Rudi Batzell on Racialized Working-Class Politics in the U.S. and British Empires

This month's episode offers a fresh perspective on an old debate. Jettisoning outdated modes of analysis that emphasize race vs. class, guest Rudi Batzell illuminates the materialist underpinnings of racialized working-class politics in the U.S. and British empires. Employing a transnational approach, Batzell shows, for example, how land reform in Ireland helped set the British labor movement on a trajectory towards more inclusive unionism, while, in the U.S., northern industrialists' ability to recruit landless African Americans from the U.S. south undermined working-class solidarity in the U.S. and lay the foundation for the more narrow craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Later, we discuss the anti-immigrant and whites-only policies of labor unions in the U.S., Australia, and South Africa, wrestling with the white working-class movement to restrict immigration. The history presented here contains some hard truths about the difficulties of organizing across fractured working-classes, while also making the case for reckoning with this history as a necessary precondition for building a more equitable and just world.