Class, Race, and Marxism

David R. Roediger

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786631244
• eBook ISBN: 9781786631251
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Social Sciences

Seen as a key figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions of identity. This volume collects his recent and new work implicitly and explicitly challenging such a view. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery, in his major essay (with Elizabeth Esch) on race and the management of labour, in his detailing of the origins of critical studies of whiteness within Marxism, and in his reflections on the history of solidarity, Roediger argues that racial division is part of not only of the history of capitalism but also of the logic of capital.

PART ONE

INTERVENTIONS: MAKING
SENSE OF RACE AND CLASS

CHAPTER I

The Retreat from Race and Class

As the twentieth century started, indeed at almost exactly the same moment that W.E.B. Du Bois predicted that the “color line” would be its great divide, Eugene Victor Debs announced that the socialist movement that he led in the United States could and should offer “nothing special” to African Americans. “The class struggle,” Debs added, “is colorless.” As the century unfolded, the Marxist left, schooled by struggles for colonial freedom and by people of color in the centers of empire, increasingly saw the wisdom of Du Bois’s insight and tried hard to consider how knowledge of the color line could illuminate, energize, and express class struggles. We would find in Debs the striking historical insight, “That the white heel is still on the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized. The history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel.”¹ But we would also find him too often unable to act on that insight.

As the twenty-first century starts, the idea of a colorless struggle for human progress is unfortunately back with a vengeance. Such is of course the case on the right in the United States, where what the legal scholar Neil Gotanda and others have called “colorblind racism” has underpinned attacks on affirmative action and even on the collection of the race-based statistics necessary to show patterns of discrimination. The high-minded, ostensibly freedom-loving names given to such initiatives—“civil rights initiatives” to do in affirmative action and “racial privacy acts” to undermine the amassing of basic knowledge regarding the impact of race—have contributed mightily to attempts to recapture the moral high ground by those thinking that a society in which white family wealth is about ten times that of African-American family wealth could possibly be a colorblind one.

Nor are such instances confined to the United States. With the blood scarcely dry from white Australian riots against Arab beachgoers in 2005, that country’s neoliberal leader John Howard reacted to press headlines screaming “RACE HATE” and “RACE WAR” by loudly declaiming that he heads a colorblind society. When the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the ruling party there and leading candidate to replace Jacques Chirac as president, recently suffered criticism on race issues, he quickly planned a late 2005 trip to Martinique to emphasize how little color matters in the French colonial world.

Sarkozy stood out at the time as especially harsh in his response to the rebellions of Islamic youth in France against police violence. He failed to join the president and prime minister in distancing themselves from a recently passed law requiring that French textbooks “recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa.” Sarkozy was so thoroughly unwelcomed by Martinique’s great politician, poet, and theorist of liberation Aimé Césaire and others that the publicity stunt had to be cancelled. But within France the pernicious role of long-established “colorblindness” operates so strongly that Sarkozy can remain a top presidential contender. The legislative left did not originally raise a serious protest against passage of the pro-colonialist textbook legislation and the nation adheres to the no-counting-by-race policy that racial privacy acts seek to enjoin in the United States. Ironically Sarkozy himself has recently called for limited “discrimination positive” (affirmative action) as a carrot operating in tandem with deportations and immigration restriction to quell French rebellions. But to put any “positive” measures into practice remains a problem. As the Economist recently put it, the French minister for equality remains practically alone at the top levels of government in advocating for finding a way to even “measure the presence of the children of immigration” in political structures, the bureaucracy, and the labor force. The prevailing logic is summed up by the nation’s prime minister: “We don’t want to take into account colour.”

Against Race but Not for Class:
Raceless Liberalism, Postcolonialism, and Sociology

What is distressingly new, or at the least resurgent, is the extent to which indictments of antiracism, and even of the use of race as a concept, come now from liberalism and from the left. Electorally, of course, one hallmark of efforts by the Democratic Leadership Council to move the Democratic Party still further to the right has been an attempt to distance itself from specific appeals to, and identification with, people of color. Thus the constituencies most aware of both race and class inequities are marginalized in the name of appeals for “universal” programs, even as universal programs, such as “welfare as we know it,” are subjected to bipartisan (and anything but colorblind) attacks. The left was capable of dissecting such a shell game, most trenchantly when Stephen Steinberg analyzed it in 1994 as the “retreat from race,” and in what will presumably be Christopher Hitchens’s last serious book, his 1999 dissection of Clintonism, No One Left to Lie To.

