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Louis said: Odd--or not so odd--that this conservative shares the same concerns as Marxist contrarian Walter Benn Michaels: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-mattersWhat Matters Walter Benn Michaels Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan P?ll Sveinsson Runnymede Perspectives, 72 pp, January 2009, ISBN 978 1 906732 10 Louis, Walter Benn Michaels is a "Marxist contrarian" the same way Pat Buchanan is--i.e., not. In fact, in the very essay you link, he provides a classic example of the sort of structurally racist and patriarchal thinking that has been roiling (some of) us on this list: "My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing." What a fucking mendacious moron. The idea that resistance to racism and sexism have nothing to do with left-wing politics would come as news to Engels, Lenin, Fanon, Sartre, Ngugi, C. L. R. James, Selma James, you name it. Michaels makes no reference to the enormous body of marxist history and theory on class, race, and gender--he doesn't know it exists. As many marxists, including Heidi Hartman and Richard Seymour have shown, ALL ruling classes need a way to segment and divide the numerically superior working class--and racism and patriarchy remain two vital techniques for accomplishing this. Michaels briefly acknowledges this in the following sentence, then ignores it: "In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people." But is it "entirely specious"? DuBois, David Roediger, and Ted Allen don't think so--the "wages of whiteness" are not just ideology, though they co-exist with exploitation. And the neat parallelism of his sentence suggests that the bloody heritage of US white supremacism is somehow equivalent to the occasional excesses of culturalist black pride ideology. Michaels is interested in a nominally marxist argument only insofar as he can use its ostensible indifference to race and gender to bash anti-racist and anti-sexist struggle over the head. He has no knowledge of marxism and no genuine interest in class struggle. His turn to "marxism" here is the perfect complement to his overt anti-communism twenty years ago, in THE GOLD STANDARD AND THE LOGIC OF NATURALISM. Really, it shocks me that NEW LEFT REVIEW could have published a similarly reactionary essay, "Against Diversity" (NLR 52, July-August 2008; http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2731). If indeed we think of Michaels as a certain kind of marxist, then either one of these essays of his offers a perfect demonstration of why a certain kind of marxism desperately needs an anti-racist and anti-patriarchal critique. Oh, and the conclusion of Michaels' LRB essay offers a perfect emetic: do savor, please, the way he ventriloquizes the opinions of his black custodian at the University of Illinois Chicago, without bothering to ask her what she actually thinks. Feh! ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
