Introduction to Class Notes by Adolph Reed Jr.

The text here is an extract from Adolph Reed Jr’s 2000 work “Class Notes”. This publication is the founding inspiration for the theme and title of this site here – long live Reed.

This book is built on commentary about current issues and events in american politics over most of the 1990s. as such, it expresses an on-going attempt to make sense of contemporary american political life from a critical perspective. most of the essays published here appeared originally in substantially the same form in my regular columns in the progressive and the village voice, or in similar venues. writing in those venues presents a special challenge— to convey complex, perhaps unconventional ideas clearly and concisely to a general audience. i’ve found this challenge very useful partly because i work out my own views on many issues by writing about them; to that extent, these essays are much less a set of didactic pronoucements than a sustained attempt to think things through, and the obligation to communicate those views effectively to others encourages preciseness and clarity. having to ask constantly, “what would this formulation mean to someone outside my own head or outside a narrowly specialized community of discourse?” imposes a requirement to bring abstractions down to the ground, to imagine how— if at all— they appear in, explain or bear upon the daily world we inhabit and reproduce. the challenge is more important, though, as a corrective to the flight from concreteness that has increasingly beset left theorizing and social criticism, and as a result political practice, in the u.s. in recent decades.

This flight has taken at least two distinct forms, both fueled by the decline of popular activism after the 1960s. One route led directly from activists’ deepening isolation in the 1970s and was driven by a failure to adapt to the new political situation. The other was charted by university-based leftists’ accommodations to their environment during the 1970s and 1980s. These tendencies, of course, were not the 1960s’ only radical legacy. Many activists dug in and persisted in the labor movement and other terrains of organizing, advocacy, and constituency-based politics, adapting to political realities and the requirements of building a real base for action while not losing sight of larger principles and goals. More than a few did so after or through periods of sectarian affiliation, often drawing usefully on the discipline learned in such political organizations while discarding the immobilizing sectarian baggage. One of the most encouraging aspects of the current period is that a good many of those people have become solid, wellrooted leaders in trade unions and other popularly grounded political institutions.

It is no accident that this legacy of 1960s radicalism goes largely unnoticed in public discussion around the state of the left. Even in what passes for a left public sphere there is little sense of creating a movement as an activity that rests on organizing, working actually to build support and solidarity among real people in real places around concrete objectives that they perceive as concerns— people who may not, indeed probably do not, all start from commitment to what is generally understood as a left political perspective or identification with issues that leftists see as highly symbolic. Instead, the more gestural approaches to politics associated with the flight from concreteness have been much more prominent and visible, and tend to monopolize public discourse about the left. That results mainly, I suspect, from the circumstance that the left public sphere itself is sharply slanted toward the social world and sensibilities of disconnected left intellectuals and political celebrities and, to that extent, reflects the symbiosis of defeatist thinking and wish fulfillment that have come to shape political thinking in such quarters. This book proceeds from a different view, one neatly summarized in the Labor Party’s model of an “ organizing approach to politics.” From this perspective, the key fact is that we do not have the popularly based, institutionalized, mass political movement that we need to realize any meaningful progressive agenda in the United States. Therefore, the principal task should be building an active membership base for such a movement. Strategic political thinking and critique should be harnessed to that goal as the normative and pragmatic linchpin of analysis. Finally, the movement we need cannot be convoked magically overnight or by proxy. It cannot be galvanized through proclamations, press conferences, symbolic big events, resolutions or quixotic electoral candidacies; it can be built only through connecting with large numbers of people in cities and towns and workplaces all over the country who can be brought together around a political agenda that speaks directly and clearly to their needs and aspirations as they perceive them. This, like all organizing, is a painstaking, slow and time-consuming process, and it promises no guarentees of ultimate victory or even shorter-term success. But there are no alternatives other than fraud, pretense or certain failure.

This viewpoint has always seemed to me to be simple common sense. The twists and turns of the self-identified left, both activist and intellectual varieties, from the Carter years through Clinton— including more than a decade of responding to the Reaganite onslaught by focusing on international solidarity work and serving as prop soldiers in Jesse Jackson’s Potemkin army, never admitting what his game so clearly is— underscore just how great a toll the legacy of defeat has taken on strategic will and clarity within our ranks. For that reason, I think it is helpful to reconstruct the two main roads that led to this situation.

