Johnetta Cole on Intimate Politics
By shag carpet bomb • Apr 8th, 2009 • Category: Black Feminist Thought, Feminist Fight Club, Identity Politics, Marxist Theory, Social movements, Women of Color Feminismat work, I’ve been listening to Angela Davis — just search on youtube and listen to them all. It’s all you need to understand what is going on, and how to address so many of the issues that come up repeatedly within leftist and feminist circles.
Seriously.
Meanwhile, a “related video” alert brought me to this talk around Bettina Aptheker’s book, Intimate Politics. (Wikipedia gives basics to understanding who she is, especially in terms of the Marxist Anti-Racist Leftist star system).
Another must hear and see is Johnetta Cole’s discussion of how the book illustrated the lessons she, too, has learned engaged in communities of struggle, especially on the issue of “intersectionality” and whether or not oppressed groups can be oppressors (she says yes) and also to the issue of *why* it hurts so much when someone from an oppressed group participates in the structures of oppression. Johnetta Cole says, in her words, it is because “there is such an act of betrayal involved.”
I thought this was an excellent way of saying what I’d been trying to say with regard to Prop 8 in the 2008 election. There was a lot of crap floating around about how everyone who was outraged was acting out of racism: they expected black people to be more hip to issues of social oppression and, thus, could be counted on to “do the right thing.”
Some of that was going on, but not all of it. In particular, there was a post from piny at Feministe that I read back in December that really burned my ass. Piny left no room for the possibility that it wasn’t racism involved per se but rather this very sense of ‘betrayal’ Johnetta Cole describes, a sense of betrayal any member of an oppressed social group can feel toward any other member of an oppressed group. The reason why people feel so outraged, so hurt, when a member of an oppressed group engages in upholding a system of oppression toward another group is, Cole says, because they cleave to “the idealized hope that there is a form of solidarity among all who are oppressed.”
That isn’t racism. That is a function of a victimized identity politics as it runs through *all* identity political movements and communities of struggle. Our very language of identity politics fosters this “idealized hope” that there is a form of solidarity among all who are oppressed. That in the very identity, oppressed, there is something different from the privileged that makes it possible to think from and act from a different perspective that has more natural access to question the status quo.
My argument here was that the reason people feel betrayed is that our very understanding of identity politics contains the mechanisms that create this sense of betrayal.
This sense of betrayal is expressed repeatedly by women of color bloggers who are outraged that white women don’t get it. How can you think or say that, they argue (not without good reason), when your own oppression and responses to your criticisms are met with the same tactics you are now using on us. Donna at Silence of Our Friends has written a couple of interesting posts about this.
The issue isn’t about an expectation that a racial group or gender group or whatever as automagically more inclined to take certain political positions. It is, rather, the feeling of betrayal, and, as Cole points out, the undercurrent that slips through all forms of victimized identity politics: “the idealized hope that there is a form of solidarity among all who are oppressed.”
This comes directly from an identity politics that locates radicality in an identity, in a social location within a system of oppression — in an identity politics that insists that, somehow, the most oppressed group holds the keys to not only understanding and theorizing oppression, but has special access to knowledges that make them more radical than any other group *and* that will lead them to, as the Combahee River Collective put it, “make a revolutionary leap” and engage in the struggles to tear down these interlocking systems of oppression.
this is precisely *why* the language of centering gets used: the idea is that, for example, women of color must be centered because they have access to these knowledges about oppression and what to do about it, in a way that someone from a privileged group does not have.
That notion runs through *all* forms of identity political struggle and it is something that we have to exorcise from our thinking through engaged self- and social-criticism of our own premises.
As I mentioned a bit ago, I saw in the work of Brownfemipower and nubian, the possibility that they’d engaged in such critique of the limits of identity political powerlessness. And they had. Unfortunately, identity political powerlessnes is (snerk) powerful stuff!
You can hear Johnetta Cole speak to these ideas here, at 11:47
Intimate politics exposes a point that I know from my own experiences and my own observation of these social movements. It is this: there are no perfect ones. All movements for social justice suffer from flaws, some of which are deeper than others. I also learned this powerful lesson that is front and center in intimate politics. Here is the lesson: that being a victim of one form of oppression does not, unfortunately, immune one from oppressing others.
