I'm just a little sick of liberals and others who focus on issues that are biproducts of capitalism (sexism, homophobia, racism etc.) without looking at the root cause. It's not that I'm against opposing these forms of oppression, I'm just against trying to fix them while completely ignoring the fundamental basis for these oppressions. Please comment, because I know there are going to be some who disagree with me. I don't have a problem with working within the system. I just find that there are a lot of people who are single-issue, whether it be abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action etc. Again, I'm not opposed to working toward changing these ...things, but I feel they can sometimes be divisive distractions from the things that we have in common. 90% of us (whether pro-life/pro-choice, pro-gay/anti-gay, racist/anti-racist etc.) are oppressed under capitalism. Maybe even more than that. I think identity politics divide people. Martin Luther King said in his anti-Vietnam speech, "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." There's a saying that the only color that matters is green ($) and you either have it or you don't. Of course, classism does interact with other forms of oppression, but the root is class-inequality. I guess that brings up another good point, which has been hotly debated in leftist circles: is class more important than race/gender/sexual-orientation etc.? I don't really want to address that question here, but it's worth thinking about. Maybe I already have addressed that question....I also wanted to mention another question I brought up in my Gender in Islam class the other day. I asked, "Do you think that there is more gender equality as you go up the socio-economic ladder?" A few WGS students in my class said no, t...hat it's either the same or opposite. I held my tongue, but I really feel that that is wrong. I think the more economic privilege you have the more respect you get, whether you're black, female, gay etc. I think about people like women CEOs of large corporations. They have more power than the average blue-collar working man. Maybe that's beside the point. I guess my point is, I do see more divisiveness in the lower-class community based on demographic lines. Racism, sexism and homophobia seem to be largely working-class problems. I suppose this is because of the divide-and-conquer tactics that the bourgeoisie use to keep working-class people down.I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's very blatant albeit maybe a de facto thing. It comes from a history of divide and conquer that goes back to the very beginnings of capitalism. Slavery, of course, was one of these tactics. Others include over-emphasis on identity and individualism, over-emphasis on "moral" political issues and de-emphasis on economic issues, depoliticization of youth through consumerism etc.Capitalism began around the same time colonialism and industrialism began; around the 18th century. Prior to that there were two other modes of production (according to anthropologist/historian Eric Wolf): the tributary mode (what we know o...f as feudalism/mercantilism) and the kinship mode (what has also been called gift economy/hunter-gatherer/egalitarian; what Marx describes as "primitive communism" etc.). The earliest mode - kinship - encompasses 99% of human history. It was based on kin, whether adopted or biological, and meant that all things were to be for the good of the tribe as a whole. Thus, gift-based economy, reciprocity and sharing were the order of the day. This all changed when agriculture entered the picture. According to Jared Diamond this is when social-stratification, gender inequality and disease came into the picture. People also started to live closer together and become more sedentary. This lasted for a couple of thousand years and eventually became the proto-capitalist system we know of as mercantilism. Mercantilism was the system of exchange under the tributary mode of production. The difference between mercantilism and capitalism is that the merchants did not reinvest their wealth in the means of production, whereas capitalists did. This investment in the means of production meant that the bosses were able to siphon off profits from the fruit of other people's labor. This is the main distinction between mercantilism and capitalism and it is why, in general, people had less agency under capitalism.I don't think there's anything "natural" about capitalism. I think it's in fact against human nature. We are a cooperative species, as Kropotkin makes clear. Capitalism makes us compete with one another. If we worked together more then ...we could accomplish much more. A good post-modern example is open-source software or the various Wiki sites. To go back to your point about the Forest People, many of these kinship-based peoples are going extinct because of global capitalism's need to incorporate everything and everyone into the marketplace. Nobody profits from egalitarian, nomadic tribes and if they're subsisting in traditional ways they're not buying anything and they don't need to earn a wage. Most of these peoples live in areas that were until recently considered untouchable for various reasons. Now with newer technology these peoples' land is being dug up for minerals, timber etc. and they are being told to get jobs and become consumers. There is currently an indigenous rights movement that is trying to keep the last vestiges of pristine living in tact. Many of the tribes who today live traditional lifestyles only live that way because they have fought for it, whether legally, violently or otherwise. A good example of violent indigenous resistance to capitalism is the Ogoni and the Ijaw in the Niger Delta fighting against Shell.Ok, so what's the moral of all this that I've just written? Marx described the modes of production along a unilinear evolutionary timeline. Clearly there are problems with this, particularly the unilinear part. There are so-called "primi...tive-communist" societies that still exist today. China evolved from a tributary economy to a communist economy without ever going through industrial capitalism. That said, Marx I think was right in saying that mankind had to go through these stages to get to anything resembling industrial communism. Many scholars describe the current period as "late capitalism." I like that. Maybe it's naive, but the idea that this period is just the warm up to the inevitable revolution makes me warm and tingly inside. We can't go back to the kinship mode (as green anarchists/primitivists would have us believe) because there are too many people on the earth. We need to progress into something new and I think that next step is something resembling socialism or one sort or another.