The limits of resistance and identity: towards radical agency

By Noaman G. Ali

This edited and updated write-up is based on the notes of a talk delivered at the 2012 “Fires of Resistance” Conference organized by the South Asian Youth Advisory Committee (SAYAC) of the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA).

I want to try and drop some ideas about two concepts or terms that I think are important to understand as radical or progressive South Asians—if that’s how we think of ourselves—and how we frame them. The first term is resistance and the second is the concept of South Asian.

In order to understand resistance, we have to ask who is doing the resisting, and for what reasons. We also have to ask ourselves what, if anything, comes after resistance. In order to think through the concept of South Asian, we have to ask ourselves why it makes sense to target a conference or workshops at South Asians as a group. Are there problems that South Asians need to resist that others don’t? Or, are there some kinds of South Asians who resist and others who don’t?

Racism and anti-racism

We might say that South Asians face racism, and it’s important to resist that. I’d agree. But let’s also think about some of the dominant ways in which we address racism. When I was growing up in Scarborough I remember a campaign which said something like, “Racism is not natural—it’s learned.” If racism is learned, then naturally the solution to the problem is to not teach people racism. So we come up with a series of solutions that revolve around tolerance, understanding, interfaith dialogue, and so on. Basically, that kind of a view, which we can call a liberal approach, sees racism as a problem that exists in people’s minds. Changing their states of mind can change the racism we see in society.

There’s another approach that’s popular among radicals and that involves seeing racism as a set of attitudes and behaviours performed, especially, by white people—what we call white privilege. The solution to this racism involves anti-oppression workshops where white people reflect on their privilege and commit to changing their behaviours. They are meant to check their privilege when interacting with people of colour, by not taking up space or by being mindful of what they say and how they say it. We can call this an identity/privilege politics approach to racism.

Effectively what both approaches are saying is that people need to stop being so racist, whether that’s by holding racist ideas or engaging in racist behaviours. In any case, the onus or responsibility of the problem is brought down to the level of the individual.

There’s a bit of a problem here, though, which is that regardless of what a white person thinks or does to be a better person, she’s simply not going to be able to erase the privilege that she gets as a white person. It’s also true that the benefits of being white don’t go to all white people equally, and that racism doesn’t affect all people of colour equally, either.

If a bunch of white people call me a Paki, it will probably hurt my feelings. But I’m a middle-class (petty bourgeois) person, and I have a set of class privileges that limit the effect racism has on me. I might have to tolerate the cultural insensitivity of a lot of white people in school or at work, and it’s true that my name and the colour of my skin is going to be a problem for me in the job market.

But there are people who have to deal with all of that and a lot more. I think it’s really important to ask what racism means in relation to those Pakistanis and South Asians who live in poor neighbourhoods, with poor schools and poor facilities, who may not be able to find jobs or who are working several part-time jobs without benefits, who are trying to keep their families together. Those are the Pakistanis and South Asians who came here on certain promises of rosy futures, but found reality to be very different. I think in their case racism means something somewhat different than what it does to me, and that has to do with their class locations.

When we start talking about the way that racism and class work with each other we have to start asking questions about the system we live in and how we think of racism. Racism is the cultural, political, economic and social privilege that white people get from the social organization of our entire material, lived existence. Racism is a problem of structures, of deep relationships between groups of people, of which class is a very important and basic relationship.

Differences in the community

If you understand racism as being structural, you can’t assume that just because we’re all South Asians we’re all in the same boat. Some people catch more hell as a result of racism than others, by whom I mean working class South Asians. There’s no shortage of South Asian politicians who, as long as their turbans, their chicken curry or their saris are being tolerated, are happy to slash funding for programs for the poor. They’re happy to push along mass layoffs and the shutdown of factories that employ immigrants. They have no problem supporting the structural practices and policies that continue to disconnect and impoverish their “own” communities—because, you know, family values come first.

But we already know from our experiences that not everyone in the so-called community has the same approach and ideas. We know that when we resist sexual assault we start from our own communities, where the problem is rarely acknowledged and where the inferior status of women is too often taken for granted by men. I heard some Pakistani and Indian men at a community meeting saying among themselves, “They want to talk about women’s rights? How would they react when they learn that women have the status of shoes for us?” I’m not making this up. I don’t even know how I’d start broaching that subject of homophobia in a community meeting without marginalizing myself. To point this out is not to buy into the rhetoric of white supremacists who think patriarchy and homophobia is unique to Muslims or South Asians—let us be clear, these are problems that cut across all communities, including white ones.

The problem of differences in approach is also there when it comes to poverty and class exploitation. We have to start by challenging the common sense in our own communities, the notion that if you work hard and persevere then you’ll make it. In fact, that’s not the case. Yet so many of these self-appointed community leaders push forward that kind of a narrative, that Canada is this land of milk and honey where you just need to work hard and you’ll find success. Some people will, but far too many people won’t.

So we understand that not all South Asians are resisting, or at least, they’re not all resisting the same problems in the same ways. It’s the subordinated, or oppressed and exploited groups, who are resisting in different ways—along lines of gender and sexual orientation, along lines of caste or national origin, and importantly, along lines of class.

