Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger’s Newsmagazine | 19.03.2007 22:00

From Mark Conlan: Michael Parenti, Berkeley-based Leftist author and professor, gave several talks on a recent tour of San Diego, inclding one at the Malcolm X Library March 7 on "The Culture Struggle." Parenti analyzed the connection between culture and class in Marxist terms, saying that culture is the way an owning class trains the working class to have the values that will make working people content with their lives and disinclined to challenge the existing ownership and control of the means of production. In his speech, and his similarly titled book, he also scorned "cultural relativism" — saying the idea that people brought up in one culture can't judge those from another has been used to defend social evils like slavery and rape — and also talked about capitalism has increasingly turned culture into a commodity.

From white m@le fed up with White Males: What a surprise to see a white male criticizing the experiences of people of color, women, and queer folk. and also surprise, he's a marxist! congratulations sir, you and your irrelevant ideology are part of the same culture that aims to perpetuate the oppression of people of color, women, and queer folk. of course the experiences of black women (for example) are subordinate to your epistemological claims! because you follow a long tradition of western enlightenment thinking that has hegemonically controlled the discourses of truth for hundreds of years!...

From shine: i am a queer female, and i was not offended by parentis words at all. i don't think he was "critisizing" our experiences as you say. in fact i think they are largely right-on. though i do find a unique solidarity amongst other queers or other womyn (and could understand why blacks would find a unique solidarity with each other or diabled folks would) i ultimately think parenti is right that our focus should be on the ruling class and should be on the ways in which we are all subservients and need to take back power... the fact that marx and parenti were both white males doesn't make their words untrue...

More from white m@le fed up with White Males: ...the idea that all hierarchy can be reduced to simple class functionalism is absurd. which is essentially the problem with marxism as a whole and the focus for the majority of criticism of the ideology by people who are actually interested in eradicating hierarchy. sure, we can all fall into step behind this notion that class is the only thing that matters, but will that topple patriarchy (the mujeres libres ran into this same problem in the spanish civil war)? racism? homophobia? are we really expected to believe that these are only tools utilized by the bourgeoisie to oppress the workers and not completely enculturated patterns of behavior representing hundreds of years of life under oppressive governmental and economic systems?...

From anarchomarxist: ...The slippery slope of identity here reduces to either the individual's own oppression being different from any others' resulting in the assertion of the individual as the main agent of history (the re-assertion of liberalism) or the next step in the critique which is the deconstruction of the individual as anon [white m@le fed up with White Males] suggests. The former brings with it all the problems of liberalism from the enlightenment that Hegel, Marx and many Anarchist theorists sought to problematize, critique and move to something more liberatory (theoretically only in the case of Hegel) that would not only better explain phenomena but lead to a sustaining practice. And the later results in a never ending negation of all postulates that seek to get agency off the ground (the postmodern predicament). Anon [white m@le fed up with White Males] suggests the later is how we should view individuals but fails to acknowledge the theory and practice problems that comport to this mode of discourse...

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Michael Parenti

Michael Parenti Speaks on “The Culture Struggle”

Professor Exposes the Breadth of the Owning Class’s Control


By MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2007 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Michael Parenti, Berkeley-based historian and political scientist, came to San Diego in early March for several speaking engagements including one at the Malcolm X Library March 7 to promote his current book, The Culture Struggle. Despite its title, Parenti explained at the start of his talk, the book isn’t about the so-called “culture wars” — the duels between Right and Left over issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, government funding of art and the like. Rather, Parenti said, “It’s about how to think about culture, especially with regard to gender, class and race.”

Parenti made it clear early on that he was coming from a classically Marxist perspective that sees the conflict between the handful of people in society who own its means of production and the vast majority that support them by their labor as the central issue in any class-divided society. In his lecture and in his book, he used the word “culture” in the Marxist sense, not merely to mean a society’s art or entertainment but the entire complex of beliefs an owning class wants the working class to have about society and their role in it, and the institutions that train people from an early age to think about things the way their rulers want them to think.

“Most establishment literature about culture treats it as neutral,” Parenti said, “but culture is really a highly charged political thing. Cultures are manipulated and anything but neutral. Most of what we call ‘culture’ is formed by the dominant class. A slave society develops a culture that supports it. The ante-bellum South was a slave culture that created a lot of ‘research’ to ‘prove’ that African-Americans were inferior.”

