Yet More Identity Politics

While I’m musing about things political in NZ – here’s a few thoughts about the Left and Identity politics.

The issue of "hate speech" comes up in relation to that all the time. Take transgenderism – I call it that because it is a political movement with a political goals and an ideology – pretty much anything which counters the current TG orthodoxy is deemed to be "hate speech". 

Now I take my politics seriously and one thing I have learned is this – you do no one any favours by applying important political concepts to any and all behaviour, thereby emptying those concepts of critical and political meaning. 

If all people, who as much as question any aspect of transgenderism, are transphobes, and transphobes are Nazis, where do you go when you need to identity a real Nazi? 

It is ludicrous. Infantile. Dangerous. Divisive. 

And the attacks on the socially cautious Left by a bunch of largely middle class, affluent, comfortable, well-educated, socially and geographically mobile people – well, the Aranui girl in me wants to say, fuck you. Actually she’d say – listen mates, the old organising principle of the Left – strength through unity – remains the only way we can possibly hope to counter the destructive might of corporate capitalism and the coercive state machinery it can command. 

Of course the working class has to fight for the rights of people who are oppressed on grounds other than class – women and people of colour, and especially black people – and those who face social disadvantage by being denied formal rights. And it has done so, although at times not nearly as well or as full-heartedly as it needed to. 

But, keep on dividing into smaller and smaller categories – competing for rights and choices that are made meaningless unless people have the means to exercise them – and we’re in neo-liberalism’s ball park, playing its game and by its rules but blindfolded and with our hands and feet bound.

If the working class is reduced to just another interest group and economic exploitation and the accompanying forms of oppression reduced to another ism – what common cause is there to bind people together? What's the political and social glue that will stop the identity politics movement exploding into a thousand pieces?