The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference”

Abstract

This article argues against the radical displacement of class analysis and the decentering of capitalism within contemporary theoretical narratives, the political pusillanimity of post-Marxist “culturalist” discourses, and offers a historical materialist critique of the “politics of difference.” The authors argue that much of what falls under the rubric of “difference” politics amounts to little more than a demand for inclusion into the club of “representation” —a posturing which they argue merely reinscribes the banality of liberal pluralism rooted in the ideology of free-market capitalism. The authors advance an approach to “difference” and “race” that seeks to reanimate these constructs by acknowledging their embeddedness in capitalist social formations and material relations of power.