- Ben Burgis
- 6 days ago
- 20 min read
Abstractionism, Reductionism and Class-First Politics
Ben Burgis
5 June 2025
Socialists want to replace the current system of private ownership of the means of production with a new system based on collective ownership and economic democracy. Along the way to that long-term goal, we want to implement “socialist policies” like Medicare for All and tuition-free higher education, and we tend to go on and on about the importance of building a larger and more militant labor movement.This much is a baseline on which damn near everyone who calls themselves a socialist agrees. Things get more complicated, though, when you ask how it all fits (or fails to fit) with other kinds of proposals for social change.
For example, some people (e.g. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor) support everything I’ve just mentioned but also advocate racially specific reparations, while others (e.g. Adolph Reed) reject that proposal for principled and/or strategic reasons. A principled reason might be that equally poor people of different racial backgrounds equally deserve to be recipients of redistribution, and it would be wrong to redistribute to them in unequal ways depending on the historical circumstances that led to their families’ poverty. A strategic reason, often emphasized by Reed, is that (a) any large-scale redistribution of wealth will confront massive resistance from vested interests, which will (b) be far easier to overcome if we can mobilize a majority of the population to fight for it and this will (c) be far easier to do if the redistribution benefits a majority of the people who would be doing that fighting.
Socialists with Reed-like positions are often accused of something called “class reductionism.” The precise meaning of this charge is notoriously slippery. Take, for example, this old article in Socialist Worker that proudly proclaims that the now-defunct International Socialist Organization “always aimed to reject the sort of class reductionism that is interested in race, gender, sexuality and the like only as a function of economics.” That’s one of the sentences that you can feel like you understand if you read it quickly and don’t think about it very much.
But what exactly is the charge? That the nefarious class reductionists have a false factual belief (that racism, sexism, and the like are a “function of economics”)? Or is the idea that they acknowledge that these things aren’t entirely a function of economics but they just aren’t “interested” in the non-economic dimension of the problem?
Nor, as I suggested here, does anything become more clear when we start taking that word “reductionism” literally. No socialist I’m aware of thinks that instances of racial prejudice or discrimination, for example, “reduce” to class-based inequality in the sense that the former literally just are the latter.
It might be more useful to start with a different question. Instead of, “What precisely does class reductionism mean,” we can ask, “What are people trying to express when they throw around this term?”
Here the answer is fairly straightforward. The underlying accusation is that the class “reductionist” doesn’t care enough about other forms of injustice. If you have enough conversations with grassroots leftists who think that something called “class reductionism” is a problem, you’ll pretty quickly run into a contrast between “class reductionism” and “intersectional” approaches to left-wing politics. The i-word also has a technical meaning that’s irrelevant here. In context, being “intersectional” means being attentive to every form of injustice (based on race, gender, sexuality, and so on, with “class” being just one of the items on the never-ending checklist). The “class reductionist” is someone who checks the “cares about class-based injustice” box but perversely refuses to check the “cares about racism” box, the “cares about sexism” box, and so on. “Class reductionism,” on this picture, is a moral failure of solidarity.
How exactly, though, is the “reductionist” supposed to be exhibiting this failure?
Certainly, neither Reed nor any other major figure frequently accused of “class reductionism” (e.g. Vivek Chibber, about whom I’ll be saying much more below) holds the position that the Civil Rights Movement’s crusade to end segregation and secure voting rights for black people wasn’t worth the candle, for example. Nor am I aware of any such figure claiming that racial, sexual, and other prejudices will magically cease to exist, or anti-discrimination laws will become unnecessary, once the means of production are socialized.
Here, however, is a position that really does exist (and which, to put my own cards on the table, I hold):
Even in advanced liberal capitalist democracies, rearguard actions to shore up legal equality will of course need to be fought. (Think here of rollbacks of abortion rights, or the possibility that the conservative movement will take up a renewed assault on marriage equality for gay couples.) However, to whatever extent formal legal equality between groups has been achieved, the best way to tackle the injustices left over by this achievement will be to strategically focus on universalistic economic solutions, frankly labeled as such, and heavily emphasize the importance of labor organizing and other forms of organizing that tend to unite working-class people across other kinds of distinctions.
Let’s call that position “class-first leftism.” The label could doubtless be nitpicked in various ways (and I know it wouldn’t be embraced by everyone whose politics I’m using it to describe), but it’s probably good enough for our purposes (1).