Analysis of structures

But so far we’ve focused on the question of identity or what it means to be South Asian. Let’s go back to the question of resistance. Racism as a structural problem means that because of the colour of your skin or national origin, you are more likely to be poorer or to have poorer living conditions—race is a shortcut for class.

In the liberal approach, if you are trying to tolerate someone’s race you are also tolerating the poverty racism produces, the marginalization and disconnection from society in general that racism produces. That is not something worth tolerating. If we go with the identity/privilege politics approach, the fact that white people are more likely to get jobs than people of colour isn’t something white people can change, or that any of us can change, by getting working white people to change their personal and individual behaviours toward people of colour.

In order to figure out how we resist, we first have to sit down and do a proper analysis of the structure of society and where it comes from so that we can start thinking about how to challenge it. In its broad outlines, historically there are three interconnected forces that bring about the society we live in now. There may well be more but I think these are the structural bases we need to think through.

For one, there’s the colonization of these lands and other lands by European powers. That involved the murder of millions of people, and their political, social and economic subordination to white people. Economic subordination took the form of the import of cheap or free Black and Brown labour. That slavery may be over, but don’t forget that the reason most of us are here is because white people stopped having babies and the system needs to sustain the population as well as a cheap labour force.

Second, colonization was particularly bad because it was connected to a system of organizing society we know as capitalism. A few people in society, the capitalists, own the productive powers, so even though workers are the people who do the work, profits go to capitalists because they own the productive powers. They own the productive powers because they stole and looted them in the first place. Capitalism means that society is structured in the interests of the rich, and this sometimes cuts across lines of race or ethnicity, at the expense of the interests of the workers and the poor. Remember, to keep the cost of labour at a manageable level, you need to have an excess in the supply of labour—these extra people don’t need to have jobs, even poorly paying ones, they just need to be around so that their potential employability pushes the price of labour downward.

Third, it would be a lot more difficult to keep the colonial and capitalist system going if it weren’t for the work that women do inside and outside homes, work that isn’t recognized as work, work that is demeaned. At the same time it’s important to realize that capitalism has complicated relationship with patriarchy and sexism, as many of these so-called domestic costs are taken out of the household, but the oppression of women intensifies in many other ways—including by reducing women to objects of sexual gratification. Even though capitalism has absorbed the entry of women into the public (as opposed to private) labour force and into education, a lot of that had to do with the resistance of women and progressive movements in the first place. Colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy come together especially hard on, for instance, Indigenous women who go missing in great numbers, but their cases are generally ignored by the police and politicians.

Resistance and agency

The key here is to understand that these problems—racism, class exploitation and gender oppression—form the structure of our societies. So as radicals we have to ask ourselves if the solutions we tend to go for are actually doing anything to change these structures, or if we just end up reproducing the structures with some surface-level changes. For example, the victory of Barack Obama was considered by many progressives as an important step in terms of overcoming racism, but as the saying goes even if the president is Black the House is still white. The very structure of society means that the state and government represent the interests of capitalist classes, who tend to be white, with sprinklings of Black, Brown and so on. Even if the representative is Black, the power behind him is white.

Some of us think that if we go into the system we can change it from within. If that was going to happen, though, I don’t know why it hasn’t already happened. For as long as there have been attempts to reform the system from the inside you’d think we’d be living in some kind of paradise by now. The NDP was in power in Ontario in the early 1990s and it found itself forced to do things that were really unpopular because of the economy—meaning the structure of capitalism. It’s unlikely that they will do any better the next time, especially as the NDP leadership has long been adopting the kinds of policies that are good for capitalists and bad for workers.

The question can no longer be one of how we tinker with the system—the problems we face now in terms of unemployment, the environment, racism, sexism and all of that are too serious for tinkering—but rather the question is how do we replace this structure with another one, a better structure based on justice in general? How do we replace the directive control of rich white men with the directive control of subordinated groups—of workers, of racialized people, of working class women of colour, and so on?

As long as we frame our goals and objectives in terms of resistance, and resistance alone, we do ourselves a great disservice and limit the field of our options and tactics. We end up operating on a field that’s already defined by the state. So, if the state is going to cut welfare or the state is going to cut social services, we say we are going to resist cutbacks. We end up on the defensive, and at best ask to go back to something that existed before rather than moving beyond the system itself. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that cutting state services is good. But we have to understand—structurally—where the welfare state comes from and why, and where it is going and why, so that we can actually get past resisting and move toward building something.

The welfare state comes as a result of massive and strong organizations of workers, who didn’t wait for the state to provide them with rights or with other services, but fought to provide for themselves. Workers literally fought with cops on the streets to have their unions upheld. But unions got comfortable after capitalists gave them a little bit here and there in the form of bargaining rights, healthcare and some welfare after the Second World War. The unions became satisfied, and ended up losing many of the arts of organizing and mobilizing—often, in fact, forgetting to organize and mobilize at all. What’s more, those benefits that workers won were often produced on the backs of Indigenous people and people of other countries, who faced imperialist exploitation. Meanwhile, the capitalist system itself keeps suffering deep crises, where capitalists can’t keep up their profits, so they look for new ways to make profits.

