No Politics But Class Politics

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For centuries, the right-wing has used race to divide and disempower working-class Americans. Michaels and Reed submit that white liberal support for policies such as racial preferences has played right into the hands of conservatives. Walter Benn Michaels is Professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago. An influential scholar in the fields of literary theory and American literary history, Michaels is also a high-profile polemicist whose political writings have appeared in publications including The American Prospect and the London Review of Books. His most recent books are The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality and The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy.

These essays tell the story of the last seven decades, charting the decline of the left and American politics. The result is as rich as it is a long view that is pressing and immediate." —Corey RobinBetween the idea that the rescue of a multibillion-dollar corporation such as Disney is subversive and the conflation of Hollywood marketing schemes with racial equality, it is clear that a thoroughly neoliberal version of social justice has been articulated here. How should the Left make sense of this moment? This is hardly surprising, and perhaps even tautological. In a capitalist society, laws are written primarily by and for the protection of financial institutions, and laws that help the poor are laws that are bad for those institutions. But what it does politically is produce a tendency to frame problems in terms of identity, which our laws recognize as a protected category. As Adolph Reed Jr. puts it, “Legal remedies can be sought for injustices understood as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or other familiar categories of invidious ascription; no such recourse exists for injustices generated through capitalism’s logic of production and reproduction without mediation through one of those ascriptive categories.” 2 The relevant takeaway from this, however, is that such remedies, while morally correct, still function as class politics. They just happen to be completely compatible with the politics of the ruling class, who will concede to no longer discriminate against workers so long as they can continue exploiting them.

A recent example of this is the competing “white working class” narratives that dominated the 2016 election media coverage, when a great deal of energy was wasted on deciding whether it was better to condemn impoverished white people as deplorables or pity them as victims. Both positions treated white poverty as a function of identity, which meant both were compatible with doing nothing to make the lives of those people in poverty any better. Looking down on someone for who they are or what they believe is obviously reconcilable with not wanting to help them. But it’s equally possible to sympathize with someone’s pain, to recognize and demand solutions to their struggles, and nevertheless support a politics that does very little for them. This, after all, describes the platforms of both the Republican and Democratic parties for many decades.Adolph Leonard Reed Jr. is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in studies of issues of racism and U.S. politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School for Social Research, and he has written extensively on racial and economic inequality. He is a contributing editor to The New Republic, and has been a frequent contributor to The Progressive, the Nation, and other left-wing publications. He is a founding member of the U.S. Labor Party. Eleonora Roldán Mendívil is a political scientist and educator. She has taught at several universities in Germany and Austria on intersectionality, racism and colonial history. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Kassel (Germany). Her research interests include Marxism, (anti-)racism, gender relations and historical education. Together with Bafta Sarbo she has published the anthology Die Diversität der Ausbeutung. Zur Kritik des herrschenden Antirassismus (The Diversity of Exploitation. A Critique of prevalent anti-racism) in 2022, now in its 3rd edition.