Padraig, nice follow up, I'm glad this thread has been revived. Your first point, regarding the structuring principle, is a good one. I follow Badiou again here and call these various things, which in the poor state of politics today simply become 'identities', the inexistant. When Marx designated the 'proletariat', he was naming a site of politics, and specifically that site where there was existence (presentation) excluded from existence (the re-presentational structure of the historical situation). Class is thus the primary inexistent of capitalist, bourgeois society, and remains so to this day. A funny thing, recently repeated to me by an uncle of mine, is how race is so quickly forgotten (in US society) the higher up on the class ladder one goes. The lower one goes, the more race becomes an issue, as your cartoons and post illustrate regarding blacks and irish competing for the same industrial jobs. Now, I don't so much think that there's an active malice which bends the 'lower' classes to struggle with one another along identitarian lines, but it's clear how the state or situation would preference these categories over class to provoke these sort of intercenine struggles, furthering the solidarity and security of the bourgeois. The inexistent then is always in a way class, that which has no share despite the fact of its existence; this is how I see the connection you describe between class and the women's movement, civil rights, etc. All these things are overcoded by the system to maintain their inexistence, and thus they become the site of possible emancipatory politics.
Perry Anderson has a bit in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism where he's attempting to link Marxism to other progressive/radical movements. He says that just as much as socialism can't happen without the emancipation of women, the emancipation of women cannot truly occur without socialism. I find this to be an appealing and insightful statement. Race, gender, ethnicity or other identities only go as far as to show us these inexistents, to begin to let us approximate where a site of politics may be; however, for such politics to truly succeed in their goals they must force social change at the level of the universal (in political and economic applications).
Don't get me wrong about the genetics bit, I might not have made myself as clear as I wanted to be. I think that this new eugenics is largely arbitrary at best and quite possibly incredibly dangerous. It's biopolitics at its height, and the atmosphere surrounding it seems ghastly, however, and this is a question for another thread, how do we kill this biopolitical paradigm without killing the possibility of doing medicine, etc.? Can we throw the bathwater out and keep the baby? Vice-versa?
Perry Anderson has a bit in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism where he's attempting to link Marxism to other progressive/radical movements. He says that just as much as socialism can't happen without the emancipation of women, the emancipation of women cannot truly occur without socialism. I find this to be an appealing and insightful statement. Race, gender, ethnicity or other identities only go as far as to show us these inexistents, to begin to let us approximate where a site of politics may be; however, for such politics to truly succeed in their goals they must force social change at the level of the universal (in political and economic applications).
Don't get me wrong about the genetics bit, I might not have made myself as clear as I wanted to be. I think that this new eugenics is largely arbitrary at best and quite possibly incredibly dangerous. It's biopolitics at its height, and the atmosphere surrounding it seems ghastly, however, and this is a question for another thread, how do we kill this biopolitical paradigm without killing the possibility of doing medicine, etc.? Can we throw the bathwater out and keep the baby? Vice-versa?