Identity crisis: Leftist anti-wokeness is bullshit

Great piece. This is a particularly good point:

The scrutiny and attention to detail that Reed applies to the recuperation of black struggle is unfortunately nowhere to be seen when he starts talking about trade unions or Bernie Sanders.

Even more so than the civil rights and black power movements, trade union officials and Parliamentary "socialists" have been entirely recuperated by the capitalist system. This is more obvious in Europe, where "socialist" parties have run much of it for much of the last 100 years, but should also be apparent in the US, which has a long enough history of (white) union officials and radicals being sucked into the Democratic party machine and turning against their previous constituencies.

Thank you for this! I can't believe I keep seeing references online to Mark Fisher's Exiting the Vampires' Castle from years ago, and your critique of Reed et al. is very relevant to Fisher as well (though Fisher lacks Reed's precision and insight). The vociferous critique of identity politics oftens covers for an endorsement of the same old failed socdem/trade union politics.

I give you credit for addressing Reed, but your ideological filter is keeping you from seeing many things. Here's a hasty response:

1. When Reed says, "I’m increasingly convinced that a likely reason is that the race line is itself a class line..." he's pointing to a truth: The class system provides a structure for racism. In the US today, we do not have a racial system that's separate from the class system as existed during Jim Crow or in apartheid South Africa. Instead, racism affects Americans within the class system like an extra weight that some members must bear.

2. The Black Panthers were working in the black community, but they rejected identity politics while fighting racism, just as Malcolm X did after he left the Nation of Islam. For example:

“Working class people of all colors must unite against the exploitative, oppressive ruling class. Let me emphasize again — we believe our fight is a class struggle, not a race struggle.” — Bobby Seale, co-founder Black Panther Party

And here's the Hampton quote with the parts that don't fit your thesis:

“We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.” —Fred Hampton

3. You say, "Reed has also dismissed “intersectionality” specifically, reducing it to merely campus activism and simply an extension of neo-liberal identity politics, ignoring that it emerged as the work of black feminists addressing specifically the failures of struggles in the ‘60s."

"Intersectionality" was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw who, like her mentor Derrick Bell, was trying to address a social problem while rejecting the anti-capitalism of people like King and Malcolm X. She is a bourgeois black feminist who has not said anything in support of socialism that I've been able to find. Why any socialist would think the concepts of the bourgeoisie are good when they come from its black members, I have not a clue, and yet some do.

You might ask yourself why neoliberals love Crenshaw's approach. David Harvey has the answer in his book on neoliberalism:

"Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multi-culturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power. It has long proved extremely difficult within the US left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the desire of political actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression of particular identities. Neoliberalism did not create these distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment, them." —David Harvey

"Intersectionality" was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw who, like her mentor Derrick Bell, was trying to address a social problem while rejecting the anti-capitalism of people like King and Malcolm X. She is a bourgeois black feminist who has not said anything in support of socialism that I've been able to find. Why any socialist would think the concepts of the bourgeoisie are good when they come from its black members, I have not a clue, and yet some do.

While I have my critiques of liberal intersectionality and its ontological foundation, this is just an ad hominem. Intersectionality has clearly taken on a life of its own after Crenshaw and means many things to different people. In short, this argument is not an argument, but a logical fallacy.

There was this one dude, Marx or something, that took a lot of concepts from the bourgeoisie; indeed most of his concepts come from them, although he subjected them to critique and injected new content into these concepts. Kinda like how intersectionality has been critiqued and given new content by many different stripes of radicals.

Something from Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" since it was mentioned:

"I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class."

Khawaga,

The difference is Marx was rejecting his class; Crenshaw was embracing hers.

The brilliance of "intersectionality" is it is effectively disconnectionality: instead of seeing the world in terms of interrelated forms of oppression, it makes each form unique and says they only intersect sometimes. It takes racism in particular from its historical roots in slavery and turns it into a psychological flaw. The result is an ideology that lets the bourgeoisie continue to divide us by race and gender.

is that so?

For Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia, intersectionality theory came about specifically to address a particular problem. “It’s important to clarify that the term was used to capture the applicability of black feminism to anti-discrimination law,” she says. In the lecture she delivered at the LSE later that evening, she brought up the case of Degraffenreid vs General Motors, in which five black women sued GM on the grounds of race and gender discrimination. “The particular challenge in the law was one that was grounded in the fact that anti-discrimination law looks at race and gender separately,” she says. “The consequence of that is when African American women or any other women of colour experience either compound or overlapping discrimination, the law initially just was not there to come to their defence.”

On the charge that intersectionality is not new, she gets philosophical. “Well, a lot of things aren’t new,” she says. “Class is not new and race is not new. And we still continue to contest and talk about it, so what’s so unusual about intersectionality not being new and therefore that’s not a reason to talk about it? Intersectionality draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics, so obviously it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to aspects of power that we don’t ourselves experience.” But, she stresses, this has been the project of black feminism since its very inception: drawing attention to the erasures, to the ways that “women of colour are invisible in plain sight”.

http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl-crenshaw-intersectionality-i-wanted-come-everyday-metaphor-anyone-could

The difference is Marx was rejecting his class; Crenshaw was embracing hers.

That's got nothing to do with anything in terms of argumentation. What you are doing with this comment is just to double down on your logical fallacy. Deal with the arguments, not the person.

