No Politics But Class Politics

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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.

This theme is further built upon by another piece included in the collection, Reed’s controversial From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much. But when actual policy proposals differ only in degree rather than in kind from a mainstream institute like Center for American Progress, we might question who ultimately benefits. Not only does the focus on the gap between white and black leave the gap between rich and poor untouched, it actually works to legitimate it. In No Politics but Class Politics, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed show how an identity politics that obscures class politics and ignores economic inequality only makes the many miseries around us worse. The gradual separation of race from class has led to a situation where many of those purportedly on the Left have (perhaps unknowingly) accepted an essentializing framework to think about race.For one thing, it makes sense that poverty is rarely embraced as an identity—namely, because it isn’t one. All too often, the proposed remedies to the existence of disparities tend to emphasize various schemes of individual wealth-building. 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. 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.

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. We need to figure out how to start trying to build a mass movement around appealing to the material needs of the broad working-class. Looking down on someone for who they are or what they believe is obviously reconcilable with not wanting to help them. This book pushes us closer towards the uncompromising, bare-knuckled anti-capitalist movement we so desperately need. As Michaels asks in the featured essay, titled Identity Politics: A Zero-Sum Game, “Which is a more progressive goal — a world in which only thirteen per cent of black people (instead of twenty-four per cent) live below the poverty line or a world in which none of them do?Stein’s work shows the depth, breadth and intellectual richness that a grounded historical-materialist perspective can bring to scholarship and understanding. Addressing an injustice connected to identity, like a mental illness, is fundamentally different from correcting the injustice of class inequality. 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. Not only can a fixation with racial disparities distract from the pervasive influence of class, it can actually end up legitimising economic inequality. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, cultural journalist Tayo Bero went as far as to champion the insurgent quality of the movie.