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Identity Politics: the impasse, the debate, the thread.

alfajobrob said:
I give less of a fuck than you about this shit...stop whingeing constantly and I won't comment....otherwise call me Rover.
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Yep, that's what I do, whinge constantly...24-7. I don't work, I whinge, I don't socialise, I whinge, I don't have personal interests and hobbies, I whinge.

You sir are a fucking legend. Yep, take a bow.
 
Rutita1 said:
Yep, that's what I do, whinge constantly...24-7. I don't work, I whinge, I don't socialise, I whinge, I don't have personal interests and hobbies, I whinge.

You sir are a fucking legend. Yep, take a bow.
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Your whingeing again...
 
danny la rouge said:
I don't have a PPE degree and I understood it. ;)

I'm sorry if I didn't explain myself clearly; I didn't realise I wasn't. What in particular didn't you understand?
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danny la rouge said:
So how did we come to a point where identitypolitics has replaced structural analysis?
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Has it? Not sure quite what you mean by either identitypolitics or structual analysis.
I've never read Marx but then I've never met a Marxist who didn't tell me I was misguided or wrong in whatever I was doing at the time. Can a dead white man talking about the industrial age really be relavant to my life now?

Must admit I probably don't have a structural analysis - I'm not looking at this academically I've just been trying to survive.


ska invita said:
But whose fault is that? Whose fault is it that wider universal liberatory project isnt there enough? Is it the fault of gay men who continue to campaign against homophobia? Is it the fault of black communities who are fighting police prejudice? To me those are two examples of identity politics - people responding politically to oppression that they experience directly due to their identity - an identity they have no choice about.

To me the problem with the attack on identity politics is it seems to blame those already experiencing oppression beyond/additional to their class oppression for not doing something about The Grand Injustice of the Superstructure. Somehow being selfish and wrapped up in their own problems. Thats how it comes across. And usually the people complaining about it are not experiencing these particular oppressions themselves.
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Thanks - well put Ska

I recall straight a straight man I met, espousing marxism and dismissing issues to do with sexuality as 'just a personal matter'. This was back in the 80s, when oppression of queer people was rife and still entenched in law (eg you could be sacked for it, arrested for kissing in the street etc, imprisioned if you were a man for sex with a man under 21) For me the personal was political. The patriachy was a structure I was against. Many trade unionists then still thought that queer issues (and black issues and womens issues) weren't their issues, but I supported L&Gs support the miners because I could see we all suffered oppression. We were all oppressed by Thatchers govt back then.

We're all still oppressed by govts following Thatchers evil ideas. I feel characterising the struggle of any group of people based on their common oppression whether thats gender, race or whatever as 'identitypolitics' and 'not an opposition to structures of oppression' sounds like a dismissive attitude. We can all listen and can learn from each other.
 
friendofdorothy said:
Has it? Not sure quite what you mean by either identitypolitics or structual analysis.
I've never read Marx but then I've never met a Marxist who didn't tell me I was misguided or wrong in whatever I was doing at the time. Can a dead white man talking about the industrial age really be relavant to my life now?

Must admit I probably don't have a structural analysis - I'm not looking at this academically I've just been trying to survive
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When I think about identity politics it is the lack of structural analysis that frustrates me the most. As a perpetual-student type I follow a lot of students and academics on twitter and have plenty of classmates on fb etc so I get an insight into the prevailing politics. These are people who are smart, educated, but still draw upon very identity-focused conception of society which, most annoyingly, just doesn't make sense.

I'm talking people who view themselves as fierce left-wing activists but absolutely disregard 1) any form of class/structure analysis, and 2) their own clear privilege as middle-class academics.

For example, on the topic of rising wages in the senior management of universities, their take will focus on how these positions are mostly white men. So we need to do something about white men. BUT we're in a city where white men are also sleeping on the streets in record numbers and dying in shop doorways. So is focusing on the fact that university management are white men the best analysis, or would it be better to focus on the way in which economic/social opportunities are structured as a whole? The white man sleeping on the streets occupies the same structural position as the immigrant sleeping on the streets. The senior board member occupies a very different structural position.

That is what I think of when I hear 'structural analysis'.

