No Politics But Class Politics

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Understood in those terms, class not only offers the left a basis on which to analyse society but also provides a strategy with which to change it. But if your stated aim is to eliminate economic inequality, even a more radical policy like reparations, which many socialists support, does in fact contradict this aim. Rather, it is to expose the broader hypocrisy and commitment to essentialism that these discourses on identity are based upon. Parker’s understanding of what makes Turner heroic is that he resisted his oppression and that his act of resistance can serve as a model for the rest of us. Because complaints about disproportionality – whether it's blacks being disproportionately unemployed, disproportionately under-represented in the top income decile or even disproportionately killed by the police – are complaints about discrimination.

If socialism is about pursuing the hunch that humans could actually take control of our own destiny, then socialists need to be organised in the workplace, in the communities, alongside those people resisting. The focus was on Julia Gillard and what an amazing feminist she was,” Brooks says, “but on the same day she’s hurting the most vulnerable women. As Michaels explains, “The identity that is identical to action is not really an identity — it’s just the name of the action: worker, capitalist.Whereas the ruling class needs to do everything possible to obscure the way society operates, for the working class, a complete understanding of all the complexities of capitalism is essential for achieving fundamental social change, for liberating itself. Yet, as Anwyn Crawford notes, liberal commentators enthusing about the speech paid very little attention to Gillard’s role in passing, on the very same day, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Act 2012, a bill slashing slashed payments to single parents.

She assumed from the outset that black political history could not be properly understood without situating it in relation to the broader currents within which it has been embedded and with which black agents have interacted at any given point. Think, for instance, of the provision of quality, affordable childcare – a key demand of the women’s liberation movement in the 70s.

This is due to occupational segregation, which is the funneling of women and men into different jobs based on gender and racial norms and expectations. Their personalities shine through in these discussions through countless witticisms and quips that will leave readers laughing and thinking at the same time. Black Americans have engaged in many different forms of political expression in many different domains, around many different issues, both those considered racial and not. There is no singular, transhistorical “Black Liberation Struggle” or “Black Freedom Movement,” and there never has been.

In a strikingly superficial account, Táíwò argues that criticism of BLM or other antiracist expressions is misguided because “elite capture” happens naturally to left-of-center expressions. That larger, more insidious effort and its objectives—which boil down to elimination of avenues for expression of popular democratic oversight in service to consolidation of unmediated capitalist class power—constitute the gravest danger that confronts us. While the lore of black history tends to focus on the radical edges of Black Power such as the Black Panther Party, this essay concludes that Black Power rhetoric “also resonated with the self-image and aspirations of an emergent stratum of black professional and managerial functionaries, administrators, and officials. But what would be the consequences of an anti-sexist campaign that oriented to the bottom of society rather than to the top? However, it is the causal explanations and the policy agendas that flow from the framing of disparities that are problematic.

These interviews are fascinating and in some ways essential for tying all the themes outlined in the essays together. I’ve long suspected that, to a certain strain of race-conscious or antiracist discourse, historical exploration in popular culture was less important than the propagation of tales of inspiration and uplift. I pulled up the clip on a recent flight and was moved yet again by the powerful imagery of black men finally able to strike a blow against the slaveocracy. The relentless exploitation they experience also gives workers a unique vantage point from which to understand the fundamental drives of the system, ‘to see society from the centre as a coherent whole’.