Primacy of Class

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jan 2 23:19:44 PST 2003


***** Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others

Gregory Meyerson

...3. The "relative autonomy" of "race" has been enabled by a reduction and distortion of class analysis. The essence of the reduction and distortion involves equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism. The key move in the critique of economic determinist Marxism depends upon the view that the economic is the base, the cultural/political/ideological the superstructure. It is then relatively easy to show that the (presumably non-political) economic base does not cause the political/cultural/ideological superstructure, that the latter is/are not epiphenomenal but relatively autonomous or autonomous causal categories in their own right--though such causal pluralism often results in the deconstruction of the category of cause. It might be said, at least with regard to the "class struggle in theory," that most critics of Marxism zero in on the perceived conceptual inadequacies of base and superstructure. So I'd like to state my position on this at some length before turning to Robinson.

4. Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses. One, of course, is the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agent--a primacy which does not, as often thought, render women and people of color "secondary." Such an equation of white male and working class, as well as a corresponding division between a "white" male working class identity and all the others, whose identity is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender and race or hybrid, is a view this essay contests all along the way. The primacy of class means that building a multiracial, multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations should be the goal of any revolutionary movement: the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender and class oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not.

5. As I will show, the incorrect understanding of the primacy of class does carry with it for critics of historical materialism both the devaluation of "race" and "gender" as explanatory categories and their devaluation as real people, women and people of color. So when the charge is made against Marxism that it makes race and gender secondary, there is always the sense that race and gender are being treated at once as analytical categories and citizens--with the implication that Marxism in theory is the corollary of a deprivation of rights in practice. On this view, race, gender, class are co-primary, interacting, intersecting and, to reiterate the confusion I see between the triad as analytical category and person, in dialogue.

6. In my view, and this is surely controversial, but it also puts Marxism on its strongest footing, the primacy of class means not only that class is the primary determinant of oppression and exploitation but the only structural determinant. "Race" and gender (this essay focuses on racism but has implications for gender) are not structural determinants. There is racist and sexist ideology. And there is a racial and gendered division of labor, whose severity and function vary depending on where one works in the capitalist global economy. Both ideology and the division of labor are understood here to be functional for class rule--facilitating profit making and social control. Class rule is itself a form of class struggle. This latter point is crucial. Class rule is never automatic or easy, and there is constant resistance, both to class rule itself and its symptoms. This essay thus strongly rejects that part of the Althusserian thesis on social reproduction that explains class rule as a function of interpellation.3

7. So class does not mean the economic in contradistinction to the political or the material in contradistinction to the mental. And class struggle should itself not be seen as a reflex of the primacy of the productive forces over the social relations of production--in this scenario, the working class is not really struggling to emancipate itself but to emancipate "the productive forces." Such a view also legitimates nationalism as a stepping stone to internationalism--insofar as nationalism (through, say, import-substitution) helps develop capitalism enough so that it becomes ripe for the next stage. Finally, class does not mean "objective," defined in turn as "impersonal forces." All agents must face the constraints of a given mode of production--capitalists must obey capital's laws of motion. They must be motivated to maximize profit in order to survive, though the strongest profit making motives in the world cannot prevent the destruction of capital, which is a property of the system. In this sense, the mode of production is objective, not reducible to the wills of individual agents. But processes of class rule always involve subjects (embodied to be sure) who do make choices about how to rule and how to resist.

8. The primacy of class means that "the economic" and "the political" are inseparable--we must not divide them into the economic base (equated with "class" and "impersonal forces," the two in turn synonymous with "structure") and the political superstructure (just about everything else from law and custom to the agency of ruling and resisting subjects), separate realms that "mutually determine one another." As I've argued elsewhere and will argue below, when you split the economic and the political and then recombine them, you do not have dialectics but an incoherent amalgam of incommensurable categories, or, in E. P. Thompson's words, "barren oscillation."4 Finally, class does not mean capitalism. The tacit equation of the two facilitates the mistaken view, central to Robinson et al., that pre-capitalist sexism and racism pose insoluble problems for Marxism.5

<http://eserver.org/clogic/3-1&2/meyerson.html> ***** -- Yoshie

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