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

8ball said:
Did you mean qualitatively different?
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No, quantitatively. it's still the same capitalism in terms of qualities, it's just that the capitalist state-form worldwide has expanded its quantitative scope, especially after WW II and the decolonisation and national liberation movements.

In the light of today, nineteenth century capitalism appears to have been an ‘undeveloped’ capitalism, not fully emancipated from its feudalistic past. Capitalism, challenging not exploitation but only the monopolistic position of a particular form of exploitation, could truly unfold itself ‘within the shell’ of the old society. Its revolutionary actions were aimed at governmental control merely in order to break through feudalism’s restrictive borders and to secure capitalistic liberties. The capitalists were thoroughly occupied with and satisfied by their extension of world trade, their creation of the proletariat and industry and their accumulation of capital. ’Economic freedom’ was their chief concern and as long as the state supported their exploitative social position, the state’s composition and separateness were none of their concern.
The relative independence of the state was not a main characteristic of capitalism, however, but merely an expression of capitalistic growth within incomplete capitalistic conditions. The further development of capitalism implied the capitalisation of the state. What the state lost in ‘independence’ it gained in power; what the capitalists lost to the state they regained in increased social control. In time the interests of state and capital became identical, which indicated that the capitalist mode of production and its competitive practice were now generally accepted. State-wide, nationally-organised capitalism made it apparent once more that it had subdued all opposition, that the whole of society, including the labour movement -- and no longer merely the capitalist entrepreneurs -- had become capitalistic. That the capitalisation of the labour movement was an accomplished fact was manifest in its increasing interest in the state as the instrument of emancipation. To be ‘revolutionary’ meant escaping the narrow ‘trade union consciousness’ of the period of Manchester-capitalism, fighting for the control of the state and increasing the latter’s importance by extending its powers over ever wider areas of social activity. The merging of state and capital was simultaneously the merging of both with the organised labour movement.
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dialectician said:
fuck national political cultures though. It was those very national political cultures which opened up the playing field for identity politics - and, really, America's imperialism when it comes to idpol, but the left is too unwilling to criticise the nation state - even though the class relationship is present within the value form as such.
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I’d argue the opposite is the case. The left cannot engage intellectually or politically with the nation state. It’s why it got Brexit so wrong.

I think the way to approach this question isn’t about where you’d want to end but where you begin. On that basis we can say two things: 1. The nation state remains a critical, possibly even the most critical, way that capital arranges itself and achieves ‘consent’. second, most people view the world through the prism of the nation state and community imagined or constructed or otherwise. Certainly most working class people do.

If that’s where we start from, and I think we have to, then we can move from there. Starting from a point of ‘fuck the nation state’ takes us not very far in my experience
 
Smokeandsteam said:
I’d argue the opposite is the case. The left cannot engage intellectually or politically with the nation state. It’s why it got Brexit so wrong.

I think the way to approach this question isn’t about where you’d want to end but where you begin. On that basis we can say two things: 1. The nation state remains a critical, possibly even the most critical, way that capital arranges itself and achieves ‘consent’. second, most people view the world through the prism of the nation state and community imagined or constructed or otherwise. Certainly most working class people do.

If that’s where we start from, and I think we have to, then we can move from there. Starting from a point of ‘fuck the nation state’ takes us not very far in my experience
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perhaps, but isn't this what rank-and-file labour party people also say? and as we can see all their attempts to engage with the nation state have led to nothing but capitulation and reneging on basic principles. The question isn't fuck the nation state - although that's my personal position granted, but how to ensure that people don't renounce fundamentals. I just don't think anyone has offered a convincing way of how that can be done in political party formations.
 
dialectician said:
perhaps, but isn't this what rank-and-file labour party people also say? and as we can see all their attempts to engage with the nation state have led to nothing but capitulation and reneging on basic principles. The question isn't fuck the nation state - although that's my personal position granted, but how to ensure that people don't renounce fundamentals. I just don't think anyone has offered a convincing way of how that can be done in political party formations.
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The key difference between us and the Labour Party of course is that Labour not only thinks the nation state is inevitable but also, under pressure, always puts the ‘national interest’ above the interests of the class. A critical point.
 
Smokeandsteam said:
The key difference between us and the Labour Party of course is that Labour not only thinks the nation state is inevitable but also, under pressure, always puts the ‘national interest’ above the interests of the class. A critical point.
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Sure, but I'm arguing that labour unconsciously has no choice but to put the national interest above the interest of the class. I'm asking how one can engage with the nation state - unless you're arguing that this engagement won't take the form of political parties.

Or put it in a phrase from Mattick, how do you ensure a working class labour movement is not capitalised?

For instance, I agree that the labour party is not really social democratic (in the European mould) - the closest we had was the BSP, but the European social democracy also voted for war credits, whilst advocating proletarian internationalism during peacetime!
 
dialectician said:
No, quantitatively. it's still the same capitalism in terms of qualities, it's just that the capitalist state-form worldwide has expanded its quantitative scope, especially after WW II and the decolonisation and national liberation movements.
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Fair enough - just figured the quantitative difference would be obvious given differences in timescale - hence maybe you meant the other one.
 