The brilliance of "intersectionality" is it is effectively disconnectionality: instead of seeing the world in terms of interrelated forms of oppression, it makes each form unique and says they only intersect sometimes. It takes racism in particular from its historical roots in slavery and turns it into a psychological flaw. The result is an ideology that lets the bourgeoisie continue to divide us by race and gender.

As I said, I have issues with the ontological basis of (liberal) intersectionality, i.e. precisely that it starts with separated forms of oppressions or identity and then bring them together rather than starting from the basis that these are co-constitutive of each other and are actually inner-related or internally related (your use of the word "interrelated" is therefore incorrect; if something is interrelated they started off as separate. Though I get that you're trying to get at the innerrelation of these phenomena).

While I am sure there are some folks that may reduce racism to a psychological flaw, I've certainly not read any proponent of intersectionality saying that. And it is just lazy to accuse intersectionality of being the culprit of division; that has existed for a long time (you should carefully read the second quote from Crenshaw that radicalgraffiti posted above). Indeed, lots of unionists, leftists and so on never did bother with race or gender to the point of not even considering women and POC as being part of the worker's movement. Intersectionality is as much a reaction to the racism and misogyny of the organized left as it is a product of academia.

Will seems to be doing here exactly what the article criticises. He is saying that some people who talk about intersectionality are liberals, so intersectionality is therefore inherently flawed. However there are plenty of liberals (well, social democrats, but same difference) who talk about class politics in equally bourgeois reformist ways (e.g Bernie Bros, Corbynites etc). However class politics is not inherently flawed as a result.

Khawaga

While I have my critiques of liberal intersectionality and its ontological foundation, this is just an ad hominem. Intersectionality has clearly taken on a life of its own after Crenshaw and means many things to different people. In short, this argument is not an argument, but a logical fallacy.

There was this one dude, Marx or something, that took a lot of concepts from the bourgeoisie; indeed most of his concepts come from them, although he subjected them to critique and injected new content into these concepts. Kinda like how intersectionality has been critiqued and given new content by many different stripes of radicals.

Where has intersectionality taken on the a life of its own? It a major ideological component of large parts of the American oligarchy. Nothing concrete that the author advocates - "struggles over wage theft, evictions, ICE deportations, community self-defense against far-right groups and the police.. against police and border violence, cuts to domestic violence services, trans access to healthcare" would be out of place in a speech by any Progressive Democratic Senator (the "abolishing labor" - reads like some millinarian protestant pie-in-the-sky bullshit and is harmless). This is just the more *radical* version of that subset of Anglo liberalism.

Other than its conclusion this article could have appeared on any far-right website. It equates 1960's bolsheviks (and the Frankfurt School ffs) with with American right-liberalism (the American ruling class itself).

Socialism states that the interests of classes are not reconcilable. You cant reconcile that with communalism (as the author suggests via Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin). Hence the authors trick of saying workers want to abolish themselves, as if thats possible without destroying the economic/political system on an international basis. Just another "social relationship" like black-white, as if cross-class identitarians can serve as a vehicle to abolish capital.

The author gives away his game when as hes listing various 60s/70s bolshevik groups as some kind of precursors to the current fake left; he excludes one crucial ingredient: white nationalism. These popular fronts, unlike the author, were seeking to seize power with the help of the socialist states and genocide the domestic political/economic elite to take their place. In order to do that having proles of the racial group making up 70/80% of the population be a part of the front was crucial. Hamptons "Rainbow Coalition" in Chicago included migrants from Appalachia who - completely ahistorically - were dressed up in confederate flag uniforms by the popular front vanguard. Similarly DRUM - a racially separatist organization - called on whites to form their own white version of the union. Theres countless failed projects like that like the "white panther party" and the completely forgotten attempt to set up "white student unions" (only the white supremacist ones are talked about today).

Since the US Democratic party (and its intersectionality organizing project) has nothing to do with bolshevism it doesnt need that last component (though as the author obliquely notes its satellites/official proxies like DSA/Jacobin want to bring it in so as to get a piece of the machines cake for themselves). The party has been in gradual decline since 1968 and at an accelerated one once the family that controlled it for over a generation imploded last election. A minoritarian managerial elite that regiments its ethnic bloc to vote on communal lines in alliance with the parties regional oligarchs is seen as was forward by the dominant sections. The side benefit is that at a time when living standards need to be lowered to restore profitability intersectionality creates the ideological and practical means of doing it by excluding the biggest racial component from their own "rainbow coalition" (educated upper class whites can bandwagon on the anti-ism racket).

The Old Left had its womens sections and anti-colonial platforms. In fact most political tendencies left and right have had such things in one form or another. There is no reason to adhere to or even appropriate one of the dominant political lines of the ruling class for any reason other than to signal ones contentment with the status quo (if only to take the radical rather than moderate course of the status quo).

The side effect of being a systemic opposition (adopting whatever policy emphasis and orientation that the ruling elite takes (why else mention unisex bathrooms, like theyre some novelty, other than to follow lockstep behind whatever parochial American cynical cable-news politics shits out on a given moment), physically attacking the "far right" but not physically attacking and even supporting the left wing of the Democratic party, even though the fascist violence and institutional power of the former pales domestically to not speak of globally to the latter) is that in a time of crisis for the regime (like post-2008) the anti-systemic space will be taken over by others including the far right. It also allows the elite to maintain stability and time/space to rebuild a basis of social rule.

Steven.

