Identity politics

Was shocked to read today that in Sweden, the Gvt has sent a leaflet to everyone's homes advising them how to prepare for war! shock

I’ll check my mailbox at lunch :) we had something like that a while back and we regularly get ‘don’t worry about the jets! Just practicing!’ Leaflets through. There’s also plans to bring conscription back (dh was one of the last years before they got rid of it so he’s done his year in the military) and an extra unit announced on Gotland (island in the Baltic.)

Don’t forget we’ve had Russian subs in the archipelago here.

Mind you they have to come through Finland first and those guys are hardcore - didn’t work out so well for the Russians last time they tried ;)

Yy Lang - it’s laughable to think corbyn’s labour (or corbyn) is ‘hard left’.

I also dismay at how often ‘communism’ and ‘totalitarianism’ are conflated...

Hot - for me the issues are separate and the importance I allocate to them is personal.

Economic issues, which labour have moved back to attlee labour on (from more right than thatcher under Blair) have up until now been more important to me than the other equalities issues that I believe they are getting very wrong.

That’s enough for my membership and my vote at the moment.

Left wing/right wing has always been almost exclusively about economic issues.

I do wonder what will happen now with a variety of social issues being attached to left and right.

@R0wantrees

Yes! Just reading those, the ones crying that he's a "straight white man" kind of illustrate his point for him

The comments under Tim Farron's tweet are interesting.

The idea of Corbyn's Labour as hard left is a strange one. The party is still triangulating on the basis of deserving and undeserving - see its manifesto calculation that it could get away with redistribution to students but not to benefits claimants or low income mothers. So it gave 4x the money to the former than it did to the latter. No party interested in genuine economic marginalisation would have done that.

It’s hard to see the difference between the left and the right nowadays. Increasingly it seems to be deciding against whom and in what way they discriminate, which is not what the left should be about. My automatic Labour vote is now in question, and the question is who else can I vote for?

Just seen this tweet from Tim Farron at the Oxford Union

"I argue that the poison in our national life is identity politics. ‘This is who I am: you accept me on all my terms, or else you commit violence against me.’ Identity politics is insidious, irrational, and leads to decisions that threaten our liberty."

twitter.com/OxfordUnion/status/998647034126241792

I'm not a royalist by any means but I had a v nostalgic feeling on Saturday that the country felt united for once and how long it had been since I'd last felt that, think it was the Olympics which was 6 years ago! There doesn't seem to be much that unites us at the moment, Brexit, income inequality, millenials vs babyboomers etc. Things like Twitter, Facebook and the proliferation of so many TV channels mean we're all at risk of living in our own little bubbles where our own world views are reinforced. We seem to be losing the art of empathy and listening to each other too. It's all a v dangerous mix and I don't know what the solution is. It's not just the UK either, it's a worldwide phenomenon. Was shocked to read today that in Sweden, the Gvt has sent a leaflet to everyone's homes advising them how to prepare for war!

Politically labour have moved back to attlee labour position anyway, but the party is still absolutely in the control of the establishment Blair created... divorced from the WC/UC.

Labour has been a mess since Blair made it into an establishment party and introduced this crap about ‘winning elections’ which so many still believe. It was very easy to do since people having political careers tend to have high levels of narcissism and it is easy to give up principles.

I have always been more left than labour. Labour under Blair was more right wing (but less authoritarian) than thatcher politically. Labour are now very similar to attlee’s labour. They still are not as left as me. I’m not expecting them to move further to the left.

I haven’t left the party.

I am watching what happens with the expansion of the equalities portfolio from simple economic equality (essentially men’s rights) to include; women, LGBT, disability etc.

They are making the usual mistakes, at the moment this could be understandable as it is a new responsibility.

I will wait and see.

It’s not your parents generation that’s the problem, it’s a small slice of society asset stripping and totally shafting everyone else

I'm also going to re-read Ben Elton's first book 'Stark', I think it was published in 1990 (ish?) and from what I remember of it, suspect it has even more relevance now.

I agree with points made on previous threads that identity politics bullshit is being weaponised against and forced on the WC/UC primarily by the leftie middle classes.

Bowlofbabelfish Thanks for your post and thread. I've been having very similar thoughts and conversations this week.

My glib idea is that we would all benefit from temporarily switching the internet off and for people to all read 5 books (given they have at the least gone through editorial process providing they aren't vanity published)!

