E101: [TEASER] Radical Reads – ‘Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics’ - Working Class History

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:23):
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Speaker 2 (00:44):
As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the
Day a million dark in kegeens one thousand mil last
grade are branden by the beauty. His sun Sun discloses
the paper. Hereus red and roses, Red and roses.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Just to begin, I guess maybe if we just talked
a little bit about, you know, why you decided to
write this, uh.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
This book.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
You know, what were or what are the debates that
you were kind of responding to or inserting yourself into,
and how you felt this book would kind of contribute.

Speaker 4 (01:27):
I think it's a bit that.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
We were kind of.

Speaker 4 (01:32):
Thinking through a lot of the ideas that came through
in the book. We were thinking together through the kind
of work we were organizing around in London. I met
Mike around the time of the Occupy movement and we
were part of an editorial collective of the Occupied Times
there and post Occupy. That editoral collective was very engaged with,

(01:53):
you know, being a media outlet for the kind of
movements that happened at the time, all the way up
to I would say a signal being twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen,
and I suppose at that point, you know, as we
all know, a lot of the energy changed towards more
kind of electoral projects, and one of those was Corbin

(02:15):
in Britain and Sanders movement. And what we found at
that moment then was essentially a very divisive sectarian discourse
on the left started to emerge around identity politics, and
the way that term was being used was just mainly pejorative,
and what it kind of denoted, or what it's supposed

(02:35):
to mean, was any politics around race. Gender was kind
of disruptive or disrupting a more universal position that a
lot of people around those movements electoral movements were very
keen to kind of message on or strategize, so there
was kind of an urgency there to be a movement

(02:57):
that represented everybody and kind of sort and more are
kind of a socialism that could be ordinary. So, you know,
at the same time as that, as we all know,
you know, there was fascist far right activity, there was
the alt right that became a sort of media spectacle
of in the liberal media, and that through that, I
think one book in particular really that really made a

(03:20):
massive landing on the left. I mean, it's a very
highly published book, even though in our vue is a
very terrible one. Is Angela Nagel's Kill or Normies? And
really what we were just would you think my community
at the time, we were just looking at this and
a what the you know, in a way, we're like,
what the fuck is going on? Because it became so

(03:41):
publicized in the argument, you know, really schematic kind of
reductive argument really is that post BLM and if you like,
where trans issues became more visible that had caused a
reaction online that provoked the far right and the lt
right into its activity, and the alt right was emulating

(04:02):
so called identity politics and that was really you know,
the base of the argument in what for us at
that moment, I think we were like exploring lots of
avenues and our own for our own experiences in the
collective we were in, and we saw this as a

(04:22):
really destructive argument. It was even worse for the for
it was very easily marketable, and it was a kind
of argument it would then arrive on larger platforms. So
what we wanted really is that, well, how do we
encounter that kind of problem, that argument and how do
we explore identity a is an issue as well which
is mutated for a long period of time historically. So

(04:45):
I think when we came to discuss this idea of
this work around twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, we were very
engaged with radical histories, black histories, feminist movements and attentions
internal to them. And you know, one of the one
of the kind of clear realities of being in the
movements we were in, but also historically is that these

(05:06):
movies have always been divided. That this wasn't some kind
of novel thing that happened with the Internet, that happened
with the so called tumble left, which is a term
that nag or you to kind of represent any issue
that organized around race or gender as you know, somehow
kind of Internet inspired and simply vacuous, whereas really waiting

(05:29):
in you know, waiting in the weeds, if you like.
It was this authentic class politics that everybody should focus on.
And you know, from the reading we've done and the
experiences we've had ourselves within the collective, within movements, we
wanted to really explore historically this problem and the problem
with division and how movements compose themselves generally. So rather
than leave it at the platform of a sort of

(05:52):
discursive back and forth, you know, full of all this
heat that there was around this debate at the time,
we wanted to bring a little bit light to it
and you know, treat it as a historical problem. Identity
is historical problem, one that is being produced by capital
and the regime of the state, rather than treat that
as some kind of novel, kind of discursive element that's