Will seems to be doing here exactly what the article criticises. He is saying that some people who talk about intersectionality are liberals, so intersectionality is therefore inherently flawed. However there are plenty of liberals (well, social democrats, but same difference) who talk about class politics in equally bourgeois reformist ways (e.g Bernie Bros, Corbynites etc). However class politics is not inherently flawed as a result.

Class politics isnt flawed but social democracy (particularly in the current epoch) is completely flawed. A party having a black caucus isnt necessarily flawed but intersectionality is completely flawed.

radicalgraffiti

is that so?

For Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia, intersectionality theory came about specifically to address a particular problem. “It’s important to clarify that the term was used to capture the applicability of black feminism to anti-discrimination law,” she says. In the lecture she delivered at the LSE later that evening, she brought up the case of Degraffenreid vs General Motors, in which five black women sued GM on the grounds of race and gender discrimination. “The particular challenge in the law was one that was grounded in the fact that anti-discrimination law looks at race and gender separately,” she says. “The consequence of that is when African American women or any other women of colour experience either compound or overlapping discrimination, the law initially just was not there to come to their defence.”

On the charge that intersectionality is not new, she gets philosophical. “Well, a lot of things aren’t new,” she says. “Class is not new and race is not new. And we still continue to contest and talk about it, so what’s so unusual about intersectionality not being new and therefore that’s not a reason to talk about it? Intersectionality draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics, so obviously it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to aspects of power that we don’t ourselves experience.” But, she stresses, this has been the project of black feminism since its very inception: drawing attention to the erasures, to the ways that “women of colour are invisible in plain sight”.

http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl-crenshaw-intersectionality-i-wanted-come-everyday-metaphor-anyone-could

This is social, political, and economic liberalism. If you thinks that fine, ok. Why drag the corpse of socialism through this shit? This is the ruling class. These are the people in power. As for Degraffenreid vs General Motors: creating another class of protected minorities with black women having greater standing legally than black men would not have prevented mass layoffs at GM. This is people fighting over crumbs, and in a class system it would have been rich black women whole would have benefited over working class ones (you can look at the wealth/class disparity within blacks as a racial whole post Nixons counter-revolution and extrapolate those tendencies).

The author chose Reed not because he offers the best criticism of so-called "identity politics" but because him being part of the trade union managerial layer and a supporter of the god-awful Bernie Sanders he makes an easy target.

This bears repeating. What does intersectionality have to do with the Black Panthers and Frankfurt school? This is regurgitation of fascist nonsense (particularly the New Right) who think that communists are in charge of the institutions. The author appropriates others struggles as his own (it reeks of positivism and US nationalism). Hampton and DRUM ( League of Revolutionary Black Workers ) where Maoists running or supporting a popular front program to implement a Maoist program. When Stalin instituted the nationalities law in the 1930's it was in response to the defeat of communism in the centers of global capitalism. It was a means to consolidate gains. Maoists following suit were attempting to substitute the weakness of their politics and the economic backwardness of China to gain power on a minimum of a platform. "Identity politics" were a means to an end. Also these programs failed tremendously. The people who came up with "intersectionality" are from the elite. They are supporters and functionaries of the Democratic party. For them "identity politics" is also a mean but its not for millions of Eurasian peasants, its for their own class. And it is a homicidal vicious class. And Critical Race theories contention that blacks (and later women) have a common interests is belied by the reality of the aftermath of the "civil" rights movement.

teh

Khawaga

While I have my critiques of liberal intersectionality and its ontological foundation, this is just an ad hominem. Intersectionality has clearly taken on a life of its own after Crenshaw and means many things to different people. In short, this argument is not an argument, but a logical fallacy.

There was this one dude, Marx or something, that took a lot of concepts from the bourgeoisie; indeed most of his concepts come from them, although he subjected them to critique and injected new content into these concepts. Kinda like how intersectionality has been critiqued and given new content by many different stripes of radicals.

Where has intersectionality taken on the a life of its own? It a major ideological component of large parts of the American oligarchy.

citation needed

Yooooo. This piece was right on time!
The goalposts of the "identity politics" debate are definitely not anywhere where they should be. Where intersectionality began as a way to put new language in place that could help people navigate multiple oppressions has been taken in by higher ed and other institutions and turned into these representational identity politics that are a huge problem. And what follows is the situation we're in now....where a lot of valid critiques of the mostly white left can and are easily dismissed as liberal identity politics, even when that's not the case. The other goalpost has moved to this point where protest movements built around oppressed identities are seen as synonymous with class struggle.
Your point about Adolph's failure to contend with all relevant viewpoints is important (and I'm super disappointed to learn of his trade union and Bernie analyses......damn.).
We started the African People's Caucus of the IWW studying and learning the very struggles of DRUM, LRBW, Mujeres, George Jackson Brigade, women of the PKK, and the New Afrikan Anarchist positions that developed far after the BPP. We also have done enough political study to understand that black union (especially trade union) "representation" doesn't translate to workers' power. Indeed it can have the exact effect that black police officers, politicians, and professional activists can have which is as a pacifying effect.
We started that caucus knowing that the IWW is a brilliant union with a very checkered radical history, but a union that has trouble diversifying and pulling in people from across the entire working class. That difficulty is a question of strategy- and the growth of the General Defense Committee and Incarcerated Workers Organizing Cmte has created a serious challenge to the IWW- one that is certainly diversifying not only union membership but also organizing campaigns. The new Wobblies' Revolutionary Union Movement (WRUM) caucus came about with a serious critique of the power of the General Executive Board, union decision-making structure, the handling of patriarchal behaviour within the union, and newfound understandings of what issues *everyone* in the working class is dealing with (not just the conditions of the overwhelmingly white rank-and-file within the IWW). With those critiques came a lot of backlash- accusations of pandering to activists or liberals, that we're just 'dividing the union', even the suggestion that we need to just kick the racist individuals out of the union- as if we were talking about some microaggressions instead of an inclusive, possibly archaic organizing strategy. Those of us in APC are working to understand these pitfalls. We don't adhere to liberal identity politics based on representation, but definitely won't go without a solid understanding of our position in the left, in the labor movement, and the development of anti-authoritarian politics that our black elders are helping forge before and alongside us. Thanks again for posting.

