I've Figured Out Race and Class
These days we hear about “racial capitalism.” I got interested in this after being nudged by my buddy Tom Walker, a.k.a. The Sandwichman. (Long story.) I was prompted to read a book entitled “Black Marxism” by Cedric Robinson (1940-2016). I think it’s an important book, but after some rethinking I’m not sure we come out in the same place.
One of my prejudices is hostility to black nationalism, plaything of the FBI’s COINTELPRO rat-fucking in the 70s, harasser of the Black Panther Party. From there it was easy to be offended more recently by the super-position of bourgeois identity politics over social-democratic program, typified by the Democratic Party establishment ‘s attacks on Bernie Sanders. Conversely, in recent years I’ve transitioned away from what I now see as a stance of class-essentialist economism, which Bernie could be accused of, to a full embrace of “Woke.”
“Economism” in this context means an exclusive focus on the bread-and-butter financial problems of the working class, to the exclusion of concerns about race and gender, among other things. Broadly speaking, I think the Democratic Socialists of America is in a class-essentialist bag. Its failure to relate constructively to the Black Lives Matter agitation was an epic political error. Not coincidentally, our membership includes few African-Americans. By contrast, “The Squad” and its growing constituencies are a rainbow that looks like America.
To me, “Woke” in a constructive sense means full inclusiveness, which entails basic respect, for all races, ethnicities, religious faiths, immigration status, sexual preference, and gender identities. It also means standing up for the full citizenship rights of all, including the right to not be shot by police.
So here is where I am now. I don’t claim originality; others may have mapped this out much better than I do here. I don’t expect media coverage of my thought process, but writing is a way for me to think it through.
The term “racial capitalism” is redundant. Capitalism has always exploited racial and other group differences within the working class, when such differences exist. In the case of race in the U.S., we could say the differences are constructed.
There is good documentation on the social construction of racism in the U.S.: the work of Theodore Allen, for instance. My old friend and movement running buddy Jeff Perry, may he R.I.P., was obsessed with it. I only wish we had more of a chance to talk about it.
What usually gets lost in the U.S. racism origin story, typified by the 1619 project, is that racism is endemic throughout human history, exploited when feasible by all elites. Robinson is good on this. That does not excuse it, it is only to point out the frame is bigger than a U.S.-centric or even a Euro-centric view would support. Somebody could write a book about racism in India before Christ; maybe somebody has.
The capitalist class employs racism, but so have previous elites. The entire process of European colonization was a vicious, vast, racist enterprise. Of course, slavery existed long before capitalism could be said to have begun. My inexpert guess is that slavery throughout human history was usually associated with racism.
So race is inherent in class, in the sense that the exploitation of the working class is facilitated by racism, or more generally, the domination of elites is facilitated by the fostering of inter-group conflict among the subordinated peoples.
To be sure, capitalist development affects how class and race evolve and interact. So if capitalism is racial, racism is now capitalistic. Too great an emphasis on race can obscure the historical transitions elaborated by Marx that are still fundamental in my view.
It will be impossible to unite the working class as long as the subordination of P.O.C. and others is not recognized and addressed.
The supremacy of white over black supports that of men over women, “straight” over LGBTQI+, Christian over non-Christian, and native-born over immigrant. It has long been thought that imperialism affects U.S. domestic social relations, I would claim, along the same lines. A basic explanation is that the arbitrariness of white supremacy, its illogic as Mr. Spock used to say on Star Trek, lends itself to increasing, perverse inclusion of new minorities to victimize.
There is some recent reporting to the effect that the MAGA obsessions with “woke” are fading. I’m not quite convinced. What seems clear in either case is that any progress for the U.S. Left will depend on a deep commitment to inclusiveness in all the dimensions cited in the previous paragraph, which programmatically means upholding the full citizenship rights of all. It will not do for DSA, for instance, to waltz into a BLM struggle in order to peddle nostrums about free college or Medicare For All.
As the aphorism went, “Sandra Bland had a job.”
I have no problems with Max's analysis. But the problem isn't analytical: it's ideological, or perhaps rhetorical. Bourgeois identity politics ("BIP") is the opiate of the ruling class: how it salves its conscience. (Some members of the ruling class do have a conscience, y'know.) The DSA is instinctively anti-BIP, and righteously so. Which raises the problem: how to be pro-woke and anti-BIP? As an analytical matter, there is no contradiction. But in terms of peoples' felt ideologies or in rhetorical space, it is damned hard.
I’d quibble with your point 4 where you surmise that all past slavery had a racist component. Maybe so, but your analysis is incomplete unless you factor in the importance of CHATTEL slavery where all descendants of slaves were also the property of their owners and all free Black people were often presumed to be runaway slaves. This makes American slavery worse than most other forms I know of.
In my darker moments, I ponder whether the fine words of Jefferson’s Declaration actually made this worse. If you want to believe that “all men are created equal” and yet you also want to enslave people, one way to resolve the contradiction is to decide that the enslaved are in effect subhuman, not men at all, just slightly more intelligent farm animals. We do note that slavery, expected to wither in the days after the Revolution, only became more deeply entrenched.
The importance of chattel slavery cannot be overlooked.