Review of David Roediger, ed., Listening to Revolt: the selected writings of George Rawick (Charles H. Kerr). (original) (raw)
Related papers
Race, class, science and the capitalist production of difference
Patterns of Prejudice, 2019
Class, Race, and Marxism is a collection of six articles, previously published between 2006 and 2016, by the historian David Roediger, who is best known for his 1991 monograph, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. One of Roediger's key points is that writers of colour had practised 'critical white studies' for a long time before 1990, around the time when 'works by whites on whiteness' began appearing (47). He points repeatedly to one book as the foundation of the tradition, W. E. B. Du Bois's classic Black Reconstruction in America (1935); Roediger's own phrase, 'the wages of whiteness', is based on a similar formulation by Du Bois (62). Knowledge of Du Bois's writings was often transmitted by the Communist Party to the labour activists who became the seminal white critics of whiteness. (DuBois joined the US Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1961, shortly before his death.) The two black intellectuals in this context named by Roediger as key influences are James Baldwin and C. L. R. James. Roediger devotes his entire third chapter to one writer, George Rawick (1929-90), who had worked with James in the 1960s and became 'one of the most important intellectuals bridging the old left and the new' in the United States (76). Rawick came from a Brooklyn family of 'radical rabbis and failed businessmen' (79), was an unhappy Trotskyist and then a reluctant Shachtmanite, who around 1960 joined the James circle. Rawick later became a historian of slavery, whose work emphasized the slaves themselves and the communities they formed. He also helped popularize the term 'working class self-activity' in a 1969 article of that title (77). Roediger describes Rawick as a key figure in the historiography of both slavery and slave communities, as well as the 'new labor history' of the 1970s (76). The point here was that 'labor history' crucially needed to involve the specific history of the self-activity of black workers, both slave and 'free' labour. Doing this required that the historian listen to black intellectuals and, for Roediger, the key figure in this regard was 'the great Black left-nationalist historian' Sterling Stuckey. The emergence of 'whiteness studies' (Chapter 2) in Roediger's narrative begins with Alexander Saxton (1919-2012), who had studied at Harvard and Chicago and had learned first-hand about the centrality of race to labour struggles as a trade union organizer in the railroad and construction industries. Saxton wrote three novels set in proletarian milieux, the first
Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism
University of Georgia Press, 2021
Many of today’s insurgent Black movements call for an end to racial capitalism. They take aim at policing and mass incarceration, the racial partitioning of workplaces and residential communities, the expropriation and underdevelopment of Black populations at home and abroad. Scholars and activists increasingly regard these practices as essential technologies of capital accumulation, evidence that capitalist societies past and present enshrine racial inequality as a matter of course. In Prophet of Discontent, Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins invoke contemporary discourse on racial capitalism in a reassessment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking and legacy. Like today’s organizers, King was more than a dreamer. He knew that his call for a “radical revolution of values” was complicated by the production and circulation of value under capitalism. He knew that the movement to build the beloved community required sophisticated analyses of capitalist imperialism, state violence, and racial formations, as well as unflinching solidarity with the struggles of the Black working class. Shining new light on King’s largely implicit economic and political theories, and expanding appreciation of the Black radical tradition to which he belonged, Douglas and Loggins reconstruct, develop, and carry forward King’s strikingly prescient critique of capitalist society.
