Re: Beyond Criticism of the Democratic Party

[Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/4/06, Sandwichman <lumpoflabor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 11/4/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > I haven't read this book yet (I'd like to soon!), but racism and
> > nativism don't quite explain the absence of a social democratic party
> > or any other kind of mass party on the Left in the USA.
>
> Well then perhaps you should read the book before arguing against it
> because the book doesn't claim that racism and nativism explain the
> absence of a social democratic party in the USA. What the book is
> concerned with is the dialectical/historical interaction between race,
> class and gender -- if that isn't too telescopic a description of its
> thesis.
>
> What particularly impressed me about it was the way that the author
> examined cultural forms of expression -- and very centrally the
> black-face minstrel show -- as the media through which both change and
> stagnation occurred.

I was mainly responding to what the review appears to suggest.  I'll
certainly read the book.  I like Alexander Saxton's Indispensable
Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, and I'm just
reading his new one Religion and the Human Prospect  (out of Monthly
Review Press).  The latter will probably be controversial.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>