bitch at pulpculture.org wrote:
>
> axshully, i'm reading a fantubulous book by Kimberly Springer about the
> rise and fall of black feminist movements, Living for the Revolution: 1968
> - 1980. In it, she is exploring this very identity politics -- how it
> formed part of the very internal struggles that erupted *within* black
> feminist organizations themselves when they debated who would be allowed to
> join (did they have to agree that they were of African descent? Would they
> allow Puerto Rican women who were asking to be included? Were they, in this
> case The Combahee Collective's most powerful voice Barbara Smith, actually
> excluding questions of elitism within the collective when they ignored
> class and other issues?
When left (i.e. working-class) movements lose momentum (whether, as is rarely the case, through their own errors or, what is usually the case, through the overwhelming force of capitalist assault) they begin to thrash about, look inward (miscalled self-criticism), blame each other, circle the wagons. That is what you are describing here. In 1975 there was _nothing_, nothing whatever, that anyone, black or white, female or male, gay or straight, working-class or petty producer, could do to blunt the capitalist counter-attack.
Looking back on what we were doing/thinking at the time I am reminded of a great Thurber cartoon: Two men fencing, one has just neatly decapitated the other, who says, Touche. It was over! It was over! (For the time being.) But we couldn't recognize it at the time -- hence the thrashing about.
> Were they aligning with third world people? [clip -- more thrashing about]
> Identity Politics? It was the label women, people of color (e.g., the
> Combahee Collective) applied to their politics in 1976. Was it a bad thing?
Neither good nor bad in itself, at the time, it was merely a way of putting off recognition of (temporary) defeat. The beginning of the long period (reflected in this thread) of looking for the magic issue/slogan etc which would bring back the glory days. Actually Andie wrote a fine precis of the whole period 1975- ?:
"Personally I'll tell you what I told Dick Rorty, that vulgar Marxism is a flop (he didn't like that at all), that you can priorities till we are blue in the face but you can't make anyone do anything, and that we can have the perfect program but the spirits of the vastly deep will not answer us unless they want to. He got that dumb shit from his (ex-)Trot parents and kept it even when he became an anti-communist, you know, the idea that if we run the Correct Line, in this case Bring Back The New Deal and forget anything that will alienate white unemployed ex-steelworkers in Youngstown, then we can elect Democrats and all will be well. Childish."
Ditto Identity politics. Ditto to the complaints of Carl, WD, etc. in this thread. They are under the delusion that there is some magic formula which will instantly revive The Left -- more or less deliberately avoiding the fact that criticisms of or policies for The Left are empty until there is something (probably a loose coalition, but an identifiable one) that can be called The Left.
> For Springer, no. It didn't divide the movement, it was part of the process
> of defining what it was. Did it lead to their demise? Not according to
> Springer. More often, it was just plain ol' burn out and the conservative
> backlash.
Roughly accurate. It was part of, a symptom of, the decline of the period of active gains. "Burn out" and "conservative backlash" are accurate empirical labels but not analyses. The analysis must focus on the reaction of capital, worldwide, to the period of struggle (1955-1975). "Identity Politics" were one way of riding out the period. But it is terribly wrong to keep the label now and apply it (stupidly apply it) to struggles for rights. The only specific behavior mentioned in this whole thread that could be called "identity politics" is the behavior of Jim Straub's "blue-collar" friends in wallowing in their Identity by sneering at Antioch liberals.
Carrol
Carrol