Dennis Claxton wrote:
> But didn't the roots of the civil rights movement include gender
> issues, like suffrage? And was it really identity movements that
> destroyed it? I'd give more weight to the same neo-con and neo-lib
> forces that have stymied progressive politics of all sorts for the
> last 30 odd years.
I apologize for my cryptic comments. These days, my energy only seems to kick in after 8:00 p.m., and I am useless till then. (It's kind of depressing.)
Anyway. I must sound very bitter always commenting on the negative effect of identity politics. There are two reasons.
The first is that I lived through it. The sixties-to-the-seventies transition had entirely to do with the fragmentation of something that looked like a general, mass, civil rights movement into a million splinters. For a while those splinters could evoke the ghost of the mass that once backed it up, and there were partial and meaningful victories. The disabled rights movement comes foremost to mind. But in the long run, the fragmentation and the new "psychology" of the identity movements resulted in a HUGE backward step for ALL.
The second reason has to do with the psychological shift that ocurred in the shift from civil-rights-based to identity-based rights. The context of civil rights was that we were all human beings who had equal rights and equal responsibilities and who should have equal opportunities. In that movement, white people marched against segregation in the South and there was the general notion that one man could not be free while others were enslaved. The context of the individual rights movement already assumed that it was all a squabble over the fragments that the ruling class had not appropriated for themselves and it was always played out as a contest of victimhood: it pitted one disenfranchisement against another, one form of injustice against another: it assumed scarce goods and it proposed winners and losers. It completely, COMPLETELY, abandoned the struggle against capitalism.
I do understand that class struggle, such as it played out in the twentieth century, was an incomplete struggle: that it did not take up the banner for gay rights, for disabled rights; that it did not always understand that private issues (like wife-beating, or domestic work) were not private at all. Nevertheless, it was within the socialist movements that women and minorities made the greatest strides in this century, and this was not by accident.
As Yoshie pointed out, history forces you to prioritize. If you're starving, you need to fight for your right to work or eat, before you can agitate for your right to fuck whomever you please. Because you have to be alive to be able to fuck. So, I am not arguing that the fight for socialism makes other struggles unnecessary, but I would strongly argue that it is THE first step and that unless we all fight together (no matter what set of sexual organs we have or how we plan to use them) we will lose everything.
Joanna