Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left - Reviews - Book Review

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by William J. Maxwell

Richard Iton. Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. 335 pp. $55.00 cloth/$18.95 paper.

Why is there no mighty American left, or at least an American social democratic party, able to squeak out a respectable minority of the national vote? Richard Iton's Solidarity Blues is among the latest books tackling this long-running question, for the last century or so the favored approach of left-wing thinkers to the mystery of America's break from European historical patterns, otherwise known as the problem of American exceptionalism. In 1906, the German socialist Werner Sombart published Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, which proposed that the great prosperity of the U.S. made for its unique defeat of Marxist laws of class conflict. The ship of socialism, Sombart memorably declared, foundered on New World "shoals of roast beef and apple pie," high-calorie tranquilizers accessible even to would-be radicals of the American working class. Iton restates Sombart's classic exceptionalist question with an eye to a more satisfying answer, one that may surprise some in Iton's own scholarly commun ity of political scientists but will shock no student of W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, Claude McKay, or Richard Wright. To Iton's mind, race is the culprit behind the relative absence of the American left and thus the major source of the peculiarities of American development. The heterogeneous "demographic circumstances that have existed throughout American history," he maintains, "along with the way in which these circumstances have been interpreted and processed and, in particular, racialized, have contributed mightily to the unique pattern" of U.S. political and social relations. Fierce government repression, philosophical individualism, and the myth and transient reality of the frontier have played bit parts in stifling American leftism, Iton admits. But Solidarity Blues centrally insists that America's special compulsion to read--and misread--class divisions in racial terms has guaranteed its exceptionality among Western industrial nations, where unignorable leftist parties and labor mo vements have remained the norm even in the wake of the neo-liberal 1980s.

Despite Iton's unexceptional take on the difference that American race makes, his book may interest more than a few readers of African American Review. The tables are a convenient eyeful, documenting poverty, unionization, and "demographic variation" rates across national borders. (They alone demonstrate the ironic truth that work in the grizzled exceptionalist tradition can be more genuinely comparative than recent work trumpeting its post-nationalism.) Successive chapters on the American labor movement, U.S. radical parties, the New Deal, and the postwar welfare state offer lucid, conscientiously researched narratives of a national left steadily thwarted by racial thinking--its own included. Not for Iton is the Jim Sleeper-Thomas and Mary Edsall-Democratic Leadership Council claim that the sudden emergence of racial politics in the late 1960s shattered the progressive New Deal coalition. Most provocative is Iton's case for the continued value of addressing Sombart's question about the lack of American socia lism, however much the question "Why is there no liberalism in the United States?" seems to have superior relevance after September 11th. In contrast to the leading labor historians, New Americanist literary critics, and scholars of black transnationalism who have come to view the idea of American exceptionalism as a retrograde embarrassment, Iton conceives the issue as the key to understanding still-critical failures of American collectivism. To ask into the comparative frailty of the U.S. left is to examine the fate of conventional leftist organizations such as trade unions and working-class political groups; as Iton poses the question, however, it's also to inquire into America's certifiably skimpy provision of public services. "The most striking feature of American political culture," asserts the Toronto-based Iton, "is its inability to produce and maintain ... comprehensive health care, sufficient housing provisions, effective worker organization and protection, and consistent police protection"--basic p ublic goods that the left has managed to secure in other Western societies. Iton's redefinition of the left as "a means to the creation of a certain kind of society and a certain set of public goods" might instruct historians of American radicalism looking to escape from the ghetto of nostalgia. And his neo-exceptionalism, though no help in charting the Black Atlantic, holds lessons for African Americanists hoping to remedy the denial of public goods to America's black citizens.

Given these strengths, it's a shame that Iton's climactic chapter on the race-based failures of American leftist culture is so conceptually rickety, not to mention intolerant and occasionally bizarre. Some of the problem seems to flow from a canned, overreaching scheme in which modem mass culture is imagined to introduce the dual poison of personal alienation and binary reasoning into traditional holistic communities. "The partitioning of mind, body, and soul that has marked cultural development in the West (and elsewhere)," Iton professes, "has rendered many practices and institutions--for instance, the church, leisure, music and the arts, sex, and education--that formerly constituted aspects of an integrated, multidimensional, and unified worldview into alienated rituals and anachronisms, frequently approached in terms of such uni-dimensional dichotomies as good and evil, weak and strong, inferior and superior." After a sentence like this, so confidently and economically unfolding an entire tragic theory of global modernization, why write another? Iton chooses to continue, however, waxing like a caricature Parisian to charge that the U.S. has institutionalized "cultural nihilism." By this Iton seems to mean that Americans, in accepting "the artificial realm of race...as the fundamental axis of difference," have made themselves "particularly incapable of producing a culture (or more accurately cultures) resilient and coherent enough to enable them to maintain the collective sensibilities other peoples have in other national contexts." According to this logic, African American culture is as dangerously artificial as racist pseudo-science and, despite massive evidence to the contrary, is unqualified to sustain a collective sensibility, whether Afro- or Omni-American. Here, if nowhere else in Solidarity Blues, Iton's distaste for the damage race thinking does to U.S. leftism recalls a vintage leftist distaste for racial difference itself.