> What you think of as "the majority" is actually a minority and vice
> versa.
I don't know what you think I see as the majority, but in any case it is_ wage earners. Who are the proletariat.
> 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
In the first place, you know nothing about what I can "afford" in terms of time and effort. Second, I have never said we should concentrate on economic class alone --- on the contrary, we definitely should concentrate on matters of identity when they are a predominant part of the exploitation of wage earners, the prime example being labour market segmentation, whether it is at the local, national or global level, and whether it defined by gender, nationality, race or whatever.
The irony, as I see it, is that the US working class, which is the biggest in world history, and which experiences the most fully-developed relations of production in history, should - from an orthodox Marxian perspective - have the greatest degree of class consciousness of any working class in a developed country. Instead it has arguably the least. It seems to me that this is caused not only by the effectiveness of the ruling class in propagating mystificatory ideologies of "opportunity", constitutionalism, liberty, meritocracy and so on, but also by the obsession of the left with identity politics, especially since the 1960s - the US left is not alone in playing this game, but it must be the world champion. Some of that can be explained by reference to the history of christian fundamentalism, slavery and so on, but not all of it.
> 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."
All true, unfortunately. And? This has nothing to do with the absence of a "revolutionary situation"?
> 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.
OK, well put. "Labour market segmentation", being the most material sign of the above, remains a real phenomenon, at levels/spheres from the individual workplace to the whole globe. I also think history has shown that - in the very long term - the immanent process of capitalist industrialisation, throughout history, has tended to destroy the "launch platforms" of industrialisation - including atavistic ideologies - as extraction, production, distribution and consumption force culturally diverse individuals together, and into a greater awareness of each other's situation. Of course, each time capital crosses a new national or cultural border or prejudice, in force, it creates new segments - or adapts old ones - and the cycle begins again. There is an associated process of stratification at work here, which results from the changing requirements of capital itself, in terms of its need for particular skills/experience - and its ability to use these in places/ways in which they have not previously been practical.
The problem, to summarise what I've said above, is that the prejudices we are talking about are, after all, deeply-embedded in popular culture, and they become - in some cases - Quixotic obsessions for the left, at the expense of economic class.
regards,
Grant.