Totality is a horizon of Marxist analysis in which objects of study are taken up in their logical and political relation to a general concept of the capitalist mode of production and its historical trajectory. This concept orients much Marxist thought because capitalism itself totalizes a set of objective and historically specific constraints that exert selective pressures on social life. While György Lukács originally identifies the methodological imperative to totalize with the potentially revolutionary class consciousness of the proletariat, the collapse of organized class politics over the past 40 years has accompanied not only widespread dismissal of this imperative but also — and more promisingly — avowedly Marxist modifications of totality as a concept. Fredric Jameson exemplifies and perhaps originates this transformed interest in totality in his 1988 essay “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project.” Jameson’s key move is to claim that Lukács’s critical theory is premised on an “insistence, not on abstract concepts such as ‘class’ or ‘production,’ but rather on group experience” (215).1 Thus, as Neil Larsen argues, at the same time as Jameson makes a case for a return to totality thinking, he implicitly brackets “the very question, perhaps one of [Lukács’s] greatest and most revolutionary theoretical contributions, of (class) consciousness as form, as structured in its relation to reification and to social form as such” (83).2 Revised, in this way, beyond its immanence to a Marxist concept of class, totality thinking takes on a more abstract and capacious form.

Totality Inside Out: Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capital, a collection of essays edited by Kevin Floyd, Jen Hedler Phillis, and Sarika Chandra, brings Marxist research in value criticism, social reproduction theory, and racial formation theory to bear on this project of revising the concept of totality away from the concept of class — primarily within a U.S. and capitalist-core context. The strength of Totality Inside Out lies in its ambition to modify our general concept of capitalism as a totality and, in turn, to sketch a more expansive and flexible conceptual space for totality thinking than that afforded by Lukács and, more broadly, by twentieth-century Western Marxism. The volume’s theoretical introduction, shaped largely by the late Kevin Floyd, exemplifies this ambition. Floyd’s work on the concept of totality in relation to sexuality and gender invigorates the volume’s attempts to map the entailments of its “inside-out” Marxist totality across “sites of contemporary political conflict over racial and economic justice, materialist feminist and queer critique, climate change, and aesthetic value” (1).

How is the volume’s concept of totality “inside-out?” Oriented by the abstract categorial analysis of value criticism, the essays collected here build on recent de-centering projects in Western Marxism by shifting attention from the working class and capital-wage relation to surplus populations and, more generally, to “identities and ideas historically understood to be secondary to the primary functioning of capitalism” (12).3 The volume justifies this shift by ascribing an identitarian particularism to class politics in general. This appears in the theoretical introduction as the premise that the “universalization of the socioeconomic realm that sits at the center of orthodox totality thinking” is actually a projection of the identitarian standpoint of the labor movement — which can be grasped primarily as a “skilled, male, and often white industrial worker” movement (6). Thus, while Lukács and a value-critical theorist like Moishe Postone would disagree over whether the totalized whole is the true or the false, the wager of Totality Inside Out is that both share an identitarian standpoint because they falsely “universalize” capitalist value relations that are in fact particular to the conditions of the “industrial working class” (6).4 Altogether, the essays collected here posit or assume a general concept of capitalism according to which the concept of class is largely, if not entirely, commensurate with the concept of ascriptive identity in terms of how these concepts are structured by capitalism’s reproduction as a total social system. This analysis of class as a “social identity” brackets the common Marxist distinction between a class-in-itself and a class-for-itself, and by identifying class with the latter, suggests that class is an affiliative relation that, for emancipatory politics, does not have a structural primacy — and therefore a strategic priority — over ascriptive identity categories like race or gender. Readers will find that Totality Inside Out’s six chapters are variably successful as test cases for this general concept of capitalism and its reliance on the abstract categorial analysis of value criticism. The volume at once enables incisive but generous critiques of intersectionality and liberal forms of identity politics while at the same time posing theoretical interventions that can be hard to distinguish from the latter.

Totality Inside Out’s first two contributions — by Marina Vishmidt and Zoe Sutherland on one hand, and Tim Kreiner on the other — exemplify this approach to class and ascriptive identity. Vishmidt and Sutherland convincingly argue that the totality thinking of social reproduction theory (SRT) partially overcomes the analytical shortcomings of intersectionality. Since intersectionality “fail[s] to go any further than a description of experience, leaving capitalist power relations, and thus potential resistance to them, un- or under-theorized” (73), Vishmidt and Sutherland contend that “intersecting” forms of identity oppression must be situated within the capitalist processes of surplus value production and labor power reproduction. This critique admirably draws the now hegemonically liberal jargon of intersectionality into the fold of Marxism and is an exemplary way to introduce Marxist analysis to those who might otherwise be skeptical of its capacity to make sense of ascriptive identity.

