How is the system of social redistribution related to trajectories of individual life? What can it mean to be a socialist today? How does race cognition work? What are the conceptual starting points for the idea of an entirely new political community? József Böröcz—Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University—answered questions by András Borbély. The interview was conducted in Magyar, for Új Szem. The slightly revised English version was translated by József Böröcz for LeftEast.
How is the system of social redistribution related to trajectories of individual life? What can it mean to be a socialist today? How does race cognition work? What are the conceptual starting points for the idea of an entirely new political community? József Böröcz—Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University—answered questions by András Borbély. The interview was conducted in Magyar, for Új Szem. The slightly revised English version was translated by József Böröcz for LeftEast.
András Borbély: You are a sociologist working on global historical issues and you have been recognized by colleagues at several internationally renowned institutions of research and learning. I’d be interested to hear not just about your professional life, but your personal and social contexts as well. What kind of social environment did you grow up and develop your professional life in? How did these influence your ability to do what you do, and how and where you do it? What important decisions have you had to make in your life?
József Böröcz: My mother, being a daughter of a Reformed cantor from a small town in the Hungarian Plains, became a member of a People’s College movement while she was attending the Franz Liszt Academy of Music between 1947 and 1951. As was usual at the time, she was soon “diverted” from a career as a concert pianist without much fuss—so she gained recognition and appreciation in the Budapest dance profession as a piano accompanist.
As for my father, he was the eldest son in an artisanal family in Siófok who was selected, at the age of ten, for admission and tuition waiver for his studies by the erstwhile landlord of the micro-region where he grew up–the Roman Catholic Church–in one of the Church’s own elite high schools. He graduated from the Piarist High School of Veszprém, with honors, in 1946. There he learned German, French, interspersed with some Latin and ancient Greek, not to mention typing, shorthand, fondness for formal logic . . . and folk dance, along with a, for lack of a better word, a “folk,” populist version of Marxism. He was a restless person, a democratic socialist intellectual in the 1930s-40s’ sense of the word. First, he was a medical student, then he studied Ethnography at the Faculty of Humanities, and finally in just a year he completed four semesters in Dance Directing at the College of Theatre and Film Arts . . . He did not complete any of these. He always found something more important to focus on— mostly having to do with the immediate task of championing the uplift of the people. The idea he and his friends shared was that they would accomplish the advancement of the people by elevating folk art, such as folk dance, to high art. The idea was to make a highly stylized version of the collective corporeal expression of peasant masses into a “modern vernacular” in modern staged dance. They thought of this task as a crucial component of class emancipation.
In 1955, he became the art director of the dance troupe of the Performing Arts Ensemble of the Hungarian People’s Army. He held that position while the Ensemble was on tour in China in the fall of 1956. The tour ended with a sharp career modification for him—he became instantly an upholsterer’s assistant—as a token of appreciation for his effectively expressed progressive, left-popular-democratic, socialist, communal political views. The formal charge was “Narodnikism”. A few years later he started again to work in the staged folk dance movement, this time as art director of the amateur dance group of the Lenin Metallurgical Works in Diósgyőr (an industrial suburb of Miskolc). He thrived in the vibrant world of amateur art movements and ensembles, theatres and community education of the 1960’s and 70’s. Hundreds of young people “passed under his hands.”
So, my father entered the world of Budapest performing arts from an artisanal background, as a “first generation” intellectual, while my mother came from an educated but life-long well-nigh destitute clerical-conservative, Calvinist environment. Both died relatively young, having lived considerably shorter lives than their parents. Such were the times then—for people changing class and stratification positions.
I grew up in a troubled, financially struggling but accepting, admirably liberal, art- and life-affirming, good-humored, self-ironical family. Due to my father’s job away from Budapest, where my mother and I lived, we hardly saw him between my ages of 2 to 12.
Following in my mother’s footsteps, I learned classical music for 11 years—piano, harmony, music history, composition, whatever. At school I hid away from the various expressions of neuroses, exclusion, aggression, harassment, bullying and overall violence characteristic of the lives of children of the “Inner Buda” environment at the time. With my mind today—and not the least thanks to having read Gábor Zoltán’s books[i] about that micro-district in Buda—I am convinced that the collective neurosis that reigned in the school must have been linked to the legacy of the sadistic Arrow Cross violence of 1944, just before the siege of Budapest began, the violence that took place in that very neighborhood. For more on that, see here.
Otherwise, school was that kind of magical environment where, for example, the institution imposed formal disciplinary measures if a child who had read half the district children’s library dared talk back, possibly to a teacher, to correct serious factual errors or slips of logic. (I soon gave up on that idea.) My high school is not worth talking about.
Thanks to the inscrutable wisdom of socialist higher education management at the time, I ended up studying at the Faculty of Humanities in Debrecen, where I graduated in Hungarian philology and public culture / adult education. Meanwhile, I tried to expand my English and, after having passed the compulsory Russian final exam, picked up Polish with relative ease.
I had two ideas about what I could become: a film director or a sociologist. However, pro primo, having tried twice, I was not admitted to the film directing department at the only institution of its kind in the Hungary at the time. And when I tried for the third time in the gaps of the imperfectly “closing” system—essentially, the plan was to “talk myself into” the Film College in the Polish city of Łódz and become, so to speak, a filmmaker “in Polish,”—even at the “cost” of a few years of apprenticeship as a lighting person or production assistant. I planned that in the summer of 1980 but what came to be known as the Solidarity strikes broke out, cutting those dreams short. I reckoned, right or wrong, that Poland had become impossible as a school environment for me, a drifter with a Hungarian passport without a state scholarship or official “permission” to do what I wanted to do.
