>>406029>The superstructure – which includes ideas – is created from material conditions in society (racism happened because of slavery) but doesn't the superstructure also shape and maintain the base?Yes, hence "using ideology to manage and smooth out that process." Ideology is useful to the shaping of society but it's not the first cause of it. This was one of if not
the key insight of Marx. Most people historically and today think that big people and big ideas are what makes history, as opposed to social systems that work in the real physical world and reproduce themselves as physical processes. Ideology is just an extension of that. Superstructure isn't just ideas btw, it's basically everything outside the core of the economic engine which in capitalism is commodity production. The factory is part of the base, but the labor laws, the cops, and so on are superstructure.
>So it's not enough to simply rearrange the base. Wouldn't that be "economism?" There is a political battle in the superstructure going on too.The issue at hand isn't which domain the battle takes place in (it's both), but that the consciousness liberals are working with doesn't grasp that there is a material base at all. And correcting false consciousness is part of the political battle in the superstructure.
>To eliminate slavery, it was necessary to destroy a whole political superstructure that maintained it as well, although it was material reasons too why that happened – the Union was more materially productive, they had more guns, they had more money, more railroads and all that good stuff too.Yes.
>There's also cultural hegemony, right? Capitalist and bourgeois values prevail for material reasons at the root: the liberal media is really powerful and there's lot of money behind it. If we want to look at media critically, we have to look at who is funding it and so on. Or there is some glow media that is funded by foundations with CIA money, that is going to shape the dominant ideas of society.Yes.
>But you have also challenge the ideas, don't you?Yes, which is what the critique of the liberal ideology is for.
>You need to build a material foundation to do that. You need to challenge racist ideas because those do help maintain the base, doesn't it?Yes, and this includes the liberal ideas that feed into racism.
>About "white privilege." I'm a white man in America. And it's very obvious that I am, if you saw me walking down the street. And I have to think that this fact – that I am perceived as a white man – shapes my interactions with society's institutions.It does. The problem with "white privilege" is not that it's technically incorrect. The problem is that the framing is wrong.
>Like… the police. Isn't that like what Althusser was referring to when he came up "interpellation?" People are "hailed" by institutions, like the police shouting "hey, you!" Or other institutions like right-wing media (funded by big business) says "hey, white man, you're under threat from blacks/immigrants/uppity women!" or whatever you want. Some of these interactions are one-sided and involuntary (i.e. the police), some of these interactions are multi-sided, or like a conversation. Or some are not necessarily involuntary but they are one-sided (media talking *to* you), but cultural hegemony gives the media's "hailing" of people a lot of reach in society. And white men in America are shaped by these "hails" from various institutions addressing them, and one result is that many white men have been "interpellated" in ways not necessarily positive for others.The problem with this framing is that everyone is being "interpellated" and when black people are "interpellated" and filled with bullets that isn't
about white people. It's about black people and their relationship to class society. There are exceptions but most of "white privilege" is looking at active, heightened oppression and violence toward nonwhite people and centering the topic on white people instead
and given that it's mostly done by white people it's a form of self-congratulatory narcissism. This is doing a couple of important things. It's framing nonwhite people as the default/baseline above which white people are elevated by privilege. It's also defining oppression as a benefit to anybody who isn't being oppressed that way. The problem with the first part is that in a white supremacist culture white is of course the default and people who aren't white are comparatively worse off not (primarily) because being white is rewarded but because not being white is punished. This is how normativity works most of the time - being normal is allowed an ignored while being different is met with "corrective" punishment. It's only by a sort of utilitarian framing of reward and punishment as opposite equivalents that the logic of "violence against black people is white privilege" is even possible. Which brings me to the second thing. White people don't benefit from nonwhite people being victimized. Not in absolute terms. The white man who benefits from a black man getting shot by the police is that cop getting paid time off. The majority of the inequalities around race are purely examples of life being made shittier for nonwhite people. This """benefits""" white people in
relative terms, i.e. when you frame the situations as related to each other. White people only "have it better because black people have it worse" when you define "have it better" in relation to other people (who have it worse) instead of in relation to your own conditions and the alternative possibilities, such as how good/bad you have it in the real world today vs how things would be for you in an alternative present/future without white supremacy. The truth is that everyone has it better (than they themselves otherwise would) when their position is improved. It's the same kind of logic as "there are children starving in Africa so don't complain about your problems." The fact that somebody has worse problems doesn't mean your problems don't exist, or in the extreme version we're dealing with here that the "real" problem is that the better off people
don't have those worse problems. It's a very clever trick being pulled on people.
And funnily enough, oppressing nonwhite people causes a lot of social problems, from crime to depressed wages and in fact if this were to change and nonwhite people had it as good as white people do, white people would be better off than they used to be. If you no longer have a designated underclass being paid shit wages, it's easier to do collective bargaining because you can't be fired and replaced with cheaper labor, and the minimum level of pay has increased. If there's less poverty and crime, you are safer. This applies to everybody, including white people. Even in the short term oppressing nonwhite people and making their lives shittier makes society worse for everybody, so fixing that means that (putting revolution etc aside) white people stand to gain in the short term.