Thread by @RodericDay

This is still the best essay on "Identity Politics" that I have read (by @RedMaistre, originally on The North Star).

I am always on the lookout for a compelling response to it.

Losurdo (so, Gramsci?) seems to be at the root of all my favourite Marxism.
redsails.org/on-identitaria…

The dismissive understanding of identity as trap parrots the position of its alleged opponents and simply gives it a negative meaning:

one can’t be [X] and be anything more than that at the same time; one can’t be [X] and understand anyone who is not [X] or anything else beyond being [X], because others’ human experiences are so opaque, and yours to them.

If identities are indeed fluid, they can hypothetically be cultivated and educated beyond any narcissistic cul-de-sac they may have arrived at, and there would be no reason for an antagonistic contradiction between them and socialist politics.

But instead, they are to be liquidated, because they “bar participation in the social totality.” It is unclear how this is the case, or what this means in practice.

If it refers to the exclusion suffered on account of being a certain identity, then it would be the fault of systemic oppression, not the identities themselves. The former should be the proper focus of attack.

If this argument is not referring to discriminatory treatment, then it seems to have the unfortunate implication that (for some unexplained reason) being-black, being-Palestinian, being-a-woman, etc., is incompatible with full participation in society.

Such views run into the grave problem that they contradict how radical politics has in fact unfolded, both in the core and the periphery. Either a great deal of what is conventionally considered revolutionary history has to be rejected, or it must be gravely misinterpreted.

The former option is openly taken by Rectenwald. The latter one is taken by Fisher, who at one point cites the example of Malcolm X and Che Guevara as authentically communist examples of “a psychedelic dismantling of existing reality.”

But the lives of both of these figures reveals a quite different dialectic than the liquidationist paradigm Fisher holds up.

Malcolm X thinking moved towards revolutionary universalism by fidelity to two particular experiences — that of being black in America, and being a follower of Islam — neither of which were static identities, but developed over time along with his overall political vision.

Nor would the trajectory of Che Guevara make any sense without his loyalties to an interconnected family of patrias — Argentina, Cuba, Latin America — and his sympathies for the plight of those throughout the world who were dispossessed of a homeland of their own by imperialism.

In neither case was the particular simply shed to reveal the “real” core of truth beneath all of the contingencies.

And surely this has also been the case with the radicalization of people who never achieved the celebrity of those two men. The mere abstract hope in a completely alien future that we cannot even yet imagine is rarely sufficient to make the leap towards resistance.

Nor is it always a concern for wages and workplace conditions that forces one to think in terms of revolution as opposed to resignation or incremental reform.

Often, it is the seizure of a name, of some fragments of experience, memory, and desire, and the refusal to surrender them up, that forces otherwise mute and dumb atomized individuals to confront the totality that encircles them.

What was formerly passively accepted destiny become then a means for self-creation and the construction of new polities. This process can take on many idiosyncratic forms.

What are usually called “identities” simply give public and political form to some of the more common manifestations of this phenomena, reflecting where the major objective contradictions of the system are located (race, gender, nationality, etc.).

While the sources for this subjectivation are different, all function by the integration of revolutionary principles into our lives as social animals who feel, love, remember, and hope, as well as think.

With the entrance of identities, the rejection of capitalism becomes no longer just about the prospect of economic improvement, but the recovery and transformation of ourselves.

Nor does this emotional investment isolate us, or at least necessarily isolate us. Once we have come to the conclusion we have been wronged by capitalism, it becomes easier to conceive that others may have suffered as well.

The world that may have presented itself as one more or less happy whole of essentially identical people now begins to tell multiple tales of tragedy, struggle, and occasional victory.

And these stories, like the oppressions they wrestle with, are connected through history by the chains of necessity.

The belonging that spectacle, humanitarianism, and legal equality failed to provide is now supplemented by counter-narratives and networks of resistance that speak of a clefted universalism that is yet to come.

Ultimately, what was wanted only for one’s own sake, in seeking to realize itself, becomes the basis for a general sympathy with others.