The Rise of Mainstream Identity Politics

When I'm asked what I believe is the birthplace of contemporary "left-wing" identity politics (idpol for short), I invariably answer the following: the decaying New Left of the '70s, militant groups who gradually abandoned socialist rhetoric when world revolution didn't materialize and moved their focus away from the proletariat and towards "oppressed people", "discriminated minorities" or "subaltern classes" as potential revolutionary subjects. That was the beginning of the post-Marxist "radical" left — radical in name only, of course.

The thing is, that doesn't tell the whole story. The New Left and what came out of it were mostly fringe groups who had all but vanished by the late '80s with the triumph of neo-liberalism. How exactly did idpol become mainstream? It's definitely true some ex-New Leftists found their way into bourgeois institutions, carved in a place for themselves and became moderate politicians (like Cohn-Bendit, a radical student leader during the May 68 events in France turned milquetoast pro-EU green-liberal)… but you can't really pin a paradigm shift on their existence alone.

I was born in 1991. By the time I was interested in politics, we were in the mid-2000s. And the fact is: I don't remember idpol being an actual force in progressive political discourse back then — neither in Europe nor the US. To me, the prototypical rank-and-file liberal of the turn of the millennium was some guy or gal who liked Michael Moore — who isn't exactly a subtle commentator, sure, but at the very least willing to deal with economics, even to name and question capitalism if superficially.

When you think about it, the election of Barrack Obama had a lot to do with his (promised and unsurprisingly unfulfilled) progressive economic policies — even when race entered the debate. But what did we get last year? Candidates who defined themselves as the first woman president and as an angry white male, who were supported by #BLM slacktivists and Kekistani trolls, respectively. If anything, I feel like Bernie Sanders wouldn't have been considered all that radical by a '90s liberal.

I think it would be in our theoretic interest to establish a genealogy of idpol.

Other urls found in this thread:

libcom.org/library/black-particularity-reconsidered-adolph-l-reed-jr)
anarchistnews.org/content/london-bookfair-‘won’t-happen-2018’
twitter.com/helensteel12/status/924542352861159424?lang=fr
theoutline.com/post/2156/mic-com-and-the-cynicism-of-modern-media
bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/843165bf-1e69-3dec-873e-973fc8e604a5
libcom.org/library/i-am-woman-human-marxist-feminist-critique-intersectionality-theory-eve-mitchell
leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html
youtu.be/Uhn4EFGiZhA
reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/7dqy3v/jamesadamore_has_come_out_as_autistic_effortpost/
medium.com/@Jenny_Karlsson/leftbook-is-disingenuous-inneffective-and-a-byproduct-of-obama-era-politics-c0bf3f3f4c9e
youtube.com/watch?v=sCRohDqWDcw
bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-26414014
japantimes.co.jp/community/2015/01/21/issues/forty-years-zainichi-labor-case-victory-japan-turning-back-clock/#.WhBVJrQ-dhA
dw.com/en/south-koreas-struggle-with-cultural-diversity/a-19069733
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

They were lying dormant in the academy for decades, and then unleashed upon the world through the internet around 2010-11. That's when their trendy jargon started catching on with liberal bloggers, on the one hand, while on the other the term "SJW" was coined the make fun of them.

I'm interested in the genealogy too.

bump

My guess is the neoliberal revolution in the late seventies. Lots of things we have today can be traced back to it as well, I don't see idpol being any exception.

The crushing of union power and the veneer of success within neoliberal capitalism plus the growing ubiquity of media and entertainment. Capitalist branding also has a lot to do with it. It create, out of profit motive of course, brands which can then be marketed. So what if some serve as useful punching bags (tumblr) or go belly up, there are a million more profitable or useful brands like sports teams or political parties.

Adolph Reed has done some work (libcom.org/library/black-particularity-reconsidered-adolph-l-reed-jr) on how African American identity politics became big during the Civil Rights Era. TL;DR professional and petite-bourgeois blacks got the power to represent blacks as a whole while capital got a simplified labor market.

I suspect this kind of narrative can be generalized to other identitarian interests within the Democratic coalition. The Dems need to signal they won’t sell their marginalized voters down the river and so the Dems reform a bit on behalf of those interests. And since America has a lot of global sway this reformist identitarianism (which isn’t really a threat to capital and can be easily co-opted) becomes the big thing for the “left”.

I love this dude
I'm surprised I haven't seen more him in interviews online or anything.

idpol is an inherently reactionary project by liberals.
They would like to return to a time when class and race were seen as seperate domains that only intersect, rather than race being a signifier. Racism only exist because class conflict makes it possible.

Anyone who thinks race can function independent of class should take a long hard look at the Japanese Burakumin.

I think that we can be a little more charitable to identity politics per se. It’s not like these identities were largely created by the marginalized just to spite class politics; it’s not as though blacks chose to be denied a role in the early American labor movement. And what better word can we find for the movement to make racial discrimination illegal than identity politics? Nevertheless, identity politics is not a good per se and the way that it is handled by broad swaths of the left right now is stupid, ineffective, and uninformed. To your point, there are a lot of tendencies in the left right now that are basically reactionary. For example, the racial essentialism which oozes out of certain liberals (the opposition to miscegenation from some comes across as particularly telling) or the obviously underthought support for religion (e.g. whitewashing the history of Islam).

