Against 'American' Thought

I generally tend not to reproduce other people's writing on this blog, but Juraj Katalenac's essay at the Adidas Marxism site (here) provides quite a useful summary of some problems with contemporary 'American' leftist theory. While none of these points is original, Katalenac points to: the conservatism of concepts such as 'cultural appropriation'; the limited applicability of US-centric notions of race to other national contexts; and the tendency to regard the working class as an identity - one which enjoys a particular moral status as the 'salt of the earth' (i.e. what Gáspár Tamás calls the Rousseauian view of the working class).