If you’re a leftist—especially a non-white one—you’ve experienced class reductionism. It’s usually online because that’s where we all are, but it could happen anywhere: you’re talking to someone about world events or American electoral politics and someone mentions redlining. Out of nowhere he appears, towering over you intellectually, and he says:
“Actually it’s not left vs right, it’s up vs down.”
The Class Reductionist cannot believe he even needs to explain this simple concept to you fucking idiots; his words drip with condescension and annoyance, because the basics of Marxian economics and class struggle clearly outline the divisions between workers and rulers. Don’t you know right and left are just two sides of the same coin? Don’t you know race is a social construct, designed to turn workers against each other so they’re easier to rule?
I really do my best to stay out of this sort of infighting in left-leaning spaces because frankly leftist factionalism is a boot on the wheel of progress, and the ones who truly suffer for it are the folks at the margins whom we’re ostensibly fighting for. I organize with Stalins and Karens. I couldn’t care less if you’re Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, or Anarchist; if you value human life more than money and want to fight Capitalism with guns, I’ve got a seat for you. Strength in numbers or whatever.
I’m chiming in on this one, though, because a) class reductionism isn’t confined to any one sect or ideology and b) it’s harmful no matter where it is. I think a suitably analogous example is liberal nonviolence: whatever its political goals may be, the ends of nonviolence always suppresses the nuance of a given issue and enforce patriarchal white supremacy, whether consciously or not.
And before I say anything else, I want anyone preaching the “up vs down” stuff to understand that we know. That’s Communism 101 shit and it’s a lecture for the Republicans who want to deport everybody, not other communists trying to confront the racial divisions within class struggle. (White male) leftists have an irksome tendency to assume that whatever they just learned, nobody else knows it, and I urge you to reconsider that worldview. But I digress.
Those who argue for class reductionism in good faith will say that it’s temporary: “yes, of course there are racial and gendered hierarchies within class divisions, but we have to ignore those for now so we can seize power together, and then we’ll address them!” I can understand the logic, obviously—alliance building across racial lines is absolutely necessary to working class solidarity, and to argue otherwise would just be dumb—but to ignore those hierarchies in the short term is to assure they’ll simply be kept or recreated in the long term.
Class reductionism is a giant contradiction. Insistence on ignoring race and gender ironically dispenses with the material conditions of vast swaths of (non white, non male) proletariats. I want you internet Marxists to remember some history every time you’re tempted to launch into another lecture about how race isn’t real: Puritanical white settlers made room for this country by exterminating 10 million indigenous people. Our foundational laws protect white landownership above all else, and still do to this day. The first engine of this nation’s economy was chattel slavery, and as the USA modernized, traditional slavery was preserved through the creation of the prison industrial complex. Marital rape was legal in every state until 1975. Any non white man in this nation was treated as more property than person until fairly recently.
American capitalism is deeply, deeply racist and misogynist. Yes, “give a white man someone to oppress and he’ll empty his pockets for you,” whatever, but that doesn’t change reality. It’s up and down and left and right, because politics are 3D. Or maybe 2D, I’m not sure what I just described, but my point stands.
And this is just a personal pet peeve of mine so treat it as such, but in my opinion, when you wade into a conversation to blurt out that “race isn’t real, it’s us vs them” you’re devaluing the decades of attritional and often very violent struggle of those groups to be treated as “us” in the first place, and in many ways they still aren’t. It’s easy for white people to have some strong opinions on who the real enemy is, but to a lot of people in this country it’s you, and it takes reckoning with that material reality to get to the class war bit.
So in the meantime, the up vs down stuff is something you should talk about with your racist dad who makes fifty grand a year and believes in white genocide, or your coworkers who haven’t realized that the boss is who’s making their lives suck, not immigrants. But in leftist spaces, it’s very tiresome.
Everything you write is so fuckin solid dude. Ty.
I hope they hear you - white man to white man because I’m a class traitor when it comes out of my mouth :,)