http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2001/2001-April/007413.html
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Gee I couldn't have picked a worse critic of WBM to cite. Thanks for the pointers, snag. While I can see Wolfe's anti-marxist angle against WBM, he still managed a pretty good critique.
I went over to Louis Proyect's blog's of September and read a long series of posts for and against WBM's Against Diversity found here:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/a-critique-of-walter-benn-michaels/
Fascinating. That was going on a month ago and covered most of the pro's and con's covered here. It's apparent that WBM annoys a lot people.
I want to go back to the idea that battles in gender and race have nothing to do with left politics. This seems to be the main point of contention. Then also Reed's snide, if true remark, that why valorize the trenches when they haven't produced anything in thirty years (see Reed, The limits of `anti-racism', lbo newsletter 121).
Of course I could make the come back, what have the scribbling class done for us trenchers lately except tells us we're in the way of true progress. What I would really prefer is to join forces in the theory practice dialectic here so that the concrete lessons in the trenches better inform the scribbling class. Or if that seems unlikely, then the fall back position for theory and social commentary, try to keep its work more closely tied to concrete examples so that I know which trenches. There is a difference between calling the established Democrats meaningless blowhards and local orgs fighting these battles with city hall, developers, etc.
Getting back to WBM. I think the reason he doesn't seem to get the intersection of race, gender, and class is because he hasn't actually been in the lower levels of the working class fights where all these socio-economic divisions operate in a synergistic and in-separable way in daily life.
The other issue is means of battle. We have laws, policies, regulations concerning various forms of discrimination that define what we can fight. It's pretty hard to find legal means to battle out the class inequalities. The capitalist have been very good at making sure of that.
What do we have on the class side? Living wage, minimum wage, demands to change taxation laws, some limited union law and some workplace rules and regulations. There was the earlier version of health care fight for some working class relief, but that got neatly pushed aside in the official arena to make room for the current farce. My only hope is that the CPC can join the insane right and defeat whatever is coming out of Senate.
Otherwise the means to fight inequalities produced by class war are more difficult to find. There were some legal and policy means to use in LBJ's war on poverty programs, but these were quickly weakened or reversed. I am trying to remember some of Model Cities stuff, but it was too long ago to remember the details. Law and poverty battles were fought and mostly lost in the fed funded store front lawyers against entrenched business interests in city halls. But the areas of law that could be used by these legal projects was also systematically reduced and or redirected. The results of those lost battles, leaves the means of walk outs, sit-ins, take overs, etc.
There is a whole history of re-thinking through civil rights history to see that many of the actions taken especially in the south were well coordinated with lawyers in NAACP in conjunction with local groups to strategically target public accommodation and Jim Crow. Some of this history can be very helpful in organizing against gross economic inequity actions like taking over failing factories and forcing reform.
The point I am trying to make is that separation of race, gender, from class was not performed by the left trenches--at least not in my experience. It was performed by the capitalist class grip on policy to keep those separated and set at cross purposes.
In my experience with the earliest generation of disabled students, we shared a sense of unity through class. Most of us were from low income blue collar white families. There were a couple men and women who were from the upper middle income professionals, but then they found their unity through the disability angle. At first the socialization by class and awareness of class as a battle front didn't seem to matter much.
But once these less formal groups started creating their actual operations, designing jobs and pay scales, wow then you could see and feel the reproduction of class and class war. The bosses v. workers division was just stunning. I was on the `doing' side, they were on the `thinking' and supervisor side. One of the projects worked among Oakland's black low income community, and evolved a whole black wing of mostly women, inside this mostly white male middle class run umbrella organization.
This organization shattered through a combination de-funding, internal political power struggles, and then a terrible strike of workers v. bosses, men v. women, white v. black. It was a clinical study in how to kill a progressive coalition by manipulating race, gender, disability and class against each other.
My experience within these battles is probably why I instinctively reacted so badly to what Michaels was saying last Saturday.
CG