consider the way Michaels writes about he sees his own participation in this system of exploitation in the last chapter, just after explaining that even though his family is in the top 1%, he doesn't actually feel as if he is as rich.
"Why is this dissidentification legitimating? Because it leads Walter Benn Michaels to think of himself as *not* rich; it leads him to think that when he talks about the problem of economic inequality, he is not the problem, the superrich are. And, of course, the superrich *are* part of the problem. But, unfortunately, he is too."
it's news to me that overpaid English professors are on the same order as Bill Gates. It's like Larry King telling Michael Moore that Moore's a capitalist too so isn't he a hypocritie for making a film critical of capitalism? *rolls eyes*
it's not just that passage, it's the entire book. It's the sloppy shifting from the use of "class" in one paragraph, to the use of "social class" in another -- after he's explained how he thinks cultural conceptions of class are wrong (so WTF use "social class" then since it's often used to signal an adherance to social strat theory?)
It's the attempt to leverage a superficial discussion of the difference between class and social status into an attack on a cultural conception of race.
It is the shift between use of the word inequality in one paragraph, to use of the word money on the next page. What is it with the constant use of "money" in Michaels text. The real problem for the poor is *money* he repeatedly says. You get the sense that all he really wants is for us to throw money at everyone who is poor, raise their living standards to some magical minimum, and that will solve the problem.
It's when you read the "money" word constantly that you realize that use of the word exploitation is superficial.
And I've already mentioned what voyou pointed out. I'll say it again: he writes criticisms of identity politics -- multiculturalism and diversity -- as if he's completely ignorant of all the black men and women and women writers who have already done so. In that, he is just plain lazy. This is especially problematic since you'd think that, after a decade of making these arguments, somewhere a critic or two would have pointed him to the correct shelves in the library where he might bury his face for awhile and find out that the work's already been done, prefigured by the very practitioners of radical leftist antiracism and feminism and queer theory whom he broadbrushes with dersive comments about how they've inadvertatently played handmaiden to liberalism. Of course, those scholars have already described the problem, but no mind.... They've already criticized diversity, multiculturalism, etc., but no mind....
also? Barbara Ehrenreich contributed a piece to a huge door stop of a book on socialist feminism, an anthology published in the late 80s. In it, she shows how socialist feminism died a quick death and pretty soon, most of what feminists fought for was co-opted and actually made capitalism stronger. The premise of that book is explored in her more popular book, _hearts of men_.
But Ehrenreich, amazingly, manages to do all that without alienating feminists or dismissing feminism as Walter Benn Michaels does.
The gall of the guy to discuss the problems with feminism, without ever once imagining that, wow!, feminists are already on the case about these issues!
shag