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No Politics But Class Politics

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Because where we, in our narrow conception of the working class, supposedly think only about those who are actually working, Clover and Singh remind us first of the distinction within “the class between the working and workless poor” and second that race is “a main driver in the production and reproduction of this internal division” – “the racialized division of the proletariat between the waged and the wageless. For many pundits and politicians, discussing class entails, almost by definition, rejecting the legitimacy of struggles against racism, sexism or other forms of oppression.

So, when workless white people outnumber workless black people by three to one what sense does it make to say that race is “the main driver in the production and reproduction” of the distinction between the working and workless poor? Such diversification of the elites is welcome, but without a challenge to the fundamental economic structures of society, it also opens up space for the right to make headway with its own brands of identity politics. 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. In recent years, a steady stream of films and other narratives have openly embraced that preference. Consider the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ vote to accept a draft plan of reparations recommendations that include a one-time payment of 5 million dollars, the complete discharge of all personal debts, a guaranteed income of 97,000 dollars, and the ability to purchase any home in the city for 1 dollar.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). The essays that follow trace the ideological underpinnings of this steady retreat from contextualizing racial inequality within the broader political economy. A great gulf exists between the large amount of media attention devoted to the issue and the very small number of people of color it will ultimately impact. 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.

Nonetheless, prominent abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and the free black community of Boston, were enthusiastic about its formation and instrumental in recruiting its ranks.Media coverage of the recent Supreme Court ruling against Harvard largely ignored the way soaring higher-education costs have ended up barring all but the most affluent students of color.

Eliminating disparities alone cannot make society more equal; it will simply make society unequal in a different way. 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. This is fine for the tiny majority of people from oppressed groups who make it into elite jobs, and it is of course important that such opportunities are widened. Reed goes on to advance a devastating critique of the movies Django Unchained and The Help, arguing that their dominant message is one of individual success and atonement, coupled with completely ahistorical depictions of slavery and Jim Crow. No Politics but Class Politics gathers together Reed and Michaels's recent essays on inequality, along with a newly commissioned interview with the authors and an illuminating foreword by Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger.A further entailment of Parker’s view of his achievement is that history, for him, must remain narrow—a conduit for inspiration or therapy, for bequeathing legacies, or for purveying information or misinformation to the present—and not much more.

And while there are undoubtedly widely shared experiences that emerge from poverty, it’s unclear why anyone would want to celebrate these as an identity. As Reed and Michaels put it, "racism is real and anti-racism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn't what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won't eliminate it". This fact, the fact of low wages, is caused by lack of widespread bargaining power and job precarity. While it is certainly true that the right-wing freak-out over the skin color of a Disney movie character is absurd, almost equally revealing is the amount of oxygen given to this issue by liberals. If you want to distinguish between the left and the right, the relevant question is not what they think about race; it’s what they think when race is taken out of the equation.Whereas the ruling class needs to do everything possible to obscure the way society operates, for the working class, a complete understanding of all the complexities of capitalism is essential for achieving fundamental social change, for liberating itself. Amongst the newly enriched professional and managerial class (PMC) the stress on race and gender discrimination has become a useful mechanism for both virtue signalling and deflecting concerns about class inequality. And then think of the widespread agreement among criminologists that the Gini coefficient “predicts murder rates better than any other variable. In the cultural sphere, a skirmish developed over the Disney remake of The Little Mermaid that was released in May 2023.

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