So: Does class-first leftism involve the moral failure of solidarity typically gestured at by the phrase “class reductionism”?
I don’t think so. In fact, the point critics tend to miss is that this is, to a great extent, a strategic debate about how best to reduce those extra-economic forms of injustice that remain when equality between different demographic groups has been achieved on a formal legal level. Think here about the Reed arguments for universalist redistribution rather than reparations as a solution to poverty disproportionately experienced by black people due to the long shadow of Jim Crow. Or the way that, in a more economically equal society, women are less likely to be financially trapped in abusive relationships (or even just ones where they feel like they have to go along with sexist cultural norms about the distribution of domestic labor). Working to achieve that by means of a movement that appeals to both men and women primarily on the basis of their immediate material interests may well be a more effective intervention than working on the other end of the equation and focusing on directly changing men’s attitudes.We’ll circle back to all of this shortly. First, though, we need to detour to a more recent accusation leveled against leftists who advocate the class-centric approach, “class abstractionism.”
The term was first introduced in a paper in Sociological Theory called “The Problem of Class Abstractionism.” The authors of that paper, Michael McCarthy and Matthiue Desan, exclusively focused their critique on Marxist academic Vivek Chibber. The “abstractionism” charge was further developed in an essay for Crisis and Critique by William Clare Roberts. That essay (“Class in Theory, Class in Practice”) also applies the critique to Adolph Reed as well as several writers for the socialist magazine Jacobin (including me). In fact, Roberts seems to insinuate that “class abstractionism” is a problem that generally afflicts that magazine. He refers at one point to “Jacobin writers” without making any distinctions within that category and in another passage he talks about “Jacobin-style class abstractionism.”
In a panel for Red May, which included both McCarthy and Roberts, McCarthy said that when he and Desan first started working on their paper, their intention was to nail down a precise analysis of “class reductionism” but they ended up deciding that the “reductionism” charge was a conceptual mess that didn’t really map onto the views of the alleged reductionists. So far, so good.
Nevertheless, McCarthy and Desan (and later Roberts) decided that at least some of the figures typically accused of reductionism were making an error at least somewhat in the neighborhood of that older accusation. McCarthy and Desan’s basic conceptual move is to separate the issues of the structural and political primacy of class. They themselves affirm that there’s some robust sense in which class is structurally primary in explaining various important things about the society in which they live. But they accuse “class abstractionists” like Chibber (and, in Roberts’s case, Reed and those “Jacobin writers”) of illegitimately inferring from this kind of primacy that class should be politically primary in terms of our strategy for changing society (2).
McCarthy and Desan vividly illustrate how structural and political primacy could come apart with a quote from David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness. “If,” Roediger writes, “racism is a large, low-hanging branch of a tree that is rooted in class relations, we must constantly remind ourselves that the branch is not the same as the roots, and that the best way to shake the roots may at times be by grabbing the branches.”
They also repeatedly suggest that identity-based political mobilization (e.g. Black Lives Matter) can count as a form of class politics, or perhaps even that class politics will emerge from some sort of organic process of such movements entering into coalitions and eventually morphing into something different, such that militant particularisms will dialectically transform themselves into socialist universalism in the fullness of time. (The “other solidarities that make up the texture of workers’ lived experience,” McCarthy and Desan write, are the “materials upon which class formation must work”.) At other points, they seem to regard the suggestion that the sort of universalist politics their class-first interlocutors hope for will ever shine through these other “subjectivities” as naive. Neither their paper nor Roberts’s followup, it would be safe to say, is a model of clarity on this point.
But the general shape of the disagreement seems clear enough when we think about the kind of race and gender examples already given. McCarthy, Desan, and Roberts think branch-grabbing is a promising strategy for changing society. Reed, Chibber, and those “Jacobin writers” are more skeptical of the utility of branch-grabbing. It looks like a straightforward strategic debate, informed by different understandings of the levers of power available to radical dissidents in the specific circumstances of advanced liberal capitalist societies.
McCarthy, Desan, and Roberts, though, insist that the “abtractionists” aren’t just misguided in their strategic assessments but guilty of a deeper theoretical error, deriving particular ideas about what socialist strategy should look like in societies like the United States in the 21st century from a highly abstract theoretical framework about the structural role of class in capitalist society. Such high-flown abstractions might have their place for certain theoretical purposes, but the fallacious attempt to use them to derive conclusions about day-to-day political strategy leads you to miss out on strategically promising branch-grabbing.