Yes, black folks can and do practice heterosexism. More I assure you than some white women can and do practice racism. Some Gay white men can and do practice sexism.
It seems to me that the reason that an oppressed person is so deeply hurt when he or she is victimized by someone from another oppressed community is because there is such an act of betrayal involved. A betrayal of the victimized’s own experience with being a victim. And, there is a betrayal of the idealized hope that there is a form of solidarity among all who are oppressed.
In intimate politics I too came to see, yet again, how I too have some forms of power and privilege. And I am reminded of my responsibility to deal with each of them. While I know the bitter stings of racism and of sexism, I must also deal with my own power and privilege as a
heterosexual. As an able bodied person. As someone who is upper middle class. And someone who is of the Christian faith.
the post where piny refused to consider that the problem is actually rooted in the very *way* identity political struggles frame themselves as having special access to knowledges by virtue of their oppression, by virtue of their location within this system of interlocking oppressions, is what leads to this oppression, which Johnetta Cole speaks about above.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/11/09/equality-for-all/#more-9545
Also, I thought Cole spoke very clearly to the issue as it emerged at Womanist Musings recently. Renee tries to use the outdated “racism = prejudice + power” framework to grasp the issues, but is met with silly objections from people who say, “but wait! I know people in Japan who are racist toward blacks. So how can people of color not be racist.”
Unfortunately, without a more radical woman of color analysis like that brownfemipower and nubian often put forth, martin’s more mainstream critique — mainstream because it lacks a structural analysis of power — ultimately fails because the focus is constantly turned on individuals, rather than the operations and mechanisms of power.
Speaking of, if you’ve never seen these, they are absolutely must sees for quick hits as to what feminism is from a socialist feminist woman of color perspective. bell hooks so wonderfully says, “look, people of color *are* white supremacists.”
By saying this she can address and forestall the stupid criticisms.
She does so when she says that people of color can uphold white supremacy — and this is because she doesn’t think that white supremacy is located in and only in white people *as* white people. It’s not an attribute of individuals. Rather, white supremacy operates structurally and invades the thought of all of us who are instrument-effects of that oppressive social system. All of us.
These video clips are, by the way, condensed versions of the books and essays she’s written. I can’t find the exact video, but here’s a link to part 1 in the series. Just keep clicking on the rest of the parts as served up in the related videos feature.
Chuckie is busy enjoying his fine self on vacation, but when he comes back, I have to say that this is where Postone is utterly at his finest: on hammering home, incessantly, why traditional marxism fails to locate this system and, instead, locates the problem in some transhistorical notion of political struggle.
And I have to laff, Chuckie, as we flesh out these ideas on LBO. True to form, Charles, Communist Party USA, is insisting on making class exploitation the obvious, purposeful work of a the capitalist class that (I should say ‘who’ given the way he uses the term) knows exactly what it (they) are doing. So, at least in the US of A, there is a there there that Postone has set out to criticize: the anthropomorphism of class I’ll call it, for lack of a better term.
And I agree with Postone on that score. But more on all that when I get off my lazy ass and start posting about what I’m reading in Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination.
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Thanks for this - it’s a very interesting thought piece. I find that there’s a really fundamental inability of so many to express intersectionality in structural terms — instead of understanding how structures of oppression interact with one another, it often comes down to kind of a tallying. You have 3 oppressions, I have 4, therefore I am more oppressed and more able to speak to oppression writ large. It can become a way to play the oppression olympics with infinitely more complicated math.
I’m going to have to mull this over a lot more. One thing, though - I don’t think you can directly compare women of color feminists’ complaints about white feminists with LGBTQ people complaints about African Americans voting in CA, simply because there is an important distinction between a political identity (feminist) and a personal identity (African American, queer, woman, what have you). I haven’t thought out specifically why I think that distinction is important, but I think it complicates part of your argument above.
