In this essay, I would like to delve into an important theoretical relationship, as formulated by Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, W.E.B. Dubois, and James Baldwin. They analyzed the relationship between working class struggle and collective, ennobling, freedom-tending enculturaton, on the one hand, and racism and deculturation, on the other.
Their analysis stands in marked contrast to what I, with Norman Finkelstein, consider to be the bankrupt contemporary ideology of “woke” anti-racism, and its “Manichean”, race-cultural-determinist views as expressed by such luminaries as Coatesi, D’Angelo, and Kendi.
I’ll begin by discussing their “woke” ideology. Then, before I get to Kallen, Bourne, and co. on the subject, we will first explore the historic “debate” between the liberal Hegel and the reactionary Nietzsche, on the relationship between culture and politics. We will explore what Hegel described as the historical dialectic of Lordship and Bondage, vs. what Nietzsche described as a merely antinomous power struggle between the morality of the Masters (which he championed) vs. “slave morality”. Hegel’s view greatly helps us understand the importance of a “culture of freedom” to the struggle for equal rights and popular liberation. Nietzsche’s view helps us understand the motivation of the ruling capitalist class in trying to stop the formation of such a liberatory culture.
“Woke” “anti-racism
I want first to express my deep appreciation for Norman Finkelstein, in addition to his courageous defense of the Palestinian people, for his summary of ‘woke” anti-racist tracts, in I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Come To It. Boiled down, as Norman writes, the woke view of racism is unmoored from any relationship to the dialectic of historical materialism or class struggle. Instead it is culturally determinative, so much so that it is completely reductionist, paranoiac, and positively Manichean.
This is a view that has devolved from the political correctness that was so popular in academia when I was a young man of 35 (thirty years ago :-) ) At the time I wrote an article for my graduate school newspaper, opposing P.C., entitled “Human Beings are not Trained Pigeons”. My point, in opposition to the post structuralist ideology, was identical to that of Norman’s in his recent book. While indeed the racism in our culture, and the relative privileges we may derive from this culture, may induce racist thoughts in our minds, we human beings have things like rationality, self control, and in Freudian terms, superego and an ego, as well as an id. In Harry Stack Sullivan’s terms, we have a “good me” and a “bad me”, as well as a “not me”. We don’t have to act on such impulses.
As opposed to this, in the wokesters’ ideology, racist-cultural ideas, Norman writes, are like a “dybbuk”: “a malicious possessing spirit” (wikipedia) Its hosts are not only any and all white people, but also, according to Kendi, even black civil rights leaders like W.E.B. Dubois and Frederick Douglass.
Another, essential, mistaken claim made by the wokesters is that the relative privilege a white person, or a black civil rights leader, enjoys over the less fortunate people of color, implicates them somehow in complicity with racism. That is guilt-mongering. It is simply not true. Again, human beings have choice. I can succumb to the seduction of racist privilege, and choose to promote racism. Or I can choose not to do so, to the point where I use whatever resources are available to me, to fight racism. But the wokesters’ guilt-mongering me, merely because I enjoy such privilege, as Stanley Aronowitz said in The Crisis in Historical Materialism, and Norman writes in his book I’ll Burn that Bridge When I Cross It, is not a good motivation for me to make one of the two latter choices. If anything, it would probably drive a guilt-ridden racist person to double down on his or her racism. The much better motivation to encourage, is compassion, and empathy. And we are all—except for the sociopaths among us--capable of that—just as Tom “Jonathan Pie” Walker asserts, in his monologue on “Straight White Male Privilege”: “I have imagination!”ii
And so, as Norman argues, paradoxically, these “race-hustlers” preserve, extend, and personally-financially exploit the very racism they claim to be “anti”, out of the other side of their mouths. The only solution they can offer to fight racism, is for everyone who ever had a racist thought, to feel guilty.
Now let’s explore the real relationship between culture, liberatory (class and national) struggle, and racism.
Lordship and Bondage.
Hegel’s Dialectic of Master and Slave, which he derived from the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (who had a powerful influence upon much of Hegel’s view of history) and which he presents in his Phenomenology of Spirit, is as follows: Two warriors meet on the field of battle. One of them, for fear of death, submits to the other. The courageous warrior grants to the coward, the right to continued life—provided the latter accedes to become his slave.
