No Politics But Class Politics

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the point of history is not so much to figure out what really happened but rather to enable reparative and redemptive mythmaking. Rich white people, who make up the majority of the capitalist class, are almost always immune to any politics that emphasizes disparity of outcomes. If we do so, we’ll be alienating workers, who don’t care about anything other than checking their pay packet and occasionally glumly swilling some beer. When faced with, say, a Sanders-style option of making existing jobs better—so that they guarantee a living wage, benefits, and job security—or swapping out workers to match the racial and gender breakdown of the US census and avoid discrimination lawsuits, employers are not really faced with an option at all. Furthermore, the belief that one can imitate another race rests on the assumption that you are betraying your actual race; in other words, it still takes race seriously as a biological fact.

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.From Clover’s and Singh’s standpoint, of course, that appeal on behalf of the working class itself looks racialized. 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. For many on the left, it seems, social justice would consist of an equitable distribution of wealth, power and esteem among racial groups. Or, to put it another way, a recognition of class shouldn’t be an alternative to combatting oppression so much as a basis on which oppression can be defeated. 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.

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! But we go on to say, “one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people” i. Warren also contrasts Parker’s vision to the one that animates Gary Ross’s underappreciated 2016 film, Free State of Jones, which was also widely dismissed on its release as just another white-savior narrative.

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. 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. Employers can pay you very little if someone else is ready and willing to replace you, especially if your job is one of the many “unskilled” jobs reserved for the working poor.

Class” thus become synonymous with “middle aged white men”, a constituency allegedly suspicious of refugees, environmentalism, the arts, same-sex marriage and anything much else other economic nationalism and social conservatism.

Yet, as Anwyn Crawford notes, liberal commentators enthusing about the speech paid very little attention to Gillard’s role in passing, on the very same day, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Act 2012, a bill slashing slashed payments to single parents. I pulled up the clip on a recent flight and was moved yet again by the powerful imagery of black men finally able to strike a blow against the slaveocracy. And no project of anti-discrimination – that is, no project devoted to making sure that everyone has a chance to succeed in a class society – can ever make the slightest contribution to ending class society. The logical implication—Reed and Michaels have been pointing this out for a long time—is that if the men and women working these difficult, low-paying jobs were represented “proportionally,” which is to say if fewer Black women and more white men worked them, the problem would be solved.