One strain of those activists who found themselves cut off from ready access to any broader audience or dialogue were left talking to no one but one another. Their isolation was reinforced by a largely honorable rejection of pressures to abjure radicalism. Practical expressions of that rejection, however, were often naively catechistic and misguided strategically. Radicalism’s proceeding marginalization heightened fears that attempts to compensate would slide into an opportunistic betrayal of fundamental radical commitments. Those fears set in motion a dynamic of intensifying ideological vigilance and purification. As a consequence, many who took that route succumbed to the temptation to retreat into arcane debates, ever further removed from issues and concerns that resonate with the lives of people outside the self-conscious left. They produced a pattern of left discourse that centers on fitting aspects of contemporary social relations into one or another pre-scripted narrative of global revolution or noble resistance. Thus a current of activist radicalism dribbled off into scholastic, albeit bizarrely intense (and often intensely bizarre), debates over what “ stage” of capitalism or imperialism the current moment represented, to what extent which populations in the United States or elsewhere enacted generic roles assigned to them in a given potted narrative, or which mundane political actions or events indicated impending revolutionary ferment or proper revolutionary consciousness. The more isolated this radicalism became, the more insular and idiosyncratic became its language and critiques. The more it was removed from connection to palpable constituencies or membership outside the ranks of the already faithful, the less constrained it was by pragmatic or strategic thinking. The more solipsistic it became, the less capable it was of distnguishing matters of principle, strategy and tactics, and the less dependent theoretical arguments were on any test of practical efficacy. And throughout this spiral a flamboyant and self-righteous rhetoric combined with interpretations of current events and popular behavior— without regard to the expressed understandings and objectives of those who enact such events and behaviors— as proxy evidence for radicals’ pet theories, a combination that has worked to paper over the reality of marginalization.

Characterizing a rent strike, say, or a group of neighbors’ challenge to an eviction as, in effect, a rejection of capitalist imperatives in the provision of housing, or representing a protest against an instance of police brutality as the equivalent of a demand for selfdetermination camouflages radicals’ inability to win adherents for their programs. Such representations accommodate marginalization through a form of denial. Redefining such political expressions as deeply, intrinsically, substantively, or implicitly radical enables a sleight-of-hand that imputes support for the radicals’ broader programs by association, without the test of persuasion. This is what underlies sectarian newspapers’ penchant for running photographs of members displaying signs with radical slogans at union picket lines or other sorts of more broadly based demonstrations and rallies. Moreover, because this politics is propelled by illusion and a Humpty Dumpty-like use of language, it can wildly inflate the meaning of the most modest or conventional actions or events without reservation. It also has built-in mechanisms for avoiding critical self-reflection on practice and acknowledgement of failure. I recall from my graduate school years a particularly outrageous illustration of the lengths to which this kind of reasoning can go to invert reality.

In the immediate aftermath of Pinochet’s brutal coup against Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, a colleague of mine pronounced the coup “progressive” because it had taught the Chilean left the futility of the electoral option. T o the objections that the left was being liquidated even as he spoke, he responded that it was possible to “kill the individuals but not the tendency.” Substituting fanciful taxonomy for strategic analysis and assessment (for example, portraying the Million Man March as a general strike) also made it possible to tag along with whatever motion appears to have some visibility or popular support. Worse, precisely because its operative logic (“ has a similar effect as = might as well be = is” ) generates protean capacities for projecting its illusions onto the behavior of others, this politics can rationalize quite disreputable and opportunistic associations, simply by defining them formalistically as something loftier. After all, anything can mean anything if you get to stipulate the conditions of meaning without constraint by the mundane facts of an external world, such as the perceptions and objectives of others. In recent years one of the clearest instances of this tendency on the national stage has been so many leftists’ persistence in tailing after Jesse Jackson’s political charade and minimizing or justifying his dubious, often obviously and crudely self-serving, programmatic twists and turns. For many this commitment has extended even to accepting the preposterous formula that defines the character of media and official attention to Jackson’s person— the rhetoric, resonant with the presumptions of an absolutist Sovereign, centered on whether he has been treated with “ respect” — as identical with recognition of progressive interests. In some cases, to be sure, this will to believe stems from political romanticism and naivete, racial patriotism or guilty racial liberalism. In many others, however, it rests on doomed hope that association with Jackson will confer popular legitimacy or otherwise provide access to a popular constituency. That association and the desperate hope undergirding it are poignant evidence of the legacy of defeat. A second form of the left’s flight from concreteness is distinct from, but grew organically within the defeatist environment prepared by, the first. The notions of cultural politics that acquired currency over the 1980s and 1990s developed most immediately in university circles. Intellectually, this tendency’s proximate sources derived from the structuralist and poststructuralist turns in left academic discourse that had become increasingly prominent during the 1970s and 1980s. This strain as well originated from entirely reasonable, even politically laudable concerns. Leftist scholars, particularly in the social sciences and humanties, who entered the professoriat from the activism of the 1960s were generally concerned to find ways to harmonize their intellectual and political interests and to secure a place for left perspectives in mainstream academic discourses.

