Making the Case for Identity Politics as a Leftist

If you have spent any time on the political internet, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or most news sites, chances are you have seen many ‘decisive take downs of identity politics’. 'Identity politics' is apparently the most divisive, preachy, pretentious trend in the modern left and in society more generally, and we see the attacks come in from every side to confine it to the history books and to make sure it doesn’t get a hearing.

Sometimes 'identity politics’ is attributed to the Democratic National Congress and Hillary Clinton, appealing to women, LGBT people and ethnic minorities to get out the vote or claim their place in a corporate boardroom. Conversely, and most often, it is laid at the feet of a defective millennial culture (apparently too much avocado toast smooshes our critical faculties), the Black Lives Matter campaign and universities, especially within social science and humanities departments. A crisis is apparently facing education because there is no time for learning when we talk endlessly about each others pronouns and cushioning every topic to protect peoples feelings within the room (there is very little proof that this is happening at all!).

Identity politics is narcissism! Identity politics is prejudice from the Radical Left, because the rest of society sees ideas, not gender and skin colour! Identity politics prevents us from having unified political struggle! Identity politics is a conspiracy to shame white men!

Now, my aim here is not to defend everything attributed to this vague and dangerous beast named ‘Identity politics’. I couldn’t do that, because ‘Identity Politics’ is something which is now hurled at people to cut off whatever point they were making rather than one single position or set of issues even. I just want to argue for the reconsideration or occassionaly, rehabilitation of at least some aspects of it and to take the sting out of the moral panic that now surrounds this term and much of political life.

A quick search of Youtube or major news sites will quickly reveal the hysteria surrounding this term and its ‘divisive' nature and its apparently unique ability to hold back social progress and conversation. Now, I could examine thousands of examples on here, the Identity Politics Hate section of the online world probably by now has its own CBD and Lonely Planet guide, but I want to focus on examples from the left of the political spectrum. I believe that this is an issue, like being tough on crime, bringing in ASBOs or bombing middle eastern countries, which has become bipartisan and embraced across the mainstream political spectrum, and as we know from those examples, is never a good thing! I will attempt to call it out on my side, which is why this is a Leftist critique, looking specifically at the Scottish Independence Movement and the Democratic Party in the United States.

What motivated me to write this piece was in a tiny but surprising event. This argument cropped up in the most unlikely of places, the Bella Caledonia Facebook group which is usually a discussion forum for supporters of the ‘Yes’ movement for Scottish Independence. Now, this is a campaign that organises around the potential for a more equal and democratic society if Scotland left the United Kingdom (I know that this is a crude definition and there is more to independence than being able to elect centre-left governments who are allowed to decide on thing, but that is a lot of the focus). The furore erupted as one member posted a video of a college class in the US learning about structural disadvantage and privilege through the analogy of starting a race from different places based on factors that people cannot control; so far, so standard fair for a lefty site, something useful and harmless. However, one member of the group reacted to say that this was a clear example of ‘identity politics',which 'destroys everything it touches’, is ‘divisive' and cited the example of the Occupy movement as a casualty of identity politics. I replied to this member that identity politics is often a means of survival and self-preservation for many groups, based on women being disproportionately impacted by welfare cuts, by black men being profiled by police and mistreated within the criminal justice system, based on being subject to hate crimes, to which he replied that these claims were easily refuted (he did not refute them). At this point I was accused of ‘virtue signalling’ for pointing out my own privilege with regards to many of these issues and calling for the Yes movement to be more inclusive.

(Now, before I say any more, I realise how this sounds to the right, such a moan is a winning lottery ticket to a right-wing keyboard warrior- A leftist who is acting like you say we act, by being triggered and offended by someone dissenting within my little echo-chamber and how the intolerant Leftist has a 1000 word meltdown #intolerantLeft. Well I said it and i’m owning it, so you can’t act like the voice of reason later because I’ve done the reflective thing now. You can’t see but I am sticking my tongue out)