(06:15):
been produced from the recent time of the left. I
think that was that was kind of how it started, Mike,
wasn't it. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (06:23):
I think what we found in the writing of it
was how much this needed to be contextualized in longer
histories of colonialism and movements and struggles, and to you
know that in the introduction the conclusion with we are

(06:44):
quite focused around kind of contemporary like discourses about how
the way that people are talking about identy politics and
wokeness and things like that is a kind of an
appropriation of kind of black political language and black political
struggles in order to be dismissive of them. But then

(07:07):
I think we wanted to focus our chapters onto these
kind of longer histories and these kinds of divisions within movements,
divisions within within the working class. Constant, we're constantly cropping
up in different ways in different periods, depending on how

(07:28):
particular states implement social control practices in terms of how
histories of race operated in those particular countries. So you know,
these ideas about like what what is permissible on the
left are very contingent. They're very dependent on like the
strength of anti racist struggles or the strength of feminist

(07:52):
struggles in certain periods when these discourses would be you know,
much more effectively shut down.

Speaker 4 (07:59):
And you see where theyarities are really that there's a
sense in which there's a weird left or there's you know,
an anti race or a two militant left, an abolitionist
left that kind of you know, a transgender critique of
cis normative Marxist thought or thinking that was kind of

(08:20):
functioning operating. Wouldn't all of these things kind of coalesce
around these terms, because in a sense there's a prejudice
that they wouldn't kind of function for the working class,
and really that what that reveals is there's a sort
of nominal working class that's been assumed there, assumed as white.
But that these reveal if you're like historical problems, we've

(08:44):
also have hald the left conceives of itself and its
relationship to the working class. And you know, I think
that's one aspect of the bit we do early on
is to give a history of what an anti local
left politics. It's what an anti identity politics position is,
and it does go far back and Adolph Reed and
Walter Burn Michael's in particular, I've been I've developed a

(09:07):
quite schematic view historically with all sorts of historical problems
contained within it to make this argument that actually neoliberalism
were produced or invented these kind of problems. And that
was the main I think that that sort of periodization
does maintain in different ways, and it was something that
we wanted to challenge in particular really that we shouldn't

(09:28):
be we shouldn't think of neoliberalism in that kind of
methodologically nationalist lens as this thing that happens, a form
of government, a form of government that kind of happens
and divides national Left projects that it's you know, it's
as global as international struggle as global, and we need

(09:50):
to relate to it in different ways. So I think
that was they're all sort of this is a you know,
immediately in the Burke, you know, we begin we said
it's about identify politics, and we're going to analyze this term,
but there's all these other related terms that spin off,
and you know, what are we looking at here? And
we keep it pretty organic really to try and develop
that problem iminently and just bring people in in positions

(10:11):
in to move to the point where we start to
you know, look a look at movies historically, take historical
scenes from you know, post sixties and the nineteenth century,
and see where how division there's always been this contestable
point because of the colonial makeup of societies we're looking at.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, I mean I'll say on that that I've recently
been reading quite a lot of kind of class reductionists
and conservative leftists and articles and pamphlets, and there's one
in particular by a communist party that I'm not not
going to name just because I can't bother with the discourse.

(10:54):
But you know, reading the position paper on identity politics,
I was just struck that there were just no historical examples,
you know, And that was the thing that I think,
that's what I really liked about this book is that
it's just it's never a kind of abstract idea of Okay,

(11:17):
this is what you know identity is, or this is
what capitalism is, or this is you know, I don't know,
whatever sexism or racism or anything out that they're never
just kind of these abstract, abstract concepts, but they're each
one of them is historically located, and the movements against
them or movements in support of them, or you know,
they're always historically located. I think that's a real kind

(11:40):
of strength of the book. It's never, never that abstract thing,
but it's always what is the actually what's actually happening
on the ground.