Structuralist Marxism, a 1970s theoretical import either directly from France or via the British, New Left Review, appealed to those concerns. In emphasizing the causal significance of durable social forces in shaping social systems and constraining behavior, structuralism provided a common conceptual frame of reference for radical and nonradical— or Marxist and non-Marxist— scholars interested in examining the ways that societies change or remain stable. This common frame of reference promised to open lines of communication between radical and nonradical tendencies and thereby to soften the ideological and institutional barriers that marginalized radical critiques within conventional academic disciplines. The greater legitimacy came at a price that became both less noticeable and more consequential as extramural activism receded toward the vanishing point in the historical rearview mirror. Pursuit of respectability in mainstream academic disciplines required shelving the idea of class struggle as an orienting principle of inquiry and debate. Pressures to do so came from several sources. Maintaining a community of discourse with nonradicals meant suspending premises the latter found unacceptable. Contemporary academic norms regard obvious political engagement— that is, linking inquiry to unconventional or controversial political programs and interpretations— as inconsistent with scholarly distance and integrity. Those norms operate at the individual level as career imperatives as well. And the atrophy o f radical activism outside the university fed this process by eroding possibilities for anchoring left scholarly activity in strategic dialogue with coherent political movements.

Structuralism’s departure from the vantage point o f class struggle supported a tendency to understate the space for meaningful human intervention in politics. The result was a form of theoretical narrative emphasizing the power of entrenched patterns of relations and institutions and discounting the possibilities for systemic change. A structuralist perspective is biased toward predicting continuities; structural forces move inertially. However, political interventions that can disrupt that inertia are volatile and usually unpredictable. T o the extent that structuralist Marxism lost its moorings in the commitment to grounding inquiry and interpretation in the objective of strategic intervention in class struggle— or any other program of transformative practical action— this turn produced a radical scholarship that more than mirrored the decline of the left outside the university; it also often rationalized that decline and sanctified it in the language of scientific law.

A curious parallel to ultraleft sectarianism developed in academic life: a logic of radical one-upmanship in which the winning arguments were those that purportedly demonstrated that capitalist or ruling class power was so great that any specific action attempting to challenge it was destined to fail. Like left sectarianism, the discourse of structuralist Marxism failed to see the processual, dialectical character of political action, its contingent open-endedness. Much as left sectarians are immobilized by their conviction that it is not possible to change anything until everything is changed, the vantage point of structuralist Marxism similarly immobilizes by its tendency to view the configuration of power relations existing at a given moment as identical to the limits of possibility. They equally fail to recognize that putting the ball in play can suddenly change the alignment of forces in the field and create openings that could not have been predicted. Both forget, that is, what Marx recognized more than a century and a half ago: that, although constrained by structures (which in turn are not active, insuperable things, but the congealed effect of “ circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” ), the course of history is dynamic and open-ended, that people actually do make history, even if not “just as they please, under circumstances chosen by themselves.” Sectarians respond to their immobilization with apocalyptic rhetoric, opportunism and wish-fulfillment; structuralist-Marxist academics tend to respond with melancholy and an almost sentimental pessimism— the highly theorized retreat to a world-weary, sometimes agonizedly disappointed quietism that presumes the privilege of secure, middle to upper-middle class employment with good benefits.

In the early 1980s left academic theorizing took a turn at least suggestive of explicit political engagement. Originating primarily in the humanities, a self-consciously radical scholarly discourse formed around the interpretive programs and intellectual sensibility represented by such labels as poststructuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism. This sensibility converged on reaction against large-scale social theories of any kind and rejection of any form of centralizing power or notion of objective truth. As a politics, this translates into: 1) a focus on the supposedly liberatory significance of communities and practices defined by their marginality in relation to systems of entrenched power or institutions, 2) a preference for strategies of “ resistance” to imperatives of institutions and “ transgression” of conventions rather than strategies aimed at transformation of institutions and social relations, and 3) a conviction that the basic units of a radical politics should be groups formed around ascriptive identities that relate to one another on a principle of recognizing and preserving the integrity of their various differences.

