Peter Frase

There's a passage from [Barabara Ehrenreich](http://www2.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=12327) that I used to find very powerful.

> The original radical . . . vision was of a society without hierarchies of any kind. This of course means equality among the races and the genders, but class is different: There can be no such thing as "equality among the classes." The abolition of hierarchy demands not only racial and gender equality, but the abolition of class.

Many still find this formulation appealing, judging by the frequency with which I see similar sentiments expressed by my peers. And I still find it beguiling as well. But over the years I've come to see that it's fundamentally wrong, and encourages a very misleading way of thinking about how class works.

Ehrenreich's framework is common among those who decry "identity" politics, and insist on the unifying and universalizing qualities of *class*, as against race and gender, as a banner under which to rally the Left. Sam Gindin, in his generally excellent [contribution](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/unmaking-global-capitalism/) to the most recent *Jacobin*, accuses "identity politics" of "parsing the working class into ever more fragmented subgroups". He insists that identities "cannot combine into a new politics because their essence is their separateness. Something else is needed to bring them together in a broader, more integrated, and more coherent politics", and "that 'something' is class." He concludes that "class trumps, without underplaying, issues of identity."

Walter Benn Michaels, tireless critic of liberal race and gender politics, uses similar [language](http://edges.gmu.edu/interview-walter-benn-michaels/). For him, "battles over gender, race, and sexuality are battles against discrimination". This makes them utterly incommensurable with struggles over class, which "has nothing whatsoever to do with discrimination; it has to do with exploitation." Class is different, he says, because it is "a fundamentally unequal relation". Thus, while anti-racism or feminism insist only on equality between races or genders, class struggle differs in its insistence on *abolishing* the class distinction.

This kind of rhetoric relies on a flimsy and inadequate reading not just of race and gender, but of class as well. In order to portray class as the unifying symbol, and all other identities as merely divisive, it must juxtapose categories at completely different levels of analysis. It simultaneously neglects the way in which race and gender are part of social systems and not just individual identities, while ignoring the way that class, too, functions at the level of identity politics.

***

Ehrenreich, Gindin, and Michaels seemingly have no vision of anti-racism or feminism beyond the horizon of liberal tolerance. The only endpoint they can see is "equality among the races and the genders", which, as Gindin points out, implies that the "essence" of these groups "is their separateness". But they are the ones essentializing separateness, ignoring a whole tradition of activists and writers for whom the goal is not merely equality but the *abolition* of both race and gender.

You'd never know from these discussions that anyone had ever [troubled](http://binarythis.com/2013/05/23/judith-butler-explained-with-cats/) the gender binary. Among radical feminists, there has always been a current that sees the ultimate aim *not* as an equality between hypostatized essences, but as the [elimination](http://themcnamarareport.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/in-a-radical-feminist-world-there-is-no-transphobia-guest-post-on-zinniajones-com/) of the gender binary entirely.

In some versions, this can veer into calls for androgyny that have some uncomfortable [Harrison Bergeron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron) overtones. But one can just as easily follow the path of [Silvia Federici](http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici), who calls it "absurd to assume that any form of gender specification must always, necessarily become a means of exploitation and we must live in a genderless world." This suggests that her utopia is a world in which gender differences don't disappear, they merely lose their function as categories of hierarchy and oppression. The performance of gender could then become more fluid, playful, and theatrical, following the models set down by queer and transgender cultures.

Likewise, radical understandings of race have viewed it as a social construct inseparable from the origins of capitalism, with "black" and "white" representing a dichotomy that must be overcome just as much as---or along with---the opposition between labor and capital. Barbara and Karen Fields demonstrate that racial categorizations are not pre-given, but must be painstakingly reproduced through a political and discursive practice of ["racecraft"](http://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life-ebook/dp/B007LCYZCE). "The social alchemy of racecraft", they write, "transforms racism into race, disguising collective social practice as inborn individual traits, so it entrenches racism in a category to itself, setting it apart from inequality in other guises."

In a much older work emerging from the Communist tradition, Ted Allen wrote of the ["invention of the white race"](http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html), and insisted that the "race" was not a biological phenotype, nor merely even a "social construct", but "a *ruling class social control formation*." No wonder, then, that Allen's research led followers like Noel Ignatiev to [demand](http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html) the "abolition of whiteness".