As a demonstration of why identity politics should be kept in their own little sects, I present to you the shut down announcement of the London Anarchist Bookfair. Sourcing to @news as it isn't dominated by one faction or another (unlike libcom).
anarchistnews.org/content/london-bookfair-‘won’t-happen-2018’

Related topic: why are trans activists so fucking militant?

I also think that the way certain identitarian groups become salient is influenced by their usefulness to electoral politics. While American Muslims are pretty socially liberal by global standards, it’s hard to see what reason besides political opportunism would cause a secular Democrat to actually think Islam is a religion of peace. Similarly, the conservatism and Catholicism of Hispanic migrants to the U.S. wouldn’t seem to make good bed-partners to a social liberal, yet they are. Or again, the social conservatism and religiosity of African Americans isn’t lambasted to the degree that it would be if it weren’t seen as “punching down” by liberals. At least in burgerland there seems to be a lot of political maneuvering involved in identity politics.
Of course I haven’t brought up the differing class politics of these groups because it becomes largely irrelevant to the actual functioning of American politics. With the use of idpol class politics can be obscured and ignored. Which is dreary. But there’s a lot of contradictions in being a modern American liberal.

I’ll also say that I think there’s a lot of Nietzschean ressentiment that is played out with identity politics. You see a lot of weird views where we should remove privilege by making everyone worse off and it’s hard to see how this is motivated by anything other than the basest spite.
It’s one of the nice things about the communist movement that it doesn’t try to valourize the condition of the wage-labourer, but rather intends to abolish it. You see a lot of desire to make important people black, gay, trans, deaf or whatever and you can tell that these categories have become fundamental to these people. They can’t imagine life outside of these categories. And this leads to a lot of analysis that is worthless because it just attempts to make marginalized synonymous with good. Which is somewhat understandable if you feel marginalized, but it makes for some shit reasoning and there’s a tendency for this to become naked tribalism. I think Enlightenment universalism and a real human community is a better course.

Compensation for weak arguments, I presume. Clubbing people across the skull circumvents the need for persuasion.

OP : ghost skins and sabotage. Flat-out.

What was the content of the leaflet that caused the whole scuffle?

nvm, found it

twitter.com/helensteel12/status/924542352861159424?lang=fr

It's nowhere as bad as it was described. Sure, some of the points featured should be open to criticism, but it's not an "anti-trans" leaflet. Nothing justifying a mob of dozens ganging on a single person, that's for sure.

SJWs are nuts, man.

Maybe identity politics arises from disparate peoples competing for scare resources while civic minded unifying culture is not only disregarded but attacked for being implicitly white? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No disparate races under the same roof, no disparate identity politics.

...

There are various factors that have led to the idpol psychosis.
The fall of the soviet union.
Bill clintons presidency and the rise of neoliberlism.

The far lefts last big hurrah was the battle of Seattle. Sometime after that 9/11 happend and the far left fell into a coma while the only people seriously calling out the government were libertarians "911 was an inside job" and all that
Post modernism.

Then finally the magic negro was elected to hope and change everything. He wasnt so good at that. In fact the fucker acutally helped out he banks.

Somewhere in his second term, after the failure of occupy wall street there was a steep rise in hyper identity politics fuled by click bait and corporate sponsors and on campus activism

This led to a weird situation were liberals came off as some sort of hyper authoritarian morality police. Witch hunters, the new inquisition that was always agitated, shoved politics into everything, was irrational, and regrssive.
The term that was invneted for such a creature was "social justice warrrior"

The spawn of satan which represented a screeching minority of petit boriguse made it so right wingers actually were kind of cool and subversive and reasonable.

Their irrationality and demand that everyone think about race all the time led to reactionary wave that summoned a creature known as the alt right.

Now the alt right, what is this, the neocons destroyed the world, the president was black, and the libs are increasingly assholes. Their backs were against the wall and trump rode that wave to the white house.

And they won. trump, the alt right, all the far right and fellow travelers (gamer gayte) won.

Which led to the complete humiliation and destruction of the center.

Trump winning destroyed both the bush and clinton dynasties, made neo liberals look weak, revitalized the far left from their post cold war coma.

And now we are here.

Idpol only became a problem when the usa became a plurality of white people instead of an absolute majority, there would be no idpol to speak of if it was 90% white, there is no idpol to speak of in homogeneous nations like Japan or Korea or China

I am right and you are wrong because Holla Forums is ALWAYS right multiculturalism is a tool of the bourgeoisie to stamp out class consciousness. Homogeneous societies are the greatest threat to the bourgeoisie

idpol was invented by American academics. It didn't spring from the masses.

The bourgeoisie do not give a FUCK about ethnicity or cultural identity - that's the whole problem with idpol. And you saying this shows how you're just the mirror image of them, i.e. you're and idpoler too.

Politics in the antebellum South were entirely dominated by white supremacists getting endlessly triggered by the mere existence of black people. Race riots were routine well into the early 20th century.

