You're Not Welcome Here, Ep. 7: "What About Class?"
What is the relation to class and identity? Does a focus on identity and identity politics overlook, trivialize, or eliminate the significance of class or economic inequality in contemporary politics and social conflict? This episode suggests that a focus on identity does not discount, and is not at odds with, a focus on class or economic inequality. On the contrary, Dan argues that class is a dimension of identity of vital relevance for understanding, and changing, political and social culture.
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Produced by Brad Onishi and Dan Miller
Edited by Shannon Sassone
Music by Matt Puckett-"Yellow Leaves"
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I am Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and I am the host for this series, You're Not Welcome Here, which focuses on identity, identity politics, and related issues.
We are hosted, that is, Straight White American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the CAP Center at the UCSB, and so I say thank you to the CAP Center.
And to all of you who listen, who support Straight White American Jesus, and I want to, in particular today, take a minute to just thank all of you who have been reaching out to me with thoughts, with feedback, with questions, with really, to me, very touching stories of how identity impacts your own life.
And these are things that I take to heart and they inform what I do.
And so I wanted to just thank everybody who takes the time to reach out.
I apologize that I don't respond to everybody and to many of the people that I get a chance to respond to.
I wish I had more time to go further than I do.
So I just want to say keep those coming.
They are informing what I'm doing.
A lot of times the questions and issues that people bring up are things that are on the agenda.
They're things that are on my agenda and my horizon of what I want us to talk about in this time.
And so I plan on getting to those.
Having said that, what I wanted to do today is respond to sort of a stream of emails or inquiry that I've gotten.
And this is basically a stream that says, and this is sort of I guess the theme of this episode, of what about class?
I've gotten a lot of emails from people on the political left, and I use that term to cover everything from, you know, those who are Bernie Sanders supporters, All the way to people who are sort of card-carrying Marxists, Communists, what have you, left with a capital L in their political orientation.
And there's a shared sense or a shared question of where is class in what I'm saying about identity.
And this ranges from I think just an open question of somebody saying how does class relate to identity to a more pointed kind of classical Marxist critique that says that in emphasizing identity I am de-emphasizing class or that I'm missing class.
I've got enough questions about this, enough thoughts about this.
People have taken the time to ask those questions and to raise those concerns, and rather than trying to respond to everybody individually, it's a pretty clear signal to me that this is something to talk about.
I've done this a little bit in the past, you know, in that I've noted that critiques of identity politics live on both the political left and the political right.
But as those who listen to the podcast know, our usual focus is a critique of the political right and Christian, you know, contemporary Christian nationalism in particular.
But this is a question coming from the left and it's a good question.
It's an important question.
It helps us to understand more about identity and what identity is.
And so I want to take a few minutes today and sort of start talking about that a little bit.
So the first thing to say is, as I say, a number of the people who've raised these concerns are supporters of Bernie Sanders, and I think there's a concern that I'm somehow anti-Sanders or being critical, and I am critical of some elements of Sanders' campaign and how it worked.
Let me say in terms of his politics and his policy positions, I'm a big fan of Bernie Sanders.
I voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary.
I've lived and or worked in Vermont for the last 10 years and so Sanders has been sort of a neighbor politician as it were.
So nothing I say is intended to be critical of Sanders politics.
But in terms of strategy, and I think maybe the political ideology that underlies why he adopts that strategy, I do have concerns.
And they really do get to this issue.
Another issue is some people have suggested, you know, or questioned, you know, am I familiar with Marx and Marxism and so forth.
And I just wanted to say that I'm not an expert in Marx or Marxist theory.
But I do have some familiarity with Marx and Marxist theory.
I've read Marx and Engels.
I've read some Lenin.
I've read philosophers like Lukács and Althusser.
I've read contemporary thinkers like Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Žižek and Hart and Negri.
And for those who are sort of keeping score or are wonky like me, my own
Theoretical or philosophical orientation is heavily influenced by Essex School political theory, which draws heavily on the Marxist theory of Antonio Gramsci, who was a Marxist theorist who really, depending on your perspective, either revitalized or revised or departed from Marxist theory in key ways, but Gramsci is there.
So what I do and what shapes what I talk about is So here's the kind of line that comes, right?
that includes those thinkers and engagement with them.
And so that's not of relevance for everybody, but for several people who've wondered, you know, there it is.
So here's the kind of line that comes, right?
The question or the critique that I want to take a look at.
And basically, it's something that goes like this.
I get an email and I say, Dan and Brad, you're on the regular podcast and the series.
Love what you're doing on identity politics, and it's great, and it's important.
And things like LGBTQ plus inclusion and gender equality and all of these things are all really, really important.
But you're overlooking the role of class.
And And because of that, You're unfair to Sanders and his supporters, or you're just sort of ultimately missing what needs to happen politically.
And so that's what I wanted to talk about here.
And the first thing to note is that the presupposition in that kind of way of formulating things is that class, or what we might call now, classical Marxists thought it's class, but we might call it Income inequality or economic status or something like that, right?
That that is something different from identity as I've been discussing, right?
Identity has to do with things like gender and race and sexuality and all these kinds of things.
But class is something different.
It's a different category of social reality than these other things.
So somehow or another you have class or economic Position on one side and identity on the other.
And this leads to the critique, this is sort of the heart of the critique of, say, somebody like Sanders or somebody related to Sanders' identity politics, is that if you focus on identity and those other identity dimensions, you're missing this notion of economic inequality or economic position.
And that until we focus on that, we don't have a chance to sort of combat Christian nationalism or neoliberal economic policies or whatever else it is.
So how do I respond to this?
I respectfully, with all respect to the kinds of thinkers that I mentioned earlier, with respect to Sanders, whose, as I say, political positions I greatly respect, with respect to listeners who I know probably have a different perspective, and I welcome that, I think it's mistaken.
I don't accept the distinction between class and identity.
That doesn't mean that I think class or economic position Is not real?
I think it absolutely is.
I just don't think it's a different kind of social reality from other identity domains.
In other words, I think that economic status, or again in classical terms, class, it's a dimension of identity.
Identities are complex.
I've said this lots of times and we're going to dig into this more as we go on.
I really, really hope we get to do that.
Identity is complex and economic status or class is a crucial part of identity, but it is one identity domain among others.
It's not a privileged domain around which all others take shape or that displaces all others.
Other domains of identity don't reduce to it.
And so that's the big difference is that I don't accept This notion that class or economic position is something other than identity.
And to understand this, let's just recall how we're talking about identity here, right?
I've said that identity is a fundamental principle of recognition, And social organization, right?
Which means it's an irreducible category.
It's part of what it means to be the kinds of creatures that we are with the sociability that we have.
Identity is universal.
It's not limited to a particular segment of society.
These processes of recognition and social categorization and organization, without them, there is no shared social life.
They are not something that only particular parts of the social do, that only people who possess particular identities do.
They are universal categories.
Part of that, part of the construction of these complex realities we call identity is class position or economic position.
So why do I think this?
There's kind of two broad levels.
One is philosophical.
We could get into, you know, Hegel and dialectical materialism and all the nuts and bolts of Marxist theory and why philosophically I just don't think that it works for a number of reasons.
We're not going to do that.
If people are interested in that, Email me, let me know.
Maybe we can have that conversation.
But this just isn't the place for that.
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