To pick up on something you've said: when people invoke marx they are talking about his ideas of how society is structured (which is still relevant of course) rather than his identity as a 'dead white man' - it's nothing to do with his identity.

None of what I am saying is a criticism of the genuine struggles for equality faced by minorities, but I am reading these abysmal analyses of structural inequality which seems to think that a certain type of person is responsible rather than examining the structures through which material resources are distributed.
 
chilango said:
I don't want to imagine them, I want to hear about them.
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I find this a genuinely strange answer because you can imagine this scenario;

if as a (e.g) black worker who do you turn to for support at work? Your white co-workers or your black boss?
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and also this one;

I'm looking at the default "if all else is equal" response. Who does one tend to have more common cause with?
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But can't imagine a worker turning to a boss and not colleagues? :confused:

Also, have you never worked somewhere where there wasn't a union presence?
 
This idea that someone might side with their boss over their colleagues because they share ethnicity with the boss but not the colleagues, am I reading the proposition right?

If I am, I think it's bollocks. I can't imagine any scenario where I'd side with a boss over colleagues, unless the colleagues in question were acting stupidly. In which case I'd just not take sides, and I'd have a quiet word with some of the colleagues. Assuming they'd listen to me, as of course I'd be from a different ethnic group or whatever.

I'm not seeing the ah-ha inside this scenario. Colleagues over bosses every time, basically.

ETA - for support is maybe harder. A boss might (might) be in a position to support me more, as a worker. Someone might get day-to-day moral/emotional/practical support from colleagues, but bosses sadly are in a position to materially alter working conditions so sometimes you have to be nice.
 
Rutita1 said:
I find this a genuinely strange answer because you can imagine this scenario;



and also this one;



But can't imagine a worker turning to a boss and not colleagues? :confused:

Also, have you never worked somewhere where there wasn't a union presence?
Click to expand...

I'm looking to hear people's experiences here, particularly about who they've found common cause with, and why. Maybe that would answer my imagined scenario (which, note, was a question not a statement). Maybe it wouldn't.

I've given a few examples from my experience. But on their own they're a bit useless.

Have I worked anywhere without a Unuon presence? Yes. Why?
 
I should add that just about everywhere I've ever worked has been mainly non-unionised, sometimes casual, and usually socially/ethnically/nationally mixed. Factories, hospitals (unionised then, but it was in the contract as I remember) , schools and care homes. Shops, pubs (lots of those). A few offices, but I don't like offices very much.

Stand with colleagues, or don't stand. Can't stand with the boss because the boss will never really have my back. And if they would have my back just because of prejudice then doubly fuck them.
 
mojo pixy said:
This idea that someone might side with their boss over their colleagues because they share ethnicity with the boss but not the colleagues, am I reading the proposition right?

If I am, I think it's bollocks. I can't imagine any scenario where I'd side with a boss over colleagues, unless the colleagues in question were acting stupidly. In which case I'd just not take sides, and I'd have a quiet word with some of the colleagues. Assuming they'd listen to me, as of course I'd be from a different ethnic group or whatever.

I'm not seeing the ah-ha inside this scenario. Colleagues over bosses every time, basically.

ETA - for support is maybe harder. A boss might (might) be in a position to support me more, as a worker. Someone might get day-to-day moral/emotional/practical support from colleagues, but bosses sadly are in a position to materially alter working conditions so sometimes you have to be nice.
Click to expand...

How has ' turn to' become 'side with'?

At least you can imagine that the colleagues could be the problem. Something I suppose.
 
I was imagining situations of conflict or support, as both happen in the workplace. Either way, colleagues first as default.
 
mojo pixy said:
Stand with colleagues, or don't stand. Can't stand with the boss because the boss will never really have my back. And if they would have my back just because of prejudice then doubly fuck them.
Click to expand...

I wonder who you are speaking to.

Also as much as bosses are bosses they have a duty of care and can be held accountable. People don't go to bosses demanding solidarity ime, they demand fairness!
 
