(I accidentally posted this as a response to Haider, but it should be up here.)
This is a bad take based on a serious misunderstanding of what we are claiming. Since Asad Haider has already defended himself and I don't care about what Vaush thinks, I will only respond to your claims as they relate to what class reductionism amounts to and your critique of Tatiana Cozzarelli.
To begin, I agree with your discussion of reductionism (strange implication that Ryle was a physiological reductionist aside). The problem is that you seem to shift to a different sense of 'reduction' than here. You have claimed that a class reductionist is a person, "who denies or downplays America's hideous racial history, or who believes that racism and other forms of prejudice don’t 'persist and cause harm', or who doesn’t think that anti-discriminate efforts are necessary." This is not what the charge of class reductionism amounts to.
That this is unclear is the fault of those of us who levy the charge of class reductionism. The classic statement of what class (or economic) reductionism is comes from Engels Letter to Bloch:
"According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form."
Note that what is key is not just that class reductionism says that all oppression is reducible to to class exploitation, but that class reductionism posits that only class has a causal role to play. Now, I would not attribute this position to you, since you do not seem to deny that racism can play a causal role. However, all that is needed to prove that class reductionism is a thing is to find a significant thinker who thinks that racial ideology does not play a causal role.
In numerous published works, Reed looks as though he is claiming that racism does not play a causal role. And in his interview with Bhaskar he explicitly says that racism doesn't explain anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDO6x6u9PlI&t=2815s If race does not play a causal role, then something else must be the cause of racism. So, he is a class reductionist in the relevant sense.
This is more easily contestable ground as I could simply be misinterpreting Reed or Doug, but your treatment of Cozzarelli indicates that you didn't read her with care. You wouldn't criticize Hartry Field's philosophy of mathematics without reading him with care. Cozzarelli deserves the same treatment.
While Cozzarelli provides evidence that shows Reed's views would be surprising if he weren't a class reductionist but unsurprising if he were, you evaluate her arguments as if they're deductive. Yes, she does write as if her conclusions are certain, but that is normal for people not trained in formal logic. That you evaluate clearly abductive arguments as deductive arguments is poor form for a trained logician.
You then describe how class-wide demands would disproportionately benefit minorities and write, "Cozzarelli doesn’t exactly deny any of this, but she still seems to think that failure to support the specific strategy of race-based reparations is a problem. But...why?" A strange question given that she answered it in the text. It is in the same part of the text that shows how mistaken both your uncharitable and charitable readings are:
"However, 'class-wide demands' are insufficient to address the particular oppression of Black folks. We have to talk about the legacy of slavery, current discrimination, and racist police violence. We have to talk about the fact that in a racist society, the implementation of 'class-wide demands' is executed in a racist way, denying benefits to people of color, like the GI Bill, the New Deal’s Wagner Act, and the Social Security Act.
"Jacobin is right to focus on uniting the working class — a working class that is Black, Brown, and queer, as well as straight, white, and cis male. But in order to achieve this unity, we need to fight against every form of oppression as such. Racism is the strongest tool wielded by American capitalists to implement hellish conditions for the working class. So, fighting against racism is a class-wide demand.
"Jacobin is also right to highlight the working class' strategic role in society: it has the ability to stop all of society as well as to provide for it. For this reason, it is a strategic necessity for the working class to take up the struggle against police violence and for Black lives, both to advance the BLM movement and to advance the fight for socialism. Using strikes and work stoppages, the labor movement must play a role in the current uprising and fight against police brutality. This requires the working class to take up the demands of the most oppressed sectors of society. This in turn, strengthens class consciousness and working class unity."
While this is not specific to reparations, how it applies is clear. It is part of fighting against racism, which is part of fighting against capitalism. She further points out reparations are specifically useful. We can put "forward a clear proposal for reparations and [explain] how capitalist wealth still has its roots in the slave system."
The larger block quote makes your uncharitable reading inaccurate, since you could not apply her argument form to claim that she is a race reductionist. Because she posits a causal role for both race and class, she argues that we should fight for both class-wide demands and race-specific demands. This differs from the emphasis on class-wide demands that flows from treating racism as non-causal.
It also makes your charitable reading inaccurate. While the history of racism does play a role, her main contention is strategic. It is about weakening one of capitalism's greatest tools to suppress the working class to better fight against capitalism.
This makes your argument from analogy is weak. There is a significant disanalogy between a serial killer with a prejudice and racism. In your analogy, you are right that we just need to work together to get out of the basement. But racism isn't just about disparities and histories; it is about preventing unification. We cannot get out of the basement if we are prevented from unifying in the first place.
You haven't successfully critiqued Cozzarelli, since you haven't understood her basic position. As she points out, this position is as old as Marx and has been refined by many great revolutionaries. It's time people understood it again.
