NeW Left PRoject INteRvIeW ( 9 )of production, to gender structures, and to socially recognized personhood
and sub- personhood.
So I would agree that “fundamental social change” is required to defeat
such a system. The question is, What counts as fundamental? The origi-
nal left claim would have been that the imbrication of class and race is so
thorough that a socialist revolution is required to get rid of racism. But the
problem today, of course, is the discrediting of the left in a “post- Marxist”
world without any attractive “post- capitalist” models. So could you have
“fundamental social change” in the form of a revolutionary transition from
white- supremacist capitalism (the dominant variety since modernity) to
non- white- supremacist capitalism? I am hoping so, since a socialist revolu-
tion in the Marxist sense no longer seems likely, and the twentieth- century
history of Stalinist regimes claiming the socialist label is a depressing one.
But given the points I just made about white working- class benefit from
racialized capitalism, what is going to motivate the white working class to
join with people of color in such a struggle? Materialism rules out moral
motivation as a prime social mover, so it would have to be perceived group
interest.
What would be necessary is a political project that makes a plausible case
that the long- term group interests of poorer and working- class whites (look-
ing ahead to the fates of their children and grandchildren) would be bet-
ter served by a more egalitarian, redistributivist capitalism, and that racial
division, by its weakening of the working class, has played a crucial role
in enabling the development of plutocratic capitalism. I believe that one
can make such a case in the United States, given the historic centrality of
race to social division here and the dizzying heights to which income and
wealth inequality have ascended in recent years (the highest in the Western
democracies); I’m not sure about Britain.