I think your factual U.S. history is a off. For example, the Civil Rights movement, which would be a socalled identity based movement below, always had a significant unity of Black freedom demands with general working class demands.
This can be demonstrated in some of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement which began long before the 1950's. A. Philip Randolph was a labor leader by vocation, but he was a major initiator of the Civil Rights movement. Paul Robeson was an originator of the legal theory against the separate but equal doctrine , which became the winning theory in the landmark Brown v Bd. of Ed case. Yet, Paul Robeson is known around the world as a champion of labor of all colors. There was a mountain named after him in the Soviet Union. He is still respected by the Welsh miners' traditions. In his _Here I Stand_ Robeson declares himself a scientific socialist, to show how conscious he is of the universal working class issues.
Communist Party members , such as William L. Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress, Claudia Jones, Ben Davis and many more were critical in initiating the Civil Rights movement. The Party slogan was "Black and white , unite and fight". The paramount Black scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B Dubois joined the Communist Party late in life, after working and struggling with communists for many years and after championing World Peace against the Cold War.
In the famous , 1961 Civil Rights march on Washington in which M.L King made his "I have a dream speech", if you have seen pictures of it, the main placards of the demonstrators said "Freedom" or some such and "JOBS FOR ALL" . I have one as a souvenir. Martrin Luther King was assassinated soon after he initiated the Poor Peoples" (all poor people, Black and White) Campaign ; and was killled in Memphis where he was to support a garbage workers' strike. Walter Reuther and the UAW were a key ally of MLKing, and the civil rights movement , bolstering their power significantly.
Even going back to Reconstruction after the Civil War, the first public education system for Black and Wihites was established because of the public education system established for the ex-slaves. In other words , the WHOLE working class benefitted from this advance that was initially for Blacks.
There are other examples of the latter dynamic, wherein "Civil Rights" gains are the wedge by which univerasl workers' gains are made. There is plenty of historical basis for going to White workers and saying "look, advances for Blacks often result in advances for all. Support Civil Rights." In general, low wages for Black workers is part of an overall dynamic that keeps White workers wages down. ( See _Economics of Racism_ I and II, by Victor Perlo). So , Civil Rights gains are materially to the benefit of the whole working class.)
In fact, it was Karl Marx who said "labor in the white skin will not be free, while labor in the black skin is branded." With racism as a branding beyond slavery, this logic means that there can be no workers revolution for white workers , while racism continues to divide the working class. So, in that regard, the Civil Rights movement IS a major necessary element of the universal working class emancipation and revolutionary movement in the U.S. in the Marxist conception.
The first "affirmative action" was a "super-seniority for Blacks" in the labor movement , initiated by Communists in the late forties.,exactly based on this logic : that the White workers ultimate class interests are critically served by equality of White and Black workers toward their united action against the ruling class.
Your claim below that the Black Freedom movement's ideology and themes contradict or are not conducive or friendly to universal working class gains is false. It is the bourgeois propagandists who misrpresent it as a "selfish identity" effort antagonistic or contradictory to the universal workers' movement, in order to fool white workers from seeing the path to revolution. Civil Rights victories are Working Class movement victories.
By the way, women are the majority , not a minority.
Charles Brown
>>> Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> 09/16/99 01:10PM >>>
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