A brilliant left wing take down of identity politics

[leyat]

Wanted to share this video I just watched, it is a brilliant left wing take down of identity politics, totally worth making a cuppa and giving it a wee watch. Nice to have a new exciting online voice out there.

www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=2RmO9GUh8pM

(Also for those on twitter you can follow her @tan_1th)

It’s similar to the stuff I was saying re gay liberation. Old school labour is a movement primarily concerned with economic class and they will be perfectly willing to trade on or be silent on other issues in order to get down to business on that issue.

Feminists should not necessarily trust the Labour Party to achieve real things for women. If women’s liberation comes into conflict with economic class it will be jettisoned or traded.

*saying re gay liberation on the drag race thread

the commonality is women are always in a state of being told what they are or should be, and deviation from this is punished and policed.

You're right, and I'm going to quotish the excellent Lisa Muggeridge in saying that socialist misogynists and capitalist misogynists will argue all day about how best to put the boot on women's necks. Both sets view us as property: the former think we're public property and the latter think we're private property.

I wonder if there is also an element of trying to look good in a very simple way, while leaving the difficult issues untouched.

It worked with gay marriage.

I thought that was excellent. There were so many stand-out lines but I'll go with:

liberal feminism tries to be intersectional to the point of nothingness

as my favourite.

We seem to have borrowed the 'Liberal' rather than 'Left' thing from the States, and, increasingly, their racial politics too.

I'm fed up with articles trying to push me into the 'white male' box whereas I've always thought of myself as British, and am quite happy with all sorts of races and religions coexisting under the umbrella that is British identity. In short, I think pushing people to consider themselves as white first and foremost is not just frustrating (being the bad guy that identity politics always requires) but incredibly dangerous.

It's people playing with fire who don't know that fire is hot.

Listened to an interesting Podcast today about somebody running as a Democratic Candidate in the US mid terms. He wanted to run as a progressive (i.e. - socialist - wealth re-distribution) but when he met with donors to raise funds all - they demanded he moderate his economics - more of the Clinton era - don't rock the boat centrism. The social issue the donors all cared about was LGBT/trans rights.

Liberals LOVE this ideology because it allows them to 'look' progressive whilst leaving the status quo in place.

www.thisamericanlife.org/649/its-my-party-and-ill-try-if-i-want-to

I remember Bill Maher asking Ann Coulter if Trump would have found it harder to beat Bernie than Hillary. Much harder, came the reply, as Bernie cares about the people, and Hillary just cares about the Chamber of Commerce.

Bearing that in mind, it makes sense to spend more time talking about transwomen using women's toilets as it means you're spending less time talking about wealth redistribution etc (which rather proves DJLippy 's point.).

In my experience on and offline, socialists, social democrats and liberals alike have largely bought into the whole identity politics way of thinking about oppression, and the right has also happily lapped it up in the UK.

And there are some socialists, social democrats, liberals and right wing folks who see it for the bullshit that it is, but the issue is that the left is meant to apply class analysis to how we understand power structures, we are meant to reject individualism. In other words you would expect identity politics to be embraced by the non-religious right and many liberals precisely because it abandons dismantling power and instead upholds personal identity in a way where oppression is simply understood as a points system denoting who should be silenced and who shouldn't, as I say allowing those power structures to remain entrenched and largely unchallenged. As Tanitha said in the video, identity politics is ultimately a victory for capitalism.

So the bottom line is that the left is where this should not be happening, and the fact that it is is an abandonment of leftist politics. And the authoritarianism of the left, which again is something embraced across the left to quite a degree, compounds this problem by using identity politics as a means of restricting free speech, something the right is not doing. So I think it is very important we understand what is going on, as it helps us to challenge it. I've had countless conversations with others on the left who support identity politics. None of them can defend that support in a leftist context. I think Tanitha's video is great at exposing why....

identity politics is ultimately a victory for capitalism

Yes, indeed. It provides nicely delineated market segments. Apparently, you can spend years at elite universities these days and yet manage to be incapable of understanding this very obvious point while declaring yourself a leftist.

Spot on critique.

The reason why identity politics is both a dead-end and a trap for the left is because it’s a game that straight, patriotic, socially conservative, working-class white people can play too. We saw this in the 2016 US presidential election, when this group were encouraged to see themselves as an ignored, patronised, victimised minority ‘in their own country’.

This narrative is catnip for the populist right in all democratic societies. They can play the ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ game too, and they can play in with a brutal hardness that will crush the left.

The left must ditch the obsession with identity politics and rediscover what is supposed to be its fundamental purpose : representing the economic interests of ordinary working people and opposing the interests of globalised capital.

Thanks for this. Genuine question. Within class analysis do we only consider sex and race when they intersect with class?

Spent ages writing a response to my own question then lost it. Anyway sorry can't do links - I dug around and found an article in the new statesman from nov 2017 called something like "how identity politics has ruined the modern left'. More American in its focus but I found its explanation and critque of identity politics much clearer than the video (easier to be clearer in print).

Totally agree that the obsession with self and own identities and experiences is limiting if not put to any use in terms of structural changes to economic inequality in society. Breeds narcissism and the moral policing of others for their thinking is abhorrent.

But I worry a little when the suggested remedy appears to be a total abandonment of consideration of how people from different social groups are sometimes treated differently because they are a member of a less socially powerful group (e.g. race or sex).

I object to the notion that those of us on the right lack caring and empathy. I know for example more republicans in the US donate to charity relative to democrats and in larger amounts too.

I’m not very wealthy myself but I’ve done tonnes of unpaid volunteer work in my time and I’m politically conservative. If I were to be feeling particularly unkind I’d point out part of the lefts problem is it’s more important to be seen to be caring rather than to actually go out and do something about it, but I do know plenty of leftists who do roll their sleeves up and get stuck in, and I wouldn’t want to disrespect them.

That said I do feel frustrated that some people feel their social responsibility begins and ends with voting left once every 4/5 years and they delegate their own responsibility to the state to fix the worlds problems. Otherwise they only other thing they’ll do is bellyache on social media.

by the way, feminism is literally a type of identity politics.

No, feminism is not a type of identity politics, not at all. Feminism is rooted in biology. Biology that is common to just over half the human race. Nothing at all to do with identity.

Feminism is absolutely not identity politics. It is rooted in the material reality of biology.

Thanks Gardengeek that helps my thinking. So a key issue is to dial down the pomo and examine claims critically and how they relate to material reality?