It's obvious this article has nothing to do with me, but since my name is mentioned in mentioned in connection with three claims which are precisely the opposite of what I actually wrote, I guess correcting the record is appropriate. The reality should be apparent to anyone who actually reads the article linked, but Burgis seems to feel like he can attribute claims to me based entirely on his imagination, maybe because he didn't actually read the article, or maybe because he just believes he can make up whatever he wants.
1. My article starts by accepting Reed's proposal that there's no such thing as class reductionism. I explicitly do not accuse him of that, because my critique is based on evaluating the argument he builds from that premise. I do not "direct my fire" at him, but rather reproduce his refutation of the "myth of class reductionism" and show that it makes valid and accurate points. I explicitly describe the accusation of Bernie Sanders as class reductionist as "disingenuous," and I say that the liberal accusation of class reductionism is based on "historical distortions and logical fallacies."
2. Far from reading the Philly DSA statement in "the worst possible light," I say that it "referred to real social problems and proposed some constructive solutions to them." I use it as an example of left debates in which the term term has occurred to orient readers unfamiliar with it, and I try to describe why the statement caused controversy, but I don't present my own critique of the statement. The most critical comment on the statement that occurs in my article is when I quote the one made later by Philly DSA itself.
3. When I refer to people online who embrace the label of class reductionist, it's specifically to point out that these people aren't significant, and that I'm focusing on engaging with the arguments of serious people who say the label is inaccurate. Burgis is completely inverting what I'm actually saying, which is that while I'll concede that for whatever reason some anonymous online trolls might say that they're class reductionists or that class reductionism is good, Reed is right to say they're not a meaningful political tendency, so we should instead evaluate his argument on its own terms. This means, as I've already said, that we can't just assert that he's a class reductionist when he's presented an argument that the category is a myth, so I try to understand what he means when he says it's a myth and trace out the consequences of his argument, which is complex. For Burgis to represent this as me conjuring up phantom class reductionists is totally dishonest.
So once again, Burgis's comments about me are based either on ignoring what I actually wrote, or willfully misrepresenting me. That's disappointing, to say the least, and I hope that future debates on the left adhere to higher standards of accuracy and honesty.
Imagine thinking that writing multiple paragraphs flaunting that you don’t even know what the key term means while blatantly mis”reading” interlocutors makes a convincing argument.
I see Ben on the front pages of Jacobin and CA. Is this really the best that left intelligentsia has to offer?
(I accidentally posted this as a response to Haider, but it should be up here.)
This is a bad take based on a serious misunderstanding of what we are claiming. Since Asad Haider has already defended himself and I don't care about what Vaush thinks, I will only respond to your claims as they relate to what class reductionism amounts to and your critique of Tatiana Cozzarelli.
To begin, I agree with your discussion of reductionism (strange implication that Ryle was a physiological reductionist aside). The problem is that you seem to shift to a different sense of 'reduction' than here. You have claimed that a class reductionist is a person, "who denies or downplays America's hideous racial history, or who believes that racism and other forms of prejudice don’t 'persist and cause harm', or who doesn’t think that anti-discriminate efforts are necessary." This is not what the charge of class reductionism amounts to.
That this is unclear is the fault of those of us who levy the charge of class reductionism. The classic statement of what class (or economic) reductionism is comes from Engels Letter to Bloch:
"According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form."
Note that what is key is not just that class reductionism says that all oppression is reducible to to class exploitation, but that class reductionism posits that only class has a causal role to play. Now, I would not attribute this position to you, since you do not seem to deny that racism can play a causal role. However, all that is needed to prove that class reductionism is a thing is to find a significant thinker who thinks that racial ideology does not play a causal role.
Doug at Zero Books is explicitly a class reductionist, as he makes clear in his response to Cozzarelli. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spgXiTUzxws
In numerous published works, Reed looks as though he is claiming that racism does not play a causal role. And in his interview with Bhaskar he explicitly says that racism doesn't explain anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDO6x6u9PlI&t=2815s If race does not play a causal role, then something else must be the cause of racism. So, he is a class reductionist in the relevant sense.
This is more easily contestable ground as I could simply be misinterpreting Reed or Doug, but your treatment of Cozzarelli indicates that you didn't read her with care. You wouldn't criticize Hartry Field's philosophy of mathematics without reading him with care. Cozzarelli deserves the same treatment.
While Cozzarelli provides evidence that shows Reed's views would be surprising if he weren't a class reductionist but unsurprising if he were, you evaluate her arguments as if they're deductive. Yes, she does write as if her conclusions are certain, but that is normal for people not trained in formal logic. That you evaluate clearly abductive arguments as deductive arguments is poor form for a trained logician.