A thing i was thinking about yesterday.
The great rescission and the rise of things like social media and smartphones coincided with each other.
SJW's and the alt right are both identierians that suffer from advanced alienation, incapable of uniting and creating a class consciousness.
The banks were bailed out, the wealth of the poor was transferred to the rich, capitalism was doing great. Not so much the proles.
This might have led the population to feel like since they are incapable of changing the economic situation they can change their individual situations
So my new pronouns are xir!
Time to shoot up some H.
Black lives matter!

Do you know how scared the powers that be would be if the alt right, sjw's, BLM, and every other prole group united as a class and marched into the rich side of town instead of fighting each other against statues and video games


That is really the ticket.

You must figure out how to unite the proles.

Those rednecks dying of heroin and those blacks being shot by cops should be working together.

But only jebus himself could come down and do that.

Ah yes, of course — the bourgeoisie trembles with fear when faced with the class militantism displayed by such bastions of socialism as Japan and South Korea.

Psychosis.

Because society treats us like garbage? I've more or less resigned myself to anarkiddie lifestylism because 99% of the population (including leftists) doesn't understand or give a shit about trans issues.

When the American Left replaced workers with students.

Socialism is a non-threat to porkies. We've been thoroughly subdued. Nationalism is the only roadblock they see nowadays.

...

"Doesn't give a shit"? Pull your head out of your ass. You and your precious suffering is the most fashionable thing there is right now. The left saws its own legs off just to show how much it cares about you. People would be much open to these "issues" of yours if you dropped the militant slave morality shit and actually made self-respecting arguments.

???

idpol literally cannot function outside of a strict conflict theory/intersectionalist worldview. It would be like asking nazis to drop race realism

...

I'm quite sure that a pretty and well-mannered trans is more desirable in society than a girl. It's just that most are really terrible in being the opposite sex. Thus, society doesn't treat trans like garbage. It simply applies its' general scrutiny.

Say what you want about Holla Forums, they have a point about george soros. He's not pouring billions into the OSF because he's an evil handrubbing jew, but because borders are a speedbump to business.

the difference is they can still be a trans person without being an idpoler

not all porkies are internationalists. There are still nationalist porkies out there.
And regardless of what capitalism is like today it is a historic fact that nationalist ideology was created partly due to the development of capitalism.

How? Isn't part of what makes a woman "desirable" having kids and raising them?

Yeah, if you're an incel

Fairly sure many non-incels still want kids of their own

Could we please get back to the topic at hand? The thread is about establishing the genealogy of idpol, not engaging with obvious Holla Forumsacks about trans issues.

Many? Sure. All? Certainly not. You're only in the same bind as homosexuals, or people who can't or even just don't want kids. You're not as special as you think.

postcolonial theory is the answer

wow i am le triggered xD

good

bump

May I suggest that you read Thomas Sowell? One of his greatest targets is total justice. E.g.: german land-owners in Bohemia oppressed the czech farmers in the 1600s. And in order to correct that injustice, Czechoslovakia was created after WW1. But by then most of the land-owners and farmers of the 1600s was dead.

This isn't exactly idpol, but it sure has its roots there.

And muh class identity forbids me to unironically like watching horse polo and be indifferent to soccer is a straitjacket if anything. And the other side of that false coin is that muh identity being a womon/kveer/black/Mac owner in a PC-family is nothing but snowflakeism.


Nope. The blacks vs chinese race riots in London didn't really follow any class logic.

...

No.

Can he not be both?

Modern idpol as a subjective experience is in great part a product of the internet and digital media. Technoutopian discourse is guilty of overlooking the ruthless algorithm optimised capitalism and the military origins of the internet. Shit's a skinner box designed to exploit your neuroses and make you miserable. Outrage generates clicks like nothing else.
theoutline.com/post/2156/mic-com-and-the-cynicism-of-modern-media

The managerial origins of social justice discourse are worth exploring. much of the tumblr lexicon can be traced back to professional diversity consultants like Peggy McIntosh and Tim Wise. Post industrial, post fordist requires a much higher level of involvement than industrial society did. The human potential movement, Werner Erhardt and EST, really helped shape modern american managerial culture and what latter became digital communicative capitalism. we are all in one huge encounter group session complete with californian narcissist facilitators (check out the adam curtis blog). Social justice is an extension of self esteem ideology with all its creepy totalitarian implications. There is a certain impoverishment and a certain standarization of subjectivity going on in here. First world capitalism is no longer about cranking out commodities at a factory, it's about producing governance and creating a whole world of motivated consumer objects. Wonder why so much of culture war discourse is centred around the consumption of pop culture? Think about 'woke' dove soap ads and how they are really just a more insidious and invasive way of linking your identity to the product.

bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/843165bf-1e69-3dec-873e-973fc8e604a5

Life in our particular historical juncture is alienating in its own special way. Everything Solid Melts into the Air. just when it seemed like we were headed for a post identity utopia, invasive mechanisms of subject construction kick in. (you) exists in the void of the eternal present, constantly reconstructed over and over again, clinging to labels in order to convince itself of its own existence. Your every social interaction, your every reaction to pop culture stimuli is political, or rather pseudo political. The bourgeois individual's interior is blown open by terabytes of data bombardment. We are obliged to market ourselves, to perform the roles assigned to us by the machine. we only exist insofar as we are institutionalised, we can only be 'included' insofar as we are excluded. This drives people insane. On one side, you have the neurotic world of decent people and victims, the world of corporate PR and HR, on the other, a lawless exteriority haunted by the spectres of sadism and violence our society strives to deny.