Then, pro secundo—we are still talking about the early eighties—sociology in Hungary was perched precariously between “tolerated” and “forbidden” fields in Hungary. In practice, this meant that a single, not particularly wide circle of acquaintances pretty much monopolized sociology training in Hungary, and I could not figure out either how to get into those circles, or into the milieu of sociologists operating without professional qualifications. All that appeared impossible—essentially due to my luckless informal network “location.” All the sociology profession was able and willing to say to me was—well, “tough luck.” I interpreted it as saying, “get lost.”
So, after graduation, I worked as a freelance translator. In the summer of 1983, as I was submitting one of my translations, an editor asked me, almost in passing, if I wanted to teach Hungarian in an elementary school in the United States. It was pure chance. That is how, instead of typing my life away as a translator in Budapest—with neither a permanent job or nor any real prospects—I became a teacher of Hungarian-as-ancestral-language in the US South, in a farming community, an hour’s drive north of New Orleans, inhabited by third-or-fourth-generation Hungarian Americans. I began my formal studies in sociology at Louisiana State University in 1984 and, after the expiration of my two-year teaching contract in Louisiana and a year back in Budapest, I got a scholarship from the Sociology Department at Johns Hopkins University, graduating there in 1992 in what was called then the Program in Comparative International Development. After three years at the University of California at Irvine, I moved to my current job, Rutgers University, where, in addition to my work as a senior faculty member in the sociology department, I also held the position of director of the university’s Institute for Hungarian Studies from 1995 through 2007. Most of my published work can be found online at https://rutgers.academia.edu/JózsefBöröcz .
“WHO IS BEHIND YOU”?
B. A.: This gives a rather complex picture, among other things, of how the aggression of the Arrow Cross was passed on in the “Inner Buda” environment, and how, despite the egalitarian social and cultural policy of the era, in which your parents took part, even if unevenly, the system of protection of privilege survived, which forced you to hide and perhaps even flee. At the same time, you also referred to a kind of deep and inscrutable wisdom about contemporary education management, perhaps not just ironically. I generalize your allusion: what did the “wisdom of socialism” consist of, stand or could stand in for you? I am also thinking of the fact that we do not see much socialist politics or culture now, or only very, very sporadically. And that your choice of words may not be accidental, and socialism may not be just politics, culture, or its control, but something even more or more “inscrutable” (?).
B.J. Hm. The “cosmos” of my childhood—especially the patterns lived by some of the children in the school I attended—forced me to go underground . . . in three ways. These were: endless reading, music, and wandering in the city. I was mostly in “hiding” because a series of experiences with sore consequences, literal and figurative slaps in the face, encouraged me to do so.
The privilege-maintenance system I mentioned with respect to both the film and the sociology fields refers to one of the most fundamental social-organizational patterns and ways of thinking prevalent in the societies of our region—namely that almost nothing happens here without the operation of an ordering mechanism that could be called “the logic of descent”, in the broadest sense of the word. Informal (friends, family, acquaintance) patterns rule most interaction and all too often overdetermine the outcomes. Thus, one of the most obvious reasons why I was unable to get into the Budapest grounds of sociology of the early eighties was the—embarrassingly trivial—problem that I could not provide a satisfactory answer to the question, formulated in a most useful form to me by an ethnographer-sociologist (head of one of the institutions doing sociological research at that time) who was well acquainted with Hungarian reality at “street level”:
“Who is behind you?”
This question, despite its embarrassing directness, apparent rudeness and cliché character, was a revelatory kind of assistance to me. I gleaned two conclusions from it: (1) “this is how this city works”, and (2) I must look for some way out, because I am at a disadvantage in this game. I did not even graduate from a university in Budapest, I don’t know anyone who “matters” who could or would stand “behind me,” I am a nobody here, should I try something else. (At that time, for example, I had already published something both in Magyar and English on my chosen topic—but nobody was interested in that either. Just nobody was interested, period.) All that seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle because, I thought, the “system” was such that I would never even be able to find out whether there was any spark of talent in me, of any kind. Hungary seemed like a dead end.
As for my reference to the “inscrutable wisdom” of socialism—you are right: I say it both directly and with a certain sarcasm. Let’s take my own trivial story as a point of departure, how I was redirected to Debrecen with my application for admission to a university in Budapest. I could point out what an irrational thing that was—it is utterly unclear by what substantive criteria, by whom and in what way the decision was made to channel applicants to the higher education system to specific universities. It would not be untrue. If I wanted to sing the story in a dramatic baritone, I could obviously sob about the difficulties involved, the everyday, tiny resentment and rejection of the town towards the “freshly arrived” student, from the capital, to boot, the story of not being admitted to the student dorms, what it meant to exist in a mostly alien, amazingly closed and joyless town compared to my previous world. I had had nothing to do with Debrecen before, I had never even been there—all I knew was that my maternal grandfather had twice—unsuccessfully—applied for the position of chief cantor of the Great Church of Debrecen. Well, that’s . . . not much. Let’s put it this way: I was woefully unprepared for life in Debrecen.
However, the same story can also be told by pointing out that I attended one of, if not the, best humanities faculties in the country at that time, mostly taught by excellent professors who had time to prepare for their classes. There was also an informal sense of academic freedom—especially outside compulsory classes, of course. In addition, my knowledge of Hungarian society was broadened infinitely by getting to know the previously unknown local universe. On top of all that, I had almost unlimited time on my hands—for example, for reading and learning languages. So that’s what I did. Plus, together with some excellent friends, I tried to apply the Marxian theory of alienation to the reality of Hungary at the end of the seventies–with surprising success.
