No Politics But Class Politics

The fifteen essays collected in the book offer a stark rejoinder to what at times feels like a futile cultural impasse that ultimately amounts to a lot of hand wringing. -- Adam Theron-Lee Rensch * The Brooklyn Rail *
A significant new book -- Richard D. Kahlenberg * The Liberal Patriot *
No Politics but Class Politics is blunt, biting, and provocative. It has to be. -- Paul Prescod * Catalyst *
Adolph Reed Jr. is the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation! -- Cornel West
[Walter Benn Michaels is] cunning, brilliant, acutely suggestive, often exhilarating to read. -- Eric Lott * Transition *
Adolph Reed Jr. is the smartest person of any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and gender. -- Katha Pollitt * Mother Jones *
For decades, Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels have brought common as well as uncommon sense to the analysis of politics under oligarchic late capitalism. -- Barbara J. Fields
Wokelords and anti-racist liberals will be frustrated, enraged, and defeated. This book pushes us closer towards the uncompromising, bare-knuckled anti-capitalist movement we so desperately need. -- Cedric Johnson
Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels have been among the clearest voices critiquing the dominant race reductionism in American intellectual life and proposing a real egalitarian alternative. -- Bhaskar Sunkara
Anyone interested in the politics of race and class must push aside the dogma of identity and grapple with what Reed, Jr. and Michaels have been arguing for decades. -- Jodi Dean
These essays tell the story of the last seven decades, charting the decline of the left and American politics. The result is as rich as it is rare: a long view that is pressing and immediate. -- Corey Robin
Reed, Jr. and Michaels take a hammer to common ways of thinking about race, class, inequality and identity, revealing ugly truths, and challenging us out of our comfort zones. -- Kenan Malik
No Politics but Class Politics offers a bracing antidote to the fantasy that ‘diversity and inclusion’ can ever constitute a meaningful left politics. […] This book is the indispensable primer for a truly progressive politics. -- James Oakes
An indispensable exposé of anti-racism as a crucial legitimating ideology for neoliberalism. The collection is a must for activists and scholar/activists. -- John Arena, College of Staten Island, CUNY * Sociology of Race and Ethnicity *
For Michaels and Reed, American history is a history of class conflict in which race emerges as an ideology that mystifies the terms of that conflict to the benefit of capital and to the detriment of the poor; and so—both historically and currently—there are no politics other than class politics. -- Anthony Shoplik, Loyola University Chicago * Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association *
To their great credit, Marxist scholar Adolph Reed and literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels have been beating this drum since long before anyone cared to listen. -- Sohale Mortazavi * Quillette *
Still, is it accurate to call this collection “groundbreaking,” as claimed in the blurb on the back of the book? Can publishing essays spanning from 1997 to 2020 be considered a timely project in 2023? On both counts, I think the answer is yes. . . No Politics But Class Politics is essential reading for academics, students, politicians, activists, and everyone who is concerned with the most pressing social pathologies of our time, that is, those produced by the capitalist system. -- Anna Romanowicz * H-Socialism *