re-play

I want to back up, and return to the beginnings of a recent post ("Strange Happenings")--or, rather, the reason why the post came to be.

As I understood him, Robert Paul Wolff had said that there are these complicated social explanations of racism, but he felt them somehow unsatisfying.  He felt an urge to say "they" are just "bigots".

Reading that, I was reminded of a feeling of dissatisfaction I had when I had heard it said that capitalists or bankers or whoever take advantage of people, cheat, lie, etc. because  we live within
a capitalist economic system.
I don't deny that our system is capitalism, nor do I deny that it is unjust--and essentially so.

However, I do feel that there is room for more psychology here--not moral accusation or condemnation.

I never said I want to punish capitalists, but I did say that I find their attempts at self-justifcation insincere and self-serving.  However, as Socrates said, if a man acts ignorantly, then he need education not punishment.

Robert Paul Wolff was having none of that and went off explaining the fundamentals of capitalism and claiming that capitalism is not essentially racist.

I think Robert Paul Wolff was misled.  I think (guess, speculate) that he understood my remark
along the following lines:  since the social scientific or social explanation is unsatisfactory, we need to rely upon folk categories ---such as "bigot" or "greedy".

However, that would be a misreading of what I have said.  First of all, I am not advocating a folk psychological explanation; on the contrary, I am suggesting there is room for a more serious sort of pyschological explanation.

I believe Robert Paul Wolff won't like that either; but I also think it's a significant distinction that he didn't make.

Secondly, even using the word "bigot" doesn't amount to an explanation.  And there are explanations of racism.  As I recall the anthropologist Lawrence Hirschfeld has suggested that young children are very sensitive to racial categories, more sensitive than biology would warrant; however, this is due (if my memory  serves me well) to their sensitivity to power relations in the society.

And I believe that a related remark was made by Jared Diamond in his book on why societies disappear.  Roughly, he claimed there was a correlation between basic resource scarcity and ethnic conflict.

The general direction would be to suggest that insofar as capitalism is unjust, it will exacerbate any tendencies toward racism or ethnic tensions. It may not be, in and of itself, essentially racist; but when you combine the fact that it leads to injustice with the facts about our psychology, you do get the result that it will tend to encourage racism.

Anyway, I do think that Robert Paul Wolff probably misunderstood me, on several levels.

I wonder whether actually existing capitalism (today, not in the past) always occurs in societies with racial or ethnic tensions.  If so, how important is the claim that some pure capitalism would be free of racism?  Would that pure capitalism be a resident of a wholly different possible world? Or would it be an impossible world?--Or, at least  a possible world where the residents had wholly different minds than we do?  If the last, then I would say the distinction between pure capitalism and actually existing capitalism is useless, irrelevant, a piece of philosophical confusion.

Put differently:  capitalism in itself doesn't care who it exploits. It is an equal opportunity exploiter.  But, in a world where racism and inequality exists, what effect will it have upon those existing phenomena?  Those are two different questions.  RPW focuses upon the first, and ignores the second.  (And, if I have misunderstood him, then I shall have to stand corrected.)

After-thought:  Of course, the Marxist point of view is trying to ignore individual psychology on the grounds that it is irrelevant.  But, then I've never said that if an individual capitalist becomes convinced that capitalism is unjust, he by himself could change the system.  I have, however, expressed puzzlement at the thought that he might learn the truth but continue to behave in the same way as prior to his enlightenment.  (And I don't think Robert Paul Wolff anywhere paid serious attention to that claim, but rather was inclined to regard it as trivial or irrelevant--whereas I think it is neither.)