[PEN-L:1928] Something completely different

[knoWWare@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Tom Walker)]

Lord, forgive us our montages. As we forgive those who montage upon us. I
couldn't help but reframe Louis and Jim's "us prols against the perfessers"
thread in the context of the high falutin' casuistry of "identity politics.
So I've sampled some of Jim Jaszewski's remarks and follow them with Terry
McDonough's ironic commentary on the capriciousness of the identitarians.
IMHO, it shows how easy it is to step over the line from class analysis to
oppression fetishism.

Informality and grittiness::marxism
as
Socially constructed identity::non-whiteness

Jim Jaszewski wrote:

>It's become clear to me (and
>others) that `academic' marxists/marxians/whatever suffer from an ACUTE
>case of lack of grounding in the reality of class struggle.
snip, snip
>        Anyone who leaves a marxism List because they don't like the
>informality and grittiness of it all isn't much of a marxist, IMO...

Terry McDonough wrote:

>Two comments from Americans in
>the audience said that this notion was "dangerous" because it
>threatened to make socially relative the essential categories of
>identity politics.  Being white must be an empirically objective
>category even if all others are the result of the endless play of
>differences.

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"Only in mediocre art does life unfold as fate." -- Michael Ignatieff

Tom Walker
knoWWare Communications
http://mindlink.net/knowware/