Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

434 • Robert Carter
argued that the ruling class was the only bene� ciary of racism; the working
class had no investment in racism as an ideology since it divided them against
themselves and � ssured their unity in the face of ruling class oppression.
However, working-class racism remained an indubitable fact of US political
life and so Cox found himself compelled to adopt a ‘false-consciousness’
approach as a means of explaining the presence of something which, at least
in Cox’s terms, operated clearly against the interests of the working class.
Racism was seen as inauthentic to the working class, something externally
imposed by the ideological dominance of the ruling class. This was not only
sociologically unpersuasive, but it discouraged serious consideration of racism
within the working class, since the real sources of such racism were held
to be the ruling class and its functional need to manage the conditions of
labour exploitation.
Although I have argued against regarding Cox’s analysis as crudely reductionist,
it does illustrate some of the shortcomings of Marxist approaches to
racism. Moreover, his analysis, with its concentration on the social relations
of the workplace, offers little scope for exploring racism in other contexts or
considering its connections with other forms of social division, such as gender
and religion, which may not be primarily workplace-based. Despite the recognition
of racism as an emergent cultural form, Cox himself only intermittently
pursued its implications. Others have been more consistent.
2. Gramsci, hegemony and the politics of racism
In developing his notion of hegemony, Gramsci recognised the critical role of
ideas in social action. He insisted that the dominant class in modern capitalist
societies ruled as much by consent as it did by coercion and that this was in
signi� cant measure attributable to the limited ideational resources available
to the dominated. These limits were secured through obvious means such as
widespread censorship and restricted access to education, but also indirectly
through the persistence of ‘common sense’ as a source of meaning in everyday
life. In seeking to account for their experience of the social world, people
routinely drew on a reservoir of traditional ideas that directly or indirectly
reaf� rmed the class hierarchies and other social divisions of capitalist society
and served to secure the ideological hegemony of the ruling class.
Nevertheless, there were, for Gramsci, important practical limits to the
dominance, or hegemony, of ruling-class ideas. Firstly, such hegemony is in