----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
On Jun 16, 2007, at 2:19 AM, Joseph Catron wrote:
> identity politics war far superior, for their purposes, to class
> struggle.
Damn, I thought this opposition of "class vs. identity" had gone the way of the dodo, or at least the 90s. Why are these things in opposition? Race, sex, sexual preference are all tied up with the distribution of property and the division of labor. They intersect with class in all kinds of ways: jobs, promotions, pay, access to inheritance. And it's a phenomenal fact that people experience their lives through these "identity" categories. You can tell them all you like that it's a delusion, and it's really all about class, but you've got to do a lot of analytical and rhetorical work to make that clear. There's no pure essence of class apart from these categories in actual lives. And there are a lot of important things that class doesn't really touch - like the privilege of visiting your sick partner in the ICU.
Doug
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No categories without categorizers; no classes without classifiers...
To quote Yoshie [from all too fallible memory] "historicize the thing."
Obviously there's nostalgia for dodo's on the list and pluralism gives some the willies re the issue of prioritization; the latter in turn related to the problem of hierarchies and oneupmanship.
Ian