In this first moment of the dialectic, the Master is the adult, while the Slave is a child. The Slave must recognize and affirm the personhood of the Master. The Master neither feels nor needs to feel a similar appreciation toward the Slave.
Yet the very nature of their new relationship mandates an eventual role-reversal. For the Slave now labors, works with the raw materials of Nature, to serve both himself, and the Master. Within this relationship, he grows up, recognizes himself as a person, and becomes potentially independent from the Master. He is now the adult. But the Master is reduced to a state of helpless dependence upon the Slave. He becomes the Baby.
Hegel historicizes this relationship. In his, idealist, dialectic of history, the refinement of ideologies and culture—from pantheism, to Stoicism, to Christianity, to liberalism and Hegelianism--is its result. Through their culture, motivated by their struggle with the Masters, the slaves become increasingly able to recognize themselves as persons, worthy of freedom, and to make demands upon the Masters for such recognition.
Socialist radicals (like myself) can easily see the influence Hegel’s discourse had upon his grandstudents, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Strip it of its idealist integument: and we see its materialist kernel, as described in the latter’s “Bourgeois and Proletarians” chapter of their Manifesto of the Communist Party.
However, this is not the only fruitful basis contained herein for socialist radicalism. For there is also here an understanding of the need of the working class, and national peoples, to develop a culture of freedom. As Alan Patten argues in his Hegel’s Idea of Freedom, Hegel discusses such a “public culture of freedom,” or Volksgeist, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History:
.. it is only in a certain form of Volksgeist that Geist as individual can be developed and sustained: it is only in the context of a public culture of freedom, one in which certain ideas, practices, and self-understandings prevail, that the capacities for individual free and rational agency can be fostered and nourished. Hegel also holds that a Volksgeist is able to achieve a certain level of freedom only in virtue of a particular historical inheritance. A public culture of freedom does not create itself ex nihilo but is always, at least in part, the product of a historical process of development that draws on previous cultures and ways of living (Hegel talks of ‘ a progression, growth and succession from one national principle to another ’ ( VG 65/56; cf. 69 – 73/ 60 – 3)).iii
Such Volksgeisten, Hegel asserts in the Phenomenology of Spirit, arise and develop historically out of the dialectic of lordship and bondage.
While Marx and Engels opposed only the idealist integument of this historical dialectic of culture, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche opposed its essential kernel: the very idea of historical progress toward freedom, achieved, ideally or any other way, by the “slaves”. Nietzsche termed such thinking, and such Volksgeisten themselves, “slave morality”. They were a guilt-mongering, passive aggressive trick, played upon the Masters by the the Slaves, out of the Slaves’ envy of the Masters’ strength. Only the culture of the Masters’, based securely and confidently upon their domination-exploitation of the Slaves, could aspire to greatness. The collective nature of the Slaves’ Volksgeist, was merely a symptom of their inability to depend on themselves, as individuals. Their suffering, that for Hegel ennobled them, was part of the trick they played on the Masters to weaken the latter. This they used to show the latter that they were “holier-than-thou.” Thus the Slaves displayed their, sick version of the universal human “Will to Power”. The Masters felt their “Will-to-Power” honestly, and thus, ideally, felt no compunctions about their exploitation of the Slaves. The sick morality of the Slaves, in contrast, by attempting to weaken the Masters via guilt, was the product of the Slaves “bottling up” their own aggression.
It would be a serious mistake not to see the value of this analysis. And Leftists such as Emma Goldman and Randolph Bourne (whose thought we will soon go on to discuss) did indeed see its value, for their critique of the small town culture of Protestant gentility that had so stifled them in their youth. Nietzsche’s ideas about “slave morality” were foundational for the later understanding of psychoanalysis of the “bottled up aggression” of the masochistic style. Today Nietzsche’s critique of the “holier-than-thou” attitude of the Slaves is essential to understand the ideologies of political correctness and woke.
