Walter Benn Michaels

Professor, English, University of Illinois at Chicago

Adolph Reed

Professor Emeritus, Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics, University of Pennsylvania

“No Politics but Class Politics”

Denouncing racism and celebrating diversity have become central to progressive politics. For many on the left, social justice seems to consist of an equitable distribution of wealth, power, and esteem among racial groups. But as Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels argue, the emphasis on discrimination is misplaced. Not only does the focus on the gap between white and black leave the gap between rich and poor, management and labor, untouched, it actually works to legitimate it. Reed and Michaels make the case for a genuinely egalitarian politics — anchored in the struggle of labor against capital, a class politics which aspires not to the establishment of a demographically representative elite but to economic justice for everyone.