Historian David Roediger has contributed to the trend in academia to identify the creation of racism as twofold, with the white working class helping the bourgeoisie to make it happen. For Amerikan academics, this is a pretty big leap, which leads them to give themselves labels such as "post-marxist," based on their false interpretations of Marxism as static and reductionist.

The step is important to escape the mis-notion that "bad" ideas adopted by relatively subordinate groups are the product of simple domination by the ruling classes. It begins to get beyond the "false-consciousness" interpretation of history. The book goes along with recent work to emphasize the active movement of oppressed groups in creating their own ideologies and forms of resistance--to see culture and ideology as the dialectical creations born out of class struggle, not just imposed by rulers.

But Roediger keeps the "false consciousness" myth alive. He assumes, but can't prove, that white workers in the nineteenth century were hurt by racism. To Roediger, the highest price paid by the white working class for racism was "the wedding of labor to a debased republicanism." He describes the tendency of "the payoffs of whiteness ... to prove spurious," because racism supposedly undermined white working class efforts to eliminate wage labor altogether.(p. 55)

He can't accept that white workers in Amerika simply got paid enough to come around to see that capitalism wasn't so bad (for them) after all. When they stopped the attack on wage labor itself, they fell in step with budding imperialism and started fighting for a piece of the pie. Ignoring this reality, The Wages of Whiteness is typical settler-leftist day-tripping, and not based in fact.

Roediger and his academic cohorts are stuck in what is really a reductionist theory based on false Marxism. Under imperialism, there is not just one working class, "falsely" divided by race. Instead working classes are by necessity allied with their nations--the international proletariat has split from the First World scabs who make up the labor aristocracy in oppressor nations like the USA.

There is nothing false about it. The white working class went where the money was, tying themselves to imperialism in the process: to imperialist profits, and ultimately to imperialism's collapse.

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