Digression: fucking call out culture.
What annoys me most about call-out culture is that we have the tools to deal with it and go beyond it.
As a GenX-er, I know that you can have effective, temporally limited, objective-related political alliances - which both draw on the strengths and circumvent the limitations of 'identity politics'.
How do I know? Because this is how the issues arising from AIDS were addressed, by and large.
Precisely because the issue was overwhelming and enormously time-sensitive, an effective, pragmatic means of political organising cane into being.
I always go on about this book - but I think it matters: Mouffe and Laclau's 'Hegemony and Socialist strategy' was, in part, a praxis that grew out of those movements: theorising them, describing them, outlining where they could move forward.
What they saw was a muscular, re-vivified Gramscianism.
It influenced many of the successful social political movements we see now (eg. Climate change groups).
There are short-comings: there needs to be some space created - alongside or afterwards - to interrogate the bases in which individual, ad hoc alliance groups are constituted; interrogations of the assumptions by which groups are constituted and how political objects are chosen.
And that interrogation has to be done in a living, positive way; one that sees it as a critique to keep action going and alliances being forged, rather than the pursuit of illusory purity.
This was work Anne Marie Smith was doing - but has stopped, unfortunately.
Anyway - it's all there, in history, as a resource and tool. But cultural memory is terrifying.
I came across a thread on a Twitter arguing the 80s were apolitical.
And I just thought, 'Where the fuck were you?'