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In a recent symposium in the web publication Syndicate on his book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, the Marxist theorist David Harvey takes issue with one of his critics, the radical scholar of religion Alex Dubilet. Harvey objects to Dubilet’s contention that the struggles against police violence, municipal courts, and white supremacy that have matured in and beyond Ferguson, Missouri after the murder of Mike Brown are “anti-capitalist” ones. “Frankly,” Harvey writes, “I don’t see the current struggles in Ferguson as dealing very much in anti-capitalism.” Instead he finds those struggles likely to recapitulate the “long history in the United States … of making sure that the anti-racist struggle does not turn anti-capitalist.” In characterizing what he regards as the most “fearsome” challenge in his book for the US left, Harvey adds, “None of these other struggles should transcend or supersede that against capital and its contradictions.”¹ Harvey gets matters quite wrong, but he starts us in a direction that is extremely useful for thinking about how we might work across disagreements where study and struggle regarding race and class are concerned.

Harvey’s position, featuring an iron distinction between antiracist and anti-capitalist (and elsewhere between “revolutionary feminist” and anti-capitalist), is especially difficult to defend regarding Ferguson itself. The best way to see the contradictions inhering in it is to watch Orlando de Guzman’s riveting film Ferguson: Report from Occupied Territory, which follows the lives of the working poor in and around Ferguson.² By letting poor people speak and taking viewers into their homes to an extent very rare in US cinema, Ferguson shows the municipal courts, the warrantless searches later justified by finding warrants accumulated in previous instances of racial profiling, unpayable fines for petty offenses, and the brutal but self-satisfied behavior by the police that ruin the lives of African American workers. We see the vast expanses of closed factories and the abandoned neighborhoods lost to deindustrialization and unfair housing practices that provide a backdrop. Those interviewed in the film clearly understand their problems as those of the working poor and the deindustrialized, as well as of those victimized in schools, courts, and on the streets because of their race. Surely, then, these are pro-worker struggles, aimed at abolishing one key institution of the state, the municipal courts, and at limiting the power of the police. In doing so, this resistance also aims to end the practice of running a suburb by shaking down its working poor rather than by taxing the large Emerson Electric corporation headquartered there.³ We are welcome to wish—I do wish—that people in Ferguson talked explicitly about ending capitalism, though no one with political visibility in the United States ever does. But to assume that that their struggles are therefore not anti-capitalist ones seems formalistic in the extreme.

Nevertheless Harvey’s response to Dubilet refuses in an important way to politically pit race against class. He emphasizes—the verbs should be familiar from the first paragraph above—that “none of the political mandates” flowing from his analysis of the contradictions of capital “transcends or supersedes the importance of waging war against all other forms of discrimination, oppression, and violent repression within capitalism as a whole.” Here Harvey draws a distinction, found in his Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism and in the work of others, between on the one hand “capitalism,” which he allows is permeated with race and gender oppression, and on the other hand “capital,” whose logic can be examined without needing to examine those categories.⁴ The substance of the exchanges, and the broader question of whether the production of difference is in fact part of the inner logic of capital, forms the subject of the last section of this brief introduction.

Also noteworthy is the tone of Harvey’s remarks and those of his critics. By tone, here and below, I mean the author’s attitude toward her or his subject matters and, in this case, opponents. Sharp differences are registered by Harvey and his interlocutors without total dismissal of the positions of others. The personal virtues of, and relationships among, the participants perhaps go some way towards explaining the healthy tone, but politics also matter. No participant in the symposium is intent on seeing race- (or class-) based initiatives described as diversions from the “real” struggle.⁵ Moreover, actual social motion in the last decade, from the immigrant rights marches and general strikes of 2006 to the local mobilizations against police murders of African-American young people named nationally as the Black Lives Matter movement, has so clearly given oxygen to US social movements that marginalizing “race” struggles is now difficult, yet still not without its aggressive advocates.

On both sides, then, the symposium on Harvey’s work indexes ways in which we are in a more hopeful place regarding the theorizing of race and class than we were a decade ago, when the first of the essays collected here were written. Harvey’s desire to balance, if in praxis more than theory, the claims of class and of other forms of social oppression might even be considered the basis for a productive common front for those thinking through these issues from various viewpoints. Thus the exchanges on Harvey’s work described raise the major concerns of this introduction: where we are in the study of race and class; how tone matters; the grounds for hope and, within the hope, how we might measure the promise of a variety of recent and older work refusing to place race outside of the logic of capital.

In January 2016, I contributed briefly to a small exchange among radicals at the invitation of one of my sons. In it activists and lawyers for Law for Black Lives took up a fascinating question: “why aren’t killer cops fired?” Some threads in the discussion had suggested that the “logic of capital” dictated that the state, as employer, could cut its troubles in the streets and its losses in lawsuits by sternly and quickly disciplining cops who kill. From this viewpoint instituting mechanisms for profiling the police who are most likely to kill and weeding them out proactively would also make sense. And yet, again and again we find that police who shoot people dead under the most questionable circumstances already have substantial records of abuse complaints before the killing and remain on the force after it. Cities so firmly in the hands of liberal Democrats that they scarcely have an opposition party sign contracts with police “unions” allowing for the destruction of records of police against whom misconduct complaints regarding use of force are lodged, making the assessment of individuals about to cross over into deadly violence all but impossible.⁶ How would scholars of race and class make sense of such apparent irrationality?

The tenor of the exchanges appealed to me greatly, in that nobody seemed to possess a ready-made line explaining everything and nobody assumed that an answer had to be finalized before actions could proceed. The discussion seemed a perfect illustration of political scientist Michael Dawson’s reminder that (re)building a Black left requires becoming “comfortable with trying to effect change without knowing all the answers in advance.”⁷ In this way it contrasted with too many academic debates.

