Tagged "political-philosophy"

A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it per- ceives capitalism dialectically, as a social total- ity that includes modes of production, relations of production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most important contri- bution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A histori- cal materialist perspective should stress that “race”—which includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a par- ticular system of production.

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.