Athos
Well-Known Member
The point I was making wasn't that there's any consensus around those ideas (or to comment on their value, generally); I was using the terms as a shorthand to demonstrate how similar mine and kabbes' positions are.
Identity Politics: the impasse, the debate, the thread.
- Thread starter danny la rouge
- Start date
The point I was making wasn't that there's any consensus around those ideas (or to comment on their value, generally); I was using the terms as a shorthand to demonstrate how similar mine and kabbes' positions are.
Good word that.
Athos
Well-Known Member
Even if he misued it.
eoin_k
Lawyer's fees, beetroot and music
I'm not really looking to go anywhere with this, just flagging up the lack of agreement because of the context of the thread.
(Politics is singular, so it should have been epiphenomenon, but the meaning seemed fine to me outside a conversation about some specific fields in philosophy.)
def. a secondary effect or by-product
Athos
Well-Known Member
You're right to do so. It was probably a bit reductionist on my part, I admit.
I was just referring to your use of the plural. Was a silly (non-)point, really.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
In all truth, I’m struggling to know what you’re arguing. It seems to me that I am making great long posts that at least attempt to explain in depth the nuances of different concepts and how they are relevant to the contempory UK, and then you are making pretty short replies that indicate a general contrariness (or, recently, general agreement) but without much specificity as to what point you are trying to make.
If you want to talk about it in terms of base and superstructure then it would help for you to identify what it is about the superstructure that you think is driving strucural problems (as opposed to these problems being derived directly from the base) and how and why identity politics has grown to meet these challenges, as well as why it will fail to manage it.
Athos
Well-Known Member
I dont think we are arguing, fundamentally!
But you're right that you lengthy posts probably deserved a more thoughtful response. I don't really have the time at the moment, but I'll try to get back to you on these points.
Athos
Well-Known Member
Anyone interested in the stuff around materialism on this thread might find this one interesting, too: Queer Materialism
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
As is often the way with these things, after not thinking about Althusser for years, this relevant essay appeared in my Feedly this morning:
Reading Social Reproduction into Reading Capital - Viewpoint Magazine
*Academicy link warning (but interesting enough to read in the queue for flu jabs at my local community centre).
19force8
For the avoidance of faith
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
This longish piece from Kenan Malik is worth sticking with. He draws together his usual themes, including that of the political left abandoning class analysis and solidarity and replacing them with 1) a managerialism that seeks to steer capitalism rather than replace it, and 2) an identity politics that came to see identity as an end in itself.
The result being that identity and culture became the only sphere for expressing discontent, with the inevitable result that if the only phenomena discussed are those of identity, then change in economic circumstances are expressed in those terms – they are blamed on the visible and perceived changes in society relating to culture and identity, specifically immigration.
Some key passages (but take the time to read the whole):
“In the 1960s, the struggles for black rights and women’s rights and gay rights were closely linked to the wider project of social transformation. But as the labour movement lost influence and radical struggles faltered, from the 1980s on, so the relationship between the promotion of identity rights and broader social change frayed. Eventually, the promotion of identity became an end in itself, an identity to which an individual’s interests were inexorably linked.”
“The shift towards managerialism highlighted the sense of the remoteness of political institutions and of a yawning democratic deficit. The shift towards identity politics reinforced the sense of a more fragmented society in which the old social bonds had snapped. Many sections of the working class found themselves politically voiceless at the very time their lives had become more precarious, as jobs have declined, public services savaged, austerity imposed, and inequality risen.”
“The so-called ‘left behind’ have been left behind largely because of economic and political changes. But they have come to see their marginalization primarily as a cultural loss. In part, the same social and economic changes that have led to the marginalization of the ‘left behind’ have also made it far more difficult to view that marginalization in political terms. The very decline of the economic and political power of the working class and the weakening of labour organizations and social democratic parties, have helped obscure the economic and political roots of social problems. And as culture has become the medium through which social issues are refracted, so the ‘left behind’ have also come to see their problems in cultural terms. They, too, have turned to the language of identity to express their discontent.”
“The language of politics and of class, in other words, has given way to the language of culture. Or, rather, class itself has come to be seen not as a political but as a cultural, even a racial, attribute. Sociologists and journalists talk often today about the ‘white working class’, but rarely about the black working class or the Muslim working class. Blacks and Muslims are regarded as belonging to almost classless communities. The working class has come to be seen primarily as white, and white has become a necessary adjective through which to define the working class.”
“Once class identity comes to be seen as a cultural or racial attribute, then those regarded as culturally or racially different are often viewed as threats. Hence the growing hostility to immigration. Immigration has become the means through which many of the ‘left behind’ perceive their sense of loss of social status.”
(My bolds).
POPULISM AND IMMIGRATION
The result being that identity and culture became the only sphere for expressing discontent, with the inevitable result that if the only phenomena discussed are those of identity, then change in economic circumstances are expressed in those terms – they are blamed on the visible and perceived changes in society relating to culture and identity, specifically immigration.
Some key passages (but take the time to read the whole):
“In the 1960s, the struggles for black rights and women’s rights and gay rights were closely linked to the wider project of social transformation. But as the labour movement lost influence and radical struggles faltered, from the 1980s on, so the relationship between the promotion of identity rights and broader social change frayed. Eventually, the promotion of identity became an end in itself, an identity to which an individual’s interests were inexorably linked.”
“The shift towards managerialism highlighted the sense of the remoteness of political institutions and of a yawning democratic deficit. The shift towards identity politics reinforced the sense of a more fragmented society in which the old social bonds had snapped. Many sections of the working class found themselves politically voiceless at the very time their lives had become more precarious, as jobs have declined, public services savaged, austerity imposed, and inequality risen.”