I answered the question on the non-firing of killer cops initially as a Marxist and labor historian. Some prior comments had reflected on police unions as a source of soft-on-police-violence practices. I argued that, as unions, police organizations were not very strong, though their power to forestall investigation of police violence is at times striking. Successful police strikes remain very rare and labor law is not on their side, even if in some places they are exempt from general onslaughts against unions of public employees. In Ferguson the police victimizing the Black community made nearly low enough wages that they would have benefitted from the triumph of a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, though conditions vary widely and opportunities for money on the side are typically present. The informal power of the police to avoid being managed is far greater than the power of their unions however. They ride around alone or in pairs, with guns, and without bosses present; the general level of managerial control is bound to be low. After that initial point, my response entered into the more familiar territory of trying to think about race and class together by questioning the premise that the “logic of capital” exists apart from the practice of countenancing and fostering often violent divisions among workers. Even so it took a while for me to get to race and white supremacy as specific modalities in which the logic of capital combines rationality and irrationality. My own work on whiteness seemed not worth mentioning, although I did recommend the historian Nikhil Singh’s provocative and convincing “The Whiteness of Police.”⁸

It would have never occurred to me, in that context, to say that other points of departure beyond those that I presented toward answering why killer cops often keep their jobs needed then to be discredited. The idea that the question itself reflects overthinking—that police simply are in James Baldwin’s terms “occupying armies” controlling racialized populations within a system accepting the collateral damage that they inflict—is not wrong. The hyper-masculine, aggressively hetero, and militarized culture and outfitting of the police certainly matters as well in producing both violence and cover for the transgressions of others among the police. The blowback from the brutalities of imperial adventures abroad, which provide intimidating equipment, technologies of torture, and manpower to police forces, likewise does so. The luxury of the exchange was to think about contributing one’s corner of knowledge without rejecting all others.

This introduction asks why the ways that we think through questions of race and class, particularly in academic settings, cannot be more like that back-and-forth on killer cops. It, and the book itself, urges less dismissiveness towards opposing positions. It refuses to imagine that we achieve open debate by embracing positions advocating for the sidelining of the consideration of race or, as in the case of liberal multiculturalism, by neglecting questions of class. However it does urge, in ways involving self-criticism of even some of the reprinted essays included in the volume, a respect for the ways in which those from whom we differ are working to address difficult problems in hard times.

A specific need for self-criticism deserves elaboration at this early point. Anchoring the collection is a 2006 provocation that I wrote for a special “Class” issue of the venerable US Marxist journal Monthly Review. Titled “The Retreat from Race and Class,” my essay scarcely avoids the problems of tone for which I skewer others both within it and below in this introduction. When I wrote it, the most polemically sharp of these collected essays, the critical things that I had to say about some people whom I like and admire gave me pause. In some cases they should have given me more pause. Such was especially the case with regard to Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres, whom I now see less perhaps as retreating from race and class analysis than as trying to move beyond Black and white in understanding those matters, and to Paul Gilroy. I was therefore pleased that as the article circulated Paul and I were able to communicate forthrightly about it. At one point in trying to contextualize our differences, and my respect for his position, I wrote to him that I thought much of the contention stemmed from those against whom we were trying to argue. In my case the quarrel has been with activists and labor history scholars whose “class first” claims reduce social divisions so profoundly as to miss both the gravity of race-based inequality and the reality that much social motion responds to that inequality not because of manipulation by “middle-class” activists, but because of a history of struggles and a present shaped by old and new incarnations of white supremacy. Views marginalizing race also too often embrace the wishful thinking that if the political field were cleared of all those arguing for organizing around opposition to white supremacy, all would be well.

In Gilroy’s case, the confrontation he enters has been with a narrow nationalism on both the fascist right in Europe and parts of the left that take the tactical utility of mobilizing on racial grounds as a fact of life. Such views, he warns, find their ways into the wider swaths of antiracist politics, which too easily suppose that constructions of race will endure and that it is wrong to question what it hides. So forcefully does Gilroy’s Against Race take this stance that it argues for the rejection, which he admits to be costly, of race-based mobilization not as an immediate cure-all enabling a return to class politics but as a necessary step to find new forms capable of addressing inequality with a goal of transcending race. One can—and I do—disagree with the prescription while acknowledging that the issues raised are profound. In that sense, while leaving my own essays intact as a part of a developing argument, it is necessary to acknowledge overstatements in characterizing, for example, my differences with Gilroy, Darder, and Torres.

Seeking, then, to raise questions of tone as well as substance, this introduction begins with a consideration of how a long period of defeats for both racial and class justice structures both our confusion and our bitter certainties. A second section considers, perhaps less graciously in terms of tone, how recent controversies over the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and its opposition to race-specific demands help to measure the difficulties of class-first positions. Such positions, I will argue, reach into the thinking even of some who succeed much of the time in keeping race and class simultaneously in view. A third part argues that, nevertheless, there are substantial grounds for hope in newer approaches to race and class, including in approaches criticized elsewhere in the introduction. Especially promising is work attempting to argue that the production of racial and other differences is itself part of the logic of capital. A concluding section takes readers through the contents and origins of the book’s six essays.