Another example appeared in this week in the Huffington Post. David Schultz, argued that identity politics is distracting the Democratic Party in the US and the wider left from brutal assaults on the working class from the recent Republican Party tax plan which has horrifically made it though the Senate. Now, the attention grabbling headline doesn’t really reflect the content of the article, but the jist of it is that Schultz argues that the Democratic party focusing on the New Left (Civil Rights, anti-war, feminist and LGBT activists) as a constituent group has taken away the focus from the Old Left and traditional issues of workplace organising and economic inequality. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama might appear ‘woke’, openly embrace minority groups and women but they do not create policies which would benefit the vast majority of people, especially those within these groups and the wider working class. Schultz even argues that Bill Clinton’s criminal justice reforms were some of the most racist policies that any president has ever put on the books and Obama began the process of mass deportation which Trump has so gladly escalated. It becomes very unclear that a focus on ‘New left identity politics’ is helpful at all, and that this rhetoric is what has unmoored social class (another identity category) and economic inequality from the Democratic party platform. It seems much much more likely that a slightly liberal position on gender and sexuality issues, at least in rhetoric is just about palatable to donors to the Democratic Party but that supporting organised labour makes Silicon Valley executives sweat . The 'identity politics' branding might have taken the place of supporting the American worker but it doesn’t allow them to achieving full intersectional social justice warrior status either- this is still a party that has very little to say about racist attacks on voting rights for instance. The answer to how to make progressive politics a much stronger force within the US is therefore just as likely to be MORE identity politics, in terms of policies that take on institutional racism, sexism and class inequality, not the abandonment of this.

To illustrate this point I would like to focus on issues of income and employment rights, and focus on a few recent reports to come out of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in the UK. Now, if you were to believe much of the centre, the right and reactionaries within newspapers, trade unions are dusty, socially conservative institutions ( what Schultz calls the Old Left). If anyone should be advocates of this analysis that social class struggle for higher standards of living comes before divisive and indulgent ‘identity politics’, it should be the TUC. What the TUC actually illustrates is that, for a collection of unions which comes together to bargain for greater worker protections and protecting people from destitution, more often than not, the most vulnerable w

. ‘ Here is the TUC in their own words:

'This is the piece of EU legislation that underpins lots of our rights to hours, breaks and holidays. It’s long been a target of the hard right, who want to give bosses even more power over workers.

When the directive came in, millions got paid holiday rights for the first time. Losing it would risk holidays for 7 million workers (4.7 million of them women, and many on zero-hours or part-time contracts).'

Radicals, in my opinion, should engage in struggles to do with class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability, all together, to have a realistic shot at fighting back against the worst machinations of capitalism and abuses of power. Any class struggle in the 21st Century is going to be an intersectional struggle, or it will fail to have any relevance at all.

The dangerous thing about this is that we have so much work to do to make our societies more inclusive and just and that seems to be being dismissed for barely a reason at all. It is not good enough to ditch identity struggles because certain people feel that they cannot share a platform with someone who once wrote a Tumblr blog about mansplaining or someone who requested to be referred to as the gender they identify as. It is also incredibly dangerous because those who are a real threat to us, the right, increasingly flirt with far right rhetoric, and are coming for us on multiple fronts.

The extreme economic inequality and poverty seen in our societies is being blamed on immigrants rather than the true culprits in corporate boardrooms and Neoliberal Governments. Equality under the law is by no means translating to an end to sexism, more opportunities for disabled people or ‘post-racial’ societies. The revanchism that we are currently seeing on trans-rights and the roll back of the welfare state, the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers- all are aided by this dismissal of ‘identity politics’. Challenging patriarchy and white supremacy and the patterns of disadvantage which they imprint on our lives by calling them out when we find them is always the more radical option, no matter how many centrists say that we are being divisive because they see ideas and character, not ethnicity, sexuality and gender.

If you can’t see that you are listening to an all male speakers panel at your radical organising night, it might be time you got 'woke’ up!

(I will look more into the ideology of the Alt-right in a future post, because it seems clear that intersectionality is a pretty effective antidote to this the true divisive venom of the far-right. The intersection of identity politics and economic struggle is something that really gets me on 10 unlike anything else and I want to look at the experience of disabled people in the UK to make extremely clear that this is one struggle in the next few weeks.)

Stuff I spoke about above

2017 Report by the Trade Unions Congress about Insecure Work and Ethnicity in the UK- https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/Insecure%20work%20and%20ethnicity_0.pdf

TUC petition to maintain the EU Working Time Directive - https://www.tuc.org.uk/blogs/boris-goves-plan-scrap-holiday-rights-millions

David Schultz in the Washington Post-Tax, Class, and the Limits of Identity Politics

- https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tax-class-and-the-limits-of-identity-politics_us_5a3923b1e4b0578d1beb7306