People should probably just stop using the term identity politics, because its almost always used in a reactionary way.
- The right uses it to fear-monger about minorities, women, and gays being elevated to the same level as white men.
- The reactionary “left” uses it for the same way, but in a “class-essentialist” context, making the claim that only relation to production determines class (and not between colonizer and colonized, enslaved and not enslaved, domestic servitude to the male patriarch, etc).
Class essentialism (really it should be called wage-earner-essentialism) is wrong: race, ethnicity, sex, and gender minority should not be extricated from poverty. Just look at the US or Latin America, your skin color is completely correlated to your wealth and life outcomes, and any analysis that tries to ignore colonialism, slavery, or patriarchal servitude as “just idpol”, is doing class collaborationism with the white rulers and the mostly white labor aristocracy, who have historically been beneficiaries of the women’s oppression in the household, and colonialism.
A correct definition of class should be holistic, and include those other forms of oppression, not just the simplistic understanding of class as “anyone who makes a wage.” Even Engels within his lifetime went beyond that original definition from his principles of communism.
There are leftist critiques of liberal tokenism, and things like “the nation of immigrants” / “multi-culturalist” US propaganda, when the US tries to say its a “melting pot”, and not a nation founded on indigenous genocide. But that is distinct from identity politics, where the entire group is targeted and treated as a monolithic entity that should stay at its current level, or dissolve their grievances and become collaborators.
Regardless, all socialist countries have had affirmative-action style programs to reduce inequalities between ethnic groups, and women’s rights (hopefully sexual minorities in the future too). In this way they’re doing the opposite of collaborationism, or asking groups to dissolve their specific grievances.
Yeah, I think the key part to focus on that left ideology needs to be inclusive and uniting. The ideas have to unite people from different cultures and walks of life. This is precisely what makes class analysis so important in my opinion. The relationship between the exploiter and the exploited is an invariant in capitalist relations. Focusing on this relationship creates a common thread that all workers can rally around.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said here but I still have more on my mind.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never liked “SJWs” (for lack of a better term). Maybe it’s just me having been raised on 4chan during my teenage years but even now I still look at these kind of people with disdain. Whilst I’m fully on board with fighting for the rights of all kinds of minorities in society, I feel the approach taken by many “SJWs” is needlessly antagonistic towards the wrong people and is also completely devoid of class consciousness.
Reaction should not be tolerated, however this does not necessitate talking down spitefully to everyone who holds reactionary views. Many people are reactionaries not because they have a heart burning with hatred for minorities but because their minds have been twisted by bourgeois propaganda telling them that these people are a threat and can you really blame them? Can any of us here say with confidence that we have never been liberals or reactionaries or have never placed any trust in MSM narratives at any point in our lives? If you can then I commend you for having been raised and guided all throughout your life by such staunchly progressive revolutionaries but the reality for the vast majority of us in the imperial core is simply not like that at all.
Much of the proletariat has been pushed into the arms of the right since this culture wars bullshit began, you can see that reflected in how many “working class” (for lack of a better term, we cannot ignore class divisions) people support Trump whilst many of those people get roundly shat on by “SJWs” who, despite some having minority status themselves, are indeed economically privileged in comparison or “middle class” and I think it’s undeniable that economic privilege trumps every other privilege as money can buy freedom, dignity and respect for any member of any minority group. I know many of us here recognise that “working class” and “middle class” are bourgeois concepts but that still doesn’t dismiss the economic reality that people live under in that a few are at the top, some in the middle and everyone else is at the bottom. Those at the bottom can only look up in scorn. A wealthy trans person is more economically privileged than a poor cishet but would you really tell the cishet that they are the ones who need to “check their privilege” purely because they don’t have a problem with the genitals they were born with?
I also strongly believe that whilst Marxists should always fight for the rights of all oppressed groups, the economic emancipation of the proletariat must absolutely come first and foremost in everything we do to push for change. If economic emancipation takes a backseat, we are no better than single-issue campaigners because we’re just trying to affect change whilst remaining under a system that will continuously frustrate our efforts and create new conflicts and divisions. I also feel that progressive social change under a bourgeois dictatorship only serves to enhance the arguments in favour of bourgeois dictatorships which you see in many liberals. It’s too easy to make shallow takes like “US legalised gay marriage but China still hasn’t, therefore the US is overall more progressive than a socialist country.” (Don’t get me wrong here, as much as I hold disdain for “SJWs” I also hold the same disdain for reactionaries in socialist countries like China who are holding back social change due to “traditional family values” or other assorted piles of horse shit.)
Also, with the economic emancipation of the proletariat and the establishment of a strong proletarian state, this will destroy the structures behind, and effectiveness of, bourgeois propaganda as it will no longer be possible to paint certain groups of people as a threat to your livelihood when your livelihood is guaranteed by the state, bourgeois media orgs are banned and public education sets people on the right path. In such a way, much of the reactionary sentiment currently present in the proletariat should simply fade away into irrelevance.
So I guess my main point is simply that whilst we should not engage in class essentialism, we cannot deny economic reality as many do.
I always thought class was the primary contradiction and all the identity stuff were separate issues, as in once there is a revolution there can still be issues faces by certain types of people. Like just because a country is now socialist doesn’t make literally all problems and contradictions go away. For example western liberal democracies have better rights for lgbtq people compared to China, or the mentality that having a baby boy is better than having a baby girl. This type of thinking is very common in certain parts of China to this day, even after the revolution.
Also the fact that so many proletariats are being pushed to the right can be a reflection of the failure of the left to reach out to the working class, so I agree with your point of not talking down to people with reactionary views. The left is so quick to call people with reactionary views literal Nazis as a strawman so they can absolve themselves of trying to remove those views.
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I agree with part of what you said but not all of it. I wonder if some Socratic questions would reveal how much we agree and perhaps make you change your mind.
Do you mean that after a revolution a socialist state would still have to deal with gender, sexuality, racial, etc, issues? (I think this is what you meant,v as you give the example of China, and I agree.)
If so, does it matter that a socialist state will still have to deal with class as well? China still had a bourgeoisie, for example, and has to reign it in now and again.
To ask the question in a different way: can class and other ‘identity’ issues be separated just because those ‘identity’ issues will remain after a revolution, if class will also remain a problem after the revolution?
During a dictatorship of the proletariat, there will still be a bourgeoisie, and the related problems of having a bourgeois class, even if it’s power is diminished. It would not be till much later, when bourgeois social relations have withered away, that class is abolished and ‘full’ communism reached.
Would you expect those identity issues to have been dealt with by the time that full communism is reached?
If so, is that not the exact time that class contradictions will be finally resolved?
And to get back to where we started, does this indicate that ‘identity’ and class are interwoven after all and cannot be treated as separate issues?
The comic reminded me of this quote from Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti:
Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploitative one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.
Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and powaer are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impressive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage publiac awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;’ "upper class;’ or “moneyed class.” And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the “ruling class.” The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion’s share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are themselves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.
Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a simple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into “conspiracy theory.” The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the “working class,” a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;’ for then one is talking about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.
The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the soothing adjective “middle.” Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt concern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of society. By including almost everyone, “middle class” serves as a conveniently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actuality of class power.
The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimization: the “underclass.” References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society’s most vulnerable elements.
Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.
The last paragraph is especially good, because he’s including those other forms of oppression in class, and not asking them to exclude their specific grievances from the class struggle.
