Adolph Reed on "left-identitarians" vs. "class reductionism"

Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola on The Young Turks of 01/23/2020 reference this piece from last year by Adolph Reed, Jr.: The Myth of Class Reductionism New Republic 09/15/2019.

It deals with the political argument between the corporate-liberal and progressive wings of the Democratic Party, one that has taken on a quasi-theological form, over how to articulate the proper relationships among race relations, women's rights, and economics. It's not a new discussion, nor is it unique to the Democratic Party in the 21st century.

I've tried to avoid the specific incarnations in the current Presidential primary race. In theory, there's not much difference between liberals and progressives over the first two, although policies and priorities are what really count.

On economic issues, the differences are understood similarly on both sides. Progressives want Medicare for All and tax policies aimed at closing the wealth and income gap between the One Percent and everyone else. Liberals don't, although they want policies that move at least somewhat in that direction. Progressives aren't afraid of the Republicans calling them socialist, liberal are. Despite the fact that Republicans have been doing just that for generations.

What I think of as the quasi-theological aspect of the current argument comes from the argument that corporate Democrats use against the progressives, and currently against Bernie Sanders in particular, that they are sexist and racist, though it's usually not put quite that crassly. There's also a Bernie-Sanders-makes-my-skin-crawl argument, but that's not really the same thing. (It's also borderline anti-Semitic.)

The anti-Sanders argument is that Sanders doesn't take white racism and sexism seriously enough, and that his talk about class and redistribution issues are a way to minimize the seriousness of racism and sexism in the US.

Reed refers to the two sides of this controversy as left-identitarian and class-reductionist. The first is probably more obvious than the latter, which refers tot he notion that "that inequalities apparently attributable to race, gender, or other categories of group identification are either secondary in importance or reducible to generic economic inequality." He argues that the class-reductionist position is more a polemical construct. "I know of no one who embraces that position," he writes.

Reed does make an important observation here

As American politics shifted steadily rightward between the Nixon and Clinton presidencies, so, too, did the discourse surrounding race and the country’s political economy. Conservatives attributed black socioeconomic inequalities to bad values; liberals attributed them to bad values and racism. Once it was effectively decoupled from political-economic dynamics, “racism” became increasingly amorphous as a charge or diagnosis - a blur of attitudes, utterances, individual actions, and patterned disparities, an autonomous force that acts outside of historically specific social relations. Today it serves as a single, all-purpose explanation for mass incarceration, the wealth gap, the wage gap, police brutality, racially disproportionate rates of poverty and unemployment, slavery, the Southern Jim Crow regime, health disparities, the drug war, random outbursts of individual bigotry, voter suppression, and more. ...

As Cedric Johnson and Dean Robinson have argued, post-civil rights black politics has tended to emphasize an “ethnic group” notion of racial solidarity that masks the face that this race politics is itself a class politics. Black Democratic and other neoliberal elites have shown again and again in their sustained denunciations of the Sanders program since 2016 that they ultimately rely on race-specific arguments to oppose broadly redistributive initiatives that would improve the circumstances of African American working people along with all others. Ironically, this means that the constituencies most affected by economic inequality and disadvantage have the least voice in contemporary policy debates. [my emphasis]

Of course, in a high-stakes political campaign like the Presidential race, campaigns are going to use dubious attacks. Some of which will be closer to true. Some of which will be less fair than others. Politics is politics.

The liberal, pro-corporate verisons of neoliberalism combines free-market fundmentalism (with a bit more humane face than the conservatives version) with a classic liberal defense of equal rights. In theory, a society with severe class divisions and a severe maldistribution of wealth and income could have complete equality between for minorities and women. There are mountains of rigorous research that show why in practice that cannot and will happen in the real world.

But the soundbite version are always going to be imprecise.