No Politics But Class Politics

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Conservatives who try to blame black crime on race and liberals who try to blame it on racism are both missing the point.

But it’s equally possible to sympathize with someone’s pain, to recognize and demand solutions to their struggles, and nevertheless support a politics that does very little for them. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists in the campaign—which had precisely to do with King’s surreptitious negotiations with Johnson. Because where we, in our narrow conception of the working class, supposedly think only about those who are actually working, Clover and Singh remind us first of the distinction within “the class between the working and workless poor” and second that race is “a main driver in the production and reproduction of this internal division” – “the racialized division of the proletariat between the waged and the wageless. There is no gainsaying what Reed and Michaels decry as "anti-solidaristic" dimensions of a reductive emphasis on racial disparity, essentialism, and particularism.And, we argue, they not only fail to advance a working-class politics, they don’t even provide a basis either for explaining those extant inequalities that appear as racial disparities or for mounting popular challenges to the most egregious attacks on weak and vulnerable populations: for example, privatization and destruction of public education and other public goods, the publicly supported, rent-intensifying redevelopment commonly summarized as gentrification, or other domains of regressive redistribution. For many on the left, social justice seems to consist of an equitable distribution of wealth, power and esteem among racial groups. In this case, there is no contradiction between your stated aims and the approach to achieving them. In a capitalist society, laws are written primarily by and for the protection of financial institutions, and laws that help the poor are laws that are bad for those institutions.

That they repeatedly assert the claim without ever considering differences in political context between then and now that could explain what they present as a contradiction, if not apostasy, also suggests their point is mainly burnishing a brand. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. Without any guiding take on the power structure of wider society, a politics of identity can lead in self-defeating directions.

Lost in the discussion was the fact that the soaring costs of higher education means that only people of color from the most affluent backgrounds are in a position to be affected by this ruling. W. Griffith’s 1915 paean to white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan, and its update for the talkie era, Gone With the Wind.