Re: [Marxism] Good critique of Walter Benn Michaels's NLR article
Bhaskar Sunkara wrote: No where is this insinuated. I can't understand how anyone could take that reading from his article. To repeat myself, WBM is a *very* slippery character. His prose is open to multiple interpretations, no doubt a function of his exposure to too many ALA conferences. The other big problem is that he is fixated on campus politics. For him, the need to replace campus admissions based on race with one based on class is a kind of philosopher's stone. He just does not impress me as someone who has the whole gamut of the African-American experience in mind, just what is in his own backyard. Black workers have been struggling for a more *diverse* workplace since the 1960s. In fact the very first affirmative action case heard by the Supreme Court involved workers in the aluminum industry in the Deep South. How does that not involve class? Or to be more specific, class distinctions within the working class. The other thing worth noting is that WBM is not known as someone on the front lines when it comes to issues of war and peace, immigrant rights, etc. Basically he is an intellectual provocateur like Stanley Fish, who enjoys stirring things up. I should mention that Living Marxism, the magazine put out by the Spiked Online people, had the *same* analysis as him and enjoyed the static it generated on the left. Why people should take characters like WBM and Frank Furedi seriously is beyond me since they don't take their own selves very seriously. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Good critique of Walter Benn Michaels's NLR article
This is probably a very valid point. There should no question that the immigrant rights movements and organizing among other marginalized groups should be a primary focus for Marxists right now. I despise when people dismiss the White working class as hopelessly reactionary, but there is no doubt in my mind that the embryo of a mass movement would have to start in more fertile territory. As far as provocation goes if part of his essay challenged leftists who have been seeing Obama, Hillary and Condi as mostly beneficiaries of the upheavals of the New Left and the post-political left, instead of neoliberalism ethos. I think this is fundamentally correct. I was unaware of his stance on diversity in universities. It sounds arcane and reactionary. On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 8:57 AM, Louis Proyect l...@panix.com wrote: Basically he is an intellectual provocateur like Stanley Fish, who enjoys stirring things up. I should mention that Living Marxism, the magazine put out by the Spiked Online people, had the *same* analysis as him and enjoyed the static it generated on the left. Why people should take characters like WBM and Frank Furedi seriously is beyond me since they don't take their own selves very seriously. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Good critique of Walter Benn Michaels's NLR article
No where is this insinuated. I can't understand how anyone could take that reading from his article. From his NLR piece entitled 'Against Diversity': “In 1947 –seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, sixteen years before The Feminine Mystique –the top fifth of American wage-earners made 43 percent of the money earned in the US. Today that same quintile gets 50.5 percent. The bottom fifth got 5 per cent of total income; today it gets 3.4 percent. After half a century of anti-racism and feminism, the US today is a less equal society than was the racist, sexist society of Jim Crow. Furthermore, virtually all of the growth in equality has taken place since the Civil Rights Act of 1965- which means not only that the struggle against discrimination have failed to alleviate inequality, but that *they have been compatible with a radical expansion of it*. Indeed they have *helped to enable the increasing gulf* between rich and poor.” On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Bhaskar Sunkara bhaskar.sunk...@gmail.com wrote: This is probably a very valid point. There should no question that the immigrant rights movements and organizing among other marginalized groups should be a primary focus for Marxists right now. I despise when people dismiss the White working class as hopelessly reactionary, but there is no doubt in my mind that the embryo of a mass movement would have to start in more fertile territory. As far as provocation goes if part of his essay challenged leftists who have been seeing Obama, Hillary and Condi as mostly beneficiaries of the upheavals of the New Left and the post-political left, instead of neoliberalism ethos. I think this is fundamentally correct. I was unaware of his stance on diversity in universities. It sounds arcane and reactionary. On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 8:57 AM, Louis Proyect l...@panix.com wrote: Basically he is an intellectual provocateur like Stanley Fish, who enjoys stirring things up. I should mention that Living Marxism, the magazine put out by the Spiked Online people, had the *same* analysis as him and enjoyed the static it generated on the left. Why people should take characters like WBM and Frank Furedi seriously is beyond me since they don't take their own selves very seriously. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/zimmer.tj%40gmail.com YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Good critique of Walter Benn Michaels's NLR article
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. Brad YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Good critique of Walter Benn Michaels's NLR article
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. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Good critique of Walter Benn Michaels's NLR article
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. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/zimmer.tj%40gmail.com YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
