The man-bunned gringo summons the waiter and asks for the check. You’ve been staring at them for a long time. By now your coffee is cold. What the hell is wrong with you? You don’t know anything about these people. Even if everything you imagined about them were true, they would be the kind of people you’d sought out for the past eight years. Had you encountered them in New York rather than Mexico City, you would have been predisposed to like them. Aren’t you their negative image? Did you not go to New York looking for the same things you imagined they sought in Mexico City?

But there is a difference. They didn’t have to worry about not being allowed in, or not being able to stay, or being forced to go back. Your peers in the ruling classes of the first world cross borders without friction, gliding from one country to another like free bloody birds. It doesn’t matter that you have mastered their language and done well at their schools and paid all the applicable taxes, followed the rules and jumped through the hoops and danced when they told you to dance — you remain a colonial subject, un maldito criollo.

The debate was never in good faith. Democracy was still a decade away; the left was marginal and toothless; the old Francophiles had begun to retire. The three countries of North America signed the treaty with great fanfare. The Mexican economy grew, but not at the pace of the neoliberals’ projections. The richest man in Mexico became the richest man in the world, but the poor remained as poor as they had always been. In a sense, they were poorer than ever. Their corner stores now sold American cigarettes, but their young people were gone. Many were never seen or heard from again. Those who returned came back broken, telling confused stories about predawn raids and freezing detention cells.

As the years passed, even the neoliberals began to suspect that something was wrong. Again and again, your father’s generation of politicians called their US classmates, who by then had become senators and governors. Had they not sat through the same seminars, listened to the same exaltations of the laissez-faire virtues of open borders and freedom of movement? Hadn’t they made a deal? The Americans would demur, misquote some Burke passage about gradual change, and say they were actually just stepping into a meeting.

You sit in your father’s TV room, your temporary bedroom, watching the economist all but tear out fistfuls of his own hair. You look at his face, at the large, deep-set eyes that are the marker of your people. Looking at him, it occurs to you that the problem was that his generation of criollos refused to see themselves as colonials. They did not realize that their classmates at Harvard and Chicago treated them nicely not because they saw them as equals but because they were light-skinned curiosities in well-cut suits, distinguished guests from a quaint but insignificant country. With indios and mestizos, it was a different story. The Chicago Boys’ belief in individual freedom did not extend to people with dark skin. Their economics was not the objective science they claimed it to be, but rather a political instrument designed to justify imperial expansion — a postmodern American equivalent of 16th-century Spanish Catholicism.

But to fixate on racial disparities—whether still open or rapidly closing—misses the point. Writing about white political dispositions in an earlier period, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that postbellum working-class and poorer white Americans received “a public and psychological wage,” withheld from African Americans and other stigmatized racial groups. He meant that whiteness secured certain expectations and assurances of material and social gains, including access to stable wages and a monopoly on public goods. What we are seeing in this moment is not a literal diminishment of white bodies, but the stagnation of these wages of whiteness.White Americans remain political, economic, and psychic beneficiaries of these wages. (Look at most corporate boards, newsrooms, academic departments, and congressional delegations.) But for whites at the bottom, the decline in the standard of living—and even the conditions of livability—is hard to ignore. For them, not only jobs and affordable housing have disappeared; education and clean water can’t be counted on, as they used to be. The sudden reversal in midlife white mortality is just another sign of how deeply the latest phase of capitalism reaches into the lives of the majority of Americans, eroding the pretense and protective covering that whiteness once promised some of them.

The wages of whiteness were generated through black enslavement, expropriation of indigenous land, migration of low-wage laborers from Asia and Latin America, and, following the abolition of slavery, segregated housing, segmented labor markets, and unequal education. Today, these legacies of black subordination produce diminishing returns. Law-and-order policies, and the mass incarceration of black bodies, paid dividends to municipal bondholders, public prosecutors, and prison-guard unions (often the only source of jobs in the towns where prisons dominate). But the same policies also locked up and disenfranchised millions of poor Americans, across the board. Predatory lenders who targeted black home-buyers fueled a housing bubble that, once popped, wiped out the savings of millions of homeowners indiscriminately. More and more poor and working-class people across the color line are being overwhelmed.

[...] Working under the auspices of Alabama Correctional Industries (ACI), men and women are paid anywhere from 25 cents to 75 cents an hour for their labors. The humming of the textile looms in these prisons is a point of pride for state business boosters: “Alabama’s state prison system faces a wide range of problems, from overcrowding to rampant violence,” reported AL.com. “But one thing its administrators do not have trouble with is coming up with things for inmates to manufacture. From cleaning solutions and clothing to couches and barbecue grills, the list of items made by prisoners who participate in the Alabama Correctional Industries prison work program is long and varied.” In the first eight months of 2017, ACI reported more than $15 million in revenues, including almost $2 million in profits, approximately half of which came from textiles.

