| Alexander Bard on Sat, 3 Nov 2018 11:12:13 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> Grand narratives vs Identitarianism |
Greetings Nettimers,
For me, the question of identity politics–--what it is, where it comes
from, what problems it creates or exacerbates, its political efficacy and
purchase?cannot be addressed in any useful way without putting primary
significance on what both Brian and Keith, in their different ways,
emphasized. Which is to say, the concrete labor of organizing political
formations.
Modern identity politics--?for convenient periodization, let's say
post-1968?--did not come out of abstract debates. Rather, it was the
growing realization, happening in many parts of the mass movements then
mobilized with the wind at their backs, that the movement work was itself
undemocratic in so many ways. One of the originary myths of second wave
feminism, for example, is the coming to consciousness among the women of
early SDS (long before '68), who noticed that the female cadres always
ended up serving the coffee while the male members went straightaway to
the debates about strategy. Casey Hayden’s story of coming to feminist
consciousness basically begins with this very story. She was already a vet
of SNCC organizing, already had thought through the systemic issues vis
racial segregation and Jim Crow. But the language for the rather more
informal politics of interpersonal behaviors?--which basically governed the
so-called private domain of the household, especially--?was yet to be
invented.
So, in that moment, with the fresh (but familiar) irritation of a tableful
of dishes left by a bunch of white male so-called radicals hashing out
movement plans, is it a debate about Marx vs Rousseau? Or is it a group of
women looking at each other and thinking, what the hell is wrong with
these dudes?? And then...hey, maybe WE should have our OWN meeting?!
Identity politics? Why, Yes, I do mind dying!
Asad Haider takes as his inspirational templates the Combahee River
Collective and the late communism of Amiri Baraka. Keith writes of the
pre-'68 masses in political motion in young African nations. Brian writes
of the resistance in Chicago today. For my part, I’ve been taking memory
trips to that poorly understood political interregnum we call the United
States of the 1980s, the campus cauldrons from which identity politics
grew teeth. This was the coming of political age for my cohort, Gen X.
Identity politics was our achievement, but also, in the way that those
politics were transmitted to the current youth without a context, our
generational failure.
And what was that context? It was a period in which the youth-driven
Sixties and Seventies mass movements conclusively disintegrated, for a
host of reasons both internal and external. Also, the decade advanced a
parallel retrenchment of capital, at all scales. Examples– Macro: Volcker
putting the stranglehold on inflation, with punishing interest rates,
forcing austerity and massive industrial restructuring. Micro: elite
institutions reclaiming authority eroded in the 60s, each in their own way,
such as Stanford University deliberately reducing the admissions of
humanities-oriented applicants and increasing their engineering
enrollments as way to manage campus activism. Molecular: the individual
who moves into responsible “straight" life, disawowing their youthful
ideals?--a narrative much reinforced in the mass media products of the time
(The Big Chill, thirtysomething, the Ballads of Rubin/Horowitz/Cleaver,
etc).
In the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher era, with wars fought by proxy, an obviously
sclerotic Soviet bloc, and a total rollback agenda targeting every
progressive achievement of the previous two decades?and no mass movements
producing pressure for new initiatives?--battles over new terms and
concepts like "sexual harassment" (the term itself hardly existed up until
then) and LGB recognition (no wide use of T or even Q yet) came to the
fore as
productive grounds for organizing--?a process that of course further
exposed the inherited dysfunctions of the activists themselves. In that
time, as I recall, activist work meant a good deal of introspection and
application
of care to one's ways of speaking. So, for example, in addition to getting
up to speed on the pros and cons of the Sullivan principles and the
various tactics of disruption and escalation in the campus divestment
movement, we took care to think through what, exactly, were our stakes
(being privileged college students of the day) in the anti-apartheid
struggle of black South Africa, and how to engage without patronizing
those with whom we felt called to stand in allegiance. The latter being an
identity politics problem, one that made the movement stronger.
The one thing is, those struggles created space for real power, for making
real changes. Until the campus activism of the 80s, colleges and
universities, not to mention corporations and government, were almost
wholly without sexual harassment policies. Ethnic Studies was born in the
late 60s but Ethnic Studies *requirements* did not take hold until students
demanded them a generation later. Apart from the two fresh but narrowly
defined social movements of the day, ACT UP and the deep ecology/ancient
forest preservation movement (in both of which identity fissures
manifested as internal secondary struggles), the campaigns that
foregrounded identity concerns were basically the only spaces in which new
radicalism exercised consequential power. In short, I now regard the rise
of identity politics in the 1980s as a rearguard politics, a zone of power
left by the retreat of the mass movements of the 70s. What power there is
in the #metoo phenomenon owes a debt to this history.
This history has not been transmitted to the post-Millennials. Hence the
ahistorical, moralistic version of today's identity politics--?a
pseudo-politics, if you ask me. One that invests itself in a supreme claim
to trauma (too easily appropriated by the hard right) rather than to an
unfolding and contingent history. I'll say it again: this failure to pass
along the history is the fault of my generation.
As to the question of class, well, yes, of course class is the political
answer. On that much, I agree with Alexander's return to Marx. But what is
a class? As Brian says, it is not an unchanging thing. Clearly. More so
than any other identity, class is a construction?--created in tandem and in
tension by both capital and labor...and when I say labor in a grand way, I
mean it in the way Alice may mean it: a universe of the marginalized,
racialized and gendered, who are doing the shit work of capital--?even if
that work is "only" passing time in a prison cell).
This post is already long, so I will leave my thoughts on class as
questions. If an agenda pushing for socialism and climate justice (maybe
the same thing, ultimately?) can only be class-driven (and I believe that
to be true), then what is the constitution of that class to be? And, given
our tools and what we can control, how is that class to made? The full
answers are long--?EP Thompson gave us eight hundred pages on just the
English working class, covering really just its first thirty years. But
the short answer is what Brian already said, which I put into Thompson's
turn of phrase: it's not the class that matters, but the making of it. So
let's get out there and make it. After all, Marx was no armchair Marxist.
>From sunny, catastrophic LA,
Dan W.
--
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http://www.prop-press.net/
http://www.madmutualdrift.org/
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