Our Period and Its Discontents

On the surface, it would seem easy to think about race and class together. Not too long ago, I would have regarded a challenging formulation in the 1963 edition of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins as giving an elegant, if a little vague, solution to the question of how we do so: “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics,” James wrote, “and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous.” But, he immediately added, “to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”⁹ The quote still resonates powerfully, but I now think of it as being more a statement illustrating how deeply our problems run than as a solution to them. James sees the two categories as distinct, separable, and needing to be ranked, in ways I no longer do. Nevertheless his vantage, like Harvey’s, provides a good basis for mutuality and common work among those with differing inflections. Subtle balancing is required. The task is hard and not susceptible to being precise. As movements ebb and flow, existing struggles make one terrain, or perhaps inflection, seem more attractive at one moment, less at others. Pretense regarding a mastery of the calculus James calls for is regularly humbled. It ought, then, to be possible to differ about the specific emphases on race and class across time and place while not vilifying each other.

Just after a 1984 conference on the future of labor history had been held at Northern Illinois University, I ran into my informal mentor George Rawick in St. Louis. George, an important thinker on race and class who is the subject of one of the essays in this volume, took care of me around the fact that I had not been invited to the conference, despite being a graduate of Northern Illinois. He offered accounts of lots of the papers, but shook his head, often suggesting that they could only be so good and were fated to descend into acrimonious, petty disputations. The whole idea of the event was, he repeated several times, a mistake: “Can you imagine holding a conference on the future of labor history when there are no strong social movements to tell us where it should go?” We might hesitate, and at other moments George would have hesitated, to stake so much on the connection between upsurges in social motion and clear thinking by intellectuals. Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Stuart Hall, for example, thought through important ideas in periods of profound political defeat. But mostly, Rawick was right in terms of substance and he was distinctly on to something in terms of the difficulty of maintaining a comradely tone during periods of social quiescence.

Rawick’s comments speak to why it has not been easy to play nice and be clever when theorizing race and class during the long decline of the civil rights and labor movements. What used to be called the “nature of the period” has been favorable to posturing and unfavorable to both charity and clarity. The largest context structuring acrimony is that it has been for a very long time difficult to talk meaningfully about the ebb and flow of either struggles against class oppression or of those contesting racial injustice. For nearly half a century in the United States, we have overwhelmingly experienced ebbs and awaited flows. Nearly fifty years ago, when I first encountered the words quoted from James, US labor strikes of over 1,000 workers averaged 300 per year, sometimes reaching well over 400. In 2009, five such strikes occurred, in 2014 eleven, and in 2015 twelve. Today when the words “strike” and “US” are paired we think of drones. Union density, the traditional measure of labor’s decline, has hit unions only a little less hard, with a third of workers organized in the mid 1960s and a tenth—far less than that in the private sector—in 2015. I still wear a faded old T-shirt opposing a “generation of givebacks” in union contracts, but persisting unions are now in the third generation of defensive struggles.

That same period witnessed the end of great advances of the Black freedom movement and a turn to struggles to keep 1960s measures in force. Since the 1980s, the movement has played defense by attempting to slow the timetable of the dismantling of affirmative action and by preserving voting rights. When I wrote the introduction to How Race Survived US History just a decade ago, I did so with a post-it note near my computer with “7x” twice written on it, reminding me of the social facts that young African-American men were imprisoned seven times as often as whites and that white wealth outpaced African-American wealth sevenfold. Today that latter figure is a factor of sixteen.

The disorienting impact of such a long period of defeat can hardly be overstated. In the 1950s and 1960s, a period of intense and constant struggle for gains by workers and by the civil rights movement, the permeability of the categories of race and class emerged in sharp relief. The expanding horizons created by the movements against racial oppression made all workers think more sharply about new tactics, new possibilities, and new freedoms. The spread of wildcat strikes across color lines is one example. The high hopes Martin Luther King Jr. invested in both the Poor People’s Campaign and the strike of Black sanitation workers in Memphis remind us of a period that could test ideas in practice and could experience, if not always appreciate, the tendency for self-activity among people of color to generate possibilities for broader working-class mobilizations.

Optimistic thinking proclaims that things have recently turned around. It Started in Wisconsin was the title of a fine book on the mass struggles there against anti-union legislation in 2011, but those struggles were defensive, ultimately electoral, and soundly defeated. Or perhaps “it started” with the 2008 sit-in at the Goose Island facility of Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors, but that was a defensive struggle against a plant closure, involving 200 workers, and the plant closed. Or, how we hoped, Occupy “started it” again in 2011.¹⁰ “It started” is interestingly most often applied to movements seen as presenting class demands, but the quality of such movements remains very far from turning into quantity. Spectacular workers’ protests have occurred, especially those of the immigrant rights marches and general strikes of 2006 and of the recent local mobilizations of Black Lives Matter.¹¹ These struggles have won gains in some instances, but they are too easily considered as non-class, mobilizations simply based on identity. Meanwhile the “labor” struggle most able to sustain itself, that of the Chicago Teachers Union, has been also the one with the most sophisticated and energetic anti–white supremacy politics.¹²

One result of living inside of difficult circumstances not of our own choosing is that it has been too easy for some to suppose that our difficulties have been caused by paying too much attention to race, to gender, or to sexuality (where mass movements have also effected some significant reforms), and not enough attention to class. When these arguments press furthest and most simplistically—for example, in the writings of the literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels—we are presented with the view that neoliberal elites countenance demands based on race, gender, and sexuality in order to divert attention from the real inequalities of class.¹³ Such a conspiracy theory trades on the kernel of truth that elites, bureaucracies, and the judiciary do persistently attempt to shift the terms of struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia/transphobia into soporific vagaries regarding “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” Corporate embraces of the “value of diversity” are, it is true, not antiracist. Multiculturalism does instead regularly mask desires for the surplus value produced by diversity. But this hardly makes popular antiracist struggles irrelevant or inimical to addressing class oppression.

