On Identity Politics

This is reprinted from my MA thesis, and I'm posting it mostly as a gesture of solidarity with Emily, who will have some personal things to say about her own encounters with "identity activists" when she finishes a long post over at Fiercely Feminist.

Identity-based radical politics argues that the best way to fight systemic injustice is through organized resistance by those groups most clearly marginalized within the system. These same proponents, however, reject class as a ground for identity because it seems to "erase" other identities—race, gender, sexual orientation—which they see as more victimized by the system. In turn, they view class affiliation as ineffective as a basis for political organization. In a recent issue of New Left Review, Michael Lind writes: "At the end of the twentieth century we now have enough examples of democratic regimes to know that parties based on class affiliation rather than other aspects of identity—regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious—are the exception rather than the rule" (99). Lind concludes that this fact delegitimizes Marxism:

In many democracies, then, class alignments are fairly weak, compared to
‘primordial’ ties, particularly where there are deep and enduring cleavages
among sub-national communities defined by race, religion, region or other
non-economic factors. Marxists may wish that most democratic party systems were
organized around debates over the means of production, but they are not, and it
simply will not do to dismiss all of the non-economic concerns of real voters in
real democracies as trivial diversions by "bourgeois" parties—particularly given
the fact that many of the intellectuals and activists of "proletarian" leftist
parties are so seldom proletarians themselves. Confronted with the fact that the
majority in most democracies, including a majority of the working class, rejects
radical leftism, middle-class leftists often console themselves with the thought
that the "people" have been brainwashed by "the capitalists" or "the interests."
Of course, if the people are really so stupid and vulnerable to propaganda one
must wonder whether they are capable of self-government at all. (99)

One sees in Lind’s argument many of the metaphysical assumptions that characterize an identity-based retreat from socialist politics: the "primordial" nature of these other identities, the inevitability of capitalism, and the tacit denial of the role of establishment rhetoric in erasing class-consciousness.

Moreover, Lind’s dismissal of Marxism contains an implicit (and undocumented) argument that most Marxists are not really "working class" but rather bourgeois academics. Solidarity activist Justin Schwartz concludes from his own political experience that nearly "all socialist theorists and leaders have been middle class, as are almost all socialists in the U.S. today." He adds: "try talking to workers about socialism" (40-1). Proponents of identity politics believe that anti-oppression movements must abandon both class and socialism: class because people do not recognize it the way they recognize their racial, ethnic, spiritual, or sexual identities; socialism because it offers only an economic structure, and does not proceed from the metaphysics of identity and difference.

However, critics of identity politics contend that the movement’s aims and achievements are not nearly as far-reaching as the anti-capitalist struggle. Mary Marcel argues that many one-time radicals have chosen "to privilege one area of oppression and stick with it, to the exclusion of any other ‘distracting’ matters." As a result, she claims, "the specific category of class oppression has often gotten transformed or subsumed within the structure and praxis of some other kind of liberatory movement, while losing the overt language of the critique of capitalism" (n. pag.). The reasons for the move away from class struggle have been more material than critico-theoretical, since

to some extent the success of liberatory movements, or perhaps I should say
their partial or nascent success, at moving at least some of their number from
the positions of absolute economic and social marginalization has weakened or
blunted the solidarity of such movements, to either keep fighting until everyone
else is free and the revolution has been televised, or, to form coalitions and
totalize the efforts of what may have begun as a single-issue agenda into an
all-encompassing one. Not all liberatory movements critique the capitalist
system in which their specific oppression is created. Many seek merely a more
comfortable place within that system, and are satisfied once that has been
accomplished. (Marcel n. pag.)

Identity politics are "easier" to mobilize around than class politics. Since it is possible to satisfy many of the immediate, reform-oriented material demands of particular identity groups (while it is impossible under the current system to liberate an entire working class from wage oppression), identity movements win small victories. Political scientist Michael Parenti sees these victories as winning "limited to changes in procedure and personnel, leaving institutional class interests largely intact" (13). Other critics complain that attempts to introduce class into discussions of movement theory or strategy are discouraged—forbidden, in a manner of speaking—in forums from classroom to meeting hall "by Right and Left alike" (Spivak 294-5).

To summarize, identity-based politics reject the notion of history as material struggle, positing in its place a concept of oppression based on the ideas of race, gender, sexuality, religion, language, or other signatory identity. These movements affirm a struggle over resources, but they see these resources as consisting of the consciousness of identities, ideologies such as racism or patriarchy, and only indirectly connected to the system of resource distribution. Moreover, identity-based movements dismiss class struggle; they believe most anti-capitalists are not workers anyway and that class is a poor basis for political organization. Finally, identity-based movements believe that theory-building can only occur within particular identity groups, rejecting attempts to universalize or combine divergent causes and types of oppression. Identity politics are a material, as well as an ideological, retreat from Marxism.

Works Cited:

Lind, Michael. "Why there will be no revolution in the U.S.: A Reply to Daniel Lazare." New Left Review, January-February 1999: 97-117.

Marcel, Mary. "The Marxian Afterlife: The Vanishing Category of Class in Cultural Politics." Paper presented at the annual conference of the National Communication Association, New York City, 22 November 1998.

Parenti, Michael. "Reflections on the Politics of Culture, Monthly Review, 1 February 1999.

Schwartz, Justin. "The Final Goal and the Movements." Against the Current, May/June 1994, 40-41.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988) 270-295.