I examined this charge in detail in my presentation at the Caucus for a Critical Political Science conference in March, based on a much longer paper I’m co-writing with my good friend Michael Sechman. I published the presentation here as On the Charge of Class Abstractionism, and it was later reprinted at Everyday Analysis. Sechman and I point out, among other things, that:
When McCarthy and Desan (and later Roberts) say they affirm the “structural primacy” of class, what they mean by that is hopelessly muddled. (See the long footnote at the end of “On the Charge of Class Abstractionism.”)
McCarthy and Desan offer two very non-equivalent definitions of what class abstractionism is even supposed to be. If you take what they say in the body of the paper seriously, you get a very different definition than the one that emerges from taking their 2x2 breakdown of possible positions seriously.
McCarthy, Desan, and Roberts equivocate between two very importantly different understandings of what the “political primacy” of class would amount to.
They ignore arguments for class-first leftism given by the various targets of their critique that are based not in abstract theoretical arguments for political from structural primacy but in concrete strategic considerations about why particularist branch-grabbing is not in fact a very effective tree-dislodging strategy under most circumstances.
In a recent response to “On the Charge of Class Abstractionism” on social media, Michael McCarthy took issue with only the second half of the arguments I’ve summarized above, so I won’t revisit the first two points here. (Again, read the first essay for much more on both of those points.) Instead, McCarthy now claims that my argument that abstractionism is a straw man is “based on just changing the definition of political primacy, which we define carefully and apply consistently.”
Let’s see.
The specific text that McCarthy and Desan mine for evidence that Vivek Chibber is a “class abstractionist” is The Class Matrix. Honestly, I think they misunderstood the point of that book in a pretty basic way. Chibber is widely (and correctly!) understood to be a left critic of identity politics and an advocate of a class-centered strategy. And The Class Matrix is a book about class theory. So, it’s understandable that some overly eager readers would connect the dots and assume that The Class Matrix is intended as a polemic in favor of the class-first approach. But it’s just not.
I did a deep dive on what I think is going on in The Class Matrix here a while back, which Everyday Analysis also reprinted. Here’s how I summarized the core point there:
Chibber is a sociologist, and he positions The Class Matrix as a response to two critiques of classical Marxism that have been influential in academia and on academia-adjacent parts of the Left. The first is the one that inspired many of the early reflections of the Frankfurt School. At a rough gloss, these theorists asked why the proletarian revolution eagerly predicted by Marx and Engels hadn’t happened yet. Given that such a revolution would serve the material interests of the working class, the Frankfurters turned to questions of culture and ideology to explain what had gone wrong. This is part of what Chibber means by the “cultural turn.” But he also addresses the more conceptually basic challenges posed by later theorists. These thinkers questioned whether we can even analytically separate economic structures and economic interests from the contingencies of culture and ideology in the first place. Aren’t interests and structures constituted by culture and ideology?
A very quick summary of his solution to both of these concerns is that adequate answers to both concerns can be found within classical Marxist economic analysis. On the one hand, the capitalist class structure isn’t culturally contingent in the way that, for example, gender roles are because the former “directly” governs agents’ material well-being (i.e. without needing to be enforced by cultural pressure or legal coercion) and thus gives people a powerful incentive, regardless of what wider cultural context they find themselves in, to internalize the cultural scripts they need in order to participate in that structure (how to dress and act at work, how to interact with supervisors, and so on). When your livelihood depends on internalizing the right cultural scripts, you’ll likely internalize them regardless of the rest of your cultural values. On the other hand, when we zoom in on the incentives individual workers have by virtue of their position in the class structure, Marxist class analysis itself would predict that most proletarians will resign themselves to their conditions and keep their heads down for fear of endangering their livelihood. Class consciousness and labor militancy are highly contingent cultural achievements.
I don’t think I’ve really done his argument justice here. (Again, read that longer essay if you’re curious.) But I hope that at least gives you enough of a flavor to realize that the particular fish Chibber is frying in The Class Matrix really has very little to do with class vs. identity stuff. Again, he has strong views on all of that. But prosecuting that case is just not the point of this particular book.
Working on the incorrect assumption that it is the project of the book, though, McCarthy and Desan repeatedly accuse Chibber of illegitimately smuggling in the assumption that the formation of a collective political agent to bring about socialism will necessarily be all about appealing to workers as workers when he should be giving us an argument for that conclusion. Once you realize the mix-up, quite a lot of their paper just disappears into irrelevance.
