No Politics But Class Politics

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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. Cooptation and repression, two sides of the same coin, commonly have been adduced for nearly half a century to preserve the romantic appeal of radical movements of the 1960s, surrounding their disappearance with an aura of tragic “if only…” narratives, as an alternative to examining the limits of those movements, the politics they advanced, and the contradictions that fed their demise. Experience in the US, Britain, and elsewhere has shown, however, that having more women, trans people or people of colour in positions of power and influence does next to nothing for the lives of the majority of the oppressed. Counterfire is a revolutionary socialist organisation working to build the movements of resistance and socialist ideas.

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. Two recent events have revealed different sides of the same problem with how the dominant media institutions and opinion-makers in this country think about racial inequality. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, cultural journalist Tayo Bero went as far as to champion the insurgent quality of the movie. As we have seen, however, the potential of the working class to develop a holistic understanding of the world has deeper sources.Comparing the favorable reception to Caitlyn Jenner’s claim as a woman with the unfavorable reception to Rachel Dolezal’s claim as an African American, Reed asks, “Is the point supposed to be that Dolezal is lying when she says she identifies as black? In that case, the perfect is the enemy of the good: a little bit of progress is better than nothing. What’s going on when a multimillionaire merchant banker can portray himself as a persecuted anti-elitist by virtue of occasionally catching the train?

W. Griffith’s 1915 paean to white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan, and its update for the talkie era, Gone With the Wind. 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. The framework of identity reduces politics to who you are as an individual and to gaining recognition as an individual, rather than your membership in a collectivity and the collective struggle against an oppressive social system. Rich white people, who make up the majority of the capitalist class, are almost always immune to any politics that emphasizes disparity of outcomes. Reed’s 2013 essay “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism” mounts a rigorous Marxist analysis of the development of racial ideologies and the work that they do.Known for challenging the “prevailing trends of postmodernist theory,” Michaels has produced works connecting postmodernism, neoliberal capitalism and socioeconomic inequality. It’s also not really discrimination when an employer gives a job to someone whose wealthy family has provided them with a better education than you.

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. The focus was on Julia Gillard and what an amazing feminist she was,” Brooks says, “but on the same day she’s hurting the most vulnerable women. There is no singular, transhistorical “Black Liberation Struggle” or “Black Freedom Movement,” and there never has been. Given the nature of the case, the conversation around the ruling was disproportionately centered on Ivy League institutions like Harvard.Not only has he been true to the neoliberal ideal of monetized social justice advocacy in his own practice; in an interview in The Drift Táíwo declares it as an ideal: “Actually, I think woke capitalism represents a substantive victory of the left and the forces of justice. As usual, Reed is able to tease out the underlying class dynamics at work in the Dolezal episode, writing that the hostile reaction “is about protection of the boundaries of racial authenticity as the exclusive property of the guild of Racial Spokespersonship. Warren quotes Stephen Oates’s The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (1975), which notes that “in the western part of the state, where antislavery and anti-Negro sentiment had long been stirring, whites held public rallies in which they openly endorsed emancipation—yes, the liberation of all of Virginia’s 470,000 slaves—as the only safeguard in these dangerous times.