The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. By David Roediger (London: Verso, 1991. x plus 191 pp.)

Trotter, Joe William

doi:10.1353/jsh/25.3.674

Cited by 21 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…8 A domestic polity "characterized by simultaneous relations of equality and privilege: equality among whites, who are privileged in relation to those who are not white" (Olson 2004, xv) is also at the core of Du Bois's democratic thought. A related literature considers Du Bois's notion of the "wages of whiteness," or the domestic dynamics of appropriation of psychological and economic resources (Myers 2019;Roediger [1991] 2007). 9 There are echoes between this discussion and Andrew Douglas's (2015) illuminating reconstruction of Du Bois's critique of the competitive society.…”

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confidence: 99%

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

Valdez¹

2022

Perspect. polit.

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This article develops W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of democratic despotism to illustrate the entanglement of popular sovereignty and empire through an excessive form of western self-determination and theorizes how features of this formation remain today. Democratic despotism implies that, in western democracies at the turn of the twentieth century, popular sovereignty was an impulse to partake of the wealth and resources obtained by empire. Western democracies issued a claim to determine themselves (democratically) and others (despotically), in what I call “self-and-other-determination.” I frame the question of imperial democracy within the literature on empire and racial capitalism and the writings of Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Saidiya Hartman to conceptualize how racial affective attachments allow citizens past and present to restrict democratic concern to a limited community, whose wealth relies on the imperial exploitation of racialized others. I discuss the absence of these questions in the literature on self-determination and reflect on the implications of my framework for the contemporary rise of right-wing populism.

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confidence: 99%

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

Valdez¹

2022

Perspect. polit.

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“…Indenture and other "gradations of unfreedom" experienced by white workers as late as the eighteenth century led many not to distinguish their own circumstances all that sharply from those of enslaved Black people, Roediger argues. 34 By the first half of the nineteenth century, however, most white workers had exited indenture and occupational positions such as domestic service that placed them in closer structural proximity to the enslaved. Although there were currents of labor republicanism that challenged "wage slavery," 35 large segments of the white working class came to jointly embrace "free" labor and whiteness as markers of their superiority.…”

Section: Racial Capitalism In America: a Short Sketchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic Democracy against Racial Capitalism: Seeding Freedom

Pinto

2023

Politics & Society

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In conversation with Ferreras’s proposal for economic bicameralism, the current article makes the case for a more direct confrontation between conceptions of economic democracy and the realities of racial capitalism. In particular, it considers how efforts to expand power and voice for workers must contend with the racial hierarchy that marks the socioeconomic division of labor and the related use of racial distinctions to thwart labor solidarity. Focusing on the American context, the argument draws inspiration from the work and vision of two key figures in the unfinished struggle for Black liberation, W. E. B. Du Bois and Fannie Lou Hamer. After recapping core elements of Ferreras’s proposal, the article briefly examines the historical evolution of racial capitalism, starting with its roots in slavery and conquest. It then considers how movements agitating for greater worker power have intervened within this landscape. Against this backdrop, it draws lessons for how economic bicameralism might fit within a broader set of struggles that challenge racial capitalism as it exists today.

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“…In the United States, a postwar structure of enterprise bargaining circumscribed support for universal welfare, which union bureaucracies perceived as a threat to the competitive advantage they offered as agents bargaining benefits at the company level (Lichtenstein 1995). Moreover, in a settler colonial state that in its constitution entrenched white elite rule, this muted impulse to fight on behalf of the general interests of the working class was compounded by the racialized exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from labor protections (Roediger 1991). Social partnership, narrow in both form and scope, limited the potential for class solidarity.…”

Section: The Future Of Work As a Political Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward Realignment: Big Tech, Organized Labor, and the Politics of the Future of Work

Vgontzas

2023

Labor Studies Journal

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A future that revalues workers will require not only revitalizing the U.S. labor movement but realigning its political alliances and, specifically, eschewing compromises that further entrench big tech as a center of neoliberal power. During the twentieth century, the Democratic Party incorporated organized labor by linking the micropolitics of capitalist shopfloor control to a macropolitics of industrial growth and full employment. This framework of political incorporation foreclosed the wider class solidarity needed for expanding the reach of the labor movement and, eventually, for maintaining its relevance altogether. As the Democratic Party turned to cultivating a new base in finance, tech, and their elite workforces, the unions of the new economy, based largely in the service sector, made limited gains amid an ongoing bipartisan retrenchment of the industrial welfare state. In recent years, neoliberal hegemony has begun to be challenged, and nascent organizing among Amazon warehouse workers, Uber and Lyft drivers, and other frontline tech workers holds the potential for restoring the fortunes of labor. For parts of the labor officialdom, this moment is an opportunity to revive the old incorporation modelin exchange for ceding the right to contest algorithmic control and employment status. I see this strategy as not only reinforcing insecure work but preempting the formation of coalitions that can tackle the vast societal issues exacerbated by algorithmic control, from police surveillance and military expansion to housing insecurity and climate change. In this piece, I call for a political realignment that centers the agency of the working class in contesting the influence of big tech on and off the shopfloor, rather than serving as its junior partner. My case has four parts. I begin by sketching the limits of contemporary labor experimentation in the United States. Second, I review how Revaluing Work(ers) clarifies normative questions in debates about the future of work, while third, I discuss the political stakes of these questions through a critique of

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The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. By David Roediger (London: Verso, 1991. x plus 191 pp.)

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

Economic Democracy against Racial Capitalism: Seeding Freedom

Toward Realignment: Big Tech, Organized Labor, and the Politics of the Future of Work

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