***

If all this goes to show that there is far more to anti-racism and feminism than liberal diversity politics, the notion of "class" evoked by the writers cited above can be attacked from the other directiosn. Ehrenreich, et al, speak of class strictly as an abstract *social structure*, and race and gender solely as individual *identities*. Yet each exists in both dimensions.

In an old essay at *Jacobin*, I tried to unpack the [dual meanings](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/11/an-imagined-community/) that "class" holds in the socialist imagination. Writers like Sam Gindin evoke "the working class" as the collective agent that can bring about universal liberation. But what does this term signify? Rather than trying to restate the point, I'll just quote myself on the curious career of "the working class" in leftist rhetoric:

> It did not simply mean class in the structural sense: workers who survive by selling their wage labor, confronting capitalists whose wealth comes from hiring that labor and producing for profit. The working class in that sense encompasses the vast majority even in the rich countries, but it has no sense of shared collective identity and hence is politically inert---it is a class "in itself" rather than "for itself," to use the old Marxist jargon. Hardt, Negri, Virno, and other contemporary theorists of the "multitude" gesture at something like this all-encompassing version of the working class, but in their hands the category expresses a hope for a future politics more than it identifies a concrete and existing collective agent.

> The working class as it existed in Old Left political discourse was a sociological category, and it often referred to a specific type of wage labor: the industrial proletariat, employed in large-scale factory work. Such workers were thought to be the leading edge of socialist politics not merely because they were exploited by capital, but because they occupied a specific environment that tended to forge a collective identity and to facilitate disruptive mass action: factories in which workers were employed for a long period of time, and where they were massed together each day performing similar, routinized work.

Today class in the second, sociological sense continues to appear in progressive rhetoric, but it has less economic specificity in deindustrialized economies dominated by precarious service sector work. Instead, it has largely been assimilated to the language of identity politics, treated as a set of cultural markers and practices that are correlated with having lower wages and fewer educational credentials. Academic [centers](http://cwcs.ysu.edu/about) exist to "increase awareness of and respect for working-class life and culture". There are organizations devoted to [battling](http://www.classism.org/about-class/what-is-classism) the evil of "classism". Class is conceived here not as Gindin's broad, integrating force, but in precisely the differential terms he ascribes to race and gender. Classism is defined by the "Class Action" nonprofit, for example, as "differential treatment based on social class or perceived social class."

One response to this, from the more traditional kind of class warrior, is to insist that this move is invalid, that class is different for the reasons Ehrenreich and Gindin give. But just because class is a structural relation doesn't mean it isn't *also* an identity. Class exists in its sociological sense, even if this is not identical with its status as an economic category. Classism is a real phenomenon, and it manifests itself even among those who are committed to class struggle in a more structural sense. It crops up every time a *soi-disant* leftist [ridicules](https://twitter.com/Mobute/status/480818342585188352) the tastes and mores of a rabble it perceives to be made up of fat, lazy, stupid rubes.

To say that combating classist attitudes is not a substitute for overthrowing class relations does not imply that such attitudes are irrelevant. To make an analogy with racism, my recent [post](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/gentrification-and-racial-arbitrage/) argued that the anti-racist attitudes of individuals could still reproduce racist economic structures. Yet it would be a monstrous absurdity to claim, on that basis, that this absolves white people of the responsibility to try to be individually less racist. And so too, adjusting perceptions of those perceived as "working class" will not by itself abolish the capitalist exploitation of labor, but it is a necessary precondition for building a movement that can do so. To deny this is to insist that class remain at the level of abstract, academic theory rather than lived experience. It's the equivalent of the white person who can talk a good game about the history of racism but claims not to "see race" in everyday life.

***

Ultimately, the partisans of crude "class first" politics want to have it both ways: they claim class as an identity superior to all others, but they do so on the basis of an abstract structural definition of class that nobody directly feels or experiences as their identity. Once class as a lived identity is understood in its particularity, it becomes subject to the same limitations and contradictions that beset race, gender, and all other oppressed identities in capitalism. If one is labeled woman, or black, it is impossible not to be aware of that fact; yet only in rare instances does this manifest in a self-conscious and collective politics of feminism or black liberation. Likewise, identifying with the culture of the working class is not a sufficient condition for a *class politics*.