Speaker 5 (11:48):
There was there was also an anarchist the UK based
anarchist pamphlet that I read not too long ago that
was a critique of identity politics, and it also didn't
historicide anything. Really it was it was a kind of
attempt to kind of say, look, we're not we're not
you know, we care about patriarchy and racism. But this

(12:12):
thing that we're calling identity politics, that we're not really
defining and we can't point to as a as a
really existing thing, is a bad move for the left
because it doesn't deal with class.

Speaker 4 (12:23):
There's a key point now I want to come in
on that. So I think, yeah, One, it's an ahistoricizing term,
isn't it. That's kind of how it functions, you know,
when it's used, and this was part of kind of
laying it out in the beginning of the book. When
it's used, it really is used as a kind of well,
you know what we mean term. It's used in a
sense to organize a kind of sentiment that's assumed. So

(12:46):
in that sense, it really is a historical and that's
kind of the point of it. But it is attached
to a certain historiographical story, which is there was a break,
there was a rupture, so there may have been a
more authentic feminist politics or anti racist policy at some point,
but the neoliberal break with that meant that all of
those movements and those ways of moving in politics are

(13:08):
just you know, kind of vaporized, really instrumentalized to the
point in which they are not just not useful, but
they're an attack on the working class. You know, those
ideas are very so prominent, you know, and they deal
you know, I think we might get to this, or
maybe we could just jump in it right now, but
there is a conspiracial aspect to that that kind of

(13:29):
can jump off, which is that you know, you take
the imagery you're kind of encountering all the time, or
you take a Hillary Clinton's speech, you know, where Hillary
Clinton will use gender or being a feminist to attack
Bernie Sanders, and you know there's real effects of that,
and there's an instrumentalization there of feminism to try and
make those attacks at a national level. Or the CIA

(13:53):
will you're not this, you know, will have an advert
and it will be you know this DEI here, everyone's inclusive,
and these kind of imageries become more content to show
and demonstrate that this is neoliberal identity politics. And that's
why any politics associated on the ground for those movements,
which has absolutely no relation at all to how it's

(14:14):
been instrumentalized, gets kind of brought up in that and
kind of caricatured in the same sense. And that reflex
is so common and it continues in lots of different ways.
And you know, the reason why we call it the
hatred of identity politics as a subtitle, really is that
a certain kind of resentment is pulled and then instrumentalized,
and that can go off in all all sorts of

(14:36):
different places. And it's not to say, as we say
from the very beginning, the identity isn't instrumentalized. Of course
it is. But at the very least what we can
do is be specific about how it is. You know,
if we want to kind of understand how incorporation works
all the way through the labor movement, which is usually
never discussed the same terms, you know that the labor

(14:58):
identity that was construct did as white and racialized as white.
You know that there was opportunities there for in corporation.
You know the tensions internal conflicts between trade union organizing,
between representation and the shop shoot movements. All of these
conflicts internally, they were never what was meant by identity politics.
This was something to do with feminism anti racism in

(15:21):
those histories, and you know that needs to be looked at.
If you if we've got an issue with how I
how our representation has been instrumentalized in the moving we're
part of an organizing within, then we can encounter that
in a sensitively presented way and be specific about what
the problem is. And you know that often happens and
in a situated kind of place, and you know you

(15:43):
can kind of reason around that. And there's other people
who point to how identities being instrumentalized in a very
specific about it, and we need those critiques. What we're
trying to like push against in this book is this
abstraction really and how it became had developed a conspiratorial
kind of motion in the discourse and allowed certain figures

(16:07):
within the left to take quite bold, kind of ambitious
critiques that you know that weren't just operating in the sky.
You know, they were entering into movement spaces. You know,
people were passing around while there's this person, there's adult
reed said this. You know, they're in a sense these
critiques that were supposed to unify the left with dividing it,
you know.

Speaker 5 (16:28):
I think I think that another part of the kind
of conspiratorial aspect of it is the way that like
first that like when people use talking about identity politics,
they're not they're not defining what they mean by it.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
But what they're doing is is they're investing.