This politics has a dual institutional foundation in academic life. Theoretically, it emerged from the turn in literary studies to linguistic analysis that sought to destabilize conventional understandings of the relation between signifiers and signified, text and world. It also no doubt seemed attractive to some left-inclined scholars and students who wanted to overcome structuralism’s denial of possibilities for transformative political action. Sociologically, it struck a responsive chord in those academic networks concerned with advancing the status of women, blacks and other minorities as students, faculty, and subject matter, particularly at elite colleges and universities. The new academic radicalism appealed to faculty and students struggling, against an often bigoted skepticism and orthodoxy, to establish footholds of institutional legitimacy for women’s studies, black studies, and other specialty areas associated with the democratization and expanded purview of American academic life since the 1960s. Its immersion in Continental European philosophy and rarefied critical theory give it a high intellectuality that legitimizes studies of “ marginal discourses” in conventionally professionalistic academic terms— by vesting them with the raiments of technical sophistication and the authority of a canon of Greats. Because it is formulated at high levels of theoretical abstraction, the postmodernist / poststructuralist sensibility is broadly gauged enough to provide a common critical frame of reference for practitioners and advocates of the various marginal discourses and, indeed, has been partly responsible for constituting them as such a group. In that sense, as a practical academic politics this radicalism has functioned in ironic contrast to its theoretical commitments to “ decentering” and suspicion of “ totalizing” projects; it has operated rather more like a language of nation-building or, at a minimum, interest-group aggregation. The various specialty areas still compete with one another for resources and visibility, and the status of postmodernism and poststructuralism within each is contested, sometimes sharply, as in African American studies. However, an apparatus of journals, colloquia, anthologies, and conferences has helped to create a community of discourse and institutional networks that unite adherents across fields. The emergence of “ cultural studies” as a rubric is an expression, and an instrument, of that process.

The new sensibility’s critique of the conventional disciplines’ ideological partiality and arbitrary exclusivism in their focal preoccupations was an obvious source of its attractiveness in those insurgent academic precincts that would come together affirmatively around the rhetoric of cultural studies, multiculturalism, or diversity, and that have shared the frustrating condition of being ignored or assigned inferior status in disciplines, departments, and budgets. In taking “ difference,” marginality, and fragmentation as guiding theoretical principles and in orienting inquiry around specification of an expanding mulitiplicity of “voices” and discrete group per spectives, the postmodernist / poststructuralist sensibility is congenial to arguments for enhancing the institutional and intellectual status of those new fields and practitioners within them. Formulations such as “ standpoint theory” recast the insight that perception is shaped by social position— articulated by Marx and a long-available, uncontroversial first premise of the sociology of knowledge— and elevate it into a major interpretive departure and a theory of knowledge and research program in its own right. Asserting the primary importance of “ positionality” in shaping perception and grounding knowledge has two programmatic implications that buttress the institutional programs of the new fields. First, in establishing a rationale for reading coherent group perspective unproblematically from common identity, that assertion solidifies field boundaries by giving them an elaborate theoretical foundation. If group identity is a fundamental ingredient of perception, then organizing academic programs and discourses around identity-group studies is all the more appropriate. Second, its premise that a shared identity confers a special interpretive authority reinforces, more or less subtly, a proprietary advantage for practitioners and interpretations able to claim that authority. As a guild move, this arguably mitigates the ethnocentric bias that partly defines mainstream lines of academic prestige, status, and interpretive priority dominated by white, heterosexual men. It does so, however, at the price of at least opening the door to the proposition that being classified as an X by definition gives one special insight to interpreting the X, a proposition that is indefensible and potentially poisonous both intellectually and politically.

The hefty theoretical apparatus obscures the fact that those claims, and the larger arguments elevating positionality, rest on badly flawed, at least implicitly essentialist views about group consciousness. Formulations such as “ the experience or perspective of the X ” depend logically on presumption of a universal, consensual or somehow otherwise singularly definitive and authentic state of X-ness. The abstract and hermetic language of positionality, difference, and otherness fixes the interpretive lens at a point so remote from the ways that people live their lives and form themselves in the everyday world we all share— the world of seeking, working, or worrying about a job, finding and consuming healthcare, forming and maintaining personal attachments, paying bills, raising children, playing, fretting about the future, shopping for furniture, trying to make sense of current events— that it never confronts very mundane questions that expose the inadequacy of essentializing notions of identity. How is it plausible to project such singular perspectives as “ the standpoint of the X ” onto populations consisting of individuals whose lives and social positions are not reducible to a single category, whose individual histories of experience differ enormously and whose points of view and interests are likely to be shaped in complex and idiosyncratic ways? O f the multiple identities that can be gleaned from the life of a given individual— student, worker, parent, manager, child, stamp collector, fantasy baseball enthusiast, precinct captain, deacon, veteran, homeowner, landlord, nurse, developer, teacher, electrician— why should we assume that perspective is endowed fundamentally by race, gender, or sexual orientation?

