"If the Palestinians ever go mainstream, I'll stop supporting them."
- Jean Genet
Calling out identity politics & its many shortcomings has become something of a meme on here. I've been a committed communist (Marxist-Leninist, leaning towards Trotskyist, who's explored various tendencies) for the past seven years, & I've seen the rise of social-justice activism, which marched side by side with the labor & anti-imperialist, anti-war movements during the Bush years, its move towards the mainstream during & immediately following occupy, as well as the preeminence of academic social-justice, with its liberal & class conciliatory aims & prerogatives, including critical race theory, gender studies, the consolidation & symbiosis of the LGBT+ movement (with it the exclusive emphasis on gender transgression), etc.
"SJWs" & the more crude segments of the liberal left has become a favorite talking point of the alt-right, now on the rise in America & Europe. Much of the public has also grown tired of hearing about transgender people, apologetics for Islam, so-called "ghetto" (that is, déclassé) attitudes, mannerisms & behaviors among poor American blacks from the left, condescending anti-intellectualism in the name of the working class, reverting to simplistic slogans & piss poor rhetoric ("we have to dumb ourselves down so the stupid workers can understand what we're saying"), etc. To compensate for this, being that the left relies heavily on mass popularity, we've seen some segments of the left turn more towards the right in some areas in an attempt to maintain popularity, or at the very least tone it down on issues of race, sexism, gender & minority issues strictly in favor of class.
The question I want to pose is as follows: is identity politics really the problem, or is it assimilation? In the past, the radical segments of anti-racism & anti-sexism, as well as sexual + religious minorities were movements & groups existing on the fringes of society, deemed too unsavory or threatening to the status quo to be acclimated into the mainstream. Eventually, all of these groups went mainstream, one way or another, with the exception of some particularly unpopular groups deemed unassimilatable, like the severely "mentally ill," more extreme "perverts," "religious extremists," etc. This greater inclusivity in the west has been decried by the right as a deliberate perversion of European patriarchal civilization by "Cultural Marxists" in liberal academia, but all of this is actually a byproduct of late-capitalism.
Over time, with greater immigration into the advanced industrial countries, with their riches, from the poor, underdeveloped, "backwards" countries in the Third-World, beset with poverty, came a more lucrative reservoir for cheap labor, resulting in greater inclusivity in the workforce; once old sexual biases against women were overcome by capitalist modernity, the bourgeoisie came to perceive that women were more profitable in the workforce as opposed to unpaid (and therefore unappropriated) household labor, and so the care of the children was left to the schools & daycares, the care of the home left to housekeepers; homosexuals & other sexual minorities more productive working in the greater society out in the open rather than concealed homeless whores in alleyways or married in closets, etc.
Capitalism is always concerned with expanding profit, no matter what. It will (and has!) sow the seeds of "sin" & callously (or casually..) do away with tradition & the morality of old, if deemed socially necessary. The problem isn't divisive identities among the working class but their assimilation and mainstreaming into the capitalist superstructure. As Hakim Bey says, there ends up being a market for these people. That's the real issue we're facing, & not fringe identities.
Thus, capitalism has achieved a number of our longtime goals in our common fight against the continuation of certain cultural & ideological leftovers from feudalism & the traditions of old: the unification of humankind via immigration & the preference for financial identity over the national, cultural or racial identities; the destabilization of the family unit (an instrument of reproducing capitalist ideology among the children & the enslavement of women), etc. Huey P. Newton referred to this as "reactionary intercommunalism." It then becomes the job of communist internationalists to transform this reactionary intercommunalism into a revolutionary one.
In closing, identity politics could be a blessing in disguise. These movements are also particularly useful for us when they are on the fringes. It would be a grave mistake for left to attempt to undo the past few decades of the historic class-struggle & the fruits they've bore. It's not the popular masses but the revolutionary masses that we're concerned, being that we aren't populists: revolutionary minorities over contented majorities.
Just some food for thought.
