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No Politics But Class Politics

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Its primary beneficiaries are not employees but employers who, liberated from their own prejudices, now get to hire the best and the brightest rather than the mediocre but the whitest, and—as the neoliberal economist Gary Becker recognized decades ago—once the eligible workforce is increased, employers get to decrease that workforce’s wages. Discourse on education has become centered on creating racially proportionate opportunities for people to overcome poverty instead of eliminating poverty in the first place. There are few scholars, if any, with a more penetrating analysis and critique of contemporary black politics than Adolph Reed Jr.

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. 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. In light of the ongoing political debates surrounding Critical Race Theory, affirmative action in higher education, the racial wealth gap, and reparations, the fifteen essays collected in the book offer a stark rejoinder to what at times feels like a futile cultural impasse that ultimately amounts to a lot of hand wringing. All too often, the proposed remedies to the existence of disparities tend to emphasize various schemes of individual wealth-building.They have engaged in race-solidaristic formations and in close concert with others, in class-based and multiclass alliances. Leaving aside the fact that more black characters than white ones have autonomous voices and personalities, the film was largely based on Shaw’s moving letters home, which were compiled in the volume Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune. Ultimately, it’s unclear what San Francisco’s reparations proposals would do outside of creating a more diverse class of property-owners.

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.

These, they tell us, are, at best, distractions from the economic imperatives upon which class rests and, at worst, provocations driving away honest sons of toil from progressive politics. What’s going on when a multimillionaire merchant banker can portray himself as a persecuted anti-elitist by virtue of occasionally catching the train? These are perfectly reasonable positions to hold, because, like people who tend to hold them, they aren’t particularly radical. Rather, exit polls suggest that a majority of white female voters – the constituency assumed to most closely identify with Clinton – opted instead for Donald Trump.

While it’s clear throughout the book that Reed and Michaels are deeply committed to a materialist account of race and racism rather than a cultural one, the book does offer some of their ruminations on the cultural sphere. However, the broader point is that one can eliminate racial disparities while still maintaining a fundamentally unequal economic system that relegates the majority of black people to miserable and precarious lives. Think, for instance, of the provision of quality, affordable childcare – a key demand of the women’s liberation movement in the 70s.Their personalities shine through in these discussions through countless witticisms and quips that will leave readers laughing and thinking at the same time. 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. Adam Theron-Lee Rensch is the author of the Field Notes book No Home for You Here: A Memoir of Class and Culture (London: Reaktion/Brooklyn Rail, 2020). As Matt Bruenig and others have consistently pointed out, elite Ivy League institutions already implement de facto affirmative action for the rich.

In tension with the mood for generalisation, there is also a strong contemporary tendency to focus on the particularity of experience rather than seeking common ground and understanding oppression as structural.It’s on that basis that Turnbull can see the US election as a vindication of his “jobs and growth” mantra, and a rejection of the “elite” agenda of the left. The relentless exploitation they experience also gives workers a unique vantage point from which to understand the fundamental drives of the system, ‘to see society from the centre as a coherent whole’. And while there are any number of moral justifications for those roles, the actual class relations that produce and reproduce inequality are an objective fact.

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