that “left neoliberals” are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things. [...]
What’s at the heart of your work is that equal-opportunity exploitation is what we’re moving towards, or at the very least it’s an ideological goal of the ruling class. So, what explains the shift in the way capital has historically acted — using racial and ethnic divisions to better exploit the working class?
Well, I think there’s absolutely no question that is true. Capitalism throughout the nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth was classically imperialist, which is basically impossible without racism, without a massive commitment to what amounted to European-American White supremacy. But one of the things that’s become obvious — leaving the racism question aside, leaving the discrimination question more generally aside, — is that the condition of capital changed fairly radically in the twentieth century. Of course, people have different accounts of why that is. Even those on the Left who agree that the falling rate of profit is central don’t agree on whether it’s a structural necessity or a contingent development. But almost everyone agrees that neoliberalism involved internationalization in a way that cannot be reduced to what imperialism was before and that it involved, above all, a kind of powerful necessity for mobility not of only of capital, but of labor.
Stalin famously won the argument but lost the war over whether there could be socialism in one country, but no one has ever been under the impression for more than a millisecond that there could be neoliberalism in only one country. An easy way to look at this would be to say that the conditions of mobility of labor and mobility of capital have since World War II required an extraordinary upsurge in immigration. The foreign born population in the US today is something like 38 million people, which is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Poland. This is a function of matching the mobility of capital with the mobility of labor, and when you begin to produce these massive multi-racial or multi-national or as we would call them today multi-cultural workforces, you obviously need technologies to manage these work forces.
In the US this all began in a kind of powerful way with the Immigration Act of 1965, which in effect repudiated the explicit racism of the Immigration Act of the 1924 and replaced it with largely neoliberal criteria. Before, whether you could come to the US was based almost entirely on racial or, to use the then-preferred term, “national” criteria. I believe that, for example, the quota on Indian immigration to the US in 1925 was 100. I don’t know the figure on Indian immigration to the US since 1965 off-hand, but 100 is probably about an hour and a half of that in a given year. The anti-racism that involves is obviously a good thing, but it was enacted above all to admit people who benefited the economy of the US. They are often sort of high-end labor, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen of various kinds. The Asian immigration of the seventies and eighties involved a high proportion of people who had upper and upper-middle class status in their countries of origin and who quickly resumed that middle and upper middle class status in the US. While at the same time we’ve had this increased immigration from Mexico, people from the lower-end of the economy, filling jobs that otherwise cannot be filled — or at least not filled at the price capital would prefer to pay. So there is a certain sense in which the internationalism intrinsic to the neoliberal process requires a form of anti-racism and indeed neoliberalism has made very good use of the particular form we’ve evolved, multiculturalism, in two ways.
First, there isn’t a single US corporation that doesn’t have an HR office committed to respecting the differences between cultures, to making sure that your culture is respected whether or not your standard of living is. And, second, multiculturalism and diversity more generally are even more effective as a legitimizing tool, because they suggest that the ultimate goal of social justice in a neoliberal economy is not that there should be less difference between the rich and the poor — indeed the rule in neoliberal economies is that the difference between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks — but that no culture should be treated invidiously and that it’s basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites. So the model of social justice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the model of social justice is that the rich make whatever they make, but an appropriate percentage of them are minorities or women. That’s a long answer to your question, but it is a serious question and the essence of the answer is precisely that internationalization, the new mobility of both capital and labor, has produced a contemporary anti-racism that functions as a legitimization of capital rather than as resistance or even critique.
You just identified the problem, increasing social inequity and heightened class exploitation in recent decades, but you also did something that you didn’t do as much in your book, which is give credence to objective economic forces — the crises of social democracy, stagflation, capitalist restructuring, union busting, etc.
Well, I wrote the book four or five years ago and I know more about it now than I did then. So yeah, that’s true, the book is in a certain sense a response to what seemed to me very visible on the surface, but I had much less of a sense of how that situation came about. One of the things that’s been useful — I know it’s been useful for me, but I think it’s actually be useful in general for at least some people on the Left in thinking about these issues — has been the popularization of the concept of neoliberalism, which has given us a better ability to periodize the history of capitalism and especially of events since World War II. You get a different vision of what postmodernism, for example, is when you begin to see postmodernism as the official ideology of neoliberalism and that’s a vision you can’t have until you have a kind of sense of what neoliberalism is. Others, of course, were alert to this long before I was.
Speaking of the postmodernists, you focus a lot on academics and academia in your book, but one could argue that correlation doesn’t equal causation. An academic might be spending too much time writing about hybridity and difference and identity movements might be marching in the streets, but is this actually preventing class based movements from emerging . . .