Benn Michaels’s move courts at least three major problems. First, it loses track of the extent to which working-class people participate in and shape initiatives such as immigrant rights, trans rights, and antiracist mobilizations and therefore misses working-class victories as momentous as those won in 2006 mass actions by immigrant workers. Second, it substitutes denunciation for patient attempts to define the terms of a coalition encouraging those oppressed in differing ways to come together and deepen the demands of all. Last, it locates the causes of the failures of organized labor and of labor politics outside and inside the Democratic Party as exogenous to those movements themselves, imagining that doing more of the same will work out fine, or would if multiculturalism were only defeated. The failures of the labor leadership are much better understood as failures of the labor leadership than the result of being outfoxed by multiculturalists.

According to Benn Michaels, the proof that demands for racial justice now function as mere covers for maintaining class inequalities dramatically surfaces when antiracists allow that in their ideal society poverty and inequality would continue and merely be evenly distributed across racial lines. The evidence that this is in fact a widely expressed position among antiracists is very scant. But, to be clear, the achievement of the equality amidst oppression so ridiculed by Benn Michaels is, though impossible without a broader social transformation, not actually a goal that anti-capitalists should sneer at as providing merely “victories for neoliberalism.”¹⁴ Since capital produces difference in its own interests, its continued sway limits progress towards eliminating racial inequality. By the same token, inroads in that regard do challenge the logic and limit the room for maneuver of capitalist management. As the London-based socialist thinker Sivanandan has observed, “in recovering a sense of oppression,” white workers must confront their “alienation [from] a white-oriented culture” and “arrive at a consciousness of racial oppression.”¹⁵ Struggles for racial justice are sites of learning for white workers, of self-activity by workers of color, and of placing limits on capital’s ability to divide workers.

Class-splaining: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tone, and Race-Specific Demands

A revealing example of the difficulties of tone and substance associated with the Benn Michaels position, and with its partial embrace by some whose work in other ways usefully challenges class reductionism, followed on an early 2016 Ta-Nehisi Coates contribution to The Atlantic. The article, “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders against Reparations?” concerned the failure of the Sanders presidential campaign to consider demands for the payment by the US state to African Americans of reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, and more recent injustices. Recently a recipient of the prestigious “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation and of the National Book Award, Coates had previously argued for reparations, but, in this instance, he further asked why Bernie Sanders’s campaign so preferred “universal” race-neutral strategies for combatting inequality over a combination of such remedies with other, race-specific policy changes.

Coates reported the position of the Sanders campaign to be not only that reparations were impossible to win but also that they were “very divisive” and a wrong choice given that people of color are so disproportionately poor. Thus reforms like a $15-per-hour minimum wage or free college education could function as economic demands that serve racial justice without dividing people. Coates confessed remaining unpersuaded, doubting that racial inequality, created by long patterns of racial discrimination in law and property, would yield to remedies that did not address the past and present of such practices. The article as a whole straightforwardly lamented that the Sanders campaign felt so little need for race-specific strategies to alleviate inequality. Coates also stressed the absence of strong support for affirmative action in Sanders’s program, underlining that the grand universalist strategy deployed by some socialists, and not only the controversial specifics of reparations, was at issue. There was not a hint that the article opposed socialism itself. Far from delivering paeans to Hillary Clinton, Coates gloried in the fact that “radicals expand the political imagination and, hopefully, prevent incrementalism from becoming virtue.”¹⁶

The responses to Coates’s little five-page article came with astonishing speed, repetition, and imbalance. They reflected a mixture of support for Sanders, of unfounded judgment, and of unseemly resentment regarding Coates’s awards. The often insightful radical historian Paul Street, with seventeen pages in Counterpunch a day after Coates’s article appeared, blamed the heresies of Coates on the “ ‘bougie’ sensibility” of the latter. He meant this not in the slangy cultural sense in which Coates has playfully applied the term to himself. Instead Street insisted that the “foundation-certified genius,” by virtue of his MacArthur grant and book royalties, is somehow actually—the italics are Street’s—“bourgeois”, and therefore embraces a “bourgeois world view” that “denies the central importance of class oppression.”¹⁷

A day later, the political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. edged from mere bitterness to ugly accusations when the economist Doug Henwood devoted his radio show to Reed’s views on Coates. It was unclear from the dialogue whether Coates was charged with being an agent of the US state, or of the capitalist class, or just of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Reed reported that Coates “sneers at programs of material redistribution,” as Coates had not done, when in fact reparations is such a program. “When I was working in the GI movement, when people like that would come into the meeting,” Reed added, “I’d just ask them ‘So which branch of military intelligence are you assigned to?’ ” Reed also, as a Sanders supporter, sniffed out a more immediate conspiracy: “The idea that Bernie Sanders becomes the target of race-line activists now, and not Hillary Clinton, is just beyond me and it smells. It smells to high heaven.” For him, Coates’s perfidy also directly reflected a class position, but this time the enemy was not bourgeois but the “professional-managerial class” that allegedly forwards the issue of reparations while Black working people, equally allegedly, do not. Coates’s stature, on this view, derived not from his writing and thought but from his utility to elites. Henwood asked: “This sort of stuff plays very well to guilty white liberals, doesn’t it?” Reed responded, “A friend, whom I won’t out, observed to me a while ago that one of the things that really irks him (and he’s a professor) about Coates is the way that white liberals gush over him and my informant said that it reminds him of the way that upper-middle-class liberals fawn over the maid’s son who has gone to college and ‘made something of himself.’ ”¹⁸

