Great News for Voting Rights

Iowa will restore voting rights for ex-felons. Read the story here.

Mark Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project and author of Race to Incarcerate, has a compelling article on the subject here.

This is a topic that is germaine to a larger discussion about the prison industrial complex. At a time when we are incarcerating people at a higher rate than ever before, and those who are incaracerated tend to be among the most disenfranchised members of society, the political benefits of voter disenfranchisement to ruling class politics are obvious. The prison industrial complex is part and parcel of the "new global economy."

Three years ago, I was introduced to the Prison Moratorium Project through an incredible hip hop CD called No More Prisons.
Sites about No More Prisons (book and CD) and the Prison Moratorium Project:

http://www.nomoreprisons.org/
http://www.nomoreprisons.net/
http://www.horizonmag.com/3/no-more-prisons.asp
http://bad.eserver.org/reviews/2000/2000-4-21-1.49PM.html
http://www.november.org/razorwire/rzold/18/18018.html
http://www.backbonecampaign.org/Blog.cfm?ID=56
http://www.prisonactivist.org/
http://www.prisonactivist.org/pmp/
http://www.exodusnews.com/Books/Review023.htm
http://www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=links

Mr. Politician, tell me who you represent?
He says I represent big industry cause they're the ones that pay my rent
Why should I back a poor community that's mostly black?
When it's a fact, I need some cash to get elected back
The bank account of the prison is the account that's feeding mine.
They need more prisoner's to make more money
So I invent another crime
Or increase the penalties for crimes that already exist
The public will love me for it as I put handcuffs on their kids
But don't blame me because the ship's about to sink
Blame the media and yourself for letting them tell you how to think
If you say that you're not influenced than your lying through your teeth
You're frightened by the cover but don't know what's underneath
Can't drive through the ghetto cause it makes you feel unsafe
When your block gets too dark you move to another place
Better think of something cause there is no place to hide
It will affect us all it's just a matter of time

Lock'em up cause it only brings us money
63% incarcerated by 2020
Little rich kid, he got caught and paid a fine
While the poor black youth got himself a 3 to 5
No more room? Well than I'll build another prison
Create another job get re-elected to my position
The war on drugs if you read between the lines
Is a way to enslave people for non-violent crimes

Abolish slavery? Fuck that, we'll reinvent it
There's crack in the black community so why should we prevent it?
Instead we'll just arrest them try to keep them all unskilled
We just built a brand new prison and the beds have to be filled
This industry is growing fast we're going to make some money
63% in the year 2020, of all black men age 18 to 34
Will be incarcerated, spend their life behind a cell block door
But wait there's more
We'll cut the budget's of all the programs that were designed
to help the poor cause we don't love them no more
Not like we ever did. Locking up our Native Americans
Puerto Ricans, Asians don't forget about the Mexicans
If you're poor and white well then we'll get you too
It will help us hide our racism make it harder for you to sue
So go ahead, speak out. Maybe you'll find someone who listens
Want to change the world? Well why not start with
NO MORE PRISONS
("No More Prisons" by the Lunchbox Superheroes)

"Team Jesus Christ"

Sheesh, I can't seem to shake this theme lately. Nick's comment on my last post was, essentially, "how is this part of some kind of significant trend?"

Maybe this story provides a little more of a representative example...induction is a tough thing, you know...

THE REPORTS OF the religious climate at the Air Force Academy are unsettling: A chaplain instructs cadets to try to convert classmates by warning that they "will burn in the fires of hell" if they do not accept Christ...freshman cadets who decline to attend after-dinner chapel are marched back to their dormitories in "heathen flights" organized by upperclassmen. A Jewish student is taunted as a Christ killer and told that the Holocaust was the just punishment for that offense. The academy's head football coach posts a banner in the locker room that proclaims, "I am a Christian first and last. . . . I am a member of Team Jesus Christ."...critics say the response was belated and grudging, treating the problem as one of a few instances of insensitivity by out-of-line cadets rather than, as they see it, a broader culture of intolerance fostered from the top down...Cadets need to know that they can serve the Air Force, and their country, even if they haven't signed up for Team Jesus Christ.