Most of Alabama’s prisons were built during the 1970s and saw rapidly rising populations, due in part to stricter drug laws. In the late ’70s, when Tee Jays first opened, Alabama’s state prison population was approximately six thousand; now it hovers at around thirty thousand, 42 percent higher than the national average. African Americans make up less than a third of the state population but more than 54 percent of those incarcerated.

As the textile factories were shuttering, emptying out, or sold off to foreign buyers, Alabama’s prisons were steadily filled to overcapacity. [...]

SINCE THE 2016 ELECTION, there has been a continuous, perhaps unresolvable, debate about whether deepening economic distress or ingrained racism led many whites to back Trump. Seen from the former empire of cotton in the US South, where surplus was extracted from black bodies, and industrial progress and good wages were allocated to whites who had only their own labor to sell, the notion that there would only be two opposed readings is impossibly simple.

We reap what we sew. Cotton made industrial capitalism possible by feeding the bodies of workers, enslaved and free, into its machine, and by voracious clearing of indigenous lands. At the back end of its historical arc, vulnerabilities that have long sundered workers along racial and national lines ensure that the race to the bottom continues. Sherry wants to fight against this by hanging on to the vestiges of her wages of whiteness, dependent on the subjugation of workers in Central America, prison labor, and the distinction that she posits between herself and other lazy whites.

[...]

If the economic struggles of white Americans like Sherry are now more visible, it doesn’t mean she is specially or inexplicably vulnerable. Her challenges do not make her unique; they make her more like everyone else. To be a working person in America today is increasingly to join the ranks of workers everywhere. Such a realization is perhaps the first step toward generating the forms of collective political will and solidarity to chart a different course. Sherry herself understands that there is little to exempt her from the crisis that has engulfed her town and region. She knows that the ground continues to shift beneath her. “I hope it works out,” she says about Mill Store. But hedging her bets, she adds, “I don’t rule it out that I would go back to sewing, if I had to.”

On the surface, these controversies might seem to have little to do with France, except that France and the US loom large for each other whenever the question of truth is brought up: whether we can know it, whether science furnishes it, and so on. American analytic philosophers tend to believe that no French thinker can say anything that is not obfuscatory. In France, meanwhile, what is generically called postmodernism is often written off, with puzzlement or frustration, as a cultural misunderstanding, as what was lost in translation when Derrida landed on American shores all those years ago and set off the mania for “French theory.” Sometimes the “French” part is dropped altogether, and wariness about grand narratives, the absolute authority of science, and such things is treated as if it were invented from scratch in American universities. Three years ago I exited at the wrong metro stop and found myself by accident at the heart of a demonstration of the euphemistically named La Manif pour tous movement, a Catholic-led campaign against same-sex marriage and, crucially for them, homoparentalité, or adoption of children by same-sex couples. The person who had the microphone at the moment I passed by was riling up the crowd with angry denunciations of Judith Butler, and of the importation of “le gender studies” from American university curricula. The crowd hissed and booed, and no one mentioned any of the towering French intellectual precursors to the names and ideas invoked.

Under ordinary circumstances, the institutions built by the old are repopulated by the young, who adjust them for new circumstances but leave them basically the same, in turn handing them over to the next generation. The possibility of successful passage through the institutions of society is what makes a person follow a normative rather than deviant life course: being a woman or a man roughly the way she or he is supposed to, partnering and reproducing in the socially standard fashion, trying to get ahead or at least get by according to prevailing ethics of education and work. In our society, this has meant (in ideal-typical middle-class terms) homeownership, an occasional vacation, sending your kids to college, and retirement. Historical continuity—the integrity of social institutions over time—works itself out on the individual level: people may feel they are making distinct, agonizing life choices, but for the most part they are living out those institutions predictably. An institution is, at the end of the day, just a pattern of social behavior repeated long enough. On the other hand, if the institutions aren’t processing enough people into the proper form—if too many can’t or won’t do family, school, work, and sex approximately the way they’ve been done before—then large-scale historical continuity can’t happen. The society can’t look tomorrow like it does today.

At the end of childhood, some millennials go to college to continue accumulating human capital. Harris is a peerless observer of the harrowing economic costs of “meritocracy,” and his chapter on college abounds in withering aperçus. “College admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids,” he writes. “And once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return.” Because the pressure to accumulate human capital is so intense, students will bear enormous costs to do it. Far from the coddled children of stereotype, Harris points out, most college students are “regular people—mostly regular workers—who spend part of their work-time on their own human capital, like they’ve been told to.” Exhaustion, overwork, and even food insecurity are common. Colleges themselves, meanwhile, reap obscene rewards from their gatekeeping position by offering a worse product for a higher price: hollowed-out pedagogy from exploited adjuncts and graduate students, masked with “shiny extras unrelated to the core educational mission.” Aggrandizing administrations bloat on student debt, the key to the whole scheme. Student debt, Harris argues, is a bloodsucking Keynesian stimulus, turning the value of the future labor of young borrowers into the capital to build stadiums and luxury dorms today, jacking up tuition even higher and allowing another round of borrowing and building.