A common response to the last question is that those identities stand out because they are the ones through which populations in this society are marked for marginalization. True enough, but those are not the only categories of people marginalized in the society; the more than forty-three million with no healthcare access, the hundreds of thousands of permanently displaced steelworkers and mineworkers, the millions of homeless and near homeless people, the so called urban underclass, residents of low-income public housing, low-wage workers in sweatshops and the consumer service sector are among the most obvious. Those categories crosscut race, gender, and sexual orientation, and for individuals many of them overlap. Nonwhites and women are disproportionately present within nearly all of them, but they are not reducible to race or gender. And it is by no means a foregone conclusion that, say, a displaced black steelworker, who is a single parent working an insecure, low-wage job with no benefits and trying to negotiate the metropolitan crisis in affordable housing, will experience her daily life and social position, fashion her dreams and expectations, or interpret her concerns and grievances primarily or typically through perceptions of racial or gender identity over the other categories­that reflect pertinent facets of her practical life. That response also does not clearly enough distinguish a claim of moral obligation (that we should privilege race, gender, and sexual orientation because those are the terms under which people are sorted hierarchically and oppressed) and an empirical one (that we should privilege those categories because they are the ones through which— perhaps because of their centrality in the system of social hierarchy— people primarily understand themselves). Attempts within postmodernist sensibility to account for the multiplicity and variety of individuals’ identities center on the notion of “ hybridity,” the blending or mixture of identities to form new ones. However, this notion emerges from a discourse centered on specifying “ difference” ; unsurprisingly, therefore, its accommodation is formalistic and reified. Hybridity, much like scientific racialist notions of dual consciousness and atavism in the Victorian era, presumes the merger or pastiche of distinct identities, a curiously mechanistic view of how human beings are formed and form themselves. Such constructions as “ the subject position of the black gay male,” as presumably distinguishable from the white gay male, black straight male, etc., do not overcome the problem of essentializing views of identity. They only compound it by extending the logic of fragmentation to break down larger essentialisms into congeries of smaller ones, mapping ever more precise combinations of identity positions.

The fetish of precision in specifying identities relates ironically both to this intellectual movement’s general critical project and its self-image of cultural radicalism. Although the impulse probably stems most immediately from theoretical and moral or ideological concern with acknowledging marginalization or unrepresented “voices,” the attempt to follow through on this concern assumes an unproblematic ability to map and detail the bases of human action that is reminiscent of the most naive positivist faith in the possibility of scientific certainty. This assumption can be sustained only by arbitrarily limiting the universe of pertinent identities to the handful of privileged “ standpoints.” This idealist pretense, though, is subject to pressure, consistent with the natural logic of the discourse of difference, further to elaborate the universe of privileged identities. We might, therefore, imagine an effort to define the subject position of the black, heterosexual, single mother, displaced steelworker, low-wage worker with inadequate healthcare and poor access to affordable housing. That is doubtful, however, and not least because undertaking the effort would demonstrate the folly of the entire enterprise. There is, after all, no such single subject position, not even in the life of a given individual who might occupy all the categories. And even if there were such a least common denominator position, it would hardly be accessible through a method of adding up reified notions of a bunch of discrete “ identities.”

Despite its affective packaging, the disposition to catalogue and aggregate neatly rounded-off identities is in no meaningful way radical. Not only is it evocative of nineteenth-century essentialisms, it also reproduces the mindset of the mass information industry, which, through public opinion and market research, sorts the population into the demographic equivalent of sound bites — market shares, taste communities— all in service to the corporate sales effort and management of the national political agenda. Within progressive politics, this mode of argument has precedents in the allegations of black workers’ double oppression that appeared in some quarters of left debate in the 1970s and of black women’s double or triple oppression that gained currency within the women’s movement perhaps a bit later. Implicit in both formulations was a presumption that greater oppression assigned a group greater insight or gave its claims moral priority. T o the extent that the proliferating specification of identity positions follows a similar logic it betrays the grain of truth beneath conservatives’ ugly dismissals of the new academic specialties as “ oppression studies.” The right-wing smear aims to discredit successes in broadening the composition of faculties and student bodies and to reinstate the narrow, sanitized, and parochial orthodoxies that had been hegemonic in the social sciences and humanities. However, it is a sinisterly motivated exaggeration of a nonetheless real tendency to invoke language that inflates the political and moral urgency of what are ultimately insular academic debates.

Any intellectual movement that develops a following will do so because it gains institutional and ideological, as well as theoretical, traction. The new academic radicalism, whatever its other attributes, meshes well with a sort of interest-group politics that has developed out of the democratization of university culture during the 1970s and 1980s. This development has accompanied and helped to solidify a marked improvement over the parochialism that previously defined much of academic life. Its accomplishments, though, can be limited and distorted by succumbing to its own ideological mystifications just as the narrow, self-centered pufferies of a generation ago passed for universal truth. For example, the idea that the social world in general can be read as one would literary texts is a staple of the poststructuralist / postmodernist sensibility. This idea has made a very useful intellectual contribution. In particular, it has been important in focusing critical attention on the extent to which accounts of natural and social events and phenomena are narratives and display properties common that form, which means, among other things, that they are strategically organized and not pure or passive expressions of those phenomena.

