The reason I posted the Spivak quote was that her displacement of the question as one of exploitation and domination, instead of class politics and i.d. politics, not only emphasizes the processes instead of the subjects involved, but specifically includes the facts of differential domination and differential exploitation in her analysis. Even though she rightly reproaches, in fine Marxist fashion, those who only see domination and ignore exploitation -- which is similar to Michaels's critique of those who see race but not class -- she is also, a few lines earlier, able to say that women "are the true surplus army of labor in the current conjuncture" and are the "new focus of super-exploitation." She makes exploitation the object of her focus while insisting that rates and kinds of exploitation differ, and that they do so along gender (and racial) lines.
Despite this analysis, Spivak doesn't lapse into stupidities about while privilege or male privilege. No doubt it's discussions of privilege and the like that prompted Michaels's hostility toward identity politics and the universal embrace of diversity. But he doesn't really escape the bounds of the discussion -- he just chooses to align with the other side. That is, despite his occasional allusions to economic statistics and realities, his definition of exploitation (which he opposes to discrimination instead of domination, a severe slippage from Spivak) is tied to identity -- in his case, "class" instead of "race" -- and he does nothing to describe a real, material basis for exploitation. (I think this is what shag means when she says his analysis is in no way Marxist.) For Michaels as for identity politics, exploitation is still cultural. And it's not just Michaels who operates within a nonmaterialist frame: When people say things like "race is used to divide the working class, or "talk of diversity is a capitalist propaganda technique," they are talking about race as something not real, a fabrication.
But race is real, and it's specifically capital that is racist. This is where Michaels is very confused and Spivak is very clear: It's the *capitalist* division of labor that makes Latino/as low-wage farm workers, women from Caribbean nations low-wage nannies, women from Asian countries low-wage home-care workers, etc. (I'm obviously referring to the U.S. context here.) And it's not just the division of labor, as there's also a division of consumption: blacks, Latinos, and women-led households get higher interest rates for mortgages and credit cards, for instance. This is precisely how race (and gender) becomes material, becomes economic, becomes "class." Given these facts, and given how the neoliberal era has in fact seen an exacerbation of these relations, claims that neoliberalism has successfully integrated "diversity" seem very strange. Either the claimants are talking about mere rhetoric, which is irrelevant, or they're talking about the state's destratifications of some of capital's stratifications.
If it's the latter, then I think that Michaels and others that claim it should be more specific as to where and how, at which levels and in which ways, diversity is working. Obviously, coming from me, distinguishing between the subject-state relation and the capital-laborer relation doesn't mean valorizing the state's reterritorializations of capital's deterritorializations. But it does keep open the distinction between politics and economics that neoliberalism, perhaps more than any other form of capitalism, tries to collapse.