The Strange Workings of Identity and Adolph Reed Jr.'s Thought

http://socialistproject.ca/2019/05/strange-workings-of-identity-and-adolph-reed-jrs-thought/
Date Written:  2019-05-11
Publisher:  Socialist Project
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23699

One of the cornerstones of the socialist approach to identity is the insistence that identities are not naturally occurring but are, rather, the products of history. The controversy surrounding Reed’s work offers an opportunity to try to clarify our understanding of identity.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Part of the reason leftists can have a difficult time appreciating Reed's work is, I think, because too many of us are attached to an impoverished, essentialist understanding of what identity is. Thus, instead of taking the time to consider Reed’s criticisms of essentialist approaches, we find it far easier to dismiss him as a "class reductionist."

But Reed is no class reductionist. On the contrary, he insists that we not regard capitalism as simply a system of class relations that exists at the point of production. As he put it in the above-mentioned podcast interview, capitalism is the "cultural totality" that we inhabit. In his writing, Reed offers a powerful approach to understanding how social stratification based on who people are -- what he refers to as "ascriptive differences" -- helps to stabilize capitalism's social reproduction. In other words, far from seeing hierarchies based in ascriptive differences -- including race and gender -- as incidental or unimportant, Reed understands them to be a crucial part of the functioning of our cultural totality.

If Reed really is not a class reductionist then why, his detractors might ask, does he insist that we set aside the particular needs and interests of black people and other racialized communities? For my part, I am not so sure that this is what Reed insists on. It seems to me that, to begin with, Reed would want to challenge the assumptions that are built into claims about "the particular needs and interests of black people and other racialized communities." Reed would warn against what the sociologist Rogers Brubaker has referred to as "groupism": “the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations, and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed."

To maintain that ethnic groups, nations, and races are not "substantial entities" is not the same as saying that ethnic groups, nations, and races do not exist or that their existence is unimportant. The point, rather, is this: while it may seem easy enough to ascribe coherent sets of needs, values, interests, and even agency to such abstract categories as "black people" and "other racialized communities," in the real world things are not organized so straightforwardly.

Reed would point out that those who seek to straightforwardly ascribe particular interests to "black people" and "other racialized communities" often happen to be elites -- members of what he calls the "professional and managerial strata." The scholarly literature on race, ethnicity, and nationalism is replete with discussions about elites having a tendency to instrumentalize "community interests" to pursue their own narrow goals.