Right Wing Religious Barbarism Update

It was never my intent to keep posting on this subject. Even after election '04, concern about religion and politics was about #24 on my list. But this is another painfully clear illustration of where we are right now:

On May 10, the Sheriff of Hamilton County, Ohio—which includes Cincinnati—delivered a fascistic tirade against “the forces of moral corruption,” at a public rally in the heart of the city’s downtown district. According to Sheriff Simon Leis, Jr., Cincinnati and police departments across the US are engaged in a battle against Satan and his minions—i.e., “liberal judges,” “atheists,” homosexuals, “feminists” and “liberals.”
...Leis denounced “proselytizing parasitic groups” like “gay and lesbian coalitions, rabid feminist groups, and the American Civil Liberties Union.” ...called on the return of “God and the Ten Commandments back [into] our schools and the workplace” to address America’s social problems.
...Leis’s speech ranged from alarmist and wildly inaccurate claims (such as, “Depression among children is up 1000 percent”) to outlandish theories whose cause-and-effect correlations collapse under the most minimal reflection (like blaming Supreme Court decisions “made in the 60s” for the spread of AIDS). ...The City Beat article interviewed Jay Twomey, a University of Cincinnati professor in the English department who teaches “Bible as Literature,” as well as other courses. Dr. Twomey discovered during his research that Sheriff Leis apparently plagiarized the bulk of his speech, lifting such lines as “satanic pestilence,” “rabid feminists,” and “perversion of the Internet” from a rant given by former Sheriff John McDougal of Lee County, Florida. ...
[Sheriff McDougal’s speech can be found online here: http://www.geocities.com/athens/academy/9517/sheriff.htm.]...

Media Transparency on how Bush is using religion to control American politics.

Class, Political Orientation, and France's Rejection of the EU Constitution

The most relevant paragraph from Peter Schwarz's report on the French referendum:

According to one poll, three quarters of all wage workers, two thirds of all employees, and the majority of farmers voted “no,” while executives and academics generally voted “yes.” More than 80 percent of the supporters of the government parties (Chirac’s UMP and the “free market” liberal Union for the French Democracy—UDF) voted for the constitution, while a majority of Socialist Party and Green supporters voted “no,” in defiance of the recommendations of their respective party leaders.

cleaning out the memory hole

IN FACT, in 2002, an FBI agent did write a memo claiming American interrogators flushed a Koran down the toilet during an interrogation in Guantanamo. The Pentagon denies the credibility of the memo. Newsweek retracted its story not because the story had been demonstrated to be false, but because the seriousness of that specific charge warranted greater verification. Neither Newsweek nor any of the "liberal" American media would ever doubt, or refuse to run, allegations of atrocities by nations designated as rivals or enemies of the United States. Such a level of scrutiny and contriteness is afforded only to the Patron.

I PREDICTED THE SPURS AND THE PISTONS in the NBA final. We'll see what happens. It seems safe to assume the Spurs at least. As a lifelong Utah Jazz fan, I know all too well how badly they beat ya.

THERE'S A THREAD going on about religion on a small listserve I'm on, and there's also this thread going on between me, Trond and Scott on a couple of the Underview posts below this one. The listserve conversation, portions of which I hope Russell will post or digest on his blog, was sparked by the death of Paul Ricoeur, but has evolved into a discussion about the validity of religious experience and the reasonableness of faith. The latter subject is what Trond, Scott and I are hashing out on this blog. It occurred to me that it's been a long time since I have really explained my views on religion, even to myself. In a way, it's scary to do so publicly because so many different people "credential" you on your acceptance or rejection of religious faith, the way you represent religion as a whole, the willingness you have to suspend judgment--especially on political matters--and embrace an essentially unverifiable faith. For now, it's easiest for me to say, echoing Unitarian Universalism, that I believe in covenants, not creeds. But I know that's inadequate, and at some point I'll have to be more specific. I'll just add this: No religious institution or community is exempt from the same critique of institutions, and their location in political economy, that I level at every other institution, and if I had my way, those institutions (albeit not necessarily their creeds) would be regulated--Just as we regulate toxic chemical industries, food, drugs and porn.