Maybe it's the mild autism or the fact I was raised by the pre-normalised internet, but I've always felt this desire to escape from society and its mechanisms of labelling and control. I guess in some people this can manifest as fascism or wanton destructiveness of self and/or of others

Gondola is pure

It's something worth discussing, in many societies,like thailand or polynesia, being trans isn't considered a mental illness, but culturally understood as part of normal human variation. However, modern capitalist society can't have fixed roles for trans people or anyone for that matter, gender is understood as fluid, performative, a matter of consumer choice and yet somehow sacrosant. The media discourse around transgenderism makes no fucking sense precisely because its is based around marketing trans people as commodities or memes. muh 86 genders is terrifying to some people precisely because it reflects the insane hell-logic of our society as a whole.

great post

modern globalised capitalism is different from its rise. it created nationalism and now seeks to subvert it

We don't live in 19th century Germany, marxism adapting to present realities is an inevitability, not a conspiracy or conscious undermining.

It's how failsons can provide for their families.

Peggy McIntosh and Derrick Bell kind of invented idpol independently.

All this is true about idpol being the product of neoliberalism. But idpol also gets a significant boost from things like oppression of blacks, women, and trans people being a real thing. The best lie has a kernel of truth, and to some extent you do look like a privileged entitled a-hole for ignoring their concerns.

There are absolutely legit critiques of orthodox Marxism for not taking into account adequately the existence of racism and other oppressions. Of course this spirals out of control into an excuse to ignore class altogether and embrace victimhood culture based on identity. But my point is that it exists for a reason.

Marxists can more adequately undermine neoliberal idpol by actually integrating what is valid about idpol and intersectionality into their theory (and of course discarding all that is invalid).

Oh look, it's the "concentrate on idpol and fuck class struggle" flag. Here's what your asking for: anarchistnews.org/content/london-bookfair-‘won’t-happen-2018’
Go back.

At no point did I say "fuck class struggle" or "concentrate on idpol." Learn to read.

Idpol =! anti-discrimination

So nothing? Because intersectionality is fundamentally anti-Marxist

You're the one who needs to read m8
libcom.org/library/i-am-woman-human-marxist-feminist-critique-intersectionality-theory-eve-mitchell

When will we reach the point where the civil rights will be considered a bad thing because it didn't bring the end of capitalism?

Where did I state that you had said such things in your post? You are the one in need of learning to read.

Not and idpol movement

leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html

the original black civil rights guys were either Marxists or pro worker.
MLK was planning on leading a black and white workers march on Washington before he was assassinated.
All of those guys that fought for civil rights had their struggle co opted by liberals who did nothing but stand in the way at the time.
The class consciousness of the left has been completely wiped out post cold war and replaced with a hyper divisive ideinty politics that serves the interest of capital by helping to divide the proles

so is some lowerclass white guy who has a heroin addiction and lives paycheck to paycheck more privileged than obama?

I am totally opposed to neoliberal intersectionality. That does not make it an inherently invalid concept or incompatible with Marxism. Black workers have often been more oppressed and treated worse than white workers (when they were workers that is, and not slaves). Doesn't mean that white workers are not oppressed or that we don't need to advocate universal liberation, because we do. It is simply acknowledging the facts of the matter, quite outside of what liberal academics have to say about it.

The anti-idpol left is rightfully pissed off at the excesses of idpol, and I totally agree with opposing those excesses. But dialectically speaking, there is no return to pre-idpol. Advance and integrate the critiques, or doom yourself to irrelevancy and only appealing to white male nerds on the internet (of which I am one and probably you are too).

What does that have to do with idpol?

It has nothing to do with its "excesses", it's not a matter of distance. It's the thing itself - which you clearly don't really understand. As I've already said, idpol =! anti-discrimination. And that you think talking about class issues only appeals to white males shows you've already allowed neoliberal ideology to creep in.

Read Adolph Reed.

I'm not talking only about idpol. Some people talk like things that don't immediately bring the end of capitalism are worthless. Imagine people during the civil rights era saying that rights under capitalism don't really matter, that all that blacks really need is socialism.

The only difference between black workers and white workers is the blackness of the former. That is an identity. They experience additional oppression on the basis of this identity. That is identity politics. It doesn't matter whether they choose to identify as black or not, the system of racist oppression already identifies them as such.


Idpol - if not identical to - is clearly related to anti-discrimination. What is discrimination on the basis of, if not identity? I would agree that there is something irredeemably flawed about neoliberal idpol, the thing itself. However, the structures of oppression they point to are real, and you can get mad at neoliberal idpols all you want but that does not change the objective structures of oppression. I agree that talking about class has broad appeal, not just to white males, however it can be a huge turn off for POC (yes, I'm gonna use an idpol word, don't get scared) if their issues outside of class are summarily dismissed by class reductionism.

Adolph Reed is on my list. Heard a good interview with him on Dead Pundits Society.

The positing on an "identity" is a superfluous step. They aren't discriminated against because of some invisible thing called an "identity", it's because of a physical characteristic the oppressors use to discriminate against.

