No Politics But Class Politics

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This, after all, describes the platforms of both the Republican and Democratic parties for many decades. This is why Reed argues that “race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left wing of neoliberalism. There have always been class differences amongst African Americans, but this is the first time those class differences have been expressed in the form of a minority of Blacks wielding significant political power and authority over the majority of Black lives. Conservatives who try to blame black crime on race and liberals who try to blame it on racism are both missing the point.

In an opinion piece for the Guardian, cultural journalist Tayo Bero went as far as to champion the insurgent quality of the movie. Nate Parker’s 2016 dramatization of the 1831 Virginia slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, The Birth of a Nation (which quite intentionally sets itself up as an answer to Griffith’s film from a century earlier), is an even more strident display of the inclination to subordinate the complexities of actual history to a narrative of black heroism in the face of universal and unremitting white supremacy and racism.

There is no singular, transhistorical “Black Liberation Struggle” or “Black Freedom Movement,” and there never has been. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. Nevertheless, the indictment of Glory as white-savior propaganda was common on the left—with the allied claim that the story was told largely through the eyes of the regiment’s young commander, Col.

The effect of omitting such a central tactical debate was to depict the civil rights struggle as a simple extrusion of King’s larger-than-life persona against a pandemic racism—as a struggle, in other words, with virtually no politics to speak of. But this comparison isn’t right either, because while it’s true that poor people shouldn’t be made to feel badly about being poor, the real injustice of poverty isn’t the stigma; it’s that you’re poor, and that your poverty is a necessary condition for the wealth of a much smaller fraction of people. In a political and cultural climate dominated by neoliberal logic, like our own, this distinction makes no sense. The necessities of various labor regimes propelled the evolutions and uses of race, which has thus always rested on a political-economic foundation.The essays that follow trace the ideological underpinnings of this steady retreat from contextualizing racial inequality within the broader political economy. The essays skillfully explore how this neoliberal version of social justice has gained hegemony in our major institutions. As a class, the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. First and foremost, No Politics but Class Politics forces readers to confront and challenge commonsense understandings of what race really is.