Totality Inside Out

Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capital

Kevin Floyd, Jen Hedler Phillis, Sarika Chandra

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780823298211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

However divergent their analyses may be in other ways, some prominent anti-capitalist critics have remained critical of contemporary debates over reparative justice for groups historically oppressed and marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual identity, sexual preference, and/or ability, arguing that the most these struggles can hope to produce is a more diversity-friendly capital. Meanwhile, scholars of gender and sexuality as well as race and ethnic studies maintain that, by elevating the socioeconomic above other logics of domination, anti-capitalist thought fails to acknowledge specific forms and experiences of subjugation.The thinkers and activists who appear in Totality Inside Out reject this divisive logic altogether. Instead, they aim for a more expansive analysis of our contemporary moment to uncover connected sites of political struggle over racial and economic justice, materialist feminist and queer critique, climate change, and aesthetic value. The re-imagined account of capitalist totality that appears in this volume illuminates the material interlinkages between discrepant social phenomena, forms of oppression, and group histories, offering multiple entry points for readers who are interested in exploring how capitalism shapes integral relations within the social whole. Contributors: Brent Ryan Bellamy, Sarah Brouillette, Sarika Chandra, Chris Chen,
Joshua Clover, Tim Kreiner, Arthur Scarritt, Zoe Sutherland, Marina Vishmidt

1 / Let the Dead Bury the Dead: Race, Gender, and Class Composition in the U.S. after 1965

TIM KREINER

The working class is growing, as Marx predicted, but it is not the old working class which the radicals persist in believing will create the revolution and establish control over production. That old working class is the vanishing herd.

—JAMES BOGGS, THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: PAGES FROM A NEGRO WORKER’S NOTEBOOK

Few specters haunt revolutionary theory more than the rote identification of proletarians with industrial workers. That identification has both historical and theoretical sources. The chauvinism of workers’ movements bears more than a little of the blame. So, too, do equations of the leading edge of class struggle with manual wage-laborers in traditional Marxism. Particularly in the wake of the Black and Women’s Liberation Movements that gained prominence at the height of the New Left in the late 1960s, those orthodox coordinates gave rise to recurring debates about the fate of women and people of color beneath the communist horizon of workers’ movements. Today’s militants are no strangers to those debates.¹ In spite of the tremendous theoretical affordance on offer, however, the legacy of those debates tends to generate more heat than light, often in the form of crude oppositions between anti-racist, feminist, and anti-capitalist political concerns. Typically, those concerns are indexed by discrete categories of race, gender, and class tied, in turn, to separate social groups. In such schema, class remains the object of a critique of political economy hostile to concerns with race and gender separately annexed to more culturally inclined paradigms. For better or worse—and mostly for worse—those hostilities long ago took on a life of their own.

Those hostilities owe much to coordinates borrowed from workers’ movements by bellwether Black Power and radical-feminist organizations in the mid-1960s, however. To note this is not to say that the historical workers’ movement determined the course of New Left liberation movements. It is simply to recall that while what made the New Left new was the emergence of new social movements organized outside the workplace, feminist and anti-racist militants were often compelled to organize around figures conceived as analogous to workers. The founding statement of the short-lived Organization for Black Power (OBP) James Boggs helped organize in 1965, for instance, offered a signal articulation of the rising tide of black nationalism. “Negroes,” as its authors put it, constitute a “revolutionary social force … play[ing] the role” in America’s cities “workers played in the 1930s in bringing about social reform in industry.”² While Boggs decisively parted ways with both orthodox Marxism and the cultural nationalism that came to hold sway over many black militants in the following years, however, the view that racial identities formed outside the workplace give rise to revolutionary motives in ways analogous to the social-democratic motives born from workers’ identities forged inside the workplace cast a long shadow. So, too, did theoretical efforts to define women as a class on the part of early radical feminist organizations. Few were more cogent than the 1969 “Redstockings Manifesto.” “Women are an oppressed class,” its authors wrote, noting that while the gendered division of labor and sexual violence is typically suffered in isolation, “in reality every such relationship is a class relationship, and the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively.”³ Much as “Negroes” are analogous to workers in the OBP statement, for Redstockings women form a class oppressed by men that is analogous to but distinct from the class of workers collectively composed against the ruling class. From this theoretical point of view, “worker,” “woman,” and “black” (or “Negro”) name different social subjects similarly organized on the normative basis of a shared collective identity.

