>
> That 'classist' outlook was an evasion. Their view of class was reductive,
> based on a distinctive section of the organised working class, exclusive of
> women and migrants. In this country, it was the Communist Party of Great
> Britain, especially when its industrial section was dominated by some
> powerful left trade union leaders, who had an effective veto over policy,
> that summed up that approach.
>
> ...Suddenly the party went all Gramscian, feminist and multi-cultural. That
> seemed like a belated acknowledgement that the New Left had it right. But
> actually it was just another kind of evasion. They used those issues of
> feminism and multi-culturalism to distance themselves from the organised
> labour movement, just as they had previously used the authority of organised
> labour to restrict their conception of what was a political issue.
>
> I like this a good bit, and see it referring to something I may not have
made sufficiently explicit in my comments. One of my favorite things about
Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity is his insistence that, while the
northern world has shifted (somewhat) from monopoly capitalism to the new,
more intense form of space-time compression some folks call post-Fordism
that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of monopoly capitalism around.
Michaels may be more fair to race-based efforts concerned with class issues than I've gotten the sense of, but it seems to me that despite the fact that much of the "left" went identity-mad for a while and despite the fact that this was fairly easily coopted by capital there was, and is, still a good bit of traditionally organizable labor around... but its more populated with women and minorities than in the past so the meaning of class politics in a working class world not dominated by white craft workers is at least a noticable increment different than it used to be.
On this ground, dumping on diversity is ripping off some pretty lame low-hanging fruit and coming off to many as implying that among the diversity crowd there are none who fail to reify diversity for diversity's sake or who are cognizant of the flip side of neoliberal diversity, the increasing (mostly relative but moderately absolute) impoverishment of the already poor - perhaps especially the oppressed minority poor is to chop down the tree in order to inspect a few or even a couple of pecks of bad apples.
Gotta go coach 7-year olds in soccer.