While culture is not an abstraction divorced from the economic realities of the society that produces it, “it seems that way because we pick up so much of our culture subliminally,” Parenti added. In fact, he argued that culture wouldn’t be as effective a means of indoctrination if it weren’t picked up subliminally. “It’s mediated through a social structure, a network of relationships from peers, families, social groups and, increasingly, corporations, schools, media and the military,” he said. “These institutions are regarded as ‘neutral,’ but they’re endowed with specific agendas.”

Parenti conceded that enculturation — the process by which people are conditioned through culture to accept the economic and social order they’re born into as the best of all possible worlds — isn’t perfect. If it were, he noted ruefully in his book, he’d have never been able to write it and no one reading it would have been able to understand it. But he stressed the importance of culture in a class society as the owning class’s and the ruling class’s (which he defined as “the politically active part of the owning class”) primary tool for getting the vast majority of the working class to accept their subservient position as the natural order of things.

“Culture is linked to class power,” Parenti said. “Class is a neglected concept, and when the term ‘class power’ is dismissed as itself ideological, it’s easier to dispose of other inconvenient concepts like ‘class struggle’ and ‘class war.’ A lot of academic research on class exists, but it deals with it simply as a matter of income level. Social scientists and media pundits have perfected the art of looking at class without looking at capitalism. There isn’t any analysis of the most important class, the owning class.”

Parenti cited the heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, as the richest and most influential family in the worldwide capitalist owning class. “They invented and developed nothing,” he said. “They’ve made their money by working people to death. Of the 50 richest people in America, five are Waltons. Their total fortune is $78 to $91 billion. Not only that, but not much is said about their class power, about how this enormous wealth is translated into political power. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and TV won’t talk about class the way I am now. They never talk about social power. They give attention to every class except the owning class, and to every power except corporate power.”

One commonplace Left idea Parenti particularly scorns is the one about how oppression based on race, gender, sexual identity or any other factor can somehow replace class in explaining how an hierarchical society functions. In his speech, he particularly ridiculed the “identity politics” that ruled much of the American Left in the 1970’s and 1980’s, by which people picked up ideological brownie points based on how many oppressed groups they were members of — which led to the joke at the time that the perfect identity-politics Leftist was a blind Native American Lesbian (female, person of color, disabled, Queer). Parenti’s position on identity politics is classically Marxist: racism, sexism and other similar prejudices are important, but mainly as ways the owning class keeps the working class internally divided so groups within the working class fight each other instead of coming together to challenge the owning class.

Another point Parenti made was that culture is increasingly becoming a commodity in its own right, something to be bought and sold in the marketplace rather than created by individuals outside the market economy. “In America and much of the world we’re seeing the death of popular culture and the rise of mass culture,” he explained. “America’s working-class culture couldn’t survive the twin blows of the 1950’s: television and McCarthyism. You still have folk culture in the world, but the very term ‘folk culture’ is an admission that we buy most of our culture today. We don’t sing anymore; we buy CD’s and pay $40 apiece for tickets to sit with 20,000 other people and hear someone else sing. We have high-school kids forming rock bands, but they’re not doing that to create their own culture; they’re looking for a big break in the culture industry. Most culture has become commodified.”

More recent developments in the culture industry both bear out Parenti’s analysis and call for some modification. On one level, the Internet has spawned a revival of amateur culture through sites like MySpace and YouTube — both of which began as entrepreneurial enterprises and were later sold to mega-corporations. Enough ordinary people are creating content for these sites without getting permission from the corporate gatekeepers of the culture industry that the Los Angeles Times, the hometown paper of a significant portion of the American culture industry, keeps running articles about how dangerous this is for the bottom lines of the giant corporations that control our commercial culture and raising the possibility that soon it may no longer be profitable for a media company to spend millions on a new movie or band because much of the young audience is more interested in the do-it-yourself culture they and their peers create.

At the same time, Thomas Frank and other Left-leaning culture critics have noted that the speed and efficiency with which giant corporations co-opt grass-roots culture is increasing. Rap/hip-hop music is a clear-cut recent example of how, within a decade, an alternative “street” form of cultural expression was turned into a corporate product — and for the most part the rappers themselves (unlike the rock ’n’ rollers of a previous generation, who felt a need to pretend that they were still edgy, countercultural, grass-roots artists even while recording for major companies and doing corporate-sponsored tours) have joyously gone along with the process and celebrated the values of capitalism and conspicuous consumption in their songs, videos and personal appearances. Various articles have described an entire new industry devoted to hiring people to trawl the emerging grass-roots culture of young people looking for new popular expressions that can be commodified.

