Morality and Material Interests
Or, Vivek Chibber's absurd claim. By Luke Pickrell
The Marxist sociologist Vivek Chibber has a sizable following on the Left. He’s the editor of Catalyst, a mainstay at various lefty publications, and has articles featured in two of DSA’s three introductory courses on socialism. In a recent interview with Nick French for Jacobin titled “No, Liberalism Has Not Buried Marxism,” Chibber argues:
A struggle for socialism or even for social democracy requires people to take enormous risks and make enormous sacrifices, because they will have to confront the capitalist class. I don't see any way that moral advocacy can be the mechanism for attracting most people to a political project of this kind. You have to be able to show people that you have a real interest in the outcome — a material interest, not just a moral calling — and also show them that it is realistic, that it is not just some kind of suicide mission.
Beg your pardon?
The assertion that morality and ideals can’t motivate people to “take enormous risks and make enormous sacrifices” is absurd. Having just finished Bruce Watson’s Freedom Summer, I was especially dumbfounded by Chibber’s claim.
A quick recap for those who might have forgotten a truly profound event in U.S. history. (All quotes are from Watson’s book.)
It took real bravery and conviction to fight Jim Crow, let alone in Mississippi, a place where “a black body floating in a muddy river was ‘as common as a snake,’ spies and informers working for the state kept dossiers on 250 organizations and 10,000 individuals backing integration,” and “civil rights workers were routinely arrested and beaten while cops laughed off charges of ‘police brutality.’”
“There is no state with a record which approaches that of Mississippi in inhumanity, murder, brutality, and racial hatred,” said NAACP head Roy Wilkins.
Just months before the Freedom Summer volunteer's departure, school kids had been blasted with water hoses and attacked by police dogs in Alabama, four girls had been killed in a church bombing (“their dark legs dangling, carried from the rubble”), and Medgar Evers had been assassinated in his driveway. Lead organizer Robert Moses was still haunted by the murder of Herbert Lee, a black farmer who had driven Moses around Mississippi three years earlier as he attempted to register voters on his own. Luis Allen, a black WWII veteran who testified to the FBI during Allen’s murder investigation, was killed in retaliation.
Still, some 1,000 volunteers headed South to register black citizens to vote.
Most volunteers were white northern college students from middle and upper-class backgrounds, “Guitars slung over shoulders, idealism lifting their strides, they piled out of cars sporting a Rand McNally of license plates.” A second group, primarily black, brought “stories of being beaten, targeted, tortured.” All were driven by a sense that “a moral wave” was building and, as one applicant wrote in his application, “No challenge looms larger than eradicating racial discrimination in this country.” Another participant explained, “You didn’t encounter many situations where there was a clear right and wrong … In this case, ‘right’ seemed very obvious.” Others mentioned the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, John F. Kennedy’s speech announcing his civil rights bill (“Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing rights as well as reality”), and scripture. The Freedom Summer volunteers were “the offspring of the entire nation.”
No material interests drove the Freedom Summer volunteers. In fact, most volunteers were going against their material interests by risking life and limb to spend a summer holiday in the most dangerous state in the nation. Andrew Goodman, soon murdered along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner by the Ku Klux Klan and local and state police, had a promising future ahead of him. But Goodman thought Freedom Summer was “the most important thing going on in the country,” and despite fearing for their son’s safety, his parents supported his decision to head South because “We couldn’t turn our backs on the values we had instilled in him at home.”
The volunteers were also motivated by an understanding that, as Martin Luther King Jr. had written while sitting in a Birmingham jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The denial of rights to one section of society was personal; Mississippi’s apartheid regime was an affront to their sense of human decency and could not be ignored. As one volunteer explained, “The injustices to the Negro in Mississippi are also an infringement upon my rights.”
Recruits took James Meridith’s words to heart: “You come from the North. Do not think that Mississippi has no relevance to you … My Mississippi is everywhere.”
Mississippi Freedom Summer is just one of an almost infinite number of examples of people being moved by morality and ideology to fight for change. During the 1963 Children’s Crusade, school kids danced as they were doused by fire hoses and skipped into the waiting police wagons. During the wars of Reconstruction, enslaved people turned free Union soldiers, turned veterans, donned their old uniforms, picked up guns, and marched in formation to defend their hard-won civil liberties. In 1964, college kids traveled to Mississippi and risked their lives to help people they barely knew. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to fight for democracy.
In fact, as Chibber demonstrates, Marxism can lead people to make some bizarre claims about how movements are developed and sustained and why people do the things they do.
To work with Civil Rights activists, wrote Howard Zinn — “to be with them, walking a picket line in the rain in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, or sleeping on a cot in a cramped 'office' in Greenville, Mississippi; to watch them walk out of the stone jailhouse in Albany, Georgia; to see them jabbed by electric prod poles and flung into paddy wagons in Selma, Alabama, or link arms and sing at the close of a church meeting in the Delta — is to feel the presence of greatness.” This democratic spirit will necessarily return en masse when a new movement for universal and equal rights takes off on a scale far bigger than the Civil Rights movement. We have unfinished business.