So then beginning with crises in the 1970s, and with the successes of anti-imperialist movements in much of the Third World, the capitalists said it’s time to cut back and to get rid of these welfare initiatives to maintain general profits. We see the effects of this trend now, with a gutted economy that isn’t giving people jobs it once used to. The problem here is that capitalists, bosses, try to make more profits. Workers try to make more wages and to get a “social wage” like healthcare and education. Bosses get profits because they own the capital, which they own because previous generations of workers produced it for them. This is class struggle. Unless workers understand that they are engaged in a continuous class struggle—where there can be temporary truces, but no permanent settlements—they’re not going to be able to move on to better forms of society. Capitalists will always strike back, because they own the productive powers of society—everything we depend on.

A permanent settlement would mean getting rid of the bosses, and with them, to get rid of a system built on profits and that’s so prone to crises because it doesn’t care for the needs of all humans. We have to get rid of a system of economic organization that relies on imperialism and on the marginalization of racialized people and women, and that teaches us to compete with and hate each other rather than cooperating and loving each other. So how do we do that?

There are no easy solutions, but I imagine that it has a lot to do with building people’s power to challenge colonialism and imperialism, capitalism and patriarchy. Without the people’s power we’re not going to be able to go and make a better society. There are two key things to think about in building people’s power.

First, we have to figure out how to separate ourselves from total dependence on the capitalist state. Think of how community organizations rely on funding from the state. The state says you can’t engage in any political advocacy—after all, the capitalist state would not give you money to fundamentally challenge it. Perhaps worse, you become dependent on the state for funds and legitimation, instead of actually serving the people. It makes people careerists: Tick off some boxes, add some lines to your resume, then you move on to the next organization. And when the next crisis rolls around even the small victories achieved with this kind of social policy get taken away from us. We have to figure out how to mobilize the people themselves to serve the people, rather than relying only on career specialists, and to do this with lesser and lesser reliance on the state and on the rich.

In the past, groups like the Black Panther Party have combined the serve the people approach with the political question of overthrowing capitalism. The Panthers were one of the largest revolutionary organizations in the United States, and they started up breakfast programs for school-going children as well as community medical clinics, among other things. At the same time, they saw these as spaces from which to build the organization of the Black working class for the ultimate overthrow of capitalism. Now, the Panthers also suffered from problems and errors which it’s also worth studying and correcting, but that doesn’t take away from what they did accomplish and the basic political line they were trying to follow.

Second, we have to figure out how to become coherent or interlinked in deep ways, to counter the organization of the state and the rich. What I mean is that a lot of radicals approach problems in a pretty disconnected way. You focus on migrant issues; you focus on housing; you focus on South Asians; you focus on Africans; you all do your own thing. Women’s organizations, queer organizations, etc., all doing your own thing. We show up, occasionally, at each others’ rallies. But we have to think about how we can, while maintaining our focuses, our independence, and the vigour that comes from this, organize subordinated groups into a powerful unity. I think there has been a suspicion of unity, because it is seen to impose an artificial sameness over very different groups of people. But it’s important to note that unity is not the same thing as identity, you can only achieve unity across differences. Identity is more about sameness—the idea that we can define a group of people coherently against other groups of people—but unity is about working through differences to build a political programme. We need this kind of unity, one that doesn’t ignore power differences amongst subordinated groups, but respects them and works through them, to build new ways of organizing production, distribution, and living in general.

An example is the work of the Communist Party of Nepal – Maoist (CPN-M), which I had a couple of opportunities to look at up close. There are different revolutionary organizations of students, of women, of workers, of peasants, of indigenous peoples, of ethnic and religious groups, and so on, each of which carry out political work in their respective fields. The Maoists also have a cultural organization and an armed wing. These different groups are coordinated by the CPN-M so that they can work together to produce revolutionary change. The All Nepal Women’s Association (Revolutionary) or ANWA(R), for example, focuses on issues that affect women, especially combating domestic violence, polygamy, alcohol abuse, and so on—often, this means that working class women are challenging working class men. But ANWA(R) is plugged into the broader revolutionary analysis and line of the CPN-M. They recognize that the fundamental causes of gender oppression are linked to the state and class structure in Nepal, and that all of that has to be changed in a revolutionary way. Respecting the diversity of focuses, they still work together for the ultimate goal. That’s what I mean when I stress unity, one that doesn’t deny difference but works through it.

In other words, we have to counter the magnificently organized apparatus of the capitalists and the state with our own magnificent organization of people’s power. We have to move beyond just resisting, on the terms of the state, toward realizing our own agency, toward creating the conditions in which we want to live and work. For that, we have to destroy capitalism, and we have to think about and act on how we want to do that.

Noaman G. Ali is a writer and organizer affiliated with BASICS Community News Service (http://basicsnews.ca) and the Campaign Against Drones in Pakistan (http://cadip.info), he can be contacted at noaman.ali@gmail.com