What’s more, though sites like MySpace and YouTube may provide an outlet for grass-roots DIY media content, the very names of the enterprises reveal that they are not generating a “working-class culture” in the sense Parenti meant when he used the term. Rather, the young people who post to those sites are seeking exposure and recognition strictly as individuals, in an era in which the corporate owning class is deliberately seeking to wipe out any vestige of class solidarity. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher summed up this attitude when she famously said, “There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals” — and it’s clear that one of the most important cultural strategies of today’s owning class is to make sure that people see themselves exclusively as individuals, responsible for their own material success or failure.

In The Culture Struggle, Parenti expresses this primarily in a withering chapter on the so-called “New Age” movement, which arose out of the progressive counterculture of the 1960’s but moved defiantly away from any attempt to build class solidarity and challenge the existing political, social or economic order and instead adopted an attitude Parenti calls “hyper-individualism.” As he explains in his book, “Instead of looking critically at the society around us and involving ourselves in activities that might help put the world — and ourselves — on a better road, hyper-individualism invites us to plunge into self-absorption, to find a universe of empowerment entirely within ourselves. It is solipsism writ large.”

As Parenti is well aware, the New Age movement may have carried the cult of individualism to extreme levels, but as a cultural strategy capitalism, especially American capitalism, has always relied on it to persuade people that their economic success or failure is entirely their own responsibility. “Under capitalism, individuated self-reliance is glorified — often by corporate interests that themselves depend on the government for multi-billion dollar subsidies and supports,” he writes. “The myth of rugged individualism features people who pursue their personal gratification free from the needs of others, almost apart from any larger social context. The movies and television dramas produced by the corporate media regularly portray fearless protagonists who single-handedly vanquish evil forces and set things aright, usually with generous applications of violence: individualized culture heroes for an individualized culture.”

Another development Parenti scorns is so-called “cultural relativism,” the belief that individuals raised in one culture can’t judge the rules, laws and mores of a society whose culture is different. While he said that multiculturalism — which he defined as “respect for other cultures” — is positive, he argued that it can be carried to extremes and used to defend highly offensive practices that maintain societies even more stratified and class-bound than our own.

“You can’t say that one culture is never better than another,” Parenti explained. “In Saudi Arabia, they used that argument to defend the stoning of women for adultery. The idea of Black inferiority was a central part of American Southern culture during both slavery and segregation. In Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism and worshiping the military were essential parts of the culture. Most evils can be justified by cultural relativism. We must challenge the repressive features of all cultures, including our own.”

Parenti cited the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948 and signed by over 150 countries, as a set of cultural values he considers absolute. Among these are “life, liberty and security of person,” regardless of race, gender, religion, national or social origin, political beliefs or other status; freedom of speech and assembly, affordable education and equal pay for equal work; freedom from fear or want, slavery or servitude, torture or degrading treatment; a standard of living adequate for the well-being of one’s family and a right to food, clothing, housing, medical care, social services and security. He pointed out that the United States signed on to the parts of the Universal Declaration that guaranteed political and religious rights similar to those in our own constitution but not the guarantees of economic rights, on the ground that they would require an undue level of government interference in the private economy.

“Most of the countries [that signed the Universal Declaration] honor it more in the breach than the observance, but they recognize it as important,” Parenti said. “Regardless of the culture, a starving child is a starving child, a raped woman is a raped woman, and an enslaved worker is an enslaved worker. There are these human experiences that transcend culture.”

