That is true, but a more politically important problem is that class consciousness comes to you much later than gender and race consciousnesses, if it comes to you at all, and that class consciousness that does eventually come to you is not necessarily of the sort that aims at abolishing class society and establishing a new classless one.
> 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
<snip>
> Examples abound, but Mr. Michaels correctly focuses on the fetishizing
> of racial difference -— a tic shared among partisans of every
> ideological persuasion -— as the key factor in the flight from a
> class-based politics.
Americans never had "a class-based politics" independent of white supremacy, so they couldn't have taken flight from what they didn't have. When the Democratic Party had a kind of "class-based politics," as in the times of the New Deal and World War 2, it was wedded to Jim Crow and put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps; when Blacks finally succeeded in purging the Democratic Party of Southern white supremacists, the Democratic Party ceased to advance any vigorous "class-based politics." Now the Democratic Party cannot do without an identity politics of diversity, a coalition of middle-income whites, Blacks, and others, whose allegiance is won mainly by appeal to their supra-class identity interests -- an identity politics predicated upon exclusion of the poorer half of the nation from participation in political processes and permanent hostility to the working classes of foreign countries (expressed in various ways from war to protectionism).
On 1/26/07, Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
The correlation is not exactly spurious. Think about it in this way: the breakdown of "family values" = an inability or unwillingness to pool incomes. Living on your own makes you worse off than living with your partner, for the rent or mortgage payment is the biggest part of many working people's monthly expenses. And getting married makes you better off than cohabiting (even with legal recognition of domestic partnership, which still denies you many federal benefits of marriage), let alone living on your own.
On 1/26/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Among left intellectuals in the U.S. there is no more regressive and
> really stupid attitude than this widely prevalent contempt for
> university faculty. Miles is wholly correct, and it is really sad that
> the argument even needs to be made on a progressive maillist.
Education, from primary schools to universities, is a big industry, and it's largely impossible to offshore. And that's the only secular social institution in the United States that almost all working-class people go through, a significant fact in a nation where an increasingly smaller proportion of Americans belong to, and can hope to belong to, trade unions. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>