2 \'Class Racism\'

'CLASS RACISM'

12

'Class Racism' Etienne Balibar

Academic analyses of racism, though according chief importance to the ·study of racist theories, none the less argue that 'sociological' racism is a popular phenomenon. Given this supposition, the development of racism within the working class (which, to committed socialists and communists, seems counter to the natural order of things) comes to be ·seen as the effect of a tendency allegedly inherent in the masses. Insti­ tutional racism finds itself projected into the very construction of that psycho-sociological category that is 'the masses'. We must therefore attempt to analyse the process of displacement which, moving from classes to masses, presents these latter both as the privileged subjects of racism and its favour~d objects. Can one say that a social class, by its situation and its ideology (not to mention its identity), is predisposed to racist attidues and behaviour? This question has mainly been debated in connection with the rise of ·Nazism, first speculatively and then later by taking various empirical indicators. 1 The result is quite paradoxical since there is hardly a social class on which suspicion has not fallen, though a marked predilection has been shown for ithe 'petty bourgeoisie'. But this is a notoriously ambiguous concept, ~hich is more an expression of the aporias of a class analysis conceived as a dividing up of the population into mutually exclusive slices. As with every question of origins in which a political charge is concealed, it makes sense to turn the question around: not to look for the foundat~ons of the racism which invades everyday life (or the movement whicq provides the vehicle for it) in the nature of the petty bourgeoisie, but to attempt to understand how the development of !

205

racism causes a 'petty bourgeois' mass to emerge out of a diversity of material situations. For the misconceived question of the class bases of racism, we shall thus substitute a more crucial and complex question, which that former question is in part intended to mask: that of the relations between racism, as a supplement to nationalism, and the irreducibility of class conflict in society. We shall find it necessary to ask how the development of racism displaces class conflict or, rather, in what way class conflict is always already transformed by a social relation in which there is an inbuilt tendency to racism; and also, conversely, how the fact that the nationalist alternative to the class struggle, specific­ ally takes. the form of racism may be considered as the ind~x of the irreconcilable character of that struggle. This does not of course mean that it is not crucial to examine how, in a given conjuncture, ithe class conditions [fa condition de dassel (made up of the material cOnditions of existence and labour, though also of ideological traditions ~d prac­ tical relationships to politics) determine the effects of racism in society: the frequency and forms of the 'acting out' of racism, the