Yet Vishmidt and Sutherland also argue that we need to decenter the category of “labor” in SRT and Marxism more generally, and this move proves less coherent than their critique of intersectionality. On their account, SRT tends to posit an “integrative ontology of labor” within capitalism that, in its synthetic ambition to grasp waged and unwaged labor within a totality, “could court the same danger that Marxist feminist critique once spotted in the ‘workerist’ politics of the factory — the moralized affirmation of labor” (76). Vishmidt and Sutherland are right to critique SRT’s occasional failure to grasp the political entailments of the distinction between waged and unwaged labor. Yet they all too quickly identify strategic labor politics with the “moralized affirmation of labor.” Applying their theoretical position to a strategic situation makes this clear. When organizing childcare workers, making sure not to “affirm” that they are paid wages is esoteric at best, and clearly less important than helping these workers achieve solidarity in the process of winning better wages — not to mention understanding that they hold more power within capitalism than stay-at-home parents. Vishmidt and Sutherland’s critique of labor’s “moralized affirmation” risks itself becoming a moralized position.

To ameliorate the danger of “affirming labor,” Vishmidt and Sutherland center the concept of “value” and decenter the category of “labor.” As their “analysis of value relations” falls into esoteric step with Moishe Postone, Wertkritik, and Endnotes,it risks an abstract and moralistic emphasis on “affirmation” at the expense of a strategic emphasis on concrete political problems. More pointedly, the question of whether or not to “affirm” labor risks an idealist condescension to working-class institutions like unions. Workers organizing as workers aren’t duped into “affirming labor” because they are trapped within a value-productive capitalist “social identity.” Rather, absent an institutionally powerful left, it doesn’t make strategic sense for workers to organize around demands that negate their structural, value-productive position within capitalism.5 Which is not to say that value-critical approaches to Marxism are not useful. Much incisive work in Mediations draws on the macro-historical insights afforded by value criticism’s categorial analysis of capitalist social forms. The point is that Vishmidt and Sutherland exemplify how value criticism’s abstraction poses analytic and political liabilities. Indeed, their “analysis of value relations” leads them to claim that “gender and race are as operative within capitalist value relations as commodified labor power” (77) and, in turn, to posit a “‘negative totality’ that would situate the logics of gender, race, and normativity within the form of value” (79). While the imperative to relate ascriptive identity categories to the capitalist form of value is unobjectionable, the claim that these categories are “as operative” as “commodified labor power” is controversial, yet assumed here rather than argued. Arguing this claim would necessitate careful empirical study of causes and their complex interrelations. But much like the intersectionality theory Vishmidt and Sutherland admirably critique, their “negative totality” brings important social relations into view while falling short of a concrete analysis of how these relations function in capitalism.

Like Vishmidt and Sutherland, Tim Kreiner attempts a Marxist revision of non-Marxist theories of ascriptive identity. Kreiner argues that the New Left’s embrace of anti-normativity is instructive for the Marxist understanding of class struggle today. Just as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble “illustrated a feminism the normative force of which was the refusal of norms” (43), Kreiner argues that his “critical” view of the proletariat should supersede what he calls the “normative” view. While this “normative” view holds “dispossession of the means of production,” “subsumption beneath the wage,” and manual labor to be the criteria for proletarian class position, Kreiner’s “critical” view holds this criterion to be “differential access to the means of subsistence” (34-35). With these terms, Kreiner offers a rich comparative discussion of New-Left theories of identity. But his analysis of the problem of class demobilization since mid-century works via abstract rather than determinate negation. That is, in Vishmidt and Sutherland’s apt phrasing, if social movements cohere around “wagers of unity” in which gender, race, or class “are often formulated negatively” (67), Kreiner’s “critical” view of the proletariat makes a “wager of unity” whose formulation is far too abstract to be analytically meaningful. In short, Kreiner jettisons a century of Marxist class theory for the phrase “differential access to the means of subsistence.” In the resemblance of Kreiner’s argument to a post-structuralist rejection of normativity — and, necessarily, a rejection of class analysis — readers may find it difficult to see how his “critical” proletariat clarifies the terrain of emancipatory politics. This is because, like most “anti-normative” positions, Kreiner’s position relies on an incomplete critique of a particular norm — in this case the Lukácsian or “traditional” Marxist norm that class is the primary historical medium for overturning capitalism. Kreiner’s “critical” concept of the proletariat is incomplete because it brackets the question of exploitation, and therefore brackets the analytic and strategic force of Marxist class analysis. Marxism defines classes in terms of exploitation because exploitation confers a form of power on the proletariat to resist their particular form of domination. Since workers are exploited, they can hurt the capitalist class financially by withdrawing their labor to interrupt production and circulation. But this is not the case for the “critical” proletariat Kreiner aggregates in terms of subjects’ “differential to the means of subsistence.” The surplus populations, “underclasses,” etc., of this “critical” proletariat” may possess “revolutionary motives” (30) to expropriate the capitalists’ means of production, but they lack the “normative” proletariat’s strategic location in the structure of production necessary to do so.6

