> 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?
The tactic of reducing your opponent to a cartoonish amalgam of Bad Things is a tactic refined by Cointelpro. I look forward to the Yoshie Colouring-in Book, in which she is depicted hanging with the Islamofascist hordes, plotting the annihilation of whitey and the imposition of the dread burqa on cosmopolitan New York females. I hate to be this harsh, but it's for your own good.
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.
No one - not Yoshie nor myself - is arguing that it is better to go back to the 1950s. I leave it to Newt Gingrich to masturbate over the Norman Rockwell illustrations. The point is to have a critical relationship to the changes that have been achieved and to correctly perceive their limits. To take a rather grand example: It's better that feudalism is gone, but did Marx neglect to mention the demonstrably baleful and destructive aspects of the emergence of capitalism? To take some smaller examples, we have always recognised the benefits of social democracy while also understanding the new barriers it raised. Revolutionaries defended the acquisition of the welfare state, and are its most forceful advocates today, but we underestimated its pacifying effects at our peril. America has abolished de jure segregation and legal racial hierarchy, but it remains a fact of life. In fact, the very gesture of disaggregating anti-racism from class struggle has the consequence of legalism, thus rendering the massive racial/gender hierarchy effectively occult. It isn't that winning the limited victories that we have won as a movement and as a class should be spurned: it is that we should take them as an opportunity to further radicalise the analysis.
You compare Yoshie to Farrakhan, but his vague entrepreneurial, racially separatist and de-classed Tuskegeeite analysis is actually anathema to the argument that Yoshie is actually making. Farrakhan's approach to family, race, gender, separatism etc is simply incompatible with Yoshie's insistence on class as the central issue, nor does it sit well with the deconstruction of sexual/racial binaries.
> 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.
I doubt that this is the argument. I think the argument is that partial victories against bigotry are only that: partial victories. And they came at a cost of integration and co-optation, which wasn't inevitable, nor does it mean we should turn the clock back, but we ought to be capable of recognising that struggling against the racial/sexual hierarchy independently of the class struggle left opportunities for their reproduction (since, after all, these forms of oppression are fundamentally rooted in the labour system).
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.
I don't detect support for the retrograde social policies of the Islamic Republic in Yoshie's writings. I have seen Yoshie defend some of the record of the Republic, but only those that are in fact defensible. And terms like 'pseudo-left' ought to make you blush.
The reason why Yoshie spends so much of her time trying to argue American left-wingers out of easy assumptions is that much of what passes for commentary on Iran in Western leftist discourse is organised around a prurient obsession with the regime's sumptuary laws. To avoid yet another misunderstanding, I do not consider gay rights to be optional or subsidiary (although Yoshie's Foucaldian analysis is actually very interesting and worth taking seriously in its own right - far better than the reactionary, left-baiting diatribes of Anderson and Afary). I do not think that it is unimportant that Iran is run by a socially conservative political class that was effectively annexed by the capitalist class during the early 1980s. However, the fact that this is the main form of Western leftist engagement with Iran, and the fact that it is so often based on bullshit spread by people who ought to know better, suggests that the arguments are really not a response to anything that is happening in Iran, but rather reflect changes in Western culture and its attitude to Islam.
> 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.
I think Chris Harman's pamphlet on Political Islam is far more nuanced than you may realise, however I don't see how this impacts on the present argument, except indirectly.
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.
Well, I don't recognise that picture. For example, I think Muslims can be left-wing, astonishingly enough. I also think they can be revolutionaries, even if they remain religious. If you're a Muslim member of Respect, you have signed up to a programme including full rights for women, gays, and immigrants; socialist policies on income; renationalisation of privatised utilities; etc etc Of course there are some conservative Muslims who supported Respect tactically, in the same way that they used to support Labour tactically, but why set up an opposition like that, as if there aren't also conservative people of other backgrounds who have always supported leftist parties because of their appeal on class issues? It would be as if one described the early Labour Party as a left-Christian alliance.
Secondly, that isn't why I'm intervening here. The reason I'm intervening is because I think you're being unnecessarily dismissive of intelligent and thoughtful analysis which - even where you disagree with it - doesn't deserve to be derided in what is basically a reactionary fashion. Plus I agree with Yoshie that too many Western leftists are basically fulfilling a symbolic identification with power, pleading innocence before the imaginary tribunal and trying to prove it by denouncing others.
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.
Well, Yoshie is saying some provocative and interesting things, and if you didn't headbutt the keyboard everytime she left a message, you might find out that you can absorbe what is useful and distribute your dissent in a more sober fashion as a result. Anyway, I *like* the footnotes.