Carrol
(P.S., for those of you who know Martha -- the idiots at Colorado have finally promoted her to full professor.)
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Query re "Identity Politics" Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 16:03:12 -0700 (MST) From: Martha Gimenez <gimenez at csf.colorado.edu> To: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
Carrol,
I will do my best to respond to your interesting question, for it forces me to clarify, for you and for myself, what I mean by identity politics.
Identity politics means, to me, a political stance and form of organization that is exclusively grounded on the interests of individuals who understand their location in the social structure solely in terms of some individual characteristic or attribute which, they believe, is the main cause of their problems. Women organizing as women, people of color organizing as such, and so on, are in my view engaged in identity politics, a politics whose success is simply to achieve admission in the institutions of capitalism on a par with the opposite identity (e.g., males, whites, etc.).
Identity politics ceases to be that and becomes, lets say, modern class politics, when individuals organize on the basis of their concrete, dialectically understood location in the social structure, one which partakes both of universality (their class position) and particularity (as working women, working people of color, etc.).
Identity politics and class politics isolated from the concreteness of thepeople sharing the same class location are both abstract and useles in the long run, because successful identity politics do not do away with the class based exploitations and oppressions affecting all workers and successful class politics do not deal with intra-class cleavages and destructive antagonisms that serve the dominant class. Class politics (abstractly conceived) and identity politics (also abstractly conceived) fit within a thesis antithesis mode of thinking about these matters and are historically specific moments in the development of political consciousness; we need to struggle for the development of the synthesis or negation of the negation, where there is both transcendence of abstract, one sided politics and preservation of their reality and political significance.
Well, hope this makes sense - let me know what you think.
Glad you liked the review - it is in my view a terrific book, although Eagleton thrashes it in his review in the last issue of NLR.
Regards,
Martha *********************8
On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, Carrol Cox wrote:
Martha,
I was just rereading the article on materialist feminism you put on line a year or so ago and came across a reference to "identity politics." The reference occurs in the following sentence:
"The terrain of those early debates, which were aimed at a possible integration or synthesis between Marxism and feminism, shifted due to the emergence of identity politics, concern with postcolonialism, sexuality, race, nationalism, etc., and the impact of postmodernism and post-structuralism."
Now, I always assumed (without ever reading anything concrete on it) that "identity politics" were some weird sort of pluralism, based on various ways bourgeios individuals identified themselves (as women, black women, gays, latino gays, ad infinitum). But in various threads on lbo I got into fights with people (particularly one woman from Australia) who thought any insistence on independent organizing (as of blacks or women) were exemplifications of "identity politics." That rather amazed me as I suspect Panthers or SNCC people in the '60s would have said "Duh?" if you told them they were practicing identity politics.
But that debate or those debates brought home to me that I really wasn't prepared to say what "identity politics" were and thus couldn't distinguish them from my arguments as to the need for and legitimacy of the Black Radical Congress (for example).
And when I saw that reference in your essay quoted above, I said to myself, perhaps Martha can give me a sound bite definition of identity politics with a bibliography cite or two to back it up.
Hence this post.
Can you?
Carrol
(I liked your book review in the December MR -- and it persuades me to get the book you review. There have been some very stupid debates over "human nature" and "humanism" on lbo recently too.)