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A Marxist critique of the theory of 'white privilege'

Cohn, Candace
http://redflag.org.au/node/7254

Publisher:  Red Flag
Date Written:  04/07/2020
Year Published:  2020   First Published:  2015
Resource Type:  Article

Candace Cohn outlines the origins and problems of privilege theory. She aruges that In holding white workers co-responsible for systemic racism, the privilege model attributed a power to white workers they manifestly do not have: control over the institutions of American capitalism – schools, jobs, housing, factories, banks, police, courts, prisons, legislatures, media, elections, universities, armed services, hospitals, sports, political parties – all of which function in a racist manner. These institutions are owned and controlled by the capitalist class.

Abstract: 
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Excerpts:

The term “privileges” was used to describe measures, such as relatively decent schools and medical care, to which whites received greater access. The problem with this conception is that these measures, rather than representing undeserved “privileges”, were in fact reforms won by the working class through bitter struggle. These class gains represented the return of a small part of the great wealth held by capitalists that workers had produced. Privilege theory – on the basis of unequal access to these gains under racist American capitalism – converted hard-won class victories, reforms and rights into “undeserved” workers’ “privileges”.

The privilege model, moreover, was producing radicals who tried to convince American workers that they were getting more than their fair share, and that they should give up their already inadequate lifestyles, possessions and class gains. It was manna from heaven for the ruling class.

...

As an ideological weapon, privilege theory reflected RYM’s middle-class student composition, its isolation from the class struggle, and its Stalinist-Maoist worldview – including alienation from, and elitist distrust of, the working class. RYM rejected the need for American workers to organise around their own needs and their own oppression. It viewed the primary struggle in the world, to which all other struggles must be subordinated, as that between the revolutionary Third World and US imperialism. RYM saw American workers as little more than potential cheerleaders for Third World liberation struggles, cheerleaders who must renounce their imperialist privileges – that is, their wages, benefits and possessions.
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In the midst of the great multiracial working-class revolt of the 1960s and 1970s, the Stalinist-Maoist ideas on privilege patently offered a poor guide to labour action. The theory’s strategic focus was on points of division among workers, the pitting of workers against one another in competition for “privileges”, and the programmatic prescription for worker renunciation and self-dispossession – all of which made it impossible for any of the Maoist sects, despite their relatively large numbers, to develop working-class roots in the rank-and-file labour upsurge. In addition, the opposition of privilege proponents to American workers fighting for their own class interests contributed to maintaining the country’s status quo, with its racism.

Other contradictions pervaded RYM’s privilege analysis. RYM argued that the same workers who should not, in its vision, fight against their own oppression should, and would, fight against the oppression of others – a utopian view of the class struggle based on moralism. Privilege theory deemed everyone privileged unless they were at the very bottom. If anyone was more oppressed than you – no matter how oppressed you were – you were privileged.
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The logic of white-skin privilege theory led to some whites demanding that Blacks give up their privileges. Since Black workers in US auto, steel, trucking and similar industries made union scale, with wages comparable to those of whites, some privilege proponents concluded that Blacks in the US were privileged by imperialism, and must relinquish their “privileges” too.

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