The slightly later response to Coates coauthored by Kenneth Warren and Benn Michaels accused Coates of purveying a “right-wing fantasy” because reparations would not do away with capitalist markets.¹⁹ Such pro-Sanders critiques of Coates ironically came at a moment in the campaign when it became clear the African-American vote was going overwhelmingly to Clinton and would be instrumental in securing her the Democratic nomination, arguably making the rejection of race-specific demands as questionable as political strategy as it is as theory.²⁰

By far the most coherent, though rancorous, response came from the often perceptive political scientist Cedric Johnson, writing in Jacobin in early February 2016. Perhaps his editors gave the piece its mean-spirited title, “An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him.” However, the piece itself did regard the historical role of not only Coates but also and remarkably of James Baldwin to be “assuaging white guilt.” Alongside a particularly strident attack on reparations, Johnson held that Coates “updates the Cold War, anti-socialist canard that any attempt to build social democracy on US soil will inevitably be hobbled by racism.” However, his own article showed that social democratic reforms certainly were so “hobbled” even at their highest points during the New Deal.²¹

Johnson criticized the “handful of Black Lives Matter protesters” who interrupted Sanders events as forwarding the anti–“social democratic” position. He lamented, “But I’ve grown weary of this position—repeated with startling unanimity by students, activists, academic colleagues, social media commentators, and career pundits, who frequently reject any talk of a universal, broad-based leftist project.” To frame matters thusly threatens to read out of existence the whole strand of fighters like James, Claudia Jones, and Dr. King, all of whom very much believed in universal projects and antiracist demands. The problems of Johnson’s position in this regard were dramatically revealed when Coates announced that he was in fact a Sanders supporter, and declared himself to be delighted that socialism was gaining a popular hearing, despite his reservations on Sanders’s understanding of white supremacy. As he wrote in a specific rejoinder to Johnson, “But I do not believe that if this world [of social democratic reforms that he supports] were realized, the problem of white supremacy would dissipate, any more than I believe that if reparations were realized, the problems of economic inequality would dissipate.”²²

Again and again, contemporary debates on race and class involve characterizations like Johnson’s of the supposed state of the existing discourse and policies as hopelessly tilted towards race at the expense of class. We need to bend the stick in one direction, it is said, because everyone else, or perhaps just liberals and neoliberals, so bend it in the other. So many well-positioned writers imagine that an increased emphasis on class can only come by toning down the race and gender talk that it is hard to see how they maintain the stance that they are lonely figures sacrificing to tell the truth. Academic emphases and those of NGOs are said to structure race-first distortions. Injecting a word about class becomes an act of extraordinary freethinking courage, defying a deck stacked against any such mention. No matter how repeatedly such mentions occur they get to count as speaking truth to power—itself perhaps an overrated practice.

On one level, as a Marxist who began writing in the 1970s when it was somewhat easier to be one, I get it. But we are hardly without platforms. Moreover, perceiving such a tilted-towards-race status quo sometimes creates too easy an alliance between those who wish to combine emphases on race and class and those who would rather see race off the agenda altogether on the theory that the poverty of people of color means that they can benefit from class-based reforms without the need for specific antiracist demands.

Consider, for example, the activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, her recent study From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and her reaction to Johnson’s attack on reparations. Her book is an estimable effort to take race and class struggles seriously. She argues well that without an emphasis on critically important questions of class only limited motion to toward racial justice can occur and a good society cannot take shape. Her book rehearses well some figures on racial disparities in wealth as well as disparities within the African-American population. Her knowledge of Black Lives Matter is as impressive as her respect for Black self-activity. The book is a cause for optimism that “race or class” sterilities might give way.²³

However, at times, Taylor seems to so believe that Marxism is locked in an uphill battle to be heard that unexamined certainties interfere with her analysis, and even her fact-checking. A pat review of the objective character of class, for example, sees her school her book’s readers to the effect that “whether or not a group of workers has reactionary … consciousness does not change its objective status as exploited and oppressed labor.” She then moves to specifics: “Just because white workers may at times fully accept reactionary ideas about African Americans does not change the objective fact that the majority of the US poor are white.”²⁴ But it isn’t. In 2013 just short of 20 million whites suffered in poverty while the combined Black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and American-Indian poor numbered 27 million.²⁵

On social media, Taylor posted Johnson’s attack on Coates and on reparations with a headnote describing it as the “essential reading for today.” The post extracted a pull-quote highlighting exactly the passage in which Johnson expressed how put upon he felt in the face of race-forward positions “repeated with startling unanimity by students, activists, academic colleagues, social media commentators, and career pundits.”²⁶ Since Taylor elsewhere avowed support for reparations, the attractions of the aggrieved tone would seem to override the disagreement with the central political issue actually raised by Johnson in this instance.

But the aggrieved tone itself is unproductive and at best half-convincing. The fuller story, as suggested above, is that substantive discussions of ending racial oppression and of ending class oppression both fight for a hearing against daunting odds. At the level of policy it cannot be said that demands for racial justice have had a sufficient presence in the program of Democrats over the last forty years to so stifle discussion of class. What would those demands be? At best, retreats from a half-hearted defense of affirmative action programs have typified Democratic practice, leavened by allegedly brave, and disgusting, attacks on family values among African Americans. That was the Bill Clinton approach, which advocated an “It’s the economy, stupid” rhetorical emphasis on the fortunes of the middle class as the unifying issue that would be jeopardized by appeals to (Black) special interests.²⁷ Racial justice has, at the level of national politics, been marginalized in the service of lamentably vague class talk, even as nebulous talk about racial justice has sidelined debates over class.

