Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>jim o'connor wrote:
>>Identity politics is a step backward to the degree that class politics
>>gets repressed (for example, in Silicon Valley, when women workers
>>demand company child care facilities because they are women and mothers,
>>instead of demanding more wages because they are workers).
>I doubt that there have been any women workers who didn't demand more wages
>and better child care facilities/benefits _at the same time_. I don't know if
Jim has >any particular situation in mind; if so, I'd like documentation.
{SNIP] Before >criticizing 'identity politics,' you might attack the gendering
of care-giving work, >both in the 'domestic' and 'public' spheres.
There has been some discussion on this list I think of the history of this concept of "identity politics" but not enough. I apparently had my back turned when the phrase or fact first showed up, and I was really surprised on these lists to find that my own positions on the place of minorities and women in left politics were classified under identity politics
I think two very different things -- in fact two sharply opposed things -- are being collapsed into one. On the one hand there is the view -- the correct marxist one in my opinion -- that *within* a unified left there was a need (a) to give priority to the struggle against institutionalized racism and sexism (against the realities, that is, of which these two isms are the ideological expressions) and (b) in order to guarantee that priority the necessity for independent organizations of different kinds for blacks, women, gay and lesbians, latinos, etc. These positions were, ultimately, based not on anyone's feelings or any psycho/social conceptions of identity but on a historical analysis of the u.s. left which saw it essentially crippled and divided by failure to honor the necessary struggle against racism. This politics had/has nothing whatever to do with anyone's sense of "who am I" or anyone's sense of his/her "identity."
On the other hand, there apparently grew up in the pe riod following the defeat of the various '60s movements (the defeat of the ERA being a convenient end point for this process) a politics of despair in which various groups, rejecting history, rejecting marxism, rejecting the left as such, tried to build a collective politics out of a sort of summation of the individual feelings of identity of the members of various groups.
As I said, the two perspectives have nothing in common and in fact are sharply opposed. I might add that anyone who follows the various debates on the BRC lists will see that there exists a large voice in the black community which follows political (even class) politics as opposed to identity politics.
Comments?
Carrol