Progressives and Religion: Response to a Response

My friend Trond Jacobsen has always been more tough-minded than me, and his eloquence makes his forcefulness go down easier. But in this instance, it is my turn to be tough-minded, in insisting that we not set up such rigid dichotomies between science and faith. Neither history or politics compels us to do so, and the false consciousness he attacks is the result of what particular religious institutions do in particular historical circumstances, due to particular social contradictions.

The reason those revolutionary priests in Nicaragua made such decisive contributions to their communities, the reason their contributions outweighed those of orthodox Marxists or other progressives in the United States (by and large, at least) is that what they did had more social weight; to use a rather worrisome term, they were in the thick of history. Circumstances existed where they could rationally, and passionately, choose a practical convergence of faith and method, acknowledging humanity's objective circumstances as well as subjective, problematic yearnings.

Maybe all spirituality is just bunk. Maybe it's all just a bad bit of cheese we ate the night before, as Scrooge said. Maybe it's false consciousness explained away by a radical anthropology. If that's the case, I can only answer:

1-that it will not go away just because a few people are brave enough to declare themselves atheists;
2-that that same irrational faith will and does make its way into the science of atheists, even some self-identified Marxists (it will go underneath their consciousness and take a different, and if history is any guide, possibly nefarious form);
3-that religion, superstition, spiritualism, what have you will possibly, then, go away when we reach a particular state of emancipatory development, but in the meantime, see #1.

Trond argues that humanist religions are weak-willed religions that, while not being oppressive per se, are distractions whose contributions to progressive politics are "exogenous to their more metaphysical assumptions." Of course, in the very rational language of academic debate, his argument is pure defense. These "softline" religions don't make things even remotely worse, and in quite many instances make things better, sometimes in spite of their adherents' faith, and (whether we socialist eggheads want to admit it or not) sometimes because of it.

But beyond that, I'm not sure what type of spiritual community he's attacking. I can only speak for my own experience among them, but Unitarians and Universalists are far from "crystal sniffers." A UU fellowship might not turn a crystal sniffer away, but you can be sure the sniffer would get a good dose of rational criticism, a lot of questions, and along the way, a social conscience and lots of training in social action. It's far more likely that, in the midst of this religious rationality, the sniffer would discover that crystal sniffing isn't all that useful, that it's a rather shallow kind of fetishization, and that there are more constructive (and probably less expensive) ways to access one's subjective yearnings.

I fully agree that humanity, life in general, cannot survive without a huge dose of science. My disagreement comes in my holding that the wholesale abandonment of faith is itself irrational and, I would think, unscientific. This is not only because for the past hundred years, the parameters and rules of science have expanded to include hitherto excluded elements of subjectivity, uncertainty, and (in praise of Douglas Adams) infinite improbability, although these shifts are important. More than this, it is because I am unconvinced that something as intrinsic to human consciousness as mystical, ineffable connectivity is really the cause of the kind of paralysis and oppressive apologia Trond rightly laments.

If Che Guervara, who certainly proved capable of killing when he held it necessary, can say in all earnestness that the revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love, I can reasonably hold that spirituality, far from being the inevitable handmaiden of oppressive religion, can motivate us to do great things, very rational things. You won't find too many people out there with stronger feelings than mine about the separation of church and state or people's responsibility to check their metaphysics at the door before participating in political life. And I would not exempt any religious hierarchy from the materialist criticism I apply to all social hierarchy. But ultimately, religion should belong to the people. That doesn't preclude criticizing it, scrapping it, changing it, making fun of it, forcing it to be accountable to rational human conduct. It just means I'm not going to talk about abolishing it. That's a decision the children of the revolution can make. Maybe they won't need to. As Engels said in the context of whether a socialist society would choose to limit population growth: Leave it up to them. They will presumably be at least as smart as we are.

The truest statement in his reply is that "faith and religious and metaphysics function in the current social order in a net regressive fashion." I can't help but think this betrays an acknowledgment, however grudging, that this question is much more about the social order than "religion." I think we have a better chance of turning people away from brutal and hateful (or socially regressive) enactment of their religious beliefs by acknowledging the sublime than by sneering at it.

More on Islamo-Fascism

From the English version of Der Spiegel comes this disturbing March 2 article:

"In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe? The deaths have sparked momentary outrage, but will they change the grim reality for Muslim women?"