But when no political alternatives to quadrennial returns to Democratic candidates who confine their tepid appeals for racial justice to the King holiday and Black churches, or support for Nader campaigns whose leader seemed not so much blind to race as discomfited by its very mention, the retreat from race quickened on the intellectual left. Thus the brilliance of Paul Gilroy is turned to writing Against Race and Antonia Darder joins Rudy Torres in producing the triumphal After Race. Orlando Patterson holds forth under the title “Race Over,” while Loïc Wacquant and the late activist/sociologist Pierre Bourdieu brand analyses of race as an axis of inequality in Brazil as pernicious exports from a United States social-science establishment that is as “cunning” as it is “imperialist.”

These works are of course much more, and in some ways much less, than a retreat to Debs’s “colorless” ideas. They lack the same focus on, and confidence in, socialist transformation and are often in dialogue less with class struggle than with cultural studies ideas about the importance of “hybridity” and the pitfalls of “essentialism.” In most cases they do not promise to re-center class by removing a fixation on race, and when they do, as in Reed’s “Class-ifying the Hurricane,” they prove unable to deliver on such a promise. They register the increase of immigration, of intermarriage and of cross-racial adoptions, and the need to affix blame (this time on the messengers) in a time when science repeatedly declares the end of race, and white supremacy nevertheless thrives as ideology. Ironically, the very success, largely under United Nations and non-governmental organization auspices, of organizing around race globally has also laid bare the varying national patterns of racialized inequality and the blurred borders between racial, religious, language, and national oppressions.

All of this has rightly made critiques of crude invocations of race as the simple answer to everything more compelling. But while retreats from race are understandable in view of the difficult and changing political tasks that we face, they are no more an answer to how we pursue those tasks when they come from the left than when they come from the right and center. The context in which they emerge, and the stature of voices contributing to them, demand that they be taken seriously. To do so requires us to look at the varieties of left critiques of race-thinking, with the goal of disaggregating them not being simply to show their incompatibility with each other but rather to identify various inspirations to which they respond. The most celebrated advocates of “race is over” and “against race” positions—Gilroy, Patterson, and Bourdieu and Wacquant—do not directly raise the issues of race and class central to this article, but their influence and arguments must be at least briefly discussed if we are to situate the more explicitly class-conscious writings of Darder and Torres and of Reed. In every case, the instability of the positions being invoked suggests all of the excitement, and the problems, of work in progress.

Gilroy’s Against Race begins with an extraordinarily dense and challenging discussion of the connections between the very idea of “race” and what Gilroy terms “raciology,” the nexus of murderous practice, policy, and science born out of seeing race. Race, Gilroy holds, is a “relatively recent and absolutely modern invention” and its scientific credentialing cannot be considered apart from its bloody implication in “evil, brutality and terror.” In a new world ostensibly beyond white supremacist science, and one in which Black bodies are marketed as desirable and even superhuman rather than only as degraded, Gilroy sees both new dangers and the possibility for a “novel and ambitious abolitionist project,” this time doing away with race itself. “Renouncing ‘race’ ” becomes not only the key to “bring[ing] political culture back to life” but the ethical response ‘‘appropriate to confronting the wrongs done in the name of raciology. Acknowledging that for “many racialized populations, ‘race’ and the hard-won, oppositional identities it supports are not to be lightly or prematurely given up,’’ Gilroy proposes a long campaign designed to show that “action against racial hierarchies can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of ‘race.’ ” In the book’s early stages, a disabusing of racist science and a recognition of the need to see the elisions of gender and to some extent class divisions made by Black nationalist movements seem to have Gilroy rejecting race but endorsing a more mature antiracism.

But, by the book’s end, despite asides suggesting that he will not too harshly judge those who hesitate to abandon the politics of anti-racist solidarity in favor of a “heterocultural, postanthropological, and cosmopolitan yet-to-come,” Gilroy has dismantled much of the grounds of antiracism. Declaring the “mood” of projects attacking white supremacy to be hopelessly passé as we leave “the century of the color line behind,” he also strongly dissents from any firm connection of racism to power or to white supremacy. Against Race poses the choice in approaches as one between an outmoded concern for “Africa’s antiquity” and an appropriate one for “our planet’s future.” Gilroy writes, “To be against racism, against white supremacism, was once to be bonded to the future. This no longer seems to be the case” as we “move out of a time in which [race] could have been expected to make sense.” The monumental but incomplete and fragile achievements of Black internationalism, so searchingly explored in their contradictions in Gerald Horne’s recent Race War, are reduced to scattered passages of precocious appreciation for the “planetary.” The utopian dimensions that Robin D.G. Kelley shows to be so essential to struggles against white supremacy and capitalism become for Gilroy moments to be captured against the grain, by reading through a lens that can reduce Frantz Fanon to “that prototypical black-European” noteworthy in large measure for his “indiscreetly anti-Marxist spirit.”

