No Politics But Class Politics

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Ava DuVernay acknowledged that she intentionally falsified the history of the iconic voting-rights campaign in her 2014 film Selma to deny President Lyndon Johnson’s role because she “wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie.

W. Griffith’s 1915 paean to white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan, and its update for the talkie era, Gone With the Wind. As a class, the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. But we argue that the race-based movements that Clover and Singh defend not only don’t signify class struggle as such, they don’t signify it at all (even when the events they responded to did! As a critic, he has spent the last few decades writing extensively about class, identity, and left politics. 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.Parker’s understanding of what makes Turner heroic is that he resisted his oppression and that his act of resistance can serve as a model for the rest of us. The second thing worth mentioning is the report’s use of the word “disproportionately,” which does a great deal of conceptual work. This is evident in the mission of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigates discrimination related to “race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, disability, age (40 or older), or genetic information.

The real constituency race-reductionism seeks to address are the “big white men (and women)” who have the power to validate Voices and agendas geared to advance black investor class interests as representing the unproblematic good of the race and thereby use race to do the same thing the ruling class ideologues of militant white supremacy used it to do at the end of the nineteenth century.Because complaints about disproportionality – whether it's blacks being disproportionately unemployed, disproportionately under-represented in the top income decile or even disproportionately killed by the police – are complaints about discrimination.

Think, for instance, of the provision of quality, affordable childcare – a key demand of the women’s liberation movement in the 70s. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Tolerance for them is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning. In that case, the perfect is the enemy of the good: a little bit of progress is better than nothing.It is a politics geared toward bending ears of and currying favor from elements of the ruling class and their gatekeeping minions.

But it’s a vocabulary that may yet come to haunt them, for while they can talk the talk, they can’t walk the walk. Very little if anything that’s happened under the banner of Black Lives Matter since the summer of 2020 has suggested, what Clover and Singh seem to believe, that the race line highlighted in every demonstration was really understood as a kind of class line. An exhilarating journey that swaps the orthodoxies of contemporary progressive culture for a class politics rooted in universalism.

It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism. 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. The essays skillfully explore how this neoliberal version of social justice has gained hegemony in our major institutions. Eliminating disparities alone cannot make society more equal; it will simply make society unequal in a different way. 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.