The insight that the world can be read as a text, however, easily slides into the reverse— a claim that interpreting literary texts is identical with interpreting the wider world. This reversal is an attractive fiction partly because it invests studies of literary and other forms of cultural production with an aura of political importance they would not otherwise possess. It is understandable that scholars who generally see themselves as committed to progressive or activist interests would be inclined to locate and emphasize political significance in their work. However, the leap that equates, for instance, the practices of textual interpretation or the production and analysis of forms of popular culture with direct challenges to power relations— such as conducting a strike, electing or defeating a legislator, mobilizing against N AFTA, fighting against segregation or for national healthcare— takes that inclination to the point of solipsism. And it empties the idea of political action of any substantive meaning.

Assertions of political significance also add rhetorical force in the struggle for position and competition for resources in institutional politics. Equating the particularistic objectives of an academic program and a global struggle against injustice rehearses a common ploy in liberal discourse, one that originates in the dramaturgy of War on Poverty and Great Society politics in the 1960s. It is a standard move in the interest-group negotiation that is the default mode of American liberal politics.

This compatibility with interest-group pluralism may be a cornerstone of the material and ideological foundation of the postmodern / poststructuralist sensibility’s cachet as a style of political expression. The interest-group model depends on a form of elite brokerage, centered on a relation between governing elites and entities or individuals recognized as representatives of designated groups. The heart of the relation is negotiation of policies, programs, and patterns of distribution of resources that presumably protect and advance the interests of the pertinent groups, but safely— in ways that harmonize them with the governing elite’s priorities. What we now understand as identity politics emerged as a rhetorical and programmatic vehicle for incorporating an appropriate notion of black interests into this arrangement, in response to popular mobilizations associated with civil rights and black power activism. Feminist, other nonwhite minority group, and gay interests subsequently have been incorporated on the same model. The new academic radicalism has attained currency partly because it ratifies what already exists; beneath all the theoretical pyrotechnics, it both packages the world in familiar ways and reinforces prevailing conceptual and organizational arrangements of liberal politics— both inside the university and as it looks at the society in general. More specifically, the style of pluralist identity politics it endorses and enacts assigns a privileged place to academic interpreters of the interests and perspectives— the “positionality” — of the designated identity groups. The essentialist underpinnings of these notions of group identity define away the contradiction of a scholarly and political discourse that purports to articulate perceptions and intentions of populations without evidence of the latter’s explicit participation in communicating those perceptions and intentions. This is what the “politics of recognition” that arises from the postmodernist / poststructuralist sensibility boils down to— a call to accept the authority of cultural theorists as articulators of the voices of populations who are presumed by the theory to be incapable of speaking clearly for themselves in public, explicit ways. This is the rational core within the absurd nattering about whether the “ subaltern” can speak. It also underlies the popularity of the notion of “ cultural politics,” which I discuss at length in the first two essays in Part Three. Its basic premise is that the authentic forms of political expression among marginalized groups are not made directly or through regular, institutional channels of political action. Their authentic expressions are instead surreptitious or indirect— in “hidden transcripts,” covert acts of “ resistance,” and “ resistive” cultural practices (for example, dancing, hanging out in the club scene, wearing unconventional fashion). This argument, requires disregarding much dramatically courageous, acutely articulate and self-conscious activity as at least implicitly inauthentic, and it ultimately renders those populations mute and reinforces the intermediary role of the academic interpreters.

From this vantage point, recent debates that juxtapose identity politics or cultural politics to class politics are miscast. Cultural politics and identity politics are class politics. They are manifestations within the political economy of academic life and the leftliberal public sphere—journals and magazines, philanthropic foundations, the world of “public intellectuals” — of the petit bourgeois, brokerage politics of interest-group pluralism. Postmodernist and poststructuralist theorizing lays a radical-sounding patina over this all-too-familiar worldview and practice. As it moves beyond the academic arena, the limitations of this approach to politics become all the more striking. Insofar as identity politics insists on recognizing difference as the central truth of political life, it undercuts establishing a broad base as a goal of organizing. Its reflex is to define ever more distinct voices and to approach collective action from an attitude more like suspicion than solidarity. Not unlike left sectarianism, its tendency is to demand that a movement be born fully formed, that all its participants possess an evenly developed, comprehensive progressive critique from the outset. This stance typically requires demonstrating knowledge of and appropriate gestures of respect for the differences and “perspectives” of a broad range of potential participants as prerequisite to acting in concert; this is how the “politics of recognition” takes shape as a practice. Whites must demonstrate their antiracism; heterosexuals must prove their opposition to homophobia; men must establish their antisexism; each nonwhite group must convincingly show its appreciation and respect for the perspectives of the others— all before strategic consideration of possible points of mutual concern. Also as with sectarianism, managing the internal politics of the movement comes easily to take precedence over externally focused action.