As for the forms of state socialism that existed in Hungary—turning to the social analysis side of your question—they were far from exclusively an exercise of naked political power. It was also a life world, a system of possibilities and limitations. A comprehensive social system. In addition to the various prohibitions many of which were petty and meaningless, practically incomprehensible to me—I still cannot fathom how, for example, reading the journal New Symposion[ii] from Novi Sad would have brought about the cataclysmic collapse of socialism in the Library of Debrecen University—there was also a certain grandiose generosity in it, something that is much less talked about nowadays. For me, the Marxisant-Weberian classic by Konrád-Szelényi[iii] (banned “of course” for a long time in Hungary, again for inscrutable reasons—but available pretty much unhindered in samizdat edition) still defines the essence of the system for me.
The key to understanding it is the concept of rational redistribution, an idea that goes, in my current reading, far beyond redistribution in the narrow economic sense. The socialist state was the administrator of the collective property rights of a social formation that far transcended the limits of private property, i.e., it was the guardian of historical “progress”—and at the same time it had monopoly over determining general rules of the state socialist economy and society (i.e. the most significant participant in the economy and the master of the rules governing economic accumulation) in a rather opaque and often arbitrary way.
However, state socialism was not only an economic, nor even a political-economic mode of production, since “the system” also realized redistribution in a social sense. There were several progressive, socially transforming and transformative institutional subsystems, such as the enabling and incentivizing of individual and collective mobility, development of infrastructure for direct collective-social use, efforts at awareness- and consciousness-raising, a complex gamut of new opportunities for knowledge production. With those, the system enabled and implemented measures to overcome past injustices and unfair disadvantages that had been in place for a millennium—and did so by relatively simple means. It was all of that, taken together.
FROM DEBRECEN TO “AMERICA”
So, when I wrote that there was a certain “inscrutable wisdom” in the system, I meant that, as a Budapest person, I was also “redistributed” to Debrecen within the framework of rational redistribution . . . This had certain consequences that made my life somewhat inefficient (the incessant train travel, isolation from my life before, not to mention loss of access to certain cultural goods that tend to be only available in the capital, etc.). But it also produced wonderful results that I did not imagine at the time. It allowed me to get to know different and new slices of reality, the realities of my own society. So, while the system “ripped me out” of my previous (mind you, far from ideal) environment and inserted me, albeit inorganically, into another milieu, I gained experience and knowledge about certain aspects of social life I had never encountered in Budapest. I gained useful and uplifting emotional, intellectual and moral insights. I learned new “languages” of experience (within the ambit of Magyar, of course). These are all things that those who remained in Budapest, my former acquaintances, for instance, did not have access to, many may not even understand what I am talking about. Of course, that also came at a price; due to the same peculiarly “re-redistributed” nature of my situation, the profession back in Budapest felt free (or, was it compelled?) to ignore me, at best it treated me as a “new arrival from the countryside”, in much the same way—as I imagined—the same environment had related to my mother and father, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of other, Budapest-bound young people at the time, when they got off their trains at the railway stations a generation earlier.
Thus, when I ended up in the United States due to a series of coincidences, the feeling of “groundlessness” caused by dislocation did not make me exceedingly exasperated as, based on my experiences in Debrecen, I had some basic experience in distilling even the sometimes-painful feelings of exile into a certain sociological worldview. So, when I entered the doctoral program in what is nowadays called Global Sociology at Johns Hopkins University—where I met my fellow doctoral candidates from all corners of the world, from a wide variety of backgrounds and orientations, who were more or less as displaced as I was—it helped me approach questions of identity, diversity, difference, negotiation, and varieties of existence somewhat more easily than it would have been, had I come directly from “my” Budapest background without the Debrecen episode.
B. A.: Is it possible to be a socialist today in any political sense (or in any sense)? Is socialism the historical object of your research, the point of view of analysis, its connection to the traditions of Marxist social analysis, or is it also a political statement? What does socialism mean or could it mean today, with existing socialism and its disappearance behind us?
B.J.: Of course it is possible.
Let’s start with this. The point is constant movement: the socialism I think about is not a fixed goal, but a change of location. It is a series of repeated, reflexive-self-reflexive attempts to humanize social relations, so that they become more tolerable, just, free from exploitation and oppression, more equal, open, free, sustainable, more conducive to the production of human values, etc. Demanding and following the total, radical liberation of humans.
I would add that for three decades now I have been interested in all this–let’s say “the idea of socialism”–exclusively from a global and historical perspective.
By the globality of “my socialism,” I mean at least three things. To start with, I am unable / unwilling to explain local problems, including our own problems, solely from the peculiarities of the local environment simply because that would be a “methodologically” faulty procedure, given that we are very much part of an exploitative, oppressive and life-destroying system on a global scale. The flipside of the same point is that criticism that operates and thinks exclusively on the “local level”, even the most well-intentioned, can only be wrong, for objective reasons. There is no effective, exclusively local remedy for global violence. (By the way, this methodological fallacy is a defining feature of almost all social democracy and liberalism, as well as peripheral, semi-peripheral, and core-fascism.)
