[Peace-discuss] American liberalism uses IP to distract us from the class struggle

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss]

"Obamas on Race: We've Been Treated Like the Help" 
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-reflect-personal-incidents-racial-discrimination/story?id=27636612

Is it about race or class? About how blacks are regarded, or how 'the help' live?

Forty years ago, American liberalism decided to work on correcting what you could say rather than how your work of head and hands was stolen from you. 

It was strenuously encouraged to do so by the rise of neoliberalism, a conscious, calculated counter-attack by American business on "the sixties."

One of the first blasts of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of sixty-eighters was the Trilateral Commission's "Crisis of Democracy" (1975), an study by three academics pointing out that the crisis of democracy in the 1970s arose from there being too much democracy around. Why, those mad radicals wanted to democratize everything, even the economy! We knew of course that the economy should be run by elderly men in New York board rooms, where the real decisions about how the wealth of the nation should be invested were made. Can you imagine that these kids (some of who were black and/or female) wanted some influence on that?!

Fortunately, the crisis subsided in the new century, class struggle was occluded by 'diversity,' primarily a campaign about tokenism and what you could say in polite liberal society. The neoliberals, in control of both US political parties, could vastly increase inequality at an accelerating rate, and all liberals did in response was to wrap themselves in their anti-racist virtue. True religion was now established. 

(Some people noticed, e.g. Walter Benn Michaels, "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality," 2007; https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/)

--CGE

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