Read the entire article here.

And here are some some anti-violence groups from a variety of religious perspectives:

Sikh Women

Muslim Peace Fellowship

Christians and Muslims for Peace

Just Peace

Global Peace Works, for peace among differing religions

Council for a Parliament of World Religions

Center for Reduction of Religious-Based Conflict

Religion out of Control

We've followed the stories of right-wing evangelicals threatening the lives of Supreme Court justices and federal judges...watched last week as Tom DeLay led a meeting at the National Day of Prayer...shook our heads at the attempt by creationists in Kansas (and about a dozen other states) to present religion as science, and make our students even LESS prepared to compete in the global marketplace (wait...are we supposed to win the battle of capitalism, or are we supposed to accept the Bible as infallable? If I were an impressionable young rightie, I'd be really confused right now!).

Here are two other recent stories that aren't likely to garner a great deal of attention:

First, as the New York Times reports, evangelicals are out of control at the Air Force Academy:

One chaplain instructed 600 cadets to warn their comrades who had not been born again that "the fires of hell" were waiting. Pressure to view "The Passion of the Christ" was reported, extending to "official" invitations at every cadet's seat in the dining hall. Nonevangelicals complained of bias in the granting of cadet privileges and of hazing by upper-class superiors, who made those who declined to attend chapel march in "heathen flights."
...General Baldwin had segments cut out [of an instructional video] on such non-Christian religions as Buddhism, Judaism and Native American spirituality.

Second, an important reminder that it's not just the evangelical Christians who pose a threat to rationality, liberty and intelligent debate. I've expressed my opinions about Islamo-Fascism before; here is a recent story about Leicester University in Britain, which cancelled a lecture over fears of retaliation by Islamic fundamentalists (who are kissing cousins of Falwell, et al, even if they occasionally have serious family spats):

Leicester University has cancelled a talk by Muslim lesbian feminist Irshad Manji because of fears of hostile reaction from right-wing local Muslims.
Compare Haifa. Ilan Pappe, a lecturer at Haifa University, is a vehement anti-Zionist, as unpopular with right-wing and conservative opinion in Israel as Irshad Manji is with right-wing and conservative Muslims.
Pappe has had trouble at the university, and some professors there are very hostile to him, but he is still in his job, still lecturing.
The pro-boycotters in the Association of University Teachers persuaded the AUT conference on 22 April to declare an academic boycott of Haifa because of Pappe's hard times.
If so, why not a boycott of Leicester University? The Manji incident shows up the pro-boycotters' double standards.
Irshad Manji spoke in London today, 12 May. She is, as far as I can judge, no sort of socialist or social radical, but she is an advocate of universal human rights, an opponent of cultural relativism, an advocate of what she calls a "reformation" in Islam.
According to Irshad Manji, Leicester University gave two reasons for cancelling.
First, that they feared hostile reactions from some local Muslims so severe that they could not guarantee the security of a lecture by Irshad Manji.
Secondly, the scheduled date of the lecture being soon after the General Election, they feared pressure during the election campaign on local politicians to come out against Manji speaking.

In both my personal and political life I have seen others deploy religion and spirituality in extremely progressive, loving, and humanizing, liberating ways. I have also seen others deploy religion and spirituality in exploitative, ignorant, silencing, marginalizing and destructive ways. The key difference is whether one is willing to submit their religion to pluralistic, rational, deliberative conversation and shared understanding. One can do this without abandoning one's beliefs. One can agree to disagree in the public arena, still motivated by the desire to do good things, a desire motivated by one's religous beliefs. The only question is whether one is willing to temper those beliefs with the humility of public deliberation.

That such a compromise seems alien to so many religious people (and seems impossible from the point of view of the non-religious) only reveals why the entire absolutist paradigm of religious faith ought to be challenged. The idea that one can be deeply religious and simultaneously committed to reaching deliberative consensus on matters of both faith and politics has been the guiding belief of Unitarians, Universalists, anti-trinitarians, and huge sections of the real religious left for centuries. In fact, I would submit that the wacked out evangelical Air Force brats, the Islamo-nazis and the bible-thumping creationists, while possessing boatloads of certainty and pantloads of dogma, actually lack faith.