One of the more insightful---though not self-aware---demonstrations of this was Mark Fisher's recent [denunciation](http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299) of academic identity politics as a "vampire castle". As an example of the invidious politics of identitarian division, he cites the case of British celebrity leftist Russell Brand. While noting that Brand is a famous millionaire, he nevertheless notes the way in which ostensible leftists criticized him in terms that can only be described as classist:

> Someone passed me a post written about Brand on Facebook. I don't know the individual who wrote it, and I wouldn't wish to name them. What's important is that the post was symptomatic of a set of snobbish and condescending attitudes that it is apparently alright to exhibit while still classifying oneself as left wing. The whole tone was horrifyingly high-handed, as if they were a schoolteacher marking a child's work, or a psychiatrist assessing a patient. Brand, apparently, is 'clearly extremely unstable . . . one bad relationship or career knockback away from collapsing back into drug addiction or worse.' Although the person claims that they 'really quite like [Brand]', it perhaps never occurs to them that one of the reasons that Brand might be 'unstable' is just this sort of patronising faux-transcendent 'assessment' from the 'left' bourgeoisie. There's also a shocking but revealing aside where the individual casually refers to Brand's 'patchy education [and] the often wince-inducing vocab slips characteristic of the auto-didact' -- which, this individual generously says, 'I have no problem with at all' -- how very good of them! This isn't some colonial bureaucrat writing about his attempts to teach some 'natives' the English language in the nineteenth century, or a Victorian schoolmaster at some private institution describing a scholarship boy, it's a 'leftist' writing a few weeks ago.

Rather than see how he is engaging in his own brand of identity politics, Fisher bizarrely uses this episode to prop up the notion of class as something that transcends identity. Which it does, but no more so than race or gender. Patriarchy is more than sexism; white supremacy is more than individual racism. And all Fisher demonstrates with this anecdote is that capitalism is more than just working class identity.

And what of class as a structural relation of power, in all its Marxist glory as a central category of the capitalist mode of production? Marx himself had a more sophisticated appreciation of it than many of his epigones; he famously [argued](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm) that "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." Class as an abstraction, as the extraction of labor time by capital, only manifests itself through concrete social forms---including gender, race, and what we call "class" in its cultural sense. A culture that's more richly developed in the UK than it is in the United States, but that in the U.S. sometimes stands in for "the straight white male working class", a useful marker for an exploited group that has no other markers of oppression to draw on.

But among intellectuals, appeals to class as the universal identity too often mask an attempt to universalize a particular identity, and exclude others. Appeals to class in the abstract neglect that the working class is always some particular working class, and it can be marked (the female worker, the black worker) or unmarked (the male worker, the white worker). Far too often, exhortations to reject "identity politics" in favor of "class" amount to an insistence that the unmarked worker be taken as the definitive example of the genre. Appeals to class thus degenerate into a kind of cultural populism, more comfortable visualizing the typical worker as a white coal miner rather than a black woman in an elementary school or behind a McDonald's counter. Higher wages can be a "class" issue but abortion or police brutality cannot, because the latter are too closely identified with the part of the working class that is marked by gender and race.

I prefer Robin D.G. Kelley's [rendering](http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue22/kelley22.htm) of the matter, in an essay on the white "neo-enlightenment" Left that is worth reading in full:

> Class is lived through race and gender. There is no universal class identity, just as there is no universal racial or gender or sexual identity. The idea that race, gender, and sexuality are particular whereas class is universal not only presumes that class struggle is some sort of race and gender-neutral terrain but takes for granted that movements focused on race, gender, or sexuality necessarily undermine class unity and, by definition, cannot be emancipatory for the whole.

Class politics ultimately confronts the same dilemmas as radical race and gender politics, as I discuss in my [review](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/) of Kathi Weeks. Emancipation of the working class means abolishing the class as such, and thus giving up the comforts of working class identity. That can sometimes seem like an impossible task. But it's essential that we face it, rather than comforting ourselves with the fable of class as the universal solvent that does away with all identity and leads directly to enlightenment.

When I first started to learn about the world of quantitative social science, it was approaching the high tide of what I call "identificationism". The basic argument of [this movement](http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/why-the-identification-movement/) was as follows. Lots of social scientists are crafting elaborate models that basically only show the *correlations* between variables. They then must rely on a lot of assumptions and theoretical arguments in order to claim that an association between X and Y is indicative of X *causing* Y, rather than Y causing X or both being caused by something else. This can lead to a lot of [flimsy and misleading](http://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/does-researching-casual-marijuana-use-cause-brain-abnormalities/) published findings.