A blog or post is increasingly given the same 'legitimate' weight as a researched article, paper or book. I think Michael Gove's comment during the referendum about us all 'having had enough of experts' is both perceptive and terrifying.

I think that the speed at which people see and react to something on social media without considering or understanding its context or background is having a massively detrimental effect. Also as most social media requires a binary response eg 'like' /'don't like' then there is little scope for nuanced discussion of ideas. As 'like' and 'don't like' are simplistically emotional responses then its unsurprising that there's little space for critical thinking, not least because this usually expands to include value judgements of 'good / bad'.

Tribalism whether in broad terms or within a single subject / post often seems to prompt people to join a side and then shout or attack the other side. The larger or louder a mob, the more power they often seem to have. In any other circumstance, this would not be the case.

Political decision making is (in my opinion) damaged by the influence that SM has on it. Not least because it disenfranchises chunks of the population.

We all need thinking time and the opportunity to reflect.
We all need to listen, talk and to be able to explore ideas.
We all need to be kinder.
I may need to go and read some books about the Luddites!

After watching that debate; I would not like to lose ‘the personal is political’, what I would like to lose is the individualism that corrupts it.

Identity politics is a cover and a distraction. Keep the proles busy arguing between themselves while the ruling class and big business in gross all the money and power for themselves.
It’s called divide and rule and it works fabulously.

Yy re woman.

And the end result being that ‘woman’ is no longer a class but a collection of random individuals.

It strikes me that there is nothing at all with ‘the personal is political’ the problem is how it has translated in practice within the context of individualism. ‘The personal is political’ as part of class analysis serves the purpose of making women’s class issues into a shared struggle. In individualism this has become ‘the political is personal’ and it is this that is the problem currently. It has been turned on it’s head.

Very good point. Thus woman has become a political category one can identify into - leaving it completely divorced from the root of oppression, which is male control of female reproductive capacity.

@fermatstheorem "Intersectionality was never intended to be, and should not be coopted, to be used as a form of identarian top-trumps at an individual level. It was meant to be a tool within the concept of class analysis."

Great post.

I touched on this in another thread. Part of the problem is that ideas like intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, etc is that they are just academic theories, you can't prove them but you can certainly debate them.

These theories are increasingly more mainstream and commonly accepted on the Left and becoming accepted as gospel.

Also, the way they're applied is becoming further and further removed from their original intention. As you rightly point out, it wasn't meant to be oppression olympics.

Like with "mansplaining", the original meaning was the "patronising way men explain things to women". Now "mansplaining" is thrown out far too casually any time a man expresses an opinion be it in real life or online. His gender is used to discredit or silence his opinion, when really opinions should be engaged with and evaluated on their content, not the group identity of the person giving that opinion

Part of the problem/issue is that everyone has a voice/platform due to social media. Platforms like Twitter only amplify the extreme voices on both sides, which further fuels the extreme voices.

I watched recently. It was interesting.

I wanted to expand on something JB kept saying about the origins. ‘The personal is political’ and how this came from 2nd wave feminism. JB paints a picture of problems with this approach and how she hated it in practice but the concept was a good one which provided language to describe women’s experiences as a class and why they matter.

It strikes me that there is nothing at all with ‘the personal is political’ the problem is how it has translated in practice within the context of individualism. ‘The personal is political’ as part of class analysis serves the purpose of making women’s class issues into a shared struggle. In individualism this has become ‘the political is personal’ and it is this that is the problem currently. It has been turned on it’s head.

Intersectionality was never intended to be, and should not be coopted, to be used as a form of identarian top-trumps at an individual level. It was meant to be a tool within the concept of class analysis.

Yes - intersectionality is about the application of systems power by institutions disproportionately marginalising certain groups. It has nothing at all to do with subjective identities.

And I worry because those turmoil events (black swan events, they’re called I think?) plus increasing economic inequality tend to be harbingers of societal turmoil and even collapse.

I too think this rings a bell. If things go pear-shaped over the next decade or two I think future historians will see major upheavals like Brexit as the symptoms rather than the cause. (Is anyone else following Italian politics at the moment? If 5 Star and La Lega are serious about their "parallel currency" of government bond issues, they could bring the Euro down, which - and I gather this is a view shared by many politicians in the EU - will make Brexit look like a side show).

One of the "canaries in the coal mine" for the collapse of civilisations is the growth, and rate of growth, of income inequality - and we're seeing that at unprecedentedly high levels in the western industrial world.