Like Gilroy, the sometimes-on-the-left Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson explicitly pronounces Du Bois’s remarks on the color line to be well-past their sell-by date. “Race Over” was the headline for Patterson’s projections in The New Republic in 2000. The article begins from the premise that Du Bois may have been “half-right” regarding the color line in the twentieth century but is certain that any attempt to continue to apply the insight would be “altogether wrong.” For Patterson the problems with twenty-first-century race-thinking are now less political and ethical than they are simply demographic. His visions are not very different from endless accounts in the mainstream press that the United States will become a white-minority nation in the not-too-distant future. By 2050, the United States “will have problems aplenty. But no racial problem whatsoever” Patterson tells his readers. By then, “the social virus of race will have gone the way of smallpox.” The retreat from race would fall into regional patterns, the details of which call the predictions of racelessness somewhat into question. On the West Coast, “cultural and somatic mixing” would produce a population mainly “Eurasian but with a growing Latin element” but the real engine of change would be in-migration by “an endless stream” of allegedly raceless new US residents who would use new technologies to change appearances. In the Northeast and Midwest, deindustrialized zones of misery would contain the white, African-American and Latino poor, bound together by “social resentment” and a “lumpen-proletarian hip-hop culture,” and isolated from the gated communities of the prosperous. In the Southeast, the “Old Confederacy” race divisions would continue—“race over” would not in fact apply—but somehow this would make no difference in the national picture.

At almost every turn the raceless predictions coexist for Patterson with invocations of old-style race-thinking. “Murderous racial gang fights” remain a fact of 2050 life and new technologies to change race are deployed. But an even more glaring contradiction obtrudes when Patterson adds other sets of prognostications in a 2001 New York Times article, “Race by the Numbers,” now distancing himself from the view of demographers that whites would become a minority in the United States in the twenty-first century. Arguing that “nearly half of the Hispanic population is white in every social sense,” Patterson forecast that “the non-Hispanic white population will … possibly even grow as a portion of the population.” Patterson may be right that children of non-Hispanic white/Hispanic intermarriages will identify as (and be identified as) “white,” but the jarring contrast between the two articles suggests just how slapdash the race-is-over position remains. Race disappears and whiteness reigns.

Wacquant and Bourdieu’s “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” published in Theory, Culture and Society in 1999 reproduces with surprising stridency Marx’s argument that the ruling ideas of an age are produced by those who dominate, putting it into the service of an attack on the discussions of racial inequality that have recently led to adoption of forms of affirmative action in Brazil. In doing so, they produce yet another separate strain of “against race” argument, finding it hopelessly fixated on the United States. Wacquant and Bourdieu pinpoint the “cultural imperialism” of United States scholars as the source of attempts to flatten varied regimes of race and class oppression, a flattening they see as producing a misreading both of history and of current political possibilities. Focusing on the case of Brazil, Bourdieu and Wacquant contend that United States–inspired, United States–funded and United States–produced research works to impose a “rigid black/white social division” offering the rest of the world a “poisonous” export. Such imperialism insinuates itself, in Bourdieu and Wacquant’s view, despite the fact that its arguments are “contrary to the image Brazilians have of their own nation.” It does so by trading on a perverse and unspecified combination of antiracist rhetoric and neoliberal financing for scholarship.

However, a series of withering critiques, especially from the Brazilianists Michael Hanchard and John French and from the cultural theorists Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, have dismantled Bourdieu and Wacquant’s contention that race is somehow a peculiarly US concept that would have to be exported. The critical responses show that in neither the United States nor Brazil is race regularly deployed for purposes of accusation rather than analysis, and that what Bourdieu and Wacquant call the “neutralization of historical context” is a charge that might be turned back on their own reductive understanding of Brazil. Most importantly, the critics show that the scholars accused of spreading “imperialist reason” and rigid caricatures of the Brazilian social system actually continue a long line of argument within Brazil that has consistently featured nuanced debates engaging both United Statesian and Brazilian scholars who well realize that the historical context of displacement of indigenous people, empires, slave-trading and slavery produced a very different, but not incomparable, racial system in Brazil than in the United States. When Stam and Shohat show that the analysis produced by Wacquant and Bourdieu is not devoid of universalistic views of race (and presumed colorblindness) found in French imperialism, the argument that we need a fuller and more complex discussion of race and empire rather than an end to debate is squarely put on the table.

Does Moving Away from Race Move Us toward Class?

The very first words in Darder and Torres’s After Race attempt to improve on Du Bois’s “dictum” regarding the color line: “We echo his statement but with a radical twist. The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of ‘race’—an ideology that has served well to successfully obscure and disguise class interests behind the smokescreens of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently, whiteness.” After Race centrally holds that race is a biological myth at long last invalidated by science, but now dangerously recreated because scholars persist in using the term, thereby decisively aiding the rise of culturally based neoracisms and even the recrudescence of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Thinking through Race and Class in Hard Times
• Part One: Interventions: Making Sense of Race and Class
• Part Two: Histories: The Past and Present of Race and Class
• Notes
• Index