The fifteen essays collected in the book offer a stark rejoinder to what at times feels like a futile cultural impasse that ultimately amounts to a lot of hand wringing. Adam Theron-Lee Rensch, The Brooklyn Rail They misdiagnose the nature of racism, which is not just an end in itself but a means to advance economic interests; Most fundamentally, class isn’t an individual trait but a social relationship. To use the terms popularised by Occupy Wall Street, the “99%” necessarily entails the “1%”. You can’t have employees without employers, and vice versa.

from “All this is a continuation of the lie, but . . . if I remain consistent, it comes close to the truth” By Alina Stefanescu Lily holds a Master’s degree from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, an M.B.A. in Finance from New York University’s Stern School of Business, and a Bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA.

The essays skillfully explore how this neoliberal version of social justice has gained hegemony in our major institutions. Discourse on education has become centered on creating racially proportionate opportunities for people to overcome poverty instead of eliminating poverty in the first place. Here is a clear-cut example of the difference between a class-based approach and one based on eliminating disparities. A class-based approach posits that the lower-paying jobs in our society, which also happen to be in the fastest growing sectors and disproportionately held by workers of color, should be made into high-quality, good-paying jobs. The identitarian approach instead focuses on how to make sure that these low-paying jobs are held by the proportionately correct number of white people. The dynamic of outrage and protests as a response is at least a half-century old. In fact, when Touré was an infant and we lived in Atlanta, I got to see that role acted out firsthand in the local political scene by Hosea Williams, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr whose political persona was all about being true to the activist roots of the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Whenever there was something like a police shooting, Hosea would march it off — he’d jump out and lead a protest march someplace. And then he’d go inside and essentially negotiate payoffs with the people who were in charge. And I’d already seen the same thing happen when I lived in North Carolina before I went to graduate school. So it’s not anything new, but it’s hegemonic at this point.

This is hardly surprising, and perhaps even tautological. In a capitalist society, laws are written primarily by and for the protection of financial institutions, and laws that help the poor are laws that are bad for those institutions. But what it does politically is produce a tendency to frame problems in terms of identity, which our laws recognize as a protected category. As Adolph Reed Jr. puts it, “Legal remedies can be sought for injustices understood as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or other familiar categories of invidious ascription; no such recourse exists for injustices generated through capitalism’s logic of production and reproduction without mediation through one of those ascriptive categories.” 2 You definitely know you’re in a world that loves neoliberalism,” Michaels writes, “when the fact that some people of color are rich and powerful is regarded as a victory for all the people of color who aren’t (and when this, indeed, is regarded as a victory for justice itself).” 9 This, after all, is why the book is titled No Politics but Class Politics. Any other sort of politics is not much of a politics at all.This book - collection of essays is highly repetitive but has one main theme. We focus too much on identity politics (racism) when we should be focused on economic inequality. Reed’s point, of course, is not to champion Dolezal’s behavior. Rather, it is to expose the broader hypocrisy and commitment to essentialism that these discourses on identity are based upon. As usual, Reed is able to tease out the underlying class dynamics at work in the Dolezal episode, writing that the hostile reaction “is about protection of the boundaries of racial authenticity as the exclusive property of the guild of Racial Spokespersonship.”

Adolph Reed Jr. is the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation! Cornel West While it’s clear throughout the book that Reed and Michaels are deeply committed to a materialist account of race and racism rather than a cultural one, the book does offer some of their ruminations on the cultural sphere. Both writers are able to draw out how and why so much of our culture has been thoroughly imbued with neoliberal ideology and themes. Perhaps more importantly, Reed in particular emphasizes the folly of attempting to use the capitalist culture industry to advance the Left’s ideas and values. If anything, this project simply serves as a demonstration of neoliberalism’s victory, as Reed explains in his essay “ Django Unchained, or, The Help,” “Nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests.” These essays tell the story of the last seven decades, charting the decline of the left and American politics. The result is as rich as it is rare: a long view that is pressing and immediate. Corey Robin It is time to build Australian first,” he says, “buy Australian first in our contracts and employ Australians first.”

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We need to recognise that, while class can be an identity, it isn’t reducible to one. It’s an objective category, not a subjective one, defined by your activity rather than your culture or ideas. The queer female immigrant staffing a call centre in New York belongs to the working class just as much as the beefy coal miner in a mid-western rustbelt town. The nativism voiced by some blue collar Trump supporters is not, in other words, the authentic and unchanging expression of working class experience. Think, for instance, of the provision of quality, affordable childcare – a key demand of the women’s liberation movement in the 70s. For the rich, of course, childcare’s a non-issue. If you’ve got the money, it’s always been available. But for working class women, decent childcare can be life changing, removing a major source of social stress and bringing to an end a common form of drudgery. The constant evocation of hegemonic neoliberalism as an explanatory force for all the economy’s woes leads to an incongruity in the authors’ arguments. As they write in the conclusion, “The extent to which even nominal leftists ignore this reality [of low wages] is an expression of the extent of neoliberalism’s ideological victory over the last four decades.” And yet despite all of neoliberalism’s supposed hegemonic influence, there seems to be a lot of people with serious credentials in the Democratic Party advocating for increases in the minimum wage or union participation. It’s likewise striking how much the authors’ criticisms about the class inequality of elite American colleges align and overlap with many self-described neoliberals and capitalists. For example, Matthew Yglesias is quoted in this volume in a manner that suggests he believes in the triumph of racial equality over class egalitarianism, but on his Slow Boring blog, he has also written lengthy posts about the idea that we should take seriously MLK Jr.’s aspiration for class struggle, which we should differentiate from “both the washed-out version of MLK that you can from conservatives and the Tema Okun version of racial justice politics that has become faddish recently.” Yglesias argues that we should place more emphasis on poverty reduction programs like the Child Tax Credit — ostensibly race-blind solutions that also serve to make the country more economically equal across all demographic swaths — and less on microaggressions and diversity training. The relevant takeaway from this, however, is that such remedies, while morally correct, still function as class politics. They just happen to be completely compatible with the politics of the ruling class, who will concede to no longer discriminate against workers so long as they can continue exploiting them. Class and IdentityTensions Anyone interested in the politics of race and class must push aside the dogma of identity and grapple with what Reed, Jr. and Michaels have been arguing for decades. Jodi Dean