You then describe how class-wide demands would disproportionately benefit minorities and write, "Cozzarelli doesn’t exactly deny any of this, but she still seems to think that failure to support the specific strategy of race-based reparations is a problem. But...why?" A strange question given that she answered it in the text. It is in the same part of the text that shows how mistaken both your uncharitable and charitable readings are:
"However, 'class-wide demands' are insufficient to address the particular oppression of Black folks. We have to talk about the legacy of slavery, current discrimination, and racist police violence. We have to talk about the fact that in a racist society, the implementation of 'class-wide demands' is executed in a racist way, denying benefits to people of color, like the GI Bill, the New Deal’s Wagner Act, and the Social Security Act.
"Jacobin is right to focus on uniting the working class — a working class that is Black, Brown, and queer, as well as straight, white, and cis male. But in order to achieve this unity, we need to fight against every form of oppression as such. Racism is the strongest tool wielded by American capitalists to implement hellish conditions for the working class. So, fighting against racism is a class-wide demand.
"Jacobin is also right to highlight the working class' strategic role in society: it has the ability to stop all of society as well as to provide for it. For this reason, it is a strategic necessity for the working class to take up the struggle against police violence and for Black lives, both to advance the BLM movement and to advance the fight for socialism. Using strikes and work stoppages, the labor movement must play a role in the current uprising and fight against police brutality. This requires the working class to take up the demands of the most oppressed sectors of society. This in turn, strengthens class consciousness and working class unity."
While this is not specific to reparations, how it applies is clear. It is part of fighting against racism, which is part of fighting against capitalism. She further points out reparations are specifically useful. We can put "forward a clear proposal for reparations and [explain] how capitalist wealth still has its roots in the slave system."
The larger block quote makes your uncharitable reading inaccurate, since you could not apply her argument form to claim that she is a race reductionist. Because she posits a causal role for both race and class, she argues that we should fight for both class-wide demands and race-specific demands. This differs from the emphasis on class-wide demands that flows from treating racism as non-causal.
It also makes your charitable reading inaccurate. While the history of racism does play a role, her main contention is strategic. It is about weakening one of capitalism's greatest tools to suppress the working class to better fight against capitalism.
This makes your argument from analogy is weak. There is a significant disanalogy between a serial killer with a prejudice and racism. In your analogy, you are right that we just need to work together to get out of the basement. But racism isn't just about disparities and histories; it is about preventing unification. We cannot get out of the basement if we are prevented from unifying in the first place.
You haven't successfully critiqued Cozzarelli, since you haven't understood her basic position. As she points out, this position is as old as Marx and has been refined by many great revolutionaries. It's time people understood it again.
It's obvious this article has nothing to do with me, but since my name is mentioned in mentioned in connection with three claims which are precisely the opposite of what I actually wrote, I guess correcting the record is appropriate. The reality should be apparent to anyone who actually reads the article linked, but Burgis seems to feel like he can attribute claims to me based entirely on his imagination, maybe because he didn't actually read the article, or maybe because he just believes he can make up whatever he wants.
1. My article starts by accepting Reed's proposal that there's no such thing as class reductionism. I explicitly do not accuse him of that, because my critique is based on evaluating the argument he builds from that premise. I do not "direct my fire" at him, but rather reproduce his refutation of the "myth of class reductionism" and show that it makes valid and accurate points. I explicitly describe the accusation of Bernie Sanders as class reductionist as "disingenuous," and I say that the liberal accusation of class reductionism is based on "historical distortions and logical fallacies."
2. Far from reading the Philly DSA statement in "the worst possible light," I say that it "referred to real social problems and proposed some constructive solutions to them." I use it as an example of left debates in which the term term has occurred to orient readers unfamiliar with it, and I try to describe why the statement caused controversy, but I don't present my own critique of the statement. The most critical comment on the statement that occurs in my article is when I quote the one made later by Philly DSA itself.
3. When I refer to people online who embrace the label of class reductionist, it's specifically to point out that these people aren't significant, and that I'm focusing on engaging with the arguments of serious people who say the label is inaccurate. Burgis is completely inverting what I'm actually saying, which is that while I'll concede that for whatever reason some anonymous online trolls might say that they're class reductionists or that class reductionism is good, Reed is right to say they're not a meaningful political tendency, so we should instead evaluate his argument on its own terms. This means, as I've already said, that we can't just assert that he's a class reductionist when he's presented an argument that the category is a myth, so I try to understand what he means when he says it's a myth and trace out the consequences of his argument, which is complex. For Burgis to represent this as me conjuring up phantom class reductionists is totally dishonest.
So once again, Burgis's comments about me are based either on ignoring what I actually wrote, or willfully misrepresenting me. That's disappointing, to say the least, and I hope that future debates on the left adhere to higher standards of accuracy and honesty.
Imagine thinking that writing multiple paragraphs flaunting that you don’t even know what the key term means while blatantly mis”reading” interlocutors makes a convincing argument.
I see Ben on the front pages of Jacobin and CA. Is this really the best that left intelligentsia has to offer?