Anyone with experience in left-of-center activist politics in the last thirty years has been exposed to the dynamic. The standards of proof vary, not only with the specific context, but also with the mood, personal and political idiosyncrasies, and sincerity of the participants. Because there is no such thing as “ the perspective of the X ” apart from the pronouncements of those who claim privileged access to it, no one can ever be fully certain not to be committing disrespect. (Just as in mainstream interest-group politics, the ironic truth underlying this style is that it requires the good will of those who are presumed to be insensitive; otherwise, they would feel no guilt or concern to prove themselves.) In such conditions, opportunists or wackos can deploy the language of distrust with the destructive effect of provocateurs.

Because identity politics does not grow from a coherent vision of how the society should work, it cannot build broad unity around a coherent common program. Instead, its model of movementbuilding revolves around constructing and imposing formal images of representativeness. This approach reduces political criticism to scrutinizing the official composition of a movement to ascertain which “voices” are present in what proportions and with what prominence, and which are not. The tendency, therefore, is to subordinate consideration of a movement’s or organization’s program, goals, and strategies to the appearance of its freeze-frame photo. A standard form of intervention from the mindset of identity politics illustrates this limitation.

A predictable moment in progressive meetings of virtually any sort, even at incipient stages o f an organizing effort, is when someone— more or less piously, more or less smugly, always selfrighteously— rises to introduce the concern that, “As I look around the room, I don’t see enough of the X, the Y or the Z present” and to issue the standard calls for inclusiveness and for making greater effort to reach out, etc. This intervention has a pro forma, gestural quality. It is a ritual act that seems automatic and obligatory. Like a mantra or a Catholic prayer of ejaculation, its purpose seems more therapeutic and aesthetic than instructive. It is typically offered as a self-sufficient commentary, seldom accompanied by specific proposals for correcting the perceived imbalances. Sometimes, in the unfolding of a meeting or event, it is possible even to notice identitarians surveying the room, seemingly with only scant regard to the progress of the meeting’s agenda, doing an inventory of the groups arguably not represented— in preparation for tailoring the predetermined intervention to the specific gathering.

Almost no one ever disagrees with it on principle, and the typical response is a round of nods of assent and a return to the business at hand. Occasionally, though, it does provoke rebukes for presumptuousness, most likely when the intervention comes from newcomers to the initiative that prompted the meeting, whose incautious and uninformed enthusiasm all too frequently ensues in theircomeuppance. Self-righteousness, though, can insulate against the embarrassment of making a fool of oneself in public. I witnessed one such instance during a Chicago-wide conference of labor and community activists and progressive elected officials, when an earnest neophyte, armed with the arrogant self-assurance that can arise only from ignorant true belief, interrupted the flow of the discussion to protest what she perceived to be the absence of some significant identity categories among the participants. On being informed brusquely of the inaccuracy of her perception and chastised for impertinence by a longtime South Side activist, she responded with indignation at not having been apprised of the situation sooner. This kind of political intervention is fundamentally countersolidaristic. Its default posture is accusation; it is propelled by presumption of others’ bad faith. In its narrowness and selfrighteousness it parallels left sectarianism in yet another way. Yet this intervention has an opportunist quality that also displays marks of its ancestor in black power-era racial politics. A political stance that pivots on accusations of exclusion or disrespect sets up a role for the accuser as either a special conduit to— or a proxy for— the excluded or overlooked constituencies. As I argue in the last two essays in Part One, this motif underlies a pattern of racially opportunistic practice within predominantly white liberal and progressive organizations.

The combination of lack of a coherent critical, strategic vision and the conviction that generic ascriptive categories are the fundamental units of political consciousness and action produces a view of a political program as primarily a vehicle for demonstrating recognition of pertinent identity groups. This means that programs tend to become simply laundry lists of designer issues. The logic of identity as an ideological position impels toward defining issues narrowly enough to fasten them to specific groups. (Apropos of this mindset, a student recently argued in my seminar, and with passionate resolve, that the material gains that black Americans experienced through the New Deal do not count as improvement of blacks’ social condition because they were not designated for blacks specifically!) That logic also leads to proliferation of the groups thus recognized, if only by virtue of ever more precise specifying of identities. The result is an inertial tendency for the list to expand in number and to become steadily more diffuse as a totality.

