>>> "Chuck Grimes"
Reed: ``...an Obama presidency (maybe even just his candidacy) will likely sever the last threads of any connection between notions of racial disparity and structurally reproduced inequality rooted in political economy, and, since even `left discourse in this country seems capable of conceptualizing the latter as a politically significant matter only in terms of the former (or its gender or similar categorical equivalent), that could just about complete purging entirely out of legitimate political discourse the notion that economic inequality is rooted fundamentally in capitalism's political and economic dynamics.
^^^^^^^ CB: The notion that economic inequality is rooted fundamentally in capitalism's political and economic dynamics is considered, in 'legitimate" discourse or capitalist ideological discourse, to be a good thing; inequality is good in capitalist ideology. The socialist discourse that characterizes inequality as a bad thing was purged from "legitimate" discourse during McCarthyism, long ago.
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Underclass ideology -- where left and right come together to embed a common sense around victim-blaming and punitive moralism, racialized of course but at a respectable remove from the familiar phenotypically based racial taxonomy -- will most likely be the vehicle for effecting the purge. Obama's success will embody how far we have come in realizing racial democracy, and the inequality that remains is most immediately a function of cultural -- i.e., attitudinal, and behavioral -- and moral deficits that undercut acquisition of `human' (and/or `social,' these interchangeable mystifications shift according to rhetorical need) capital, a message his incessant castigation of black behavior legitimizes.
^^^ CB: When this question of structural racism vs personal responsibility was raised to challenge Obama here in Detroit about 2 months ago, he said the media doesn't report his speeches when he criticizes structural and institutional racism.
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In this context, the `activism' appropriate for attacking inequality: 1) rationalizes privatization and demonization of the public sector through accepting the premise that government is inefficient and stifles `creativity;' 2) values individual voluntarism and `entrepreneurship' over collective action (e.g., four of the five winners of the Nation's `Brave Young Activist' award started their own designer NGOs and/or websites; the fifth carries a bullhorn around and organizes solidarity demos); 3) provides enrichment experiences, useful extracurrics, and/or career paths for precocious Swarthmore and Brown students and grads (the Wendy Kopp/Samantha Power model trajectory), and 4) reduces the scope of direct action politics to the `all tactics, no strategy,' fundamentally Alinskyite, ACORN-style politics that Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone have described as `activistism' and whose potential for reactionary opportunism Andy Stern of SEIU has amply demonstrated. Obama goes a step further in deviating from Alinskyism to the right, by rejecting its `confrontationalism,' which severs its rhetoric of `empowerment' from political action and contestation entirely and merges the notion into the pop-psychological, big box Protestant, Oprah Winfrey, Reaganite discourse of self-improvement/personal responsibility.
^^^^^ CB: Is Reed proposing the formation of a Leninist Party ? Rainbow Coalition ? Anti-monopoly coalition ? All-Peoples' Front ? or what is he proposing _is_ to be done ?
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All of the above salves the consciences of our professional-managerial class peers and coworkers who want to think of themselves as more tolerant and enlightened than their Republican relatives and neighbors, even as they insulate themselves and their families as much as possible from undesired contact with the dangerous classes
^^^^^ CB: Is Reed saying these are dangerous/lumpen classes or not ? Are they mis-analyzed as "underclass" ( from twenty years ago) or not ?
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and define the latter in quotidian practice through precisely the same racialized and victim-blaming stereotypes as the conservatives to whom they imagine themselves superior. This hypocrisy, of course, is understood within the stratum as unavoidable accommodation to social realities, and likely to be acknowledged as an unfortunate and lamentable necessity. Yet those lamenting at the same time reject out of hand as impractical any politics that would challenge the conditions that reproduce the inequalities underlying those putative realities. Obama, in the many ways that Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley and others have catalogued here, is an ideal avatar for this stratum. He has condensed, in what political dilettantes of all stripes rush to call a `movement,' the reactionary quintessence that Walter Benn Michaels in The Trouble With Diversity identifies in a politics of identity or multiculturalism that substitutes difference for inequality as the crucial metric of political criticism...''
^^^ CB: No comment from comrade Reed on the masses of working class people, not from the professional/managerial stratum, supporting Obama ?
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