(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
One of the crucial issues today in the United States is the question of the relationship between class and race – how they are connected and what comes first. Is the fight against exploitation still the basic contradiction, or is it the difference between white and black? In an attempt to navigate around both color-blind Marxists – for example, David Harvey, who sees no class struggle in the Ferguson riots and reduces slavery to a purely historical phenomenon – as identity-political liberals – those who do not want to change the system, but merely fighting for social mobility, as if several rich blacks or more blacks in the administration would make any difference, for the millions of African-Americans who are in prison or unemployed – American historian David Roediger tries in his new book Class, Race, and Marxism, to show how an analysis of the relationship between «race» and the reproduction of the class relationship is interrelated and is necessary for a theory of the dismantling of capitalism.
White capitalism. As Roediger shows, the relationship between capital and labor in the United States is not racially neutral, but has, on the contrary, always been racially coded. Roediger is one of the most important theorists in the so-called whiteness studies, describing how white workers are privileged by the local capitalist class and endowed with 'white privilege' or white benefits, as he prefers to call it. For more than three centuries, the capitalist class in the United States – from plantation owners to multinational American capital – has equipped white workers with social status and privileges to avoid alliance with black workers, whether slave-based in the 17th and 18th centuries. black or 20th-century black workers. The working class was thus divided and unable to threaten the ruling class.
As Roediger shows, the relationship between capital and labor in the United States is not racially neutral.
Along with other historians such as Noel Ignatiev, Roediger (in continuation of WEB Du Bois) has analyzed in detail this process, in which the capitalist class divides the working class and bribes the 'white' working class to abandon any system-critical perspective and accept their own yield to avoid sinking completely. down to the bottom of the social pyramid. This does great harm to the non-white workers, but it also happens at the expense of the white working class's own emancipation. They are satisfied with a slightly better yield. The starting point for Roediger's whiteness analysis is, of course, that whiteness is no more natural than any other racial category, and that whiteness has expanded historically from once being a term for immigrants from England and Northern Europe to include Italian and Irish migrants. Roediger shows how working class in the United States has always been linked to racial issues and to being white. To be a worker was simply to be white as opposed to blacks and other non-whites (for a time, Irish and Italians were thus not white). This racial encoding of worker identity is one of the crucial elements in the history of (the absence of) class struggle in the United States.
As Roediger has shown in his books, the most important of which is probably The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class from 1991, this racial class politics has reproduced over time. The local capitalist class used the notion of unchangeable differences between people to remove the threat of an attack on capitalism, and white workers have, over the centuries, defended their privileges. Slavery was thus continued in an ideology of white supremacy used by the ruling class to divide the working class into real 'white' workers and 'non-white' subjects. Race became the medium class relationships were seen through, as Stuart Hall once put it.
The whiteness discourse as a political-economic instrument. The discourse of whiteness was a political-economic instrument that destroyed the opportunities for a settlement with American capitalism to the detriment of both white and black workers. Faced with this class alliance between the white capitalist class and white workers, the fight against white supremacy in the United States has always been a struggle against capitalism as well. And so Roediger cannot accept David Harvey's rejection of the importance of racial differences in the fight against capitalism. A race-blind class policy will never be enough in the United States, he writes: "Race and class requirements are not a zero-sum game." It does not make sense to step up the class struggle if it happens against the backdrop of silence about racism.
Roediger's new book tries to show that whiteness studies have been a Marxist project all along. So it is not just part of some post-Marxist turn toward social constructivist identity politics. The errand has always been a nuanced historical analysis of the relationship between racialization and the capital-labor relationship, where race acts as a differentiation tool that allows capital to avoid worker militancy and raise profit rates. This pointing is important both in liberal identity politics positions that focus on representation and diversity but do not address the structural inequalities of capitalism and in more classic Marxist analyzes that do not see how racial differences are necessary for capital self-reproduction. They do not see that the ongoing fight against police violence in the streets of the United States has an anti-capitalist perspective.
More and more people are becoming redundant for capital.
Crisis and whiteness. In a situation characterized by a seemingly insurmountable economic crisis, which is slowly spreading to the political system, the question of whiteness is of central importance. Trump is the most obvious example of that development. More and more people are becoming redundant for capital, they don't care and don't even constitute a reserve army in Marx's sense. They are simply just thrown outside, there is no need for them, and they must try to survive in the margin of the economy. In such a situation, there is a great risk that the superfluous will become dangerous to the system and to the rich: the one percent that has gained greater and greater wealth over the past 40 years after the postwar economic redistribution was turned into a 'neoliberal' savings policy.
As more and more poor people become involved, it is necessary to control them and turn up control. This is done by equipping a small part of the poor with weapons and the right to control the poor masses, put them in jail or, if necessary, shoot them. It's the story of the explosive growth in the number of African-American inmates in the United States and the reason why so many young black men are killed by police. The ones with uniforms control the areas of the poor and keep the unemployed out of the neighborhoods of the rich, and if they do not obey, they will go to jail or be shot. The importance of being white in such a situation of growing economic inequality and political authoritarianism is enormous. And of course, that's why black resistance is growing. The fronts are pulled hard. If you are black, the risk of smoking in prison or being shot is far, far greater. Therefore, the fight against whiteness and the whiteness of the working class, the working class as white, is extremely important. The crisis and the capitalist class's need for control and division make it necessary not only to analyze, but also to fight whiteness. And only a radical abolition of the structural conditions for the exclusion of workers, black as well as white, can curb the exclusion. In this sense, class struggle in the United States today is necessarily "black" class struggle.