http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl-crenshaw-intersectionality-i-wanted-come-everyday-metaphor-anyone-could[/quote]

Quoting Crenshaw in 2014 does not change the fact that her original conception of intersectionality was limited to race and gender. When I did a little researching, I saw another feminist brought in class about a year later, if I remember correctly.

In my experience, intersectionalists tend to talk about "classism" rather than class, continuing their focus on prejudice rather than economic relationships.

Khawaga

The difference is Marx was rejecting his class; Crenshaw was embracing hers.

That's got nothing to do with anything in terms of argumentation. What you are doing with this comment is just to double down on your logical fallacy. Deal with the arguments, not the person.

I am not saying Crenshaw should be ignored because she's bourgeois. I'm saying intersectionality is a bourgeois ideology. When neoliberals like Hillary Clinton cite it, you should suspect it's not a concept that's on our side. It is an approach to justice that focuses on identity proportionality, so to an intersectionalist, if the classes were equally representative, they would be fair. Whereas I would say the problem is not proportionality; it's the existence of a class system that must be ended no matter what form it takes.

WillShetterly

Khawaga

The difference is Marx was rejecting his class; Crenshaw was embracing hers.

That's got nothing to do with anything in terms of argumentation. What you are doing with this comment is just to double down on your logical fallacy. Deal with the arguments, not the person.

I am not saying Crenshaw should be ignored because she's bourgeois. I'm saying intersectionality is a bourgeois ideology. When neoliberals like Hillary Clinton cite it, you should suspect it's not a concept that's on our side. It is an approach to justice that focuses on identity proportionality, so to an intersectionalist, if the classes were equally representative, they would be fair. Whereas I would say the problem is not proportionality; it's the existence of a class system that must be ended no matter what form it takes.

capitalists talk about the working class, capitalists call themselfs socialists communists or anarchists

Tripling down on the logical fallacies, though this time guilt by association. In other words, you're not really providing any arguments WillShitterly.

I was disappointed with this article. Rather than deal with the substantive issues Reed raises, you pin to him a ‘representational’ politics (which could apply to anyone, even members of the IWW) that then resorts to the old trick of leftist-movementism that Reed has actually criticized pretty accurately in the past.
The problem here is a conception of what being radical means. For the movementists, radical behavior is a set of individual moral norms which govern the pursuits of the activist. Radical is a commitment to a set of abstract principles (the neverending list of ‘antis’) which, far more than any concrete success, set someone up as a comrade.
Reed’s central critique which you’ve *missed completely* is that programmatic politics based on institutions actually build the kinds of movements which advance class struggle. Reed does not argue against revolution and Reed does not dismiss the efforts of the more class struggle and integrationist elements of the 1960’s. But he does acknowledge that those movements lost. DRUM lost. MLK was murdered and his movement fractured. Same with Hampton. And as some historians have argued, in periods where programmatic integrationist politics flounder, Garveyist black nationalist/capitalism politics spring up (a fantasy).
This combined with the class interests of black-petit bourgeois has led to a kind of race politics based on ridiculous obviation of the fundamental connection between race and class, eschews programmatic politics (a politician's dream come true) and actively works to undermine class unity:

“The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation.

This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South. The 1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed against specific targets, like employment discrimination in defense production. Black Power era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly focused on combating specific inequalities and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of voting rights and specific programs of redistribution.”

To restate; programmatic politics, the pursuit of concrete and specific rights and gains through the vehicle of membership led institutions, is the way forward for issues facing the working class, including issues pertaining to racism and sexism.
Unfortunately this is lost on the contemporary anarchists tinged with liberalism. The ‘anti-representation/mediation’ movementism has to falsely read back things into the history of socialism, anarchism, and communism. Much like the author does with ‘solidarity unionism’, in order to claim some legitimacy from this past tradition. The problem is that the tradition, if studied in detail, supports Reed’s fundamental point.
The I.W.W. paid it’s officers and staff wages. They employed organizers and took a principled approach to contracts/agreements to employers, though there were competing ideas in the organization at the time.
Debs promulgated a Kautsky inspired programmatic socialism allied (if only briefly in a formal fashion) with the IWW’s industrial unionsim (this makes him a left kautskyan like Luxemburg, Pannekoek and Lenin. Recall, Kautsky’s politics up to WW1 were essentially that the program was the set of necessary changes that would *functionally* bring the working class into power; that is, form a working class type of self-government to then reorganize the economy and transition to socialism).
So it’s difficult, for the two reasons, to read this as much of a rejection of Reed’s descriptions. At one point the author complains that Reed only focuses on the negative aspects of the BPP, then in another, their same misogyny is cited as part of their lack of commitment to intersectionalism, feminism, or whatever ideological remedy the author might prescribe! Reed makes essentially the same point, that black nationalist politics require the abandonment of class politics (we know this from history, from Garveyism articulated among parts of Local 8 workers, especially after the ILA and the Government smashed the union and worked to foster racial resentment). So Reed is wrong for criticizing the lack of the black nationalists commitment to class politics, but the author is permitted to criticize their misogyny? What gives?
A final note; autonomy is a near meaningless terms as employed. What does it mean for a movement to be autonomous? A people? A group? A body? It means for them to be *unaccountable*. Certainly a class unified and making collective decisions needs accountability among subordinate parts. Certainly on the other hand, non-whites don't have to answer to anybody when it comes to democratic rights (to vote, assemble, etc.). But this conflict often presents itself as some either-or choice, that we must pick autonomy or assimilation.
But we do not. There are rights to which humans should not have to be accountable to another human in their exercise. We call these often civil rights or democratic rights; speech, voting, assembly, etc. It’s this scope of rights we aim to expand in our pursuit of working class power. E.g. the right to housing, healthcare, and food; or the abolition rent, private healthcare, and in general, the wage condition. Workers need institutions; not movementism.