On the other hand, second, I insist that whatever the problem, we look at it, think it, live it, suffer it from the point of view of people whose lives are destroyed by global hierarchies, oppression and exploitation chains. I am thinking here of the most concrete human lives possible–say, members of the Bangladeshi “migrant” precariat in Kolkata, India, the children living in utter desperation in refugee camps in, say, Sudan or Jordan or the streets in Türkiye, that large proportion of the world’s self-sustaining peasantry that survives on incomes below USD 5 a day, the global metropolitan sub-precariat created by industrial capital, the Cambodian or Bangladeshi girls sewing our cheapest garments instead of going to school, the point of view of West African or Moldovan teachers working in the brothels of Ghent, etc.
Of course, I am aware that with this attitude I am “plucking” myself out of much of European public discourse . . . well . . . so be it. I understand that we don’t play on the same pitch. I am simply unwilling to make unprincipled compromises in this regard.
Third, my insistence on the globality of socialism means that, contrary to the concrete compromises and concessions that various versions of official state socialism had made in eastern and east-central Europe—which have been considerable, and perhaps understandable, or maybe not— I am not prepared to limit the demands for emancipation, progress, more tolerable conditions for life, etc., to moral-geopolitical or “racial” limits that are incidental, exclusive and neither morally nor intellectually defensible.
Now, as for my reference to the historicity of my idea of socialism, by that I merely mean that the global system that is making life impossible for billions of people today, is a product of history. Thus, the past is not just a curiosity of family memory and history lessons, but a constitutive element of the present, today. Every day. The present is a re-re-configuration of the past, so the present can only be effectively understood and subjected to effective criticism as a product of the historical processes that create and sustain it.
Since no formal political organization or institution considers me a member—and rightly so—I also have the priceless advantage of being able to formulate these criteria with a certain determination, without bearing in mind the tactful-euphemistic rules and niceties expected by the institutions, without having to conform to various petty power games. (This, of course, could easily be interpreted as a fancy of my false consciousness, and I suspect that everything, including this relative absence of constraints, has its downside.)
“RACE” AND US
B. A. From a global point of view, how can we explain the horrible, at best indifferent or hypocritically tolerant, at worst murderous attitude towards the Roma in Hungarian society? And what kind of local action could follow from understanding the situation from a global perspective?
B.J. Perhaps we should start by pointing out that “race” cognition and the resulting political ideology, the latter colloquially called racism, are not exclusively products of Hungarian, or even east European culture(s). “Race” cognition is anti-social charlatanism, an indefensible identity rhetoric in (pseudo-)scientific garb—which is why whenever I must use the word I put it in quotation marks—the essence of which is a combination of the following intertwined assumptions. Those include:
- the carving up of the ontological unity humanity into non-overlapping groups, “populations” and “races”,
- the idea that these imaginary groupings could be grouped into some kind of clear hierarchy,
- treating this hierarchy as an ahistorical constant regardless of context (i.e., the assertion that, whatever the criteria used in establishing the hierarchy, in whatever historical context, the place occupied by different “races” would always be the same), then proceeding to
- include the immense diversity of humanity in this hierarchy under the pretext of some aspects of their external appearance—such trivialities as head shape, skin color, hair type, etc.—and, placing. . .
- . . . always, in every context, the group marked by the lightest “skin color” at the top of the pyramid—thus, taken together, the wildest, inanest manifestation of the worldview of “race” cognition is what Bourdieu aptly called symbolic violence.
In this sense, “race” cognition, and its condensed political derivative, racism, constitute a specific ideology of colonial capitalism’s system of oppression, exploitation, and destruction that has gradually engulfed the world since the long sixteenth century. The most pronounced period of its formation was the second half of the nineteenth century, when European colonial powers reached the point of having almost completely subjugated parts of the world outside Western Europe. What they could colonize, they colonized. What they couldn’t, they subjected to forced “free trade” (as in, e.g., opium), and to wars of aggression. One of the cultural and moral consequences of this was that the accumulation in the centers of colonial chains—that is, “free” plunder outside Western Europe—took on such intense forms, such overwhelming proportions, that sooner or later even observers occupying the cognitive position of Western European colonizers more or less inevitably came to the point of wondering whether the destruction of the way of life of our fellow human beings, the occupation of their territories, the ever more shameless plundering of their possessions, their ever more brutal subjugation of their bodies and souls, whether all that was at all compatible with the Judeo-Christian ideal of love and acceptance. Whether it is morally acceptable to enrich individuals, families and cliques of interest at the top of the aristocratic, bourgeois and bureaucratic “elites” of Western European societies through colonial activity on such a scale that cannot be conceived by reason. Whether it is right, worthy and just that the cities of about ten European countries should become arenas for the conspicuous display of wealth to the extent that they had.
A common element of “race” cognition, not to mention overt racism, is that ultimately the entire schema serves as tool to place, and keep, “whiteness” at the imagined apex of all human hierarchies. As a result, there are, so to speak, long, long queues of people in the world today waiting for all, even the most uncertain, chances of entering into “whiteness.” In the US, for example, a small cottage industry of historians has been discussing the twentieth-century histories of various ethnic groups previously considered “non-white” having “become white.”[iv] Either way, the point is that, at the heart of “race” cognition, we find “whiteness.” In my earlier work, I defined “whiteness” as a powerful, uncompromising desire for un-earned, un-earnable, unconditional privileges—gains in material, lifestyle, moral, political terms, etc. That means, emphatically, that, in “race” cognition, the abundant references to seemingly “objective,” physical features such as skin melanin levels, body shape and size, cranial shape, etc. are not “explanations” for the phenomenon; they are pretexts for social discrimination, exclusion and oppression, fraud and deception in the global struggle for privilege. This is true even if, as we know, sociocultural contexts vary, so two contexts may very well place certain specific people in different categories. The English language even has a separate concept—”passing“—if the “race” of actors racialized non-white in a particular context are “accepted as white” in another context. “Passing” is particularly relevant to east Europeans in the context of western Europe. There is a lot of exciting work that could be done on that single phenomenon.