One of the key points Sechman and I make is that McCarthy and Desan equivocate throughout between two things “the political primacy of class” might mean.
The first is what we can call “political primacy a la Ellen Meiksins Wood” (since this is what she was worried about trendy left academics “retreating” from when she wrote about the “retreat from class”). This one holds that, on a broad historical level, the working class is the only part of society suited to be the agent of change that can bring about the transformation of society socialists want.
The second we can call “political primacy a la Adolph Reed.” This is going to be roughly the position described above as “class-first leftism.”
The difference between the two might not be obvious at first sight. Certainly any Marxist who accepts primacy a la Reed will accept primacy a la Wood. And being convinced of primacy a la Wood gives us at least some reason to suspect that primacy a la Reed will hold as well. After all, while Rube-Goldberg-ing people into class consciousness by means of appealing to them on the basis of particular identities in order to spur a movement that could somehow end up taking on more universalistic class-focused characteristics over time might do the job of activating that collective agent of historical change, this probably wouldn’t be your first guess about how to go about it.
However related they are, though, the two are at least logically detachable. One is a claim about who can accomplish socialist goals and the other is a claim about how to go about activating this historical agent. To better see the distinction, think about instances where particularist appeals really might make perfect conjunctural sense. If you’re trying to organize a workplace where the workers are overwhelmingly female and sexual harassment by bosses is a significant problem, for example, then encouraging people to stand up for themselves “as women” might well make sense (and might even usefully draw in the support of some low-level female managers). And no one, by the way, denies that cases like this one exist. In fact, when he was on my podcast, Vivek Chibber explicitly affirmed that he thinks there are cases where mobilizing people on the basis of particularist appeals serves the cause of class formation but “as a rule, typically, no.”
One position that’s at least logically consistent (even if I don’t think it has much else going for it) would be to affirm political primacy a la Wood but disagree with Chibber’s “as a rule, typically, no” assessment. In fact, while they’re far from clear about this point, at least some of the formulations in both the McCarthy and Desan paper and the Roberts followup suggest that the three of them hold precisely this combination of views.
With all of this out of the way, we can directly examine McCarthy’s claim that he and Desan “define” the concept of political primacy “carefully and apply” it “consistently.” It’s very easy to show that they don’t.
Here are a couple of places where they use “political primacy” to mean primacy a la Wood:
“At issue here is the political primacy of class as the privileged subject of radical, and especially socialist, politics.”
“What neo-orthodox [their preferred term for Chibber’s version of Marxism] shares with orthodox marxism is the pretension to justify the political primacy of class, that is, the notion that class subjects are a priori the necessary subjects of radical politics, in terms of its structural primacy at this abstract level.”
Here are some passages where they clearly have in mind primacy a la Reed (or, often, a cartoonish caricature of primacy a la Reed (3):
“The political primacy of class refers to arguments for the priority of class subjectivity in political mobilization”
“Because the class structure operates at multiple levels of abstraction, the structural primacy of class does not necessarily entail its political primacy, in the sense of making the abstract category of ‘worker’ the immediate and exclusive subjective basis for class formation specifically and socialist politics more broadly”
“What defines claims regarding the political primacy of class is simply the view that the subjective basis of radical politics should be a priori defined in terms of class.”
In his social media response to “On the Charge of Class Abstractionism,” McCarthy tries to clarify all of this in a way that ends up clarifying very little:
If you check his and Desan’s paper, the “class difference thesis” is the claim they attribute to Chibber “that class structure has primacy of determination over nonclass social structures because it alone directly governs people’s material well-being and therefore their material interests.” Whether that’s an accurate interpretation of anything Chibber says depends on how you read the phrase “primacy of determination.” Remember, the only bits of culture that Chibber claims in The Class Matrix that the class structure determines are the parts directly necessary for that structure’s existence. But we can put aside that issue, because whether it’s accurate or not, “the class difference thesis” is clearly a claim about the structural-explanatory primacy of class, not its political primacy. The “negative selectivity thesis” similarly “posits that class structure determines culture in the sense of selecting against incompatible cultural forms.” This is a more careful reading of Chibber than the “class difference thesis” but, again, this is structural primacy stuff, not political primacy (in either sense). Charitably, it could be that what McCarthy means when he says political primacy is (in his and Desan’s readings of Chibber’s views) “embedded” in these theses is that they think Chibber derives political primacy from them. If so, that doesn’t strike me as a very careful reading of The Class Matrix. But, whether or not you think Chibber does this, it’s irrelevant to the issue at hand. Even if this were true, it wouldn’t change the fact that, throughout their paper, McCarthy and Desan toggle back and forth between two definitions of political primacy. In pointing out that both are there, I’m not "just changing the definition of political primacy.” I’m quoting them giving multiple non-equivalent definitions of the concept.