8ball said:
Fair enough - just figured the quantitative difference would be obvious given differences in timescale - hence maybe you meant the other one.
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It is obvious but I don't think the left has really come to terms with it, hence the afterlife of anti-imperialism to liberate the oppressed from feudal comprador domination, even though that basically never applies in these cases.

In this sense, the traditional post-war left allowed identity politics to fester, especially its Maoist varieties in the US.
 
The language of oppression is also straight out of Stalinist-maoism, oppressed nations and the like. This is the language of a technical intelligentsia wanting liberation from a colonial aristocracy. In the US, given no such aristocracy existed, this became a new form of middle class career consolidation. Goldner talks about it quite a bit here.

But Elbaum does put his finger on the fact that the Third World Marxist- Stalinist- Marxist-Leninist and Maoist milieu was much more successful, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, in attracting and influencing militants of color. And he is equally right in saying that most of the Trotskyist currents, not to mention the “post-Trotskyists” to whom I was closest, were partially blind to America’s “blind spot”, the centrality of race, in the American class equation. The ISC, when I was in it in Berkeley in the late 1960’s, was all for black power, and (like many other groups) worked with the Black Panthers, but itself had virtually no black members. Trotskyist groups such as the SWP did have some, as did all the others. but there is no question that Elbaum’s milieu was far more successful with blacks, Latinos, and Asians (as was the CPUSA). To cut to the quick, I think that the answer to this difference was relatively straightforward. As Elbaum himself points out, many people of color who threw themselves into the ferment of the 1960’s and 1970’s and joined revolutionary groups were the first generation of their families to attend college, and were-whether they knew it or not– on their way into the middle class. Thus it is hardly surprising, when one thinks about it, that they would be attracted to the regimes and movements of “progressive” middle-class elites in the Third World. This was just as true, in a different way, for many transient militants of the white New Left, similarly bound (after 1973) for the professional classes, not to mention the actually ruling class offspring one found in groups such as the Weathermen. Elbaum does point out that the white memberships of many Third World Marxist groups were from working-class families and were similarly the first generation of their families to attend college. He also shows a preponderant origin of such people in the “prairie radicalism” (i.e. populism) of the Midwest, in contrast to the more “European” left of the two coasts, one important clue to their essentially populist politics. These are important social- historical- cultural insights, which could be developed much further. Charles Denby’s Black Worker’s Notebook (Denby was a member of Raya Dunayevskaya’s New and Letters group) effectively identifies the middle-class character of the Black Power milieu around Stokely Carmichael et al., as well as black workers’ distance from it; the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers similarly critiqued the black nationalist middle class, though it was hardly anti-nationalist itself.)
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breaktheirhaughtypower.org

Break Their Haughty Power » Review: “Revolution in the Air” by Max Elbaum

<p>Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of the grotesque Stalinist- Maoist- ‘Third World Marxist” and Marxist-Leninist groups and...
breaktheirhaughtypower.org
 
Here is something I came across that is literally identity politics, in that it is a government-commissioned report into how changing identities could influence policy.


It’s a cross-disciplinary academic report, which makes it interesting reading. They draw upon those various disciplines to conceive of identity across three overlapping dimensions — social, biographical and biometric — noting that the implications and reality of identity change across these can be qualitatively different.

This was an interesting comment regarding why identities matter to policy makers:
Identities influence people’s behaviour, but are not necessarily predictive of behaviour, especially at the level of the individual. While identities can provide a guide to likely behaviours (for example, a worker would be expected to travel to their place of work), it is important to understand which identities could come to the fore at any particular time and disrupt behavioural patterns (for example, the worker might instead stay at home to care for their sick child). As there are many potential variables which can affect the situation, it is problematic to extrapolate in simple terms from an ‘identity’ to ‘behaviour’.
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I think that is a neat encapsulation of some of the issues raised in this thread. Identity politics tends to want to make that extrapolation, and not just in relation to behaviour either but also in terms of interests.
 
Meant to post this sooner (but forgot).

The article’s premise is that black and Latino Trump supporters (but really applies to anyone from a racial minority who is on the right) aren’t black or Latino people after all, but in fact are part of a new racial grouping ‘multi-racial whiteness’.

This adjustment allows a number of positions to be adopted:

1. That black and Latino people cannot hold reactionary views,
2. That the prism through which all of politics can be boiled down to is a battle between two competing identity blocs
3. Most significantly, we see that some ‘anti-racists’ have come full circle and in doing are required to adopt a set of reactionary politics that’s once designated certain groups who were once othered (the Irish, for instance) to become “white”.

Astonishing stuff.

 
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Another useful piece from KM, who seems to be the one ‘thinker’ in the mainstream media really digging underneath the ‘culture war’ to unearth precisely what’s going on and why.