I don’t know if it’s preventing it. My thesis was never that it prevented class based movements from emerging. I mean I never meant to present a theory about what has prevented class-based movements from emerging in the US and I certainly didn’t mean to imply that what people do in English classes did it. Although, of course, given the class position of the students in those classes, it’s probably right to say that English departments and elite universities more generally do a very good job of providing the upper middle class with its impressively good anti-racist, pro-gay-marriage conscience. But the more striking thing here is that when it comes to respecting difference, the academic world is hardly very different from the corporate world. The kind of distinctions and divisions that academics have learned to make in various identity categories are absolutely matched in sophistication by the ones that are made by any major US corporation.
There do things that corporations would do that academics would never think of. I’ve never been in the worst bullshit cultural theory class that actually took seriously the idea that we really should think of first born children and middle children belonging to separate cultures, but there are corporations that do indeed have organizations designed precisely to deal with the cultures of first born and middle born and youngest children, so I don’t think that business America should be at all ashamed of its performance in relation to academic America.
It’s true, we in the university are in some sense the research and development division of business, but in this regard business has also exceeded us. So I think actually there is a whole lot of continuity between ways in which Americans think of these issues both in the academy and outside. And then beyond that if you get to the core of it, anti-discrimination — which is after all something we are all, including the general American public, committed to — has become the almost exclusive criterion of political morality. American society today, both legally and politically, has a strong commitment to the idea that discrimination is the worst thing you can do, that paying somebody a pathetic salary isn’t too bad but paying somebody a pathetic salary because of his or her race or sex is unacceptable. That is, in some sense, built into the logic of liberal capitalism, but it has reached new heights in the last thirty or forty years. And from that standpoint the American academy is really only following along with what is been central to American society more generally.
The most vivid image of that is going to be same sex marriage. I mean Stonewall was, what, in 1969? So, it’s almost exactly forty years ago, and the idea that gay rights would include or should include same sex marriage was seen as . . . I don’t know if anyone even had that idea, I mean I’m old enough to have been around then, and I might have missed it, but I don’t know if that was on anyone’s agenda even as a utopian fantasy. Today it’s going to be a reality; it is in five states, on its way to being a reality in six states. That’s not been produced primarily by academics, that’s due to a shift in American society itself. And it is on one hand a completely admirable shift, I don’t think there is any doubt that you have a freer, more just society if you allow same-sex marriage, but on the other hand it is a shift that is in no sense oppositional to capitalism.
Major social changes have taken place in the past 40 years with remarkable rapidity, but not any in any sense inimical to capitalism. Capitalism has no problem with gay people getting married and people who self-identify as neoliberals understand this very well. So I think the main thing to say there is that, maybe in the book a lot of the examples tend to be academic examples, but I think you can find examples in American society everywhere of the extraordinary power, the hegemony of the model of anti-discrimination, accompanied by defense of property, as the guiding precepts of social justice. You can see this in the study that people have recently been making fun of — the one that shows that liberals are not as liberal as they think they are. What it showed was that when people were asked about the question of redistribution of wealth they turned out to be a lot less egalitarian than they thought they were. People who characterized themselves as “extremely liberal” nevertheless had real problems with the redistribution of wealth. And someone pointed out, I think he teaches at Stanford, that that’s the wrong way to think of this, because yes it’s true that especially as people get more wealthy they tend to become less committed to the redistribution of wealth but there are lots of ways in which they become “more liberal” — with respect to gay rights, antiracism, with respect to all the so-called “social issues,” as long as these social issues are defined in such a way that they have nothing to do with decreasing the increased inequalities brought about by capitalism, which is to say, taking away rich liberals’ money.
The truth is, it’s hard to find any political movement that’s really against neoliberalism today, the closest I can come is the Tea Party. The Tea Party represents in my view, not actually a serious, because it’s so inchoate and it’s so in a certain sense diluted, but nonetheless a real reaction against neoliberalism that is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist Right. It’s a striking fact that what the American Left mainly wants to do is reduce the Tea Party to racists as quickly as humanly possible. They’re thrilled when some Nazis come out and say “Yeah, we support the Tea Party” or some member of the Tea Party says something racist, which is frequently enough. But you can’t understand the real politics of the Tea Party unless you understand how important their opposition to illegal immigration is. Because who’s for illegal immigration? As far as I know only one set of people is for illegal immigration, I mean you may be [as a Marxist], but as far as I know the only people who are openly for illegal immigration are neoliberal economists.
