Rethinking Class and Social Difference

Barry Eidlin, Michael A. McCarthy, Barry Eidlin, Michael A. McCarthy

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781839820212
• eBook ISBN: 9781839820229
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Política

Rethinking Class and Social Difference brings together contributions from scholars developing new social scientific and theoretical approaches to a wide range of differing forms of social difference and inequality, especially as they are rooted in and informed by the political economy of capitalism. These include race, nationalism, sexuality, professional classes, domestic employment, digital communication and uneven economic development. The volume is brought together by a focus on how seemingly class-neutral processes of social difference and inequality is deeply related to class inequality. Ultimately, the volume argues for a brave rethinking of the ways that class and other forms of social difference are bound together.

Applying the Black Radical Tradition: Class, Race, and a New Foundation for Studies of Development

Zophia Edwards

Abstract

In recent decades, it has become clear that the major economic, political, and social problems in the world require contemporary development research to examine intersections of race and class in the global economy. Theorists in the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) were the first to develop and advance a powerful research agenda that integrated race–class analyses of capitalist development. However, over time, progressive waves of research streams in development studies have successively stripped these concepts from their analyses. Post-1950s, class analyses of development overlapped with some important features of the BRT, but removed race. Post-1990s, ethnicity-based analyses of development excised both race and class. In this chapter, I discuss what we learn about capitalist development using the integrated race–class analyses of the BRT, and how jettisoning these concepts weakens our understanding of the political economy of development. To remedy our current knowledge gaps, I call for applying insights of the BRT to our analyses of the development trajectories of nations.

Keywords: Class; race; colonialism; development; Black Radical; Black Radical Tradition; ethnicity; racial capitalism

Introduction

Neoliberal capitalism and increased global interconnectedness promised to bring about economic prosperity, political stability, and a sense of global community. Instead, it appears to have exacerbated inequalities within and between nations, threatened democratic institutions, and deepened racism and xenophobia. Indigenous people continue to endure land dispossession, and poor racialized groups are overrepresented among the victims of human trafficking, contemporary slavery, forced labor, and migration due to economic imperatives, imperial wars, ethnic conflicts, crime, and state violence. We are witnessing the continued exploitation of who Franz Fanon ([1961] 2004) so famously called “the wretched of the earth.” The fact that racialized groups across the periphery and within the core are overwhelmingly among the poorest and most vulnerable in the world indicates the importance of the intersection and coarticulation of both class and race in the global political economy.

Yet, “development studies” in the United States – the field that typically grapples with questions concerning the economic and social conditions of nations (particularly in the periphery), the nature of capitalism, inequality, and how to achieve human well-being – tends to be anchored in colorblind understandings of exploitation and capitalism. Scholars of development acknowledge that neoliberal capitalism has exacerbated economic inequalities, but shy away from highlighting and addressing why these inequalities bear a distinct racial pattern.

Fortunately, the wheel does not need to be reinvented. From W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Cedric Robinson and Claudia Jones, a rich body of work that dates back over 100 years called the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) has long recognized the racial and colonial character of capitalism. This body of work advocates for combined analyses of class, race, and colonial legacies in order to understand industrialization, capitalist development, democracy, and equity. Race, BRT scholars assert, has historically been a central organizing principle for the economy and capital accumulation both nationally and globally. As such, the economy and society, capitalist development and inequality, and its impacts on workers the world over cannot be fully understood without centering both class and race in social scientific analyses. ⁱ

While this scholarship is widely recognized in history, philosophy, and Africana studies, it has been overlooked in mainstream studies of development. ⁱⁱ Evolving largely without reference to the BRT's contributions to analyses of capitalism, successive waves of development research have bifurcated class from race, emphasized one over the other, and progressively dropped one or, in some cases, both concepts from their analyses. The traditional class analyses that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s focused on class structures and class alliances/conflict to explain capitalist development, and deemphasized issues of race and racism. In so doing, these works tended to underestimate the ways in which class dynamics are shaped simultaneously by racial projects and structures. In the post-1990s period, the ethnicity and development branch of research that emerged attempted to deal with race, but developed even further afield from BRT formulations. This literature excises both race and class from its analyses: It treats race as a subtype of ethnicity, thereby confounding the two, and almost entirely ignores class (Alesina, Baqir, & Easterly, 1999; Easterly & Levine, 1997; La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, & Vishny, 1999). Thus, because class- and ethnicity-based frameworks sidestep the ways in which race and class are mutually constitutive, our current tools for thoroughly explaining the racialized class-based processes and dynamics that characterize capitalist development are limited.

In this chapter, I argue that drawing upon insights from the BRT can inspire future development studies because it pushes us to reconsider how we understand capitalist development in the Global South and the global political economy more generally. I start by reviewing the main tenets of the BRT and contend that three major features of this tradition make it a powerful approach to furthering development research: (1) it incorporates an analysis of how racial structures were constructed alongside class structures through imperialism and colonization; (2) it theorizes the impacts of racial conflicts within classes and class-based conflicts within racial groups; and (3) it emphasizes the intersection of race and class in mass mobilizations for emancipation from capitalist oppression. I then show how the explanatory power of the postwar research on development in the Global South – namely the culmination of studies that focus exclusively on class and those that examine race under the umbrella of ethnicity – has become progressively weakened due to its lack of engagement with the BRT and its inability to cotheorize race and class. I discuss how infusing contemporary development analyses with attention to race and class might reorient future development research.

