The concept of identity politics (or "id-pol") gets thrown around a lot here at Holla Forums. It's an important concept to understand, and we're right to oppose it. However, we've all seen it used by posters incorrectly; things being described as constituting an example of identity politics in action, when they quite frankly do not.
The purpose of this thread is to educate ourselves and others through discussion and debate about the concept of identity politics: what it means, what are examples of it and what are not, why it is a problem, and what we can do about it.
One of the major problems I've seen here is the mistake of equating simply having an "identity" or even just being from a group that often thinks of itself as having an identity, equals identity politics. This is not the case. Being gay does not equate to identity politics. Nor does being black, or being a woman. Engaging in certain personal preferences or being from a certain social background is not identity politics. In fact, quite the reverse; attacking someone on the basis of their personal preferences or social background is identity politics.
Here is Wikipedia's introductory definition of "identity politics", to give those who have no idea, some idea: What do we think of it? Satisfactory? Looking forward to a decent discussion on the subject.
Honestly, I have not noticed this being an actual problem here. The people who fail to grasp the concept are usually just Holla Forums shitposters or nihilists.
Brody Perez
All political action and thought is based on some form of identity, class is an identity. The problem with liberal idpol isn't that it wants to focus on identities, the problem is that it narrows its focus down to advocating for marginal groups that don't have a huge affect on the mainstream political system like Native Americans or trans folk.
Eli Scott
Well generally speaking "identity politics" is used to refer to political action based on any of the forms of identity other than class - given that class is (correctly) understood to be the politically relevant "identity" by Marxists.
Parker Hernandez
I feel a lot of people here refer to any discussion outside of Engles-ish materialist reductionism as idpol, wish I think misses a lot of the nuance of late modern capitalist exploitation.
Concepts such as biopower, gendering, subaltern vs metropole etc, are really useful for criticizing the superstructure of capitalism - and in so doing unveiling the machinations of the bourgeois to hide the base.
David Martinez
How the superstructure legitimizes and maintains the base is most clearly seen by analyzing a person's paycheck and his bills. We really do not need an in-depth analysis of how the superstructure creates divisions within the working class to perpetuate the mode of production, because that all becomes readily apparant to a person as soon as he recognizes the material systems that compose the base.
Deconstructing the superstructure is convincing to anyone who wants to engage politics on an intellectual level, but we should not be interested in convincing intellectuals. Workers are our audience, and workers have real and present concerns. Show a worker how he is being fucked over, and he will work out the rest for himself.
Anthony Roberts
Ignore the embarrassed Holla Forumstards who think they're leftists.
Tyler Roberts
I was under the impression that the audience of Holla Forums was largely over-educated NEETs.
Hudson Torres
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Carson James
As in they are qualified for jobs but not getting them, not as in they are geniuses.
Brayden Roberts
I think you have us confused with Bunkerchan.
Michael Brown
This absolutely ridiculous, you're claiming we will fight capitalism better by having less of an understanding of it's functions.
A dogmatic belief that the behaviour of capitalism hasn't made major changes since Marx or Lenin is the reason we still have illiterate tankeis supporting Russia, China or Iran against the US because they've failed to realize capitalism centre of power has moved away from imperialist nation-states to large super-national conglomerates. Or, some tards instance on that immigrants are lumpenproles here to steal their jobs, which exactly points to that they need better understanding of what divides the working class.
Moreover, one's class is not even measured in income to begin with - but rather one's relationship to the means of production. You're entire post is an argument for that we're suffering from under-education if anything.
Chase Perry
I thought you were suggesting there is some such thing as too much education, which reeked of ideology to me. Sorry.
Asher King
Agree, there is no such thing as too much education. Which is why it's important to properly discuss these issues of the superstructure; a lot of leftypol is capable of understanding these ideas but is instead presented with meme-tier understandings of questions of race, sexuality, gender etc.
Dominic Bailey
For someone arguing on behaf of intellectualism, you demonstrate surprisingly poor reading comprehension. You are arguing against a bunch of points that I never made.
