Angela P. Harris
The speaker, Angela P. Harris, is visiting UB Law as the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Distinguished Scholar for the 2009-10 academic year. A tenured faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, she is widely known as a leading voice in critical race theory and feminist legal scholarship.
“America’s New Class Warfare” was the theme of the two-day conference, held Oct. 23 and 24. It was organized by UB Law professors Teresa A. Miller, Athena Mutua and Martha McCluskey, and co-sponsored by the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development at St. John’s University School of Law, in New York City. Panel discussions took up the issues of class and critical race theory, class struggle in 2009, class in the city, class in the marketplace, class in public policy and class in criminal justice.
Professor Harris’ keynote address was delivered in the elegant confines of the new visitor center at Buffalo’s Darwin Martin House, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed masterpiece that is being restored as an architectural tourism attraction.
Before an attentive audience, Harris began by citing some of the dozens of cities that have passed laws against feeding the hungry, such as Las Vegas, whose City Council “made it illegal to provide food to poor people in city parks for free or at low cost. It remains legal,” she added wryly, “to provide food to well-off people.” Such laws, she said, are “designed to make the homeless – not homelessness – disappear.”
In reference to the theme of the conference, Harris said, “The question of whether there is or isn’t a new class war is, in some senses, a distraction from a deeper question” – the idea that “capitalism as we know it” is unsustainable. Key, she said, is the end of low-cost oil, which has fueled the United States’ long-term growth of 3 to 7 percent annually. Even new oil drilling and new technologies, she said, won’t reverse that factor, given that emerging economies like China will stretch world oil supplies to the limit. As well, she said, global warming “will produce economic and social devastation.”
As Americans, she said, “our level of collective cultural blindness is such that to say ‘Capitalism is unsustainable’ is unthinkable. The question is, how do we as teachers figure out what comes after capitalism?”
Harris pointed to some principles on which to build “in the coming period of reconstruction.” For example, she said, “There are no culture-free market forces.” Thus class inequality is built into our economic system because human labor is seen as a commodity: “Human flesh is made invisible as flesh when it is reduced to labor power and thus can be bought and sold. … Capitalism teaches us that inequality makes us free.” She also pointed to “nested and chained associations of race, class and gender” entrenched in the free-market system, saying, “We’re taught to accept and practice inequality and subordination” in the name of economic progress.
Finally, she said, a post-capitalist economy might be organized along a most non-economic principle: that of love.
“Love is an idea that has been debased in political theory,” she said. “We’re used to thinking of love in private, romantic things that should be tucked away. But our existing economics is about the allocation of scarcity. Capitalism as we know it is therefore based on anxiety and fear. What might a post-capitalist economy look like if it were based on love?”
She then returned to the anti-homeless ordinances, many of which, she said, were passed in response to the work of Food Not Bombs, a loosely organized volunteer collective that distributes to hungry people surplus food gleaned from grocery stores, bakeries and markets. Harris noted that this work has gotten the organization placed on an FBI anti-terrorism watch list.
“Their fundamental principle is that society has to promote life, not death,” she said. “Taken seriously in the practice of everyday life, this commitment to the non-violent life, to love and the alleviation of suffering, threatens the invisibility and inequality that is so central to the capitalist system. Seen in this way, Food Not Bombs is a revolutionary organization.” But, she said, such a revolution might be the best way forward into a new economy.
