-snip
>struggle against racism. This politics had/has nothing whatever to do
>with anyone's sense of "who am I" or anyone's sense of his/her
>"identity."
>
>On the other hand, there apparently grew up in the pe riod following
>the defeat of the various '60s movements (the defeat of the ERA
>being a convenient end point for this process) a politics of despair
>in which various groups, rejecting history, rejecting marxism,
>rejecting the left as such, tried to build a collective politics out
>of a sort of summation of the individual feelings of identity of
>the members of various groups.
A good point, but we need to note that cultural identities have been used in this country as a major tool to defeat a labor movement. For example, Theda Skocpol in her _Protecting Soldiers and Mothers_ argue that US was one on the first countries in the world to implement something that closely resembled a public welfare system, but unlike in other countries, the justification was to assist victims of the Civil War and their families, and not to help working people (as in European countries). Skocpol argues that women's suffrage movement at that time played an important role in the implementation of these policies.
In the same vein gender identity is used to win justice in the workplace today e.g. anti-discrimination or child care. I think that is the only way of geting ANY justice in the workplace - given the rabbidly anti-labor stance of the US government, business leaders, and public opinion makers (especially the academy). Ofc ourse, a small victory is better than no victory - so this strategy is good in the short run. But in the long run,
protection of special interest minorities is not a winning strategy. It is so, because minority interests are defined according to culturally defined identities and expectation. Thus, it is easy to launch a countermovement based on culturally defined identities constructed by the mainstream opinion makers.
The notion of "revese discrimination" is a a case in point. Beacuse protection was granted to special interest minorities and not workers as such, it was easi to mount a reaction to such anti-discrimination policies by constructing a cultural identity that nominally included the majority of workers, and use the antidiscrimination rhetoric to defeat the very purpose for which identity based antidoscrimination laws were created. If, on the other hand, the anti-discrimination laws were formulated in terms of rights for all workers i.e. th eright to be gainfully employed according to qualifications, the right to union representation, the freedom of harassment of any kind at the workplace, etc. - then such protection could be easily dismissed by constructing counter-identity and the notion of 'reverse discrimination.'
So it is not farftetched to say that anti-discrimination campaign of the 1960s, basd on the notion of minority interest protection rather than universal rights, sow the seeds of its own destruction in 1980s and 1990s.
wojtek