WJ WILSON

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (rakesh bhandari)]

This didn't seem to make it to the line; I am sending it again....

For anyone interested, here is a note on the famed underclass expert
William Julius Wilson, now about to join the dream team at Harvard's Dept
of Afro-American studies; Wilson delivered a lecture here at Berkeley on
Thursday and sat on a panel about his work today.

Wilson says the economy is not doing well for most workers; that this gives
rise to a zero sum mentality; that race-based affirmative action, which
only helps select advantaged minorities,  will thus be opposed by the
majority of whites; that while we should support affirmative opportunity
progams especially in education for disadvantaged minority youth, our real
focus should be full-employment and progressive social policy.  I think it
is safe to say that Wilson has not had a truly new idea since the
*Declining Significance of Race* more than 15 years ago.

In the most disturbing moment of his lecture, Wilson confessed to a  faith
in the possibility of the emergence of a "charismatic leader" who will be
able to unite the races in favor of progressive, race-neutral macroeconomic
policy. In short, he does not see historical change as effected by the
initiative of people themselves.

He most certainly is not clear as to what the real possibilities of full
employment policy are and to the sorts of resistance which  such policy
meets today.  Moreover, he does not prove that the only Keynesian path to
full employment may be the indirect means of lowering the real wage through
inflation.  He does not explicitly rule out such a solution to
unemployment.   He does not consider all the barriers to radical Keynesian
policy today (including of course the deep structural ones anticipated by
Mattick 30 years ago in Marx and Keynes: the limits of the mixed economy)
and thus retains an intellectually unjustified faith in the possibility of
capitalist reform. Of course, the idea that both parties will attempt to
reduce unemployment in the offical labor market through ever more massive
incarcerations is totally foreign to him. Here he maintains a strategic
blindness, one could say.

 Wilson is able to list several public sector jobs which people could do as
if the absence of such a list is the underlying problem. Thus he simply
does not consider the sorts of opposition such a policy would encounter.

In my opinion despite his clear social democratic preference for
progressive macroeconomic policy (though he was a supporter of NAFTA on the
advice of James Tobin), the real significance of his work remains in his
argument that an attentuation of race-based demands is essential to create
the multiethnic unity necessary to press for progressive macroeconomic
policy. Insofar as he may actually be implying (and Wilson is nothing if
not slippery) that the reason for the absence of such policy is the
divisiveness engendered by the politics of anti-racism, I think he tends to
exonerate capitalism for a totally exaggerated attack on race-conscious,
petty bourgeois minority militants.

 Moreover, since Wilson provides simply NO theory or substantial evidence
of the diminishing role of on-going racism in various markets and facets of
social life, I see no reason to agree with him that it is tolerable to
water down affirmative action to what he is calling affirmative
opportunity.  If deep-seated discrimination remains a feature of our
society, I see no reason not to fight it explicitly and programmatically.
There of course may be real limits to the sorts of programs now in place,
and this needs to be talked about.

At any rate, as one commentator pointed out today, 20,000 qualified white
(and Asian) kids are turned down from Berkeley every year; to think that
the 700 affirmative action slots (native Americans, Chicanos,
African-Americans) is responsible for this situation is absurd.  But
California voters are already sidetracked into this California Civil Rights
Initiative, not the fight against prison expansion, the contraction of
public eduction for all and ultimately the run-away of techno-capitalism.

Rakesh Bhandari




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