The volume’s next two essays — by Sarika Chandra and Chris Chen on one hand, and Arthur Scarritt on the other — also focus on surplus populations but emphasize how their often racialized character buttresses capitalist accumulation. Both essays, like those preceding them, take up crucial questions and offer some important insights, but generally bracket the strategic analysis afforded by Marxist class theory. Chandra and Chen try to break out of what they call the “race/class problematic” (136) by theorizing the concept of race not primarily in relation to class but in relation to a general concept of “accumulation.” Their lucid overview of racial formation theory maps out the stakes of various positions in this field of study and draws them into the orbit of “three co-constitutive, recursive, and specifically capitalist mechanisms: exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion” (138). Thus Chandra and Chen attend to how the capital accumulation process, in excess of the exploitative wage relation at its core, involves racialized processes like the naked theft of productive capacities and resources — as in chattel slavery, indentured servitude, colonialism, debt peonage, and prison labor (155) — and the expulsion of subjects from the labor process altogether — like the disabled or those whose skills are no longer fit for the new economy. Within this schema, they pursue the value-critical approach exemplified by Vishmidt and Sutherland. That is, Chandra and Chen argue that to bring these three “exes” into focus “does not require a claim of causal primacy but instead enables us to re-theorize how capitalism produces relational interlinkages among different domains of social life through a general measure of capitalist value” (157).

With this re-theorization, Chandra and Chen, like Kreiner, bracket the analytic primacy that Marxism has traditionally attributed to the material interests, rooted in the wage relation, that give rise to class struggle in capitalism.7 While Chandra and Chen are right to be skeptical of abstract debates about causal primacy, they inadequately defend the strategic implications of their shift away from the concept of class and toward a concept of the “general measure of capitalist value.” Like Moishe Postone’s concept of “abstract social domination,” their concept of “value” and its three “exes” risks abstracting their analysis of race beyond the realm of strategic politics.8 9 Consequently, Chandra and Chen offer an incomplete critique of class politics at present. They argue that left critics like Barbara and Karen Fields, Adolph Reed, and Walter Benn Michaels approach race “as an ascriptive social phenomenon [that is] primarily subsumed within the project of forging working-class solidarity” (161), and that this approach’s focus on “economic inequality” and, in turn, a “distributionist” understanding of capitalism forecloses challenges to the mode of production itself (175).10 Against this inequality-focused “distributionist” approach to critiquing race, Chandra and Chen suggest that today “simultaneously anti-capitalist and anti-racist” strategy should not be “reducible to…the project of assembling affirmative multi-racial working class identities” (136) — in other words, should not be reducible to working-class organizing. They elaborate: “The choice of inequality as a measure of racial and economic injustice frames both racism and class formation mainly in terms of maldistribution, limiting the horizon of politics to redistributive measures aimed at closing the inequality gap between distinct groups occupying differential class positions” (154-55). Chandra and Chen’s “distributionist” epithet is a red herring because the point of egalitarian class politics is that class-based redistributive demands can fundamentally challenge the capitalist mode of production, rather than merely its form of distribution. Social-democratic demands in the U.S., like Medicare for All, Childcare for All, expanded unionization rights, etc., are immediately “distributionist,” but in their capacity to unify workers on a mass scale around their material interests, they harbor the potential to build the institutionalized left that is the condition of possibility for any progressive challenge to capitalism and the exploitative wage relation at its core. Merely anti-racist politics, on the other hand, necessarily entails nothing more than a “distributionist” political horizon because it aims to close discriminatory gaps between racial groups while leaving the exploitation intrinsic to the wage form unchallenged.11 This is the anti-racism that today, in Chandra and Chen’s apt phrasing, has been transformed into “a vast counterinsurgent infrastructure that disrupts, delegitimizes, and demobilizes political insurgencies by both concealing deep intragroup conflicts over political ideology and stigmatizing emergent forms of interracial solidarity” (169).