AllEternalsHeck said:
For example, on the topic of rising wages in the senior management of universities, their take will focus on how these positions are mostly white men. So we need to do something about white men. BUT we're in a city where white men are also sleeping on the streets in record numbers and dying in shop doorways. So is focusing on the fact that university management are white men the best analysis, or would it be better to focus on the way in which economic/social opportunities are structured as a whole? The white man sleeping on the streets occupies the same structural position as the immigrant sleeping on the streets. The senior board member occupies a very different structural position.
.
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UK unis are a good example because they have fundamentally changed their status in the last 20 years. The commodification of university education pretty much made the change in pay structures within them inevitable. So yes, clearly focusing on the race and gender of those benefiting from that commodification is missing the point that the commodification is the cause, or rather the opportunity now being taken advantage of: they are now competing with one another to sell a product, and their management can quantify 'success' more clearly with money to justify taking a bigger wage packet. Today, the fact of university expansion can be taken to be a function of the operations of a market. Previously it was a managed situation in which government decided how many places there would be according to social need, the market limited to overseas students, who were of course squeezed as hard as they could be. Now it's everyone who can be squeezed. No wonder the vast majority of university managers lobbied so hard for tuition fees.

And that's not entirely unrelated to the fact of the people on the street. All these systems that allow those at the top to take a bigger share mean that everyone else is squeezed. And those at the bottom are squashed. With the uni example and with any other example of privatisation and commodification of life, it is those already at the top who benefit, who get to take a bigger share of the wealth than they previously took, while others stagnate. Capitalism has worked like this for a long while now, since the 70s at least, with a steady decline in wages as a percentage of GDP, staying afloat with growth so that the minority can take a bigger share without the majority getting poorer. As growth shrinks or disappears, the process, which was already going on, is made harder to conceal, as those at the top continue to take a bigger share and get richer on real terms and everyone else gets poorer.

You'd hope that this kind of analysis would gain traction where people can see how they're being squeezed.
 
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Rutita1 said:
as much as bosses are bosses they have a duty of care and can be held accountable.
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power balance means they often don't attend to the former and the latter, well, yeah. Can doesn't mean are. Thats why we have unions, if you are lucky enough to be in a unionised private sector workplace. Its a fundamentally unequal relationship. I'm sure some of them are lovely people really.
 
friendofdorothy said:
Has it? Not sure quite what you mean by either identitypolitics or structual analysis.
I've never read Marx but then I've never met a Marxist who didn't tell me I was misguided or wrong in whatever I was doing at the time. Can a dead white man talking about the industrial age really be relavant to my life now?

Must admit I probably don't have a structural analysis - I'm not looking at this academically I've just been trying to survive.



Thanks - well put Ska

I recall straight a straight man I met, espousing marxism and dismissing issues to do with sexuality as 'just a personal matter'. This was back in the 80s, when oppression of queer people was rife and still entenched in law (eg you could be sacked for it, arrested for kissing in the street etc, imprisioned if you were a man for sex with a man under 21) For me the personal was political. The patriachy was a structure I was against. Many trade unionists then still thought that queer issues (and black issues and womens issues) weren't their issues, but I supported L&Gs support the miners because I could see we all suffered oppression. We were all oppressed by Thatchers govt back then.

We're all still oppressed by govts following Thatchers evil ideas. I feel characterising the struggle of any group of people based on their common oppression whether thats gender, race or whatever as 'identitypolitics' and 'not an opposition to structures of oppression' sounds like a dismissive attitude. We can all listen and can learn from each other.
Click to expand...
I don't think your experiences here are identity politics (not what I mean by identity politics anyway). You might not be a marxist, but you do seem to have a structural analysis - of patriarchy, of oppression by governments and thatcherite capitalism. You supported a solidarity project, despite homophobia and sexism from straight male trade unionists (and would have helped push queer issues, anti-sexism, anti-racism into the unions by doing this). I've also come across socialists (and anarchists) (specific individuals and specific groups) that were sexist, homophobic, (or at least dismissive of sexism and homphobia) or just wankers frankly - I do think that Marx is relevant to understanding the way society is structured though. I also don't see anything wrong with oppressed groups organising autonomously against the oppression they face, and I don't think that organising efforts against oppression have to have a perfectly formed structural analysis for me to have solidarity with them. I agree that listening and learning from each other is important.

I think you said in another thread that you thought that Pride had been stolen from us. I think by analysing what is wrong with identity politics and how it has been used by neoliberal capitalism we can see why and how this has taken place, for example.

