Cicerchia (excerpt)

One can reproduce the same assumptions as neoclassicism from a different starting point. For neoclassicists, the market is basically indifferent to identity, so one must explain divergent labor market behavior through extra-economic prejudices, education levels, cultural influences, lazy dispositions, or the ignorance of the working class. For the critics that I discussed in the previous section, too, the fact that bringing workers together need not entail solidarity within the economy requires an extra-economic explanation. The subjective failures of workers are not the labor market’s fault, but the fault of external processes that “shape” market competition. Racism and sexism shape the process of class conflict from the outside by preventing the requisite subjective affinities and political unity on the inside. Critics then conclude that capitalism may only bring white workers or male workers together in solidarity, so the effects are not what class conflict theories assume. Consider multiple systems theories. Theorists of multiple systems (patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy) like Hartmann and Mills critique class conflict theory by identifying other systems of social differentiation. Mills, for instance, explicitly retreats from the terrain of analyzing class and race together, toward analyzing white supremacy as its own system. Mills uses Roediger’s cultural analysis of white working-class racism to support his view that whites have an “ontological stake” in white supremacy that shapes their interests. It is thus possible for white workers to forego their economic interests to maintain a privileged ontological position. Mills thinks that race shapes the contours of collective action and political solidarity because class brings workers together, but white supremacy divides them (Mills 2000: 164-9). Racism (extra-economic) shapes the class structure (economic). The inside/outside framing of the economy holds even if one admits that workers are exploited.

In my view, multiple-systems theory reifies the analytical distinction that originates with
neoclassicism. Of course, the irony is that the view itself results from an attempt to conceptualize class in a less narrow, more relational way. But one need not vindicate earlier theories of class conflict to show that their critics do not resolve the problems that are germane to those theories. Indeed, the verb “to shape” invokes the image of someone making pottery with a wheel; hands running along the outside of a system in motion. Many words have been used to describe this basic image—intertwining, co-determining, interlocking. All retain the basic idea that the market is, in principle, indifferent to identity and then point to normative features that are ostensibly external to market principles explain why what happens on the inside is different than what one may expect based on abstract models. The outside “shapes” the inside of the market in a specific locale, which explains both market failures and failures of solidarity.

Lillian Cicerchia