Socialism and Democracy, 2020
Hillary Lazar: This special issue intends to provide space for reflecting on where we are today, and where have we come in the last couple of decades since the heyday of global justice movement and what some of the key takeaways are that we can glean from two decades of mobilizing. Where I would like to begin are conversation is hearing about where you were both in terms of your own political work at the turn of the twenty-first century leading into that Seattle moment. What were the struggles that you were involved with? How did it relate to that Seattle moment and the mobilizations during the heyday of the global justice movement? And what trajectory did that put the two of you on? Walda Katz-Fishman: Fundamentally my trajectory starts with my childhood in the Jim Crow South in the '50s and '60s and then in the '70s, when I went to Detroit for grad school and was introduced to Marxism, which I immediately embraced. It explained so much of the world I lived in, in the US Southwhich for me is the belly of the bestin terms of race, class, and patriarchy and the intractability of trying to reform capitalism. So, I started on a journey of studying Marxism as a tool for political struggle and work within political organizations, which was initially the Communist Labor Party. And this gave me the foundation, which has guided me and steadied my understanding of the revolutionary process of race and class in the American context. Then, in the '80s, just 20 years after the Voting
Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2022
Racism is like a Cadillac: they bring out a new model every year. Malcolm X In the germinal book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (), political theorist Cedric Robinson presents the concept "racial capitalism" as a framework for a new kind of inquiry and the proper object of Black radical critique. Although the most common articulation of the concept is associated with Robinson, in recent years a notion of racial capitalism has been taken up with more frequency and generality, across a range of topics and disciplines, from discussions of the history of slavery and capitalism to the impact of mass incarceration and subprime lending, to the politics of #blacklivesmatter. Departing from Robinson's discussion, this essay takes a conjunctural approach to the concept's formation in an effort to elucidate some of the intellectual and political stakes of contemporary usage. At the core of this discussion is whether there can be a nonracial capitalism, a capitalism without racial exclusion (and implicitly, a more just capitalism), or, conversely, whether the idea of racial capitalism makes audible a coercive or violent compulsion integral to capitalism proper across time, but one problematically muted by anti-capitalist critique and struggle. Robinson intended "racial capitalism" as an answer to the second problemwhat he characterized as a racist partiality (and thus recursive failure) of emancipatory discourses within the unfolding of bourgeois civilization in Western society, including Marxism. "Black Marxism," according to this argument, supplemented a specific lack: "the failed efforts to render the historical being of Black peoples into a construct of historical materialism, to signify our existence as merely an opposition to capitalist oppression" (Robinson, Black Marxism, ). Even so, equivocation persists: the term "merely" does heavy lifting here. Successive historical recompositions of Black life and labor in chattel slavery, sharecropping
Oliver C. Cox and the Political Economy of Racial Capitalism
Dialectical Anthropology, 2022
Oliver C. Cox was one of the most important and accomplished US-based sociologists, labor historians, and socialist thinkers of the twentieth century. He produced a series of classic works on racial prejudice and race relations and the foundations and development of capitalism. Despite some recent interest in his work, likely due to the renewed interest in the concept of racial capitalism, in-depth analysis of Cox’s work remains underdeveloped. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, the paper shows that the development of racial prejudice was, for Cox, not only an invention of capitalism as a particular moment in history, but it was also always undergirded by the requirements of capitalist political economy. Second, I show the dynamics that Cox believed were required to establish the conditions for racially prejudiced working-class subjects. Part of capital’s ideological alibi was, for Cox, the development and sedimentation of working-class racial antagonism. Yet, Cox showed that racial antagonism among the working class was inherently contradictory and counter to working-class interests and was traceable to the social, political, and economic apparatus of the elite class. Because the elite class necessarily relies upon the exploitation of the labor supply, it likewise relies upon racial antagonism to maintain labor quiescence. The work of the social scientist, then, is to explain such asocial phenomena in materialist terms, thereby redirecting working-class energy toward solidarity and the horizon of socialist revolution.
Historical Materialism, 29(2), 119-142 (May 2021). doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341956
As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois's Hegelian concept of 'double consciousness' , as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.
Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, 2019
We analyze class, race, and revolution in the US through Marxist theory and philosophy, and the experience and lessons from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (League) in the auto and related plants and community in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The League brought the black liberation movement to the point of production. They grasped the dialectics and interpenetration of class exploitation and racial oppression within capitalism, and the strategic centrality of white supremacy for ruling class profit and control. Their struggle embodied the unity and interrelation of theory and practice, and the necessity of becoming proletarian intellectuals. The League came to Marxism-Leninism as the theory most closely related to their practice as workers at the point of production. Armed with the weapon of Marxism, former League members stayed the course through the stages of capitalist development-from Detroit as the epicenter of global capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the technological shift from labor enhancing to labor replacing automation and robotization in the plants, to the deepening capitalist crisis, economic, ecological, and social destruction, and intensifying militarism and fascism in the current moment. For over fifty years, they were part of the leadership of the multiracial, multinational, and multigendered working class in the 1960s, and remain active within today's rising movement. Former League members consistently lift up the strategic direction and class unity necessary for revolutionary transformation in the interests of the working class, and for the survival of humanity and the planet.