Love Songs and Politics

Here I go again. While trying to compose an essay on the public sphere, media, and political life, you'd think my playlist would be a little different. But this is what I have spinning on my computerized jukebox this morning:

"Cotton Alley" by 10,000 Maniacs
"Evangeline" by Bad Religion
"Must I Paint You a Picture" by Billy Bragg
"A Home" by the Dixie Chicks
"Sweet Avenue" by Jets to Brazil
"Forget Me" by the Promise Ring
"I am Stretched on Your Grave" by Sinead O'Connor
"Love Serenade" by the Waifs
"Only in Dreams" by Weezer

Except...except...this is so hard to explain sometimes...because it makes me seem so unscientific and undisciplined...but songs about politics and social criticism merely give me intellectual inspiration. Love songs help me remember why I care enough to give a damn in the first place, you know? So a good love song, for me, isn't necessarily "political," but it is what is behind those politics...at least some of them.

It's that ineffable, unphrasable longing for another's well-being. It's the feeling I get when I look at my child and the person with whom I co-created him. It's the idea that somewhere, in Iraq or South Dakota or Mexico, someone is languishing and longing, wants a nice place to live with someone he or she loves. That somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, there are people afraid of losing jobs, certainly, but really, when you get underneath it, they are afraid of losing the ability to love, losing the object of their desire, not in some abstract sense, but in the concrete material sensuality of love. Bombs falling from the sky, means I cannot touch you. Union losing its pension fight, means I cannot feed you. Oh God, let me take care of those I love. Let me have dignity and security. Let me stretch myself across this great, beautiful earth and get some of the plenty, some of the promise. Not just for me. Not just for me.

Here's Weezer:

"You can’t resist her.
She’s in your bones.
She is your marrow, and your ride home.
You can’t avoid her.
She’s in the air.
And in between molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide."

I Love Militant Nurses!!!

From laboreducator.org

NURSES KICK ARNOLD'S BUTT

HARRY KELBER, LABOR EDUCATOR - Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have made a major political blunder when he called the California Nurses Association a "special interest" and sought to block the independent union's successful sponsorship of legislation to reduce the RN-patient ratio in the state's hospitals.

Schwarzenegger infuriated CNA members when he pointed at a group of protesting nurses in the audience at one of his fund-raisers and told the crowd they were "special interests" and he was always "kicking their butts." His remarks were also meant for the state's teachers, police and firefighters who have good reasons to oppose him. . .

CNA has led the fight against the "Great Arnold" by using guerrilla tactics that caused his public approval rating to plummet from 65% to 43% - and it's still dropping. RNs have dogged each of some forty of the governor's fund raising and media events, evoking his anger and frustration.

For example, at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco on April 5, some 5,000 RNs, teachers, firefighters and police circled the hotel and made it a media circus that dominated the news for three days and left 500 to 600 seats at the fund-raiser empty, while creating beautiful footage of the governor sneaking into the back of his own event. At various fund-raisers, a light plane has been a frequent uninvited guest, towing a banner through the skies that read "California is not for sale."

The Fairness Doctrine Revisited

Steve Rendall of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has a wonderful piece on the Fairness Doctrine: what it was, what it wasn't, and why we need it again.

Announcing the "Solidarity in Debate" Awards

I'm pleased to announce the formation of a new award to honor service in the intercollegiate debate community. Starting in the spring of 2006, the University of Wyoming Debate Team will sponsor the Solidarity in Debate awards. These awards (two or three of them each year, depending on the number and quality of nominations) will be presented each year to individuals (coaches, directors, debaters, alumni, etc.) who have done significant things to help economically disadvantaged people succeed in debate.

I am honored to report that the following people have volunteered to serve on the inaugural awards committee:

-Gina Lane, Director of Forensics, William Jewell College
-Ed Lee, outgoing Director of Forensics, University of Alabama
-Emily Cram, 2005-06 parliamentary debate coach, University of Wyoming
-Joe Bellon, Director of Forensics, Georgia State University
-and of course, me

Who might qualify for Solidarity in Debate awards? Some initial thoughts:

- Directors who aggressively recruit and find sources of financial support for poor and working-class debaters;
- Coaches, debaters, or directors who operate low-cost summer institutes or debate cooperatives;
- Scholars and activists in the debate community whose scholarly research and/or political advocacy significantly advances understanding and amelioration of poverty;
- Debaters or coaches who make economic access issues a significant part of their argumentative work;
- Alumni, directors, coaches or debaters who help resource-challenged programs stay alive, or resource-challenged debaters keep debating.

