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