> Let me try to hazard a guess as to why he elicits that kind of reaction.
> There are (A) some people who only think in terms of identity politics and
> who don't like to think too hard about capitalism. There are also (B) some
> people who think about both, and about the interactions between them.
I'm probably being pedantic, and I certainly don't mean to pick on you, SA, because what you say here seems to be the way these debates usually plays out. That is, talking about "interactions" between identity and capitalism implies two autonomous things that periodically come into contact and work with (or against) each other. But identity isn't some preexisting thing; it is from the beginning structured by capitalist relations. Race isn't a natural way of being that can be appropriated by capital, or not as the case may be. Capitalism can claim that it's multicultural, and it is largely, but it still is fundamentally drawn along race (and gender, and disability) lines.
A lot of silly things seem to arise from thinking that capitalism doesn't require race or gender, not the least of which is that race or gender analysis or politics can be unproblematically left behind in favor or class politics. (This pretends of course that class is not an identity.) Thinking class relations or doing class politics can't be heroically, by sheer intellectual will, separated from race or gender because capitalism doesn't separate class from race or gender.
(Fwiw, even though I think she's wrong about a lot of stuff, Nancy Fraser does some good work on the differences between i.d. politics and "class" politics:
<http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=1810> <http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2248>)