So when Chandra and Chen assert that class politics focused on inequality can only define “the alternative to neoliberal antiracism in terms of the social democratic management of the distributive consequences of capitalist production” (175 n. 52), they are only partly right, and the incompleteness of their critique is exemplary of Totality Inside Out’s tendency toward the depoliticized abstraction of value criticism. That is, Chandra and Chen are right in their implication that mid-century social democracy is not reproducible at present, but the onus is on them to name a popular left demand that is not immediately “distributionist.” They are also right that the “self-expanding ecocidal character of capitalist imperatives, systemic constraints on redistributive policy, existing critiques of full employment as a normative ideal, and the historical trajectory of actually existing social democracies” (175) pose immense challenges for the left today. Value-critical Marxism helps bring these challenges into view — but its abstraction can also produce critiques of left strategy like Chandra and Chen’s that struggle to account for political exigencies like the necessity to build a mass, institutionalized left around material interests that, in the U.S. today, in part take the strategic form of social-democratic demands. Overall, however, Chandra and Chen’s essay is an ambitious attempt to map theoretical approaches to post–Jim Crow racial politics and investigate therein areas of possible compatibility with left politics. So while their reliance on Michael Dawson’s concept of “linked fate” (162-63, 167-68) and Tommie Shelby’s concept of “nested” solidarities (163) cashes out rather ambiguously in their argument, a deeper elaboration of this argument in their book-in-progress should be of high interest to readers.12

In the next chapter, Arthur Scarritt also deemphasizes the relation between class organizing and the analysis of racism at present, but does so on the grounds that neoliberalism is not primarily a regime of exploitation rooted in the class system but a system of racialized rentierism. While Scarritt’s sweeping historical story agrees with the widely held Marxist analysis that modern racism emerged as part of an elite-driven process of disciplining labor and rationalizing inequality, he dismisses the centrality of exploitation to this process. For him, the early European colonists of North America and Peru sowed racial division in order to maintain their elite position in a feudal social order as an “aristocratic” end-in-itself. Scarritt uses this claim to draw an analogy between early colonialism and neoliberalism that is only skin-deep, for it is not clear how neoliberalism can be adequately grasped as a system of “global white supremacy.” While the early-colonial rentier and the neoliberal rentier may both benefit from what David Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession,” Scarritt does not explain how the neoliberal rentier relies on an institutionalized system of racism. Rather, he points out that neoliberal rentiers or those they exploit are disproportionately one “race” or another. That the persistence of racial disparities into the present might be primarily explained by impersonal market forces, which invariably compound racial disparities produced under past regimes of institutionalized racism, does not seem to pose a problem for Scarritt. Ultimately, his argument relies on a conceptual separation of the “political” from the “economic” that cashes out in a historical separation of what he calls “the class system” of capital and labor from “the racial system” of rentiers and racialized surplus populations (115). He consequently argues that neoliberalism is “an explicit form of racial rule with its own independent racial logics” (115) and stages an analytical separation of race from political economy that mirrors the moralizing pathologies of liberal anti-racism. Nonetheless, his account of how rentierist processes of redistribution displace class bargaining in the neoliberal period is generally compelling. Less abstractly racialized accounts of this displacement — Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner’s, for example — complicate Kreiner’s narrowly race-driven account of neoliberalism and what may follow it.13