Yet, as the political theorist and intellectual historian Ishay Landa has shown, in his book The Overman in the Marketplace, Nietzsche is the quintessential philosophical strategist for the bourgeoisie, to encourage individual members of the working class to reject cultures promoting their class solidarity, in favor of Nietzsche’s anti-ethos of the sociopathic, completely unscrupulous, screw-thy-comrade “blonde beast”.iv Nietschean celebration of rugged individualism and the great millionaires, is a central media strategy for the bourgeoisie to roll back any possibility that “the herd” can get their collective act together, to achieve the culture of freedom and unity they require to overthrow their capitalist Masters and create the Good Socialist Society.v
Augmenting this Will-zu-Macht of the capitalist class, is the essentially competitive, and thus anxiety-ridden nature of the capitalist market system itself. It is corrosive of collective culture, and encourages an attitude of “I’ve got (or I’m going to get) mine, Jack—lest I lose the dog-eat-dog struggle and sink to the bottom”. These two dynamics are the two principle obstacles to building a culture of liberation. Let’s discuss now the views of our radicals, whose efforts to understand these dynamics was heroic, and far superior to our contemporary woke epigones.
Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America” 1916.
Randolph Bourne was one of the most important anti-war socialist intellectuals of his generation. In his cultural, social, and economic concerns, I consider him an American forerunner of the great Italian communist theorist, Antonio Gramsci. His vision of a “Beloved Community” which he derived from the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Peirce, and the Hegelian Idealist, Josiah Royce, was taken up later by the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King. James Baldwin also seems to have been influenced by Bourne’s vision. And as we will see, Bourne’s vision of a ‘trans-national America”, and the obstacles to it, was probably the basis for Baldwin’s profound understanding of anti-black American racism.
Bourne derives much of his views for this essay, on an essay the liberal Horace Kallen wrote a year earlier, “Democracy vs. the Melting Pot”. As Kallen’s title indicates, he expressed here his opposition to the ideal of playwright and noveist, Israel Zangwell. Bourne also opposed this ideal, which they viewed as a terrible prospect: the washing out of all Old Country cultures, to standardize ordinary Americans in the culture of the Boston Brahmins, subjecting them to mass culture, and mass manipulation by elites.
Here is Kallen on the subject. Decrying the effects of the frenetic geographic and economic mobility of American society, he writes the following:
Hardly anybody seems to have been born where he lives, or to live where he has been born. The teetering of demand and supply in industry and commerce keeps large masses of population constantly mobile; so that many people no longer can be said to have homes. This mobility reinforces the use of English for a lingua franca, intelligible everywhere, becomes indispensable by immigrants. And ideals that are felt to belong with the language tend to become "standardized," widespread, uniform, through the devices of the telegraph and the telephone, the syndication of "literature," the cheap newspaper and the cheap novel, the vaudeville circuit, the "movie," and the star system.
The alternative is hinted at by Kallen when he discusses the Southern black community of his time:
South of [the] Mason and Dixon line the cities exhibit a greater homogeneity. Outside of certain regions in Texas the descendants of the native white stock, often degenerate and backward, prevail among the whites, but the whites as a whole constitute a relatively weaker proportion of the population. They live among nine million negroes, whose own mode of living tends, by its mere massiveness, to standardize the "mind" of the proletarian South in speech, manner, and the other values of social organization.vi
What does that mean, the “mere massiveness” of the negro population, amidst “a relatively weaker proportion of whites”? It cannot mean mere numbers. According to the demographics, the black population of the South, between 1910 and 1920, numbered slightly below a third of the total Southern population.vii So it must mean the relative weakness of the whites’ culture, and the mobility of the poor white population, and the relative compactness of the black minority, and the cohesiveness its own culture and community. Why the difference? Because the minority are segregated and more oppressed, than the majority. From the ante-Bellum days before the Civil War, we have in the black community the more freedom-questing culture of the Slaves, as discussed by Hegel.
For Bourne, the true wellsprings of American cultural and moral life, are the old Volksgeisten celebrated by Hegel.
Yet a truer cultural sense would have told us that it is not the self-conscious cultural nuclei that sap at our American life, but these fringes. It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a mere elementary, grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who supports the Bohemian schools in Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the Bohemian who has made money and has got into ward politics.
The capitalist forces that are transforming America into Zangwell’s ideal of a melting pot, demoralize and atomize the population.
