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

as complex as any other abstract concept. generally used to mean things like an absence of coercion and a wider range of activities available to perform. or simply the ability to do what you want.
 
CRI appearing to be writing for the Guardian now.
Half of white women continue to vote Republican. What's wrong with them?
The truth is that the 53% of white women who voted for Trump in the last presidential election was actually an improvement on even worse numbers from previous cycles.
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What is wrong with white women? Why do half of them so consistently vote for Republicans, even as the Republican party morphs into a monstrously ugly organization that is increasingly indistinguishable from a hate group? The most likely answer seems to be that white women vote for Republicans for the same reason that white men do: because they are racist.
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A moronically stupid and nasty piece. And of course total and utter nonsense, the majority of "white women" won't have voted for Trump.
 
Really enjoyed this review from our American communist dad Loren Goldner on Elbaum's book, whole thing is worth reading, raises the good point that those attracted to third world ideologies were the emerging middle class (the first of their migrant/racialised families to go to college etc.) I.E: they identified with the transformation of the peasantry into the proletariat after the peasantry had rid itself of feudal colonial remains. (which is the mass scale beginning of capitalist industrialisation) When third worldism and the US new left totally imploaded it was inevitable that there would be a wholescale migration to what we have now. It's not just subjectively bad politics.

Break Their Haughty Power » Review: “Revolution in the Air” by Max Elbaum
 
dialectician said:
Really enjoyed this review from our American communist dad Loren Goldner on Elbaum's book, whole thing is worth reading, raises the good point that those attracted to third world ideologies were the emerging middle class (the first of their migrant/racialised families to go to college etc.) I.E: they identified with the transformation of the peasantry into the proletariat after the peasantry had rid itself of feudal colonial remains. (which is the mass scale beginning of capitalist industrialisation) When third worldism and the US new left totally imploaded it was inevitable that there would be a wholescale migration to what we have now. It's not just subjectively bad politics.

Break Their Haughty Power » Review: “Revolution in the Air” by Max Elbaum
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Feel like i'm going back in time here! The book is worth a read. The discussion around it since from the US PHD left is appalling and it's a real blindspot of even people live viewpoint. The NCM articles and their imperialism issue are beyond dire.
 
About to read this on the subject.
12 Rules for Life by Jordan B Peterson review – a self-help book from a culture warrior

I’m aware of his ?links to the far right (although he rejects this and describes his politics:
In an emailed rebuttal to a journalist who termed him a figure of the “far right”, he described his own politics as those of a “classic British liberal … temperamentally I am high on openness which tilts me to the left, although I am also conscientious which tilts me to the right. Philosophically I am an individualist, not a collectivist of the right or the left. Metaphysically I am an American pragmatist who has been strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic and clinical thinking of Freud and Jung.”
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).

Will read with an open mind anyway. If only for this :D “The effect is bizarre, like being shouted at by a rugby coach in a sarong.”

Anyone else read?
 
mojo pixy said:
A good rule for life is, ignore self-important twats and their self-important lists of 'rules for life' :thumbs:
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The opening of this book is something else :eek: I can barely read it it’s making me laugh so hard in disbelief. It’s written by a friend of his, and is easily the most sycophantic thing I’ve ever read. Going on endlessly about how brilliant, modest (no seriously, no shit, despite him himself obviously having decided to include it), intellectual (but like popular intellectual), well read he is.

It’s proper :eek: :D :D

Whatever comes after I don’t think I’m gonna be able to take seriously. Guy must be a meglomanic!

Edit: read a fair amount. It’s terrible. Really, really bad science shoehorned onto suspect political assumptions and packaged as philosophy :facepalm: Don’t bother.
 
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When I think about identity politics now I’m increasingly interested in how three regularly observable sets of labelling are deployed and how they interact with each other:

1. The use of the term ‘white working class’ as a cultural signifier of a particular type of person with all sorts of negative and othering connotations.
2. The denial of the label working class to black and other minority ethnic groups who are condemned to be labelled by their race rather than their relationship to the economy. Thereby assuming their interests lie with the rest of their race rather than class.
3. The gathering campaign in the media and by some campaigns to suggest group 1 and 2 are in opposition to each other. That anything good for group 1 must be bad for group 2 and vice versa. Given the white working class are the overwhelmingly largest group in Britain and given minority communities are disproportionately working class that this concept has such agency is both surprising and perhaps something that needs to be called out and challenged on a more emphatic basis.

This is an excellent contribution to the debate by Kenan Malik:

Working class versus minorities? That’s looking at it the wrong way | Kenan Malik

And also by Metzgar (from a US democrat perspective but the idea is directly relevant)

Talking Class and Race at the Same Time



ETA: just noticed Magnus McGinty has posted the Malik article so apologies for the double posting
 
In the same vein the publication of this report by the Runnymede Trust earlier this year struck me as very important (it was completely overlooked by both sides in the ‘culture war’).

Research and work that points out the blindingly obvious - that class remains the central antagonism - even when coming from an organisation created to pursue the interests of minorities is eschewed.

Both sides are invested instead in trying to efface the centrality of class to the experience of both groups. The reports conclusion puts it well:

“The undue emphasis on what informants themselves say can disguise something more significant. In fact, the most disadvantaged working-class people of whatever
ethnic background, roughly the poorest fifth of the population, are increasingly separated from the more prosperous majority by inequalities of income, housing and education. By emphasizing the virtues of individual self-determination and the exercising of ‘choice’, recent governments have in fact entrenched the ability of the middle and upper classes to avoid downward social mobility and preserve the best of life’s goods for their own children. Moreover, the rhetoric of politicians and commentators has tended to abandon the description ‘working-class’, preferring instead to use terms such as ‘hard working families’ in order to contrast the virtuous many with an underclass perceived as feckless and undeserving. Furthermore, several authors of this volume argue that recent changes in work patterns have contributed fundamentally to these inequalities, as the work of so many of the worst paid has also become part-time, ‘flexible’ and casual – in other words, highly insecure.

Some contributors discuss the decline in status of working-class occupations. A piece of research in Bethnal Green in the 1950s looked at the evaluation by working-class men of the status of different occupations.* The results showed that status was strongly linked by them to the utility and productivity of work; only doctors were ranked more highly than the working class occupations of craftsmen, miners or factory-workers in terms of their value to society. It would be very unlikely for the nature of much of today’s manual work to be valued so highly. As several contributors note, self- esteem is more closely linked to educational achievement today than ever before.
What we learn here is that life chances for today’s children are overwhelmingly linked to parental income, occupations and educational qualifications – in other words, class. The poor white working class share many more problems with the poor from minority ethnic communities than some of them recognize. All the most disadvantaged groups must be helped to improve their joint lot. Competition between them, real or imagined, is just a distraction.”


https://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/WhoCaresAboutTheWhiteWorkingClass-2009.pdf
 
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