First of all, neoliberal economists are completely for open borders, in so far as that’s possible. Friedman said years ago that, “You can’t have a welfare state and open borders,” but of course the point of that was “open the borders, because that’ll kill the welfare state.” There’s a good paper you can get off the web by Gordon Hanson, commissioned by whoever runs Foreign Affairs, and the argument is that illegal immigration is better than legal immigration, because illegal immigration is extremely responsive to market conditions.
So it’s quite striking that you have all this protesting against illegal immigration, and especially at a time when it’s down. So why are people so upset about it? They are upset about it not because it has gotten worse, it hasn’t, but because they somehow recognize that one of the primary sort of marks of the triumph of neoliberalism in the US is a very high tolerance of illegal immigration, and that illegal immigration is the kind of ne plus ultra of the labor mobility that neoliberalism requires. I mean that’s why for years — even though it’s a kind of contradiction in terms — as a policy it’s worked well. The Bush administration did everything it could to talk against illegal immigration but leave it alone and I’m sure the Obama administration would do the same thing except its hand’s being forced by the Tea Party. So you get these people who are saying illegal immigration sucks, and even Glenn Beck will say “immigration good, illegal immigration bad” and, what he’s reacting against is not, as he thinks, socialism but currently existing capitalism, but he has no clue.
In fact, he’s become obsessed in an interesting way with communism though as far as I can tell we have zero communists not only in the US, but almost anywhere else in the world. But you can sort of see it, because they recognize in illegal immigration a form of capitalism that has finally begun to emerge as a threat to the middle class and even a little bit to the upper middle class, but the only way that they can conceptualize it is as “communism.” They are so committed to a kind of capitalism, which neoliberalism is in fact destroying, that when they see neoliberalism in action they just identify it as “communism.”
[....]
You mention Tea Party angst, but if we are moving towards an “equal opportunity exploitation” with the ideal of a more diversified elite, wouldn’t that naturally cause a degree of white male status anxiety . . .
People always bridle when I say this, but I really doubt that the main issue here is white male status anxiety. Obviously I’m not in a position to say there aren’t people who are experiencing it. What I’m saying is that people in the Tea Party movement have a problem that is realer than “white male status anxiety,” that the economic shifts that are taking place, the more and more extreme inequality, the more and more going to the top, no doubt some people may be unhappy because of loss of status, but many millions more are going to be unhappy because of the loss of actual money. So my point isn’t really to deny the phenomenon of status anxiety, it’s just to point out the extraordinaire eagerness of American liberals to identify racism as the problem, so that anti-racism (rather than anti-capitalism) can be the solution.
On the relationship of the academic Left to the white working class, do you see it one of neglect or outright contempt?
You know it is kind of striking that universities think of themselves and are thought of by their opponents — gratifyingly for the universities themselves — as the most liberal institutions in America today. You have a vision of social justice in which it consists of nothing but basically non-discrimination and no university faculty is outraged by that. But I don’t think it’s because professors are psychologically indifferent to the working class, I think it’s because they’re indifferent to the phenomenon of exploitation. Professors don’t really worry about any form of inequality that isn’t produced by discrimination. We worry a lot about whether women are treated fairly in math classes but we don’t worry at all about that the salaries of the women who clean our offices. More often than not I would guess we feel like those salaries are what those women are worth.
Victimization that does not take place through discrimination is invisible and that’s why it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of poor people in the country are White. After all, the country is about 70 percent white and if you look at the bottom quintile of income it’s about 61 percent white, so it’s an absolute majority. Sure, some will acknowledge “Appalachia” at least, but it’s 61 percent and there aren’t that many people in Appalachia. They are in Chicago, they are in Washington, you don’t have to go that far to see poor people and the minute I say something like that the Richard Kims of the world say “See all he’s worried about is the injustice being done to poor white people,” but it’s obvious that that’s not the point. It’s obvious that the utility, as it were, of poor white people in this discussion is that they are poor not because they are the victims of prejudice; they are poor because of other structures of exploitation.
The fact that most of our poverty is not produced by prejudice should suggest to us that if we are actually concerned about poverty, no matter how much anti-discrimination work we do we are not going to take care of the poverty problem, certainly not in our little test group, the 61 percent of the country who are poor and White. So there are two ways to deal with that; one you say “Okay maybe it’s true that we should focus a little less on discrimination and a little more on other forms of dealing with this inequality,” or, two, the state of the art thing which is to say, “No actually it’s false. White people have been the victim of discrimination, because the lower class is itself a victim of discrimination.”
I wrote a piece on this last year based on the Gates episode for the London Review of Books, a review of a book that had just come out in the UK about extending anti-discrimination to deal with the white working class, as if the problem with the white working class was that it was insufficiently respected and that if you could only get a few more White working class guys up at the top . . . basically just treating the white working class as if it were an identity. That’s cutting edge neoliberalism.
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