He's not 'ignoring them' he's making an argument about what resulted from their collapse. You're right he doesn't cite DRUM and others when asked about nationalist politics; why would he cite the positive class elements of a set of people in the discussion of the historical and logical consequences to nationalist politics held by the same group? Would you rather he have not commented on the negative aspects of nationalist politics? Or do you think nationalist politics have a relevant revolutionary content?

'Identity politics' is a persistently moving target. 'Intersectionality' is a bit easier to pinpoint, and pinpoint it Reed does in various pieces. It's a set of ideas about disparate and discrete identity categories and forms of oppression that are seen to intersect. Now this is so general as to be pretty useless. Yeah. Some people put up with more bullshit than others. What does that tell us about how each 'set' of bullshit functions and interacts with other bundles of bullshit?

However, the 'theory' hasn't translated into any sort of successful class politics and puts forward little in the way of explaining how it could. The author of the op simply argues that it "came out of" some legitimate place or group of people. Authorship is not a reliable measure of the validity of a set of claims about the world or predictions about outcomes.

If you trace Reed's influence for his conceptions of race the derive in part out of Robert Allen (iirc) and Harry Chang (iirc). The latter attempted to dig through a dialectical deconstruction of race categories; what their logic implied for those attempting to apply them, with the elementary acceptance the social basis of race as a basic premise.

Most liberal race politics explicitly or implicitly reject the social basis of race; they have to cleave to some race essentialism to justify some form of 'authentic' community which is in turn often a necessary component of the justification for 'autonomy' as a matter of absolute principle. Stalinist politics at best; straight up reactionary nationalism at worst. This dovetails nicely with most of the right who greet the idea of authenticity policing and discrete racial communities with glee.

A final point: Your citation number thirteen is incorrect. That quote is from a separate article or interview. What it cites is actually an essay from which the following quote derives (And this is important for understanding Reed's positive conception of Race, which violates the author's claim that reed "rejects" antiracism):

"Even the New Deal embedded premises of racial and gender hierarchy in its most fundamental policy initiatives. The longer-term implications of the two-tiered system of social
benefits thus created persist to the present day. This extensive history illustrates that, as Marxist
theorist Harry Chang observed in the 1970s, racial formation has always been an aspect of
class formation, as a “social condition of production.” Race has been a constitutive element
in a capitalist social dynamic in which “social types (instead of persons) figure as basic units of
economic and political management.”6 Chang perceptively analogized race to what Marx
described as the fetish character of money. Marx, he noted, described money as “the officiating
object (or subject as an object) in the reification of a relation called value” and as a
“function-turned-into-an-object.” Race is similarly a function—a relation of hierarchy rooted
in the capitalist division of labor—turned into an object.7 “Money seeks gold to objectify itself—
gold does not cry out to be money.” Similarly, “the cutting edge of racial determinations of persons
is a social ‘imposition’ on nature,” which on its own yields no such categories.8"

https://libcom.org/files/Marx,%20Race%20and%20Neoliberalism%20-%20Adolph%20Reed.pdf

Mike, I suspect you're misreading Reed's take on the Panthers. You quoted him saying, "The Civil Rights and Black Power movements prefigured the coming of this new age; the feminist photocopy of the black road to nowhere was its farcical re-run." That's not necessarily a judgement of the Panthers. It's talking about the Black Power movement in general and pointing to the roots of contemporary left-identitarianism.

But I grant he may have meant what you inferred. The Panthers said and did some admirable things as well as some not-at-all admirable things and ended up nowhere. Do you have anything else by Reed that criticizes the Panthers?

Also this:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lupus-dragonowl-against-identity-politics

I haven't read Adolph Reed's work and cannot therefor really comment on how valid Mike Harman's critique is but on a first reading of his critique agreed with some of the more positive points Mike raised whilst still having an uneasy feeling that there was a fault line in it somewhere that I couldn't put my finger on. I mean I wasn't aware that Kolinko's approach for instance was derived from any kind of 'Intersectionalist theory'. So Mike just for my benefit in continuing to follow this discussion - if I say that it seems to me that a 'pro-revolutionary' politics must be critical (rather than just dismissive) of all 'identity politics' including 'working class identity politics' where each separate identity within the working class and equally a claimed positive working class identity are taken as the primary basis for organising - how far from your approach is that - would that in fact still be 'a communist praxis informed by intersectionality' or what? Don't mean this to distract from the more detailed arguments between those more familiar with Reed's work but I'm struggling a bit with some of the more nuanced differences of opinion! If all that is confusing it's because I'm still confused by this discussion.

