A good critique would take what he actually says
and show how some of it is empirically wrong and politically a bad tactic.
Well, what he sloppily insinuates about income inequality and New Left
movements being the cause of it, is easily refutable.
But as far as tactics are concerned, I'd say that totally distorting the
political trajectory anti-racist social movements with the explicit purpose
of discrediting them, is a pretty awful tactic for building a broad-based
Left.
I read the PinkScare critique. How doesn't that provide a critique of what
he actually says?
-Tyler
On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Louis Proyect l...@panix.com wrote:
brad bauerly wrote:
I am sorry but that is not a good critique of Benn Michaels. Like yours
Louis it too is filled with strawperson arguments based on things that he
never said. I am not going to get into specifics of his arguments, which
I
personally think he does not present very well, because it is clear that
most are unable to maintain simple reading comprehension whenever someone
mentions race and gender. A good critique would take what he actually
says
and show how some of it is empirically wrong and politically a bad
tactic.
I have yet to read such a critique and zero interest in writing it.
I don't think it is possible to mount a good critique of WBM (although I
tried) because he speaks out of both sides of his mouth. His article
reads like Jim Sleeper in one passage and like Rosa Luxemberg in
another. That is his stratagem. He wants to be published in NLR rather
than in Dissent Magazine.
But when he says that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not part of the
left, then he really betrays his backward tendencies. As I pointed out
to a fellow named Will Shetterly who has been taking up WBM's cause on
my blog, there's a long line of class trumping race or gender on the
left, usually however published in Dissent rather than NLR. Here are
some snippets that I posted on my blog. Tomasky, a rascal if there ever
was one, sounds most like WBM:
1) Jim Sleeper: I stuck to my claims, including an insistence that more
than a few whites are readier to let go of the old racist coordinates
than are some blacks, who have sought a perverse kind of comfort in
guilt-tripping whites by finding racism in every leaf that falls.
(http://www.jimsleeper.com/?p=13)
2) Todd Gitlin:
MR. WATTENBERG: And you think the left now has taken their eye off the
ball. Is that more or less the idea?
MR. GITLIN: I think that many people, perhaps most on the left, orat
least most who are visible, have gone down a path in which theyare
obsessed with what differs between them and one — one crowd and another.
They are more obsessed with what divides them than what they have in
common with the rest of humanity.
MR. WATTENBERG: Who would these groups that engage in identity politics
be, for specifics?
MR. GITLIN: Many of them are so-called racial or ethnic minorities, or
groups who are organized around their narrow group interest. They’re not
all on the left, by the way. I mean, there’s also a right-wing version
of identity politics, which is –
full: http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript235.html
3) Michael Tomasky:
Imagine! The principle of diversity supported by a mostly Republican
group to such an extent that Congress was taken aback. The
revolutionaries dropped it, left it to the courts. These corporations
were in fact making a common-good argument to the revolutionaries:
Diversity has served us well as a whole, enriched us. And it’s not just
corporate America: All over the country, white attitudes on race,
straight peoples’ attitudes toward gay people, have changed dramatically
for the better. These attitudes have changed because liberals and (most)
Democrats decided that diversity was a principle worth defending on its
own terms. Put another way, they decided to demand of citizens that they
come to terms with diversity. So it can work, this demanding.
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