Alternatives

Abstract

This article examines the dynamics of the 2020 US elections in counterpoint to the antiracist uprising in defense of Black lives earlier in the year. The complex mediations of race and class in the United States are centred in the analysis of the election campaign and its aftermath. Failure by the American Left to build an antiracist working-class movement, it is argued, could be disastrous in the face of a resurgent far-Right.

Keywords:

• Capitalism
• elections
• racism
• Trump

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Buchanan, Bui and Patel, “Black Lives Matter Protests.”

2 Kindelan, “6 Teen Girls.”

3 See Smith, Ax, and Kahn, “Exclusive: Most Americans Sympathize”; Karson, “74% of Americans View”; Budryk, “More Americans Troubled”; MPR News, “AP-NORC Poll”; Long and McCarthy, “Two in Three Americans.”

4 See Kolundzic, “Biden’s Victory,” and Bean, “Biden’s Corporate Cabinet.” It is true that Biden has announced a major stimulus package to the tune of $1.9 trillion. But this is in keeping with the neo-Keynesian approach to resuscitating the capitalist economy that has been episodically in play since the Great Recession of 2008–2009.

5 Herndon, “Georgia Was a Big Win.”

6 Marx, Grundrisse, 157. See also Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” 377–79.

7 See Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” Early Writings, 124, where he describes the bureaucratic form of the modern State as “the same fantastic expression.”

8 Among the deepest commitments of social democracy is its devotion to the capitalist State and its parliamentary forms. As Ralph Miliband famously noted, the British Labour Party is dogmatic about only one thing: “not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system.” The party has consistently rejected “any kind of political action” that falls “outside the framework and the conventions of the parliamentary system.” See Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, 13.

9 Note that the “non-citizen” experiences an even more profound reification, being rendered politically nonexistent, indeed dead, as far as the electoral process is concerned.

10 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” and Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 190, 234.

11 Wood, “The ‘Demos’ Versus ‘We, the People: From Ancient Democracy to Modern Conceptions of Citizenship,” in Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 216.

12 This is generally known in the literature as Marx’s principle of self-emancipation. See Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory, Ch. 10, and Swain, None So Fit to Break the Chains.

13 For a detailed treatment of Marxist approaches to electoral politics in this insurgent spirit, see Nimtz, Ballot, Streets, or Both?

14 Wood, “The ‘Demos,’” 216.

15 Farber, “Trumpism.”

16 Serwer, “The Capitol Rioters.”

17 See McCarthy, “Revenge”; Carnes and Lupu, “It’s Time to Bust the Myth”; Zhang and Burn-Murdoch, “By Numbers.”

18 Thompson, Making, 8.

19 Camfield, “Re-Orienting Class Analysis.” To be clear, I use “proletariat,” like “working class,” to indicate all wage-labourers, employed and unemployed, and the bulk of their household members.

20 Sears, Next New Left.

21 Callaway and Collins, “Unions, Workers and Wages.”

22 McNally, Global Slump, 113–21.

23 Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis, 339, 346.

24 See Goldfield, Color of Politics, Ch. 9; Davis, Prisoners, 169–70; Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 121–26. For the way the Democratic Party collaborated in developing this racial agenda, particularly under the presidency of Bill Clinton, see Singh, Race, 154–55.

25 Ian Kullgren, “Union Workers”; Schmidt, “The Union Members.”

26 Bartels, “Ethnic Antagonism.”

27 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone.

28 The classic text here is Allen, Invention of the White Race.

29 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 701. On “the wages of whiteness,” see Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.

30 Marx, “Marx to Sigfrid Meyer,” 294.

31 Davis, Prisoners.

32 Indeed, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues that the rise of this Black elite, epitomized in the Obama presidency, was a crucial element in the political frustrations that fueled the emergence of Black Lives Matter. See Taylor, From Black Lives Matter.

33 This is central to the argument of Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key. For a few specific case studies, see Kelly, Race, Class, and Power; Halpern and Horowitz, Meatpackers; Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters; Arnesen, Waterfront Workers; and Gilpin, Long Deep Grudge.

34 In Racial Formation, Omi and Winant focus on the 1980s as a key turning point. However, they do not sufficiently attend to the political economy of crisis and restructuring in this regard. For an important corrective, see Gilmore, Golden Gulag. For an analysis of the 1971–1982 period in the US economy, see McNally, Global Slump. The attempt to reconstruct older patriarchal relations has also been central to the project of the New Right in the United States. This is evident in the antifeminist panic found in Gilder’s Sexual Suicide.

35 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 705. In a related vein, Lewis Gordon has argued that white racism requires “bad faith” on the part of its participants. See Gordon, Fanon, ch. 2. I am not denying that parallel processes are evident in all imperial and white settler polities. But the US case has specificities that are most relevant here.

36 See Goldfield, Color of Politics.

37 Baldwin, “On Being ‘White,’” 179–80.

38 Adorno, “Freudian Theory,” 127.

39 “Fascism as such is not a psychological issue,” says Adorno, “Freudian Theory,” 130.

40 Goldfield, Southern Key.

41 Dixon and Fineout, “I’m Not.”

42 Bade and Werner, “Centrist House Democrats”; Barron-López and Otterbein, “Tlaib Lashes Out.”

43 Brown, “Democratic Whip.”

44 Eustachewich, “’The Squad’”; Herndon, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”; Barron-López and Otterbein, “Tlaib Lashes Out.”

45 Perez, “Don’t Blame.”

46 New York Times, “National Exit Polls.”

47 Milligan, “Young Voters.”

48 “The squad” is composed of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Presley of Massachusetts.

49 There are important exceptions within DSA that deserve mention. The work of Afro-Socialist caucuses within a number of DSA chapters has been laudable. In cities such as Austin, Texas, DSA has been central to campaigns to defund the police.

50 Goldfield, Southern Key, 24–27.

51 See McNally, “The Return of the Mass Strike.”

52 See Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%.

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David McNally

David McNally is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston. His most recent book is Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire (Haymarket Books, 2020).