No Politics But Class Politics

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Today, progressives regularly devote themselves to identifying high-profile representatives of the oppressed (whether in politics and pop culture, or in sport and in arts) and championing their achievements, in the expectation that diversity will trickle down to ordinary people. No Politics but Class Politics gathers together Reed and Michaels's recent essays on inequality, along with a newly commissioned interview with the authors and an illuminating foreword by Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger. As Michaels explains, “The possibility of belonging to a race of people who don’t look like you produces the possibility of manifesting your racial identity in your actions — of acting white or black. A further entailment of Parker’s view of his achievement is that history, for him, must remain narrow—a conduit for inspiration or therapy, for bequeathing legacies, or for purveying information or misinformation to the present—and not much more. For many on the left, social justice seems to consist of an equitable distribution of wealth, power and esteem among racial groups.

In this sense, they benefit from the causal mechanism being shifted from class exploitation to racial discrimination. Eliminating disparities alone cannot make society more equal; it will simply make society unequal in a different way. 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. Joshua Clover and Nikhil Pal Singh imagine that the “occasion” for our book No Politics but Class Politics is “the George Floyd Uprising” in the summer of 2020. Ultimately, it’s unclear what San Francisco’s reparations proposals would do outside of creating a more diverse class of property-owners.

Here is a clear-cut example of the difference between a class-based approach and one based on eliminating disparities. Such diversification of the elites is welcome, but without a challenge to the fundamental economic structures of society, it also opens up space for the right to make headway with its own brands of identity politics. Absorption and Theatricality Aesthetics Affect Anti-Racism Art Art and Objecthood Art History Autonomy Bertolt Brecht BLM Capitalism Class Clement Greenberg Daniel Patrick Moynihan Elizabeth Anscombe Film Form Identity Inequality Intentionality Interpretation Judith Stein Karl Marx Language Latin America Literary Criticism Michael Fried Modernism Neoliberalism Neuroscience Pablo Picasso Philosophy Photography Poetry Policing Political Economy Politics Race Racial Disparity Representation Stanley Cavell Subjectivity Theodor W. But to transfer such concerns wholesale when considering the mass response to police violence in the decade since Ferguson – that is, to conflate Black Lives Matter with Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc. Watching it this time, I remembered how startled I had been when Glory was released to learn that many people, including blacks and people on the left, dismissed or even disparaged the film as a “white savior narrative”—a phrase that is now a routine derogation of certain cross-racial sagas of resistance to white supremacy.

The book also features four interviews, more like discussions, between Reed, Michaels, Jäger, and Zamora. One indication of this universality is that the working class contains within it the overwhelming majority of the oppressed and therefore provides at least the possibility of a fighting unity in practice. If socialism is about pursuing the hunch that humans could actually take control of our own destiny, then socialists need to be organised in the workplace, in the communities, alongside those people resisting.She never accepted analytical categories that attributed political agency to abstractions like “the black community,” “white supremacy,” or even “capitalism,” and always grounded her arguments in the issues, concerns and understandings of the groups and tendencies she studied. But as we have seen, against all the stereotypes, on many issues workers’ consciousness runs ahead of other classes in society even at times of relative social peace. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. But if your stated aim is to eliminate economic inequality, even a more radical policy like reparations, which many socialists support, does in fact contradict this aim. For many on the left, it seems, social justice would consist of an equitable distribution of wealth, power and esteem among racial groups.

As Michaels explains, “The identity that is identical to action is not really an identity — it’s just the name of the action: worker, capitalist. As a class, the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. No Politics but Class Politics drives home the point that the current brand of identity politics, with its centering of disparities as the ultimate measure of inequality, is not only a form of class politics but also a politics that aligns with and reinforces the basic tenets of neoliberalism. It is increasingly clear that what is known today as “anti-racism” — with its accompanying displacement of political-economic questions to the realms of psychologistic babble, cultural navel-gazing, and disparities discourse — fits comfortably within the agenda of black elites and the broader ruling class. A crucial characteristic of the current situation is that the antagonism between the pragmatic and the visionary that liberals have often used as a cudgel against left aspirations and programs—the ubiquitous “now is not the time” or “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”—is passé.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. But readers of this discussion will also remember that she ran against Sanders with much greater success, speaking against what she derided as Sanders’ economism. These questions strike at the heart of the contradictions inherent in the identitarian reactions to Rachel Dolezal. So, when workless white people outnumber workless black people by three to one what sense does it make to say that race is “the main driver in the production and reproduction” of the distinction between the working and workless poor? On the contrary, the nature of wage labour provides a basis for the expression of a very different politics.

In a political and cultural climate dominated by neoliberal logic, like our own, this distinction makes no sense. But when actual policy proposals differ only in degree rather than in kind from a mainstream institute like Center for American Progress, we might question who ultimately benefits. And while it’s true that such politics would benefit some people of color, it’s likely many would find no meaningful change from the unjust conditions they have been forced to accept as everyday life. The scene depicts the first engagement of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first Northern regiment of black troops organized by the Army of the United States to fight against the Confederate insurrection.Looking down on someone for who they are or what they believe is obviously reconcilable with not wanting to help them. No doubt there are movements where class struggle, although not “signified as such,” is nonetheless signified. Similarly, Clover and Singh persist in asserting that Reed’s current argument about the relation of race and capitalism is a reversal of his arguments in the 1990s and early 2000s. However, as Warren notes, “they point to a truth rarely narrated about the South, namely, that it has never been as solidly pro-slavery or even as anti-black as popular imagination has depicted it”; he goes on to cite as a crucial case in point the rise of the interracial Readjuster Party, which wrested electoral power from planter elites and governed Virginia from 1879 to 1883—nearly two decades after the antislavery western counties seceded to form West Virginia.