Wayne Rothschild: The Prime Directive

I quite agree that there can be reactionary movements "from below," but that's why political programs and principles are important, too. Otherwise, the pure multitude in motion could turn out to be not an insurrectional crowd but a lynch mob!

Following on from Ted: Not only programs and principles, but the "organic intellectuals," or if you prefer, the "advanced workers" who are at ease amongst the masses and can act as bearers and propagators of these higher principles. Gramsci's partially worked-out ideas might be useful here.

The masses in motion, mass action or the multitude, is the strategically priveleged form of political action. Marx and Marxists have said this in many ways, even if they did not supply its concept (someone familiar is speaking through me here). That said, both classes and masses, are ambivalent, the concept racism from below is an attempt to capture the way in which racial exclusion and gender oppression are a constitutive part of class and mass consciousness. The lower classes include themselves in by excluding the others. We should be direct about this, racisms are not external manipulation they have a popular base.

Our task, should we choose to accept it, is to bring people together in opposition to all forms of exploitation and oppression, to connect the dots--universalization. Program, principles and organization should be posed in such away as to get working class and oppressed people to see themselves as the basis of a new kind of political power. And yes, there is a need for Socialist organization and politics, and goals, for todays
struggles to get off the ground.

The U.S. working class has many qualities that are "peasant-like". It's possible to theorize widespread racism among working people as one of many survivals of pre-capitalist ideologies.

It's also possible to theorize it as a consequence of imperialism. Imperialism re-worked older racisms into its own specific ideology with racialist components.

There's a considerable component of what you might call "defensive racism" among oppressed communities of color.

Is it helpful to look at any of these possible components of real-world racism abstractly, that is, independently of the others?

Or does it make better sense to try to figure out whether there's a mixture of these sources, other sources, etc. which combine to create the concrete racism(s) influencing real people?

I suspect -- but I don't know -- that if one is seeking a "concept" of concrete racism among non-ruling-class populations, something more along the line of the analysis of complex articulations of multiple sources will turn out to be most fruitful.

If so, a successful conceptualization would allow activists to better understand how the popular base of racism becomes popular. From there it might provide a basis for strategically coherent intervention.

Who's done this work?

The X-factor exclusion of the other, any other will do, that holds together social groupings is typical in history. It has become more acute with the modern nation state. One way of posing it, following something in Ted's blog, is that it is a kind of displacement where class resentment is shifted onto the external other. Modern anti-semitism is paradigmatic here.
The other key mechanism is identification, people identify with their nation, and things get personal. The political point is racism and national chauvinism have deep roots and have to be addressed politically, they cannot be tossed off as something external.

I don't believe that working people have some sort of built-in, ahistorical drive to group together on the basis of exclusion of "the other", who or whatever that may be.

Racisms are complex articulations of ideological materials which have concrete histories. They change over time, are re-arranged, re-adapted, disseminated, broadcast, transmitted and inculcated via whole panoplies of material means and mechanisms. This process is a real process and it's always under struggle.

In my opinion the curse of over-abstractness is that it seems to result inevitably in a purely verbal politics. How do anti-racist activists intervene against the X-factor exclusion of the other? There's no evident leverage there. What does one do? Stand outside the factory gates shouting, "You there! Worker! Don't be racist!"?

Real struggles against concrete racisms require material practices such as the development of new media; battles for control of the ISAs; evolution of counter-ideologies; popular mobilizations inside and outside the labor movement; battles over legislation; cultural interventions by artists and other ideological workers; blah blah blah.

Modern anti-Semitism is in my opinion not at all paradigmatic in the sense suggested. Contemporary anti-Semitism is, I think, concretely overdetermined. Much of it is garbled response to Zionism. Maybe it would be better to say, "poorly understood" response to Zionism. A type of anger over injustice which fails to sort it all out; that is, fails to achieve the historical/political analysis necessary to distinguish the leadership from the people, the politics from the religion. In my opinion it's a symptom of the colossal historical failure of the left, whose job is in part to make sense of these things. I don't find it paradigmatic at all, unless what we mean by paradigmatic is that it's the complexly overdetermined result of real struggles, and also that concrete analysis is a more helpful way to think about racism.