Spikymike

if I say that it seems to me that a 'pro-revolutionary' politics must be critical (rather than just dismissive) of all 'identity politics' including 'working class identity politics' where each separate identity within the working class and equally a claimed positive working class identity are taken as the primary basis for organising

I would agree that this sort of "identity politics" is worth criticising. However there is a real problem that some people denounce any mention of any type of discrimination other than class as "identity politics". The recent denunciations of those defending survivors of sexual violence within the left as "identity politicians" is one such example.

Mike, Thanks, Just quickly, my use of the term ''positive'' above in relation to 'working class identity'' was just referring to that crude left criticism that ends up positing it against other 'identities' on much the same basis as some liberal intersectionalist arguments who in turn talk about class only in terms of an equivalent 'oppression' ie as 'classism'. Of course I subscribe to a class analysis and a pro-revolutionary ambition towards the self-abolition of the working class which I think you referred to in your opening text. Might have some disagreements with other aspects of your conclusions in terms of what the actually revolutionary anti-capitalist potential is in much of the 'equality's' agenda in capitalism but not sure - that's another discussion.
Edit: Forgot to reference this earlier text; https://libcom.org/library/non-identity-negation-identitarianism-affirmation-difference or just search 'identity communist movements negation of social relations'. (edit. The original text easier to find here: https://thecharnelhouse.org/2016/06/01/non-identity-and-negation-identitarianism-and-the-affirmation-of-difference/)

Mike, I'm thinking about your recent answers and trying to decide whether to address them. It may be that our basic takes on universality vs identity are simply too far apart, for all that we can agree, I hope, that both matter.

For now, I'm wondering about this: "there is a real problem that some people denounce any mention of any type of discrimination other than class as "identity politics"."

Who are you thinking of? That's certainly not Reed's take. For me, whenever there's a question that neoliberals address exclusively in identity terms, the first step is to factor in class. If it then turns out that people of different identities within a class are treated the same, the problem is class. If there are differences, then the problem is identity.

Reed is a social democrat. The scope of his perspective straitjacketed by that. Like many academic leftists he offers some useful observations and many reformist conclusions. But those unfortunate conclusions dont necessarily make the useful observations null and void.

I think the ideological ambiguity of the terms "identity politics" and "intersectional politics" is a bigger problem than some think. Class struggle intersectionalism, for lack of a better term ('communist praxis informed by intersectionality'), is a microscopic perspective compared liberal identity politics/intersectionalism. Furthermore, it is so divergent from liberal identity politics in both analysis and goals that it confounds me why it's advocates are so invested in retaining and defending such value laden terms. And at times it seems as tho many class struggle interectionalists get really defensive when liberal identity politics are critiqued.

Biffard, I also don't understand why socialists would keep the name if they're trying to address something other than Crenshaw's original liberal take.

For me, the biggest problem with the intersectional model is that it says the different kinds of oppression are unique and they only sometimes intersect. That model may have some value when talking about sexism because it appears to predate the class system. As Engels noted: "In an old unpublished manuscript, written by Marx and myself in 1846, I find the words: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male."

But intersectionality is a worthless model when talking about race, a concept born in slavery and promoted in English around 1680 to divide us. With race, we're no longer dealing with intersectional things; we're dealing with interrelated ones.

Biffard Misqueegan

Class struggle intersectionalism, for lack of a better term ('communist praxis informed by intersectionality'), is a microscopic perspective compared liberal identity politics/intersectionalism. Furthermore, it is so divergent from liberal identity politics in both analysis and goals that it confounds me why it's advocates are so invested in retaining and defending such value laden terms. And at times it seems as tho many class struggle interectionalists get really defensive when liberal identity politics are critiqued.

In terms of your first point, yes it is correct that class struggle intersectionalism is a "microscopic perspective" compared with the liberal one. However it is also true that "socialism" and "communism", in their true sense, are "miniscule" compared with the Social Democratic and state capitalist variants. But they are worth defending. I would say the same point applies.

In terms of who this is addressed at, I think it is worth mentioning the following. I run the Working Class History Facebook page. Often if we post something about an LGBTQ rights campaign, or the fight for women's suffrage, or a civil rights/antiracist fight some people (always white men) comment "What's this got to do with the working class/class struggle?"

Sometimes the more "radical" ones try to double down when you try to explain with them. For the fight for women's suffrage, for example, they turn round and say that the suffragettes supported World War I. Now while it is true that some suffragettes did support the war (many didn't of course), you could also make exactly the same argument about the unions, as they lined up behind the war as well. However no one ever extends the same argument to union activities before the war.

Steven, Not sure about ''no one'' - The UK 'Wildcat' group Mark 2 might be the exception to your last comment regarding the pre-World War One trade unions as here: https://libcom.org/library/good-old-fashioned-trade-unionism-wildcat, though I don't endorse it in it's entirety myself - more anarchist than Marxist perhaps.