Also, have you thought about re-engaging with the blog world? Probably a touchy subject, but I love reading your work and think it could add a lot to some conversations that are currently swirling around.
skavs –
you are definitely right about the difference between a political identity and a personal identity. i struggle with this. iow, when women of color feminists are angry with white feminists, they are speaking as people who’ve developed a politicized understanding of the world. and they are speaking to people who they feel have a similarly politicized understanding of the world.
so, yes, when politicized lgbtq folks got pissed about the prop 8 vote it isn’t exactly the same thing. the people who voted that way on prop 8 — no one really knows the state of their politicized identity.
but here’s where johnetta cole helps contribute to what happened — and her own words reproduce the almost inevitability of that sense of betrayal: in her words, she locates the hurt as when one member of an oppressed group feels betrayed by a member of another oppressed group. just by their very social location, she says, people can feel that betrayal. the emphasis on identities formed through political struggle drops out of the picture. it has to. because if it doesn’t, you have to question the very assumptions that found a victimized identity politics as such.
i mean, not to pick on her, but consider the way brownfemipower, lately, constantly uses women of color community and love and so forth without constantly problematizing those expressions. Recently, in a post about the firestorm that broke out between Renee Martin and Black Amazon, she constantly evoked a notion of women of color as naturally sharing a social location and, thus, a certain politics — an entire being in the world, in fact. She said something about how women of color go for the knives when they get in a debate — *because* of the nature of their oppression. And, as such, that oppression is what causes them to get so vicious with each other.
I was nodding along thinking, Omigod yes! But then, I thought about my own life and the viciousness I’ve seen white men attack other white men. I have seen people try to get other people fired! I’ve seen these arguments come to blows. I have seen people spread vicious rumors and lies about one another. And all over disputes that can seem arcane and abstract, but can also seem very very intimate and personal.
It can’t be about the nature of the oppression people of color suffer. not by itself. not in such an uncomplicated way.
but also the rhetoric in that post, an attempt to heal and keep a community together by evoking its politicized nature at the same time that politicized nature is concealed. Women of color are upheld as having the special bond of fierce love. This is solidarity building for sure, It is political even as it tries to shed how intractably political the claim is.
What happens when someone says that politics is about love or community or whatever and someone ostensibly from that very community, who identifies both personally (as identity) and politically (as identity), what happens when she shows up and says, “I don’t agree. Your words, love, solidarity, community, etc. harm me and leave me out. I don’t want to love you.” (I’m referring to firefly’s interventions at brownfemipower’s blog, as well as A woman’s Echydysis blog.
_Even_ the politicized identity is not enough.
And then I want to think about the problem of making that sharp dichotomy to begin with. It’s like Butler’s arguments about sex/gender. What function does biological sex play as socially constituted floor or limit, a place beyond which the socially constituted character of the world cannot continue to devolve in its endlessly, socially constructed way?
Isn’t a “personal” identity as, say, black always already a political identity.
Of course, the creation of identities is, in the first place, political. It’s about power — generative and repressive. So what function does it perform to want to — and I am saying that i want to with you, it pulls, it appeals, it seduces — place a limit, a floor beyond which the endlessly, politically, socially constructed character of identity cannot move beyond.
Why do we want to posit an identity that isn’t political - but personal (I am black. I am gay. I am Latina. I am disabled.) . It depoliticizes the way that identity was constituted in the first place. It wants to make it natural in a bizarre way. It wants to make identity somehow pre-political.
And we know we don’t mean that at all! But why are we so comforted by that dichotomy?
And if we skip all that and just say, but what we are talking about (say in the Burqa wars) is that it’s not just that “any old brown women will do”. IOW, it’s not just that I can find a woman from Pakistan and a woman from Afghanistan to tell me that she thinks your arguments about Burqas and Amanda Marcotte are ridiculous. So shut up and stop saying that you speak for women of color. You don’t. Because I have two brown women here who disagree with you and don’ think you speak for them. nyeh nyeh.
The answer to that is to say, “NO, we’re not just talking about personal identity, but about *political* identity. We’re talking about women who are “brown women” because they are mobilized, share a political identity in that political mobilizaton and movement, because we are struggling against oppression.”
That seems satisifying. I’ve said it myself in other contexts, when trying to argue with (mostly) white men about women of color feminism. :)
But what happens when it turns out that the politics are not so uncomplicated: the recent debate over radical media and accomodationist media brownfemipower had with renee and latoya? the argument about big girl panties? the long ago debate between bfp and darkdaughta? the examples are legion.
