[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

I read the words "identity politics" as just a right wing complaint that suddenly all these pesky brown people, gays, disabled folks and women are demanding a place at the debate and decision table. That's just inclusivity, moving more closely to what the founding documents for this country profess (acknowledging that we've never attained the goals.) But, WTF, we can fucking aspire to the rhetoric, can't we?

I believe everyone has the right to speak. The problem with Identity Politics (capital A capital P) is that it prioritises certain groups over others and prohibits the critique of certain positions through de-platforming, the introduction of 'safe-spaces', etc.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

the thing with identity politics is that it’s always been there though. tribalism is the constant of what the marxists like to call the barbaric stage of society. even in the so-called logic of fascism there is a core of irrationality and identity politics—blood and race. so il duce invades ethiopia, adolph exterminates the jews and subjugates the slavs, etc. the english royal family thus changes their german names to windsor. so very ethnic]


communism ignored ethnicity and look at what happened: the breakup of yugoslavia gave us a long bloody civil war and ethnic cleansing. the soviets split back into their republics and it hasn’t been as popular to talk about the bloodbath in the caucasus but that mess will continue for at least another century.

the enlightenment and classical liberalism glossed over the expansion of empires that justified their conquests on the bases of ethnicity. france in algeria, belgians in the congo, england all around the globe, the dutch in indonesia and south africa, spain and portugal in the americas, continental genocide, the slave trade, etc. sure there were economic interests at stake but those were justified on the basis of ethnic or religious arguments. the white man’s burden, the advancement of christian civilization, manifest destiny vs. the wild irish, the beastly negro, the primitive indian, etc etc etc. and it was always a man’s world.

at the same time many of the modern republics rose from ethnic / nationalists impulses out of the old empires. greeks freed from the turks, ireland freed from england, finland out of russia or was it sweden? etc etc.africa is still figuring it out but let’s not forget rwandan machetes. latin america is a bit different, too long to get into it, but it was the creoles (whites) lording it over brown people—so, ethnic. now catalonia wants to break free again. scotland might try again. every ethnic group is looking to separateas the world becomes more integrated. laugh at alvin toeffler all you want but he saw this coming.

do i find identity politics appealing? as a global mongrel, i certainly do not. but that’s also based on my identity no? hahahaha. well, everyone is a mongrel really if you ask me, but many find the label repugnant/insulting. dumbfucks love racial purity and hate science.

but anyway, identity politics has lived longer and harder than any modern political ideology. everyone believes they’re the chosen people, or beyond that, simply “the people”, and the rest are just barbarians, bar bar bar, barking unintelligible words, or you know what, merely animals—let’s put them to work.

intersectionality etc is merely the current way of describing those on the receiving end of the ethnically centered and gendered power systems that haven been with us since the dawn of time. i find it absurd and logical at the same time. it’s a form of resistance, but it goes nowhere.

the talk of white working class you find so objectionable is precisely what’s going on here: the white working class left out of the feast of globalization embracing identity politics. it really is an ethnic voting block.

when will this end? i have no fucking idea. but it’s been with us since the dawn of our species. and none of the grownup political ideologies have properly grappled with it.

my hopes are of course on liberalism, not in the “left liberal” sense that came to be in america but on the broader one that gave us modern democracy, human rights, economic freedom, and protects the individual from collective oppression, updated for our time. the full promise of the enlightenment.

the unavoidable march of globalization might be delayed but can’t be stopped. it’s been inevitable since we left africa, and the only real question is what are the values that will shape it.

There's too many points here to address individually but a lot of what you say (most of which no reasonable person could disagree with) hinges on the idea that Identity Politcs is just a politics that acknowledges peoples identity. Of course, pretty much all politics does that, but the kind of politics I'm talking about is more specific than that. I'm talking about a particular kind of Marxism that emerged after 68, which replaced its emphasis on class and economics with 'oppression' and culture. This was welded to ideas about power from people like Foucault which gives rise to this strange topsy-turvy world we see now, where the daughter of a banker at Harvard can tell an unemployed guy from the rust belt to check his privilege. Where the 'Left' are willing to fall behind a politician if they say the right thing about an oppressed group, regardless of the fact their neo-liberal economics are essentially Reagonomics/Thatcherism on steroids - and unquestionably do more damage to the oppressed people of the world than someone who might innocently miss-apply a gender pronoun.

The world is in a seriously dangerous state right now so we need to be serious about it. Identity Politcs just seems like a frivolous distraction to me. Decadent in the broadest sense of the word.