Anthony Cook
Right yeah sorry, the part about income I was mixing up with another post. I've just seen this shit so many times.
If you're interested in understanding the relevance of the critique of identity politics in contemporary anarchist theory - and understanding what identity politics even is and why anarchists are against it - this article covers it extremely well.
Wyatt Miller
Beware of cointel comrades. Do not fall for it.
Jaxon Anderson
You cannot "identify" as a bourgie, if you are not. You can promote bourgie interests, but that doesn't make you a bourgie. It only makes you a classcuck.
Then you are just insane.
That has nothing to do with politics AKA socioeconomics. It has everything to do with human rights. And this is where the "Current Year" holds any power. 21st century is supposed to have some stabilized values on human rights. SUPPOSED. it cannot, because exploitation
The problem with Identity politics is that they avoid socioeconomics entierly, and just go to a post-fukuyamaist ideology of "we need to strugle for identity X to be equal as identity Y, within a system that is inherently unequal".
So, simply,
The proletarians have no IDENTITY!
CLASS is not IDENTITY
Lucas Nelson
Go actually read Capital before you talk as if you know socioeconomics.
Easton Campbell
Is every objective material relation then an "identity?" Does putting on shoes add to my "identity" and removing them detract from it? What about how close I am to, say, Bern, Switzerland. Is my relative geographical location in regards to this arbitrary place part of my identity? If I move to Bern or to its exact global antipode does that change my identity?
Thomas Turner
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Josiah Smith
STRAWMAN ADHOMINEM NATURALISTIC FALLACY HAHAAH GOT YOU
Bentley Russell
Just because it torpedoes your argument doesn't make it a strawman
Zachary Lopez
"Middle-class" is what holds capitalism toghether. Once capitalism reaches it's end, they will become either Bourgies or Prols.
Also, I said they are classcucks. Didn't I?
Levi Jackson
this is just like that thread that feminist idpoler made where she said that leftypol was wrong about identity politics, got btfo, threw a tantrum and then left in a huff
is this the best reddit can do?
Josiah Mitchell
I have many problems with leftypol's understanding of "identity politics"
I think addressing issues of the oppression of women, minorities, etc. is a necessary component of the communist revolution, and, while they mean nothing when disconnected from communism and proletarian revolution, they are things which must be addressed in a proletarian framework.
True identity politics, like the SJW's, is liberal poison which must be fought in any and all instances, but that doesn't mean that, for example, issues like those facing lgbtq's don't need to be discussed within a class perspective.
These things need to be understood in reference to, for example, the abolition of gender, race. etc. which are both a result and a component of the establishment of communist social relations.
SJW's, bourgeois to the core, are stuck within the typical atomistic bourgeois liberal perspective which finds "difference" something holy, which cannot be overcome, only respected. SJW's operating completely with a reformist agenda, wanting to simply equalize "privilege", but acting in reality to further atomize and perpetuate the myth of the "individual".
Communists must fight against every form of oppression, but fighting towards material synthesis, rather than some bourgeois notion of ahistorical irreconcilable differences in "identity".
Nathan Collins
>>>/reddit/
Sebastian Barnes
that picture is of Sylvia Pankhurst, not Whoredull
Andrew Bailey
Who cares? No struggle but class struggle. No socialism but scientific socialism.
Lincoln Baker
she fell to anti-fascism, much like the rest of the working class
Sebastian Wood
They are part of the class struggle
I'm not advocating Utopian socialism, notice how I put the abolition of gender and such as a result and component of communism (understood as a process, and as a mode of production)
Oliver Powell
I was going to throw up a thread about it. Glad this one's here…
Identity politics is a reformer's notion of class struggle. The point is to ignore class by making it about you having solidarity with others because of your race or whatever.
The problem is that without any class analysis, this breaks up your understanding and solidarity immensely. This is one of the reasons I'm so critical of a number of anarchists (Bakunin being a principle problem and Emma coming up as she's had her idpol moments as well) whereupon their solutions are highly individualistic and ignore the problems of class for single solitary solutions.
