No Politics But Class Politics

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No Politics But Class Politics

No Politics But Class Politics

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They misdiagnose the nature of racism, which is not just an end in itself but a means to advance economic interests; The essays skillfully explore how this neoliberal version of social justice has gained hegemony in our major institutions. Discourse on education has become centered on creating racially proportionate opportunities for people to overcome poverty instead of eliminating poverty in the first place. Here is a clear-cut example of the difference between a class-based approach and one based on eliminating disparities. A class-based approach posits that the lower-paying jobs in our society, which also happen to be in the fastest growing sectors and disproportionately held by workers of color, should be made into high-quality, good-paying jobs. The identitarian approach instead focuses on how to make sure that these low-paying jobs are held by the proportionately correct number of white people. Worse than diverting attention from larger economic issues, the focus of upper-middle class white liberals on racial distribution can actually help “legitimate” economic inequality. Diversifying the gender and racial makeup of America’s billionaire club, for example, can make a system rife with economic inequality seem fairer. The focus on racism alone, Michaels and Reed write, “functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it.” In untangling the racial "interpretive paradigm" used within politics, Michaels and Reed go point-by-point:

Denouncing racism and celebrating diversity have become central to progressive politics. For many on the left, it seems, social justice would consist of an equitable distribution of wealth, power and esteem among racial groups. But as Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels argue in this incisive collection of essays, the emphasis here is tragically misplaced. Not only can a fixation with racial disparities distract from the pervasive influence of class, it can actually end up legitimising economic inequality. 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 book - collection of essays is highly repetitive but has one main theme. We focus too much on identity politics (racism) when we should be focused on economic inequality. It’s importantly true that racism and sexism have played the central role in selecting the victims of American inequality, but it’s also true and just as important that they have not played the same role in creating the inequality itself. Paying workers less than the value of what they produce does that.” 4

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Adolph Reed's comment about how anti-racism could end up doing for capitalism something similar to what slavery- an enterprising decision that justified unpaid labor in the US- and Jim Crow- a political regime that marginalized and provided cheap labor- both do. Justify its existence by using a take on race to further its aims, especially through corporate antiracism in hiring practices or employee training. Reed is wary of big, heartfelt words that group people into stereotypical voting blocs: "The symbols of community authenticity... well, in the first place, positing the community as an effective source of left agency provided you with no critical standard except authenticity in representing the aspirations of community. The 'community of course was an abstraction by definition, kind of like 'the masses'," (237). You definitely know you’re in a world that loves neoliberalism,” Michaels writes, “when the fact that some people of color are rich and powerful is regarded as a victory for all the people of color who aren’t (and when this, indeed, is regarded as a victory for justice itself).” 9 This, after all, is why the book is titled No Politics but Class Politics. Any other sort of politics is not much of a politics at all. The constant evocation of hegemonic neoliberalism as an explanatory force for all the economy’s woes leads to an incongruity in the authors’ arguments. As they write in the conclusion, “The extent to which even nominal leftists ignore this reality [of low wages] is an expression of the extent of neoliberalism’s ideological victory over the last four decades.” And yet despite all of neoliberalism’s supposed hegemonic influence, there seems to be a lot of people with serious credentials in the Democratic Party advocating for increases in the minimum wage or union participation. It’s likewise striking how much the authors’ criticisms about the class inequality of elite American colleges align and overlap with many self-described neoliberals and capitalists. For example, Matthew Yglesias is quoted in this volume in a manner that suggests he believes in the triumph of racial equality over class egalitarianism, but on his Slow Boring blog, he has also written lengthy posts about the idea that we should take seriously MLK Jr.’s aspiration for class struggle, which we should differentiate from “both the washed-out version of MLK that you can from conservatives and the Tema Okun version of racial justice politics that has become faddish recently.” Yglesias argues that we should place more emphasis on poverty reduction programs like the Child Tax Credit — ostensibly race-blind solutions that also serve to make the country more economically equal across all demographic swaths — and less on microaggressions and diversity training. 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 rare: a long view that is pressing and immediate. Corey Robin Walter Benn Michaels is a thinker, literary theorist, and author whose areas of research include American literature, critical theory, identity politics, and visual arts. Known for challenging the “prevailing trends of postmodernist theory,” Michaels has produced works connecting postmodernism, neoliberal capitalism and socioeconomic inequality. Three of his best-known books are Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004) and The Trouble with Diversity (2006).His books have been translated into German, among other languages.