Just so surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of the mob.viii
In a later essay, which he wrote for the Menorah journal, “The Jews and Trans-national America”, Bourne took aim at the “Americanization” campaign supported by Presidents Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt. This was a deliberate project to wash the immigrant workers clean of their old cultures, in order to reduce their cultural capacity to challenge capitalism and militarism. Perhaps Bourne was too enamored of Nietzsche’s culturally radical ideas, to realize that these Presidents’ project fell almost completely in line with Nietzsche’s project for the preservation of the Masters’ domination of culture and society? He never mentions this consanguinity.ix
W.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction, 1935
Another analyst of the manipulation of culture, and in particular, racism, to ensure the domination of the capitalist class, was W.E.B. Dubois. In his 1935 Black Reconstruction, Dubois details how the culture of the Jim Crow South was created after elites, North and South, conspired together to roll back the liberatory prospects inherent in Reconstruction. On the remains of this movement, poor whites, enjoyed nearly the same bleak economic prospects as their poor black brethren. They were seduced, however, into supporting the rule of the Southern Bourbons, by what Dubois termed “the shibboleth of race”, and “the psychological wages of whiteness”. For example:
They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.x
James Baldwin, In Search of a Majority, 1960
Finally, we turn to the speech James Baldwin made at Kalamazoo College in 1960, “In Search of a Majority”. There is a strong hint here, as I wrote before, that the speech owes a debt to Bourne’s essays on “Trans-national America”, as well as his concept of the Beloved Community. Baldwin makes reference to the same concepts about American cultural history as Kallen and Bourne. His “Founding Fathers”. Like Bourne’s Boston Brahmins, they “established a status hierarchy of manners” in America. When this was lost, the immigrants and their children had no cultural or moral framework, by which to establish a secure sense of status, or much of a sense of community, in the face of the corrosive social effects of market competitive society, as well as the terrible project of cultural erasure called Americanization—except racism.
Turning from Bourne’s essays, to Baldwin’s speech, 44 years later, I am reminded of the Leonard Cohen song, “Everybody Knows”, especially the line, “everybody knows the good guys lost.” What Baldwin might tell Bourne (who died unfortunately in 1918 of the influenza epidemic) is precisely that.
The Americanization drive, and the deculturating tendencies of American culture, have stripped the white European immigrants of their potential to resist. Driven by the great economic insecurity of the competitive market, they strive to rise up what Baldwin called the “hideous ladder of success”, to reach a place above the fray, where there is no dirt, ooze, death—or for that matter, love. Black people, whites identify in their frenzy, with the bottom of the ladder, as well as all that dirt, ooze, sex and death they aver. And so they fear and hate blacks, and are racist.xi
Let’s now take stock. What is the difference between the analyses of racism by these older authors’, and that of the current crop of woke theorists? These elders profoundly disagree with the youngsters’ contention that white racism is the essential culture of whites, or that whites have a true interest in it, or that it empowers them. No. It is a function of their deprivation. It only becomes epidemic, after the ruling class, and the anxieties of competitive capitalist society, ravage whites and strip them of their old country Volksgeisten, the cultures they have developed over centuries that previously ennobled them and lifted their spirits toward liberation and morality. Stripped as they are of the cultural capacity to recognize their own and each others’ personhood, they deny that recognition to, and hate, minorities.
And thus the oldsters’ answer is not to endlessly guilt trip whites for their alleged complicity in racism, because they once in a while make a tactlessly racist remark, or have an occasional racist thought. The answer is to build a new culture of socialist, working class resistance.
We get a taste of that, when we read Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism (1979)xii. Certainly, the culture the Communist Party created had its (Stalinist, bureaucratically insane) drawbacks. But it also, according to Gornick, with its ethos of class unity, encouraged a culture of mutual, inter-racial recognition of each comrades’ personal worth. Of course I am not saying that we should just go back to Stalinism. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party was thoroughly racially integrated—with half the members in the 1940s, black. (Blacks left in droves when the leadership started preaching black separatism/natioalism, even disallowing interracial romance between members).