What came up in the last 50 years is that neoliberalism didn't want class being understood because that class consciousness was what made liberalism have to work for the mass of people instead of corporations.
To be fair, the right wing is proliferate in this stuff. For example, with regards to Mizzou, you'll hear about Jonathon Butler and how he's a millionaire. Well, how the hell does that factor in to the football team saying he should eat, Wolff being ignorant on that, and fucking over the faculty and grad students by taking away their healthcare?
Likewise, the Seattle protests are not about free speech, but the people are trespassers on the property and have no valid complaints because they need a safe space.
As it stands, it seems that people take idpol positions now because they don't even understand class struggle. If they did, we'd see a lot more solidarity while people throw away the gay discrimination while fighting for other, more base rights, such as economic and political equality.
Jacob Sullivan
How so? If the specific forms of oppression that such groups are purported to endure are rooted in capitalism, then it would follow that those oppressions would either be eliminated entirely or irreperably altered by a radical change in the mode of production.
Leo Long
Which Seattle protests? We have riots every other year.
Really triggered the reactionaries with this one. They think everyone on campus is a trespassing Marxist. I lol'ed…
Matthew Campbell
No shit? Most of us know this already.
Ayden Lopez
well? people "identify" as bullshit all the time. doesnt make them that. all identities are cancerous, but some are beneficial to some extent
Zachary Wilson
Because of the special character of that "radical change in the mode of production".
Communist social relations are completely transparent and immediately understandable, communism is the conscious overthrow of the entire social organization.
Communism is human liberation via the destruction of labor as a separate category of life (and its consequences, e.g. alienation).
While the class struggle is the historical engine, in order for the proletariat to complete its historical task, it must revolutionize every aspect of the way society produces and reproduces itself (social relations) to align it with the particular development of what society uses to provide for itself (the forces of production). This includes, for example, the family. For example, freeing the female sex, is part of the change in the mode of production. "Abolition of patriarchy" (as a material fact of the the productive process) is within the set "the socialization of productive relations".
This does not imply the task is anyone's but the proletariats' (it cannot be done anywhere else but the proletarian revolution, and under any power but the dictatorship of the proletariat) nor does it do anything in relation to SJW's but specifically negate all of their liberal ideology: any practice of pathetic idealist "safe spaces", checking ones' "privilege" and other moronic bourgeois liberal nonsense as a means to achieving any progress from a historical perspective. The only progressive force is communism; the proletariat replacing the decadent capitalist system with one which allows the greatest expansion of human potential, communism.
The superstructure: the specific ideological constructs of racism, sexism, homophobia etc. will, of course, take longer to disappear. But that doesn't mean that everything to do with the relation between sexes, etc. aren't part of the conscious communist change in the material base of society.
William Jones
Class is an identity.
Jayden Thompson
This. A grounded critique (that is anti-capitalist) of how different identities are affected by capitalism absolutely has a place in leftist circles.
Luis Torres
No, its a relationship between the economic system and an individual. You can identify yourself as a capitalist all you want, but if you're working at burger-fat you're a worker.
Adrian Long
I think it was a joke.
John Lee
you cant be too sure of that. I cant tell if people are just acting retarded or are legitimately retarded anymore.
Andrew Howard
Class is an identity. Race is a relationship you have with people from different backgrounds. Sex is a relationship between the two reproductive units of most species of animals.
Henry Collins
Holla Forums is the designated retard board, that's why we're all here, 95% of this board has some kind of genetic defect, why do you think anons get so pissed off about racial inferiority?
Zachary Nelson
Communists can't make jokes, they don't even have know what culture is.
Daniel Hall
Getting suspicious now that is right
kek
Henry Foster
Your sense of humor consists of being intellectually superior.
Michael Hill
Really?
It can't have anything to do with the word "culture" that comes after it and its context of an accusation which is ungrammatical?