Spikymike

Steven, Not sure about ''no one'' - The UK 'Wildcat' group Mark 2 might be the exception to your last comment regarding the pre-World War One trade unions as here: https://libcom.org/library/good-old-fashioned-trade-unionism-wildcat, though I don't endorse it in it's entirety myself - more anarchist than Marxist perhaps.

hi, yes that may be true. However what I was specifically referring to was commenters on the working class history page

Thanks Mike. Ah yes the holy grail of ''..how to link these things to a totalised critique...'' Unfortunately I'm not convinced that many of the small competing groups in our milieu (let alone the Left more generally) either have an adequate grasp of the material links between these ''things'' (there are a lot of assumptions made) or are very effective in their assumed specialised role in imparting a ''totalised critique'', often instead just turning up at protests on the assumption that all will be transparent with their mere presence and a few slogans! In some ways the linked discussions on libcom are potentially more effective, but then only to the self-selected few.

Utilizing the methodology of identity politics (irony), I think there's a disparity of experiences between the North American left and the UK left. The 'class analysis' left was obliterated in NA to an extent it never was in the UK. Liberal identity politics was the dominant ideology of the NA left decades before it took hold in Europe. The effort to get any sort of class struggle perspective interjected into the discourse of the NA left has been an extreme uphill battle.

Perhaps the UK experience has been an inverse of this situation to some degree, because the notion of having a flood of Joe Blow facebook users arguing 'what does LGBT have to do with class?' is quite hard for me to imagine seeing on a NA leftist facebook page.

Biffard Misqueegan

Perhaps the UK experience has been an inverse of this situation to some degree, because the notion of having a flood of Joe Blow facebook users arguing 'what does LGBT have to do with class?' is quite hard for me to imagine seeing on a NA leftist facebook page.

most of the fans of the WCH Facebook page are American. But TBH I don't know what nationality the people saying that were, so it may be a moot point

A central claim - that Reed is a class-reductionist 'colorblind' social dem is refuted in the first two paragraphs of this text:

A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it perceives capitalism dialectically, as a social totality that includes modes of production, relations
of production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that
lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most important contribution
to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A historical
materialist perspective should stress that “race”—which includes “racism,” as one is
unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and
has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored to a particular system of production.
Race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations
as groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on “natural”
or essential characteristics attributed to them. Ideologies of ascriptive difference help to
stabilize a social order by legitimizing its hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, including
its social division of labor, as the natural order of things.

https://libcom.org/files/Marx,%20Race%20and%20Neoliberalism%20-%20Adolph%20Reed.pdf

One of our concerns is, or should be, the tendency among a strain of exuberant leftists to proclaim programmatically diffuse coalitions and subordinate the class program to counter-solidaristic identity politics.

I think we should build on the more visionary aspects of the program, e.g., the demand for free public higher education, decommodified health care, etc and the vital fight to stop the TPP, and yes of course against discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc and also against neoliberal policing and the constantly expanding public/private carceral apparatus, which we have to understand and insist that others also understand is a class issue.

I fail to understand how this is supposed to be Lassallean. Public education and partially decommodiefied health care are fairly common achievements in industrial countries. The reason why Reed is talking about them is because US is desperately lacking behind in these compared to most countries with a similar level of economic development, and that's also linked to racial inequality.

I find this line of argument confusing. On the one had it criticizes Reed for being workerist (trying to affirm the power of the working class instead of abolishing its condition as the working class), but then it also accuses him of not giving enough brownie points to the workerist potential of the 1960s identity based movements. Having a social democratic strategy itself doesn’t imply necessarily Lassallean political program, and being a reformist doesn’t automatically devalue Reed's academic and political output. Rainbow coalition politics Maoist and Leninist influenced groups were trying to create never amounted to much in practice. There is no reason to cuddle failed revolutionary movements. The fact that these groups had some victories doesn’t mean that they didn’t have underlying problems that are linked to their later decline.

The article doesn’t defend being “woke” as a political strategy, so why is it “bullshit” to criticize those shallow forms of online liberalism? - Because reformists do it? Reeds argument in a nutshell would be that “race” based “oppression” is mostly driven by structural discrimination at the heart of capitalism (linked to specific historical contingencies of course), so being “woke” or organising along identitarian lines is unlikely do anything about it, because the whole framework of the “race problem” (mass incarceration, police violence, unemployment) is a class issue to such a large extend. Identity is not a good category for understanding most “oppressions” intersectionality is claiming to explain.

Reed’s problem with identity politics is that it’s used to push politics away from the underlying economic problems, into a realm of representational “equalities” and problems of individual prejudice. Another point is how the bourgeoisie is structurally able to set itself up as the leaders of these movements, and smuggle in its own intersectional interests above all else. Essentialising discourses contribute to this, as they make structural problems appear as ethnic. Criticising anti-racist politics in the US doesn’t deny existence of racism, the point is to find a way to fight racism in a way that works. Reed is not calling for unity in the expense of fighting racism, he’s calling for universalist demands for changing the underlying conditions that cause racism.

Being more “woke” about discrimination and bad behaviour within leftist subcultures is a good development. These tiny groupings to tend to be demographically so male dominated, that it’s a considerable gain, that the issue of confronting sexism within the movement is taken seriously. But this is a completely different issue from the dynamics Reed is criticising. I’m not sure why the author is bringing it up, since I don’t remember Reed ever saying that fighting discrimination within the movement is dividing anything.

I can understand why people would be concerned about this issue, - it’s perfectly legitimate considering the history of the movement, but it’s a conceptual mistake to think that this is related to the kind of identity politics Reed is criticising.