A new revolutionary democratic socialist movement, might just turn the trick.
iCoates, however, has partially redeemed himself in risking the loss of his sponsorship by The Atlantic—Zionist--editor Goldberg, to come out solidly in defense of the Palestinian people, against the slaughterfest now visited upon them by the genocideal monster Netanyahu and co.
iiA similar critique can and should be made of the radical feminist, #Me2 crowd, as represented by psychotherapist Adam Jukes’ book, Why Men Hate Women. Jukes derives the “insight” expressed by his title (and the insinuation within it that all men hate women!) from the psychoanalytic work of Jessica Benjamin and Lynn Chancer, who argue that men are more inclined to try to dominate and are prone to sadism, than are women, because of the unique separation dynamic they experience with their mothers, Generalizing wildly from his experience serving in a clinic for violent, rapine men to all men, and grotesquely exaggerating Benjamin’s insights, Jukes, like the race-hustlers discussed above, does not distinguish between having a sadistic impulse, resulting in indulging oneself in a purely private sexual fantasy, and acting out that fantasy. Most men have such fantasies. The majority of women, at one point or another in their lives, have fantasies about being raped. That doesn’t mean that it has to happen. It doesn’t mean that the basic feeling of all men toward women is hatred. That is nonsense.
iii Patten, Alan. Hegel's Idea of Freedom, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1999. Hegel’s indebtedness to the influence Herder upon his ideas is discussed by Clare Thérèse Pellerin in her Masters thesis for the University of Saskatchewan Dept. of Political Science, The Philosophies of History of Herder and Hegel, at https://harvest.usask.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/9e17052f-a408-4736-9b8c-2e603e43cc25/content
ivIshay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture, Lexington Books, 2009. When John Shea studied for his role as rags-to-riches arch-criminal Lex Luthor for the TV series Lois and Clark, he studied both Nietzsche’s works, and the life of Donald Trump, whose “fire your boss” mentality fits perfectly with Nietzsche’s anti-ethos. The 1949 film directed by Edward Dmytryk illustrates the conflict between the solidaristic ethos of Marxism vs the anti-ethos of Nietzsche, particularly in the scene near the end of the film between Geremio (Sam Wanamaker), who expresses a communal ethos, and his mistress Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan), who expresses this anti-ethos. The screenplay was based on the life of Geremio DiDonato, father of working class and fellow communist Pietro diDonato, Geremio was a bricklayer who literally drowned in concrete. The film ends with his death. Pietro’s most famous novel, Christ in Concrete, begins with it.
vIt’s a strange irony. Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality is foundational for understanding the problems and psychological motivations behind P.C. and woke. Yet because they promote the disunity of the working class into ever tinier monads of intersectional identity and oppression sweepstakes, he would probably embrace these ideologies with open arms. It is no accident that his mid-to-late-twentieth century disciple, Michel Foucault, was one of the formulators of their bedrock, anti-ontological ontological school, post-structuralism.
viDEMOCRACY VERSUS THE MELTING-POT (msu.edu). This idea that black culture, because of blacks’ oppression and communal cohesion, was central to Southern culture, was later elaborated by the American Trotskyist Richard Fraser, who led a minority within the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that supported what Fraser called “revolutionary integration,” as the answer to black oppression. The majority, led by George Breitman, supported the (scientifically unfounded) idea that blacks already or could constitute a “nation within a nation”. One of the requirements for this special status was a culture separate from American culture. Against this, Fraser pointed out that instead of a separate culure, black culture was integral, not just to Southern culture, but to all of American culture.
vii"Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For The United States, Regions, Divisions, and States" http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/twps0076.html
viiiTrans-national America - The Atlantic
ixZionism and Transnationalism (1916) | Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History | NYU Press Scholarship Online | Oxford Academic (oup.com) For an account of the way in which Jewish-American culture shaped workers militancy, see Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905. By Hadassa Kosak. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
xW.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction, 1935.
xiJames Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority”, Kalamazoo College, 1960, at jamesbaldwin-insearchofamajority.pdf (wordpress.com) The relationship between racism and authoritarianism, on the one hand and the economic anxiety conduced by the capitalism, on the other, had been explored years earlier by members of the Frankfurt School. Such texts included Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, 1941, and a few of the Studies in Prejudice, with research and writing conducted by School members, and sponsored by the American Jewish Committee: such as Nathan Ackerman and Marie Jahoda’s Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder, 1950. Bourne himself had written about how “war is the health of the state” in his posthumously published essay, The State, 1918, in which he detailed how the anxieties created by war breeds authoritarianism, intolerance, racism, and hysteria.
xiiVivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism. Basic Books, 1979
Excellent essay, thankyou.