The Walter Benn Michaels interview is fantastic. He is one of the sharpest voices of the English-speaking left.
Not only is he an astute critic of identity politics, he's also a sharp critic of ideological anti-fascism:
"Berman and Hitchens they are basically returning to a sense that the evil is “totalitarianism” and the remedy is “liberalism.”And once you get the “liberal,” “totalitarian” dichotomy going, you’re always going to choose liberalism, and capitalism now counts as a solution rather than a problem, even for writers who are supposedly on the Left."
And crude forms of "class-based" politics:
Jacobin: In your book you also describe how categories of class have been turned into a culture—like it's a heritage to be proud of—why is studying working class literature in the same way we study, say, African-American lit “profoundly reactionary?”
WBM: In so far as it suggests that they think the way to deal with the working class is by respecting it. You can get the beginning of that in Raymond Williams if you’re a literary critic, the sort of profound nostalgia for a certain version of the working class. If you genuinely thought that working class virtues were real then of course it would make sense to be nostalgic for them and think it really is better to belong to the working class. But of course the whole concept of the working class depends on there being a class structured society. My argument is fairly straightforward. To be poor in America today, or to be anything but in the top 20 percent in America today, is to be victimized in important ways and in so far as we’re appreciating the characteristic products of victimization, we are not actually dealing with exploitation, but rather enshrining victimization, treating it as if it had value and therefore ought to be preserved. And
that’s obviously reactionary.