I'm not going to do a line by line, because much of what you say is either obvious, it completely ignores what I've already said, or is so purely ideological that there is no point.
> 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.
In many years of reading on colonialism, I've yet to hear a convincing description of the things that are shared by the wide variety of "colonial political economies" and how they differ from the wide variety of "non-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.
There is, as you know, no consensus among left scholars that this idea is really the case, although the idea certainly has a populist life of its own.
> The majority of the global working class are subject
> to racial, ethnic, religious, and/or other oppressions.
To the extent that this is true, it is also subject to the question: "do they care and can we do anything about it?" If you say such questions are irrelevant, you start going down the same path as the neo-cons, liberal imperialists and other vulgar radicals.
>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).
My partner recieves a partial disability pension and works part time; I'm sure she'll be glad to hear that she has so many allies.
> 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*.
Perhaps you need to think some more about who _exactly_ Marx meant, when he used the word "proletariat". There is no _working_class_ resistance before there is a numerically strong working class. It is hard to see how any working class other than the US could be facing more "further developed" capitalist relations of production at the moment.
> 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.
These revolutions have all failed or are on the verge of failure.
> 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.
I don't see how France is necessarily more socialist/communist country than the UK or USA. Perhaps you're going down the same road as DRR, confusing dirigisme, land reform, etc., for socialism.
> 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.
I agree completely. Neoliberals will attempt to introduce any number of social changes...except the one which counts.
> 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.
In the first place, you don't seem to understand what I mean by "economic" and, in the second place, where is such a sustained concentration on "workplace organising" occurring? I don't know what "trend" you are referring to.
> 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
Strangely enough, I said to ChuckO recently that I can't see very much trade union consciousness -- "big labor" was his preferred term -- in the US, with its national union membership level of about 15%. It seems one thing that unites US ultraleftists of both Marxist and anarchist varieties is their disdain for unions.
regards,
Grant