The Exigency of Radical Class Politics: A Personal Journey


Kevin Lam, Drake University

This paper situates class struggle/conflict as the starting point of analysis. As such, it calls for a renewal of approaches founded in historical materialism and insists on the exigency of radical class politics for analyzing contemporary and historically marginalized and dispossessed communities across time. The paper makes the argument that it may be a worthwhile project for minoritized groups to return to the radical class politics of the late 1960s and 1970s, when issues of class were central to analyses of inequality. Mainstream understandings of class consider socioeconomic factors that include educational attainment, occupation, markers of income, cultural habits, and social status in order to then categorize individuals and groups within a taxonomy of upper, middle, or working class. In doing so, this model of class obscures economic interests and capitalist relations. On the other hand, liberal anti-racists, who reify skin color as the most active determinant of social relations, have “evacuated” the class content of American society, and in the process, addressed race and racism in a vacuum (Fields and Fields 2018), while reifying skin color as the most active determinant of social relations. The paper proposes that racism and school reform are most productively addressed in the context of politics, economics, and history.

This paper will be presented at the following session: