ABSTRACT
The emergence of Black Lives Matter (BLM) in the USA has prompted the re-emergence of arguments about class- versus race-based campaigns. For some Marxists, movements like BLM are another instance of identity politics that fail to address issues about capitalist markets and material inequality. In this chapter we set this within the context of a similar disagreement in Britain in the 1980s between Robert Miles and the Race and Politics group of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). While both offered more nuanced and sophisticated positions than are evident in current debates, the so-called “Miles–CCCS” debate underscores the division between Marxist and cultural studies approaches to the sociology of race. In the former, racism is seen as an ideology that reconfigures labour relations without changing the political need for a class struggle beyond any divisions. For the CCCS, race is relatively autonomous from class and cannot be reduced to it, neither in theory nor in practice. Although their respective contributions were actually different in nature – one general and systematic, the other deliberately conjunctural – we suggest that elements of both can be combined in two ways that seem relevant for us today. First, we argue in favour of a broader understanding of material inequality that includes an analysis of historically ingrained forms of disadvantage, thus connecting present racism with the historical burden of slavery, colonialism and national identities. Second, we suggest that struggles waged by the racialised against the specific forces to which they are exposed – such as racism, discrimination and segregation – are in fact part of the wider struggle against material inequality.