All this raises many cultural, emotional, moral and aesthetic issues—for example, the collective psychoses of west European societies in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the morally unjustifiable, yet widely “justified,” genocide-affirming and indeed genocide-demanding insanities were all based on the same process. The common essence of these is that the colonizing subject latched onto the concept of others, presented others as forever marked by ontological characteristics, froze them in historical time, and began to portray them as ontologically inferior social, cultural and/or moral forms of existence.
All this made it possible for the Western European colonizer subject to shake off the odium of its own misdeeds (wrongs done by his/her associates, predecessors, or themselves to others) with relative ease, since it was easy and sufficient to take the position that “it is not immoral to steal the goods of others, destroy the society of others, devastate the self-esteem of others, make the lives of others impossible, etc., since—what can we do? . . .—the others are . . . objectively inferior.” More hypocritical speakers may add, at times, “alas.” . . .
But that . . . “alas” . . . of course didn’t change anything.
The severely unscientific and anti-social mental practice of “race” cognition, including its politically tailored form, racism was a product of the colonial system. “Race,” in its modern form, is the west European-centered, core identity ideology of global colonialism. There are two additional, truly unfortunate factors that make things even more difficult.
EXPANDING RACE COGNITION
“Race” cognition was not confined to the European subject active in the colonial environment. Among its representatives, we can find people hailing from other geo-economic and geo-political milieux from the very beginning. Consider, for example, a man by the name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who lived between 1857 and 1924. Born in present-day Ukraine as a subject of the Tsar’s Russian Empire, into a progressive-national-liberal family of educated Polish nobles, his entire oeuvre unfoldedin English, under a British identity, with the pen name Joseph Conrad. His brilliant work was . . . “alas” . . . fully consistent with the aesthetic and literary program of colonial empire and “race” hierarchies. It is enough to read Marius Turda’s work on eugenics, empire and race to see how deeply “race” cognition was deeply ensconced in the (post-)Habsburg east-central European context as well.
“Alas.”
The second unfortunate factor—we can consider that an extension of the former in historical time—is that the patterns of “race”-cognition / racism that emerged in the colonial system took on a life of their own. They did not disappear with the collapse of the global colonial empires. In fact, they have been spreading in an increasingly intensive form, one might say. Today, the “race” code is a nigh universal marker of otherness and difference, something that appears in a wide variety of political and moral contexts. For instance, the two great tragedies in the history of Hungarian culture related to “race” cognition—centuries of ostracism, hatred and contempt for Romani people, and anti-Semitism—are also, absolutely part of this process. From the worshipping of whiteness and all other forms of color-coded, circular hatred, including, for example, the terrorists who went from the skinhead underworld of Debrecen to commit the “Roma killings“, through the elderly woman who spat at a visiting American performer on “grounds” of his skin color, in front of the Budapest Basilica a few years ago, to the intellectuals who yap incessantly about geographical directions and continents as if they had a moral meaning . . . almost the entire spectrum of Hungarian culture participates in the practice of “race” cognition.
So, I must disappoint the reader who might expect me to offer a sensible recipe for the question “what is to be done?” in relation to Hungarian culture and society. It seems obvious to me that we should work on all points of the complex “race” cognition process as a system of social relations, all at once. Criticism of racism in our institutional systems must be linked to direct, on-the-spot resistance to racist speech and thought, racist assumptions of otherness and self-representation, not to mention the struggles around supposed biological inferiority and superiority, social exclusion from the informal network, and cultural and political racism.
Unfortunately, it would be unrealistic to expect quick success in this regard: during the four decades of my life that I have spent developing, teaching and disseminating critical approaches to social life, I have consistently found that, for some reason, it is precisely takedowns of “race” cognition and racist schemes of political speech and behavior, exposing even the most obvious facts, its most well-known basic concepts relating to “race,” that provoke the sharpest rejection, opposition and anger . . . Even in otherwise asymptomatic, civic, supposedly “left”-leaning contexts. The societies of our region seem—barely—to tolerate critiques of class oppression and exploitation, discussions of global inequalities, exposures of injustices related to migration, takedowns of gender oppression and exclusion from informal networks—but they tend to react with astounding sharpness to even the most obvious insights concerning “race” cognition. In my view, one of the fundamental reasons for this is that many people in this part of the world feel that “we have been pushed to the wall”, that we have nowhere to “retreat”, that our last “rescue” might be a violent self-attachment to Eurowhite identity.
A manifestation of this is the (historically completely unfounded, in so many ways hilarious and sad, I might add) desire instantly to join the Eurowhiteness represented by the “Western” societies of the European Union, leading to a near-total ban on any, even the most factual critical examination of the role and functions of the EU in the eastern half of the continent. I am speaking of experience here—having published extensively on that topic.[v] All this is based on vulgar ideas of “whiteness” narrowed down to skin color or other aspects of physical appearance. It is perhaps enough to mention the distinction between lighter vs. darker-skinned populations as they have been received vs. rejected, helped vs. pushed back, as they sought asylum in Hungary and Poland over the last decade. I am referring here to public culture, popular perceptions in large majorities of the populations of those countries, not just the fractions of political “elites” that manipulate media content to this effect.[vi] The problem is much bigger than a few cynical right-wing demagogues.