As I argued at the start of the Bill Clinton years in a New Left Review essay titled “The Racial Crisis of American Liberalism,” timid and duplicitous race politics perfectly complement timid and duplicitous class politics.²⁸ If—and I have held no illusions that this is ever to be in the cards—the Democrats were to have advanced militant departures from center-right politics on race, they would almost certainly have had to offer something to organized labor to keep a coalition together. To build support for strong forms of affirmative action, for example, in the 1980s or 1990s would have almost necessitated commitment to rewarding union support with labor law reform. It is hard to say which the party hierarchy wanted less. If Sanders were—again the whole paragraph here deals in hypotheticals—to have taken Coates’s advice and supported reparations, it would have been wise to offer reforms creating conditions for rebuilding unions and to take up directly how to build a movement to win such demands. Race and class demands, on this view, do not exist in a zero-sum relationship. Increased boldness in class demands is not gained, as the attacks on Coates assume, by hitting the mute button where race talk is concerned.

Where Work on Race and Class Is Going and Might Go

Admittedly, so far the introduction has not been a model of a positive, open-to-everything tone. Where attempts to sideline thinking about specificities of racial oppression are concerned, I suspect that letting “a thousand flowers bloom” cannot be the watchword, though willingness to work and debate together across difference can. I do stand by the idea that all of us should approach the difficulties for thinking about race and class generated by the difficult period in which we live with humility and frank admission that we cannot know where things will go. Happily, there is much in recent scholarly work and in recent struggles that offers glimmers of possibility. Indeed, some of the best insights in politically engaged recent work comes from some writers whom I have criticized above as too ready to suppose that class analysis best thrives when the field is cleared of over-emphasis on race.

In particular, three areas of promise deserve emphasis. The first involves how the critical study of whiteness might best respond to profound changes in the working class itself. The second measures the importance of anti-police, anti-racist movements and of recent work addressing inequality within the African-American population and to the increased visibility of what might be called “rulers of color.” The third brings us back to the introduction’s beginning, taking up the ways in which recent work challenges the view of David Harvey and so many others that race sits outside of the logic of capital.

With regard to the critical study of whiteness, the left scholarly project with which I have been most involved, the grounds for possibly productive auto-critique seem clear. I approach matters as someone who doubts that how we attach labels matters much against the weight of social relations. “Black or African American?” produced for a time interesting debates, for example, but in the longer run things shifted, and it became clear that academics and even activists do not get to determine popular usages, and social relations mattered more than names for them. Nevertheless, I think that we may be due for discussion on whether “white privilege” now serves us well in naming patterns of white advantage inside a system in which most people are miserable.

This question struck me forcefully during a 2015 visit to Rochester, New York. The historians Joel Helfrich and Jonathan Garlock had taken me on a wonderful tour of Rochester’s past struggles and present deindustrialized crises before I appeared on a Rochester Public Radio show. The host asked much about “white privilege.” It is not a phrasing I use often but neither has it ever been one I objected to. In this instance, I did note the extent of joblessness and foreclosure across the color line in Rochester and wonder aloud if “white advantage” might be a less loaded term.²⁹ This reservation registers the fact that the Marxist coinage of “white privilege” (or “white-skin privilege”) by Theodore Allen with Noel Ignatin in the 1960s seems to have become less the popular meaning of the term today than non-Marxist variants. Allen theorized “white privilege” as the package of mostly petty preferences offered to all whites and especially to poor whites, in order to create a cross-class, elite-dominated political coalition policing (enslaved) Black labor and keeping propertyless whites out of mobilizations challenging the wealthy. Why “privilege” became Allen’s noun of choice remains a mystery. Whatever the derivation, as used in Allen’s writings “privilege” cannot be read as anything but ironic and bitter, with the benefits of the crumbs from masters’ tables being pitiable and fully worth rejecting.³⁰

Today though discussions of the privileges attached to whiteness, whether in the useful writings of Peggy McIntosh and Stephanie Wildman or the less fresh formulations of Tim Wise, refer to what whites get away with interpersonally, especially within social movements and to what small affronts they do not have to worry about facing. In such writing white privilege is to be rejected in the name of racial justice but not necessarily also so that working class whites can fight for their own broadest interests.³¹ This usage will continue whether or not it is championed by historical materialists and I wonder if we on the left might be better off with a different terminology, perhaps focusing on white advantage, though with the same credit to Allen.

Critical studies of whiteness also have anchored—mea culpa—discussions in a framework that imagines race as overwhelmingly involving Black and white people as its subjects. This is true of both activist and academic writing on the subject. Rooted in an explanation of the origins of whiteness as bound up with racial slavery, it has been less than curious about settler colonialism’s role in shaping the creation of a white identity. The explosion of fine new work on settler colonialism and race, especially Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, challenges older studies of whiteness profoundly.³² The sociologist Moon-Kie Jung’s brilliant Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U. S. Racisms Past and Present specifies the task of retaining older emphases and taking on new ones in its closing words: “Once we realize that we are, or side with, Indians and Blacks, pledging allegiance to Old Glory is no longer an option. Instead it becomes incumbent on us to adhere to a variation on one of [James] Baldwin’s famous lines: As long as we think we’re Americans, there’s no hope for us.”³³

