Dispute it all you want but racism, sexism, and homophobia in the 70s-today have become a lot less socially acceptable than it was in the 1950s or even 1930s. You can google polls and do some research on your own if you don’t believe me.

The elimination of de jure oppression merely emmbedded the oppression in the class structure and lead to the working class self oppressing others by race, gender and sexual orientation.

Last time I checked, the working class is the oppressed class, not the oppressor. This is the problem with identity politics - no one can figure out who the enemy is (or conversely, who to ally with).

Some fractions of the ruling class were probably aware of the benifits of making these forms of identity oppression de facto…

Any names or concrete examples to back this assertion up? I doubt the Wall Street Journal or New York Times ever ran sympathetic articles on the Black Panthers…

That is a pretty big assertion and one that many would dispute (feminists in particular). The elimination of de jure oppression merely emmbedded the oppression in the class structure and lead to the working class self oppressing others by race, gender and sexual orientation. It also increased the size of the reserve army of labor and offered legitimacy coverage for liberal capitalism (see the problem is not capitalist utopias but self interested racists, sexists and homophobes).

The ruling class is not monolithic nor is it aware of its best interests most of the time. Some fractions of the ruling class were probably aware of the benifits of making these forms of identity oppression de facto, others could not see how it would benifit them even though it would later, while other fractions it did not benifit initially, but they took advantage of it. To argue that because the ruling class at first opposed the action is simply not evidance of it hurting the ruling class. The ruling class opposes many things which later are of prime importance to the maintinance of its domination, that is the kernal of the problem; capitalisms dynamic capabilities to overcome the double movement, or to use it to further its domination.

Undermining racism, sexism, and homophobia within the working class, for starters. The ruling class was put on the defensive by these movements, which explains why they went to great lengths to murder the Black Panthers and subvert these movements.

As Mr. Proyect argued, if the ruling class benefitted from these movements, they would have armed the BPP and funded movement organizations instead of infiltrating them with FBI agents to destroy them.

Total bullshit!—

Can you explain how it weakened the American ruling class or strengthened the working class? I would not go nearly as far a Yoshie but bringing people of color and women under the control of the labor market and out of the ‘primitive’ forms of domination neither hurt nor benifited the ruling class. It merely provided the ideological cover for de facto forms of discrimination and class domination.

To Yoshie I would suggest a rereading of Polanyi. The double movement did infact help embed society into the ’self-regulating’ market up to a point, then the internal contradictions became too great. The idea that capitalism can treat everyone equal is a complete liberal fantasy. Ending de jore racism/sexism may have hidden class domination behind the veil of civil rights but it did not end domination.

Which means that the tremendous gains of the 60s and 70s made by the Black power, women’s, and gay liberation movements all strengthened the American ruling class.

Total bullshit!

“Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected – unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other. The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population. Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats; for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding – or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding – of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life. For this reason the conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement, which our Economists preach, is so extremely harmful and reactionary in its practical significance. In order to become a Social-Democrat, the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real “inner workings”; he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected. But this “clear picture” cannot be obtained from any book. It can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc. These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity.

“Why do the Russian workers still manifest little revolutionary activity in response to the brutal treatment of the people by the police, the persecution of religious sects, the flogging of peasants, the outrageous censorship, the torture of soldiers, the persecution of the most innocent cultural undertakings, etc.? Is it because the “economic struggle” does not “stimulate” them to this, because such activity does not “promise palpable results”, because it produces little that is “positive”? To adopt such an opinion, we repeat, is merely to direct the charge where it does not belong, to blame the working masses for one’s own philistinism (or Bernsteinism). We must blame ourselves, our lagging behind the mass movement, for still being unable to organise sufficiently wide, striking, and rapid exposures of all the shameful outrages. When we do that (and we must and can do it), the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and religious sects, the peasants and the authors are being abused and outraged by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life. Feeling that, he himself will be filled with an irresistible desire to react, and he will know how to hoot the censors one day, on another day to demonstrate outside the house of a governor who has brutally suppressed a peasant uprising, on still another day to teach a lesson to the gendarmes in surplices who are doing the work of the Holy Inquisition, etc. As yet we have done very little, almost nothing, to bring before the working masses prompt exposures on all possible issues. Many of us as yet do not recognise this as our bounden duty but trail spontaneously in the wake of the “drab everyday struggle”, in the narrow confines of factory life. Under such circumstances to say that “Iskra displays a tendency to minimise the significance of the forward march of the drab everyday struggle in comparison with the propaganda of brilliant and complete ideas” (Martynov, op. cit., p. 61), means to drag the Party back, to defend and glorify our unpreparedness and backwardness.”

What Is To Be Done, Ch.3