This isn’t just nitpicking. The reason this particular equivocation matters so much is that in both the McCarthy and Desan paper and the Roberts followup, 100% of the textual evidence that Chibber is making the “abstractionist” move of deriving the political primacy of class from abstract Marxist structural premises is about him deriving primacy a la Wood. (And of course that much really does follow from structural premises about the interests and capacities of the working class.) But they turn around and treat that as evidence of Chibber (who’s taken as a stand-in for the whole “abstractionist” camp) trying to derive primacy a la Reed from abstract theoretical considerations about class structure unassisted by concrete conjectural analysis.
In “On the Charge of Class Abstractionism,” I went into detail about how Roberts pulls this bait and switch. So as not to repeat that, here’s how McCarthy and Desan do it—first, they summarize something Chibber actually does say in The Class Matrix and claim that this exemplifies “abstractionism”:
The basic argument is that because the capitalist social order is dependent on the working class…in a way that is not true of other social groups, the working class occupies a politically strategic structural location. In this section [on class abstractionism], we argue that this belief relies on an unduly abstract conception of class.
It’s true that Chibber does say that the working class occupies a politically strategic structural location. But that’s just primacy a la Wood. (Or really, to put a finer point on it, primacy a la Marx.) It’s not entirely clear to me that McCarthy and Desan (or Roberts) would deny this kind of primacy, and it would be difficult to make sense of McCarthy and Desan’s claim that their paper is a “contribution within Marxism” if they reject it. The proposition that the emancipation of the working class is necessarily the act of the working class (since no other social force has the interests and capacities to bring it about) is pretty foundational to anything recognizable as a version of Marxist thought.
In any case, after (accurately) summarizing Chibber deriving political primacy in the “agent of historical change” sense from structural premises, McCarthy and Desan turn around and say things like this:
What we call the political primacy of class, then, refers not to a general claim of the political significance of class, which all Marxists would agree to, but rather to a particular way of understanding the relationship between class formation and socialist politics. Specifically, it refers to the claim that such a politics must in the first instance be pitched in class terms to be effective.
In this formulation, political primacy clearly means something entirely different. They’re now talking about (a perhaps slightly cartoonified version of) primacy a la Reed. But no one is saying they can derive that from structural claims about class at a high level of theoretical abstraction, unassisted by concrete strategic arguments. That’s just a straw man.
Earlier this year, McCarthy appeared on an episode of Daniel Denvir’s podcast The Dig, where he was joined by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. The episode, entitled “Woke Wars,” was a two and a half-hour venting session about some socialists somewhere being overly critical of “woke” identity politics, in ways that Denvir and his guests all strongly suggested reeked of a moral failure of solidarity toward various marginalized groups. Not a single name was named, which is convenient if you’re not going to try very hard to accurately representing anyone’s views, but various context clues suggest that the whole thing was intended as a response of sorts to Chibber’s then-recent critique of identity politics as well as a New York Times article where Bhaskar Sunkara and Jen Pan were quoted criticizing corporate DEI trainings and suggesting that cross-racial labor organizing has been consistently proven to be a far more effective way of reducing racial prejudice in the workplace.
In the episode, McCarthy rehearsed the arguments in his and Desan’s class abstractionism paper, Táíwò rehearsed the arguments in his book Elite Capture, and so on. But what really stood out at me was that they spent two and a half hours expressing disgust at the lack of enthusiasm for radical-liberal identity politics in parts of the Left, and making all sorts of dubious claims about what “some people on the Left” think, without ever giving their listeners even a hint of what sort of strategic considerations might nudge someone who wanted just as much as they do to reduce harms experienced (or disproportionately experienced) by historically marginalized groups to opt for frankly universalistic class-based approach as opposed to trying to have it both ways.
