The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender

[Hannah Bell]

The introduction of Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama’s first selection for the US Supreme Court took place at a White House media event of a completely choreographed and stereotyped character. Such ceremonies have become an essential part of how America is governed. The less the political system is capable of actually responding to the needs and aspirations of working people, the more it must put on the pretense of concern, using biography as a substitute for policy.

As always on such occasions, the nomination’s “roll-out” was an unrestrained exercise in public tear-jerking...Sotomayor’s elevation was presented as a triumph over all manner of adversity... the humble origins... hard-working immigrant parents, her poverty-stricken childhood in a South Bronx housing project, the death of her father...even her struggle with juvenile diabetes.

There is another element of Sotomayor’s nomination that deserves analysis. Media coverage of the nomination, and the bulk of the political commentary, liberal and conservative, approving and hostile, focused on the fact that she would become the first Hispanic and third woman to take a seat on the highest US court. The premise of both supporters and detractors was that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnic origins were of decisive importance in evaluating her nomination and determining her likely course on the court.

Totally obliterated in this flood of commentary is the most fundamental social category in American society: class. Sotomayor will go to the Supreme Court, not as the representative or advocate of Hispanics, women or the socially disadvantaged more generally, but as the representative of a definite social class at the top of American society—the financial aristocracy whose interests she and every other federal judge, and the entire capitalist state machine, loyally serve and defend.

Only one “mainstream” bourgeois publication focused on this critical question. That was the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page serves as a major voice of the ultra-right—denouncing the Sotomayor nomination in strident tones—but whose news pages explored her record as a well-paid commercial litigator and federal judge, on issues of direct interest to big business, including contract law, employment and property rights.

The newspaper quoted several Wall Street lawyers describing Sotomayor as a safe choice for corporate America. “There is no reason for the business community to be concerned,” said one attorney...

In response to the social eruptions of the 1960s...the American bourgeoisie began to utilize identity politics to divide and confuse the mass opposition to its policies and block the emergence of the working class as an independent social force.

Black nationalism, “Chicano” nationalism, women’s liberation and gay liberation all emerged, to name only the most heavily promoted forms of identity politics. In each case, real social grievances of significant sections of the American population were divorced from their connection to the socio-economic foundation...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/pers-m28.shtml

[Hannah Bell]

1. heresy, i know.

palin's short skirt is much more au courant.

[ColbertWatcher]

2. But why is it heresy?

If there are facts that support it, why can't people accept it?

[cali]

3. not heresy, just the same old same old from wsw

a one dimensional portrayal of the landscape. and there's something amusing about an article that goes after a woman who comes from a background where she has a triple whammy- economic class, ethnicity and gender- and trancends them to become an accomplished member of the judiciary. Is every judge sitting on the federal bench an evil collaborator to keep the people down? That's what this shallow article claims.

[rug]

4. The answer to your last question is, essentially yes.

[Hannah Bell]

5. one can always count on you.

[cali]

7. and you with your endless stream of simple minded dogma from the wsw

by the way, do you have permission to print more than the normally allowed fair use four paragraphs?

[Hannah Bell]

8. their policy is you can copy their whole article as long as you give credit.

so, yes.

"non-simple-minded dogma" would be the 300,000th story about how some shill for the banksters worked their way up from being born in a coffee can.

a triumph for the little guy! one of their own can help keep them in their place, manipulate their world view, keep their coffee can hopes alive!

[bluestateguy]

6. Fine, we'll put Joe the Plumber on the USSC

But I'm sure the "World Socialists" would kvetch about that too.

You're not going to fine a Supreme Court nominee in the telephone book. If that makes me elitist, fine.

[Hannah Bell]

9. i **wish** someone would fine those dolts.

[struggle4progress]

10. In discussing class, ethnicity, and race in American culture, one should not overlook the fact

that ethnicity and race have historically been used to define the underclass. Certainly, slavery and Jim Crow were systems designed to create and exploit an underclass, but they were also systems intended to mystify the exploitation, and the historical existence of such systems means that exploitation of the underclass is associated with certain racial or ethnic social concepts. A more modern version is the Juan Crow system that simultaneously identifies "illegal immigrants" as a potentially exploitable underclass, which can be kept in place because its members can readily be deported if they seek better terms of employment -- here, again, the true nature of the exploitation is mystified because it largely occurs along lines of race or ethnicity, and because the exploited class can be identified as "criminals" who "ignore the law." And in the case of Juan Crow, just as in the case of Jim Crow, an analysis of circumstances cannot ignore the racial and ethnic concepts, or the legal concepts, that obscure the real exploitation -- because these mystifying constructions actually become part of the practice

[Hannah Bell]

14. no one said ignore them. but the economic exploitation is the motive for the creation of

the "despised" racial/ethnic/etc. group, not the "essence" of the group the cause of the exploitation.

and having a (woman, black, hispanic, gay person) on the SC enforcing ruling class dictat is no triumph for the ruled.

