[lbo-talk] Adolph Reed responds to Alan Rudy

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Mon Oct 5 21:00:57 PDT 2009


Hell yeah, now I'm an ideological enemy of the real left... who knew?

Where oh where did I defend multicultural neoliberalism?

When was that when I failed to address my key concerns, teaching students and building (quite possible) political connections? I'll repeat: who the hell does Michaels think is his audience? what movement is he thinking he's building? I have an audience, I have to work with them, his stuff will fail with my audience - and just about all others in the US... and it doesn't have to, he's just gotta figure out that he's undermining his own success, if he defines success as actually making a substantive difference on the left.

I lost a lot of respect for Reed when he sneered at folks working with and advocating for poor people. Many are tools, many are unwilling tools and many are not tools atall but - like his buddy Walter - its easier to paint with a broad brush... actually dealing with the fact that lots of people subvert the systems they work under to do better than doing well by doing good would necessitate dealing with real people and the actual complexity of real people dealing with impossible stuff on this front.

Hell, my point was basically Dwayne's (below), the world and its racial politics are uneven and, maybe, just maybe, folks addressing corporate diversity and academic multiculturalism might could want to deal with that, if for no other reason than not immediately pissing off potential allies. Just 'cuz Bush II perfected multicultural neoliberalism doesn't mean all folks working in a way that starts with race are neoliberals or are opposed to class analysis.

Yeah, and all those AIDS activists, all those agroecology folks fighting ag biotech, all those anti-profiling activists, all those SciTechMed feminists, all those bi- and transexual activists, all those Food Firsters fighting "overpopulation" politics... its just wonderful to know that all they've done is redefine victory so it means defeat. It couldn't POSSIBLY be that there's so much to work on that a world of different, incomplete, inconsistent, sometimes contradictory but always non-innocent and impure things need to be done, no we need to be reminded that Reed and Michaels are pure, that we suck, that they are righteous and we are the enemy. It couldn't possibly be that there are a myriad of other issues that perfectly parallel the multiculturalism/neoliberalism path that folks are working on - and almost always with too little concern for - but some openness to - class analysis.

Did anyone read me saying that the class analysis part was right and that identity politics sucks?

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> [I forwarded some of the WBM thread to Adolph Reed, who writes...]
>
> I started a note this morning reacting to Alan Rudy's rant. It is
> extraordinary. It seems increasingly clear that the greatest enemies of
> developing a left politics in the US now are people who identify as
> leftists. This much willful misreading by people who aren't otherwise
> illiterate has to mean that ideology's at work. And I think what the
> reaction to Walter shows, as does all the persistent Obamamania, is that
> too
> many of those who imagine themselves leftists have framed their worldviews
> and understandings of the limits of political imagination entirely within
> the horizon of multiculti neoliberalism. I fear this indicates how
> hegemonic
> the "doing well by doing good" mindset has become -- people are too
> comfortably settled into familiar grooves of being on the left by
> expressing
> "support" for the right positions without having any bearing on their own
> daily lives and practice -- e.g., combining e-activism and pc yuppoid
> consumerism.
>
> All that taking cues from those "who are in the trenches" I'm beginning to
> think is part of the aversive mechanism. Who is in the "trenches" besides
> those who function increasingly as the neoliberal regime's social service
> coordinators? That's who is most directly and immediately committed to the
> race line and other expressions of identity politics. And, besides, why
> should we give trumping word to those whose practice hasn't produced
> anything in three decades except redefining the terms of victory to
> accommodate steady defeat?
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