But not every kid-bond matures. Students who can’t keep up are diagnosed, drugged, and punished. The extraordinary proliferation of mood and attention disorders among the young, and their development into a lucrative pharmaceutical market, is only the logical complement of the human-capital-accumulation regime of testing, supervising, and debt collecting. Depression, Harris notes, is up 1,000 percent over the past century, “with around half of that growth occurring since the late 1980s.” While there’s always a question about changing diagnoses with this sort of figure, Harris is convincing that there’s more to this phenomenon than an artifact of measurement. So too the growing punitive apparatus waiting to catch kids who fail: “We can draw a straight line between the standardization of children in educational reform and the expulsion, arrest, and even murder of the kids who won’t adapt.” On this account, mass incarceration, too, is a generational phenomenon, and it makes its first appearances inside schools, which are now heavily policed zones, as are the public spaces in which working-class kids congregate. “Millennials are cagey and anxious, as befits the most policed modern generation,” Harris writes. In this way, the book effectively argues that widely different experiences of neoliberalism—from the grasping student’s anxiety for good grades to the young person of color dodging the cops—are nonetheless part of the same social process.

HARRIS EMERGED as a writer with anarchist politics over the past decade, particularly in the New York milieus of Occupy Wall Street and the New Inquiry, though one can find his writing in this magazine and early issues of Jacobin as well. The window of possibility, the feeling of historical openness, that was generated by the Occupy moment did not stay open. The halves of the anticapitalist left, embodied on the one hand by Harris’s anarchism and on the other by the emergent democratic socialism of Jacobin, became incompatible—a rupture to which Harris’s work feels like a partial response. You can actually watch this happen in real time in a video of a 2011 panel at Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side. The same day that thousands had rallied to defend the occupation against a police raid, anarchists Harris and Natasha Lennard squared off against socialists Jodi Dean, Doug Henwood, and Chris Maisano in a contentious exchange off which one can read much of the substance of intra-left developments and conflicts of the past six years. Periodically, the camera pans around the packed bookstore, and a sharp eye can pick out a large number of prominent figures from New York’s left-wing world of letters.

[...] can the political impulses that Harris represents, the ones that come out of our generation’s distinctive experience, mature into potent collectivity? Or are they individualist from the root, bound to decay into posture and then a racket—absent the guidance of more seasoned activists, or without connection to struggles more deeply historically or socially grounded?

[...] What is the proper relationship to the past for those of us who want to make a new future?

The more traditional socialist left argues for continuity. We’ve been doing occupations since forever, Maisano said; let’s rebuild social-democratic institutions like CUNY, Henwood said. Socialism may be embraced by the young now, but in this version it still looks and sounds like Bernie Sanders—still a project of recuperation as much as invention, resuming an effort interrupted by the neoliberal caesura. In some guises, such historical continuity is humbling and useful. In others, it’s boomer narcissism run amok, reducing every left-wing proposition from a young person to an opportunity to force the past into the present. “Don’t repeat my mistakes,” cries the old socialist to the new one. The result can be formally radical but quite often conservative in affect and mood, dabbling soberly in the far-fetched notion that you can change the structure of society while everyone stays the same kind of people. This is one way of understanding why whiteness and masculinity continue to bedevil the socialist left, even in its committed antiracist and feminist quarters. A left that maintains a tether to a usable past is bound more tightly to the historical American nightmare. It can’t rush toward utopia, because it’s committed to engaging with people as they are and nudging them along.

The insurrectionary left, on the other hand, wants year zero. The power of the occupation, Lennard pointed out, is that when you step into it, you become someone else. The problem with becoming someone else, though, is that you’re disinherited from your history, so you can’t wield it effectively to understand the present or get ready for the future. It’s life in a permanent now, a condition reflected in anarchism’s traditional weakness when it comes to strategic calculation and engagement with state institutions—those durable, blunt objects. What was predictable about Occupy’s destruction—in fact, what was predicted at Bluestockings that night—was for this reason hard to prepare for until it was already under way.

It is, in its way, a generational question. If you kill your parents, you won’t hear their warnings, and then you’ll eventually just become them without realizing it. If you listen to them, you’ll become them on purpose. The question is how to become new and stay that way, how to be a stable point moving steadily from past into future without a neurotic relation to either—neither clinging nor leaping. This is the existential core of the strategic question on the left. It’s a question about growing up.