This was perhaps the most frustrating to hear when the four of them (somewhat ambiguously) defended the value of corporate DEI trainings. Taylor told a story about a lawyer she used to work for who said racist things about people they interacted with in court while she sat and uncomfortably listened, and McCarthy said that because, he’s sure, DEI trainers are disproportionately black (4), and because middle-class black professionals are more likely than their white counterparts to be financially supporting poorer relatives, abolishing these positions is an assault on the black poor.One very obvious point that any alleged “abstractionist” would have made if any had been included is that hoping that money paid to affluent black professionals will trickle down to the black poor is a spectacularly inefficient redistributive strategy. Meanwhile, some studies have suggested that the effect of DEI trainings is (at best) neutral in the long run, and at worse even increases racial resentments at work.
Another is that hoping that people like that racist lawyer will change their ways because they had to sit through tedious corporate soul-searching sessions seems like a bad bet, while focusing on universalistic economic solutions is more likely to pay off. In less economically precarious circumstances with better labor protections, etc., workers in the position Taylor was once in would have to worry less about what telling a racist boss to shut the fuck up would mean for their future livelihood. As with the point about universalist economic redistribution empowering women to renegotiate the domestic contract with husbands and boyfriends in more egalitarian ways, the advantage of socialist universalism here is that it puts the power in the hands of people who are far more likely to know how to look after their own interests than anyone else who we might hope will act on their behalf.
There are responses someone on the McCarthy/Denvir/Taylor/Táíwò side could make to all this, of course. You could raise the concern, for example, that sexist working-class men will correctly realize that universalist material redistribution will help realign gender roles in a more egalitarian direction and prioritize resisting that over furthering their own direct material interests. As such, you can argue that we need to focus on changing attitudes first. As an empirical matter, I’m not convinced by that objection, but at least it’s a real response to the kinds of arguments class-first leftists actually make.Here’s the larger point:There’s a real strategic debate to be had between these perspectives. I want to have it. But silly straw men like “class reductionism” and “class abstractionism” don’t help.
Speaking of which, a small mea culpa is in order here. In 2020, Noah Berlatsky wrote an article about me for Arc Digital Media called “Why Class First Leftists are Wrong.” In it, he distorted my political positions beyond recognition and, in full froth at the end of the article, said that the “ethics” of class-first leftists like me, are “often” “reactionary garbage” and that our political program amounts to “a new white male cishet boss taking the place of the old.”In my response, I took issue with all of this as you’d expect. By and large, I’d stand by the substance of what I wrote there. But the one part I regret is that I added that I don’t know what “class-first leftism” even means. In retrospect, I should have said, “Yes, that phrase fits, but you’re wrong about every aspect of what class-first leftists think.”
There’s an interesting anticipation of this charge in Ch. 7 of Søren Mau’s book Mute Compulsion. It came out the same year as McCarthy and Desan’s paper, so Mau doesn’t have the term “abstractionism” yet, but he says that “narrow-minded traditional Marxist distinctions between revolutionary class struggle and 'identity politics’” are best resisted by rejecting the idea that “it is possible or desirable to derive political strategies from theoretical arguments developed on a very high level of abstraction.” My own view, as we’ll see, is that Mau is correct to say we shouldn’t do this, but that he’s incorrect to assume that this is what the “narrow-minded traditional Marxists” are up to.
Roberts starts his essay with a quote from Reed himself that he doesn’t quite seem to realize shows precisely that Reed doesn’t believe in political primacy in the sense of wanting to exclusively appeal to “class subjectivity” (i.e. appealing to people as workers). Here’s Roberts’s opening paragraph: ”It is impossible to deny that a new discourse of class has been ascendant since 2016. Some of the figures in this new class discourse have been hoeing this same row for a very long time. Adolph Reed has been making the same arguments consistently for thirty years. That argument is that, while ‘obvious racial disparities’ are a problem, ‘the way forward is precisely through the kinds of social and economic policies that address black people as workers, students, parents, taxpayers, citizens, people in need of decent jobs, housing, and health care, or concerned with foreign policy—not to homogenize them under a monolithic racial classification.’” That’s certainly a call for universalist appeals and a predominant focus on material interests, and it pairs naturally with a strategic focus on building up proletarian power in the workplace, but it’s pretty clearly not a call to only ever appeal to people ‘as workers.’
Perhaps more complete data would bear out McCarthy’s assumption, but for what it’s worth the numbers I’ve seen don’t.
