White workers accrue skin privileges in the form of higher wages and salaries, superior health care, access to quality schools and safer neighborhoods, promising job opportunities and promotions, longer life expectancy, and more compared to their brothers and sisters of color. I’m hardly the first one to make this observation in recent years. A legion of commentators have made the same point far better than me. But what goes unmentioned in many instances is the other side of this dialectic. Which is that neither racism nor white skin privileges, which are a product of racism, are an unalloyed blessing for white workers – politically, economically, culturally or morally.

Juneteenth – A Day of Celebration, Remembrance, and Recommitment

Yesterday Susan Collins (R-ME) said: “S. 1 would take away the rights of people in each of the 50 states to determine which election rules work best for their citizens.” But what if states enact discriminatory, anti-democratic legislation that suppresses the vote? Should the federal government and Congress sit idly by, doing nothing to right the wrong? Nothing to protect democracy and voting rights?

Collins, not surprisingly, avoided these questions. Not out of ignorance though. Cynicism doesn’t explain it either. That lets her off the hook too easily. Words like crassly anti-democratic, racist, anti-working class, and demagogic for me anyway, better capture her position and mental makeup.

It goes without saying that the position of rest of her Republican colleagues mirrors hers. And like her, they do this shamelessly, even righteously. So much so that is doesn’t strain the ears to hear echoes of the apologists of slavery in the 1850s and the Southern Redeemers in the 1870s.

Early on I didn’t fully appreciate the full impact of China on the Biden’s administration’s decision to turn away from neoliberalism in favor of a people/labor, climate, egalitarian centered economic policy. If you doubt this, hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, listen to Ezra Klein’s recent interview with Brian Deese, Director of Biden’s National Economic Council.

In 1979, Paul Volcker, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, raised interest rates to nearly 20 per cent. In doing so, he engineered a deep recession to squeeze inflation out of the economy and discipline labor. A year later Ronald Reagan, the newly elected Republican President, complemented Volcker’s actions by slashing government spending, attacking the labor movement, and assailing the movements for equality. Together their actions upended the prevailing model of profit accumulation and political governance – Social Keynesianism – and ushered in a new regime – neoliberalism, unfettered globalization, and financialization – that both parties, in different ways, adjusted their politics to. No less significantly, their actions threw any opposition within and beyond the state on the defensive.

Four decades later that regime of accumulation and governance, thanks to its own economic and political contradictions – none bigger than the Great Recession of 2007 – and a changing terrain of struggle, is hanging by a few threads. Whether 2021 will mark the moment when those threads completely unravel isn’t a certainty, but the sustained actions of the Biden administration and the political coalition that elected him could be the coup de grace to this anti-popular economic and political regime.