I don’t think we’ll get to communism without acknowledging the personal characteristics of identity politics. The task for revolutionaries is to consider these characteristics through the lens of dialectical and historical materialism and placed within their political economic relations.
Take race. Race is class. Race is the mechanism for divisions of labour along global colour lines. As Fanon argued, we have to ‘stretch Marxism’ so that our class analysis fully accounts for race.
Take gender. Gender is class. Gender is the mechanism for divisions of labour with regard to reproduction. As Federici demonstrated, so called ‘primitive accumulation’ never stopped; it continued, in particular against women labelled witches. Along Fanon’s lines, we need to stretch our Marxist concepts to fully account for gender.
These examples are incomplete. And I don’t mean to say that every characteristic is ‘class’ or that race and gender are only class. The examples show, however, that what gets separated under liberal identity politics is, in fact, interconnected.
Without idpol and intersectionality you get distortions like the core’s equation of ‘working class’ with ‘blue-collar white working class men’, with no antiracism and no internationalism.
The problem with liberal idpol is that trying to attend to one characteristic at a time isn’t going to lead anywhere. Maybe a few gains won here and there. But it can all be taken away once the heat dies down and the protestors go home or grow old.
Slavery can be rebranded as prison labour. Abortion rights can be reversed. Anticolonial movements can be reframed as independence movements and coopted by neocolonialists and compradors. The fight for climate justice can be reduced to recycling. Gender equality becomes more women arms dealers. The list is endless because the working class is restless in it’s fight for freedom (even if its members don’t always know that’s what they’re doing) and the ruling class tireless in its reaction.
We either all get free or none of us will be freed. Idpol has it’s use to the extent that it points the way to a more rigorous revolutionary praxis. At that point it’s up to Marxists to theorise and act upon.
I don’t think we’ll get to communism without acknowledging the personal characteristics of identity politics. The task for revolutionaries is to consider these characteristics through the lens of dialectical and historical materialism and placed within their political economic relations.
Take race. Race is class. Race is the mechanism for divisions of labour along global colour lines. As Fanon argued, we have to ‘stretch Marxism’ so that our class analysis fully accounts for race.
Take gender. Gender is class. Gender is the mechanism for divisions of labour with regard to reproduction. As Federici demonstrated, so called ‘primitive accumulation’ never stopped; it continued, in particular against women labelled witches. Along Fanon’s lines, we need to stretch our Marxist concepts to fully account for gender.
These examples are incomplete. And I don’t mean to say that every characteristic is ‘class’ or that race and gender are only class. The examples show, however, that what gets separated under liberal identity politics is, in fact, interconnected.
Without idpol and intersectionality you get distortions like the core’s equation of ‘working class’ with ‘blue-collar white working class men’, with no antiracism and no internationalism.
The problem with liberal idpol is that trying to attend to one characteristic at a time isn’t going to lead anywhere. Maybe a few gains won here and there. But it can all be taken away once the heat dies down and the protestors go home or grow old.
Slavery can be rebranded as prison labour. Abortion rights can be reversed. Anticolonial movements can be reframed as independence movements and coopted by neocolonialists and compradors. The fight for climate justice can be reduced to recycling. Gender equality becomes more women arms dealers. The list is endless because the working class is restless in it’s fight for freedom (even if its members don’t always know that’s what they’re doing) and the ruling class tireless in its reaction.
We either all get free or none of us will be freed. Idpol has it’s use to the extent that it points the way to a more rigorous revolutionary praxis. At that point it’s up to Marxists to theorise and act upon.