Before I tackle this article itself, I would like to make an appeal to civility among fellow Marxists. The point of writing this short response to “The Dead-End of Racial Identity Politics” is not to attack the author or his organization (Workers’ Offense) but rather to open up a dialogue between Workers’ Offensive and the media collective that I am part of (Emancipation) on issues of race and class. In this dialogue I do hope to critique the article’s flaws and the ideological underpinnings that have lead to said flaws. Generally the disputes between individual Marxists, let alone different organizations on the left, tend not to be very productive due to an overly hostile polemical tone that is taken in the discourse—a tone that I’ll be explicitly avoiding.

The Labor Movement (or Lack Thereof)

The weakness of this article and of many attempts at critiquing identity politics from the left is that they all seem to provide the same alternative to “IDpol.” Whether they be social democrats like Adolph Reed and Amber A’Lee Frost or left communists like Workers’ Offensive’s E.S., they all point to a revival of the traditional labor movement as an answer to the lackluster neoliberal identity politics dominating discourse on the left. Something these critics of identity politics seem not to grasp is that the traditional labor movement cannot be revived in the ways that they suggest. For example, E.S argues that wildcat strikes and riots will revive the forces of labor. This is wrong in two crucial ways.

First, two relatively recent wildcat strikes do not reverse the “decomposition” of the working class that has taken place over the past 40 years or so. The total number of manufacturing workers globally has decreased in the past two decades and what is called “deindustrialization” has turned parts of the United States that were once dedicated to manufacturing into the desolate wastelands known as “the rust belt”. As one can imagine such a decomposition of the working class coupled with the neoliberal assaults on unions leaves the traditional labor movement utterly devastated, with nothing but class-denying neoliberal identity politics to fill the void. Second, E.S fails to confront that many involved with riots that have happened over white supremacist violence are either not actually the workers or are not the workers of the old labor movement, because the temporary nature of their jobs makes them incredibly hard to organize. He comes dangerously close to acknowledging this fact when he writes:

“Instead, the majority of black workers live in a chronic state of unemployment or under-employment and have been affected more than any other subsection of the US working class by the tendency towards the casualization of employment that has flourished under neoliberalism.”

E.S. makes use of conventional Marxist language about the proletariat, using “worker” interchangeably with “proletarian”. While this is part of the Marxist attempt to maintain the dignity of not just the proletariat but the exploited classes of history, we suggest that this traditional language obscures our contemporary problem. Unemployed proletarians are generally not doing socially recognized “work”, and often encounter workers’ identity as an external attack on the dignity of their existence. Now he could possibly describe unemployed people as a part of the labor reserve army and therefore part of the proletariat but this would require making a distinction between the structural position of proletariat and workers at the point of production specifically. Even members of Endnotes, who thought the implied employment prospects for a labor reserve army were too optimistic and applied Mike Davis’ concept of surplus population to the proletariat, have often taken to “worker” language.

Moreover, he fails to acknowledge that underemployed black workers are in a relatively different position than their peers because the majority of them are not considered “overqualified” for their work. So since the white supremacist educational system has failed them to the point that they could not possibly get a college degree even if they worked themselves to death, they will be permanently stuck in part-time minimum-wage jobs with high turnover rates, making them incredibly hard to organize by virtue of how easily they can be replaced even during wildcat strikes. This leaves us as communists in a rather dire situation since we have always relied upon a more sustainable labor movement as a means of facilitating struggle. We can not simply point to labor as a solution to neoliberal identity politics in the face of the challenges that made labor falter and neoliberalism ascend to start with. While it is not impossible to organize a new proletarian movement, the nature of it must be radically different from the traditional labor movement of the 20th century, one capable of organizing what James Boggs called “the outsiders”.

On Addressing Race

One of the most damning aspects of E.S.’ article is the way it talks about race. The way E.S handles the issue of race in relation to class struggle is flippantly disregarding of those involved with the issue; he haphazardly dismisses attempts at dealing with the question of race beyond colorblind workerism, like the Black Lives Matter movement, as identity politics. There’s much to be critically of when it comes to movements like Black Lives Matter given it is not a singular organization but a heterogeneous grouping of different activists. There are bound to be major flaws within, and as E.S. points out, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations, usually associated with the Democratic Party) were heavily involved in the movement. Liberals were able to take advantage of the disorganized nature inherent to movements like BLM just like they did with Occupy before it. However E.S goes beyond making these reasonable observations about BLM into criticism that is just plain wrong:

“Black Lives Matter are modern-day Garveyites, only they have traded in the overt homophobia and misogyny of the latter for hollow social justice rhetoric that throws a veneer of radicalism over their essentially capitalist politics.”

How could you describe a movement as multifaceted as Black Lives Matter as such a specific tendency of Black Politics? There are no major elements within BLM advocating for black separatism or any kind of return to Africa as the Garveyites did. This assertion doesn’t even make sense if you follow E.S.’ own logic, since a position of black separatism would be out of place for a Democratic Party-NGO complex that is still made up of mostly white people top down. Odd assertions like this about racial politics seem to be prevalent within tendencies of the ultraleft, from the International Communist Current’s bizarre line on “Anti-White Racism” to common colorblind arguments for internationalism which fail to provide a compelling alternative to national liberation for oppressed peoples. This lack of nuance does not mean that we should simply accept the left nationalisms that are popular on the rest of the left simply to avoid the whiteness of the ultra left, for left nationalism has its own pitfalls, but we must recognize that the standard ultraleft appeals to internationalism have failed to reckon with the needs of those proposing national liberation due to a broader tendency-wide inclination towards colorblind workerism.

I sincerely hope that the criticism leveled here is not taken as an assertion that our comrades are racists or as misrepresentative of E.S.’ “The Dead-End Of Racial Identity Politics”. I want to have a genuine dialogue on the import of race within class that furthers the Marxist perspective on labor in a positive direction, and I look forward to engagement with this criticism.