Brainaddict said:
It's worth recognising the good impulses behind it - there's an 'injury to one is an injury to all' thinking behind it that says we can't be free without everyone being free. And there's also been a realisation that political movements are often led by privileged people and this has inhibited their radicalism.

But there are a few more problematic assumptions that I see behind it all;
1. That you know how 'oppressed' someone is by their stated identity (even worse, it sometimes comes down to their visible identity)
2. That the most oppressed person in the room knows the most about fighting oppression
3. That focussing on the specific oppressions is the core of liberatory thinking. This implicitly contains a rather liberal negative view of freedom and offers no positive vision of what a different world might look like.
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I think this is a good starting point for what people are getting at when they criticise identity politics. I don't just think the onus for this is on oppressed people fighting oppression. I think in many cases these assumptions have been adopted by "radical" or "left-wing" groups, well-intentioned people who do not experience those particular oppressions, along with boss class and [edit:] conservative members of oppressed groups, and can actually undermine organising by working class oppressed people who in many cases might not share these assumptions.

I would add:

4. That oppression can be erased through personal action - obviously its important for people to stop being racist, sexist, etc, and for sexism, racism, and other bigotry to be criticised, and calling for solidarity is an important part of organising, but lots of identity politics goes further than this and there's often a belief that if enough people stop being racist/sexist etc that oppression will disappear - without looking at the structures that would remain underpinning the oppression. Conversely I can't smash patriachal capitalism through my personal actions no matter how "empowered" I become through my chosen hobbies.

5. Essentialising political attitudes- so assuming that the actions people suffering a particular oppression will always be radical, or writing off huge swathes of working class people as social conservative whose views can never be changed and who are incapable of acting towards social change

6. Asking people to become allies rather calling for solidarity - so discouraging the linking of struggles and the view of "an injury to one is an injury to all", but it also often tends to mean certain people from outside an oppressed group, often those who are able to express their anti-oppressive attitudes and guilt at their privileges in the correct way, are listened to while others are dismissed.

7. What others on here have called community brokering - I would add that as well as this being by certain members of oppressed groups (usually those who are not working class) to advance their own interests and being used by the state to control us [and steal stuff away from us], this is also a way that "radical" or "left wing" groups often act against the interests of people actually fighting oppression (ie anti-racist organisations that rely on working with "community leaders" without interrogating their class position or wider politics or investigating the various organising efforts and controversies within those communities).

8. The politics of representation (ie how many women managers/mps/etc there are) and ignoring class or turning it into another identity.

9. Reducing political struggles against oppression to our rights to be free to make choices, with no analysis of what actually limits those choices.
 
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littlebabyjesus said:
UK unis are a good example because they have fundamentally changed their status in the last 20 years. The commodification of university education pretty much made the change in pay structures within them inevitable. So yes, clearly focusing on the race and gender of those benefiting from that commodification is missing the point that the commodification is the cause, or rather the opportunity now being taken advantage of: they are now competing with one another to sell a product, and their management can quantify 'success' more clearly with money to justify taking a bigger wage packet. Today, the fact of university expansion can be taken to be a function of the operations of a market. Previously it was a managed situation in which government decided how many places there would be according to social need, the market limited to overseas students, who were of course squeezed as hard as they could be. Now it's everyone who can be squeezed. No wonder the vast majority of university managers lobbied so hard for tuition fees.

And that's not entirely unrelated to the fact of the people on the street. All these systems that allow those at the top to take a bigger share mean that everyone else is squeezed. And those at the bottom are squashed. With the uni example and with any other example of privatisation and commodification of life, it is those already at the top who benefit, who get to take a bigger share of the wealth than they previously took, while others stagnate. Capitalism has worked like this for a long while now, since the 70s at least, with a steady decline in wages as a percentage of GDP, staying afloat with growth so that the minority can take a bigger share without the majority getting poorer. As growth shrinks or disappears, the process, which was already going on, is made harder to conceal, as those at the top continue to take a bigger share and get richer on real terms and everyone else gets poorer.

You'd hope that this kind of analysis would gain traction where people can see how they're being squeezed.
Click to expand...

