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30 April 2025
This is a transcript of a talk I gave on February 24th at the Caucus for a Critical Political Science (CCPS) conference in South Padre Island, Texas, based on a paper I’m co-writing with Michael Sechman.
Socialists who are critical of identity politics are often accused, even by other socialists, of something called “class reductionism.” But, what exactly does that mean? Taken literally, “reductionism” about some phenomenon means thinking it can be completely analyzed in terms of some other underlying phenomenon. To be finicky and precise about this, an A-reductionist believes that instances of A are “nothing above and beyond” instances of the underlying B. So, for example:
In the philosophy of science, “reductionism” about the special sciences is the position that biology can be “reduced” to chemistry and chemistry can be “reduced” to physics in the sense that ultimately facts about biology and chemistry are nothing above and beyond certain kinds of extremely complicated facts about basic physical particles.
In the philosophy of mind, “reductive” physicalism is the view that mental states are nothing above and beyond certain bits and pieces of physical reality, perhaps involving brains or behavioral dispositions.
Taken literally, “class reductionism” about things like race or gender would be the view that facts about race and gender are nothing above and beyond facts about class. And, sure, some trends in Marxist theory do point in that direction, at least to a degree. Socialist-feminist “social reproduction theory,” for example, seeks to use the categories of Marxist political economy to understand gender roles, and “caste” theories often feel like a way of trying to turn race into a sort of semi-class category. But, first, these aren’t the kinds of views that anyone is railing against when they throw around that charge of “class reductionism.” Second, it’s deeply unclear what consequences, if any, even a literal full-on “reductionism” about these questions would have for debates around socialist political strategy. By analogy, an epidemiologist who’s studied a little philosophy of science and come away a convinced “reductionist” about the special sciences, fully committed to the claim that the viruses she studies have no metaphysical status above and beyond the protons and electrons that make them up, would be neither more nor less likely as a result to recommend masking in response to a bird flu outbreak. It’s just an unrelated issue.
Writing in the journal Sociological Theory, Michael McCarthy and Matthiue Desan criticize the same socialists who are often accused of “class reductionism,” but they do so in a new way. Abandoning the “reductionism” charge as a conceptual mess for more or less the reasons we’ve just gestured at, they instead accuse these socialists of “class abstractionism.” This is supposed to be the misguided attempt to infer from the premise that class is “structurally primary” in terms of a correct analysis of the workings of capitalist society to the conclusion that class is “politically primary” in terms of socialist strategy.[1]
McCarthy and Desan have no quarrel with structural primacy. In fact, something I’ve seen McCarthy say a couple of times is that in order to be a Marxist you have to believe in some version of structural primacy, however exactly you cash out that concept. But they reject political primacy, for reasons suggested by a quote they give in a footnote from David Roediger’s book The Wages of Whiteness. “If,” Roediger writes, “racism is a large, low-hanging branch of a tree that is rooted in class relations, we must constantly remind ourselves that the branch is not the same as the roots, and that the best way to shake the roots may at times be by grabbing the branches.” Commenting approvingly on this passage, McCarthy and Desan say it suggests that class is “more fundamental, more basic” than race in an explanatory sense but that it’s not “more important” in a political sense.
Everyone in this debate has been massively influenced by the late great Erik Olin Wright, who famously loved to illustrate his concepts and distinctions with 2x2 diagrams, and McCarthy and Desan duly throw one of those into this essay.
If you believe that class is neither structurally nor politically primary, then you’re a class “relativist.” If you believe that it’s not structurally primary but it is politically primary, you’re a class “constructivist,” which is a position they vaguely associate with non-Marxist left populisms that lean on language about “the 99%.” They don’t say much about either of those possibilities, so we won’t either. Instead, their point is to critique class “abstractionism” in the name of the approach they take to be superior, which is class “dynamism.” Class abstractionism, according to the 2x2, is the view that class is both structurally and politically primary, while class dynamism affirms structural but not political primacy.
And the first thing we want to call your attention to is that, without quite seeming to realize it, McCarthy and Desan have two very non-equivalent definitions of “class abstractionism” in play here...
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[1] They seem to take it so thoroughly for granted that this is what “abstractionists” think that they’re doing that they repeatedly take it as a damning criticism of Vivek Chibber that they can show that, “in effect,” he hasn’t really inferred political primacy from structural primacy after all.
[2] Since I’m freed here from the time constraints of a 20-minute conference presentation, here’s what we wanted to point out about structural primacy: (full note text preserved exactly as provided in original submission).