With regard to race and nonwhite immigration the critical study of whiteness has certainly helped to inspire very important studies, including those of Neil Foley, Natalia Molina, Ian Haney-LÓpez, and Kornel Chang.³⁴ However, the most-cited studies have not made non-white immigrant labor central to theorizing whiteness. We have in the United States nothing like Satnam Virdee’s methodologically pathbreaking study of the United Kingdom, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider. On balance the study of whiteness has contributed, even among its critics, to keeping left attention focused on Black and white.³⁵ Thus, when Taylor wishes to make the case that Black liberation requires alliances with the working-class movement, she decisively concludes in the familiar setting of a critique of “whiteness studies” rather than an engagement with the question of Black–immigrant solidarity. At a time when there are probably more—figures are necessarily unreliable—undocumented workers in the US labor force than private sector members of labor unions, we have been very slow to realize what working-class unity, and struggle, now means. In this area the critical study of whiteness has too often helped more to recapitulate dated discussions than to generate new ones.³⁶

The second set of gathering trends in life and letters inspiring work on race and class concerns the challenges and possibilities raised in the recent past by militant African-American anti-police and campus protests, coinciding as they do with the most visible ever presence of “Black faces in high places.” The ways in which those protests focus on terror, take psychology seriously, and feature jobless, female, queer, and trans people ready to participate, lead, and bring their own demands encourages us to consider ways in which identities, including class identities, are multiply made. Frank Wilderson’s forceful 2003 critique of reductionism, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” could almost have been written for today’s movements against police violence. Wilderson insisted that any theorization in which “racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political economy … is not an adequate subalternity from which to think the elaboration of antagonistic identity.”³⁷ Written much more squarely within the Marxist tradition, but taking account of the simultaneity and materiality of strands of identity, the Canadian sociologist David Camfield’s elaboration of an “anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism” deserves to change how we think about race, class, and more.³⁸

In 2006, when I wrote critically of the “retreat from race and class,” few would have predicted that an African-American liberal would hold the most powerful political position in the world two years later. Certainly, a few Black leaders occupied already very visible leadership positions in the cabinet and armed services and on the Supreme Court but they were then largely Republicans. The Congressional Black Caucus (under)represented African Americans in Congress, and Black mayors at times had the unenviable job of running cities in crisis. The election of Barack Obama posed the issue of Black and particularly Black liberal roles in running an oppressive system with new force. Allied with the growth of significant wealth at the top of the African-American community, this trend has given rise to exciting new scholarship on intra-racial class politics and on intra-racial economic inequality in the last five years. Or to be more self-critical, perhaps my 2006 critique was too harsh in examining work that already was attempting to account for inequality within the Black community and the inadequacies of African-American liberal leadership, though in ways that I still think ended being insufficiently attentive to either race or class.

The most stylish and emblematic book among several taking up these problems in the recent past is the political scientist Lester K. Spence’s Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. Racism, Spence argues, “still shapes the lives” of African Americans, but “it cannot explain why some blacks … have a lot of resources and some have few.” He adds, “Racism cannot explain why there are some black populations we as black men and women are willing to fight for, while there are other black populations we are willing to let die.” Like Taylor, whose book also exemplifies the usefulness of apprehending race and class together, Spence notes tremendous inequalities among African Americans.³⁹ Indeed if we add also Dawson’s extraordinary Blacks In and Out of the Left, with its emphasis on the changed contours of social relations under neoliberalism, its vigorous defense of reparations, and its discussion of a Black middle class that is both important and threatened, a fascinating range of agreement and differences is emerging in the new literature on race and class.⁴⁰

One barometer of the understandably unsettled nature of contemporary approaches to race and class is the regularity with which remarkably lucid and eloquent accounts of the centrality of race emerge from accounts generally arguing for universal, class-based approaches and against identity. Thus, in Johnson’s “Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him,” after a flat statement that “racism is not the principal determinant of material conditions and economic mobility for many African Americans” comes a very sharp observation on the role of racism in the entire system. “Social exclusion and labor exploitation,” Johnson writes, “are different problems, but they are never disconnected under capitalism.” He continues, “Both processes work to the advantage of capital. Segmented labor markets, ethnic rivalry, racism, sexism [and] xenophobia … all work against solidarity.”⁴¹

Johnson’s point regarding the “never disconnected” relationship of race and class is occasionally stated with equal force and subtlety by Adolph Reed. Writing recently with Merlin Chowkwanyun in Socialist Register, Reed proposed “jettisoning the hoary, mechanistic race/class debate entirely,” favoring instead “a dynamic historical materialist perspective in which race and class are [only] relatively distinct—sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes incoherently related or even interchangeable within a unitary system of capitalist social hierarchy.” The essays collected here would lead us to call the unitary system “racial capitalism,” following Cedric Robinson, rather than simply capitalism, a point so far eluding the meticulous but largely atheoretical and not-so-new-as-imagined set of studies undertaken under the rubric of the “new history of capitalism.”⁴² Indeed in the recent past, compelling new studies of capitalism have overwhelmingly been ones focused on both class and other forms of difference.⁴³

The simultaneity and interpenetration of race and class remarked on by Johnson, Taylor, Reed, and Chowkwanyum takes us to the last area of promise for current possibilities in radical scholarship. The most dynamic new work often calls into question the easy distinction that Harvey makes between capital, whose logic is said to exclude racial divisions, and capitalism, which has on his view happened to hold sway in a long epoch littered with such divisions. In making this distinction Harvey retools the theorist and historian Ellen Meiksins Wood’s contention that “Class exploitation is constitutive of capitalism as gender or racial inequality are not.” While Wood’s shorthand has provoked criticism from within Marxism, hers and Harvey’s view remains broadly the dominant interpretation.⁴⁴

When Elizabeth Esch and I began ten years ago to take up these questions in a Historical Materialism essay (reprinted in this volume) and then in The Production of Difference, the most developed arguments that capitalism not only encountered but also sought, exploited, needed, and created difference came from scholars extremely well-versed in Marxism but not necessarily identifying as Marxists. These included Cedric Robinson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Lisa Lowe, from whom we took the phrase “production of difference.” Especially important to us was the work of the Marxist economist Michael Lebowitz in his 2006 article “The Politics of Assumption, The Assumption of Politics,” a piece based on his talk as recipient of the Deutscher Prize. Lebowitz held that “the tendency to divide workers” functions as “part of the essence of capital, indeed, an essential aspect of the logic of capital.” To paraphrase Harvey, Lebowitz argued that racism was part of capitalism, and of capital, but not of Capital, as Marx left the production of difference untheorized in a way that we cannot afford to.⁴⁵ Lebowitz’s contribution very much helped Esch and myself to argue our case within Marxism.

