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Thinking Clearly about the White Working Class David Gilbert, Looking at the U.S. White Working Class Historically (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2017), 97 pages, $10.00, paperback.
David Gilbert is a worthy heir to Antonio Gramsci. Like the Sardinian radical, he has kept abreast, from a prison cell, of world events and written about them with considerable clarity. He has been an activist among his fellow prisoners and has maintained a lively correspondence with militants beyond the walls. In this timely book, a new edition of his 1984 volume Looking at the White Working Class Historically, Gilbert addresses a subject that could not be more relevant-the white working class in the United States. Conventional wisdom has it that white workers propelled Donald Trump into the Oval Office, and liberals and even some leftists seem to think that the only hope for a resurrection of progressive politics is to bring white workers back into the fold of the Democratic Party. What has been missing from these accounts is a historical perspective, one that looks at things from the standpoint of material reality.
Gilbert sets the stage for his analysis in the preface to the 1984 edition, reprinted in the new volume. Obviously, the phrase "white working class" indicates that the workers in question are part of the working class, and, as such, of a much larger class worldwide, a mass of potential agents for the overthrow of the capitalism that oppresses them. However, they are also "white," and, given the racist history of the United States, part of an oppressor nation that has subjugated, tortured, and murdered black, indigenous, and other nonwhite people for centuries. Gilbert states forcefully that "Historically, we must admit that the identity with the oppressor nation has been primary" (1). There have been exceptions, mainly in interracial efforts to improve wages and conditions in the workplace. Unfortunately, some scholars, such as Adolph Reed Jr., in an effort to deny that race remains a factor that cannot be subsumed by class, sometimes overstate the class solidarity of black and white workers.1 We could go back to the eighteenth century and note, as have historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, that there were numerous multiracial uprisings in North America, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom (particularly London).2...