But this list should NOT be seen as exhaustive! Indeed, the process of award selection, and criteria for these awards, will be shaped by the nominations received, meaning those doing the nominating (you in the debate community) can help define what economic solidarity means by nominating people you believe are worthy of the awards.

Beginning this September, I will periodically issue calls for nominations. The awards will be decided by March of every debate season, and I will personally fund the (inexpensive) trophies and deliver the awards to the recipients (donations to that end are certainly welcome). The winners will be announced publicly on intercollegiate debate list-serves and (with the permission of relevant governing bodies) at national tournament awards ceremonies. Winners' names will also be forwarded to administrators, news organizations, and campus public relations officers.

Please feel free to forward this announcement to any of the many intercollegiate debate listserves or organizations. Any questions or suggestions about the philosophy and process of the Solidarity in Debate awards may be directed to me, via one of my many email accounts.

In solidarity,

Matt Stannard
University of Wyoming

On Identity Politics

This is reprinted from my MA thesis, and I'm posting it mostly as a gesture of solidarity with Emily, who will have some personal things to say about her own encounters with "identity activists" when she finishes a long post over at Fiercely Feminist.

Identity-based radical politics argues that the best way to fight systemic injustice is through organized resistance by those groups most clearly marginalized within the system. These same proponents, however, reject class as a ground for identity because it seems to "erase" other identities—race, gender, sexual orientation—which they see as more victimized by the system. In turn, they view class affiliation as ineffective as a basis for political organization. In a recent issue of New Left Review, Michael Lind writes: "At the end of the twentieth century we now have enough examples of democratic regimes to know that parties based on class affiliation rather than other aspects of identity—regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious—are the exception rather than the rule" (99). Lind concludes that this fact delegitimizes Marxism:

In many democracies, then, class alignments are fairly weak, compared to
‘primordial’ ties, particularly where there are deep and enduring cleavages
among sub-national communities defined by race, religion, region or other
non-economic factors. Marxists may wish that most democratic party systems were
organized around debates over the means of production, but they are not, and it
simply will not do to dismiss all of the non-economic concerns of real voters in
real democracies as trivial diversions by "bourgeois" parties—particularly given
the fact that many of the intellectuals and activists of "proletarian" leftist
parties are so seldom proletarians themselves. Confronted with the fact that the
majority in most democracies, including a majority of the working class, rejects
radical leftism, middle-class leftists often console themselves with the thought
that the "people" have been brainwashed by "the capitalists" or "the interests."
Of course, if the people are really so stupid and vulnerable to propaganda one
must wonder whether they are capable of self-government at all. (99)

One sees in Lind’s argument many of the metaphysical assumptions that characterize an identity-based retreat from socialist politics: the "primordial" nature of these other identities, the inevitability of capitalism, and the tacit denial of the role of establishment rhetoric in erasing class-consciousness.

Moreover, Lind’s dismissal of Marxism contains an implicit (and undocumented) argument that most Marxists are not really "working class" but rather bourgeois academics. Solidarity activist Justin Schwartz concludes from his own political experience that nearly "all socialist theorists and leaders have been middle class, as are almost all socialists in the U.S. today." He adds: "try talking to workers about socialism" (40-1). Proponents of identity politics believe that anti-oppression movements must abandon both class and socialism: class because people do not recognize it the way they recognize their racial, ethnic, spiritual, or sexual identities; socialism because it offers only an economic structure, and does not proceed from the metaphysics of identity and difference.

