“Lobbying Decisions and the Health Reform Battle” Kenneth Goldstein

Race and Class Race and Class/Capitalism: artifact? Identity or in Decline. Left has traditionally seen race as either an artifact of capitalism, or, more recently as a “non-economic, ascriptive identity.” Others, on both the Left and Right have suggested that race has declined in importance. (265) Among the latter, Reed includes everyone from David Duke to Cornel West…who both claim that “race [still] matters” (despite their obvious differences) …

Race and Class Defining Race and Class: Both rooted in Capitalist Labor Relations “Both are more effectively, and more accurately, seen as equivalent and overlapping elements within a singular system of social power and stratification rooted in capitalist labor relations.” (266) “Hierarchies of civic status mediate and manage this stratification system by defining populations and assigning them ascriptively to what come to be understood as appropriate niches of civic worth and entitlement.” (266)

Race and Class History and Race and Class Relations “These hierarchies evolve and are enforced formally through laws, public policies and quasi-officially means…and informally through popular ideologies.” (266) Examples: Colonial America: “Virginia planters attempts to impose…distinctions between…slaves and indentured servants” and free blacks. (266) Revolution to Civil War: efforts to expand the vote developed along race (and gender) lines. Movements for voting, and labor rights were “typically articulated through a rhetoric that either advocated or accepted a premise restricting full civic membership to those capable of living independently and heading households.”

Race and Class Late 19 th Century: Knights of Labor sough to build a “biracial and interracial” Movement…was targeted by elites (led by Southern Planters) who sought to scatter the power inherent to such working-class organizing. They did so by pushing to exclude poor whites and blacks from active involvement in public life and politics. (267) Economic Motives to Jim Crow Planters wanted to “compose a labor regime that would approximate as nearly as possible a restoration of slavery.” (267)

Race and Class Fear of Black and White Class Unity Southern planters wanted to disrupt any organizing or solidarity between blacks and poor whites which might challenge their rule. So long as blacks could vote, the possibility of a biracial struggle against economic inequality was feared… (268)

Race and Class Mistaken Approaches to the Study of Race and Class (268) Most attempts to understand the interaction of race and class have been “too abstract and ahistorical.” Both those emphasis the “class pole” and/or the “race pole” treat capitalism as “ideal-typical system defined by generic economic categories.” There are two key problems with this “idealist view:”

Race and Class Defining Class and Race (269-) Capitalist Class Relations: originates from an essential, material foundation that can be generalized across social contexts – the social organization of labor on more or less coercive basis for the production or privately appropriated value.” (270) Race: “has no essential foundation, its concrete features characteristics, meanings…are entirely bound by the specific social context within which it is deployed.”

Race and Class Both ideas play a role in the establishment and sorting of civic status in capitalist class relations. (270) Civic Hierarchies: “All sides of the debate underestimate the significance of struggles over civic status – including articulation and contestation of ascriptive status such as race and gender – as definitive of the concrete class dynamics of American capitalism as a social system.” (270) Race and Gender are both an ascriptive status: they “emerged as a basis for setting sharp…boundaries between the settler European, indigenous and black Population…” (271) Hence, Race and Class are linked, and share a “common foundation in the Capitalist labor relation.” (272)