It looks good. Of course, the contrast of class oppression against racism and patriarchy is a false binary, or at least a simplification of how idiosyncratically gender and race have become part of class. But the argument below is very on-point. And, there really is something in the air in the general public today about class. A vague populist anger is being felt about economics across the political spectrum working-class people, and liberals have started noticing and participating. However this sentiment is being felt, I believe, in complete absence from the articulations of how race and gender fit into money and power that the left has specialized in the last few decades.
I think this might fit into how little the left has to do with what progressive and populist sentiments are emerging in the public today. For instance, of the generation of radicals I grew up with, almost everyone speaks of race in terms of 'people of color' and 'whites'. But in the actual breakdown of political coalition and public sentiment in non-white communities, almost no non-leftists are expressing this analysis. My friends who are what I call 'professional anti-racists', ie who specialize in challenging white supremacy workshops and work, simply don't want to talk about race in the gang and prison and municipal battles in southern california, or what I hear latinos and phillipinos in hospital workforces say about each other non stop every day, or the way support for right-wing politicians in the latino community is identical to the rise of pentecostalism and the decline of catholicism there. In one of Jordan Flaherty's very good articles about race in new orleans, he quoted a black resident who was responding to a korean-american activists speech about people of color uniting against whites by saying 'what?, you're white', and Jordan's response to this was to call this a 'white supremacist dynamic'. Sure division among people of color serves white supremacy, but at what point does our racial analysis actually have to engage with a public dialogue about race that bears no resemblance to the dialogue that came out of the late sixties?
Or also, there's unfortunately very little public discourse on gender and the decline of working-class economic power; i.e., advancement of women in and into the labor force happening alongside decline in real wages so much so that most working-class families today cannot survive without a two-income household (and then you get single women, and single mom families, screwed worst by far. my partner still lives with her mom partly because she doesn't make enough on tips in a non-union chain restraunt to rent her own place in vegas). I think vague public perceptions of this have actually contributed a great deal to the ongoing rise of conservative traditionalism and 'defense of marriage' bullshit--- things were better in the mythical good ol nuclear family days, the almost unconscious spurious correlation of the decline of 'family values' with the decline of economic security. Also, 'we must defend marriage, and get more people marrying' finding fertile ground in a public that notices long-term married couples doing economically better than the rest of the block.
I hope it doesn't seem like I'm denigrating the validity of left critique of patriarchy and white supremacy, at all. I am wondering, at what point do we miss the boat when the masses are starting to get pissed about being screwed, and in a totally different analytical language than we speak in? I have the impression that in the sixties/seventies, the left provided the analysis and language for a broad upheaval. If another upheaval came, would we be anything but a side note?
The left has been lost in the barren textualism of the academy while the general public has been drawing its own conclusions, many of them nutty inarticulated feelings easily manipulated by the religious right; meanwhile, the right has spent decades not arguing over imaginary postmodern nonsense in the ivory tower, but building churches and organizations and a party, and developing 'movement affinity' between capital and the traditionalists, Norquists' 'leave-us-alone' coalition, god guns and gays plus get rid of the public sector and progressive taxation.
Of course saying all this, we have to remember, the main reason we have a chance of getting the troops out of Iraq today is not because of the left or because of class, but because -women- have turned unanimously against the war. The gender gap between right and left which collapsed for Bush in 04 has re-emerged with a vengeance in public polling on Iraq. Thank god.
[Zizek points out that the holy trinity of American left/liberalism --
> gender, race, and class -- are not alike: the first two (female/male,
> black/white) can be solved by reconciliation, but not the third
> (exploited/exploiter). The following review from the New York Observer
> suggests that this book is a worthwhile discussion of the theme. --CGE]
>
> Wit and Sharp Argument Skewer a Damaging Euphemism
> *The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity
> and Ignore Inequality*, by Walter Benn Michaels.
> Metropolitan, 241 pages, $23.
>
> By: Chris Lehmann
> Date: 1/29/2007
>
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