[HamdenRice]

11. Spoken only as someone who never experienced being black in the segregated south could

If you had had that experience, you would not be so foolish as to a priori privilege any social division over any other social division.

But then again, the specific type of Marxist analysis you are using is more like a fundamentalist religion than an empirical application of theory to facts, which is what Marx himself actually did.

[cali]

12. nail meet hammer.

[Hannah Bell]

13. and the creation of the black slave class & then underclass came about - why?

[HamdenRice]

16. Why what? There is zero analysis in your post.

So I'll pose a more precise question. Let's say it's 1948 and you ask a black sharecropper in Mississippi whether his oppression as a black person is an illusion, and whether he should have solidarity with the white workers in the local KKK who are working to keep blacks out of southern industrial unions, what do you think he would say?

Oh, I know, whatever he would say, you would call it false consciousness and tell him that his belief that he is racially oppressed is an illusion.

[Hannah Bell]

18. That's because I was asking you a question. I'm not obliged to provide analysis when

asking a question, nor answer yours when you haven't answered mine.

I repeat, how is it that black enslavement in the west came about in the first place?

[readmoreoften]

19. Here's your analysis:

Analysis: the ORIGIN of the problem is in the creation of class society (perhaps due to surplus and famine arising from new technologies) about 6000 to 10000 years ago. In class society, wealth is not communal but belongs to families who are concerned about the passage of property through blood lines above all. A rigid society emerges concerned with blood line. After the rise of the burgher class at the end of the Crusades, the development of roads and other technologies reorganizes the world into a decentralized class society where Kings align themselves with Burghers in order to secure their power. When ancient Western cultures conquered territories, it was in the name of a King or conquerer (i.e. Alexander, Xerxes, etc) not in the name of trade or the rise of the burgher class over feudal structures.

But with this global world where kings no longer mattered, the burghers were MORE PARANOID THAN EVER about controlling the passage of property. Because the Burghers were European, their family lineage was European. The Indians they slaughtered and the Africans they took as slaves (or conquered on the African continent) were the largest threat to their property/lineage because a child born of mixed parentage represented a visual marker of the disruption of the property line.

This brings us to your black sharecropper. Should have solidarity with the white workers in the local KKK who are working to keep blacks out of southern industrial unions? Of course not. But of course this is straw.

Fascism, nationalism, chauvinism these have always been the enemy of the working class. It is the fault of the racist white workers, those fools and idiots who didn't recognize class as the primary division and who instead identified with their oppressors. It is they who are the traitors and the sharecropper who bares the violence of the white traitors and the white ruling class.

However, if members of the white working class aligned with members of the black working class asks the black sharecroppers to join with them to fight the fascists and the burghers, and the black sharecropper refuses out of greed citing hatred of all whites to cover his cowardice, than he is reactionary and bears some personal blame.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, and nationalism divides the international working class (although I would expand the meaning of this term to a 21st century analysis of labor). The world is only becoming more global and the working class only needs more solidarity. While religion, nationalism, and Western feminism have opened opportunism to *some* blacks, *some* women, *some* Latin Americans, and *some* gays in the transition to late capitalism, the majority are still members of the working class. As is the majority of the human race.

There is your analysis.

[HamdenRice]

23. It would take a semester of "vulgar Marxist" deprogramming to show why this is all wrong...

I'm trying to decide whether it's worth 5 minutes to at least start the process.

[mistertrickster]

29. Well done. Mega dittos. nt.

[hfojvt]

15. Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condi Rice n/t

[readmoreoften]

17. Racism stems from the rise of class society 6000 years ago and the vicious purification of

property lines. As does patriarchy and homophobia. Engel's basic analysis. It should be no coincidence that the birth of racial slavery comes with the rise of the Burgher class.