Brownfemipower tried to engage in reconciliation recently by naturalizing those extremely complicated and very political differences: by engaging in a demand for convergence in shared identity of woman of color oppression that, as janet halley points out, becomes a normalizing demand: to be one of us, we must make our differences converge into an overarching framework that explains what is going on. by locating our solidarity in our shared politics of resistance to oppression. to be woman of color is to be part of a radical community of women of color who’s very differences are contained within the identity: women of color.
it is a normalizing demand. I’m thinking here of Wendy Brown when she writes:
Sorry to babble on. This issue has been percolating for awhile. I had wanted to write part 2 of my post on brownfemipower’s political theorizing and practice, to talk about the ways in which she actually speaks to a different kind of politics, one that Brown thinks can overcome the problem of a victimized identity politics.
But then I had to stop because I realized that i would also have to speak to the tensions noted above.
about getting back into blogging, well, it’s just not a possibility. because one of the reasons why i started feeling that blogging wasn’t political was when i realized that it doesn’t contribute to community. it can, of course, but what it tends to do is create isolated individuals. the only way to overcome that is to consciously refuse to be a blogger who posts, waits for comments, and then engages those comments. that’s not community building in my book. as i said in another post, and i was completely serious: community building would require you spend just as much time engaging people at *their* blogs.
so, whatever it is, this blog isn’t political. it isn’t something i consider a political project.
i want my political energy being spent on building something, with others. that isn’t an option with this thing called blogging. i think the only example of something that comes close is brownfemipower’s and jessica’s rethinking walking series. they are trying to build something, together. they aren’t expecting that the only thing that mediates their relationship to one another is discussion. there’s a third term between them: the project.
one of the reasons i think things go to shit in bloglandia is because of that: there is nothing mediating people’s discursive relationships to one another. they share nothing that they create, together. they do not engage in collaborative projects that require that they negotiate with each other in order to create something. raising money for a cuase by writing posts or sticking bling in your sidebar isn’t creating anything in the way i mean. raising awareness by writing is fine, but it’s still pitting discourse against discourse, pushing up discourse alonside other discourse, rubbing each other’s discourse — the discursive i in touch with every other discursive i. my words and your words, together. creating more words.
all that discoursing, an acquaintance once observed, tends to heighten the … something. i can’t remember her words, exactly. but she was saying that … well, fucket. i looked up the exact quote:
the problem with pursuing zizek into censorious mode (censoring the charge itself in the abstract) is, as kelley says, that it regards racism and sexism as existing entirely within the realm of speech acts. but, speech acts is all we do here on the list, which has the effect of making racism and sexism, as well as a discussion of them, more pronounced and more troubling.
i am not sure i understand why speech acts and discoursin’ makes disucussions and charges of racism/sexism/ablism/heterosexism/etc more pronounced and troubling. but it sure feels that this is what is going on when all we have between us is discourse trouble.
we need to get something between us.
also, *blushing* thanks for your comments and for pushing me to clarify and think — even if that’s a horrible ramble. :)
I’m back. I’ve got a payroll to do. So I haven’t even read the posts carefully. My question remains, what is ‘traditional’ Marxism. Postone’s bib has a few social-Democrats (Kautsky, Hilferding), a bunch of Frankfurt Schoolers. But otherwise it’s very hard to tell who he’s talking about. Now I confess, I have my suspicions, but since he doesn’t name names, he’s making it mighty easy on himself.
More pertinent here, ‘oppression’ seems like a bogus overgeneralization, doesn’t it? Just as ‘exploitation’ breaks down into a whole lot of concrete processes, ‘oppression’ does too. Without first recognizing and analyzing the manifold mechanisms, it would be pretty hard to posit a ’system’ that incorporates them all.
oh, i didn’t realize you were uncertain who ‘traditional marxists’ are. he’s basically saying that almost all variants of marxist thought engage in a traditional marxist perspective. there’s a lot of stuff going on as to what that means, but primarily he’s arguing that there’s a difference that emerges with capitalism: the move from a class domination that operates through direct domination of one class by another to a society where those relations of domination become diffuse, spread throughout society as a set of impersonal demands.
I’ll probably retrieve this and place it in a sep post, for now:
This will have to come in parts, I think, but I pointed to what Heartfield said about the use of direct coercion v. the indirect compulsion of the market. I think Carrol is referring to that, and to Postone development of this distinction in a chapter called ‘Abstract Labor’ in a section called ‘Abstract labor and alienation’.
