Another Polemic on Identity Politics

The post war years saw a massive surge in liberation and equal rights movements: anti-colonialist and national liberation in countries within various European empires; the women's and gay liberation movements;  movements to advance workers', students, prisoners', indigenous peoples’ and black and minority ethnic rights; the anti-nuclear, peace, anti-psychiatry and the environmentalist movements.

 

There was a cold war raging and the Non-Aligned Movement was emerging as a massive third political force in the world. 

 

In response and as always, capitalism wielded a range of ideological weapons as well as overt, sometimes brutal, force and coercion. 

 

An alliance of major capitalist nations led by the USA crushed emergent left-wing movements and overthrew or killed left leaning leaders of international liberation movements, eg. the  overthrow of Mossaddegh in Iran; the US backed overthrow of Sukarno and the slaughter of a million Indonesian communists by the army and Islamists;  assassinations of important black leaders like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo; the wars in South East Asia …..on and on and on.

 

And domestically – that same mix of coercion and brute force (worst if you happened to be advancing indigenous and B&ME rights) – in the USA ranging from agents of the state firing on students, to the complicity of the state in the assassinations of important black leaders and the imposition of life time sentences and the mass incarceration of black men, which signalled the rise of what Angela Davis calls the prison-industrial complex. 

 

Few other states (South Africa was an ignoble exception) were as brutally and openly coercive as the US which created and orchestrated the game plan. The treatment in the 1960s of Paul Robeson – scholar, athlete, artist, communist and unapologetic radical advocate for black and working class rights and arguably the first and greatest of the "black Messiahs" that white racist America so hated and feared – showed the Anglo Alliance at work. (1)

 

But ideological means are far preferable to coercive and on the ideological front, one of the best ideas the right-wing ideologues ever had was to promote the factionalising and fracturing potential of interest group politics – ie people combining around a particular set of specific interests broadly flowing from sex, race/ethnicity or sexual orientation and in opposition to harmful prejudices in popular lore and unfair discrimination in formal law. 

 

The traditional left had failed to engage sufficiently or at all with issues of sex and race as the two huge elephants in the corner of the political room, and initially IGP found its natural home within the left and the labour movement and drew on that for its wider strength, eg the emergence of specific sections within left-wing political parties, trade unions etc.

 

Capitalism dug in and initially threw all it could into resisting even basic demands; every small advance had to be fought for – especially workers' rights to decent pay and conditions and to workplace health and safety. (2)

 

In the late 70s and early 80s, as the ideologues geared up for the neo-liberal revolution with its monetarist economic doctrine, the gloves came off with the working class and an ideological onslaught was unleashed – portraying militant unions as the "enemy within",  in cohorts with the "enemy without" – communism. 

Militant (in the sense of uncompromising in their demands) women's liberationists were portrayed as hairy legged, boiler suited men haters; black and minority ethnic people were portrayed as disaffected, feckless, criminally minded or potential terrorists; environmentalists – first branded as well-meaning but stupid tree huggers, became eco-terrorists. 

 

The biggest coup however was a far more subtle ideological move – one that parts of the Left enthusiastically embraced – the emergence of identity politics for which second wave feminism had inadvertently laid the groundwork with its distinction between biological sex and social gender,  an emphasis on how we are made or learn to be women, which flowed smoothly into the ideas of gender as performance, and to the idea that not just sex roles but biological sex itself is socially constructed and, as a result, is able to be deconstructed.

 

The most recent and divisive manifestation of identity politics – gender identity – moves away from the material reality of biological sex and of social stratification as the basis of male power (with patriarchal authority as an illusory compensation given to otherwise powerless men), and into ideas about the essentialism of individual identity. Political action was about shifting alliances between groups of people with same or similar  identities, and adding a swathe of categories to the hierarchy of oppression. 

 

The great organising principles of the material reality of class-based economic exploitation and of the hyper exploitation of women – both as workers and as producers of new generations of workers, whose unpaid domestic and reproductive labour enabled greater profits; the hyper-exploitation of people of colour within capitalism enabled by the ideology of race – and all the multiple layers of overt and covert, interlinked forms of oppression heaped upon and wrapped around people to facilitate economic exploitation – have all but been all drowned by a tsunami of agitprop and academic waffle proclaiming the end of history, the end of class, the end of sex, and the rise of the aspirational individual and his/her/their bespoke, unique identity whose very existence we are told, will bring about an end to oppression – conceptualised as whatever unpleasantness looms largest on any individual's personal horizon.

 

That capitalism's drive to obscure – not just the nature of class but its very existence– is being enabled by the Left, is an irony of cosmic proportions.

 

This new form of identity politics was of course best able to be conceptualised and expressed from within the relative safety and affluence of the buffer zone that exists between the mass of increasingly impoverished, marginalised people and the true elites. An important part of this buffer zone is the coordinator class, that group of public and private sector managers, technocrats, specialists, consultants etc who, by organising, systematising and arranging, serve to both obscure and protect and ultimately serve the interests of the hyper-rich.

 

Identity politics does its bit to help keep open the flood gates for an era of unprecedented wealth accumulation and extreme plundering of, and harm to the natural world, and the reconsolidation of gross disparities between rich and poor – and as such it is a regressive, reactionary movement. 

 

 

Notes:

1. After a suicidal breakdown thought by his son to have been induced by a psychotropic drug slipped into his drink by the FBI, Robeson was eventually hospitalised in the UK where for two years he was subjected to 54 ECT sessions and kept on a regime of powerful barbiturate drugs with no psychotherapy until his family had him released and took him to a clinic in the GDR where he recovered somewhat but was never able to appear in public again.

2. The women's movement in the US has still never achieved an equal rights amendment for example; abortion remained in the crimes act here in NZ until this year; denial of equal pay is a crime in only one country, elsewhere it's a civil issue; the principle of equal pay for work of equal value has never really been engaged with even where there is legislation that enables its and in fact - with a loss of collective bargaining, individualised contracts, low wages, zero hours etc, women workers are arguably worse off in 2020,  even with the formal right to pay equity.