Starting in the 1980's, critics of these practices [started to emphasize](http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2007/03/31/what-is-the-matter-with-empirical-economics-freak-freakonomics-again/) what is called, in the statistical jargon, "clean identification". Clean identification means that your analysis is set up in a way that makes it possible to convincingly determine causal effects, not just correlations.

The most time-tested and well respected identification strategy is the randomized experiment, of the kind used in medical trials. If you randomly divide people into two groups that differ only by a single treatment, you can be pretty sure that subsequent differences between the two groups are actually caused by the treatment.

But most social science questions, especially the big and important ones, aren't ones you can do experiments on. You can't randomly assign one group of countries to have austerity economics, and another group to have Keynesian policies. So as a second best solution, scholars began looking for so-called "natural experiments". These are situations where, more or less by accident, people find themselves divided into two groups arbitrarily, almost *as if* they had been randomized in an experiment. This allows the identification of causality in non-experimental situations.

A famous early paper using this approach was David Card and Alan Krueger's 1992 [study](http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf) of the minimum wage. In 1990, New Jersey had increased its minimum wage to be the highest in the country. Card and Krueger compared employment in the fast food industry both New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Their logic was that these stores didn't differ systematically aside from the fact that some of them were subject to the higher New Jersey minimum wage, and some of them weren't. Thus any change in employment after the New Jersey hike could be interpreted as a consequence of the higher minimum wage. In a finding that is still cited by liberal advocates, they concluded that higher minimum wages did nothing to cause lower employment, despite the predictions of textbook neoclassical economics.

This was a useful and important paper, and the early wave of natural experiment analyses produced other useful results as well. But as time went on, the obsession with identification led to a wave of studies that were obsessed with proper methodology and unconcerned with whether they were studying interesting or important topics. Steve Levitt of "Freakonomics" fame is a product of this environment, someone who would never tackle a big hard question where an easy trivial one was available.

With the pool of natural experiments reaching exhaustion, some researchers began to turn toward running their own actual experiments. Hence the rise of the so-called ["randomistas"](http://rupertsimons.blogspot.com/2008/10/deaton-on-randomistas.html). These were people who performed randomized controlled trials, generally in poor countries, to answer small and precisely targeted questions about things like aid policy. This work includes things like Chris Blattman's [study](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2439488) in which money was randomly distributed to Ugandan women.

But now, if former World Bank lead economist [Branko Milanovic](https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/476026660781711360) is to be believed, the experimental identificationists are having their own [day of crisis](https://chronicle.com/article/Poverty-Under-the-Microscope). As with the natural experiment, the randomized trial sacrifices big questions and generalizable answers in favor of conclusions that are often trivial. With their lavishly funded operations in poor countries, there's an added aspect of liberal colonialism as well. It's the Nick Kristof or Bono approach to helping the global poor; as Milanovic [puts it](https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/476029714637656064), "you can play God in poor countries, publish papers, make money and feel good about yourself."

If there's a backlash against the obsession with causal inference, it will be a victory for people who want to use data to answer real questions. Writing about these issues [years ago](http://www.peterfrase.com/2009/10/elster-on-the-social-sciences/), I argued that:

> It is often impossible to find an analytical strategy which is both free of strong assumptions about causality and applicable beyond a narrow and artificial situation. The goal of causal inference, that is, is a noble but often futile pursuit. In place of causal inference, what we must often do instead is causal interpretation, in which essentially descriptive tools (such as regression) are interpreted causally based on prior knowledge, logical argument and empirical tests that persuasively refute alternative explanations.

I still basically stand by that, or by the pithier formulation I added later, "Causal inference where possible, causal interpretation where necessary."

This post spins out something that occurred to me in the course of writing about consumerist politics and its limitations. One of the sections concerns gentrification, and the political dead end of blaming it on what Anthony Galuzzo called ["the fucking hipster show"](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/05/the-fucking-hipster-show/).

Artists, students, and others classified as "hipsters" are often blamed for gentrification, rather than being understood as people who are often driven into poorer and browner neighborhoods by large-scale processes rooted in capital accumulation and government policy. This creates a divisive cultural distraction from the need to organize neighborhoods across race and class lines. I go into that in more detail in the forthcoming essay. But I had an odd thought about the racist dimension of gentrification that didn't fit in there.

