Class

[pre-print]

["bitch is the new black" illustrates how weblogs help Black women articulate identity and develop social capital]

Author Posting. (c) 'Information, Communication & Society', 2010.
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of 'Copyright Holder' for personal use, not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in Information, Communication & Society, Volume 13 Issue 7, October 2010.
doi:10.1080/1369118X.2010.498897 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2010.498897)

This study deals with the tensions and contradictions between resource governance, welfare policies, and the constitutionally recognized rights of nature and the indigenous peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador. We have identified a certain reductionism in current debates on these issues and propose a more systematic analytical focus on class and the class-ethnicity duality, as expressed in historical and contemporary indigenous struggles, and also confirmed via our ethnographic material. Drawing on the double bind as expressed in Joseph Heller´s Catch-22 wherein the protagonists face situations in which they do not have any choice to achieve a net gain, this article centres on how national governments have to choose between the protections of rights – in this case ethnic and environmental rights-and welfare provision financed by extractive revenues. From the perspective of ecologically concerned indigenous actors, the Catch-22 is articulated in the choice or compromise between universal welfarism on the one hand, and ethno-environmental concerns on the other hand. The article draws primarily on ecosocialist arguments and on indigenous-culturalist perspectives on Good Life (Sumak Kawsay or Vivir Bien). A central finding is the existence of awareness among involved actors-oppositional movements and government authorities-that the Catch-22 quandary and joint class-ethnic concerns are unavoidable ingredients in their discourses, struggles, and understandings of Good Life.

We analyze class, race, and revolution in the US through Marxist theory and philosophy, and the experience and lessons from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (League) in the auto and related plants and community in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The League brought the black liberation movement to the point of production. They grasped the dialectics and interpenetration of class exploitation and racial oppression within capitalism, and the strategic centrality of white supremacy for ruling class profit and control. Their struggle embodied the unity and interrelation of theory and practice, and the necessity of becoming proletarian intellectuals. The League came to Marxism-Leninism as the theory most closely related to their practice as workers at the point of production. Armed with the weapon of Marxism, former League members stayed the course through the stages of capitalist development-from Detroit as the epicenter of global capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, through the technological shift from labor enhancing to labor replacing automation and robotization in the plants, to the deepening capitalist crisis, economic, ecological, and social destruction, and intensifying militarism and fascism in the current moment. For over fifty years, they were part of the leadership of the multiracial, multinational, and multigendered working class in the 1960s, and remain active within today's rising movement. Former League members consistently lift up the strategic direction and class unity necessary for revolutionary transformation in the interests of the working class, and for the survival of humanity and the planet.