[lbo-talk] Re: Identity vs. class politics

Dennis Redmond dredmond at efn.org
Fri Jan 26 16:49:40 PST 2007


Jim Straub wrote:


> 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

Oh, there are a few barren textualists out there, but also many fine people in academia, who do indispensable work with the social movements. Still, the deeper problem with class politics is context: the US Empire is falling apart, and its brand of military-industrial monopoly accumulation is going extinct (which is why the US is running current account deficits of 6.8% of GDP, an eye-popping figure).

The US badly needs a post-Imperial politics, which means directly confronting the Empire and convincing Americans they don't really benefit from it -- a polite way of saying, the roughly $600 billion which the US spends on its military-industrial complex ought to be spent on worthier things.

-- DRR



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