Identity politics

charles brown cdehbrown at hotmail.com
Tue May 26 13:05:34 PDT 1998


Max Sawicky writes:
>
>Tell me why a lot of the politics of long-run
>ecological catastrophe, indigenous peoples,
>race/gender/sexual orientation discrimination
>doesn't reduce to class-indifferent solutions
>(if not worse) or screaming into the wind.
>Being morally righteous and politically
>ineffectual. (Been there, done that.)
>
>If I thought it worked, I'd go for it, believe
>me. At the very least, it would be better for
>my career.

Well actually Marx and Engels placed the national question as central to the solution of the class question when they said "Workers of all COUNTRIES unite !" and race is an complex national question. Marx also said regarding the U.S. specifically, "Labor in white skin will not be free while labor in Black skin is branded." Lenin made this even more focussed when he modified it to "Workers AND OPPRESSED PEOPLES of the world unite !" So it is not post-modernists, but Marxist-Leninists who orginated the formulations that race is anything but a "class-indifferent" factor. National chauvinism and racism liberation are THE key to working class emancipation, according to the number one slogan of Marxism.

Charles Brown

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