No Politics But Class Politics

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Since, in an entirely orthodox fashion, we actually think of the working and the workless both as part of the labor force, we’re not entirely sure what difference to our views their racialization of the working and workless would make if it were true.

The trickle down feminism of the Clinton candidacy was, in many ways, similar to that espoused by Julia Gillard during her prime ministership. The book also features four interviews, more like discussions, between Reed, Michaels, Jäger, and Zamora. And because all of us necessarily have identities that are different from everyone else’s, it undermines the possibility of collective self-organisation. In the foreword, Jäger and Zamora aptly describe the current conjecture as one more sign of the “the slow disarticulation of the agenda of the civil rights movement from any commitment to reshaping the economic relations that produce inequality in the first place. The earlier instance, instructively, was a non-response to Reed’s corrective that the earlier arguments that they believe to contradict his current views were a “substantive critical foundation of the arguments about identitarianism that they don’t like.As the primary objects of a more and more exploitative system, the working class provides a baseline of opposition to the depredations of turbocharged capitalism from which effective resistance can be launched. Consider the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ vote to accept a draft plan of reparations recommendations that include a one-time payment of 5 million dollars, the complete discharge of all personal debts, a guaranteed income of 97,000 dollars, and the ability to purchase any home in the city for 1 dollar.

Reed’s 2013 essay “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism” mounts a rigorous Marxist analysis of the development of racial ideologies and the work that they do.

The close parallel between fin-de-siècle racist ideologues’ assertions of the primordial and immutable nature of white supremacy and contemporary race reductionists’ can provide perspective helpful for ascertaining what lies behind the impulse to insist, in the face of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that nothing has changed for black Americans and, yet more strikingly, Hartman’s dismissal of Emancipation as a “nonevent.

And they understand our skepticism about such movements – and more generally about “the social phenomenon broadly known as Black Lives Matter” – as a form of blindness to the ways in which the racialization we criticize can be both justified on its own terms and crucial also to the “anticapitalist politics” that they and (when they’re practicing “critical generosity” they think) we share.

His argument urges celebration of performative radicalism past and present – Combahee River Collective, Black Lives Matter – and acceptance of its failure to produce changes in social relations.

And Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 race film Django Unchained reduced slavery and manumission to the antics of a spaghetti-Western-style hero who in fact never challenges slavery but fixates only on rescuing his wife. Both positions treated white poverty as a function of identity, which meant both were compatible with doing nothing to make the lives of those people in poverty any better. Or, as Michaels puts it, “it tells everybody made rich by capitalism what they want to hear—that the only poverty they need to worry about is the poverty that’s an effect of racism.

It’s also irrelevant if you’re like many progressive idealists who certainly imagine loftier change but are cynical enough to accept that such change will never happen. It takes this identity for granted and suppresses the fact that all identities are socially constructed. They have engaged in race-solidaristic formations and in close concert with others, in class-based and multiclass alliances.