>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 majority of the global working class are women, negatively impacted by sexism and/or patriarchy. The majority of the global working class, male or female, do not enjoy sexual freedom. The majority of the global working class live in former colonies of one or more empires and therefore live with complex legacies of colonial political economies. The majority of the global working class live outside the rich nations, getting paid less even when they do exactly the same work as workers who work for the same corporation in the rich nations. The majority of the global working class are subject to racial, ethnic, religious, and/or other oppressions. The majority of the global working class confront, at least for some period of their lives, disability (if we live long enough, we will all get disabled one way or another). It is safe to say that the majority of the global working class face more than one system of oppression among those mentioned above.
Such systems of oppression do not respect the boundary between "the labor market" and other spheres of life. Oppressions inside and outside the labor market are mutually reinforcing. To take just one example, when women are compelled to carry the main burden of care-giving and other sorts of domestic labor, they get disadvantaged in the labor market as well, for their employment history will be more intermittent than men's and they may be forced to choose part-time rather than full-time work.
It's only a tiny minority of the global working class whose only direct burden is exploitation in the Marxist sense alone. Even they are indirectly negatively impacted by oppressions of other workers. If a woman gets paid 30% less than her peers who do the same work, her husband, too, indirectly loses out, for the total household income goes down. Where there exists homophobia, straight men, too, lose freedom, in so far as they are not free to act in a way that may possibly invite suspicion that they may be queer. In the US South, where Jim Crow was more rigidly enforced for a longer period of time, unionization was (and still is) much more difficult than in other regions of the USA, with the result that wages and living standards have tended to be below those in the other regions.
>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.
I don't think that there is any good theoretical or empirical reason to think that the working class in the nation that has the "the most fully-developed relations of production in history" should necessarily have "the greatest degree of class consciousness," for class consciousness is *not* an automatic product of the development of relations of production at all -- to the contrary, class consciousness is a result of *resistance* to ruling-class power, quite often a result of *resistance* to *further development of relations of production* imposed by *the ruling class*. It is often noted that the only socialist revolutions that the world has seen so far happened on the periphery of capitalism, in nations where peasants far outnumbered wage workers, most often in the context of struggles against colonial capitalism. Even when we look only at the richest nations -- the USA, Japan, and West European nations -- we see that the nation that twice experienced the most revolutionary form of working-class struggle is France, rather than England and the USA whose ensembles of social relations are more thoroughly capitalist than France, in that peasants are more thoroughly expropriated in England and the USA than France.
What appears to you like a prominence of what you call "identity politics" since the late 60s and early 70s is the result of global retreat of socialism/social democracy/the shadow welfare state (in the case of the USA which never had social democracy worth its name). The retreat is the result of the end of post-WW2 economic boom and the ruling-class political response to it, i.e. neoliberalism. The reason why we are still making at least some advances on the sex/gender/sexuality front is that such advances are not only not contrary to neoliberalism but also in some ways consonant with what neoliberalism can exploit: e.g., the development of service industries, attacks on what is called "the family wage," etc.
Earlier, I mentioned Venezuela as one of the few potential exceptions to the general absence of social revolution in the world today. Even the Bolivarians, however, have been working within the limits of the neoliberal form of accumulation: see, for instance, Gregory Wilpert, "Collision in Venezuela," New Left Review 21, May-June 2003, <http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25505.shtml>.
That's not the fault of Bolivarians in Venezuela or activists who are struggling for the equal right to marriage in the USA or whatever. Even if all activists worldwide dropped all organizing that you erroneously believe has little or nothing to do with purely "economic" questions (such as matters of more or less wages, more or less pensions, longer or shorter working hours, etc.) and concentrated only on workplace organizing alone, they would not be able to change the global trend of capitalist accumulation.
>As a historical materialist, however, my belief is that issues
>regarding wage labour itself remain the key issues in regard to the
>class consciousness of wages earners _as_a_whole_, GLBT or straight.
>Therefore, the political left will be non-revolutionary in direct
>proportion to the time it spends on issues which are a material
>concern for only a small section of that class, such as GLBT
>workers, rather than the class as a whole.
The only sort of class consciousness that can develop when workers think only of "issues regarding wage labour itself" to the neglect of other spheres of life would be at best trade union consciousness and at worst individualism. If the only thing that you want for yourself is higher wages, better benefits, shorter hours, etc., why not try to get them only for yourself or your family or at most your workmates in the same union local at the expense of other workers? For instance, why not suck up to your boss and try to get promoted to a foreman? Why not focus on sending your kids to college, so they won't have to become wage workers like you? Why not try to keep women, Blacks, homosexuals, immigrants, etc., etc. out of your union or profession or your children's school as expanding the labor pool may bring down your wages or diminish your children's life chances, so you might want them to stay in their places in the segmented labor market? Why not make your wife do much of domestic labor, if you bring home a bigger paycheck? Why not agitate for tariffs and subsidies that protect your industry at the expense of foreign competitors and domestic consumers of your industry's products?
>What I am saying is not novel
That is true (for instance, I've heard the same from Todd Gitlin among others) -- therefore, it is time that it be consigned to the dustbin of history, as it is not only old but also without any supporting evidence. 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/>