The inability to realize whiteness as material is inherent to the “hidden” or obfuscated nature of white supremacy. This naturally leads to the whitewashing of the working class, which is the foundation of class reductionism. It reduces class to its simplist form in order to accommodate embourgiousieified workers in the global north, and centers colonial discourse above revolutionary discourse. There is this false conception that any worker with a boss is automatically a natural proletarian (meaning the wretched underclass that has revolutionary potential due to the internal contradictions of capitalism) but the truth is class is more complex than this and simply performing labor for a capitalist does not develop revolutionary potential. It basically reduces class down to another identity politic, but maybe that is not the best way to describe it.
People make attempts to build class consciousness by utilizing a whitewashed conception of the working class but this has enabled labor movements to extort colonized people to empower white workers historically, which was a major part of developing the US into the empire it is today. Labor movements in the north have actually been instrumental in spreading capital’s empire because it has relied on colonial discourses/means to improve its situation at the expense of the global proletariat and colonized people. It relies on a colonial cultural-linguistic lense to interpret and communicate information and this lense is anathama to proletarian class consciousness because it grew out of exploiting and disarming the proletariat, not organizing it.
The inability to realize whiteness as material is inherent to the “hidden” or obfuscated nature of white supremacy. This naturally leads to the whitewashing of the working class, which is the foundation of class reductionism. It reduces class to its simplist form in order to accommodate embourgiousieified workers in the global north, and centers colonial discourse above revolutionary discourse. There is this false conception that any worker with a boss is automatically a natural proletarian (meaning the wretched underclass that has revolutionary potential due to the internal contradictions of capitalism) but the truth is class is more complex than this and simply performing labor for a capitalist does not develop revolutionary potential. It basically reduces class down to another identity politic, but maybe that is not the best way to describe it.
People make attempts to build class consciousness by utilizing a whitewashed conception of the working class but this has enabled labor movements to extort colonized people to empower white workers historically, which was a major part of developing the US into the empire it is today. Labor movements in the north have actually been instrumental in spreading capital’s empire because it has relied on colonial discourses/means to improve its situation at the expense of the global proletariat and colonized people. It relies on a colonial cultural-linguistic lense to interpret and communicate information and this lense is anathama to proletarian class consciousness because it grew out of exploiting and disarming the proletariat, not organizing it.