He goes on to talk about the autonomy of art, which is a little more problematic for me...but anyway check it out.
http://edges.gmu.edu/interview-walter-benn-michaels/
Interview: Walter Benn Michaels
Posted: February 17, 2014 at 11:40 am
Q: In The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality , you argue that diversity perpetuates inequality and that you favor emphasizing class in order to further social change and so is there a way to understand how class intersects with these other forms of difference? Quick blurbs on the internet might warrant an understanding of your work as claiming there is an irreducible difference between the two.
A: That is totally what I am trying to argue, in particular against the emergence of supposedly more sophisticated forms of analysis over the last thirty years which have tried to make class relations look as if they were versions of race or gender relations. Here is a really easy way to put it: battles over gender, race, and sexuality are battles against discrimination. And of course, it’s absolutely true that discrimination is wrong and we should be against it. But class has nothing whatsoever to do with discrimination; it has to do with exploitation. And you could imagine a world with no discrimination at all in which exploitation was left untouched. You can actually see a little version of that in our own world. When I first started writing the Diversity book, back in 2005 or 2006, there was only one state in the union that allowed same sex marriage; now, eight years later, there are seventeen states. It is not a complete victory for anti-discrimination, obviously (lots of states still to go) but it is serious progress in removing the discrimination against gay people getting married. And, again if we go back to 2006, that was the year in which the highest degree of economic inequality was ever recorded in the US – until 2012 when it was higher. So you have a period in which, on the one hand, you have a series of battles against discrimination with great success while, on the other hand you don’t have anyone battling against exploitation at all and instead, you have exploitation getting worse and worse.
Part of the point of distinguishing class from race and gender is that class is a fundamentally unequal relation — it cannot be made equal in a capitalist society. Whereas race and gender are fundamentally equal relations and what a liberal society wants is for us to recognize the equality that in fact exists. Thus, nothing, in my view, is more confused than something like intersectionality, the idea that weaving all these things together will get you a more sophisticated account when in fact you get a more confused account — with the ideological effect of helping produce a society where people are extremely attached to a particular form of social justice (anti-discrimination) while being extremely disconnected from another model of social justice (anti-exploitation).