At the same time, the commitment to gross, reified categories as the foundation of political authenticity turns symbols of recognition into the least-common-denominator issues held to represent the concerns of specified groups as singular collectivities. But because they are so general, such issues— for example, opposition to English-only requirements, defense of affirmative action, support for Mumia Abu-Jamal— are not likely to animate the great bulk of people to whom they are presumed to appeal, people whose felt concerns are much more immediate and mundane. The highprofile, generic issues are much more meaningful to activists and progressives (you know, the few hundred of us anywhere who show up for one another’s events and actions) than to anyone else. This is not to argue that those issues are trivial, just as noting the wrongheadedness of the identitarian rhetoric of inclusiveness is not to deny either the importance of building an inclusive politics or the fact that doing so may require special effort. The point is that these characteristics of identity politics militate against mobilizing a popular base broad and large enough to hope to have any significant effect in advancing democratic and egalitarian interests. In fact, insofar as politics is about the effort to mobilize an effective base for concerted public action, it may be improper to call the ideology and rhetoric of identity a politics at all. Its focus on who is not in the room certainly does not facilitate strategic discussion of how best to deploy the resources of those who are in the room, and its fixation on organizing around difference overtaxes any attempt to sustain concerted action.

The prominence of identity politics and cultural politics is less the harbinger of new types of social movements befitting postmodern times, as a group of scholars of and many propagandists for these approaches would have it, than it is evidence of demoralization, defeat, historical amnesia, and class insularity within elements of the left. Cultural politics in particular in some ways strikingly approximates the Reaganite/Thatcherite view of the world. It devalues political institutions and processes and elevates private, individual acts over public, collective engagement. W ithin its purview, as in Thatcher’s apothegm, there is no such thing as society, “ only individuals and their families.” Exaltation of “ everyday acts of resistance” is a don’t worry, be happy politics. If all is resistance, there is no need for concern with mobilizing collective action, especially because in this view public institutions are inauthentic or corrupting.

The perspectives of both identity politics and cultural politics also diminish the structuring role of political-economic and class forces in shaping the social order, including its shifting forms and constellations of identity. Notwithstanding potted disclaimers to the contrary, both reject organizing on an explicit class basis as a strategy for building a movement capable of fighting for a just and egalitarian society; in doing so, they embrace a different class base implicitly. In fact, in reducing politics to gestures and poses, both imagine a social movement without a foundation in willful, painstaking, highly labor-intensive organizing of any sort.

Defenders of identity politics would argue, rightly, that class is itself an identity and that class politics is, therefore, also an identity politics. The crucial distinction is not that class is in some way more real or authentic than other identities, though it is certainly possible to argue that in this society class— as functional location in the system of social reproduction— is the social relation through which other identities are constituted and experienced within political economy. Even without elaborating that theoretical argument, however, there is a pragmatic justification that is sufficient for taking class as the identity around which to organize. The goal of building a mass movement— and there is no way other than such a movement to pursue progressive social transformation with any chance for even partial or contingent success— requires proceeding from those identities that unite as much of the society as possible around a vision and program that most directly challenge the current power relations. For the vast majority of people in this country— of all racial classifications or identities, all genders and sexual orientations— the common frame of reference is the employment relation, the fact of working, or being expected to work, a job. Moreover, the concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by political economy— for example, finding, keeping or advancing in a job with a living wage, keeping or attaining access to decent healthcare, securing decent, affordable housing, pursuing education for oneself and intimates, being able to seek or keep the protection of a union, having time for quality of life, being able to care adequately for children and elders, having access to good quality public services and social infrastructure.

A politics focused on bringing people together around such concerns and the objective of collectively crafting a vehicle to address them is a politics that proceeds from what we have in common. It is a politics that, like trade unionism, presumes a concrete, material basis for solidarity— not gestures, guilt-tripping and idealist abstractions. To the extent that differences are real and meaningful, the best way to negotiate them is from a foundation of shared purpose and practical solidarity based on a pragmatic understanding of the old principle that an injury to one is an injury to all.

This is not simply a politics that attempts to build on a base in the working class; it is a politics that in the process can fashion a broadly inclusive class identity that clearly encompasses all sorts of working people— both employed and unemployed or on what remains of public assistance. This is the politics we so desperately need and have needed for all of our lifetimes and much longer. We cannot construct it with potted narratives, global abstractions, wish fulfillment or solipsism. We can create it only through direct organizing and mobilization within the class, at the level of the neighborhood, the workplace and the union, and it can be created only by recognizing that it does not yet exist. A truly popular politics of this stripe cannot be built, especially not in its early stages, mainly through big events. It grows much more from one-on-one interaction and with small groups of coworkers, neighbors, friends and other associates.

Part of the intellectual work of this kind of organizing is cultivation of an ongoing discussion, linked to practical political activity, around making collective sense of how the social order and its mystifications are reproduced on a daily basis. The essays collected in this book are episodic attempts to stimulate and contribute to that discussion. They cohere around a premise that understanding American politics, and organizing effectively to operate within it, requires recognizing the centrality of class forces and dynamics in shaping consciousness and establishing both lines of cleavage and possibilities for solidarity.