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Ben Burgis
5 June 2025
Socialists want to replace the current system of private ownership of the means of production with a new system based on collective ownership and economic democracy. Along the way to that long-term goal, we want to implement “socialist policies” like Medicare for All and tuition-free higher education, and we tend to go on and on about the importance of building a larger and more militant labor movement.This much is a baseline on which damn near everyone who calls themselves a socialist agrees. Things get more complicated, though, when you ask how it all fits (or fails to fit) with other kinds of proposals for social change.
For example, some people (e.g. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor) support everything I’ve just mentioned but also advocate racially specific reparations, while others (e.g. Adolph Reed) reject that proposal for principled and/or strategic reasons. A principled reason might be that equally poor people of different racial backgrounds equally deserve to be recipients of redistribution, and it would be wrong to redistribute to them in unequal ways depending on the historical circumstances that led to their families’ poverty. A strategic reason, often emphasized by Reed, is that (a) any large-scale redistribution of wealth will confront massive resistance from vested interests, which will (b) be far easier to overcome if we can mobilize a majority of the population to fight for it and this will (c) be far easier to do if the redistribution benefits a majority of the people who would be doing that fighting.
Socialists with Reed-like positions are often accused of something called “class reductionism.” The precise meaning of this charge is notoriously slippery. Take, for example, this old article in Socialist Worker that proudly proclaims that the now-defunct International Socialist Organization “always aimed to reject the sort of class reductionism that is interested in race, gender, sexuality and the like only as a function of economics.” That’s one of the sentences that you can feel like you understand if you read it quickly and don’t think about it very much.
But what exactly is the charge? That the nefarious class reductionists have a false factual belief (that racism, sexism, and the like are a “function of economics”)? Or is the idea that they acknowledge that these things aren’t entirely a function of economics but they just aren’t “interested” in the non-economic dimension of the problem?
Nor, as I suggested here, does anything become more clear when we start taking that word “reductionism” literally. No socialist I’m aware of thinks that instances of racial prejudice or discrimination, for example, “reduce” to class-based inequality in the sense that the former literally just are the latter.
It might be more useful to start with a different question. Instead of, “What precisely does class reductionism mean,” we can ask, “What are people trying to express when they throw around this term?”
Here the answer is fairly straightforward. The underlying accusation is that the class “reductionist” doesn’t care enough about other forms of injustice. If you have enough conversations with grassroots leftists who think that something called “class reductionism” is a problem, you’ll pretty quickly run into a contrast between “class reductionism” and “intersectional” approaches to left-wing politics. The i-word also has a technical meaning that’s irrelevant here. In context, being “intersectional” means being attentive to every form of injustice (based on race, gender, sexuality, and so on, with “class” being just one of the items on the never-ending checklist). The “class reductionist” is someone who checks the “cares about class-based injustice” box but perversely refuses to check the “cares about racism” box, the “cares about sexism” box, and so on. “Class reductionism,” on this picture, is a moral failure of solidarity.
How exactly, though, is the “reductionist” supposed to be exhibiting this failure?
Certainly, neither Reed nor any other major figure frequently accused of “class reductionism” (e.g. Vivek Chibber, about whom I’ll be saying much more below) holds the position that the Civil Rights Movement’s crusade to end segregation and secure voting rights for black people wasn’t worth the candle, for example. Nor am I aware of any such figure claiming that racial, sexual, and other prejudices will magically cease to exist, or anti-discrimination laws will become unnecessary, once the means of production are socialized.
Here, however, is a position that really does exist (and which, to put my own cards on the table, I hold):
Even in advanced liberal capitalist democracies, rearguard actions to shore up legal equality will of course need to be fought. (Think here of rollbacks of abortion rights, or the possibility that the conservative movement will take up a renewed assault on marriage equality for gay couples.) However, to whatever extent formal legal equality between groups has been achieved, the best way to tackle the injustices left over by this achievement will be to strategically focus on universalistic economic solutions, frankly labeled as such, and heavily emphasize the importance of labor organizing and other forms of organizing that tend to unite working-class people across other kinds of distinctions.
Let’s call that position “class-first leftism.” The label could doubtless be nitpicked in various ways (and I know it wouldn’t be embraced by everyone whose politics I’m using it to describe), but it’s probably good enough for our purposes (1).
So: Does class-first leftism involve the moral failure of solidarity typically gestured at by the phrase “class reductionism”?
I don’t think so. In fact, the point critics tend to miss is that this is, to a great extent, a strategic debate about how best to reduce those extra-economic forms of injustice that remain when equality between different demographic groups has been achieved on a formal legal level...
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Original Article Link:
https://alfiesbown.wixstudio.com/mysite/post/abstractionism-reductionism-and-class-first-politics