No it isn't, Idpol asserts this invisible thing "identity" as a politics. It begins with: this is what we are. Anti-discrimination by contrast has nothing to say until discrimination happens, and says: this is what is happening to us.

And instead of shedding it, idpol accepts it and then inverts it, effectively reifying it.

It's a particular approach to anti-discrimination. A flawed one.

Ineradicable physical stigmas, which can happen can happen regardless of the identity of the person. Some remote dark skinned person might never have even known he was "black" until he went to America and got shot. The cop didn't care about his identity.

The words "structure", and "oppression", let alone taken together as "structure of oppression" - gets thrown around way too much. Reed talks about this. What does it even mean? Exactly what "structures" are you talking about? What makes something "structural" as opposed to just … frequent? The word "oppression" is also way too broad, abstract, and vague. It's a window to sloppy thinking.

Total myth. Bernie Sanders had plenty of POC support, and labour unions in America are he least-whitemale they've ever been.

Read Adolph Reed, Walter Benn Michaels, and the book "Racecraft" by Barbara and Karen fields.

Walter Benn Michaels was on Dead Pundit Society too

That physical characteristic would have no meaning if it did not signify that the victim belonged in a group of Others, i.e. an identity. It is not the physical characteristic itself that is disliked but the fact that it signifies that they belong in a different group than you do, and you affirm your own group identity by discriminating against theirs.


And what if "what we are" is a result of a long history of "this is what is happening to us"? In an ideal world where discrimination against black people was a one-off, non-systemic occurrence, it would make no sense to have black pride marches. In a world where we had 200 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow, and 50 years of mass incarceration and excessive racialized police brutality it does make sense to have black pride marches. Black identity didn't start with "this is what we are," it started with all of that happening to black people whether they decide to identify as black or not.


Then oppose the reification of identity, not analysis based on identity.


He got shot because he was identified as black by the cop. Blackness is a spook, but that doesn't prevent it from having real effects. Your example shows that even if you don't identity as a member of an oppressed class, you can still experience oppression on the basis of it.


I agree that "structure of oppression" in a vague sense is thrown around by sloppy-thinking liberals too much. That doesn't mean it is not a valid concept, just one that is in need of more rigorous explication. Class can also by a sloppy concept if you don't make it rigorous through study of Marx etc.


He had some POC support, like Killer Mike and Cornel West. I think he probably did the best he could to appeal to POC given his background in Vermont being lily white. But by and large, white voters formed the basis of his appeal. If African-american voters went his way instead of Clinton, he probably would've clinched the nomination. I think that's shitty because no one in their right mind should vote for Clinton. But the fact remains that Bernie was culturally out of touch and failed ultimately to appeal to POC.

There's no way I could say it any clearer than what I already posted. The whole "identity" layer that you keep insisting on is just totally superfluous and is a reification of the very group differences that anti-discrimination should try to abolish. It's called idpol, and it's anti-Marxist because it's anti-materialist.

Read the introduction to this (or the whole book, preferably)

Also read Vivek Chibber to see how the concept of "difference" is a straight path into anti-Marxism.

Trust me, friend, you have some neoliberal in you.

Here's Walter Benn Michael's review of the book

lol

The term "identity politics" was first used in passing in a statement by the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s

I'll give it a shot thanks. I have a lot of respect for Chibber, based on what I've read/heard.

The term identity politics is just a term used describe a phenomenon that has always existed.

It was though. Nationalism was literally invented by the bourgeoisie to create solidarity between themselves and the peasants and proletariat.

Idpol is not synonymous with tribalism, or even Otherness. It just entails them.

True, if the concept of "black worker" and "white worker" existed in an empty space. The problem is that there is a bunch of stuff besides there, especially this economic system called "capitalism". So there other differences between white and black workers, for example blacks being poor and lumpenproles to a larger extent.
This is a very abstract and because of this totally useless way of looking at oppression. The flaw with this way of thinking is that it obscures class, which is obviously the basis of our economic system, and works very differently compared to any other identity. The reason for this is that it is not a loosely defined "system of oppression" which is characterized by a certain group of people being in a shitty situation, but an actual, concrete power relation rooted directly in the base (which is responsible for the reproduction of our daily lives, it is the single greatest factor driving society). If you are a prole, you are always subdued to a capitalist. On the other hand, the connection between black and white people is very different. Being black doesn't place you in any concrete power structure. Sure, a black person can be beaten up or jailed easily, but that doesn't mean shit and not true for many other black people, just like not all white people are responsible for blacks getting fucked. The basis of their oppression is not blackness (which is just that - having a black skin, black ancestors and nothing more really). The basis of their oppression are racist attitudes, which can have an effect on them only through people exercising power over them. This power comes from one place: capitalism. The prison industrial complex; the police and the political movements aiming to direct the white working class' anger away from the capitalists. These are the systems of oppression which discriminate against blacks, this is what they should be fighting against along with the effects of de-industrialization, which hit them the hardest. If they don't do that and drink the liberal kool-aid, they will never recognize this whole capitalism thing happening behind their backs and will be stuck with BLM protests/riots and gibsmedats. This is why intersectionality is very dangerous; it doesn't negate class, but obscures it and strips it from its structural importance.

...

