Class, Race and Marxism. David R. Roediger
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against police violence, municipal courts, and white supremacy that have matured in and beyond Ferguson, Missouri after the murder of Mike Brown are “anti-capitalist” ones. “Frankly,” Harvey writes, “I don’t see the current struggles in Ferguson as dealing very much in anti-capitalism.” Instead he finds those struggles likely to recapitulate the “long history in the United States … of making sure that the anti-racist struggle does not turn anti-capitalist.” In characterizing what he regards as the most “fearsome” challenge in his book for the US left, Harvey adds, “None of these other struggles should transcend or supersede that against capital and its contradictions.”1 Harvey gets matters quite wrong, but he starts us in a direction that is extremely useful for thinking about how we might work across disagreements where study and struggle regarding race and class are concerned.
Harvey’s position, featuring an iron distinction between antiracist and anti-capitalist (and elsewhere between “revolutionary feminist” and anti-capitalist), is especially difficult to defend regarding Ferguson itself. The best way to see the contradictions inhering in it is to watch Orlando de Guzman’s riveting film Ferguson: Report from Occupied Territory, which follows the lives of the working poor in and around Ferguson.2 By letting poor people speak and taking viewers into their homes to an extent very rare in US cinema, Ferguson shows the municipal courts, the warrantless searches later justified by finding warrants accumulated in previous instances of racial profiling, unpayable fines for petty offenses, and the brutal but self-satisfied behavior by the police that ruin the lives of African American workers. We see the vast expanses of closed factories and the abandoned neighborhoods lost to deindustrialization and unfair housing practices that provide a backdrop. Those interviewed in the film clearly understand their problems as those of the working poor and the deindustrialized, as well as of those victimized in schools, courts, and on the streets because of their race. Surely, then, these are pro-worker struggles, aimed at abolishing one key institution of the state, the municipal courts, and at limiting the power of the police. In doing so, this resistance also aims to end the practice of running a suburb by shaking down its working poor rather than by taxing the large Emerson Electric corporation headquartered there.3 We are welcome to wish—I do wish—that people in Ferguson talked explicitly about ending capitalism, though no one with political visibility in the United States ever does. But to assume that that their struggles are therefore not anti-capitalist ones seems formalistic in the extreme.
Nevertheless Harvey’s response to Dubilet refuses in an important way to politically pit race against class. He emphasizes—the verbs should be familiar from the first paragraph above—that “none of the political mandates” flowing from his analysis of the contradictions of capital “transcends or supersedes the importance of waging war against all other forms of discrimination, oppression, and violent repression within capitalism as a whole.” Here Harvey draws a distinction, found in his Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism and in the work of others, between on the one hand “capitalism,” which he allows is permeated with race and gender oppression, and on the other hand “capital,” whose logic can be examined without needing to examine those categories.4 The substance of the exchanges, and the broader question of whether the production of difference is in fact part of the inner logic of capital, forms the subject of the last section of this brief introduction.
Also noteworthy is the tone of Harvey’s remarks and those of his critics. By tone, here and below, I mean the author’s attitude toward her or his subject matters and, in this case, opponents. Sharp differences are registered by Harvey and his interlocutors without total dismissal of the positions of others. The personal virtues of, and relationships among, the participants perhaps go some way towards explaining the healthy tone, but politics also matter. No participant in the symposium is intent on seeing race- (or class-) based initiatives described as diversions from the “real” struggle.5 Moreover, actual social motion in the last decade, from the immigrant rights marches and general strikes of 2006 to the local mobilizations against police murders of African-American young people named nationally as the Black Lives Matter movement, has so clearly given oxygen to US social movements that marginalizing “race” struggles is now difficult, yet still not without its aggressive advocates.
On both sides, then, the symposium on Harvey’s work indexes ways in which we are in a more hopeful place regarding the theorizing of race and class than we were a decade ago, when the first of the essays collected here were written. Harvey’s desire to balance, if in praxis more than theory, the claims of class and of other forms of social oppression might even be considered the basis for a productive common front for those thinking through these issues from various viewpoints. Thus the exchanges on Harvey’s work described raise the major concerns of this introduction: where we are in the study of race and class; how tone matters; the grounds for hope and, within the hope, how we might measure the promise of a variety of recent and older work refusing to place race outside of the logic of capital.
In January 2016, I contributed briefly to a small exchange among radicals at the invitation of one of my sons. In it activists and lawyers for Law for Black Lives took up a fascinating question: “why aren’t killer cops fired?” Some threads in the discussion had suggested that the “logic of capital” dictated that the state, as employer, could cut its troubles in the streets and its losses in lawsuits by sternly and quickly disciplining cops who kill. From this viewpoint instituting mechanisms for profiling the police who are most likely to kill and weeding them out proactively would also make sense. And yet, again and again we find that police who shoot people dead under the most questionable circumstances already have substantial records of abuse complaints before the killing and remain on the force after it. Cities so firmly in the hands of liberal Democrats that they scarcely have an opposition party sign contracts with police “unions” allowing for the destruction of records of police against whom misconduct complaints regarding use of force are lodged, making the assessment of individuals about to cross over into deadly violence all but impossible.6 How would scholars of race and class make sense of such apparent irrationality?
The tenor of the exchanges appealed to me greatly, in that nobody seemed to possess a ready-made line explaining everything and nobody assumed that an answer had to be finalized before actions could proceed. The discussion seemed a perfect illustration of political scientist Michael Dawson’s reminder that (re)building a Black left requires becoming “comfortable with trying to effect change without knowing all the answers in advance.”7 In this way it contrasted with too many academic debates.
I answered the question on the non-firing of killer cops initially as a Marxist and labor historian. Some prior comments had reflected on police unions as a source of soft-on-police-violence practices. I argued that, as unions, police organizations were not very strong, though their power to forestall investigation of police violence is at times striking. Successful police strikes remain very rare and labor law is not on their side, even if in some places they are exempt from general onslaughts against unions of public employees. In Ferguson the police victimizing the Black community made nearly low enough wages that they would have benefitted from the triumph of a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, though conditions vary widely and opportunities for money on the side are typically present. The informal power of the police to avoid being managed is far greater than the power of their unions however. They ride around alone or in pairs, with guns, and without bosses present; the general level of managerial control is bound to be low. After that initial point, my response entered into the more familiar territory of trying to think about race and class together by questioning the premise that the “logic of capital” exists apart from the practice of countenancing and fostering often violent divisions among workers. Even so it took a while for me to get to race and white supremacy as specific modalities in which the logic of capital combines rationality and irrationality. My own work on whiteness seemed not worth mentioning, although I did recommend the historian Nikhil Singh’s provocative and convincing “The Whiteness of Police.”8
It would have never occurred to me, in that context, to say that other points of departure beyond those that I presented toward answering why killer cops often keep their jobs needed then to be discredited. The idea that the question itself reflects overthinking—that police simply are in James Baldwin’s terms “occupying armies” controlling racialized