“The so-called ‘left behind’ have been left behind largely because of economic and political changes. But they have come to see their marginalization primarily as a cultural loss. In part, the same social and economic changes that have led to the marginalization of the ‘left behind’ have also made it far more difficult to view that marginalization in political terms. The very decline of the economic and political power of the working class and the weakening of labour organizations and social democratic parties, have helped obscure the economic and political roots of social problems. And as culture has become the medium through which social issues are refracted, so the ‘left behind’ have also come to see their problems in cultural terms. They, too, have turned to the language of identity to express their discontent.”
“The language of politics and of class, in other words, has given way to the language of culture. Or, rather, class itself has come to be seen not as a political but as a cultural, even a racial, attribute. Sociologists and journalists talk often today about the ‘white working class’, but rarely about the black working class or the Muslim working class. Blacks and Muslims are regarded as belonging to almost classless communities. The working class has come to be seen primarily as white, and white has become a necessary adjective through which to define the working class.”
“Once class identity comes to be seen as a cultural or racial attribute, then those regarded as culturally or racially different are often viewed as threats. Hence the growing hostility to immigration. Immigration has become the means through which many of the ‘left behind’ perceive their sense of loss of social status.”
(My bolds).
POPULISM AND IMMIGRATION
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
All of that really good (thanks danny), but this part especially strikes a chord. It's a narrative that has been ever present on threads about Trump (and to the lesser extent UKIP and the EU referendum), hugely damaging and exposing starkly the vast gulf between liberals and socialists.
EDIT: I also think it's worth quoting this
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Presicely. I don't think it can be bridged. And this is the fault line. It's time to plainly say "we don't have the same aims".
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Yes, I'm in total agreement.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
That second quote hits on something i've been thinking about - the difference between identification with and identity. I am anarchist and a communist because i support and identify with those politics (same for say Somerset CCC or LUFC). That's not an identity in the sense that identity politics uses identity - even though it is clearly attempting to base itself on both identification with and hidden or unstated older essentialisms. The idea of identity itself needs to come under more critical scrutiny than i currently see it being placed under.
It’s a good essay and it presents a strong argument. I would like to see that argument now pursued through the establishment of evidence. There are a lot of claims made in it. The very fact that I intuitively agree with those claims, though, makes me wary of accepting the whole edifice without the due hard cycle of evidence that should accompany it.
(I mean evidence in its academic social scientific sense — qualitative or quantitative but directed at establishing the validity of specific claims rather than just presenting the broad sweeps of history)
(I mean evidence in its academic social scientific sense — qualitative or quantitative but directed at establishing the validity of specific claims rather than just presenting the broad sweeps of history)
and they're not wrong. as far as it means anything at all socialism is the left wing of liberalism.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
I've been trying to formulate something along those lines too. Differentiating between Personal Identity, Social Identity, Selfhood, and Culture. Because people are both using the same terms to mean different things and conflating ideas that deserve different terms.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
That's something that deserves a different thread. I've got books on my shelf devoted to the meanings of "socialism". I'm an anarchist communist. I broadly use "socialist" to mean "people with a class perspective I'd recognise". It's not ideal, though.
possibly, but I think it points to a problem I have with Malik's argument, which is that through the lens of a sort of romantic Spiked liberalism or whatever his perspective is, class politics can be substituted for basically managerialist, representational, cross-class political projects that draw on identity in not strikingly dissimilar ways to the political forms he critiques in his numerous articles on the subject. That he in my view overemphasises the significance of the collapse of the USSR is perhaps telling in as much as it is surely the collapse of the social democratic/Keyensian consensus to which the socialist/labour movement had tied its fortunes that is crucial.
iirc Andrew Kliman in his book on the 2008 crisis says he doesn't like to use the term neoliberalism too much because it obscures the continuity between it and the capitalism of the past - maybe similar could be said for the apparent gulf between socialism and identity politics. how much of the appearance of a divide is really only that they seek to occupy the same bit of terrain? I'm not sure that Malik lumping together working class struggle and the would be representatives and managers of capitalism in one 'universal project' brings much clarity to the developments of the past half century or so.
Tom A
Goat among sheep
In my experience the people deeply involved in IDpol that I have encountered in real life tend to identify as anarchists, and have some involvement with and support from anarchist groups in the area.
mojo pixy
...שלא נמצא בשמאל
Not everyone who says they're an anarchist really believes in anarchism, IME. Plenty of self-proclaimed "anarchists" don't even know what anarchism means, they just claim it as a label because it sounds edgy.
ETA, not here of course. I tend to expect posters here who use the term to know what it means.
ETA, not here of course. I tend to expect posters here who use the term to know what it means.
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Athos
Well-Known Member
Wow. I'd be interested to hear more about this (not asking you to name individuals or groups, obviously). When you say anarchists, are you talking about politically or lifestyle-wise?
Athos
Well-Known Member
Perhaps we need less emphasis on what people say they identify as, and more on what they are, what they believe in, and what they do?
And I very deliberately mean a change of emphasis, rather than a wholesale abandonment of the idea of 'identitfying with' (and identity), which can be very politically useful.
And I very deliberately mean a change of emphasis, rather than a wholesale abandonment of the idea of 'identitfying with' (and identity), which can be very politically useful.
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Athos
Well-Known Member
You're right to the extent that different people use the same terms to mean different things.
Tom A
Goat among sheep
There was definitely overlap between them and well-known anarchist groups. However many of them were trustifarians, relying on the goodwill of middle-class families to help them stay in the manner they were accustomed to, so they cannot really be defined as either "political" or "lifestyle".
Athos
Well-Known Member
Interesting. How was that id politics expressed.
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