The evidence presented above suggests that not only do socialist identifiers differ significantly in their social and political beliefs from non-socialist identifiers in general, but they also differ significantly from those conventionally acknowledged as the beginning and end of the American ideological left: liberals.
How are we to understand working-class consciousness under current conditions? We argue that in this conjuncture, the dominant form of workers’ consciousness is a moral sense of injustice, a protest against violations of an implicit social contract. The reactive scandalization of broken promises and violated expectations, rather than systematic ideological edifices, dominate as a modus operandi of workers’ political consciousness today.
The relationship between capitalism and racism is structural rather than merely historical. It is not just that capitalism emerged in an already-racialized context, and so developed in a racialized way. It is also that racism can be explained by its functional role in stabilizing capitalist class relations. This view has occasionally been described as "class reductionist." In our view, this does not itself amount to a fatal criticism, but it does associate our argument with others that we in fact reject.
The task at hand is to place the political economy of repression within the contours of U.S. history. It involves sketching in broad terms how, over time, repression is the product of dynamic and fixed relations between capital and labor. The goal is to represent how capital is able to repress labor given essential prerequisites.
