NO POLITICS BUT CLASS POLITICS
Paperback
Extent: 392 pages
Trim: 15.2 x 22.9 cm
ISBN: 9781912475575
Price: £20 / £10 (ebook)
Adolph Reed Jr. is the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation.
—Cornel West
Walter Benn Michaels is cunning, brilliant, acutely suggestive, exhilarating to read.
—Eric Lott
Wokelords and anti-racist liberals will be frustrated, enraged, and defeated. This book pushes us closer towards the uncompromising, bare-knuckled anti-capitalist movement we so desperately need.
—Cedric Johnson
An exhilarating journey that swaps the orthodoxies of contemporary progressive culture for a class politics rooted in universalism.
—James Bloodworth
Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels have been among the clearest voices critiquing the dominant race reductionism in American intellectual life and proposing a real egalitarian alternative.
—Bhaskar Sunkara
Anyone interested in the politics of race and class must push aside the dogma of identity and grapple with what Reed and Michaels have been arguing for decades.
—Jodi Dean
Denouncing racism and celebrating diversity have become central mainstays of progressive politics: for many on the left, social justice consists of equitable distribution of wealth, power, and esteem among racial groups. But as Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels argue in this groundbreaking collection of essays, the emphasis seems to be tragically misplaced. Not only does a fixation with racial disparities distract from the pervasive influence of class—it actually legitimises economic inequality. As Reed and Michaels put it, “racism is real and anti-racism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn’t what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won’t eliminate it”.
No Politics but Class Politics gathers together Reed and Michaels’s recent essays on inequality, along with a newly commissioned interview with the authors and an illuminating foreword by Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger. These writings eschew the sloppy thinking and moral posturing that too often characterise discussions of race and class in favour of clear-eyed social, cultural and historical analysis. Reed and Michaels make the case here for a genuinely radical politics: a politics which aspires not to the establishment of a demographically representative social elite, but instead to economic justice for everyone.