Although the radical geographer F.T.C. Manning is probably right that the Harvey-Wood position remains the “easy, well-trodden, obvious Marxist/leftist path,” other roads are becoming a little more traveled. In some ways the tenor and quality of online exchanges on race and the logic of capital reminds me (absent the internet) of the late 1980s when many of us realized we were writing similar books critically studying whiteness in response to the historical moment of Reaganism. For example, Manning’s acute response to Cinzia Arruzza’s “Remarks on Gender” offers much on the ways in which race and gender are analogous and different in relation to capital, and a firm stance against the idea of an “indifferent capitalism” without an interest in the production of difference. But the response can only be so critical in part because Arruzza’s own article provides a striking critique of Wood’s position. That Harvey so clearly acknowledges what Manning calls the “primacy of race and gender despite their structural contingency” gives critiques room to work. Dubilet roots his challenge to Harvey’s arbitrary distinctions between “what is internal and essential to the contradictions of capital, and what is an externality, merely belonging to capitalism as a social formation” with the example of Ferguson. In thought and life, the idea that to consider difference as fundamental to the capitalist era places one outside of Marxism occupies a far more defensive position than when Wood wrote a quarter century ago. Indeed, we may soon be debating, as Chris Chen’s work perhaps suggests, how admitting white supremacy as being within the logic of capital can allow us to also theorize the social “relations of terror” and a logic of white supremacy in materialist thought.⁴⁶

The Book

The book itself is divided into two parts. The first roughly half gathers three essays on how we write about race and class. The first selection is the occasionally too fierce Monthly Review piece on the “retreat from race and class” discussed above. The two other essays in Part One manage to be more restrained. The first of these, “Accounting for the Wages of Whiteness: US Marxism and the Critical History of Race,” speaks crucially to the overall themes of the volume. Published originally, and perhaps somewhat obscurely in Germany in 2011, the work originated out of frustration. Puzzlingly, liberal and too many left opponents of recent histories taking seriously race, and particularly “whiteness,” have managed to miss the fact that, more perhaps than in any other historical subspecialty, work on whiteness has been produced by Marxists. Connecting as they did the wave of study of whiteness in the 1990s to Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, postmodernism, the “linguistic turn,” liberalism, and “identity politics”—indeed to all manner of things other than the historical materialism at its core—dismissive critiques finally seemed worth a response.

This problem hardly seems behind us where the critical study of whiteness is concerned. The current Wikipedia entry on “white privilege,” for example, samples the volubly anti-communist historian Eric Arnesen as delivering a “Marxist critique” of the study of whiteness, somehow linking his position to a 1972 essay in Proletarian Cause. In so doing, Wikipedia repeats an error still made in more scholarly, and activist, venues. Taylor’s recent book makes the admittedly increasingly hard-to-take recent writings of Tim Wise stand in for the whole field of the critical study of whiteness, which then can be attacked as anti-Marxist and reformist.⁴⁷

The final article in the book’s first half, “The White Intellectual among Thinking Black Intellectuals: George Rawick and the Settings of Genius,” first appeared in a special “Thinking Black Intellectuals” issue of South Atlantic Quarterly in 2010. It portrays an unlikely figure who fashioned a heterodox, supple, and psychoanalytically informed Marxist approach to race and class after long apprenticeship in Trotskyist groups not always nurturing in any of those regards. Rawick, a mentor of mine, had the good fortune to encounter the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, the militant Black workers of Detroit in the 1960s, and the voices of ex-slaves whose stories had been collected in a Great Depression project funded by the federal government in making his escape from rigidities.⁴⁸

The book’s second half, also gathering three essays, speaks to matters of tone and to questions now being debated under the rubric of race and the “logic of capital.” The first of the pieces in Part Two, published in a small book of essays in honor of the sociologist Wulf Hund, is “Removing Indians, Managing Slaves, and Justifying Slavery: The Case for Intersectionality.” It briefly attempts to think about how critical both settler colonialism and the gendered social reproduction of the enslaved labor force were to producing a slaveholder-led cross-class alliance that undergirded the expansionist capitalist state in the United States before 1848. The second, originally appearing in the Marxist journal Historical Materialism in 2009, reflects the breadth and confidence born of my collaborating in writing it with the historian of transnational Fordism Elizabeth Esch. Titled “ ‘One Symptom of Originality’: Race and the Management of Labor in US History,” it argues that US capitalist management both exploited and reproduced racial division as part of processes of expansion, production, and accumulation.

The final selection, “Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past,” comes back to questions of tone. It emphasizes how precious, but also how understandably fragile, broad solidarities are among groups who are oppressed but oppressed in very different and divisive ways. Originating as my 2015 presidential address to the American Studies Association and first published in American Quarterly the following year, it reconstructs the checkered history of the origins and uses of the word solidarity. It also analyzes the urgencies and silences surrounding how we memorialize, remember, and experience instances of solidarity, which we urgently need to desire and to question.