Dennis
> >(Yawn). These are word-games. Part of the Fascist agenda was racism;
> >another was sexism; still another was military Keynesianism; yet another
> >was colonial accumulation, a.k.a. military imperialism. All of them have
> >to fuse to touch off the fission-reaction of Fascism, and even then,
> >different constellations can result in quite different situations (thus
> >the span from Italian Fascism to the Japanese version). Ideology in the
> >age of monopoly capital (roughly 1850-1950) is monopolistic, i.e. it
> >administers a *range* of identity-politics, each as complex as the
> >division of labor in the society at hand. Which means (1) the Resistance
> >has to fight numerous local battles against each form of oppression --
> >sex, race, gender, etc., and (2) class is actually a very complex thing, a
> >composite of an enormous number of other mediations. Abolishing whiteness
> >would be terrific, but it can't happen unless we also abolish maleness,
> >Wall Street rentier-edness, hetero-ness, First Worldness and all such
> >related horrors. Each struggle needs all the other struggles, and the
> >defeat of even one struggle is a defeat for all the others.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> You are contradicting yourself. On one hand, you speak of class as
> "a very complex thing, a composite of an enormous number of other
> mediations"; at the same time, you establish a chain of equivalences
> among any number of oppressions in such a way that one word -- racism
> -- will do whether the question at hand is white supremacy in
> America, oppression of Koreans in Japan, anti-Semitism in Germany, or
> whatnot -- all various manifestations of the same Essence in your
> opinion.
>
> It appears to me that the "complex" part of "a very complex thing"
> has gone out of the window! This even aside from the infelicitous
> description of class as "thing."
> ...
But the same set of phenomena can be usefully described in simple or in complex terms, depending on the use to which the description is to be put. For instance, it can be said that the earth rotates and revolves around the sun, although in fact the motion of the earth is very complex and requires many thousands of lines of mathematical notation or computer code to describe accurately.
In the same way, the innumerable forms of institutionalized oppression we observe appear to be connected to, to be an expression of, class war. These phenomena exhibit both simplicity and complexity at the same time.
I don't think it's necessarily the case that acting against one form of oppression (say, the construction of Whiteness) _necessarily_ strikes at the whole system. Class warriors fight one another all the time and one set often tries to disadvantage another by doing away with the other's fields of operation. In the U.S., many examples related to race have occurred, e.g. the abolition of Negro slavery, and later the struggles of the established (capitalist) liberal authorities against unregulated race discrimination. While one can support one side in such a struggle it is prudent to remember that one's allies may have very different goals from one's own.
In effect, a ruling class can, so to speak, sell off some of its privileges or members to buy other advantages. "One step backwards, two steps forward."