"The point is not that these privations are trivial but that without recourse to the white masculine middle class ideal, politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their claims to injury and exclusion, their claims to the political significance of their difference. If they thus require this ideal for the potency and poignancy of their political claims, we might ask to what extent a critique of capitalism is foreclosed by the current configuration of oppositional politics, and not simply by the "loss of the socialist alternative" or the ostensible "triumph of liberalism" in the global order. In contrast with Marxist critique of social whole and Marxist visions of total transformation, to what extend do identity politics required a standard internal to existing society against which to pitch their claims, a standard that not only preserves capitalism from critique, but sustains the invisibility and inarticulateness of class not accidentally, but endemically? Could we have stumbled on one reason why class is invariably named but rarely theorized or developed in the multiculturalist mantra, "race, class, gender, sexuality"? </quote> "
That is really and truly excellent and the first time I've seen the argument that identity politics presupposes and hearkens to a middle class whose continued existence requires the continuation of capitalism.
I was just thinking over the last week or so that Marx does not privilege the working class because it is oppressed, but because it is most directly involved with the production of material reality. This point seems to get lost.
Joanna