Professional Documents
Culture Documents
William Clare Roberts
William Clare Roberts
Class in Practice
William Clare
Roberts
Abstract: An articulation of class politics that has gained prominence C
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on the post-Bernie Left presumes that a socialist politics should appeal I
to the common interests of the working class because the working S
class has a structurally privileged position in capitalism. I argue that this I
S
position (“class abstractionism”) conflates work relations with capitalist
class relations, and that it is therefore prone to substituting an image of &
one fraction of the proletariat for the proletariat as a whole. C
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Keywords: class; proletariat; class abstractionism; class structure; class I
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identity; culture I
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U
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I. Class Abstractionism
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It is impossible to deny that a new discourse of class has been Volume 10
ascendant since 2016. Some of the figures in this new class discourse Issue 1
have been hoeing this same row for a very long time. Adolph Reed has
been making the same arguments consistently for thirty years. That
argument is that, while “obvious racial disparities” are a problem, “the
way forward is precisely through the kinds of social and economic
policies that address black people as workers, students, parents,
taxpayers, citizens, people in need of decent jobs, housing, and health
care, or concerned with foreign policy—not to homogenize them under a
monolithic racial classification.”1
Critics have assailed this argument as “class reductionism” – a
name Reed reasonably refuses as a “specter” and a “myth”2 – but the
argument, has not only weathered the criticism but has found a new
constituency in parts of the Democratic Socialists of America and
beyond in the wake of the two Sanders campaigns and the Trump
presidency. That constituency is certainly not confined to Marxists.
From so-called popularists and centrist policy wonks – who want the
Democratic Party to focus on universalistic economic messaging rather
than “divisive” cultural and racial issues – to Left populists – who want to
revive the “we are the 99%” slogans of Occupy – to the genuinely neo-
Strasserite elements that have coalesced around Compact Magazine,
there is a wide and quite disparate chorus of voices singing the praises
of class-based politics, understood as a politics that addresses people
as workers.
Despite this wider reach, these arguments for the political primacy
of class continue to have a special affinity with Marxist accounts of the
1 Reed 2019.
2 Reed 2019.
3 On the distinction between political and structural primacy, see McCarthy and Desan 2022.
5 Chibber 2016.
6 McCarthy and Desan call those for whom class is politically primary, even though it lacks any
special structural status, “class constructivists” (McCarthy and Desan 2022, pp. 10–11). They point to
Left populism as an example of this tendency, but I see it as encompassing a wider range of political
tendencies.
7 Production is here understood in a very broad sense, and includes the production of new human
beings.
12 Chibber 2016.
14 Žižek 2022.
15 Bergfeld 2020; Burgis 2020; Guastella 2020; Savage and Trickett 2021.
18 The actual distinction between the two strategies is the distinction Lenin identified one hundred
twenty years ago between economistic and political social democrats.
19 Note that while Riley and Brenner are clearly thinking of this control-and-redistribution as
something carried out by the state, riot and looting is a variation on the same strategy (Clover 2016;
Osterweil 2020).
This polemic rests on the same fiction that Blanc and Gong articulated, &
that the interests of the whole working class are diametrically opposed C
to the interests of the whole capitalist class. After all, the politicians, R
activists, and intellectuals who find themselves “in opposition to” the I
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miners and retail workers of Hibbing are, by the same criteria Karp is I
proposing, in alliance with the textile factory workers and gas station Q
attendants of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Why should the workers of U
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the Fourth and Fifth Congressional Districts be less indicative than the
workers of the Eighth District?23 The only fair reading of the situation is /
that the working class is divided against itself, and that these mutually Volume 10
opposed fractions of the proletariat have allied themselves – politically Issue 1
and culturally – with different fractions of the capitalist class.24
Karp is correct that “celebrations” of the urban fraction of the
working class – the fraction “which already votes against Republicans”
– are facile. They certainly do nothing to bridge the electoral divide
between urban, service-sector workers and rural, “hard-hats-and-
pickup-trucks” workers. At their worst, they replicate the slow-motion
Stalinism of Obama-era liberalism, when people convinced themselves
that autonomous demographic trends were busy electing a new people,
ushering in a permanent Democratic majority of cosmopolitan and
upwardly-mobile urbanites. In fact, the truth is nearly the opposite of this
optimistic prophesy. Left-leaning parties in first-past-the-post electoral
systems face an uphill battle precisely because their base constituencies
are concentrated in urban areas. This is inefficient from the perspective
of electoral politics, since Left-leaning parties often rack up massive
wins in a few urban districts while losing a swath of suburban and rural
districts by much smaller margins.25
Nonetheless, we should not think that the Democrats’ loss of
the miners and retail workers of Hibbing, Minnesota – granting for the
moment that this loss is real – as the crisis that must be reckoned with
if we are to find “any way forward for the American left.” The Democratic
23 It is also worth noting that Karp produces no evidence that “the miners and retail workers of
Hibbing” actually broke for Trump. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton in Hibbing by seven votes; in 2020,
turnout was up significantly, and Trump’s margin over Biden grew to about 170 votes out of 8600
cast. I do not know the demographic breakdown of these votes, but Karp presents no evidence that
the working class of Hibbing lining up solidly behind Trump as opposed to being deeply divided.
24 As well as, it should be noted, different fractions of the landowning class; see Manning 2022.
25 Rodden 2019.
IV. Conclusion
There’s the old saying in labor circles that “the boss is the best organizer.”
Class abstractionism wants this to be true, not only at the level of the
shop floor, but at the level of society at large. There have been points
in time when that actually seemed like a plausible story. In situations of
rapid industrialization, it was reasonable to think that capital organized
the proletariat at a national or even international scale. The emptying out
of the countryside, the massive amalgamation of the industrial working
class in factory, mine, city, and district – all of this encouraged Marxists
and other socialists to think that capital was itself forging the proletariat
into a political subject with common experiences, common spaces,
common mores and traditions, and common aspirations.
That belief is not reasonable, however, outside the context of
mass industrialization that suggested it in the first place.27 In a de-
26 Rodden 2019.
28 Winant 2021.