[Fwd: Article I am working on for Z]

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Tue Jun 23 18:29:33 PDT 1998



>That is, if class and economics were riding relatively high in the saddle
>and then along came efforts to put race, gender, and sex into our
>conceptual framework (with some elements arguing replacement but others
>arguing addition) how come thirty years later only the advocates of class
>have to argue that it needs to be put back on the table, and why did it
>fall off the table, in the first place? I think this is an interesting
>question and that many folks are coming to the wrong conclusions about it
>with potentially disastrous results./

I can't agree with Dennis' (typically engaging) argument that we don't have a left because we haven't yet needed one in imperial America. Capital and the state have successfully executed a 30 year class war--which included the destruction or cooptation of the representatives of labor into the narrowest and most economistic of forms; the only activists left and the only goals seemingly realizable are middle class ones: equality for all (non class) identities, environmentalism, recycling, radical bikers and (in Berkeley today) destruction of parking meters. By judging themselves on the plane of radicalism flattened by counter-revolution, these molehills of leftist identity activists imagine themselves as mighty mountains (and with it goes truly olympian contempt for past revolutionaries, including that hidden revolutionary treasure to which Arendt referred). Instead today's activists (which include many incarnations of myself) are merely the cheap amusement and sideshow the ruling class can afford after a hard day's work of class war.

Just as under the shadow of a counter-revoutionary regimes in Brazil all causes identified as communist disappeared (so to speak) and indigeneous activism became absolutely central, we have "identity" or "micropolitics" as the contested arena today while we endure an all encompassing and on-going, albeit silent, war against communism and autonomous working class action. People are so disoriented that a real live left or libertarian communist (perhaps the most oppressed minority of all, e.g., our underrepresentation in academic depts has led to no affirmative action at all) is easily mistaken for a left conservative. Just how fanatically anti-communist this country remains--well, can I get a witness? Was I just dreaming the Reagan era? best, rakesh



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