No, his solution isn't color blind social democratic politics and you've adduced no citations of reeds work to support the claim.

He argues that the programmatic politics of the new deal or the civil rights movement were more effective than movementism and he is (arguably) correct. He has a weak critique of the labor liberalism problem, but then again so does most of the left.

Mike, I only read your piece and none of the comments -- yet.

It's excellent, spot on, and totally appropriate for the historical period we're currently living through.

Thanks for writing it.

Just a quick comment about the mention of Black Lives Matter. I think it definitely makes more sense as a class movement than a race one. For example BLM activists also made a big deal about police killings of white working class people, whereas the "all lives matter" crowd basically didn't give a shit.

Mike Harman

Short on time, so an incomplete reply to the last two comments:

Sharkfinn

Having a social democratic strategy itself doesn’t imply necessarily Lassallean political program, and being a reformist doesn’t automatically devalue Reed's academic and political output.

This is an assertion, but there's no argument. The basic split between Lassalle and Marx, is that Lassalle wanted to conquer the state and use it for the interests of workers, Marx and Engels wanted to abolish it - both of these positions are often mis-labeled as 'Marxist'.

When someone is saying things like "There is no millenarian moment, no objective moment of the crash." or "Fourth International and other fantasists", then tells people to vote for Bernie, that indicates one side of this particular split.

Lassalle believed in the "iron law of wages" and that workers cooperatives had to be subsidised by the state to be an improvement to worker's lives - a belief based on 19th century economics. What Engels means by "wither", is a matter of a more compex debate, but it did not mean immidiate abolishment. Marx believed in stages and pursued party politics, and how that relates to modern day politics is another matter. Reed doesn't hold any 19th century German labour party beliefs. If you want to call him reformist Ok, but maybe then just use the word.

Reed solution might be insufficient, but that doesn't devalue his underlying argument about the problem. Those are two different things.

Great piece, remains relevant even now 3 years later.

For anyone interested in thinking about this stuff further, the recent Angry Workers book is a really excellent illustration of how, once you move beyond just abstract appeals to class unity against capitalism and start to get actually involved in the real struggle of actual workers in a specific workplace, getting a full understanding of that situation inevitably means talking about "the particular" - i.e. stuff that could be described as "identity". (I promise this post is not actually sponsored content.)

For your consideration, an article on 'whiteness' situated beyond the common America-centric focus on such issues.

http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/pdf_essays/the%20power%20of%20whiteness.pdf

R Totale wrote: "For anyone interested in thinking about this stuff further, the recent Angry Workers book is a really excellent illustration of how, once you move beyond just abstract appeals to class unity against capitalism and start to get actually involved in the real struggle of actual workers in a specific workplace, getting a full understanding of that situation inevitably means talking about "the particular" - i.e. stuff that could be described as "identity". (I promise this post is not actually sponsored content.)"

We appreciate that you like the book! - but while focussing a lot on the concrete divisions within the class we really tried to make clear that framing the issue of racism or sexism in terms of identity politics ('the Asian community', 'the women') is counterproductive. You don't fight racism with anti-racism, but with class politics that understand divisions historically and materialistically. This is not just semantic juggling...

Point taken, but I think the point of pushing back against the "anti-idpol" left is less to defend "identity politics" (whatever that is), and more to show the weakness of positions that use a sweeping critique of "identity politics" in a way that dismisses actual class struggles against division - e.g. people who just (rightly) criticise the politics of the activist layer who speak in the name of "Black Lives Matter" and then stop there without analysing the actual anti-police violence movements beyond that. Or, at best, who admit the need for "class politics that understand divisions historically and materialistically", but seem to get stuck at the stage of endlessly calling for such class politics, without ever moving on to actually producing that kind of analysis themselves. Sorry if that's a bit of tangled post, hopefully people can see what I mean.

R Totale, it makes perfect sense and is precisely what the anti-idpol lot completely misses. Ffs, there are people (some who post here even) that shift the cause from dividing the class away from racism and sexism and to the women and POC who dare to say or do something about their experiences.

while focussing a lot on the concrete divisions within the class we really tried to make clear that framing the issue of racism or sexism in terms of identity politics ('the Asian community', 'the women') is counterproductive. You don't fight racism with anti-racism, but with class politics that understand divisions historically and materialistically. This is not just semantic juggling...

Hear, hear.

So I never really got to any substantial conclusions of my own on this discussion and just read this comment from a Lefty academic who probably would qualify as a promoter of ''class representation under capitalism'' (and sympathetic to trotskyism to boot) but still makes some useful observations along the way as the BLM movement and it's various constituent organisations gather more prominence today:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1303/race-uber-alles/

Since Adolph Reed has recently made it into the "getting to talk about being silenced/cancelled in the New York Times" crowd - a publication which is not at all PMC, obviously - Asad Haider's recent writings on this and related subjects are very much worth reading:
How calling someone a "class reductionist" became a lefty insult
Notes on Conformism
PMC Posturing
Critical Confusion
Class Cancelled: The class reductionism debate continues to go nowhere.

R.Totale. Thanks for those links. I read the first and last of those and would especially recommend the last fairly long one titled 'Class Cancelled...' (here: https://asadhaider.substack.com/p/class-cancelled) definitely one of the better critical responses to Adolph Reed's approach that despite some interesting arguments by Reed prioritises a rather social democratic style of class politics.