In the volume’s penultimate chapter, Sarah Brouillette and the late Joshua Clover aptly remind us that “the consequential losses stemming from a divorce of the political and the economic are many” (196). They incisively critique shallow accounts of neoliberalism that split the economic from the political by failing to relate the policy of the past 40 years to macroeconomic dynamics of capital accumulation. And turning to the realm of art, they critique recent left defenses of aesthetic autonomy as entailing “exactly the viewpoint we have been detailing, wherein the political is understood to exist as its own content, separated from the economic and thus able to stand in opposition to it” (197). This reified “viewpoint” follows, they argue, from “the fetish of autonomy” and its commitment to “‘unsubsumed’ art, characterized as possessing and/or figuring autonomy from the discipline of the marketplace, as bearer of value independent from and consistently opposed to political-economic value” (197). Brouillette and Clover rightly condemn art that would, as such, arrogate to itself an “integrally effective resistance to the depredations of contemporary capitalism” (207). But at this point in their argument, Brouillette and Clover construct a straw man of the specific left-autonomy position on art they have in their sights. Contra their polemic, left-autonomy advocates like Walter Benn Michaels and Nicholas Brown identify art’s autonomy with neither its “unsubsumed” status nor its political efficacy. Rather, for these critics, autonomy is an artwork’s assertion of medium-specific self-legislation that has no instrumental purpose; an artwork’s status as “unsubsumed” is, on the other hand, a sociological description of artistic production that is not subject to a certain degree of market heteronomy. Further, the left-autonomy position not only claims that no art at present is plausibly “unsubsumed” (thus, Brown contends, art must overcome its commodity character by asserting its aesthetic autonomy), but also holds art’s medium-specific self-legislation to be politically ineffective.14 Michaels describes the artworks he interprets as bearing a “class aesthetic” rather than a “class politics,” and argues that they embody “efforts to produce better art, not a better society.”15

The stakes of these distinctions about autonomous art are, in many ways, far removed from left debates about political-economic analysis and strategy. But in a journal committed to Marxist research in literature, arts, and culture, it is important to bring these stakes into focus. Brouillette and Clover begin to do so when they paraphrase how autonomous art is, ostensibly, “not determined by a totality of social relations but instead takes those relations in and assesses them from on high” (208). Immediately, “on high” implies a charge of elitism that exemplarily misinterprets the left-autonomy position. Following Brown, if the discipline of interpretation integral to the humanistic study of modern artworks relies on these works’ assertions of medium-specific self-legislation, and if it is unrealistic at present to demand universal access to the noninstrumental education necessary for this humanistic study, a defense of autonomous art constitutes

not a critique of the demand [for noninstrumental education] but, rather, a rebuke to the conditions that make it so. As long as the pursuit of noninstrumental knowledge is reserved for only a few, the directly humanistic noises we make about it are vicious mockeries of themselves. But the degree to which we no longer make them reveals the degree to which we have stopped pretending our societies are fit for human beings.16

The distinction between successful art and failed art is not itself a class distinction, even if the humanistic education requisite for coherently making this distinction often correlates with class position. With the force of Brouillette and Clover’s charge of elitism thus acknowledged, their paraphrase of the left-autonomy position brings this position’s more general stakes into focus. For what does artistic production have in common with Marxist theory and practice but that each “is not [merely] determined by a totality of social relations but instead takes those relations in and,” in a moment of autonomy, “assesses them” to produce an artwork, a Marxist analysis, or a strategic action toward an emancipatory end? That the assertion of aesthetic autonomy within an artwork can require a more expensive form of education than the assertion of political autonomy is true, but irrelevant to this point. The left-autonomy position holds that both art and politics require moments or aspects of autonomy, and that the failure to grasp the specificity of art’s autonomy is a mistake. It is important to extract this basic claim of the left-autonomy position from the distortions of Brouillette and Clover’s polemic because a defense of aesthetic autonomy from the left, while esoteric, dramatizes important questions on the left today and, for this reason, deserves more careful scrutiny than offered in their polemic.

