Left-wing Bigotry?

I recently gave a talk on the "transition from state feudalism to capitalism in contemporary China" before a group comprised primarily of heterodox/radical political economists, some of whom would self-describe as "Marxists" and I was surprised at the discomfort expressed about my applying class analysis to China. In fact, there were virtually no questions about China (or feudalism, for that matter), only about class analysis, and mostly challenging the validity of doing a class analysis of the Communist Party of China-led state and the transformations the party-state has orchestrated over the past half century. Is there some law of Marxian theory that I'm unaware of that says one should not apply class analysis objectively to any social formation, regardless of who rules that social formation (at the level of the state bureaucracy/military), and regardless of the outcome of that class analysis? Some seemed particularly uncomfortable with the idea that a CPC-led state would have orchestrated the creation of a variant form of feudalism (although not a single person offered a challenge to my definition of feudalism or an alternative definition that might allow the CPC to get off the hook for bringing back this form of exploitation), one that continued many of the positive changes in quality of life begun with the 1949 revolution, such as better health and nutrition, improved literacy, longer life expectancy, etc., even as this party-state brought back a form of exploitation (first feudal exploitation and later capitalist exploitation) that the revolution was supposed to end. It's that last part that was irritating for a number of those in the audience. I've encountered a similar resistance when analyzing racism ("Black people can't be racist." "Indian people can't be racist." "Marxists can't be racist." And so on. Racism, like exploitation, is a social process [one cultural, the other economic] and any set of human beings can engage in any social process, if the proper conditions are in place).

A similar type of bigotry was encountered years ago at Food First Publications (Institute for Food and Development Policy) when a group of us (I was editorial director) attempted to expand the Food First lens to include hunger in the United States (particularly in the rural and inner city U.S.). For some reason this attempt to do the same sort of analysis of U.S. social relationships as was done in "Third World" contexts was considered taboo by certain powerful individuals within the organization, so much so that an internal coup d'etat resulted. (In their defense, there were rumblings that a "domestic program" would hurt fund raising.) Most members of the "domestic committee" were dismissed. I was offered a chance to stay but declined. Mother Jones was offered a chance to investigate and write about the events, but declined (out of "solidarity" with another left organization). I cancelled my subscription.

In any event, if the left (what there is of a left in the United States) is just as bigoted about doing social scientific analysis as the right, then we have a long way to go before social science is liberated.