Someone who believes that racial dominance is the PRIMARY DIVISION in society believes that once racism is overcome, there will be harmony (or in the case of a fascist who holds this belief, he/she believes that once his race dominates all harmony will come).

I'd venture to say Hannah Bell has read a hell of a lot more Marx than you. And that "fundamentalist religion" nonsense is pure ad hominem. Tracing racism, homophobia, and sexism to the rise of class society isn't "a fundamentalist religion." It IS empirical analysis.

Just because someone phenomenologically "perceives" his or her suffering to be the fundamental social split (i.e. spoken like someone who never blah blah...) does not, in fact, make it so. I doubt you'd agree with the idea that gender ambiguity or LGBT issues are the source of "the primary" social division. I could say "Spoken like someone who was never raped and beat to death for being transgendered" but, hey, I already explained that such claims are only appeals to emotion, pure rhetorical flourish.

[cali]

21. bwahahahahaha. are you seriously suggesting that the rise of the burgher

class ocurred some 6,000 years ago? That presto magic, come the agrarian society, came a burgher class? Sorry, but assumptions about prehistory are not empirical evidence. Do class divisions have a great deal to do with racism? Yes. Do other factors? Almost certainly. Fear of the other seems to be a factor. And keep in mind that humans evolved to live in small tribal units. In any case, you're romanticizing prehistoric human society.

[Hannah Bell]

22. no, he's not. try reading.

[HamdenRice]

24. Reading comprehension is your friend

You wrote: "Someone who believes that racial dominance is the PRIMARY DIVISION"

Can you point to any evidence of that? No? As Gomer Pyle would say, "surprise, surprise!"

I said that to, a prior, elevate class division over any other social division, is a matter of fundamentalist faith rather than empirical analysis.

You have to look at each historical situation, and take seriously how people themselves understand it, to make judgments about what the primary divisions are.

You can't determine, a priori, that the primary division is class, just because your "vulgar Marxist" color-by-numbers analysis tells you it's always class.

I wonder whether Yemeni women would agree that the primary social oppression to them is class, because some half baked, pretend, Marxist says it has to be always in all circumstances.

[mistertrickster]

28. Yemeni women probably don't even think of themselves as exploited or repressed,

because they have so bought into the existing power structure.

Conservative Islam uses the "separate but equal" fallacy to great effect . . . women have their roles and men have their roles, everybody's valued for his or her role.

BS.

BTW, I offer you the same choice I posted elsewhere--rich Arab woman or poor Arab man? Which is better?

The money always trumps gender and race, doesn't it . . .

[mistertrickster]

26. I have to humbly disagree with that. Given a choice between being a rich black or a poor white,

which would you choose?

Oprah or Ma Kettle?

[laureloak]

20. That's how the powers keep us divided and poor.

Focus on things that can't possibly be changed like a person's race or gender, and maybe we won't notice the inequality of the classes.

[mistertrickster]

25. This is brilliant. I've been saying this for years now to anyone who'll listen.

But I have one quibble. I don't think it was the bourgeoisie who seized on "identity politics." It was the left itself that splintered into feminists, gays, black, hispanics, native Americans, vegans, etc.

WHAT you are displaced WHO you are . . . what one believes and the resources they have behind them.

[Hannah Bell]

30. take a look at the funders of the identity movements, & their media pr.

[EFerrari]

27. The problem with this critique is that it imposes value

which replicates the oppression it describes. A secondary problem is that it flattens out streams of power, which do have their own dynamics, and that is a mistaken waste of potential resources.

(I think I know what I just said. lol!)

[L. Coyote]

31. REC #20

[Echo In Light]

32. K&R

[Uncle Joe]

33. I do believe class is the predominant divider and attempting to climb the ladder

leads to magnifying fragmentation along racial, cultural, ethnic, regional and religious lines. Having far more people than ladders gives motivation to some at the top to create strife at the bottom, either due to wanting their own kind for company at the top or to increase their own relative wealth by having fewer people over all associated with their class at the top.

Watching what was considered to be on the table and not on the table regarding health care reinforces my belief. The people; doctors, and nurses; aka; experts in the field of doing the actual health care were ignominiously ignored while those wealthy institutions; that make a living gambling on the peoples' illness and injury held the court on health care. I see this as a major win for legalized gambling, not so much for national health care.

Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the tread, Hannah Bell.

[Political Heretic]

34. Possibly the most inconvenient truth in our politics and society.

K&R