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Book Review Essays: Familiar Refrains, Intractable Issues: The Radicalization of Class-Gender-Race

Approaches to Class Analysis Erik Olin Wright (ed.) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2005. 222pp. Hb $70 Pb $27.99. What's Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century Michael Zweig (ed.) Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2004. 213pp. Pb $17.95. From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism Charles W. Mills. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2003. 307pp. Hb $75.00 Pb $27.95

School of Management, University of Western Sydney, New South Wales, 2150, Australia, g.lafferty{at}uws.edu.au

This review essay addresses an apparent paradox of recent decades: the concurrence of diminishing academic and political interest in class issues alongside the polarization of class inequalities under the neo-liberal ascendancy. Both the departure from class and the occasional attempts to re-assert its theoretical and political significance have assumed diverse forms. This diversity is represented in the three books discussed here. The first comprises a collection of Marxist, non-Marxist and explicitly anti-Marxist chapters on class analysis, edited by Erik Olin Wright. The second is Michael Zweig's edited volume of Left-oriented interpretations of class in its various political, economic and social dimensions, with consistent reference to gender and race. Finally, there is Charles W. Mills's rejection of class and Marxism in favor of a black radicalism underpinned by the concept of white supremacy. The essay goes on to explore the possibilities for a reinvigoration of the radical potential of class, through its theoretical and political integration with other bases of difference and division, most notably gender and race.

Key Words: neo-liberalism • class • gender • race

Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 41, No. 2, 227-244 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0486613409331434


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