The grammar of class relations and exploitation is a liberal ruse that structurally can’t include blackness – their theory misunderstands the absolute incoherence of blackness

Mashinini’s words center blackness as a condition that simultaneously defines suffering in incomparable experiential terms and ontologically transcends not only precariousness, but labor and its injuries. In the former sense, she articulates a critique of wage labor that questions class and gender as vehicles of universal human claims. Her point is strikingly congruent with the critique expressed in generations of Black radical feminism in the U.S., marked by the publication of The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, the statement of the Combahee River Collective (1977), and the earlier elaborations, in the 1980s, of intersectionality as a critique specifically grounded in the multiplicity of oppressions facing Black women. Sharply felt in Mashinini’s words is the perception that, contrary to white workers and white women, labor and its family-sustaining properties would bring to Black men and women neither citizenship nor inclusion in civil society. They would rather solidify social dereliction through the vectors of kin, but in the interdiction of actual families, and “flesh” as “theft of the body” (Spillers 1987), or the mark of the Black body’s continuous violability. Ontologically, Mashinini--an official of the retail workers’ union CCAWUSA, which was in her time influenced by Black Consciousness and panafrican ideologies—grounds Black suffering not in the machinations of political economy and a grammar of exploitation and alienation, but in the awareness of Black inhumanity in an antiblack world. Her feeling that black workers are not “seen as human beings” recalls Cesaire’s (1950) and Fanon’s (1952: 88) definitions of Blackness as, respectively, “thingified” and constantly “close to disgrace”. It is a suffering structured by a grammar Saidiya Hartman (1997) and Frank Wilderson (2010) define in the terms of “accumulation” and “fungibility”, which for Hartman sustains the “afterlife” of racial slavery in the Western hemisphere. The colonization of Africa was fully part of such afterlife, both in its perpetuation of Black captivity and in the ethical pretenses of abolition and “free labor” with which it justified captivity. Mashinini was a union organizer, thus her critique eventually sought in working-class relationality an anchor to, again in Fanon’s terms, “ontologically resist” white antiblackness, domination, and violence. As I show in Precarious Liberation, however, Black critique of labor ontology persistently called to task the erasure of Blackness both in the universalism of class struggle as the harbinger of Human emancipation and in the way white activists and left intellectuals caricatured Black critique itself, by presenting it as one polarity in a “race-class” debate that configured racial blackness in terms of culture and identity, thereby expunging from it any structural or ontological salience. Within the labor movement itself, Black voices targeted the dominance of “new left” white union leaders, which, having risen to positions of power and influence also thanks to their racialized educational privilege, deployed working-class agency and “nonracial” imagination to defuse the “fact of blackness” and its world-shattering negativity (Barchiesi 2011: 49-50). Steven Biko (1978: 50) himself, as a theorist of Black Consciousness, warned on the effects of “class theory” and calls for a “common humanity”, which he saw as integral to liberal racism working through socioeconomic proximity and interdependence to relativize the antiblackness of white workers supporting the apartheid system. Segregationist South Africa was indeed a laboratory, attended by scholars and experts funded by giant Western philanthropies, for policies and imaginaries that turned the moral and existential elevation of “poor whites” into a touchstone of coherence for “global whiteness” (Willoughby-Herard 2015), a condition to be protected from descent into the abjection and dereliction of blackness.