white European chauvinism even within the bounds of capitalismoth in the ideological realm and the arena of actual practice. But at times, this belief has been used to evade understanding of the constitutive character that structural suppression and exploitation of women and peoples of color possess in capitalist economics, politics, and culture, as well as evading the undeniable rise of this phenomenon precisely as capitalism is moving to homogenize again an international working class. The task of disaggregating gender and race temporarily as a way to reintroduce them into a new configuration with class has never been more urgent than today. When the very character of the increasingly immiserated working class throughout the world is overwhelmingly female and multiethnic, efforts to segregate the theoretical pursuits of cultural studies, women's studies, and Black, Latino, Asian Pacific Islander, and Native American studies from the analysis of the increasingly ruthless nature of class-driven transnational capitalism and its drive to recolonize will only contribute to that very recolonialization. In other words, if we continue to swim in the fragmentary and bask in disaggregation, the universals of capitalism's requirement of expansion will relentlessly reorganize the world. Meanwhile, masking big sticks, big ideologies, and big economic maneuvers, the apparent atomization of the social successfully achieves hegemony by disorientation.29 Ironically, as left political leader Eric Mann says, "socialism is at a world-wide low exactly at a time when capitalism is performing at its worst"nd the absence of alternative social models, combined with widespread disillusionment with efforts to reform capitalism, has led to a cultural and political crisis of demoralization and despair throughout the international Left.30 Compare the confusion fostered by postmodern theorizing on the Left to the success of intellectual work aligned with the political Right as it accounts for contemporary social conditions. Ironically, postmodern theoristsaising disorganization to a principle �are no match for the newly organized Right. One successful strategy of the Right is to explain social decay as the direct result of liberal policies: conjured up are such terms as "reverse discrimination," "welfare queens," "black rapists and murderers," "illegal aliens," "lazy workers," "shrewish women," and "political correctness" to embolden reactionary ideology. Supplementing these successes is what cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg critiques as the "depoliticization of politics" itself, where politics and issues are divorced from one another and positioned as affective investments, emptied of any political content. Grossberg argues convincingly that the project of the new conservatism in the United States is the attempt to refigure the ground of American life: all of the domains of people's lives, all of the practices and institutions of the social formation, and the very meaning of America and the vectors of its future.31 What makes this attempted reconstitution so profound, however, has been the Right's10INTRODUCTION
