identity politics – just moving along like everyone else

zenosanalytic:

waragainstintelligence:

Identity has become the axis of so much university activism because, for all the radical posturing associated with it, identity politics does not threaten the established order of society. It promotes a moralistic and self-indulgent anti-politics, where a person’s use of language and the purity of their thinking matters more than confronting collectively the material conditions and social relations under which they are forced to live. It creates a simulation of political struggle – one that doesn’t merely fail to challenge the material inequality and unfreedom of late capitalism, but fundamentally aligns with the dynamics and interests of its atomised, spectacle-driven society. It is a perfect mirror of consumerism, playing-upon the individual’s desires for real freedom, only to perpetuate and prettify the conditions of their alienation.

But naw though.

First, any critique of “Identity Politics” that ignores the fact that USian conservative politics is Entirely “identity politics” in the form of white nationalism and white supremacy just flat-out should not be taken seriously because of the enormous bad-faith it’s being made in.

And Second, that you choose to target “university activism” is telling because what is the “identity politics” you are decrying here? Antiracism activism, Academic Parity activism(Non-Anglo Studies, etc), the BDS movement, Feminism, Queer activism; this is the “university activism” commonly meant by “Identity Politics” in our political parlance. So non-whites protesting for recognition of and respect for their humanity; women fighting to end their exploitation and force our society to look at it; queers fighting for the basic fucking dignity to be allowed to live their lives in peace. That’s what you’re attacking as “radical posturing”, “moralistic”, and “self-indulgent”: people coming together as a community to pressure the rest of their society to acknowledge and respect them by extending them the same legal protections and substantive rights as those which that society centers as “normal”: the white, the wealthy, and the male.

You are taking the most fundamental, dynamic, and successful political work to establish a more egalitarian and equitable society of the last century -the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and Queer Equality- and labeling all of it “anti-political”. Ironically your claim itself is far closer to the history of “antipolitics” in philosophy; you’re no better than Plato, looking at people he dislikes having the temerity to make their voices heard and saying it’d be better off for everyone if they just shutup and let the “Better Sort”, with the “Wisdom” to see society’s REAL problems, handle things.

Then Third, there’s the sheer breathtaking, ahistorical arrogance of the conspiratorial assertion at the center of this argument. “Identity Politics does not threaten the
established order of society”? Really? On what basis is that claim made? “Established Society” has spent and continues to spend millions of dollars and labor-hours on police suppression and
subversion of anti-racist activism; has spilled and continues to spill millions of gallons of ink and electrons on
dismissing and denouncing the feminist fight for recognition and
justice; has struggled and continues to struggle so endlessly –from the courts to the streets and from
pharmacy-counters to then legislative-bench– to keep gender and sexual
minorities labeled “deviant” and barred from the legal affirmations and
protections of its mainstream: why does the Capitalist class do this when it considers none of them nor the reforms they champion a threat to the order they have established? The claim that Capitalist States -the same States that have struggled so
mightily to suppress these movements and failed through the power of
politics- “Allow” the struggle for social justice and equality to exist
as a distraction, that the entire arc of the various Civil Rights
struggles of the 20th century are a “Simulation” planned out and put on
by Capitalists to distract people from “real politics”, and that none of it really matters is so facially facile, so tin-lined in its basic conception, that it’s quite possible even Dan Brown would blush to write it, yet somehow it is taken seriously. And what are these “real politics” “Identity Politics” distracts from? Why, the
very material conditions and social relations these “Identity” movements have been, and are actively
engaged with and dedicated to, changing in a more egalitarian direction. Imagine That.

So fundamentally this is a contradictory argument. It grants political primacy and “reality” to the very structures which “Identity” activism seeks to change, while labeling that activism a distraction from changing those structures. For some reason, you’ve chosen to deny the radical nature of 20th Century “Identity Politics”: to deny the intense connections between anti-poverty activism and Civil Rights activism; to deny that Planned Parenthood has been one of the most effective and reliable providers of general healthcare to low-income communities precisely BECAUSE of its dedication to feminist ideals and politics; to deny the central role of Queer activism and Queer politicians in liberalizing US politics; to deny the role of political racism in undermining Unions and pro-Labor politics in the US, and thus the centrality of confronting political racism with political antiracism if ever a labor-based politics is to succeed; to deny the essential intersectional nature of any political nature truly dedicated to egalitarianism and liberty.

I don’t know why you’ve chosen to something so wrong-headed and misleading, but I know that it’s wrong, and that you sound far more like Jonathan Chait and Andrew Sullivan in writing it than you do Marx or Kropotkin. Well, at least your nametag is apt.