Class, Race, and Marxism

by David Roediger

Overview

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association C.L.R. James Award

Seen as a pioneering figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions of identity. This volume collects his recent and new work implicitly and explicitly challenging such a view. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery, in his major essay (with Elizabeth Esch) on race and the management of labor, in his detailing of the origins of critical studies of whiteness within Marxism, and in his reflections on the history of solidarity, Roediger argues that racial division is part of not only of the history of capitalism but also of the logic of capital.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786631268
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	07/04/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

David Roediger is the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Kansas University. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Thinking through Race and Class in Hard Times 1

Part 1 Interventions: Making Sense of Race and Class

1 The Retreat from Race and Class 33

2 Accounting FOR the Wages of Whiteness: US Marxism and the Critical History of Race 47

3 A White Intellectual among Thinking Black Intellectuals: George Rawick and the Settings of Genius 73

Part 2 Histories: The Past and Present of Race and Class

4 Removing Indians, Managing Slaves, and Justifying Slavery: The Case for Intersectionality 101

5 "One Symptom of Originality": Race and the Management of Labor in US History (Coauthored with Elizabeth Esch) 115

6 Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past 157

Index 189

Editorial Reviews

05/29/2017
Roediger, a professor of American studies and history at the University of Kansas, reflects on the ongoing connections between racial and class-based oppression in the United States in these six essays, all previously published between 2006 and 2016. The introduction to the collection is both timely and incisive as Roediger “urges less dismissiveness” between socialists and Black Lives Matter activists, which he sees as undermining solidarity. The essays that follow offer little more than a tasting platter of Roediger’s scholarship over the years. Roediger is eloquent on, for example, the journey of the historian George Rawick from orthodox Marxism to engagement with racial liberation movements of the 1960s. Similarly, his 2009 essay (cowritten with Elizabeth Esch) on the relationship between race and labor management is insightful about the birth of modern production processes. But the essays as presented in the collection, not updated or placed in dialogue with one another, add nothing to their original publication. Readers who have not previously engaged with Roediger’s work may appreciate these works—particularly the final and most recent essay, “Making Solidarity Uneasy”—as a useful introduction to his scholarship, but those who are already familiar with his ideas are not likely to find much here of note . (July)

Publishers Weekly

No contemporary intellectual has better illuminated the interwoven social histories and conceptual dimensions of race and class domination. With this stunning new collection of essays, David Roediger once again demonstrates that he is a vital thinker for all of us seeking to bridge the imperatives of economic and social justice.”
—Nikhil Singh, New York University

“David Roediger’s work is always as learned as it is profoundly engaged with the pursuit of social justice. From his signature study of the ‘wages of whiteness,’ to the analysis of links between settler colonial dispossession, gendered social reproduction, plantation management, and immigrant labor in the making of modern racial capitalism—Roediger’s bold commitments to demonstrating the historical and ongoing implications of race and class in the United States are timely, and more necessary than ever.”
—Lisa Lowe, Tufts University

“These bracing essays express hard truths and grounded hopes as they help us to rethink a past too much with us still. Portraying a history of oppression and resistance made at the intersections of social identities, Roediger makes sophisticated analyses of culture and political economy accessible to scholars and to activists.”
—Kimberlé Crenshaw, Columbia University School of Law

“When it comes to thinking about the history of racism, anti-racism and the US working class, David Roediger has no peer. Incisive, provocative, and uncannily timely, Class, Race, and Marxism reckons honestly with the challenges of building class solidarity across the fissures of race, the difficulties of writing about it, and the ways in which the two are entwined. If there is a single lesson here, it is that solidarity is not forever—it is elusive, fragile, and hard as hell.”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

“Excellent.”
—Counterpunch

“David Roediger wades into the fray with refreshing nuance and generosity.”
—In These Times

“A wealth of interesting historical insights and a breath of fresh air for anyone who feels there is a space to be found between the caricatures that ‘Tumblr social justice warriors’ and ‘old white men of the left’ paint of each other.”
—Nathan Akehurst, Morning Star

“Roediger’s book couldn’t have appeared at a more timely moment.”
—Brooklyn Rail

“A scintillating compilation … Roediger’s book explains exactly why even the most sickening atavisms of racism are fully compatible with the capitalist order, with ramifications into the 21st century.”
—Alan Wald, Against the Current

“Roediger addresses the challenges that class and race continue to present for U.S. radicals … should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the era of Trumpian politics. This is an important book, with lessons that some way wish to ignore, but at their peril.”
—Working Class Studies Association C.L.R. James Award

“Studying, understanding, struggling against, and ultimately replacing this centuries-old, foundational, and deep societal reality remains essential, as Roediger, a consistently pathbreaking historian, makes clear in these insightful essays.”
—Monthly Review

“Amid the cacophony of competing perspectives, David Roediger’s Class, Race and Marxism not only expertly evaluates the historical, theoretical, and political stakes of contemporary debates on race and class, but also significantly contributes to scholarship that ‘refus[es] to place race outside of the logic of capital.’”
—The Black Scholar Journal

From the Publisher