Re: Re.: Race and Class

[Peter McLaren <mclaren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Brady wrote:

But, as my studies have
indicated, no other factor is generally
as powerful as the economic one, that is: CLASS. (As an expert in the
field, Peter McLaren could corroborate this contention).


Response:
...I wish I could elaborate further but I am leaving shortly for Xalapa,
Mexico, to give some talks...and I won't be in e-mail contact for a week...I
have tried over the last few years to bring Marxism into the debate over
school reform as far as the educational literature/research is concerned.
Not an easy task but I keep trying, with some success.  Lately I've been
dealing with the issue of race and class in articles with a Marxist-feminist
Canadian professor, Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale.

for those interested see:

  Valerie Scatamburlo-D¹Annibale and Peter McLaren.  Class Dismissed?
Historical Materialism and the Politics of Difference. Educational
Philosophy and Theory, (forthcoming 2003). (Reprinted as Adios a la clase?
El materialismo historico y la politica de la ?diferencia¹, in Herramienta,
vol. 20, ano VII, pp. 131-146.)

 Valerie Scatamburlo-D¹Annibale and Peter McLaren  The Strategic Centrality
of Class in the Politics of Race and ?Difference¹ Cultural Studies/Critical
Methodologies,  vol. 3. No. 2, pp. 148-175

 Contemporary variants of multiculturalism in the West?even the most
progressive used in colleges of education?tend to view the history of ethnic
antagonism (domestically and internationally) from the perspective of ?race¹
in which race is identified with characteristics of phenotype and skin
color, cultural traditions, belief systems, and social practices. We argue,
instead, that race should  be situated within a critique of racism, with
racism being understood, first and foremost, as racialized class relations.
We reject the popular 'intersectionality' argument put forward by many
post-structuralist and post-modernist theorists that stipulates race, class,
gender and sexual orientation should all receive equal attention in
understanding the social order and the institutions and ideologies that
constitute it (for an excellent book on this issue, see the forthcoming
AFTER RACE, by Antonia Darder and Rudy Torres).    Capitalist exploitation
and relations of capitalist production cannot be reduced to one set of
relations among others -- this  systematically denies the totality of
capitalism that is constitutive of the process of racialized class relations
(Darder and Torres, in press; Scatamburlo-D¹Annibale and McLaren, 2003).
This is not to argue that the pernicious ideology of racism is not integral
to the process of  capitalist accumulation.  Nor is it to privilege an
analysis of class exploitation over an analysis of racism, but, as Darder
and Torres argue, it is an attempt to prevent the antiseptic separation of
politics and economics as distinct spheres of power or ensembles of social
relations. Rather than focus on race, or raced identity (i.e., shared
phenotypical traits or cultural attributes), we make the case for
concentrating upon the ideology of racism and racialized class relations
within a larger materialist understanding of the world, and in this sense we
approach the issue of racism by way of an historical materialist analysis
and critique of political economy. Separation of the economic and the
political within current contributions of multiculturalism premised on
identity politics has had the effect of replacing an historical materialist
class analysis with a cultural analysis of class (Scatamburlo-D¹Annibale and
McLaren, 2003). As a result, many critical race theorists as well as
post-Marxists writing in the realm of cultural studies have stripped the
idea of class of precisely that element which, for Marx, made it
radical?namely its status as a universal form of exploitation whose
abolition required (and was also central to) the abolition of all
manifestations of oppression.

Unlike contemporary narratives which tend to focus on one or another form of
oppression, the irrefragable power of historical materialism resides in its
ability to reveal how forms of oppression based on categories of difference
do not possess relative autonomy from class relations but rather constitute
the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based
system and how all forms of social oppression function within an overarching
capitalist system. 

Peter McLaren