Speaker 5 (16:46):
Like an inordinate amount of power into the people that
they're accusing of being. You know, these kind of people
who are part of some kind of nevarious identity politics
movement or force that they're kind of they're these kind
of wreckers who are or they wanted, you know, that
there's there's somehow inherently middle class that they are, you know,

(17:08):
usually seen to be young, and that basically what they
what they're doing or what they want to do, is
to divide and destroy kind of class unity. Or if
it's other other kind of people who are critiquing identity politics,
then the collectivity that they're that they see a threat
towards is different.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
It might be the nation, it might be you know,
democracy itself.

Speaker 5 (17:30):
For for a kind of a lot of the kind
of transphobic gender critical movements, it's it's womanhood that's being divided.
If you if you look at a lot of the
kind of writing of gender critical you know, writers and
people online, it's they used the identity politics language a
lot as a way of explaining the kind of what

(17:53):
they see as a kind of on the novelty of
trans existence and it being a kind of a product
of this kind of generational confusion. So yeah, it's that
there is this sense that the people who are behind
identity politics have great power, and we you know, that's
very recognizable as a kind of conspiracy conspiratorial frame.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm pretty sure that I'm
stealing this term from from a tweet of yours, Michael,
about sort of anti identity politics being conspiracy theory adjacent.
And so even if it's not, you know, explicitly conspiratorial,

(18:37):
there's there's certainly something in the structure of it that
is that mirrors standard kind of conspiracy thinking, specifically kind
of you know, if you think of you know, anti
identity politics as kind of being like, well, you know,
elite academics and cosmopolitans who may or may not be

(18:59):
rootless in their existence are using feminism and anti racism
to divide the working class it's not a million miles
away from just you know, openly well, Jews are using
feminism and black people to destroy the nation, you know,
I mean, especially when the working classes itself figured you know,

(19:21):
in kind of figured as white or figured as in
a particular kind of like masculinist kind of forms.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
If you replace identity politics or witness with cultural Marxism
in a lot of the ways that they're used today,
then it works the same way.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
I kind of would like to talk about black feminism.

Speaker 4 (19:43):
Yeah, I just I realize, Yeah, usually when we've done
these things, we spoke about that first, because I think that,
you know, it relates incredibly importantly to the frame and
introduction where we historicize this anti identity politics discourse. And
one of the things that obviously changes there is that
identity politics begins as a radical militant concept to understand

(20:07):
fracture and division within black liberation movement, and it ends
up as this kind of signifier of a divisive element.
So there's a complete reversal really of what the initial
conception was there to do. And we start with the

(20:27):
US case really of women's liberation, and we start with
Comby River Collective, their kind of exposition of identity politics
as a collective, and what this is intended to do,
and what becomes really apparent when you know, you read
that text closely is that they're actually it's a critique
of identity thinking internal to the movement. So you know

(20:51):
that black liberation becomes universalized, Actually it's not, because there's
masculine elements, in malee elements in there that suppress kind
of the women's contacts and Black women's situations within that composition.
They're looking at the feminist movement and analyzing the whiteness

(21:12):
of that movement, you know, the whiteness of the women's
movement and attention within black communities for black women whether
to associate with feminism at all because of that whiteness.
So really they're looking here and saying, well, we're taking
this perspective, and you know, what's been historically produced is
this identity of black women that essentially doesn't fit into

(21:35):
some of these constructs that we're kind of trying to
deal with. So it's very historical, and really it's a
way of looking at that period in the seventies where
you've got the black liberation movements have come into conflicts,
they're praying and really analyzing what the position is here
for liberation. It's very militant, so you know what's distinctive

(21:58):
about it. It's coming from a grass coler perspective and
a militant perspective, and it's there is a critique of tokenisms.
There is a critique of instrumentalization of identity and to
form positions where you can start to think about and
kind of you know, revise what's understood as a workless