Postone’s argument is that capitalism is a new development. By that he means that, in earlier forms of social domination, the compulsion is a function of direct, personalized, concrete forms of domination. He opens by saying this:
“Proceeding from the category of the commodity and the initial determination of labor as a social mediation, Marx then develops further determinations of the capitalist totality by unfolding the categories of money and capital.”
This social mediation, though, is not one in which individuals are located in relation to one another. Rather, this social mediation is unlike earlier forms because it takes on a “life of its own.” As such, it is completely independent of the “individuals it mediates. It develops into a sort of objective system over and against the individuals, and it increasingly determines the goals and means of human activity.” (p 158)
And this is where I think it’s interesting, if only because I’ve been arguing with Carrol about this for years, and now he’s starting to get it! :) Postone says next, “Marx’s critical theory…entails a complex analysis of the reciprocal constitution of system and action in capitalist society which does not posit the transhistorical existence of that very opposition — between system and action — but grounds it and each of its terms in the determinate forms of modern social life.”
So, you see, Postone is not at all interested in developing a conception of absolute totalizing structure where individual action accounts for nothing. But moving on, about the totality, which is new, he writes,
“this form of domination is not grounded in any person, class or institution;”
I’ll stop there, to let it sink in. His position here is taking a side in the basic arguments we have repeatedly on this list. I’ll try to, as Jenny wrote recently, run some examples through my claim as we go along, but for now, I want to look at what else Postone says:
(so this domination is impersonal, abstract, objective; it is not grounded *IN* a person, class, or institution; rather,):
“its ultimate locus is the pervasive structuring of social forms of capitalist society that are constituted by determinate forms of social practice.[1] Society as the quasi-independent, abstract, universal Other that stands opposed to the individuals and exerts an impersonal compulsion on them, is constituted as an alienated structure by the **double character of labor in capitalism.** (my emph) The category of value, as the basic category of capitalist relations of production, is also the initial determination of alienated social structures. Capitalist social relations and alienated structures are identical.”[2]
OK. now here he also says something that piqued my interest as it, again, speaks directly to pervasive arguments on this list. in this case, the argument about whether objectification of one’s body/mind/whatever is something we should encourage people to do in spheres of society where we are usually not supposed to. Bluntly, the sex worker wars! ha ha! :) Obviously, Postone is not running his claim through this example, but I think it speaks directly to it when he writes:
“It is well known that, in his early writings, Marx maintains that labor objectifying itself in products need not be alienating, and criticizes Hegel for not having distinguished between alienation and objectification.”
But this depends on how you understand labor — how you conceive of the relatonship between alienation and objectification — says Postone.
“If,” Postone insists, “one proceeds from a **transhistorical notion of ‘labor,’** (my emph) the difference between objectification and alienation necessarily must be grounded in factors *extrinsic*(P’s emph) to the objectifying activity — for example, in property relations, that is, in whether the immediate produces are able to dispose of their own labor and its products, or whether the capitalist class appropriates them.”
But, but, but… Postone rejects this approach — because he rejects any notion of a transhistorical notion of labor. Thus, he continues:
“Such a notion of alienated labor does not adequately grasp the sort of socially constituted abstract necessity” peculiar to capitalism. To illustrate he writes, “In Marx’s later writings…alienation is rooted in the double character of commodity-determined labor, and as such, is *intrinsic* (his emph) to the character of that labor itself. Its function as a socially mediating activity is externalizes as an independent, abstract social sphere that exerts a form of impersonal compulsion on the people who constitute it. **Labor in capitalism gives rise to a social structure that dominates it. This form of self-generated reflexive domination is alienation.”
“Such an analysis… implies another understanding of the difference between objectification and alienation. The difference…is not a function of what occurs to concrete labor and its products; rather, his analysis shows that *objection is indeed alienation — if what labor objectifies are social relations.* (his emph) This identity, however, is historically determinate; it is a function of the specific nature of labor in capitalism. Hence, the possibility exists that it could be overcome.”
I will skip over some more and maybe come back to it later, because I will leave you with the money shot:
“The abstract domination and the exploitation of labor characteristic of capitalism are grounded, not in the appropriation of the surplus by the nonlaboring classes, but in the form of labor in capitalism” (p 161)
[1] in his footnote for this sentence, he says that this is the opposite of what Foucault is up to in _Discipline and Punish_
[2] he tells you to go read Bertell Ollman on alienation, esp pp 157, 176 :)
_Do you think his characterization of Foucault in_ D&P_ is correct? (Didn’t Foucault take care to parse out power and domination from each other?)
“not in the appropriation of the surplus by the nonlaboring classes, but in the form of labor in capitalism” - is there a difference between the two?
yes.
heh.
thinking that there isn’t a difference is the gist of traditional marxism. the reason why i even showed up here to notice comments in the queue was that i was going to write some about postone where he finally fleshes out his claim a little bit more.
i’ll explain more in a post. i hope.
no, not at all. but it was just a footnote and there’s enough in the main text to try to parse and, perhaps, take issue with, that i’d rather read himon Foucault directly to see if he gets it right.
one of the reasons why i threw the footnote in was that i originally typed that to a debate held at the lbo-talk discussion list. we were in the midst of a debate over foucault, against people who mischaracterize foucault as postone seems to here. so i couldn’t resist taking a little jab. heh.
btw, Chuckie, i totally loved the guided tour of YOUR tour! it was so fun to click all those links and read up on where you’d been and what you’d seen. what a vicarious blast!
Now there is a difference in the appropriation of surplus between capitalism and feudalism. But IN capitalism, the form of labor is the appropriation of surplus by the ‘non-laboring’ classes. Judging by his bib, I bet Postone does not name ONE ostensible Marxist who says otherwise.
“gives rise to a social structure” - this is heart of Postone’s determinism. Does the book include his claim the ‘anti-Semitism’ is similarly ‘given rise to’ by capitalism. The man ignores history and human beings.
god dayum. i wish i liked reading postone. but he sucks. sucks giant green puss oozing donkey dong. i mean, here’s this book. at the speed i read, i should have read it five times over by now. i got a new book tuesday and i’m 70 pages into it, and that’s just putting in a few hours, max. (i was reading somewhere about how people like me who read a lot read in massive interpretive chunks…. which is why we read so fast. we don’t read each word, but whole sentences and ‘graphs.)
i’m just not motivated to sit down with this book and pick it apart like i did with janet halley’s book, a much much much more engaging book.
by the way, currently reading Dan Berger’s _Outlaws of America_ which is about the Weather Underground. It’s pretty good, and filling me in on a lot of white radical movement history with which I was unaware. it is too fucking bad we, as activists/intellectuals, didn’t read a lot more of this history. we’d realize: we’re reinventing the wheel way more than we need to.
xo
On Postone, I’m feel validated now that you find him as impossible to read as I do. As I confessed before, I actually enjoy hypertheory as a kind of art form. But Postone is just indigestible. A couple of weeks ago I got a little German pamphlet subtitled “an introductory critique of ‘circulation-Marxism.’ Postone is one of the targets, although far from the most important. There are in fact three influential contemporary German Marx interpretations that share fundamental assumptions with Postone. Like Postone, a number of these writers are associated with or strongly influenced by the Frankfurt School. The critique of this approach labels it ‘circulation’ Marxism because it focuses almost exclusively on the first chapters of the first volume of Capital and claims that in those chapters on the commodity, value, circulation and the fetish Marx defined the categories from which his critique of capitalism and the rest of “Capital” follow in some deductive sense. I agree with the authors of the critique that in fact the exposition of the process of production in vol. II and the integration of production and circulation in vol. III serve to expose the delusory, ideological nature of the categories in those opening chapters. The categorical-deductive approach amounts to ‘ultraobjectivism’ based on “cognition from the pure concept,” in contrast to “an analysis of tendencies in concrete social developments.” Interestingly when I googled up the authors of this pamphlet, which is most pronouncedly ‘traditional’ in its theoretical stance, it turns out they are associated with two publications and circles oriented to Italian Operaismo, or Autonomism as its usually known in English, that is Negri and friends before Negri went around the po-mo bend. One circle, around the magazine Wildcat sustains the autonomist emphasis on shop-floor activity as the focus of political organizing and analyzes crises in capitalism as first and foremost the outcome of class struggles. The online journal Grundrisse primarily publishes theory, but with a persistent focus on gender that is unique in the German-speaking left. When writers from this very non-traditional milieu take such a traditional stance vis-à-vis Postone, you have to listen. I suppose I should actually read, relate, translate some of their materials.