This is true

...

...

Idpol (from a marxist perspective) was not the end, it was the means- a subversive tactic used to delegitimize the speech, actions, and eventually, even the existence of the prevailing identities (don't pretend you don't know the ones), whom even today are consistently told by their left leaning betters, that they, unlike others, have no legitimate right to exist or act in their own best interests. This has not only wrought havok in leftist social groups, it has wrought havok everywhere else this sort of thinking has become the norm, only it wasn't supposed to backfire on us, resulting in the discord and fragmenting in left leaning movements, but also the rise of the far right's popularity- why are so many young, working class white people joining the Alt-Right? Because the left, specifically it's own brand of identity politics, demands penitence, self degradation, debasement, deplatforming, all for their skin color, and everything that it supposedly represents- and you're not allowed to talk the same way about Black Americans' homophobia and misogyny, you're not allowed to talk about problems within oppressed/marginalized communities- the statistics don't exist, or if they do exist they're misleading, but if they're peer reviewed and lead to reasonable conclusions, well, it's time for Buzzfeed to tell us 11 Reasons Why Facts And Objectivity Are Social Constructs Designed To Oppress Minorities, and pseudo-marxist lefties eat that shit up.
You can't alienate these ethnic groups and then act shocked when they rally behind groups that at least pretend to give a shit about them instead.

Wife of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe avoided speaking with Donald Trump by pretending no speakie English.

Turns out she's part of the Ford Foundation®'s Never Trump™ Campaign. She loves walls so long as they're walls for graet climate justice.
youtu.be/Uhn4EFGiZhA

the guy is just as stupid as he is in bussiness come on, are you really going to cut him some slack?

unironically great post

When I'm asked what I believe is the birthplace of contemporary "left-wing" identity politics (idpol for short), I invariably answer the following: the decaying New Left of the '70s, militant groups who gradually abandoned socialist rhetoric when world revolution didn't materialize and moved their focus away from the proletariat and towards "oppressed people", "discriminated minorities" or "subaltern classes" as potential revolutionary subjects. That was the beginning of the post-Marxist "radical" left — radical in name only, of course.

The thing is, that doesn't tell the whole story. The New Left and what came out of it were mostly fringe groups who had all but vanished by the late '80s with the triumph of neo-liberalism. How exactly did idpol become mainstream? It's definitely true some ex-New Leftists found their way into bourgeois institutions, carved in a place for themselves and became moderate politicians (like Cohn-Bendit, a radical student leader during the May 68 events in France turned milquetoast pro-EU green-liberal)… but you can't really pin a paradigm shift on their existence alone.

I was born in 1991. By the time I was interested in politics, we were in the mid-2000s. And the fact is: I don't remember idpol being an actual force in progressive political discourse back then — neither in Europe nor the US. To me, the prototypical rank-and-file liberal of the turn of the millennium was some guy or gal who liked Michael Moore — who isn't exactly a subtle commentator, sure, but at the very least willing to deal with economics, even to name and question capitalism if superficially.

When you think about it, the election of Barrack Obama had a lot to do with his (promised and unsurprisingly unfulfilled) progressive economic policies — even when race entered the debate. But what did we get last year? Candidates who defined themselves as the first woman president and as an angry white male, who were supported by #BLM slacktivists and Kekistani trolls, respectively. If anything, I feel like Bernie Sanders wouldn't have been considered all that radical by a '90s liberal.

I think it would be in our theoretic interest to establish a genealogy of idpol.

reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/7dqy3v/jamesadamore_has_come_out_as_autistic_effortpost/

I miss when the fringe of society just believed that the grey aliens were actually demons and only life existed on Earth because of god, Niburu 2012 Niburu 2012
Rt if you agree

medium.com/@Jenny_Karlsson/leftbook-is-disingenuous-inneffective-and-a-byproduct-of-obama-era-politics-c0bf3f3f4c9e