If we scratch the surface, soon enough we encounter the obsessive-compulsive preoccupation that much of the world outside Western Europe—to quote the horrible, forced phrase of public discourse in Hungary that pops up in the most surprising contexts–is “not suitable for white man.” (See Figure 1 below.)
Once again, the mainstream of our cultures has been reduced to begging, praying—to an imaginary authority, I should add—to be “permitted to enter” into the haloed category of Eurowhite identity, imagined as paradise . . . Lest we get stuck outside the fortress of Eurowhiteness, among the putative “colored” folk. The contempt, oppression, exclusion, ridicule and outright hate toward the racialized minorities in our societies—as well as our neighbors, especially those to the east and south of us, see Milica Bakić-Hayden’s poignant analysis in “Nesting Orientalisms”—are therefore key pointers to the existence of a kind of global identity politics, a construction-of-self on part of the exhausted servant who delivers back breaking work with a forced smile “upward” while trampling, treading with exaggerated violence “downward” . . . Thus, the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe strain themselves to cleanse the “dirt” from their “dirty white”[vii] identity.
B. A.: Do I understand correctly that the problem of “race” cognition, as you describe it, is not a partial issue but something that concerns the general political structure of global space? And that it does not fit into what is often called identity politics or the question of recognition versus redistribution, but includes all these and much more: the class problem, the question of our relationship to Europeanness and to horizons beyond Europe? The way I see it, from this point of view, our political community can and must also be fundamentally reconsidered, since through these, local spasms and frozen notions can theoretically–to paraphrase Fredric Jameson–become possible to map globally. In other words, this issue is no longer just a description of society, but as if you were also supplying tools for a new kind of politics. Or am I overstating the dimensions of the problem?
B.J. As a sociologist, I have concluded that, in our post-feudal environment, despite all its rhetoric of modernity, there are three, exceptionally obdurate systems of relations—class, “race” and gender—whose socially destructive effects cannot be reduced to each other even with the greatest intellectual / political effort. Thus, we will never be able to explain “race” exclusion and violence exclusively from class exploitation or gender relations, no matter how much we affirm our Marxist or feminist commitments. Clearly, the three processes interfere in, work side by side with, each other. My conclusion is that only by fighting all three together can we reduce the social damage and tragedies they cause. If we focus on only one, the other two will team up to smash our effort. I insist on saying this as a follower of the Marxian view of alienation, a person committed to combating gender oppression, and a sworn enemy of “race” oppression. This is the problem at the abstract level. We can’t choose our “favorite” affliction at the expense of other problems. We need to fight them all, simultaneously.
What you referred to as identity politics can be roughly defined as the cultural reflex of a hyper-exploitative, neoliberal society. It takes place in two steps:
- informally strictly forbidding or blocking the use of the critical concept of class capitalism and, then,
- selecting one, always only, of the remaining two plagues—”race” cognition and “gender” violence—and pretending to remedy it by purely symbolic means.
But “of course” they are very careful not to affect the system by the tiny reforms thus realized. Band-aid—for the plague.
Let me give you two recent, “race”-related examples from the US context. Due to the collective retirement of senior colleagues, a sociology department shrank somewhat, and it tried to find new colleagues for several jobs at once. For one of the vacancies advertised, they were looking for a sociologist of “race,” even mentioning postcolonial theories in the job description.
A young candidate working on a truly exciting project also applied: “historical sociology, knowledge of four languages, two colonial environments and the colonial relations connecting them through the colonial “center”, letters of reference from one of the world’s leading universities, excellent publications, book contracts” one member of the committee said after reading the dossier. His colleagues look at him . . . Then one of them asked with a furrowed eyebrow:
“And what is this person’s . . . profile?”
„??? What do you mean?”
“’Race’-wise”.
“I don’t deal with ‘race’ science,” he said (while thinking of “Rassenkunde”).[viii] This was the end of his active participation in the work of the Committee.
The other relevant problem is what we could call the “the ornamental peasant of folk plays.” Employees at a leading public university—lecturers, PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, part-time lecturers, administrators, everyone—had been working without a collective agreement since the summer of 2022, as the previous contract expired. For half a year, the president of the university ignored the union’s emails sent to him, pro forma letters by lawyers, etc., with a certain aristocratic elegance, he just disregarded the employees of his own university. Finally, the employees had to go on strike . . . The striking, marching, protesting professors, staff and doctoral students were routinely videorecorded by various unknown characters, and everyone who had an internet connection to the university received increasingly obvious, manipulative messages containing blatant lies and increasingly open threats from the president’s email address. A message from the president’s office, sent to students, called on everyone to spy on, and report on their professors. Even the Teamster Union—the national union of truck drivers, a very strong pressure group in the US—supported the strike. The president—who was originally a biographer of an African-American diplomat who had lived a generation earlier—started to negotiate with his striking employees (actually, more accurately, he never showed up personally, he only sent in the university’s team of lawyers) when the governor of the state (a Democratic Party politician, i.e. politically dependent on union support), the supervisor of the president of the state university from a budgetary point of view, also intervened on the side of the strikers. Had he been a Republican governor, the university could still be on strike up till today.
How is all that relevant to our conversation about “race”? Well, the president’s appointment a few years earlier was almost universally welcomed by thousands of academics at the university—an East Coast, predominantly left-leaning institution, so far as that goes—as he became its first president in its history that was an African American scholar. The board of governors, consisting of representatives of local big capital and the state, conducted their politics by “making concessions in terms of skin color”—and elected a candidate who promotes the interests of big capital, and does so in a neoliberal, anti-educational, anti-student, anti-science, and ultimately anti-freedom fashion. That is a process of the “color coding” of neoliberalism.
