Building from Marx: reflections on class and race.

• Author: Bannerji, Himani

I know I am not alone. There must be hundreds of other women, maybe thousands, who feel as I do. There may be hundreds of men who want the same drastic things to happen. But how do you hook up with them? How can you interlink your own struggle and goals with these myriad, hypothetical people who are hidden entirely or else concealed by stereotypes and/or generalities of "platform" such as any movement seems to spawn? I don't know. I don't like it, this being alone when it is clear that there will have to be multitudes working together, around the world, if radical and positive change can be forced upon the heinous status quo I despise in all its overwhelming power.--June Jordan, "Declaration of an Independence I Would Just as Soon Not Have," in Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (1989)

Introduction

IT IS CONVENTIONAL IN ACADEMIC AND POLITICAL CIRCLES BY NOW TO SPEAK OF "RACE" in the same breath with gender and class. It is more or less recognized that race can be combined with other social relations of power and that they can mediate and intensify each other. (1) This combination of "race," gender, and class is often expressed through the concept of "intersectionality," in which three particular strands of social relations and ideological practices of difference and power are seen as arising in their own specific social terrain, and then crisscrossing each other "intersectionally" or aggregatively. (2) It is a coming together of social issues to create a moment of social experience.

Yet, speaking of experience, nonwhite and white people living in Canada and the West know that this social experience is not, as lived, a matter of intersectionality. Their sense of being in the world, textured through myriad social relations and cultural forms, is lived or felt or perceived as being all together and all at once. A working-class nonwhite woman's (Black, South Asian, Chinese, etc.) presence in the usual racialized environment is not divisible separately and serially. The fact of her blackness, her sex, and gender-neutral personhood of being working class blend into something of an identity simultaneously and instantaneously. (3) This identification is in the eye of the beholder and in her own sense of social presence captured by this gaze. The same goes for a white woman, yet when confronted with this question of "being" and experience, we are hard put to theorize them in terms of a social ontology. What accounts for this inadequacy of conceptualization, which fails to capture such formative experientiality? If it is lived, then how can it be thought, and how can we overcome our conceptual shortcomings? My intent here is to suggest a possible theorization that can address these questions, or at least to grasp the reasons why we need to ask them in the first place. This is not a matter of simply responding to a theoretical challenge, but is also a political matter. It is a basic piece of the puzzle for the making of social democracy.

For democracy to be more than a mere form consisting of political rituals that only serve to entrench the rule of capital and sprinkle holy water on existing social inequalities, it must have a popular and actually participatory content. That content should be social and cultural demands concentrated in social movements and organizations that work through political processes aimed at popular entitlement at all levels. Such politics needs a social understanding that conceives social formations as a set of complex, contradictory, and inclusive phenomena of social interactions. A simple arithmetical exercise of adding or intersecting "race," gender, and class in a stratificatory mode would not do. Neither can it posit "race" as a cultural phenomenon and gender and class as social and economic. It must overcome the segmentation of the overall social into such elementary aspects of its composition. For example, a trade union cannot properly be said to be an organization for class struggle if it only thinks of class in economic terms, without broadening the concept of class to include "race" and gender in its intrinsic formative definition. Furthermore, it must make its understanding actionable on this socially composite ground of class. (4)

Outside the trade unions, which are explicitly "class" organizations, the usual practice in current social justice movements is to adopt "coalition" politics that do not discriminate against platforms on which these organizations have been put together. (5) Such coalitionist activism is a tactical matter that reflects the same pluralist aggregative logic of social understanding. Class-based organizations come together with those that are not because of a shared interest in certain issues. In "new social movements," issues of class and capital would be considered unnecessary, if at all. (6) So popular demands based on gender, "race," sexuality, identity, and so on must primarily be formulated in cultural terms, outside of class and capital. In this political framework, "antiracism" becomes more a question of multiculturalism and ethnicity, as the socially relational aspects of racialization embedded in the former is converted into a cultural demand. The sharp, recent decline in work on "race" that combines hegemonic/cultural commonsense with the workings of class and state is thus not surprising. (7) The turn to postmodernism, away from Marxism and class analysis, has resulted in increasing valorization of cultural norms and forms, and made theories of discourse into vehicles for "radical" politics. If once positivist Marxists compelled us to deal with economism and class reductionism, now our battle is with "cultural reductionism." Neither of these readings of social ontology allows us to do justice to politics for social justice. Our theoretical journey must begin somewhere else to reach another destination.

Theorizing the Social

The theorization and politics I suggest are not exercises in abstraction. They do not eschew thinking or organizing on specific issues relating to economy, culture, or politics. They can be highly specific or local in their scope, about neighborhoods or homelessness in Toronto, for example, or speak to cultural problems. But using these different entry points into the social, they have to analyze and formulate their problems in terms of political problematics that show how these particular or local issues only arise in a wider or extra-local context of socioeconomic and cultural relations. If they are "specific" issues, we must realize that it is because they are "specific" to a general, larger set of social, structural, and institutional relations. (8) For example, is the type of homelessness experienced in Toronto possible outside the way capitalist economic and social development has proceeded in Canada as a whole? Redressing the wrongs in this case, one has to think and ask on grounds beyond the immediate situation, go above and behind it. It would not do to think of "poverty" as an issue or problem by itself, only to be added to "race," class, or gender, or to conceive of these outside of capital.

Beyond the frequent lip-service to reflexive social theorization or even to some excellent works on class, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, especially by historians, we need to venture into a more complex reading of the social, where every aspect or moment of it can be shown to reflect others, where each little piece of it contains the macrocosm in its microcosm--as "the world in a grain of sand" (William Wordsworth). What we have instead is a thriving theory industry that ruptures the integrity of the social and joyously valorizes "fragments," preferring to posit a non-relational inchoateness, or to add them whenever necessary. By such accounts, the social amounts to an ordering of regulatory parts--the old utilitarian arithmetic--and properly speaking, is inconceivable. Marxists and neo-Marxists have also succumbed to a ceaseless debate on modernism and postmodernism, allowing the aesthetic, moral category of the "modern" to distract them. Seeking to bypass the terms of this debate, I would like to come back to Marx' own formulation of "the social," the ontological or the existential, in different terms or concepts. Here I assume "the social" to mean a complex socioeconomic and cultural formation, brought to life through myriad finite and specific social and historical relations, organizations, and institutions. It involves living and conscious human agents and what Marx called their "sensuous, practical human activity." (9) Here culture and society are not in a mechanical relation of an economic base and a cultural superstructure. All activities of and in the social are relational and are mediated and articulated with their expressive and embedded forms of consciousness. Here signifying and communicative practices are intrinsic moments of social being. Using such a formulation of the social, my primary concern is to perform a Marxist critique of what "race" means with respect to "class" and gender. In other words, I am trying to socialize the notion of "race."

Before articulating my theory of the social, I will consider the habit of fragmentive or stratified thinking so prevalent among us, which ends up by erasing the social from the conception of ontology. This same habit can also produce an evaluative gesture whereby "the cultural," for example, becomes secondary, apparent or illusory, and "class," understood as a function of "economy," becomes the "real" or the fundamental creative force of society. Culture as superstructure "reflects" or "corresponds" to the economic base. In the reverse conceptual habit, the formative power of discourse determines the social. By becoming primarily discursive, the social becomes a thought object. Epistemologies reach a proportion of exclusivity, which is not new and about which Marx speaks in his First Thesis on Feuerbach. (10) In both reductive modes, class...