Class, Race and Marxism. David R. Roediger
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