Just coming back to this, a further thought on a mistake that id politics can make in its looking at a thing, in misidentifying the problem:

Within a society there may be a structural inequality such as one in which black people do worse than white people on average. You need to be careful with those kinds of stats as the children of immigrants from different groups have quite widely varying outcomes, but the thing doesn't disappear - there is racism in our society. But the mistake can then be made to reduce this process to the result of something done to black people by white people, hence the idea of 'white privilege' that I've seen applied to all white people regardless of their situation, which is absurd. Looking at the kinds of things such as the process outlined above, the class aspect of the exploitation becomes clearer. Something some people are doing to everyone else, where those some are disproportionately white, will produce a situation where you can demonstrate truthful stats showing that black people on average do worse than white people.
 
chilango said:
I'm looking to hear people's experiences here, particularly about who they've found common cause with, and why. Maybe that would answer my imagined scenario (which, note, was a question not a statement). Maybe it wouldn't.

I've given a few examples from my experience. But on their own they're a bit useless.

Have I worked anywhere without a Union presence? Yes. Why?
Click to expand...

I asked about this because your answer to your own example above was 'the union, obviously'.

I once worked in a restuarant as a waitress that had both a female and male manager. There was no union presence. Over a period of time the sexualised comments/banter from the a few of the kitchen staff got so regular I decided to tell one of the managers in the hope that them having a word in the right ears would put a stop to it. Every attempt I had made to reason with them had failed. Explaining why I didn't like it was met with 'can't you take a joke' like comments. Trying to get them to understand just how fucking sexist and objectifying the comments were was met with comments like me taking things too seriously would get me anywhere in the real world. That I thought I was better than them because I was at university etc. etc.

Which manager did I approach and why?
 
Rutita1 said:
I asked about this because your answer to your own example above was 'the union, obviously'.

I once worked in a restuarant as a waitress that had both a female and male manager. There was no union presence. Over a period of time the sexualised comments/banter from the a few of the kitchen staff got so regular I decided to tell one of the managers in the hope that them having a word in the right ears would put a stop to it. Every attempt I had made to reason with them had failed. Explaining why I didn't like it was met with 'can't you take a joke' like comments. Trying to get them to understand just how fucking sexist and objectifying the comments were was met with comments like me taking things too seriously would get me anywhere in the real world. That I thought I was better than them because I was at university etc. etc.

Which manager did I approach and why?
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The one you found the most approachable? The one you felt was the most likely to to listen to you, and take your complaint seriously. The one you felt would be able to deal with it in the best way. Since all we know is that one was a man and one a woman. I don't see how we can tell really.
 
To return to the Union. Another experience that is pertinent (perhaps) is of when we were negotiating some new deal and we fought for the p/t Philipino cleaners to get the same childcare rights as the rest of us. If they'd fought as Philipino women they'd have lost (just on numerical grounds) if the majority of the Union had fought on the grounds of being Italian citizens who already had these rights and actually risked losing a very beneficial deal by stick their heels in for the handful of Phliipino cleaners. And some members did argue to accept the deal on those grounds. The argument that won, both the meeting, and ultimately the whole deal, was the basic "injury to one is an injury to all". We all won.
 
For what it's worth, the Maori party in New Zealand seems to have been badly hit, or even wiped out, in this weekend's election, which must mean, I suppose a lot of Maori voters returning to Labour.

This is probably the (partial) result of things like this:

6a00d83451d75d69e20128765d07b3970c-pi


Which doesn't necessarily mean that the things that inspired the Maori Party have gone away, mind. . .
 
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chilango said:
To return to the Union. Another experience that is pertinent (perhaps) is of when we were negotiating some new deal and we fought for the p/t Philipino cleaners to get the same childcare rights as the rest of us. If they'd fought as Philipino women they'd have lost (just on numerical grounds) if the majority of the Union had fought on the grounds of being Italian citizens who already had these rights and actually risked losing a very beneficial deal by stick their heels in for the handful of Phliipino cleaners. And some members did argue to accept the deal on those grounds. The argument that won, both the meeting, and ultimately the whole deal, was the basic "injury to one is an injury to all". We all won.
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Why were all the p/t workers Pilipino?
 
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