Race, class and totality: left disputes over how to think and know

This article engages with several of the contributed chapters in On Class, Race, and Educational Reform (Darder, A., C. Hayes II, and H. Ryan. eds. [2023. On Class, Race, and Educational Reform: Contested Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury]) to explore deeper issues in political and social theory that undergird the left’s longstanding race-class debate. These include conflicting beliefs about grand theory, particularity versus totality, categorical primacy among social systems and “oppressions”, and epistemology. The pertinent contested frameworks are Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, decoloniality and postmodernism/poststructuralism. Race-class debate has conventionally tangled over competing primacies, and such queries should indeed continue. The article, however, seeks to plow deeper, to examine certain competing assumptions and ways of knowing that may impede left discussion – on race, class and more.