Identity Crisis

March 18, 2017 11:46 PM

Salar Mohandesi looks at identity politics from a left socialist perspective. Starting with some historical context (including the Combahee River Collective--previously!), Viewpoint Magazine examines the changing role and definition of identity in leftist/socialist politics.

Over the next few decades, these insights were codified into what we now understand as “identity politics.” But in the process, what began as a promise to push beyond some of socialism’s limitations to build a richer, more diverse and inclusive socialist politics, made possible something very different. Rooting political action in the identity of subjects offered a promising response to the most pressing political problem of the time, but it left an opening that would soon be exploited by those with politics diametrically opposed to those of the CRC.

This strategy was recently on display when Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s former communication director, attempted to explain the burst of anti-Trump protest following the inauguration. “You are wrong to look at these crowds and think that means everyone wants $15 an hour,” she said in an appearance on MSNBC in February. “Don’t assume that the answer to big crowds is moving policy to the left … It’s all about identity on our side now.”

Later in the piece:

This idea that one could draw such a direct line between identity and politics would become the basis of identity politics in its contemporary form, the core around which all these other elements – guilt, lifestylism, or the homogenization of groups – came to gravitate around over the next decade. Although this kind of thinking remained marginal at first, over the 1970s and 1980s, a vicious conservative backlash, the destruction of radical movements, the migration of political critique into the universities, the proliferation of single-issue campaigns, and the restructuring of capitalist relations all worked in unexpected ways to create the historical conditions that allowed identity politics to eventually achieve a kind of hegemony on the left.

But its limitations were clear from the outset. Most importantly, identity politics tended to flatten important distinctions within otherwise heterogeneous identities. It was in this context that the idea of “intersectionality” emerged. Although now regarded as synonymous with identity politics, the concept actually originated as a critique of its flaws.

posted by Joseph Gurl (2 comments total)

Hey, just a heads up that there may be a problem with that link. I'm getting a message that says "error establishing a database connection."
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:54 PM on March 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

Crap--I had the window open and it was fine, but yeah, seems borked rn

Here's the Google cache
posted by Joseph Gurl at 11:56 PM on March 18, 2017