G'day Peter,
I see Kelley and Carrol have had useful things to say on this thread already, but I think we;re beginning to forget the point you're making about what 'secondary' means.
You write:
>This last line sort of surprises me; granted you say "extreme political
>importance," but it seems to me that most leftists who complain about
>identity politics simply feel it is secondary. Of course, the question is
>what does secondary entail.
Now, I don't reckon we know what 'identity politics' means, either. If it means 'I am black/female/homosexual/disabled etc before I am of my class' - or if it means 'because I am black etc, I live in an incommensurably other world than the one you white etc people think you have created for us all' - then I think identity politics is *ultimately* a counter-productive thing.
But if it means my colour, sex, sexual preference, physical attributes etc are such important parts of my being that I could not devote myself to a movement which affords them anything other than equal-primary status, then I'm all for identity politics. Life has thus far been experienced differently for people thusly different from the tacit norm, and should not carelessly be expected to improve with the fortunes of an actually existent workers' movement (which is what I take "making their identity secondary" to mean). Sorry if this is a tad obvious, but it can be forgotten - and to forget it would strike me as a fundamental error. Even if we go so far as to see the relevant 'isms' as epiphenomenal macules on the capitalist rump (and this is moot, I think - as I do not share the view generally expressed here that the historical record *proves* that these inequities did not, on occasion, predate what we'd call capitalism), it does not follow that (a) these inequities would diminish under just any kind of proletarian self-rule, and (b) capitalism hasn't the wherewithal to diminish these inequities.
In short, if the Marxian left is to breathe itself back to social relevance, it must bear in mind the one thing that makes the Marxian project thinkable. Which is not that capitalism creates crises every now and then, but that it sees capitalist society as producing a social phenomenon that is more powerful than capital itself. To pursue the point, I contend that women (as such) have made more ground than people 'of colour' (as such) in the western liberal capitalist societies of this century decisively because those societies are more female than they are coloured. If the one identity that is potentially irresistible is to become irresistible in fact (ie all of us, as the working class), its institutional face must appear to the woman as female worker, to the person of colour as worker-of-colour, and so on.
And it just ain't gonna unless those identities are coeval and coessential.
>From my experience, radicals who harp on the new class are anarchists (e.g.
>Z's Michael Albert and his obsession with "coordinators") Their point is
>that should a revolution occur, this new class will axiomatically try to
>usurp power from the "true" working class. To hedge against this, they
>argue, a revolutionary movement should be made as democratic as possible.
Michael Albert is avowedly unorthodox, but I reckon his 'councilism' (or whatever it's called now) qualifies as socialism, meself. And the idea that the revolution should be 'from below' goes back a good bit before him. Who was that old English geezer who pointed out that 'democratic socialist' was a waste of breath, as if it weren't democratic, it couldn't be bloody socialist?
>Taking a page from Carrol's playbook, I'd say, should a revolutionary
>movement with some clout come into existence, at that time we can see what
>form it takes and what happens and take it from there. If it's too
>vanguardish, I'm sure I'd be rounded up with the rest of the protesting
>anarchists.
Hope we get to share a cell, Peter - we could while away that wait for the wall swopping our favourite Hitchens lines, eh?
>These are some pretty big what-ifs, however.
Thankfully, vanguardism is a bad practical idea as well as a bad moral proposition. Vanguards do, alas, occasionally get powerful enough to shoot some good people, but they've a lousy record of even looking like attaining their professed ends.
For a broad, deep, multifarious, headless left, and in loving memory of EP Thompson (glad to see him cop a few mentions) Rob.