Michaels explores this more deeply in his provocative “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man” by challenging the common dictum, touted by both liberals and leftists, that race is a social construction. As the primary objects of a more and more exploitative system, the working class provides a baseline of opposition to the depredations of turbocharged capitalism from which effective resistance can be launched. Just as with the Bookerite progenitor, developing and advancing a popular politics is not the point at all.

The second thing worth mentioning is the report’s use of the word “disproportionately,” which does a great deal of conceptual work. I’ve long suspected that, to a certain strain of race-conscious or antiracist discourse, historical exploration in popular culture was less important than the propagation of tales of inspiration and uplift. As it happens, this isn’t true but the more relevant fact is its importance for them, since they understand the Uprising (and similar events like Standing Rock and the “national riots after Ferguson”) as expressions of the way in which movements where “class division and class struggle” are not “signified as such,” can nevertheless mark “the path to revolution.The project of making higher education free (or at least significantly more affordable) would do more to improve the educational opportunities and outcomes for students of color than simply shuffling around the very small number of spaces available at the top of the pyramid. Spanning the last two decades and covering a diverse range of topics, from electoral politics and movement history to film and art, this collection offers a comprehensive analysis of the limits and contradictions of anti-racist politics. Reed consistently decries the crystallization of black political aspirations around ill-defined goals like “community control” instead of concrete policy initiatives that would lift the material living standards of black working people.

In that case, the perfect is the enemy of the good: a little bit of progress is better than nothing. Employers can pay you very little if someone else is ready and willing to replace you, especially if your job is one of the many “unskilled” jobs reserved for the working poor. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. 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 same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing.It’s not hard, then, to see the outline of a class-based campaign against sexism, one that would unite ordinary women and men for a demand that would materially change family life for the majority of society. Understood in those terms, class not only offers the left a basis on which to analyse society but also provides a strategy with which to change it.

Reed’s reflections on his political journey encompassing Black Power student activism, new urban black electoral regimes, academia, and Labor Party building are rich with insights and lessons from an entire life devoted to working-class politics.Rich white people, who make up the majority of the capitalist class, are almost always immune to any politics that emphasizes disparity of outcomes.