Indeed, if the esoteric question of art’s autonomy does find an exoteric grip on the arguments of Totality Inside Out, it does so heuristically in relation to the concept of class. That is, one of the volume’s shortcomings is its inability to acknowledge the aspect of autonomy inherent to class politics. Following foundational value-critical thinkers like Postone and Norbert Trenkle, the working class appears throughout the volume as entirely heteronomous to the reproduction of capitalism as a total social system. Thus, Totality Inside Out’s refusal of working-class autonomy mirrors Brouillette and Clover’s refusal of art’s autonomy. The point is that these distinct forms of autonomy are precarious and embattled at present, but both persist — and it is crucial that Marxism does not lose sight of either. Autonomous art may be commodified, but it achieves meaning as medium-specific self-legislation — which is precisely what distinguishes the artwork from the mere commodity: the former can sustain medium-specific interpretation, the latter cannot. Likewise, labor under capitalism may be commodified, but it can (but need not necessarily) achieve a form of self-legislation in revolutionary class consciousness that can contest the reproduction of capitalism. Grasping the autonomy of art necessitates medium-specific analysis of how artworks work on their own terms in historical context, and grasping the political autonomy of the working class necessitates strategic class analysis of the political-economic terrain faced by the left today. Both intellectual endeavors, that is, sublate abstract theorization within the immanent critique of specific cases: a commitment to political-economic strategy orients class analysis, and a commitment to medium-specificity orients the interpretation of art.

At the root of Totality Inside Out’s commitment to turning totality “inside out” is a bracketing — and at points an outright rejection — of this immanent and concretizing approach to class politics (and art). For if there is no emancipatory political possibility, no moment of autonomy, “inside” the capital-wage totality, then — the argument goes — such possibility must somehow lie “outside” of this totality in racialized surplus populations. Given the global collapse of left labor politics and the total trajectory of capitalist development over the past 40 years, this inside-out revision is not without reason. However, its reasoning is incomplete. For this revision only attains coherence at the level of abstraction endemic to the Marxist discourse of value criticism; when situated within the concrete struggles of today’s embattled left — particularly in the capitalist core and, more specifically, in the U.S. — the essays in Totality Inside Outraise important questions but struggle to achieve analytic or strategic grip. As Brent Ryan Bellamy observes in the volume’s final essay on climate change, “the challenge of thinking totality and the Earth system at once is that the scale of abstraction leaves little room for practical action” (213). That is, beyond Bellamy’s compelling overview of strategies for representing climate change in terms of the Marxist concept of totality, his ecological problematic dramatizes how the volume generally struggles to mediate between abstract categorial analysis and concrete political analysis.

To be clear, value criticism is indispensable for analyzing the macro-historical logic of capitalism’s unfolding as a total social system; it enables incisive general accounts of how the left confronts a different terrain of struggle today than in the twentieth century. And totality’s “inside” surely mediates its “outside,” and vice versa; exploitation is interrelated with processes of expropriation and expulsion, just as working-class composition is bound up with surplus-population formation within processes of capital accumulation. But in order for a value-critical standpoint to be a substantive innovation within Marxist analysis, this standpoint requires, in every case, context-specific analysis of not only how these “insides” and “outsides” of totality are mediated by political-economic structures, but also how these structures present context-specific strategic openings or constraints for left politics. Crucially, left analysis must not lose sight of proletarian agency and the strategic primacy of class. While the conditions of class formation have changed, it persists as the primary medium of left politics. Workers subsumed within the totality of capitalist value production can think and act as a class to actualize a world beyond capitalism that benefits all. These workers need a left that will convince, welcome, and support them as they struggle within and against capitalism.