e-mail:: mgconlan@earthlink.net
Homepage:: http://zengersmag.blogspot.com/

what a surprise 20.03.2007 07:56 to see a white male criticizing the experiences of people of color, women, and queer folk. and also surprise, he's a marxist! congratulations sir, you and your irrelevant ideology are part of the same culture that aims to perpetuate the oppression of people of color, women, and queer folk. of course the experiences of black women (for example) are subordinate to your epistemological claims! because you follow a long tradition of western enlightenment thinking that has hegemonically controlled the discourses of truth for hundreds of years! relativism shmelativism, the perspective of western white male is universal truth! -white m@le fed up with White Males anon yeah 21.03.2007 03:18 i think many of parentis words are wise--- and i think the analysis are generally right on. as for the "white male" who responded---i am a queer female, and i was not offended by parentis words at all. i don't think he was "critisizing" our experiences as you say. in fact i think they are largely right-on. though i do find a unique solidarity amongst other queers or other womyn (and could understand why blacks would find a unique solidarity with each other or diabled folks would) i ultimately think parenti is right that our focus should be on the ruling class and should be on the ways in which we are all subservients and need to take back power. futhermore, i think he's right on with his general analysis of culture and individualism---down to the interesting recent examples of diy culture and how--despite the fact that they allow more agency for "the people" they do become hyper individualistic. the fact that marx and parenti were both white males doesn't make their words untrue---and if you are to criticize your criticisms are made far more valid by actually looking at the content of what he said-- not just his genitals and color of his skin power to the people, peace, shine shine e-mail:: mollie11@riseup.net content 21.03.2007 08:00 shine, i don't mean to say that the simple fact that he is white and that he is a male discount his theories, as i happen to share those same qualities. what i do mean to say is that i believe his ideas are entirely problematic. aside from the fact that he uses the idea of cultural relativism in an entirely incorrect way (he is arguing against a moral or ethical relativism), or the fact that his analysis of so called diy culture is in fact not at all related to the realities of what radical diy culture actually is (as indymedia sites such as this are perfect examples of), the idea that all hierarchy can be reduced to simple class functionalism is absurd. which is essentially the problem with marxism as a whole and the focus for the majority of criticism of the ideology by people who are actually interested in eradicating hierarchy. sure, we can all fall into step behind this notion that class is the only thing that matters, but will that topple patriarchy (the mujeres libres ran into this same problem in the spanish civil war)? racism? homophobia? are we really expected to believe that these are only tools utilized by the bourgeoisie to oppress the workers and not completely enculturated patterns of behavior representing hundreds of years of life under oppressive governmental and economic systems? the fact that he would explicitly claim that another persons experiences are subordinate to his ideas of where oppression comes from shows exactly how uninterested he is in displacing his own hierarchical status. the idea that the entirety of lived experience on the planet can be reduced to a single identity of "worker" is an idea that has been criticised by feminists and others for years. does a male worker have the same experiences as a female worker? does a white worker have the same experiences as a black worker? clearly, this is not the case. the same thing goes for reducing individuals to a single entity. while the narcissistic individualism that is endemic to (and a creation of) capitalist social relations is an obvious negative influence on how people interact in society, believing that you can remove the individual from social relations is an illusion. society exists because of individuals, not the other way around. an argument for the opposite is an argument in favor of coercive force to the collective "good", ie authoritarian communism. if we want to take back power, class reductionism is not the answer. it's a fantasy to think that overthrowing the ruling class would automatically eliminate all forms of hierarchy, and it's offensive to say that non class based hierarchy is simply less important than class. white m@le fed up with White Males e-mail:: dancethehempenjig@riseup.net Marxistentialist 23.03.2007 20:17 Anon reduces all marxists to a single epistemic position and further, fails to distinguish between what Marx wrote and Marxism. In that anaon attempts to build us a straw man so as to easily knock it down. As unchecked white male as Parenti is, i can site many lectures and writings of his where he points out the independence of various forms of oppression from class oppression. Thus, anon's comments on this point are further misrepresentative of Parenti's position as well as many Marxists. Anon locates Marxism in the western canon as an outgrowth of the enlightenment. Here anon is demonstrating his lack of understanding about conceptual movements in the western canon especially as relates to critiques of and breaking with the enlightenment period of discourse. The oppressions of differing identity groups (which have as many problems in their epistemic definition as anon suggests with class) are (r)eal and class oppression visits itself upon them in unique ways. What white-male-worker, white-female-worker, black-male-worker, black-female-worker, black-female-queer-worker, black-female-queer-disabled-worker and black-female-queer-disabled-unemployed-worker have in common is that they are all in their own way oppressed as workers and objectified and subjugated under the ruling class agenda. The slippery slop of identity here reduces to either the individual's