[lbo-talk] "Stupid Straight Men on the Left"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Jul 3 13:35:55 PDT 2004



>IMO the situation in the developed world is now completely
>different, perhaps even reversed, i.e. the class of wage earners is
>far more "fit to rule" than those rank and file Bolsheviks, but it
>lacks a coherent sense of who it is and what it is capable of, i.e.
>it is not yet a class-for-itself. That, IMO, is what we should be
>concentrating on.
>
>Grant.

What you think of as "the majority" is actually a minority and vice versa. Those who, like yourself, can afford to concentrate on economy and economy alone in separation from oppressions based on race, gender, sexuality, etc. in the international division of labor are decidedly *a minority* in their respective nations as well as in the entire world.

Bean-counting doesn't create "a coherent sense of who it [the working class] is and what it is capable of," the consciousness of "a class-for-itself." Problems of homophobia, sexism, racism, imperialism, etc. are not only that they directly impact the *majority* of workers who are in one way or another relegated to statuses below -- and therefore more exploitable than -- a relatively privileged *minority* who approximate the mythical norm of heterosexuality, masculinity, whiteness, etc. at the heart of the multinational empire; they prevent a minority of workers who approximate the mythical norm from ever thinking that they and those who are stationed below them belong to the same class who have shared political interests, to say nothing of ever conceiving what the said class are capable of. -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



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