The birth of hyper-left-identity-politics spanned the 9 years sandwiched between the financial crash and when Sanders mainstreamed the word, “socialism”.
After the Bush administration sat back and let the world stock market fall on their watch, it was Obama’s turn to provide a sufficiently large enough fiscal adjustment to prevent the stock market crisis from bleeding completely into the real economy, and because of it’s scale: the worldwide economy. Obama failed at this. For 8 years he failed at this, and the world political climate is still adjusting in hyper-reactionary politics to his and his cabinet’s failure. There are two popular left reactions to this failure:
Obama’s fiscal adjustment wasn’t nearly large enough and he should have done something approximating a New Deal, and half the country still hasn’t come close to recovering
The economy is too mysterious to control. The worse a stock market crisis is the harder it is to deal with rather than it being a wider opportunity for government provisioning of public resources. And hey, the stock market went up so things got sufficiently better during Obama’s administration.
In other words, 1. real Keynesianism vs. 2. economic fatalism and/or denial
The economic fatalists and denialists won the narrative of Obama’s relation to the continually declining living standards of the lower class of America. After all you can’t blame something so large on the first African American president, and for the first two a years of his presidency, a virtual Democratic supermajority.
When the left turned to identity politics, the right mainstreamed their economic narrative. Occupy and the Sanders campaign came too late.
The right jumped at the chance to provide their own explanation of the crisis when the left didn’t want to. Again this starts in 2008–2009. Young, intelligent Republican men confused at why they couldn’t inherit their parent’s prosperity were fed a heavy online diet of hardcore and detailed Austrian (small government, austerity) economics on every corner of the internet. They became very good at arguing economics, and to this day an average internet savvy rightist can cream the average internet savvy leftist to a hardcore economic debate online. The left never tried to learn because it was mentally blocked. Naturally, the first and main political protests to the destruction of the economy came in the form of the right-populist Tea Party movement, which advocated among other things, curtailing government and removing the social safety net during a recession!
The sensible and honest economic left was constrained to extremely small organizations and third parties during these 9 years. They did advocate for a massive economic stimulus, and salvaged themselves from complete destruction by doing so. However these orgs accounted for maybe 0.1% of the left. During Obama’s first term, most of the left was still looking for something to do with an economic fatalist mindset and both the Obama administration and virtually the entire left found LGBT rights issues as their lifeline of something to stand for.
In 2010, Obama propped up the economy with a temporary bipartisan 2-year 2% payroll tax cut which kept the broader economy just barely above water. After the 2012 election, the tax cut expired without a fight despite it being the only legislation being enacted on a true bipartisan basis during Obama’s 8 years. The left marched on with it’s LGBT and identity focus, while Obama’s approval ratings fell below a public majority for almost the rest of his second term and the public blame for the economic conditions of the lower class sat on the left’s shoulders. While Obama is not, “left-wing”, his base, many of who turned out in droves to vote for him on an identity platform in 2012, were. This left wing base was rewarding Obama’s efforts on identity, but largely ignoring his economic ineffectiveness, at their peril. The anarchist left did provide an “investment banks are greedy” explanation of the events through the Occupy movement. It came four years too late and there was basically no effort to explain the government’s failure as well from the left in an equally aggressive way.


i wrote dis

back 2 r/socialism

tl;dr economy crashed, leftists joined liberals in turning to identity politics as something to stand for as the right took the opportunity to explain the crash

and it's still fighting it's Obama-era gender wars, even tho the wars have been won

forty keks, idpol is forever

it's like he forgot all of european history

21st century so far:

the democratic party will never get rid of identity politics because embracing class politics again would cause their donors and corporate sponsors to abandon ship.

What i do see in hillrys loss was most likely a massive blow to "we need more women ceo's" white feminism and and door opening up for non white women to take the mantle of feminism

If the far left is to take hold of the DNC they cant be sitting on their ass making tweets. They have to be hitting the pavement, voting out neolibs, attacking the far right, attacking the center, attacking compromisers, they need to go insane like the tea party did.

Obama didnt really accomplish much in office when you think about it.
His first two years were spent trying to compromise with republicans who kept telling him to go fuck himself.
Then the tea party votes in a massive republican wave that spends the next 6 years repeatedly dunking on him and the democrats and preventing obama from doing anything without an executive order.
Then finally trump gets elected and throws all of those executive orders in the trash.

So obamas legacy is pretty much just a shitty healthcare bill no one was really satisfied with and and fucking over poors. Also not really doing much for black people.

Culturally america turned into a white hot ball of rage and identity politics. SJW witch hunts, alt right reactions. Endless culture war and click bait.

I dont think the sjw's are completely demoralized, maybe they got a good punch in the nose after 8 years of thinking they were hot shit.
Which was cathartic.

Its up to the far left to fight the good fight and push class consciousness back into the mainstream, obi wan bernie san would like it

UNITE THE RED AND BLACK
UNITE THE RED AND BLACK
UNITE THE RED AND BLACK

I know what you mean, when i was a kid the liberals werent this insane, they were john Stewart tier, not screeching rainbow haired harpy that is a walking caricature out of a right wing political cartoon tier.

I think it wasnt till obamas second term this shift occurred.

I was born in 91 too, and some older people have told me there was actually a big wave of idpol like this in the early 90's too.

What i have really noticed is the liberals complete deletion of the idea of workers rights, class politics, and critique of capitalism

The modern liberal wants social justice but cant even comprehend the idea of economic justice

I really do hope this wave of idpol dies off or the bernie guys take over the lib culture. Cause the obama era liberals are a cancer.

Except this is wrong insofar as it assumes these ideas sprang from a vacuum at the point of the crisis. They didn't. These same idpol ideas have been present in society since the seventies. During the early 90s there was a concerted attempt by identity politicians to police language which resulted in the birth of "political correctness" as a snarl term for the right. Even as far back as the early eighties, feminists were quite happy to allow black men to describe them in terms they would have excoriated other men for doing so. IIRC, this documentary will provide some background: youtube.com/watch?v=sCRohDqWDcw

yeah, all of this starts in the 70's.
The 70's was called "the me" generation. It became about fuck you got mine individualism rather than what is best for the community and america as a whole.
But while there were lots of people dealing in idpol back then those people still had a class consciousness. The black panthers, mlk, the feminists, they still cared about poor people and workers.
Modern liberals only care about culture wars and being morally superior to the proles. They willingly hook their identity to corporate brands, consuming and making corporations profit is seen as fighting da man.

Now when it comes to feminism that is a whole can of worms man. White women fighting colored feminists, sex positive fighting sex negative feminists. Multiple waves of feminism.

