Racism And The Class Struggle

James Boggs wrestles with the problems of the specific character of American capitalism and American democracy, the historic mission of the black revolution in the United States, and the need for the 1960s black movement to develop theoretically and organizationally.

As Black oppression moves again to the forefront of American public life, the history of radical approaches to combating racism has acquired renewed relevance. Collecting, for the first time, source materials from a diverse array of writers and organizers, this reader provides a new perspective on the complex history of revolutionary debates about fighting anti-Black racism. Contextual material from the editor places each contribution in its historical and political setting, making this volume ideal for both scholars and activists. "Paul Heideman’s book reconstructs for us the long flowering of anti-racist thought and organizing on the American Left and the central role played by Black Socialists in advancing a theory and practice of human liberation. Class struggle and anti-racism are two sides of the same coin in this powerful collection. At a time when the emancipation of oppressed and working-class people remain goals of progressives everywhere, Heideman’s book provides us a map to a past that can help us get free."-Bill V. Mullen, Professor of American Studies, Purdue University "Should white workers pursue racial supremacy to make America great again? Ignore race by practicing color-blindness and dwelling on labor and economic issues alone? Or challenge oppression, bigotry, and exploitation in all their forms, wherever and whenever they appear? These strategies may sound like ones from our own time, but they were live options for the left a century ago. We are all in Paul Heideman's debt for compiling Class Struggle and the Color Line, a set of rare original sources that remind us of this: In the absence of sound social theory, disgusting racism can be passed off as populist rebellion. Don't let it happen again." -Christopher Phelps, co-author, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War Paul Heideman is a PhD student in Sociology at New York University and is a frequent contributor to Jacobin and the Historical Materialism Conference.

Racial distinctions in U.S. society, and the racism that accompanies them, continue to be integral parts of the American experience more than 100 years after W.E.B. DuBois identified ¿the color line¿ as the most significant social feature of the United States. Even within the complex racial and ethnic dynamics that have developed in the United States since the immigration reform of 1965 opened the door to millions of Latino and Asian newcomers, the question of racism directed at African-Americans carries special weight. This is so not just because millions of African-Americans continue to be adversely affected. As Ted Allen shows in this pamphlet, the system of racial oppression in the United States, rooted in African-American slavery, was organized to discipline and suppress European as well as African labor, and has from the beginning had profound and contradictory consequences for European-Americans. For almost the whole of American history, this system of social control has effectively derailed working class unity. And it continues to shape controversies surrounding the arrival and absorption of new ¿minorities¿ to this day.

An updated edition of James Boggs’ influential essays on revolution and Black Power Having just written his groundbreaking book, The American Revolution, Detroit autoworker James Boggs sat down in the early 1960s to continue his study of revolution. Boggs looked at the Black Power uprisings then beginning in the United States within the global context of the overthrow of rightwing puppet regimes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Racism and the Class Struggle, Boggs produced thirteen powerful and prescient chapters that wrestled with topics such as the specific character of American capitalism and its intricate relationship to American democracy, the historic mission of the Black revolution in the United States, and the need for the 1960s Black movement to develop theoretically and organizationally. Boggs also hailed the coming of what was at the time the new slogan of the "Black revolution" with a momentous essay called "Black Power: A Scientific Concept Whose Time Has Come." In other essays, he hammered at his theme of a "second civil war" and Black control of the cities. With conflicting U.S. forces so sharply polarized, wrote Boggs, "No one can predict when or whether a revolution will succeed, but we do know that ... there is no turning back until one or the other side is defeated." Today, amid the metastasizing manifestations of "white power," Racism and the Class Struggle is stunningly pertinent to people of all races who, in the struggle against Empire and white supremacy, will not turn back.

This book brings together internationally known scholars from a wide range of disciplines and theoretical traditions, all of whom have made significant contributions to the field of race and ethnic relations. As well as identifying important and persistent points of controversy, the collection reveals a complementary and multifaceted approach to theorisation. The theories represented include contributions from the perspective of sociology. These range from the established perspectives of Marx and Weber through to the more recent interventions of rational choice theory, symbolic interactionism and identity structure analysis.

'The book, for all its complex detail, is very readable ... [It] is an intense and compact resource for understanding how the political economy of racism evolved in the United States.' Science & Society'Written in a style accessible to both students and a wider non-specialist audience - could usefully be read by anyone interested in the origins and impact of racism in the United States.' Patterns of PrejudiceUnlike conventional theories advanced by conservative and liberal thinkers, The Political Economy of Racism shows how the persistence of racism can be explained in terms of the changing economic and political needs of different groups of capitalists. Leiman demonstrates clearly how the relative decline in the American economy is clearly linked to the persistence of racism. He argues that capitalists are not a class with a monolithic and unchanging interest in a particular form of racial discrimination and that the character of racism changes with the economic and political needs of different groups of capitalists. The Political Economy of Racism is a controversial book that challenges existing theories of racial discrimination and provides a radical alternative theory.

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association C.L.R. James Award Seen as a pioneering figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions of identity. This volume collects his recent and new work implicitly and explicitly challenging such a view. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery, in his major essay (with Elizabeth Esch) on race and the management of labor, in his detailing of the origins of critical studies of whiteness within Marxism, and in his reflections on the history of solidarity, Roediger argues that racial division is part of not only of the history of capitalism but also of the logic of capital.