So, to answer your question directly, the concept of political community absolutely needs to be reconsidered—in all three dimensions, at the same time. And it is obvious that it can also lead to the development of political practices, goals and ideals that are quite different from today’s.
FIFTY SHADES OF WHITENESS
On the issue of “race” specifically, there are two obstacles to overcome. First, the theoretical traditions prevalent in our part of the world—probably a function of the delusion of our supposed un-involvement in colonial history, but I am open to all other explanations—is almost entirely devoid of any critique of the “race” problem. It follows, very simply, that the trajectories of our political thought operate under some truly embarrassing misconceptions, such as:
- “**whiteness refers only to skin color**”[ix]–according to this blunder, from a political point of view, from the point of view of social-moral-cultural-material oppression, the distinction of “race”, hence the idea of, desire for and will to “whiteness”, is an epiphenomenal, purely superficial problem.
- “**Whiteness is normality itself**”, i.e. . . . according to this, there may well be a certain “race” problem with the world but “alas . . .” that boils down to the fact that “non-white” individuals, societies, cultures, etc. have not yet “grown up,” have not developed a framework for becoming equal . . . “with us”, whites . . . because
- “**We are white, based on skin color**”—this is perhaps the most serious scourge, perhaps the most self-defeating, mendacious lie of the east-(central-?) European political subject, since it simultaneously naturalizes “race” discrimination, i.e. denies its social origin and conceals the existence of a claim for privilege all over the world behind the category of “whiteness”. Meanwhile,
- it becomes **impossible to observe and understand** the peculiarity of “race” identification in our region, the “off-white” self-positioning, suggesting that
- **the “’race’ problem” is a “non-European issue”**. This is the equivalent to the fallacy of claiming that crucial issues such as sexual violence, gender oppression and inequalities, the entire “gender problem” are neither serious, nor “real”, as “**it is only a problem of women, LGBTQ and intersex people, etc. **”—i.e. a mere particularity).
In this way, it becomes understandable that political thought—even its supposedly academic variety—gets dumbfounded when confronted with the racist tendencies of society, be it the “race”-exclusionary, oppressive system of our formal and informal institutions or the “race” patterns of everyday life and speech. In this sense, some decisively important topics are excluded from the scope of discussable questions–namely,
- who / what is “human”,
- whether there is, can there be a hierarchy among humans, and
- what is society.
What is odd about that formation is that we are talking about societies that—tacitly, cynically, almost as if “in a fit of forgetfulness”—leave out about 10-20 percent, perhaps even more . . . of themselves, from their definition of themselves.
I would add that this tendentious, foul, forgetful game goes a long way in explaining the astonishing resistance of the social sciences in our region to any serious consideration of globality as an analytical tool. For, if we could say, as I am convinced we cannot say, that **the concept of human being is coextensive, in some mysterious way, with the category of “light-skinned person,” ** this tendentious distortion of reality could excuse us from the task of knowing the history of most, if not all societies of the world rarely or never at all discussed in our cultures. Meanwhile, we turn around and proceed, with perfect self-confidence, with the assumption that our conclusions about that tiny fraction of the world which we do see . . . apply to all others unproblematically. In other words, the “race” cognition that presents whiteness as **generic humanity** excuses us from the job of learning “other” histories and incorporating the collective experiences of those histories in our “generic” thinking. That is an awfully lazy way to proceed.
Unfortunately, the idea of the “racial,” specifically, “white” homogeneity of our societies—although, clearly, not valid for any society in the world in the descriptive sense of the word—is obstinately central to a certain, widespread definition of Europeanness. That is obviously a false and strikingly anti-human assumption—yet it exists and exerts its very real, destructive effects. One of the slippages of the European cognitive tradition, sadly reflected in the theories of the social sciences—something that is immediately apparent from any position of observation outside Europe—is that it speaks of the “world” but its “universal” claims are based on a selective and idealized reading of west European societies. It is a stylized, lightly sublimated representation of “Eurowhiteness”—a west European politics of identity.
This implicit standard of “Eurowhiteness-as-humanity” is contained in the de facto self-definition of the societies that make up the European Union. It is also present de jure, in somewhat indirect but no less brutal forms—see, e.g., the “race” cognition assumptions behind the EU’s “common migration policy.” Well-educated, “sophisticated” Eurowhite consciousness makes ontological claims of goodness about itself—meanwhile, it delegates the dirty job of beating, starving, drowning people, racialized as nonwhite, for no reason other than their specific racialization, to Italian, Spanish and Hungarian Schengen border guards.
“European pristineness” is, thus, a murder weapon, and the homicides take daily. Meanwhile, we are taught / expected to speak from the moral identity position of “universal goodness.” To put it very simply, we are uninterested in the rest of the world, and ignore the experiences of the rest of the world, the lessons that could be learned from them, etc., in our theory- and policy-strategizing thinking. Why? Because . . . we consider ourselves European in that sense which equates the term ‘Europe’ with ‘Eurowhiteness’—and . . . the rest of the world is . . . well . . . “alas” . . . not . . . “white.”
