On Oct 7, 2007, at 4:01 PM, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
> On 10/7/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>>
>> You're turning into some weird hybrid of Louis Farrakhan, Thomas
>> Byrne Edsall, Christopher Lasch, and Todd Gitlin, all wrapped up in a
>> hijab. What is the point of this? We should try to recover some race-
>> segregated patriarchal nuclear family world because it's more
>> organic? Because it provides a better basis of resistance to
>> capitalism? We should have subordinated the fight against racism and
>> sexism to the class struggle, like the most idiotic of Stalinists
>> used to argue?
>
>
> Straight from the CIA's Cold War handbook, Doug.
That's a strange characterization, which would have looked even stranger had you preserved the bit immediately following where I praised the CPUSA. Or do you think the CP was a CIA front because Langley bought so many subscriptions to the Daily Worker?
> I suspect that Yoshie is arguing for what marxists sometimes call a
> 'dialectical' understanding of patriarchy and racism. In fact, the
> upshot
> is quite the contrary to what you suggest. It is not that anti-
> racism and
> anti-sexism should be subordinated to class struggle, but that these
> struggles are contiguous, and the attempt to separate them has been
> fatal,
> allowing the preservation of the worst forms of class rule, and
> patriarchy,
> and racism, while also stripping away the defensive aspects of
> traditional
> units of organisation, reducing people to atomised and practically
> defenseless agents in the face of a ruling class onslaught. It
> doesn't mean
> we embrace patriarchy or defer the struggle against it, for
> example: it
> means we take it up as part of the class struggle.
I don't buy this argument, whether it comes in more congenial form from you, or in less congenial form from Yoshie. First, I think sexism, racism, and homophobia are bad things in themselves. It would be nice if the fight against them were all bound up with the fight against class society, but that's not the way it happened. Our society is much better because Jim Crow is gone. It's better because some of the more egregious forms of sex discrimination are gone. It's better because two people of the same sex can walk down the streets of many cities holding hands. Many people found the traditional patriarchal family a stifling place to grow up, and family life today as much more pleasing than it was in the Leave It To Beaver days. I don't see these as counterproductive developments in any way.
And I fail to see how these partial victories against bigotry have left the working masses any more atomized than they would have been otherwise. You could make exactly the opposite argument, in fact - there is now at least the possibility that working people could unite as a class, less divided by those traditional demographic categories than they were in the 1950s. Why would unions be stronger if white people and Dad still ruled without challenge? I don't see the mechanism at all.
Adolph Reed had a nice article a few years back on the nostalgia that much of the black petite bourgeoisie was feeling for the old segregated days, because they wished they were bigger fish in a smaller pond. (I think Yoshie flattered this sentiment as being that of "organic leaders.") Well, yuck. But it does fit nicely with her affection for the Iranian regime, dominated as it is by the small business interests of the bazaar. Which is what I suspect was behind her post - a pseudo-left, workerist apology for the retrograde social policies of the Islamic Republic.
What I don't get is why you're cutting this nonsense so much slack. You once recommended a book on Iran by your party colleague Chris Harman that I thought nailed the Iranian revolution very nicely. Someone (not Lou Proyect) pointed out to me offlist that you may be seeing this through the British experience of a left-Muslim alliance a la Galloway. We don't really have anything like that here. We do have some cultural conservatives on the left who long for the old days of Dad with the lunchbucket and the factory job, when you didn't have to worry about sis becoming a lesbian at Smith. Someone else (also not Lou Proyect) pointed out to me offlist that Yoshie is sounding more & more like Eugene Genovese, when he found something anti-market to admire in the Old South. Creepy.
So that's why Yoshie's arguments drive me crazy. That, and the lecture-y tone, complete with footnotes.
Doug