1. Fredric Jameson, “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project” in Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2010).
2. Neil Larsen, “Lukács sans Proletariat, or Can History and Class Consciousness Be Rehistoricized?” in Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, ed. Timothy Bewes et al. (London: Continuum, 2011).
3. See, for example, Neil Larsen et al., Marxism and the Critique of Value (MCM’, 2014); Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge UP, 1995).
4. Readers will likely want more explanation on this point, since, despite their differences, Lukács and Postone hold capitalist value relations to be logically rather than empirically universal. That is, they hold the universality of commodification and class to mean that anyone can be subject to its constraints, not that everyone is.
5. Adolph Reed and Mark Dudzik’s definition is helpful here: “By left we mean a reasonably coherent set of class-based and anti-capitalist ideas, programmes and policies that are embraced by a cohort of leaders and activists who are in a position to speak on behalf of and mobilize a broad constituency. Such a left would be, or would aspire to be, capable of setting the terms of debate in the ideological sphere and marshaling enough social power to intervene on behalf of the working class in the political economy. Some measures of that social power include: ability to affect both the enterprise wage and the social wage; power to affect urban planning and development regimes; strength to intervene in the judicial and regulatory apparatus to defend and promote working-class interests; power not only to defend the public sphere from encroachments by private capital but also to expand the domain of non-commoditized public goods; and generally to assert a force capable of influencing, even shaping, public policy in ways that advance the interests and security of the working-class majority.” Mark Dudzic and Adolph Reed, “The Crisis of Labour and the Left in the United States,” Socialist Register 51 (2015): 351-52.
6. There is an assumption running throughout Totality Inside Out that the working class no longer exists as an organizable force for left politics. Instructive here is Kim Moody’s critique of Clover’s book Riot. Strike. Riot. (Verso, 2016). Contra Clover’s demotion of class-based organizing in favor of a flexible and spontaneous politics arising from racialized surplus populations, Moody argues that the working class, with its “hands…on the high and low-tech levers of production, distribution, and social provision,” has “both the numbers and vast potential far in excess of the surplus population” to challenge capital. See Moody, “Organize. Strike. Organize,” Jacobin, May 22, 2018, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/05/riot-strike-riot-joshua-clover-review.
7. Vivek Chibber mounts a powerful defense of the analytic primacy of class-based material interests for left politics at present in The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn (Harvard University Press, 2022).
8. See Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination.
9. Alberto Toscano critiques a similar form of depoliticization in the Postone-influenced “communization” theory of collectives like Endnotes and Théorie Communiste. See Toscano, “Now and Never,” in Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (Autonomedia, 2012), 85-101.
10. Chandra and Chen concede Karen and Barbara Fields’s argument in Racecraft (Verso, 2012) that “racial difference does not explain racial oppression but is itself in need of explanation,” and that racism and economic inequality are analytically inseparable (149). Yet they do not follow Fields and Fields’s consequential argument to its end, which entails the “abandonment of race as a coherent category of analysis” (148). While a more substantive engagement with Chandra and Chen’s critique of Fields and Fields is beyond the scope of this review, it seems that the forms of “race” that Chandra and Chen claim exceed Fields and Fields’s analysis are actually explicable within the terms of the latter’s concept of “racecraft.”
11. Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr. “The Trouble with Disparity.” Nonsite, Sept. 2020, https://nonsite.org/the-trouble-with-disparity/.
12. For example, Chandra and Chen cite Michael Dawson’s affirmative conceptualization of race as “linked fate or group solidarity” to affirm that in “contemporary postwar U.S. black politics… ‘racial and ethnic ‘group interests have served as a useful proxy for self-interest’” (162). Yet their attempt to re-theorize race as such begs the question of whether racial group interests actually serve as a useful proxy for self-interest today. Here, Adolph Reed’s critique of Dawson’s ‘linked fate’ concept is crucial yet not engaged by Chandra and Chen. Reed contends that while Dawson “notes that upper-status blacks are more likely than other blacks to see themselves as having benefited from the politics of racial advancement… he does not consider the possibility that the ‘linked fate’ phenomenon that he observes may reflect not a mitigation of class consciousness but its expression as an ideology through which those very petit bourgeois strata enact the dominance of a particular definition of the scope and content of black political activity.” See Adolph L. Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 46. In short, it is not at all clear that “the concept of ‘linked fate’ emphasizes how race represents a dynamic context for action that remains in principle compatible with the broad vision of economic justice that the Fieldses endorse” (154). While in the U.S. under Jim Crow, progressive organizing on the basis of a racial “linked fate” was possible and obviously effective, it is debatable whether the Civil Rights Movement that resulted was ever compatible with a socialist egalitarianism. And today, in the contemporary U.S. and much of the developed world, anti-racist demands appear broadly incapable of building mass constituencies that unite workers’ material interests and therefore make emancipatory left politics possible. See Adaner Usmani and David Zachariah, “The Class Path to Racial Liberation,” Catalyst, vol. 5, no. 3, https://catalyst-journal.com/2021/12/the-class-path-to-racial-liberation.
13. Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, “Seven Theses on American Politics,” New Left Review, no. 138 (December 21, 2022): 5–27. Also see Matthew Karp’s critique of how Brenner and Riley approach the racialization of contemporary US politics: Karp, “Party and Class In American Politics.” New Left Review, no. 139 (2023): 131–44.
14. On the problem of art’s subsumption, see Brown, “What We Worry About When We Worry About Commodification: Reflections on Dave Beech, Julian Stallabrass, and Jeff Wall,” Nonsite, April 5, 2016, https://nonsite.org/what-we-worry-about-when-we-worry-about-commodification/.
15. Walter Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 171-72. See also, Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke UP, 2019), 34.
16. Brown, Autonomy, 34.