The Intersections of Race and Class-Based Social Movements under Fordism: Rediscovering a Neglected Form of Critical Social Analysis

Sammanfattning: When critical scholars coming from different academic disciplines, such as sociology, gender studies, or Black studies, meet and discuss today, discussions sometimes take the form of whether recognition of particular identities or redistribution of material resources is of most importance. In this thesis, my aim is to explore resources that could contribute to moving beyond this framing of the question, which inevitably implies that one always would need to step back in order for the other to move forward. I recently came across the works of the Johnson-Forest tendency from the 1940s in the US, which combines social dialectics with a Marxist analysis in which particular identities are at the very center of their analysis and considered the basis for revolution. There is not much available literature on the Johnson-Forest tendency, and therefore I will devote this thesis to a detailed investigation of their works. I will start by outlining biographical and contextual background to their works. Then I will take a closer look on some of their writings on the relationship between race and class, and then look a hitherto unexplored correspondence between the members of the Johnson-Forest tendency, which one of the members later claimed was of major importance for their development. Finally, connecting back to the discussions mentioned above, and in light of the current #BlackLivesMatter-demonstrations, I will evaluate what relevance the works of the Johnson-Forest tendency have for an analysis of the relationship between race and class today.