What's the difference between class politics and identity politics?

what's the difference between class politics and identity politics?

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Identity is a spook

Class is a measure of one's objective relation to production and the economic/political structure. Identity is a subjective measure of one's perceived place/role in a societal-level social network.

class is a material relation that produces social relations, identity is a social construct that sometimes has no material relation to bear it, it's purely fictitious. Intersectionality has completely destroyed any attempts at producing class consciousness as it favors the identity and quantification of equal freedom for all marginalized groups, as purely groups, rather than form a collective body of people who are all suffering from some sort of oppression in capitalist society.

Class identity is a social construct(aka spook)

Nice meme

Actually read Stirner before you publicly make an ass of yourself please.

Lmao stupid

Class politics address people's relation to the productive process of society (one's class), while identity politics address people's personal subjectivities within society (one's identity).


No clue why people are assblasted at this guy. Class is just as much of a social construct as identity (shaped by the dominant mode of production and the class ruling it); there is nothing immutable about either. "Spook", which is basically just a more esoteric term for "social construct", is thus just as much of an appropriate term.

...

No. Property relations are part of the material base. Spooks and social constructs are the superstructure that reinforces those relations and make sure that they will prevail.

Somebody eating truffles and caviar while the person down the street eats spam is not a spook, it's reality. The "right" of the rich guy to do so and being protected by society is the spook that you talk about. In legal terms: Possession is a fact, legal ownership is the spook that enables the latter.

You're both misinterpreting my point. The superstructure of a society is the result of its material base (relations of production), but the material base itself is already the product of human development, especially in the case of capitalism which is the cumulative result of hundreds of years of history. There is nothing natural or immutable about private property, even if it form the base of a capitalist society. It needs to be enforced by those who maintain the cycle of capital, either the ruling class or the subservient class as it is interpellated by the ruling class's dominant ideology.

yes, that is true, but the idea of being able to coerce force to mantain possession of said property is not in any way a social construct

you could say it could be a social construct if we could decide who owns what with voting, but there is no such thing in a capitalists society

which is why it is a material reality

Social construct means "not natural; man-made". To this extent there is nothing "real" or legitimate about anything in any mode of production, even in its base, outside of its own ability to maintain its legitimacy through coercive or ideological means. This is why it's a social construct (or esoterically, a "spook"). When Marx speaks of "material reality" in the base of society, he invokes this in the context of what is real within the upholding of capitalism through its ruling class's coercion and ideology: the relations of production.

Class is your relation to the means of production, identity is how you perceive yourself and its relation to how others perceive you

Anyone who has ever interacted with another human being realises the importance of class

Identity politics is class politics for petite-bourgeois

Read Adolph Reed

"[Identity] politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature.

An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.

It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class."

1. Class politics puts class at the base of society, idpol puts identity at the base. So idpol believes that identity and culture are what drive history, while class politics believes class warfare and technology drive history.

2. Idpol is about preserving an identity, communism is about destroying the proletariat. Hence idpol is inherently reactionary.

no, social construct stands for a society that constructs universal truths about something material, hence why the superstructure of capitalism considers the ownership of property as a "right", the "right" to private property is a social construct

however despite the superstructure, propietors don't need public acceptance to determine possession of the productive forces, they have the force to disregard any social construct and claim property as theirs, this is class

He has to be the only person in the world who uses that word. This is the second time I've had to look it up and I remember he was the reason I had to last time.

pretty spooky fam, why do egoists automatically assume that everyone will be as ideologically liberated as them, and act in their own "best interests?"

Social construct is a denominator for things made and upheld by human action, not "a society".

Don't really get what you're trying to say here.

This "right" itself, if upheld without strict coercion or not, functions entirely upon man-made interactions. There is a difference between what the base of a society is and its consequential superstructure, but both are the result of a human effort to uphold the base and the superstructure it mandates.

Exactly. As I said, the dominant mode of production in a society can either be upheld by its ruling class through coercion, or by ideological means (making the ruled, in the case of capitalism, unaware of their conditions of existence as exploited). Once again, all of these categories are man-made constructs that would collapse without any human effort spent in upholding them.

In the most simplistic terms and I mean so basic that a child could grasp it.:

The politics based on someones standing in society in the terms of their financial capital.

Person #1:
I'm working class
Person #2:
I'm upper class
Person #1:
My freedom is being oppressed via the amount of work I have to do and the conditions I work in thus I want benefits such as healthcare and welfare.
Person #2:
But then that oppresses my freedom because I will have to pay extra taxes and I wont be able to reinvest"
(Continue ad nausea)

The politics based on someones standing in society in terms of a subjective factor such as gender identity or skin colour.

e.g:

Person #1:
I'm a white hetrosexual male

Person #2:
I'm a black homosexual female, I feel like I am being marginalised within society and feel like we should combat it through anti-hate speech legislation and education.

Person #1:
But then that marginalises me because it doesn't take double standards into account and it hinders my free speech."
(Continue ad nausea)

I know I've left a lot of stuff out and I haven't taken different forms of class/identity politics but this is how I explain to some people when they ask:

The quote predates the current understanding of altruism as a biological impulse so i wouldn't blame Stirner for it.

You're jumping off the deep end here. Collecting wood and animal skins to build a lean-to is not coercive or ideological. Neither is gathering fruit to make a fruit punch or gathering herbs to treat disease.

A spook is not necessarily a social institution. It's a mental "sacred cow" that one dare not disturb or challenge.


Class becomes identity under a Marxist system, because the revolution requires class agitation.

Underrated post

class relates to material conditions

idpol is shit in people's heads

None. All politics are identity politics. Identity is one of the few things that aren't spooks.

idpol by definition are losers and will stay losers.
Ranting assholes with no ideas how to implement anything they say. Medieval hierarchies.

That's excellent as fuck desu.

This

Here is what identity politics is: "The reactionary character of racialist politics and the Black Lives Matter campaign is proven by the very fact that this tactic of division by race is fully embraced by the entire political, academic, and media establishment. While the police continue day in and day out to brutally murder working class and poor people of all races, the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement insist on begging for reforms from the very powers who employ this body of armed men to protect their interests. They demand only to have more racial diversity among the oppressors—more black police, police chiefs and mayors—not to abolish the system of oppression.
The grievances of the social forces who form the backbone of Black Lives Matter have nothing to do with the increasingly desperate plight of working class people, black or white. They could care less. It has to do, rather, with envy and frustration over the unequal distribution of income and wealth within the top 10 percent and demands for more money, more power and more prestige for the lower rungs of the wealthy upper-middle class." from
wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/18/mcke-o18.html

And billionaires back identity politics because it is actually a bourgeois strategy to divide and more easily conquer the working class. The bourgeoisie uses all kinds of chauvanism- race, gender, language, religion, age, nationality, ability, etc., to divide workers. See:
wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/11/pers-o11.html