MARX, RAÇA E NEOLIBERALISMO

A perspectiva Marxista pode ser útil para a compreensão dos conceitos de raça e racismo na medida em que propõe uma percepção dialética do capitalismo, enquanto uma totalidade social, que inclui os modos de produção, relações de produção e o conjunto pragmáticamente em evolução das instituições e ideologias que facilitam e impulsionam a sua reprodução

Early Complexity Supports Development of Motor Behaviors in the First Months of Life

Complexity in motor behavior is a hallmark of healthy systems. The purpose of this study was to investigate postural complexity during development of early motor behaviors and under two conditions. Twenty-two infants participated from 1 to 6 months of age. Linear and nonlinear measures of displacement of the center of pressure at the base of support were used to quantify magnitude and temporal structure of postural control. Behavioral coding was used to quantify the emergence of midline head control and early reaching. Results suggest that infants have complexity in postural control strategies early in development. This complexity decreases as infants learn motor behaviors, even when magnitude of the postural variability does not change. Infants were able to adapt the magnitude of postural control variability under different conditions. We propose that infants proceed through three stages which support the infant\u27s ability to adapt motor behaviors

Adaptive individual variation in phenological responses to perceived predation levels

The adaptive evolution of timing of breeding (a component of phenology) in response to environmental change requires individual variation in phenotypic plasticity for selection to act upon. A major question is what processes generate this variation. Here we apply multi-year manipulations of perceived predation levels (PPL) in an avian predator-prey system, identifying phenotypic plasticity in phenology as a key component of alternative behavioral strategies with equal fitness payoffs. We show that under low-PPL, faster (versus slower) exploring birds breed late (versus early);the pattern is reversed under high-PPL, with breeding synchrony decreasing in conjunction. Timing of breeding affects reproductive success, yet behavioral types have equal fitness. The existence of alternative behavioral strategies thus explains variation in phenology and plasticity in reproductive behavior, which has implications for evolution in response to anthropogenic change

Revolution as ‘National Liberation’ and the Origins of Neoliberal Antiracism

This essay is motivated by the centennial of 1917 providing occasion for reflection on the great revolutionary projects of the last century and rumination on the status of the notion of revolution now. My concern is fundamentally ‘presentist’ and best characterized as demystification or ideology-critique. Specifically, my interest is in reflecting on the emergence of antiracism as a discrete political stance – that is, not simply a principled opposition to discrimination and bigotry – and the impact that it, along with other strains of what is commonly called identity politics, has had on contemporary left political thought and practice, including dominant ways of conceptualizing social transformation and revolution. I believe, for reasons that I trust this examination will make clear, taking critical stock of antiracist politics is a crucial task for the left, especially in the United States, where antiracism arguably emerged as a claim to a discrete politics, but elsewhere as well. Antiracist politics, and its corollary commitment to diversity, has become a significant American cultural export, as Bourdieu and Wacquant noted nearly two decades ago.As the intellectual left moved both into the academy and away from an intellectual and epistemic commitment to class struggle, it by and large gave up the goal of radical social transformation and the objective of pursuing political power for the purpose of realizing that goal became less distinct from liberalism. Such a left, as Russell Jacoby notes, ‘ineluctably retreats to smaller ideas, seeking to expand the options within the existing society’. Militant embrace of the discourses of identity politics, most notably antiracism, has helped to sustain an appearance that the left is not in retreat but remains on the cutting edge of transformational politics. That is because of the prominence of a view that construes ‘oppressions’ rooted in race and gender, etc., as both foundational to American society – or the West – and so deeply embedded that most whites/men are in denial about their power. From that perspective the civil rights movement’s legislative victories in the 1960s were superficial and could not address the deep-structural sources of racism and sexism, which are effectively ontological and therefore beyond the reach of normal political or social intervention. Thus the struggle against these sources of inequality is always insurgent because their power never diminishes

The Evolution of ‘Race’ and Racial Justice under Neoliberalism

Social or cultural resentments – including racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia – certainly played a role in the rise of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald J. Trump. But to acknowledge the important influence of race in American political and social life is not to insist that it operates independently of evolving political and economic relations of power. The problem is that the discourse of social justice now dominant presumes, even demands, an either/or construction of the relationship between inequalities rooted in capitalist class dynamics and those attributable to ascriptively-based ideologies of hierarchy such as race or gender. Postwar racial liberalism generated a moralistic discourse that seems rhetorically powerful. However, because it is devoid of meaningful content, moralism – affirming, though it may be – offers neither useful interpretive frameworks nor practical remedies capable of redressing the social, historical, and political-economic dynamics that reproduce inequalities of all sorts in US capitalism. High-minded idealist constructs such as ‘racism is our nation’s Original Sin’ or ‘our national disease’ or, more recently, that ‘racism is in our DNA’, are evasions that deflect attention from the historical and material sources of racial inequality past and present. Many self-identified liberals and far too many leftists continue to embrace these evasive metaphors that treat ideological or cultural attachments as if they can, in fact, ‘take on a life of their own’. Such constructs have become especially appealing in recent years because, much like underclass ideology, they allow one to sidestep the proximate material and cultural processes that inform the constitution of racial ideology and its evolution. Ironically, this ostensibly antiracist view, in asserting that race/racism transcends specific historical and social contexts, is itself quintessentially racist. There is no doubt that racism is real and has negative consequences for people’s lives. This is why we have consistently argued for the continued value of anti-discrimination policies. But race reductionism’s insistence on uncoupling disparities from political economy lends itself to individualist reforms (anti-racism training and swelling the ranks of black capitalists) as responses to structural ailments. We must reject race-reductionist analyses and refuse to accommodate charges that a left focused first and foremost on critique of and challenge to capitalist political economy as such, with its corrosive human consequences, is unacceptably ‘class reductionist’. To summon an old Maoist slogan, at a time such as this, it is imperative that we clarify who are our friends and who are our enemies