but wait, there's more

I'm also finding it difficult to deal with what seems like a conflation of big-L Labor (as in the house of, as in the AFL-CIO, as in cold war liberalism) with small-l labor, as in the creation of value, as in the work that people do that transforms nature and without which there is no capitalism. The former does not have a monopoly over the latter and did not in the 1960s, and one would hope a treatment of the new left's labor politics might have more to say on the subject than just detailing its often cordial and often fraught relationships with the AFL-trade union bureaucracy as well as the more left-wing leadership of 1199 and District 65 (an ancestor of the UAW's Technical, Office, and Professional department and Local 2110 more specifically.) talking about "blacks" (small b) and "labor" (small l) as two discreet entities, even during the jim crow era, is similarly problematic - because African American workers formed their own unions and their own organizations within white unions (like the Dining Car Waiters of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, - see Eric Arnesen's Brotherhoods of Color) and fought against both the employers and the racism of white unions, because the noble effort to extricate black bodies from their inscription as 'mere labor' notwithstanding, the african american populations of both the deep south and the urban north were racialized as labor, as people genetically primed (biologically or 'culturally') for certain kinds of work, and ineligible for certain kinds of social citizenship and privilege. Looking at black political movements as somehow outside of questions of labor, as Levy seems to in the first few chapters of his book, flirts with the mystification, and therefore reification (what you don't see can hurt you) of the specific ways in which black labor is racialized and rendered either invisible or pathological by racist state and capitalist optics.

I ran into my aunt and her semi-separated(?) husband on the street today. First time i'd seen her since my grandmother's funeral last september. Very strange, and kind of sad.