Racism is a central, unavoidable component of the whole process of gentrification in places like the United States. Landlords in non-white areas perceive that if they can bring white people into a neighborhood, they will attract more people like them. At first, the newcomers may be the low-income hipster types, but they are the pioneers who make the area safe for colonization by the rich. The ultimate outcome is that the non-white residents get priced out and displaced, along with the original gentrifiers. It's a process that's been repeated so many times in recent decades that that it barely needs explaining anymore.

But it occurred to me is that the first wave of white gentrifiers are engaging in what we might call, by analogy with finance, a kind of racial arbitrage. Arbitrage is the practice of exploiting differences in prices for the same good in different markets. When such discrepancies appear, it can be possible to make risk-free money by buying out of one market and immediately selling into another.

Early gentrifiers aren't engaging in arbitrage in this strict sense; the gains that go to early home-buyers, for instance, are consequences of the unfolding of the gentrification dynamic itself and not of some market imperfection in static comparison. But in the early stages, racism gives rise to a situation where the perception of certain neighborhoods diverges from their lived reality. A white person who notices this can exploit it to procure housing at a discount.

This is primarily because, all things being equal, white people perceive a neighborhood as having more crime [the more black people it has in it](http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pager/files/quillianpager_spq2010.pdf). Blacks are, in fact, more likely to live in high crime areas, but white perceptions go beyond this reality (see the linked paper for a detailed study). A white person who knows this will realize that an apartment in a black neighborhood will be systematically cheaper than the same apartment in a white neighborhood. By renting in the black neighborhood, whitey gets a discount without actually facing any additional danger.

The size of this discount is magnified by a second aspect of white racism about black crime. This one relates not to how much crime there is, but to what drives crime, and in particular violent crime. Many white people believe that rather than having a rational basis, violence in black neighborhoods is driven by some kind of cultural pathology or inherent animalistic nature. We therefore come to believe that mere proximity to black people puts us in danger.

This is illustrated in the recent, excellent [debate](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/) between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait. (Excellent on Coates' side, that is. Chait's contribution consisted of digging himself into a hole, then calling in a backhoe.) Chait, like many white liberals, tends fall back on nebulous ideas of black cultural pathology to explain why black people face higher levels of violence and poverty. The primary difference between people like Chait and his conservative counterparts is Chait's magnanimous acknowledgment that black pathology stems from the legacy of slavery rather than inherent inferiority.

Coates demolishes this whole patronizing and misbegotten enterprise. Drawing on his own experiences growing up in Baltimore, he shows how violence and machismo can be understandable and even necessary ways of surviving in a tough environment. "If you are a young person living in an environment where violence is frequent and random, the willingness to meet any hint of violence with yet more violence is a shield."

But white gentrifiers moving into black neighborhoods don't face anything like this same environment of violence. For one thing, a major source of random violence in black communities is the police, who certainly don't treat white newcomers the same way. For another, these newcomers are disconnected from the social networks, and the legal and illegal economies, on which many urban residents depend for survival, but which can also be suffused with violence. Certainly, white gentrifiers may be subject to property crime if they are perceived as rich or as easy marks. But the notion that they face the same murder rate as their black neighbors is simply preposterous. (For women, of course, there is an additional set of concerns about safety. But here, too, there can be an overestimation of the likelihood of being raped by a strange black man rather than the pleasant-seeming friend who might even claim socialist politics.)

Nevertheless, when I've mentioned the possibility of moving to a high-crime, predominantly black neighborhood, I've heard jokes---even from leftist comrades---along the lines of "heh, only if you want to get shot". These are, presumably, people I won't have to compete with for an apartment. Hence the racist perceptions of crime's sources and targets drives down rents further and compounds the racial arbitrage.

The anti-racism of the early arrivals, then, is what helps start the whole process of revaluation and displacement. There's an almost absurd quality to it: white supremacy is so pervasive, and its structural mechanisms so powerful, that *even white anti-racist consciousness can be a mechanism for reinforcing white supremacy*. It's an important lesson that shows why anti-racism isn't just about purifying what's in our hearts or our heads. It's about transforming the economic systems and property relations that continue to reproduce racist practices and ideas.