(22:19):
working class movement. So, you know, so we look at us,
and really what that chapter is meant to do is
to look at what internal debates and conflicts were going
in within the American women's movement and how that's that
been discussed and how certain kind of ideas around black
liberation developed further on than that. And one of the

(22:40):
reasons to do that is that identity politics and intersectionality
were just kind of used as almost like coterminous problems
in the way these contemporary discourses developed. And to show
really that intersectionality and black famish liberation are two different
have their own different developments as well, and these histories

(23:01):
need to be qualified rather than conflating, you know, because
you see someone who's a black woman like Kamala Harris
in the US.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
It's kind of that's.

Speaker 4 (23:11):
Proof really that these histories don't really mean anything more
or they've kind of been evaporated. That actually, if we
get local to what historical moment situation is, that way
of thinking around identity is a critique of identity, thinking
of relating identity and non identity. You know that people
become identity becomes imposed on people and then people have

(23:33):
to deal with it and have to find kind of
political momentum within that kind of moment of domination. That's
what's been discussed in that chapter. And parallel to that,
we look at British black feminism. So writers like Hazel Carby,
who does an incredible kind of pamphlet at the time
for white woman Listen and again straight away incredibly instructive pushing.

(23:59):
Again it's an idea of token is and what that
black women think all the same, or that there's just
one identity here, and looking historically at Britain's colonial relationship
to race and immigration and how racialized women have been
differentiated in the labor force. So really, you know, what
we argue in those first two chapters is that not
only are all these writings by black feminists at the

(24:23):
time very varied, and there's lots of debate within that,
and they provide some of the most cogent critiques internal
to black liberation but also white the feminist movie as
a whole, but also it provides some of the best
Marxist analysis. You know, a lot of the tension for
kind of political left Marxists around race is that, you know,

(24:46):
Alan Woods's notion that capitalism can survive as a class project,
but it doesn't need race. It sorry, it couldn't survive
of our class, but it doesn't need race. And what
we're trying to demonstrate as part of those two chapters
that like feminists work, really you can't think around class
composition without some of these kind of instructive texts that

(25:07):
you know that set up I think methodologically the whole
book for us. You know that these arguments really then
take us immediately into the Aliens Act in the nineteenth century,
and we can start to think about these histories with
these tools. So I suppose, yeah, you know, in terms
of the role black feminism is playing in this book,

(25:28):
it's methodological as well as just key historical interest. And
I think for people who are just used to receiving
this term identity politics and these critiques of intersectionality really
low hanging fruit most of the time, stuff that kind
of should be kind of obvious.

Speaker 5 (25:44):
You know.

Speaker 4 (25:44):
It's incredibly powerful people who are racialized that also dominate
lots of other people. You know, they don't necessarily represent
these longer histories of within the black radical traditions, you know,
So we use those chapters really just a ground or
understanding of what the identity parties concept was doing in
its historical location and what it was conceived to do,
and really set up an idea of looking at race

(26:07):
and borders, race and labor differentiation. The way race is
understood by black family's collectives in Britain and the US
is different as differently developed because those colonial regimes have
their own interests. All these kind of particular ways of
analyzing the world we're in are you know, part of
this these kind of intellectual inquiries. So I think that

(26:30):
is what we're doing in those two chapters, and and
you know, get into the get into the problem of
the identity of womanhood and how that's been discursively developed
and how this work really just takes that apart, but
just does take it apart into not only kind of
destroys these notions of identity thinking around womanhood or around

(26:53):
you know, the universalization of liberation, but actually allows us
or gives us the kind of scent tools. The Center
ties ourselves to different ways of looking at our class works.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
As we come Martin, Martin and the beauty of the day.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
That brings us to the end of this episode. Preview
To listen to the full thing and help support our
work with searching and promoting people's history, join us on
Patreon at patreon dot com slash working class History link
in the show notes

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E101: [TEASER] Radical Reads – ‘Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics’

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}E101: [TEASER] Radical Reads – ‘Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics’