No Politics But Class Politics

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The essays skillfully explore how this neoliberal version of social justice has gained hegemony in our major institutions. The issue of reparations is an emotional one, primarily because it is inseparable from the profound moral injustices of slavery, Jim Crow, and beyond. 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. No doubt there are movements where class struggle, although not “signified as such,” is nonetheless signified. Today, progressives regularly devote themselves to identifying high-profile representatives of the oppressed (whether in politics and pop culture, or in sport and in arts) and championing their achievements, in the expectation that diversity will trickle down to ordinary people.

Nonetheless, prominent abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and the free black community of Boston, were enthusiastic about its formation and instrumental in recruiting its ranks.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. If anything, this project simply serves as a demonstration of neoliberalism’s victory, as Reed explains in his essay “ Django Unchained, or, The Help,” “Nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. 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.

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". It is a politics geared toward bending ears of and currying favor from elements of the ruling class and their gatekeeping minions.

As we have seen, however, the potential of the working class to develop a holistic understanding of the world has deeper sources. The scene depicts the first engagement of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first Northern regiment of black troops organized by the Army of the United States to fight against the Confederate insurrection. Because people without wealth are denied jobs all the time, we just happen to describe this as competition. 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.

Gillard’s famous misogyny speech of 9 October 2012, in which she hit back at the Trump-like bullying of Tony Abbott, was widely lauded in the media. She has taught at several universities in Germany and Austria on intersectionality, racism and colonial history. The problem is that having a morally correct motivation, like racial and gender equality, in no way guarantees an outcome of economic equality, even if that’s your goal.First and foremost, No Politics but Class Politics forces readers to confront and challenge commonsense understandings of what race really is. In a strikingly superficial account, Táíwò argues that criticism of BLM or other antiracist expressions is misguided because “elite capture” happens naturally to left-of-center expressions. Addressing an injustice connected to identity, like a mental illness, is fundamentally different from correcting the injustice of class inequality. Joshua Clover and Nikhil Pal Singh imagine that the “occasion” for our book No Politics but Class Politics is “the George Floyd Uprising” in the summer of 2020. The real constituency race-reductionism seeks to address are the “big white men (and women)” who have the power to validate Voices and agendas geared to advance black investor class interests as representing the unproblematic good of the race and thereby use race to do the same thing the ruling class ideologues of militant white supremacy used it to do at the end of the nineteenth century.