Chase Morris
This is exactly what I'm talking about.
Ayden Ross
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Sebastian Russell
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Zachary Turner
I make mistakes too, its fine too laugh at them. I'm not laughing at any intellectual inferiority, I'm laughing at the contrast of the mistake with the accusation.
For example, the way I used the wrong form of "to" above on accident the second time, (I decided to leave it after I realized the mistake so I could talk about it). It isn't an "haha I'm/your stupid", its a "haha look at the grammar mistake in context to the conversation topic"
More importantly, fuck of >>>Holla Forums trolls
Sebastian Mitchell
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Ryan Turner
Perhaps you should read it first. The petite bourgeoisie don't simply identify with the bourgeoisie, they engage in actual capitalist activity themselves. Just their businesses are small doesn't mean they're somehow proletarian. As for the "middle class": it doesn't exist, just because a prole has a higher income than other proles and has delusions of grandeur, doesn't mean they qualify is a separate class.
Not that poster but do you really have so much trouble conceiving of the family as being a sphere of production itself and therefore a necessary component (up to a point anyway) of the reproduction of capitalist relations?
Asher Carter
Holy shit it's not even womyn anymore, it's womxn, like it was a bloody nickname on a FPS.
Well no surprise here.
Adrian Perez
Whops.
Owen Perry
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Dominic Campbell
xXxShadowWomxnxXx
Austin Foster
This is not the right way to greentext smh
Jose Brown
The material process of social reproduction is a spook?
this
Elijah Sanchez
Delicious.
Evan Gray
bump
Jason Turner
That's all well and good, and I'm not trying to be Third Worldist here, but what do we call people who don't own a business but earn so much money its hard to call them exploited.
Ayden Fisher
Apparently some of our resident anarchists have decided that "materialism" and "material conditions" is a meme now.
Oliver Flores
I think this might actually be referring to me! Weird. Like a month ago? I don't even have the energy or patience to discuss it here anymore and mostly observe, but I'm glad I'm remembered.
Wyatt Mitchell
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Daniel Wood
it's like they've identified the strawman people use against anarchists and are emulating it. they've given life to the strawman.
Asher Sanchez
Kek'd hard at the timid white girl voice the "strawman" is the reality tho fam
Brandon Lee
It's not a straw man as much as it's what happens when stupid people try to appropriate smart ideas instead of shitting on them.
Brandon Johnson
They're having way too much fun doing this.
There's nothing fun about emancipatory politics. The "secret activist club" mentality has to go.
Carson Garcia
huh I guess that only applies to CIS people, het-men or non-white people when they refer to their lived experience rather than actually making an intellectual argument.
Pic related tho
Leo Powell
Thank you. I've been saying this for ages. It's undialectical to be dogmatically Marxist.
We should concern ourselves with identity politics only in the sense of what groups were historically oppressed, of course idpol for idpol's sake, creating new forms/aspects of identity out of thin air which were never oppressed is anachronistic and idiotic. Feminist and other leftist theory after Marx reveals subconscious/inborn divisions like racism that might arise post-revolution which would be counterrevolutionary and how we might counteract those.
Marxism isn't the be-all and end-all of leftist theory.
Jason Bennett
I would not even count that as a protest. It is seriously about twenty SJWs throwing a tantrum that the most torture chambery safe space of a university that I have ever had been to is not more so. The only people who are taking them seriously are the faculty and apparantly Ksharma Sawant who is probably using it as a photo op.
Seattle U is already a fucking disgrace. Damn near every history and social studies class is postcolonial idpol garbage. I am not kidding; all but two history classes this quarter were about particular ethnic identities. At least at my other schools I was able to find classes that were not about "finding the voice of the subaltern" or shit like that. If I were not so far along on my bachelor's degree I would transfer.
And this is the place that the SJWs are bitching about. There is absolutely no pleasing these cunts.
Nathan Watson
Yeah, Marx's philosophy was completely at odds with dialectics.