As Malik notes here, being critical of ideas that some “may call “woke”. Of viewing white people as the problem. Of seeing racism where the problem may be other forms of discrimination. Of the concept of white privilege. Of presenting disagreement as bigotry. Of the politics of identity.
The anti-wokeness shtick that has suddenly erupted is, though, equally unattractive. Part of the problem is that so many words critical to political debate have lost meaning. Fascism. Radicalism. Racism. Words used so promiscuously that their value is only as a means of political positioning. To say “Boris Johnson heads a far-right government” or “JK Rowling is a bigot” is not to engage in discussion but to signal the tribe to which one belongs

Dismissing something as “woke” is similarly a means of marking out territory rather than engaging in meaningful debate.”


 
After Andrew Neil mentioned the 'w' word the other day, Twitter was full of Dictionary Bores proudly spending literally no time or effort investigating the fascinating reality of what 'woke' means. Did they really think American university campuses all started to mis-conjugate the verb 'to wake' wrongly? I mean really.

The truth is so much more fascinating and I am surprised that Kenan Malik quotes James Lindsay yet still doesn't understand it. As Lindsay says,

"The hard truth is this: if you don’t yet understand this, you don’t know the fight we’re in or have the slightest idea what to do about it."
 
Geoffers said:
After Andrew Neil mentioned the 'w' word the other day, Twitter was full of Dictionary Bores proudly spending literally no time or effort investigating the fascinating reality of what 'woke' means. Did they really think American university campuses all started to mis-conjugate the verb 'to wake' wrongly? I mean really.

The truth is so much more fascinating and I am surprised that Kenan Malik quotes James Lindsay yet still doesn't understand it. As Lindsay says,

"The hard truth is this: if you don’t yet understand this, you don’t know the fight we’re in or have the slightest idea what to do about it."
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I gave that a go. (slow day)

And nope, can't say I'm all that much the wiser. Other than that he likes writing 'woke' a lot. That and 'Critical Social Justice'. And talking about such things as if there were some group out there with membership subs and a rule book.

I'm with Malik - as soon as I hear someone using a term like 'woke' I assume there isn't going to be all that much that is worthwhile in what they subsequently say. I think that Lindsay essay may be a case in point.
 
Well from what I can make out in the Lindsay article, he appears to be warning about a position that considers the basics of argument (logic, evidence, etc) to be unnecessary, and he quotes one person to somehow prove that this is 'the fight we're in'.

I dunno. I don't have any experience of engagement with that. Sounds more like a position espousing Trumpist 'fake news' than anything to me.
 
Geoffers said:
After Andrew Neil mentioned the 'w' word the other day, Twitter was full of Dictionary Bores proudly spending literally no time or effort investigating the fascinating reality of what 'woke' means. Did they really think American university campuses all started to mis-conjugate the verb 'to wake' wrongly? I mean really.

The truth is so much more fascinating and I am surprised that Kenan Malik quotes James Lindsay yet still doesn't understand it. As Lindsay says,

"The hard truth is this: if you don’t yet understand this, you don’t know the fight we’re in or have the slightest idea what to do about it."
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I think it might be that Kenan Malik, whatever other shortcomings he may have, is capable of recognising and understanding that James Lindsay is a daft twat. I did have a go at reading Lindsay's stuff, this bit quite tickled me (emphasis in original):
Theirs [that is, the worldview held by the Evil Woke] is, very much in particular, not liberal.
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People who are... not liberal? Whatever next?
 
Except that is how some people are defining it in order to defend it.

The real definition is fascinating though isn't it? Even hypothetically. Angry young people who don't want to hear logic or evidence, don't want to discuss ideas, but are entirely focussed on what tribe you belong to and how oppressed or privileged it is.
 
That first person you link to also says '"Politically correct" means "polite" and "sensitive to others feelings"'. Do you think that, based on this evidence, "politically correct" is also a precise and helpful piece of terminology to use?
 
Geoffers said:
The truth is so much more fascinating and I am surprised that Kenan Malik quotes James Lindsay yet still doesn't understand it. As Lindsay says,

"The hard truth is this: if you don’t yet understand this, you don’t know the fight we’re in or have the slightest idea what to do about it."
Click to expand...
OK, I've now got around to reading that Malik essay, and I'm curious about what it is that you think Malik doesn't understand and he needs to learn from Lindsay. For the record, here's the part where Malik quotes Lindsay:
Kenan Malik said:
Consider the strange case of James Lindsay. An American mathematician, last year he published with Helen Pluckrose Cynical Theories, a critique of postmodernism and critical theory. Lindsay has a particular bugbear about woke Jews. “Extra rightwing antisemitism”, he tweeted recently, “is arising because lots of progressive Jews are nonsensically Woke.”

He claimed, too, that the Frankfurt School – a group of German and German-American Marxists that emerged in the interwar years – wanted “to end Western Civilization and is almost wholly comprised of Jews. This allows antisemites to recruit new antisemites”. Critics who rightly condemned this as blaming Jews for antisemitism were accused of spreading “smears”. An obsession with wokeness, as much as with whiteness, can make you blind.
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I think that Malik is correct there, and that "antisemites are able to recruit because there really was a conspiracy of Jews who wanted to destroy civilisation" is not a helpful way of understanding and explaining the world. Is it your contention that Malik is getting it wrong, and that he needs to adopt more of Lindsay's ideas?
 
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