I think what Yoshie and LT are saying is simply this: for capital to have moved into the (American) South and for the third world to be weaned from Communism, the civil rights movement was mandatory, and in fact supported by the Courts, Foundations and the elite media. Just too cumbersome to set up a factory with two sets of bathrooms and counters, Adolph Reed argued back in the 1970s. So civil rights was not a bottom up movement but an elite led change of legal conditions for the purposes of capital accumulation and system legitimacy in general. The Cold War forced capital to realize that it accumulates best anyway on a juridical foundation of abstract individualism, equal right, tolerance and diversity. Our ethics are the depoliticizing ethics of the market. The legitimizing of what Andie touts as competitive elections also put a halo on the political form through which capital manages its own internal plurality while achieving the consent of the governed.
Feminism also only justified the competing down of wages to the point where the couples' wage equals that of the old male breadwinner, doubling the rate of exploitation. It's not that these movements made things worse; they just made capitalism as a system of self expanding value possible.
So identity politics are not forms of resistance but of entrenchment of the juridico-political forms of capitalism whose system of domination is abstract, dis-simulated and paradoxically collective.
Rakesh
"And just what are these hard lessons? If it's that feminism, the civil rights movement, and The Gay International have scored only partial victories that have left capitalism in place, I'd say, yeah, sure, I sorta knew that already and didn't need 50 gigabytes of alleged proof that Iran doesn't hang same-sexers and stone adulterous women because back in the 16th century every poet had a loverboy. If it means that those movements have in some sense made things worse by legitimating capitalism or some such, I'd have to say "horseshit."