However, critics of identity politics contend that the movement’s aims and achievements are not nearly as far-reaching as the anti-capitalist struggle. Mary Marcel argues that many one-time radicals have chosen "to privilege one area of oppression and stick with it, to the exclusion of any other ‘distracting’ matters." As a result, she claims, "the specific category of class oppression has often gotten transformed or subsumed within the structure and praxis of some other kind of liberatory movement, while losing the overt language of the critique of capitalism" (n. pag.). The reasons for the move away from class struggle have been more material than critico-theoretical, since

to some extent the success of liberatory movements, or perhaps I should say
their partial or nascent success, at moving at least some of their number from
the positions of absolute economic and social marginalization has weakened or
blunted the solidarity of such movements, to either keep fighting until everyone
else is free and the revolution has been televised, or, to form coalitions and
totalize the efforts of what may have begun as a single-issue agenda into an
all-encompassing one. Not all liberatory movements critique the capitalist
system in which their specific oppression is created. Many seek merely a more
comfortable place within that system, and are satisfied once that has been
accomplished. (Marcel n. pag.)

Identity politics are "easier" to mobilize around than class politics. Since it is possible to satisfy many of the immediate, reform-oriented material demands of particular identity groups (while it is impossible under the current system to liberate an entire working class from wage oppression), identity movements win small victories. Political scientist Michael Parenti sees these victories as winning "limited to changes in procedure and personnel, leaving institutional class interests largely intact" (13). Other critics complain that attempts to introduce class into discussions of movement theory or strategy are discouraged—forbidden, in a manner of speaking—in forums from classroom to meeting hall "by Right and Left alike" (Spivak 294-5).

To summarize, identity-based politics reject the notion of history as material struggle, positing in its place a concept of oppression based on the ideas of race, gender, sexuality, religion, language, or other signatory identity. These movements affirm a struggle over resources, but they see these resources as consisting of the consciousness of identities, ideologies such as racism or patriarchy, and only indirectly connected to the system of resource distribution. Moreover, identity-based movements dismiss class struggle; they believe most anti-capitalists are not workers anyway and that class is a poor basis for political organization. Finally, identity-based movements believe that theory-building can only occur within particular identity groups, rejecting attempts to universalize or combine divergent causes and types of oppression. Identity politics are a material, as well as an ideological, retreat from Marxism.

Works Cited:

Lind, Michael. "Why there will be no revolution in the U.S.: A Reply to Daniel Lazare." New Left Review, January-February 1999: 97-117.

Marcel, Mary. "The Marxian Afterlife: The Vanishing Category of Class in Cultural Politics." Paper presented at the annual conference of the National Communication Association, New York City, 22 November 1998.

Parenti, Michael. "Reflections on the Politics of Culture, Monthly Review, 1 February 1999.

Schwartz, Justin. "The Final Goal and the Movements." Against the Current, May/June 1994, 40-41.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988) 270-295.

Moral Myopia: "Cultures" of Life and Death

The same Republicans who postured about Terry Schiavo are now (and have for a long time been) blocking legislation that would help others in the same situation as Terry--victims of eating disorders. Read Jane Fleming's short article here.

No need to isolate the Republicans for "culture of life" hypocrisy, though. Don't forget that it was Democrat Bill Clinton who smugly condemned the Columbine shootings on the same day that U.S.-led NATO warplanes began bombing Kosovo. Clinton's showmanlike return to Arkansas six years earlier to watch the execution of Ricky Ray Rector similarly greased the wheels for the pro-life hypocrites who've followed since.

Here is the pattern: Condemn localized, individualized acts of violence and death, while condoning, facilitating, and accepting large-scale, systemic death.

Support the death penalty but not environmental regulations. Condemn school shootings but carpet bomb Baghdad. Condemn Ward Churchill for insensitivity about 9/11, but conveniently ignore Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson for same. Or, condemn Ward Churchill and maybe even Falwell and Robertson too, but support a system that results in the functional equivalent of a dozen or more 9/11s every week, somewhere else in the world.

Or, if you're our dearly departed pontif Pope John Paul II, condemn war in very abstract and unworkable terms, but oppose the distribution of condoms (condoms!) and in doing so set the stage for millions of agonizing AIDS deaths in poor nations.

It's called moral myopia, folks. Looking at the world through a keyhole. Both bourgeois parties do it. The powerful routinely do it. But hey, a lot of them go to church, so it's okay.

Don't be afraid to call them on it.