Identity politics

Max Sawicky sawicky at epinet.org
Tue May 26 13:18:12 PDT 1998



>
> Max, you are not an activist. You are a policy wonk. Your politics go
> hand-in-hand with your occupation. The Economic Policy Institute is not
> evil. It just doesn't challenge the capitalist system.

We're talking about what effective activism is, whether I am one or not. I'll resist temptation to further discussion about my favorite subject, me.

There's no point in rehashing how social-democracy or EPI does or doesn't challenge capitalism. We've done that before. Let's talk about you.


> I am a Marxist. Since I don't belong to an organization, I pick and choose
> my causes very carefully. The last time I was an activist was in
> the mid to
> late 80s when I supported the Central American revolution. If those
> revolutions had been successful, the cause of socialist revolution would
> have been advanced. It was a no-brainer for me.

The If-then logic is impeccable but begs the broader question of whether anything else might have been a better use of your time. Or more to the point, lest we become mired in correcting the past, what's the best thing to do now?

You've reminded me that for a couple of years back then, in fact the only politics I did was CISPES solidarity work, albeit on a microscopic scale in a campus environment.


> I am getting involved in indigenous rights today because I have
> an analysis
> that the struggles of "peripheral" peoples today like the Navajo,
> the Mayan
> Indians in Chiapas, etc. has enormous consquences worldwide once they are
> generalized. I was trained to think this way by George Breitman, the
> American Trotskyist, whose pamphlet "How a Minority Can Change Society"
> explained how the black liberation movement can act as a fulcrum to move
> larger forces in society.

I'm genuinely curious about this and meant to mention it in my post. What is the argument? My fear is that it's in the nature of a moral appeal that is expected to sweep the nation, including mostly those whose material interest is not directly involved. If the public is not much moved by affronts to its own interest, why should it be by the plight of someone perceived as an 'other'? You seem to be wandering far from what I understand to be Marxist politics-- the movement of the working class in its material self-interest. That, it seems to me, is the real challenge to Capital, if not to capitalism.

For the U.S., civil rights and abolitionism might be the most recent analogies to what you're alluding to. These movements certainly had far-reaching effects, but I would expect you to agree that the effects were very limited from the standpoint of "challenging the capitalist system."

It's more difficult to attune the liberal bourgeois to the U.S. working class than to issues like Third World or minority poverty. Now your analysis of these things would clearly differ from a liberal one, but as politics it could be argued, at the risk of setting off a who's more radical argument, that the real cutting issue is not how one feels about the obviously oppressed, but how one feels about a concept like the working class that abstracts from the most unbearable pictures of oppression.

A good case in point is list-member Brad DeL., who has a reasonable response to third world poverty, as reforms go, but hears all sorts of alarm bells when talk turns to trade, labor market regulation, trade unionism, and other solutions which go beyond progressive taxation/aid to the poor/lean social insurance.


> On top of everything else, I get involved in particular causes because I
> hate capitalist oppression. The indigenous peoples are being brutalized to
> an extent that no other people are. I liken what is happening to them to
> what was happening to the Jews in Germany. When genocide is happening in
> the country you live in, you have a responsibility to act. The genocide of
> 1998 might look different than the genocide of 1878 but it is genocide
> nonetheless.

Motivation is not in question. Responsibility to speak out is one thing. Nobody can disagree with that. Making such causes the focus of politics is quite another. The latter I think is what's in question.

Pardon me while I go back to challenging capitalism for a while.

Cheers,

MBS



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