Radfems are basically right wingers that hate men when you analyze it

when you think about it, they passed that 1960's immigration act to allow non whites in.
In the 70's hyper individualism is encouraged, the atomization of a homogeneous society begins.
In the 80's Americans are fed the idea greed is good.
In the 90's the cold war ends and its the final victory for liberalism, neo liberalism is locked in by the victory of bill clinton because of that idiot ross perot.
In the 2000's a new enemy is needed, 9/11 happens, the war machine profits, the surveillance state expands, civil liberties are destroyed or ignored, endless war and terror attacks become the new norm
in the 2010's a black man who runs on the idea of hope and change wins, quickly turns out to just be another neo liberal fuck boy. bails out the banks that gambled with other peoples money. Capitalism itself by this point is completely fucking up more than normal. And there isnt really a diffrence between both mainstream parties, its like 1984 with the inner and outer party. Liberals are cleansed of all class consciousness by now, completely atmoized, completely slaves to corporate marketing, all traditions destroyed, replaced by identities you can buy provided to you and which are fought over endlessly by both the right and left. The liberals have a hyper focus on identity which leads to a reactionary backlash of alienated white men who vote in a nationalist and the host of the apprentice as president


Oh boy what will the 20's bring :)

normalfag internet was the great catalyser


good post

I was sitting on da toilet and i had some thoughts
America is being divided through the use of hyper identity politics.
america has been complete atomized to the most hyper individual level, all traditions and spirituality and revolutions destroyed.
America is a strip mall where various ethnic groups, races, genders, and sex's fight each other over who can consume the most.
All old idenities having been destroyed and all idneities now hooked into the corporate marketing machine.
Americans are in an endless competition with all other americans about who can consume the most and who gets to consume, and who was the first to consume. All ethics, morality, race, tied in with consumption. They are also fighting for who gets to be the manager that maintains that capitalist status quo. they call him the president though.
No, unting together and fighting for a better wage is bad to them.
Fighting each other over burka barbie good
it makes liberals feel warm and fuzzy to conssmue.
That will show those evil meany white people.

And the idintites, they just keep splitting and forming new identities, and you have feminists fighting feminists, and right wingers fighting right wingers, and left wingers fighting left wingers.
And everyone is fighting each other all the time.

And they are doing it over……video games

I think america needs a cultural shift into something more uniting so that we dont implode.

well all production was outsourced to the third world, all homegnouse culture was destroyed, hyper individualism was encouraged. and now americans are at each others necks, never fighting for the greater good or the nation. there is no nation, i guess white people held it together culturally, but mass immigration destroyed that. its just a mass of people buying fidget spinners now. Also performing their identity by being a Muslim feminist that buys a fidget spinner, move aside white boys, fidget spinners are for girls now.
REEEE FIDGET GIRLS GET OUT ITS FOR BOYS ONLY.
Remember when fidget spinners werent cultural Marxist man?


But seriously guys, something has to change about american culture or its going to nuke itself

alienating white people and telling them this isnt their country anymore and to sit down and shut up and that they are born evil and should self flagellate because muh privilege is a good way for hitler to come waltzing right in and gathering all them peoples that are newly marginalized for the cause.

The idpol of the obama years really needs to die.

Treating white people like an absolute evil incapable of redemption probably wasn't a good idea libs

When you are told you are born racist there is no point in fighting that. You either stop giving a shit and embrace it or turn into some self flagellating loser

and well, here we are.

No, the feminists explicitly did not care about poor people or workers. They cared (and continue to care) about """womyn""". They refused to work with other groups for being "male identified". That is the faction of people who wrote the theoretical framework guiding modern idpol movements, regardless of their internal squabbling. If you trace the origin of the terms emanating from current idpol proponents they overwhelmingly came from feminists or are using definitions concocted by feminists.

I'm not gonna defend liberals 'cause I'm not one. But do you honestly think the above that your crying about happened? Maybe by some stupid fat lesbian in NY somewhere, but not by actual political figures.

This.

Except that's wrong?

bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-26414014

japantimes.co.jp/community/2015/01/21/issues/forty-years-zainichi-labor-case-victory-japan-turning-back-clock/#.WhBVJrQ-dhA


Bonus round: "Only white countries are expected to be multiculturalist look at me I'm retarded"

dw.com/en/south-koreas-struggle-with-cultural-diversity/a-19069733

If anything, 90% ethnic majority just hides these issues (except with japan which is just explicit)

Do you see anyone berating "Cis Han Males" for Chinese treatment of Tibetans and Uygurs? Furthermore, once again, anti-discrimination is being conflated with idpol.

Ugh what a dumpsterfire. Not sure which is more cringe, the OP or the top comments. According to OP apparently you have to have autism to fit under a protected victim category and not get shit on by red liberals. And according to the comments even that is not enough, because Damore committed the SIN of going against liberal orthodoxy, and is FOREVER STAINED. never mind that he's just a fucking ordinary working guy - yeah probably more privileged than most, working at Google, but yes your priorities are out of whack when instead of focusing on opposing a multinational corporation you side with them and direct your anger towards the worker they fired.

Fuck Chapo Trap House and fuck reddit.