Thread by @GCorreaCabrera

"The poor against the poor? Race, class and anti-fascism" Nick Moss and Mark Neocleous (Mar/Apr 2002)
radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-po…
This is the best piece I have read in a very long time. Thank you my friend @alejandrolerch for bringing this amazing analysis to my attention. ¡Gracias!

"One reason the BNP has a white working-class audience is because the Left in most of its variants has actively abandoned that constituency. This abandonment has been contemporaneous with a tendency to eschew class analysis in favour of a liberal multiculturalism...".

"...Such a move has meant giving up the attempt to forge active solidarity based on the recognition of a shared reality of poverty and exploitation in favour of an emphasis on other forms of social difference and demands for their recognition...".

"Not only has this done little so far to advance the goal of working-class emancipation; it has also helped create the very ground on which the far Right currently flourishes...".

"Virtually all of the discursive tropes and political techniques of identity politics are present in the current thinking of the far Right: statements of self-affirmation and pride, assertions of difference, the production of identity tokens, certain forms of body fetishism,"...

"...a theory of its ʻoppressionʼ by the state and established groups within civil society, and the belief that pursuing the relevant identity will be the basis for an emancipation from such oppression...".

"In talking the language of ʻidentityʼ the BNP consciously steals the clothes of multiculturalists. The intention and rhetoric of ʻdifferenceʼ and ʻrecognitionʼ as used by the Left may be anti-racist; the logic...allows the politics to run equally well in the opposite direction."

"The fight against racism has thus become a fight for ʻcultureʼ. But ʻcultureʼ is here evacuated of its economic and political significance to mean lifestyle, language, custom and artefact, all subsumed under the label ʻethnicityʼ...".

"And since local authority funding is largely geared to ʻethnic needʼ, a thousand ethnic groups can suddenly bloom. ʻWeʼre all ethnic nowʼ becomes the only slogan left. ʻEthnicityʼ becomes central to a logic of separatism...".

"Historically, this has blunted the edge of black struggle by disconnecting W. Indian from Asian, from African, and...from workingclass white;...it has allowed the nascent black bourgeoisie to move up the system. Worse, the logic of separatism is also the logic of the far Right."

"Furthermore, the language of difference obscures the fact that racial identities are, in a real sense, constructs of the state, through which the state seeks to administer civil society and the struggles generated therein...".

"...debates around...ʻcitizenshipʼ and ʻcoloured immigrationʼ...and the more recent manufacture of a ʻcrisisʼ around the issue of asylum seekers, have been engineered...for generating the racial categories through which the population is administered and comes to perceive itself"

"In adopting such categories and stressing the discourse of ethnic difference, much of what once seemed obvious about racism has been forgotten by some sections of the Left...".

"If the point of the ʻrace cardʼ when deployed by politicians is to get the working class to take its eye off the ball...then to focus on ethnic difference is to fall into the very trap we need to escape...".

'Recent opinion polls...have shown that ʻrace relationsʼ is a more pressing concern for the majority than ʻpovertyʼ or ʻunemploymentʼ. Such prioritizing of the differences between races is the point of playing the race card in the first place: ...".

"...questions which are really about class are blamed on the ʻmultiracial experimentʼ and white working-class voters are offered a ʻracialʼ identity instead of an identification on the basis of class...".

"Rather than working-class dissent focusing on the role of New Labour in maintaining the system of oppression experienced by the working class in all its myriad forms, such anger has collapsed in on itself...".

"In place of conflict between classes we have the beginnings of what the Italian fascist Gianfranco Fini calls the ʻwar of the poor against the poorʼ...".

Nick Moss and Mark Neocleous wrote this in 2002. They could have written this piece today. It is perfect and now applies to many other parts of the globe. Thank you @alejandrolerch. Cada vez es más claro para mí.

@threadreaderapp unroll please