After all, the trickle down feminism of the Clinton candidacy was, in many ways, similar to that espoused by Julia Gillard during her prime ministership.

Here is a clear-cut example of the difference between a class-based approach and one based on eliminating disparities. What else can explain the fact that Black women, on average, are paid 63 percent of what non-Hispanic white men are paid? Both positions treated white poverty as a function of identity, which meant both were compatible with doing nothing to make the lives of those people in poverty any better. Amongst the newly enriched professional and managerial class (PMC) the stress on race and gender discrimination has become a useful mechanism for both virtue signalling and deflecting concerns about class inequality.These interviews are fascinating and in some ways essential for tying all the themes outlined in the essays together. Cooptation and repression, two sides of the same coin, commonly have been adduced for nearly half a century to preserve the romantic appeal of radical movements of the 1960s, surrounding their disappearance with an aura of tragic “if only…” narratives, as an alternative to examining the limits of those movements, the politics they advanced, and the contradictions that fed their demise. Similarly, Clover and Singh persist in asserting that Reed’s current argument about the relation of race and capitalism is a reversal of his arguments in the 1990s and early 2000s. She never accepted analytical categories that attributed political agency to abstractions like “the black community,” “white supremacy,” or even “capitalism,” and always grounded her arguments in the issues, concerns and understandings of the groups and tendencies she studied. It’s also not really discrimination when an employer gives a job to someone whose wealthy family has provided them with a better education than you.

Anyone interested in the politics of race and class must push aside the dogma of identity and grapple with what Reed and Michaels have been arguing for decades. This is due to occupational segregation, which is the funneling of women and men into different jobs based on gender and racial norms and expectations. No doubt there are movements where class struggle, although not “signified as such,” is nonetheless signified. Robert Gould Shaw, who was killed leading the 54th’s attack on the Confederate South Carolina stronghold, Ft. She quotes a woman using the pseudonym “Nicole Brooks”, who complains that journalists focused on Gillard’s speech – and largely ignored what was happening to working class parents.For many on the left, it seems, social justice would consist of an equitable distribution of wealth, power and esteem among racial groups. The striking thing about this statement is the degree to which it is both completely true and totally wrong. Or, to put it another way, a recognition of class shouldn’t be an alternative to combatting oppression so much as a basis on which oppression can be defeated. An exhilarating journey that swaps the orthodoxies of contemporary progressive culture for a class politics rooted in universalism. The system that generates these oppressions and the exploitation at its heart go unchallenged and is even perhaps strengthened by being able to appear inclusive.