Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 10:19:56 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Re: The "Identity" Politics That Dares Not Speak Its Name


In a viciously arrogant post, Casey uses my defence of Bob M as an excuse
to simultaneously attack the  importance of leadership in socialist
politics and pour scorn on the role of the working class in forming a
revolution leadership on the one hand, and to idealize a non-existent
spontaneous working class that will at a stroke release him and his
fellow-sufferers from the pain of having to do anything themselves.

I'm not speaking for Bob -- he can speak for himself. What I'm doing is
pointing to the most obvious example here on the lists of an authentic
voice from the non-college, non-petty-bourgeois, non-sceptical,
non-opportunist, non-freeloading revolutionary working-class Marxist left.

Revolution is a fusion of Marxist ideas and working-class social power. Bob
and everyone like him represents the way this happens -- in reality, now,
whether people of delicate sensitivities and refined taste like Casey & Co
like it or not and regardless of who tries to stop it happening (and Bob
described various crude and refined ways of doing this in his post
yesterday).

Regardless of his programmatic shortcomings, James H is enough of a Marxist
to recognize this, and enough of a political fighter to see where real
lines are being drawn up by real social agents.

So the tide is rising, and the froth from Casey's mouth will be washed away
like foam on the beach.

Cheers,

Hugh

___________________________________


>Hugh's claim that Bob Malecki is the closest thing to an "authentic" working
>class voice on this list is a wonderfully revelatory statement. First, because
>in its defense of the inarticulate, theoretically incoherent and rhetorically
>challenged as "authentically" working class, it reveals exactly what this
>vanguardist-Trotskyist view of working people is. No wonder Hugh believes that
>working people need a vanguard party of dogmatic intellectuals like himself to
>lead them. Second, because in this glorification of class origins and
>biography, it reveals that the worst of what may be called "identity" politics
>-- the use of identity qua social position (class origins, race, gender,
>sexual orientation) as some sort of moral trump over rational argument, as if
>one's "identity" leads forthwith to "politically correct" politics, and as if
>someone with a different social position could not be articulating a position
>with considerable more insight. (The same argument, although with considerable
>more sophistication, lies at the root of Yoshie's recent interventions on the
>question of "As a lesbian of color...")





     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---