own oppression being different from any others' resulting in the assertion of the individual as the main agent of history (the re-assertion of liberalism) or the next step in the critique which is the deconstruction of the individual as anon suggests. The former brings with it all the problems of liberalism from the enlightenment that Hegel, Marx and many Anarchist theorists sought to problematize, critique and move to something more liberatory (theoretically only in the case of Hegel) that would not only better explain phenomena but lead to a sustaining practice. And the later results in a never ending negation of all postulates that seek to get agency off the ground (the postmodern predicament). Anon suggests the later is how we should view individuals but fails to acknowledge the theory and practice problems that comport to this mode of discourse. Under hegomonic white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, what is needed to preserve agency that is transgressive is a counter hegemony. All other attempts to justify agency or simply link theory and practice in any sustainable way will eventually fail through implosion or co-optation. This above postulate is not based on universal justified (T)rue belief as there is no such thing void of human (subjective) construction; though it is neccessary for liberatory praxis. To the extent that there can be a transgressing counter hegemony to white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy it will be constructed by those willing and will be based on coherent notions of Solidarity. Hopefully, a coherence based on the axioms of libertarian autonomy and critical thinking. What is needed, as Angela Davis says, is the commitment and ability to fight oppression on all fronts. This, in elementary terms, will prevent the ruling class from using actually existing isms as tools to divide and conquer thus perpetuating actually existing isms. Given the above, i find anon's comments to be informed but quite reactionary in concept and tone. A synthesis to the troubles is needed; one of historic, epistemic, and axiological proprtions. The intent of this response was an attempt at making a small contribution to just that..... Love, Peace and Solidarity, Anarcho-Marxist just plain fed-up. P.S. If further discourse on this is sought by those reading, perhaps there can be a meeting organized to discuss some of the history, theory and practice mentioned in the comments to this article.... Contact if interested or post to these comments on SDIMC. X e-mail:: mr.anarchomarxist@gmail.com a call for logic and reason 29.03.2007 03:04 The idea that one must be a member of a certain ethnic group, gender, etc to speak on an issue is absurd. Yet we hear it every day, i.e., the "white man" did this, the "whites" did that, as if the problem is skin color, as if the problem is "whites". Actually the problem isn't whites. The problem has to do with wealth and who is controlling it. The biggest problem we face is capitalism. If you're going to bash people bash the rich. If you're going to bash whites bash the rich whites for it is they who posess most of the wealth and who control the US. Make the distinction between rich and poor. Poor white didn't own slaves. They don't make the racist decisions of this government. Poor whites have no stake in this system. Though many of them are sucked into beleiving they do, it is only out of their ignorance. But actually they are no more ignorant than anyone else who becomes wealthy via capitalism - females, people of color and GBLT included. Rich pigs come in all shapes, sizes and colors. Lets stick to logic and reason in our struggle to free ourselves from the chains of wage slavery. People who bash white males for being white males are either nationalists, fake leftists or liberals. In either case they are reactionary and function as an impediment to our struggle. d. walker Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environm 30.03.2007 09:38 In response to your post on Michael Parenti, Culture, Individualism, Consumerism and Commodification I want to post a part from my article which examines the impact of Speed, Overstimulation, Consumerism and Industrialization on our minds and environment. Please read. [b]The link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues.[/b] The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature. [b]Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment.[/b] Subject : In a fast society slow emotions become extinct. Subject : A thinking mind cannot feel. Subject : Scientific/ Industrial/ Financial thinking destroys the planet. Subject : Environment can never be saved as long as cities exist. Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking. If there are no gaps there is no emotion. Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/ language) for emotion. When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/ industrial/ financial/ fast visuals/ fast words ) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing. There comes a time when there are almost no gaps. People become incapable of experiencing/ tolerating gaps. Emotion ends. Man becomes machine. A society that speeds up mentally experiences every mental slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety. A ( travelling )society that speeds up physically experiences every physical slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety. A society that entertains itself daily experiences every non-entertaining moment as Depression / Anxiety. Fast visuals/ words make slow emotions extinct. Scientific/ Industrial/ Financial thinking destroys emotional circuits. A fast (large) society cannot feel pain / remorse / empathy. A fast (large) society will always be cruel to Animals/ Trees/ Air/ Water/ Land and to Itself. To read the complete article please follow any of these links :  http://www.planetsave.com/ps_mambo/index.php? option=com_simpleboard&Itemid=75&func=view&id=68&catid=6  http://www.ephilosopher.com/bb-topic-244.html  http://www.theholisticwheel.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=324 sushil_yadav sushil yadav e-mail:: sushilydv@yahoo.co.in