> I'm not even sure of the
>application here since I was making as much an argument about racial and
>gender issues as class differences.
-oh? working class people are what now? some mysterious entity where there -are no women, no men, no whites, no blacks, no latinos, no asians, -etc? they have "class" and only "class" and their concerns have nothing to -do with race or gender oppression.
Again marginal language games that are avoiding the analysis of internal democratic structures of organizations. Are no women or blacks capitalists and non-working class? A standard argument that is made against the NAACP and NOW is that they are "middle class" and don't reflect "real" black and women's issues.
I'd have preferred that argument to this endless splitting of hairs on language.
As for "appropriation" of peoples voices, that is exactly what is done when folks throw Nader up as the true voice of the working class, blacks, women and every other group, despite the fact that the elected leaders of mass organizations representing millions of those voices have refused to support him.
As I said, the criticism of the limits of democracy under capitalism has jumped off the rails into this postmodernist language swamp of "appropriation" and other language games, where every mass organization can be dismissed as illegitimate in favor of the literary rhetorical views of the writers and intellectuals lining up behind Nader.
-- Nathan Newman