No Politics but Class Politics

Description

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”. No Politics but Class Politics gathers together Reed and Michaels’s recent essays on inequality, along with a newly commissioned interview with the authors and an illuminating foreword by Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger. These writings eschew the sloppy thinking and moral posturing that too often characterise discussions of race and class in favour of clear-eyed social, cultural and historical analysis. Reed and Michaels make the case here for a genuinely radical politics: a politics which aspires not to the establishment of a demographically representative social elite, but instead to economic justice for everyone. Foreword Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism What Matters The Limits of Anti-Racism From Black Power to Black Establishment: The Curious Legacy of a Radical Slogan Beyond the Great Awokening: Reassessing the Legacies of Past Black Organizing The Trouble with Diversifying the Faculty Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and Its Analytical Discontents The Political Economy of Anti-Racism Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Why Race Is Not a Social Construction Believing in Unicorns From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much Identity Politics: A Zero-Sum Game Django Unchained, or, The Help: How ‘Cultural Politics’ Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why Who Gets Ownership of Pain and Victimhood? Chris Killip and LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Promise of a Class Aesthetic Interview One: 27 May 2021 Interview Two: 3 June 2021 Interview Three: 10 June 2021 Interview Four: 1 July 2021 Conclusion: The Trouble With Disparity Notes Credits Acknowledgements