The Black Radical Tradition

The BRT can be described as:

…a tradition of resistance honed by the history of racialized, permanent, hereditary, and chattel slavery that formed the counters of civic and social life in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. (Johnson & Lubin, 2017, p. 10)

It centers on the work of intellectuals in Africa and the African diaspora – WEB Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Angela Davis, CLR James, Claudia Jones, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Richard Wright, and Walter Rodney – to name a few. These scholars draw heavily upon Marxism specifically because of its critical historical approach, focus on oppression, and promise of emancipation. They reject the dominant notion of their respective times that “development,” broadly defined as the pursuit of Western economic, political, and cultural formations, should be admired and desired. Rather, they show how exploitation, oppression, inequality, and poverty are inherent in these patterns of capital accumulation and industrialization. ⁱⁱⁱ In line with classical Marxism, BRT scholars have sought to expose the structural sources of industrialization and capitalist development, and believed in the indispensability of class analysis – examining class structure, class coalitions, and class conflicts – for this task.

Yet, the BRT also went beyond classical Marxism. Black radical scholars found that orthodox Marxist class analyses failed to systematically analyze and critique fundamental features of modernity: race and racism; slavery; genocide; and colonial domination. They drew attention to the fact that rapid and incredible accumulation of capital occurred not just because of the exploitation of workers in general but also due to the exploitation of racialized, and in particular Black, workers around the world. “Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me,” Du Bois ([1940] 1997, p. 155) reflected:

I should have probably been an unquestioning worshiper at the shrine of the social order and economic development into which I was born. But just that part of that order which seemed to most of my fellows nearest perfect, seemed to be most inequitable and wrong…

They, therefore, emphasized combined race–class analyses to thoroughly understand capitalist development. ^iv

Black radicals also extended classical Marxism by advocating for emancipation from the structures of colonialism and racial representations that they viewed as similarly foundational as material class structures. Europe, to them, should not serve as inspiration to the former colonies. They envisioned a new world order constructed to uphold racial and class equality, and human dignity. Fanon ([1961] 2004, p. 238), for example, argues that we must strive for a world free of:

…the differentiations, the stratification, and the bloodthirsty tensions fed by classes; racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation, and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions of men.

Thus, while the BRT shares with contemporary development scholars a research agenda that aims to explain capitalist development, because of the lived experiences and subjectivities of people struggling under white supremacy and racial ideologies, it emphasizes liberation and emancipation from capitalist–imperialist and racialized labor oppression as well as the recognition of the humanity of the racialized.

In theorizing the sources of industrialization and capitalist development and how to achieve a different social order where all humans, regardless of their race, can flourish, Black radical scholars have provided theoretical and analytical tools for a combined race–class analysis that can be utilized in contemporary studies of capitalist development. Below, I highlight three such tools: (1) attention to race, class, and colonialism, (2) the racial character of class alliances and conflicts, and (3) the recognition of the agency of colonized racialized subjects.

Integrated Attention to Class and Racialization through Colonial Relations

Black radical scholarship places class, race, colonialism, and slavery at the center of their analyses of capitalism. For these scholars, capitalism emerged as a global racial and colonial regime. Admittedly, these scholars differ in precisely how they theorize the relationship between race and class. Some, like Cedric Robinson, see race and class as co-constituted and co-evolving in historical and contemporary capitalism. Others who hewed more closely to Marxism, such as CLR James, viewed race as secondary to class, but nevertheless warned that “to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error…” (James, [1938] 1963, p. 283). Still, and common to all scholars in the BRT, capitalism cannot be understood apart from the history of the interrelation between race and class.

Black radical scholars, in engaging with Marx, argue that capitalism is undergirded by a global system of racial stratification and dichotomous relations between center and periphery. This explains inequality across and within nations. Marx saw capitalism as emerging from internal class conflicts within Europe that gave birth to a new class structure. The weakening or overthrow of the landed upper classes, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the creation of “free workers,” were key ingredients for industrialization and the establishment of capitalist relations. Du Bois and Robinson, pioneers of revising the concept of capitalism, argue that these processes are inextricably linked to colonial domination and the transformation of bodies into “races” to be used for particular forms of labor – unwaged/waged, unfree/free, dependent/independent (Itzigsohn & Brown, 2020; Johnson & Lubin, 2017). Thus, their analyses involve attention to global racial and colonial structures and processes and further theorize the impact of this racialized colonial capitalist system for conditions in the Global South.

Robinson's concept of “racial capitalism” specifies how race is a central organizing principle of historical capitalism. “The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society,” he said, “pursued essentially racial directions” (Robinson, [1983] 2000, p. 2). Within Europe, Robinson argues, the first European working class (Irish, Jews, Slavs, and so on) were racialized subjects vis-à-vis “Anglo-Saxon chauvinism” who experienced invasion, colonization, and dispossession. Thus, contrary to Marx's formulation, racial slavery was not a precapitalist formation, a vestige of the old feudal order. Rather, Black radical scholars argue that colonialism, genocide, and “expropriation” of bodies, land, labor, and natural resources – features of “primitive accumulation” as Marx termed it – are not only processes of a bygone era that featured only at the genesis of capitalism and/or pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Senior Editorial Board
• Student Editorial Board
• Title
• Copyright
• List of Contributors
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introducing Rethinking Class and Social Difference: A Dynamic Asymmetry Approach
• Caught in the Countryside: Race, Class, and Punishment in Rural America
• Is the National Front Republican and Does It Matter? Class, Culture, and the Rise of the Nationalist Right
• The Great Equalizer Reproduces Inequality: How the Digital Divide Is a Class Power Divide
• Unraveling the Middle Classes in Postrevolutionary Iran
• Just Work: Sex Work at the Intersections
• Applying the Black Radical Tradition: Class, Race, and a New Foundation for Studies of Development
• Of Home and Whom: Embeddedness of Law in the Regulation of Difference
• Index