In the 1970s, however, oppositional currents within anti-racist, feminist, and anti-capitalist movements challenged the core beliefs that gird such normative views today. “The proletariat is not the working-class, it is a social relation,” Gilles Dauvé reminded us in 1972.⁴ Two years earlier Shulamith Firestone had declared that “just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself,” so, too, “the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.”⁵ Similarly, in the wake of the split between the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party, the Berkeley-based Racism Research Project took stock of “the incongruous position of criticizing race relations while simultaneously embracing racial categories” then providing “a theoretical justification for the present unsavory state of the racially divided organizational workings of the Left.”⁶ Even within movements that are typically composed by the shared interests of uniform social identities in popular memory today, that is to say, opposing currents unevenly confronted by state violence animated recurring organizational dilemmas during the 1970s. In the wake of those dilemmas, however, the tension between militants committed to the emancipation of this or that social group and militants committed to emancipation from social orders composed by group interests was largely displaced by conceptual oppositions among racial, gender, and workers’ identities. Today, therefore, the ghosts of that organizational tension—between the emancipation of particular groups and emancipation from social orders ruled by group interests—cross all divides in revolutionary theory.

The argument that unfolds in the following pages is as simple as those ghosts are formidable: categorical oppositions among race, gender, and class stem from organizational dilemmas. The unfolding of that argument is complicated, however, by the triumph of particular conceptions of gender, racial, and workers’ identities over other organizational models within feminist, anti-racist, and workers’ movements. Clarifying these organizational dilemmas will not magically resolve our imagination of life without capital, patriarchy, and white supremacy into a common minimum program. Resolving such theoretical debates merely returns us to the practical matter of how we remit the uneasy relationships between anti-systemic struggles today. At the heart of that problem lies the hoary question of what used to be called revolutionary subjects. If we want to grasp that problem in all of its complexity today, therefore, we will need to return, with clear eyes, to the practical questions who revolts why and how it is to be done.

We will also need to do so without drawing our conclusions in advance from the slogans and costumes of the past. Not all communist projects resemble the chauvinistic sectors of the historical workers’ movement. Nor do all feminist or anti-racist politics today resemble their occasionally anti-communist variants. By the same token, class, gender, and race are not incommensurable categories, even as the latter two index differently lived experiences that exceed the grasp of the former. We can ill afford the unhappy luxury of such categorical sparring at this late date. Today, those who dismiss feminist or anti-racist organizing in the name of communism—or vice versa—have corpses in their mouths.

The Making of the Proletariat (1848–Present)

When the League of Communists issued the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels drafted on the eve of revolution in 1848, few people considered proletariat synonymous with industrial workers. Indeed, the latter-day cognates of proletarii, originally coined to designate a class of citizens in the Servian census with nothing to offer Rome but their children, typically referred not only to factory hands and wage-workers but also to farm hands paid in kind, journeymen, peasants, prostitutes, thieves, the poor on relief rolls, and the otherwise unemployed, even in the emerging discourse of political economy.⁷ Simonde de Sismondi ushered prolétaire into heavy circulation therein with his 1819 Nouveaux Princips d’Économie Politique and placed it on firmer conceptual ground in his 1837 Études sur l’Économie Politique.⁸ The latter occasioned Marx’s pithy paraphrase in his 1869 preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.”⁹ Yet for Sismondi, as for many members of the ruling class deposed by the Revolution, prolétaire still gathered all those who owned nothing but their ability to labor in a heterogeneous mass opposed to the propertied classes, a mass swollen with semi-proletarianized peasants, wage workers of al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Half Title
• Introduction: Totality Inside Out
• 1. Let the Dead Bury the Dead: Race, Gender, and Class Composition in the U.S. after 1965
• 2. (Un)making Value: Reading Social Reproduction through the Question of Totality
• 3. Tripartheid: How Global White Supremacy Triumphs through Neoliberalism
• 4. Remapping the Race/Class Problematic
• 5. On Artistic Autonomy as a Bourgeois Fetish
• 6. Ecology with Totality: The Case of Morton’s Hyperobjects and Klein’s This Changes Everything
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index