>[SNIP]
>> ... (By the way, the Albert or Hahnel piece that said first there was class and then Black liberation came along in the mid-sixties obliterates 500+ years of African liberation struggles.
>They not only ignore that 500 years of history, they actually ignore their own history. I doubt very much that I would be a marxist today (or that Albert and Hahnel would be whatever they are) had it not been for SNCC and the "rioters" of the inner cities. In fact, I doubt that this list would exist except as a late development of that Black struggle of 1955-65.
I wish people would make the effort to perform good faith readings of peoples words before they criticize them. It is very easy to deliberately take the most racist horrible possible interpetation of someone and then criticize them on the basis of that interpetation. Carroll: You go into a rage when someone misreads your own words. Try to extend the same courtesy you ask of others.
Here is my reading -- which may be right or wrong -- but was at least made with an attempt to deal with what the article actually said.
To start with the article was by Michael Albert. Robin Hahnel gets none of the blame or credit. He has co-written many articles with Michael. This was not one of them.
My good faith reading of the article is the following
1) In the fifties and sixtes something extraordinary happened with regard to the movements for gender and racial equality. They started to make major advances within society, and within the other movements. That is femininst began enriching their analysis with the insights of the racial equality movement. The racial equality movement began enriching it's own insights with those feminism. Both had had insight from the left male left to begin with. But now some of the white left male left began enriching it's analysis with insights from the movements for racial and gender equality. It is not that none of this had happened before, but that it happened to a much greater extent than at any since pre World War II, and for once the white left (kicking and screaming) was forced to some extent to listen.
Albert deliberately included the description of the synthesis of that took place betwen class and race and gender during these periods.
Albert does not claim this is the first time such synthesis took place: but do you disagree that the sixties were an extraordinarly fruitful period for this type of synthesis both in theory and in practice?
Now he also notices something else that happened. There was a retrenchment, a backing off on class. Class demands -- that is demands on issues which would have been common to women and blacks and poor white men started retrenching. Support for unions,for increased tax progressivity (to name a few examples) started comeing at the bottom of peoples lists. And he does not blame this on racial or gender liberation movements which deserve to win a great deal more than they have.
Instead he does a class analysis.
Specifically he argues that workers who make the day to day decision and have more than their share of the more empowering jobs constitute a coordinator class. (Not a new argument. The extensive cricticism Engles makes of PB parties can be streched to cover this point) He argues that most of the left is led by people who come from the coordinator class. He argues that when you use the tools provided by feminsim and anti-racism, and economic class analysis at the same time to look the way work is organized -- that in addition to racial and gender oppresson and the opression of capitalist ownership of the means of production you will notice the oppressions in the hiearchal division of work. In short, he argues it is stongly against the interests of coordinators for this synthesis to become widespread or even to notice this themselves. (Note this is not a rule that no-one from the coordinator or new class or whatever you choose to call it should play a large role in a left movement. But just as you cannot overcome racism if you do not know such a thing exists, you cannot overcome coordinator bias unless you know such a thing is possible. And Albert argues that the synthesis of class and race and gender will lead to exposing coordinator -- unless either class is backgrounded or race and gender are backgrounded. In other words if you focus on only the non-economic forms of oppression (i.e. even a rich woman can be raped; even a rich black man can be murdered or framed by the police) or on only the economic forms of oppression (i.e. even a white racist can have surplus value extracted) it is at least possible to miss the existence. Or if you make any of the three structure and the other superstructure you can finesse this particular class division. But when you synthesize the categories makeing ALL THREE structure (and possibly adding other categories such as disability as well) then it is almost impossible to miss.
You don't have to agree with this thesis. But I hope it is possible for someone to be wrong without being racist or sexist.