I cannot think of any other logic that would create a situation in which we find that neither political theory, nor sociology, nor any of the other basic sciences dealing with society in our region propose to deal in any, theoretically serious way with the question of “race” cognition—and especially not with its specific, locally rooted, globally informed critique of it. They do not do this, because at the level of the assumptions lodged in their self-definition, they have implicitly, tacitly, informally denied the relevance of the vast non-“white” majority of the world, as a point of departure. In this respect, even the greatest intellectual idols of the left in our region, who enjoy much outpouring of public affection and respect, speak with impunity about “the world” as extending “from Porto to Helsinki, from Athens to Edinborough.” Nobody reminds them of the existence of the ninety-plus percent of humankind outside that quadrangle on the map. Almost all of us run into this limit. Progress, if that is to be had in this regard, will come once we transcend it.
The intellectual-moral decision to “turn outward,” to appreciate, partake in and incorporate the lives, experiences, forms of knowledge, art worlds, etc. articulated by the non-European, non-“white” societies of the world would not only make everyone better scholars and more progressive political subjects—although that would be no small thing—but would also make it possible to understand our own societies and deal with the political problems of these societies more effectively. We would see the world differently, including our own cute little “world.”
One of the many fascinating consequences of this exercise would be that the “race” minority groups that are discriminated against, belittled, mocked, etc., in the eastern half of Europe could also be seen as a link to the wonderfully complex and amazingly rich parts of the extra-European world, no matter how distant from Europe. It could even be argued that one of the many functions of symbolic and physical violence against “race” minorities by the “race” majorities in our region is precisely to prevent relationship building.
To resist that separation (should we call it “apartheid”?), one immediate task is to construct relations. What we need for that to happen is to create specific social, cultural and political institutions of mutual, equal respect, appreciation and even, in the broad, cultural sense of the word, admiration, devotion, acceptance, affection, and the creation of shared emotional universes. What we need is a series of innovative social practices of higher complexity than today; wittier, more meaningful, better, more beautiful. This would require nothing less than a redefinition of what is meant by “society” (including the sense ‘socio’- as in “fellow [person]”). In other words, we need to create and promote a new political and social ontology.
Of course, for this to happen, the key task is the creation of joint endeavors among people who occupy a wide variety of “social positions” so that increasing numbers of people get used to the possibility of institutions operating “in the widest possible band” in social terms. There is an urgent need to increase what Durkheim would have called the social density of our societies, by way of inclusive socio-cultural practices across class, “race” and gender lines (not to mention others not discussed here, e.g., age, education, etc.) We must create and normalize a much broader, more encompassing form of social existence—in direct contravention to today’s neoliberal, apartheid existence. All this would also help us overcome the stubborn inferiority complexes that permeate both social practice and intellectual production in our region. That way, we might arrive at a point where there is no need for us to be ashamed of what we think, say and do—even in front of our current, and future, friends in the Global South.
[i] E.g., Zoltán Gábor, Orgia, Pesti Kalligram, 2016 and Szomszéd, Pesti Kalligram, 2019. I read them in the original Magyar. Orgia has been published in English as Orgy, by CEEOL Press, in 2023.
[ii] Új Symposion was a creative Yugoslav neo-Marxist journal in Magyar, with an impressive dose of avantgarde art.
[iii] George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1979.
[iv] See Brodkin, Karen, How Jews became white folks and what that says about race in America. Rutgers University Press, 1998, Gualtieri, Sarah, “Becoming” White”: Race, religion and the foundations of Syrian/Lebanese ethnicity in the United States.” Journal of American Ethnic History 20.4 (2001): 29-58, Luconi, Stefano, “Becoming Italian in the US: Through the lens of life narratives.” Melus 29.3/4 (2004): 151-164, Loveman, Mara, and Jeronimo O. Muniz, “How Puerto Rico became white: Boundary dynamics and intercensus racial reclassification.” American Sociological Review 72.6 (2007): 915-939, Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish became white. Routledge, 2012.
[v] I speak from first-hand experience. See, e.g., József Böröcz, The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-Economic Analysis, Routledge, 2009, https://www.academia.edu/190682/The_European_Union_and_Global_Social_Change_A_Critical_Geopolitical_Economic_Analysis or József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács (eds.) Empire’s New Clothes: Unveiling Eastern Enlargement, https://www.academia.edu/161649/Empires_New_Clothes_Unveiling_Eastern_Enlargement , Central Europe Review, 2001.
[vi] See, e.g., Krivonos, Daria, “Racial capitalism and the production of difference in Helsinki and Warsaw.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 49.6 (2023): 1500-1516, De Coninck, David, “The refugee paradox during wartime in Europe: How Ukrainian and Afghan refugees are (not) alike.” International Migration Review 57.2 (2023): 578-586, Zawadzka-Paluektau, Natalia, “Ukrainian refugees in Polish press.” Discourse & Communication 17.1 (2023): 96-111, Alsbeti, Deanna, “A Double Standard in Refugee Response: Contrasting the Treatment of Syrian Refugees with Ukrainian Refugees.” Hum. Rts. Brief 26 (2022): 72, Pepinsky, Thomas B., Ádám Reiff, and Krisztina Szabo, “The Ukrainian refugee crisis and the politics of public opinion: Evidence from Hungary.” Perspectives on Politics (2022): 1-26, as well as Agnieszka Holland’s recent film, Green Border, that addresses the complexities of the Polish reactions to the two waves of refugee flows.
[vii] For more on the “Eurowhite” vs. “dirty white” distinction, see my paper titled “Eurowhite Conceit, Dirty White Ressentiment: ‘Race’ in Europe.”
[viii] Literal translation of ”Rassenkunde,” the name of the “race” cognition paradigm that dominated German public thinking until after World War II.
[ix] I use double asterisks (**) to mark formulas that are stylized reconstructions of implicit assumptions, hidden arguments, etc., whose validity I question.