In the foreword, Jäger and Zamora aptly describe the current conjecture as one more sign of the “the slow disarticulation of the agenda of the civil rights movement from any commitment to reshaping the economic relations that produce inequality in the first place.” The essays that follow trace the ideological underpinnings of this steady retreat from contextualizing racial inequality within the broader political economy. Anyone interested in the politics of race and class must push aside the dogma of identity and grapple with what Reed, Jr. and Michaels have been arguing for decades.–Jodi Dean It’s on that basis that Turnbull can see the US election as a vindication of his “jobs and growth” mantra, and a rejection of the “elite” agenda of the left.The dynamic of outrage and protests as a response is at least a half-century old. In fact, when Touré was an infant and we lived in Atlanta, I got to see that role acted out firsthand in the local political scene by Hosea Williams, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr whose political persona was all about being true to the activist roots of the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Whenever there was something like a police shooting, Hosea would march it off — he’d jump out and lead a protest march someplace. And then he’d go inside and essentially negotiate payoffs with the people who were in charge. And I’d already seen the same thing happen when I lived in North Carolina before I went to graduate school. So it’s not anything new, but it’s hegemonic at this point. These questions strike at the heart of the contradictions inherent in the identitarian reactions to Rachel Dolezal. Those who deny the validity of Dolezal’s claim on the basis that there’s more to race than identity have waded into some dangerous territory. As Reed points out, this view reveals a belief in “a view of racial difference as biologically definitive in a way that’s even deeper than sexual difference.” Robin Bleiweis, Jocelyn Frye, Rose Khattar. “Women of Color and the Wage Gap.” Center For American Progress. November 17, 2021.(https://www.americanprogress.org/article/women-of-color-and-the-wage-gap/) This disparate collection of essays is united by a few big ideas, some of which I happen to agree with but others I don’t. The authors make three major arguments: There are greater inequalities within races than between races. Both left and right have attempted to elide class as a useful vector for understanding social relations in favor of identity politics, which is neither very useful nor salient for improving basic standards of living. Finally, the sanctification of anti-racist politics, even as discrimination against the poor remains codified within laws and social systems, has served to hinder the wider goal of economic equality. Richard D. Kahlenberg is the author or editor of 18 books, including the forthcoming Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NiMBYism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See . He is a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

Lily Jamali is a senior reporter covering business and the economy at American Public Media's Marketplace, airing on hundreds of NPR stations across the country. Prior to Marketplace, Lily spent three years as co-host and correspondent at KQED’s The California Report. Lily has also worked as an anchor for Bloomberg TV Canada, reporter and producer at Reuters TV in New York and San Francisco, and as a freelance foreign correspondent in Central and South Asia, and Latin America. 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. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, cultural journalist Tayo Bero went as far as to champion the insurgent quality of the movie.

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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 Reed Jr. is the smartest person of any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and gender. Katha Pollitt, Mother Jones It is time to build Australian first,” he says, “buy Australian first in our contracts and employ Australians first.” Nor is it hard to grasp how such a push would reshape the political landscape, as the so-called populists of the right abandoned their radical rhetoric and united with their liberal opponents to defend the status quo against ordinary people. It’s easy – or, at least, possible – for Malcolm Turnbull to denounce ABC journalists as elitists. It’s much harder for him to use the same language against people like Nicole Brooks.



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