TNF, class warfare politics (I mean real class warfare politics, rather than cosmetic or lip service class warfare politics), just doesn't work in a global economy.
I disagree. A genuine politics of class struggle is an internationalist politics, because the working classes of every country have more in common with one another than they do the respective ruling classes of their countries. Past approaches will not work, that I will concede to you. We cannot, for example, think that we have any shot of restoring the 'Great Compromise' of the 1940s-1970s, because we never will. The only solution for a genuine class politics is to reach across national borders and construct a truly international working class party that can combat Capital anywhere and everywhere. Capital is mobile and organized on an international basis, and so must be the working class.
I don't think that's impossible, either. Liberals might because they don't believe in the agency of the working class, but the historical record proves them wrong. Time after time, workers from many different countries, speaking many different languages, of many different colors and religions and ethnic backgrounds, have come together and influenced politics in a big way. What was the CIO but a miniature version of what I'm proposing here? If a group of half-literate, half-starved immigrants from every corner of the globe (along with the native born) could get together and bring corporations like General Motors to the bargaining table 80 years ago, who's to say that we, in our more connected society, with fewer international barriers between us, couldn't do the same to Google, Microsoft, etc?
The identitarian struggle benefits no one but the ruling classes of each country. They have a vested interest in the division of the population on racial, ethnic, or religious lines because it helps them maintain their rule over the mass of people. In the old days, they did that with Jim Crow and the exclusion of non-white immigrants. Today, they do it by manipulating our better impulses, our inclinations toward anti-racism. They tell us that whites and blacks and browns and everyone else and in between cannot ever understand one another, because the experience of that particular group overrides any universality the human experience might bring. And because of that, they tell us that any struggles we engage in must be the struggle of the oppressed or marginalized 'community' or individual, who cannot hope to ever really form lasting bonds with others who may be from a different background than they, because they're too racist or too sexist or just don't get it.
And all the while they do that, they also deliberately stoke resentment among other segments of the population. Deprived of full-time employment, living wages, and basic access to the fundamentals of life, is it any surprise that many white Americans would turn to racist or sexist or other kinds of conspiratorial forms of thinking to help them understand why they're making less than their parents did, why they're losing their home, why they're children are growing up as poor as the children of black and brown parents? Combine this with the fact that you have hyper-segregated society, in which when most white people say they 'have black friends' they're literally meaning one or two people, and you have a recipe for unmitigated hatred, misunderstanding, and the very kind of inability to understand the other that the ruling class tells us already exists.
This is exactly how they want it. They don't want us to go to the same movie theaters, to visit the same shopping malls, to go to the same schools, to eat at the same places,
to fall in love with one another and have children together. Because if we do, they know that every barrier that they have thrown up to keep us apart, to confuse us, and to rule over us, begins to shake at its foundations, and they
know what that means for them.
