Michael Rectenwald and other left/ex-left identity politics critics

As for your first example (of the IWAs), you acknowledge they did criticisable stuff, but immediately add that "these are all divisions which affect non-identity-based class struggle groups". In other words, it is not related to their IdPol orientation.

My example of a critique of the Bund did relate to their IdPol orientation. In your extremely restricted (arbitrary) definition, they were not a class-organisation.

Sivanandan, mentioned in #47 above, died last month. From an obituary;

Quote:

... Siva’s many celebrated aphorisms – easy-to-remember encapsulations of complex ideas that challenged simplistic assumptions. Others included: “We are here because you were there” (relating to post-colonial migration); “If those who have do not give, those who haven’t must take”; and “The personal is not political, the political is personal”.

The latter illustrated his growing frustration with the solipsism of emerging identity politics, particularly among what he saw as a more well-heeled, younger generation of intellectuals, who he felt were reluctant to engage with issues of class even though it was the struggles of the black working-class who had paved the way for them. “The people who made this mobility possible were those who took to the streets,” he once told me. “But they did not benefit.”

As for domicile, location, Marxism Today was to find these in the thinking of a Left intelligentsia eviscerated of class and the counsels of a Labour Party thrashing around for a showing at the polls. In France and Italy the Eurocommunists were parties in their own electoral right, but in Britain Marxism Today, having broken with the “Stalinists,” had no comparable base — nor, presumably, having broken so violently with the theory and practice of the vanguard party, could it countenance one. Labour, besides, was the established party of socialism.
[...]
Could Labour do the same? Could it abandon its traditional class perspective and accept that a social bloc has to be “constructed out of groups which are very different in terms of their material interests and social positions”? And could these “diverse identities” be welded together into a “collective will”?

[...]
There may well be all sorts of “resistance to the system,” as Stuart Hall suggests, in civil society today, all sorts of new social movements and “a politics of the family, of health, of food, of sexuality, of the body.” And they may even succeed in pushing out the boundaries of individual freedom. But the moment they threaten to change the system in any fundamental way or go beyond the personal politics of health, food, sexuality, etc., they come up against the power of the state. That power does not need to be used at every turn, just to intimate that it is there is sufficient to change the politics of the new social forces, personal politics, to a politics of accommodation.

Civil society is no pure terrain of consent where hegemonies can play at will; it is ringed around, if not with coercion, with intimations of coercion — and that is enough to buttress the system's hegemony. It is only in challenging state power that you expose the coercive face of the state to the people, sharpening their political sense and resistance, providing the temper and climate for “the construction” of more effective “social blocs.” Conversely, you cannot take on the dominant hegemonies in civil society without at some point — at the point of effectiveness, in fact — falling foul of the system.
[..]

By their very nature and location, the underclass are the most difficult to organise in the old sense of organisation. They do not submit to the type of trade union regimen which operates for the straight “official” workforce — but they come together, like villagers, through hearsay and common hurt, over a deportation case here or a death in custody there, to take on the immediate power of the immigration officer or the police and to go beyond it, if that is where it takes them, to oppose the power of the state itself as it presents itself on the street. They come together, too, over everyday cases of hardship to help out each other's families, setting up informal community centres to help them consolidate whatever gains they make. These are not great big things they do, but they are the sort of organic communities of resistance that, in a sense, were prefigured in the black struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and the insurrections of 1981 and 1985.

If you want to a hold critical discussion about Adolph Reed, give some quotes so that I know what you're on about.

Accepting this reasoning, let me turn the tables: why do you (and Jay_S) rant about boilerplate critiques of IdPol, when in fact your problem really is with "workerist" social democratic politics and rightwing/mainstream attacks on the lifes of minorities?

The problem with identity politics, then, is that it is one-sided and undialectical. It treats identities as static entities, and its methods only serve to further reify those categories. It aims to liberate identity groups (or members thereof) qua identity groups (or individuals), rather than aiming to liberate them from identity itself. Identity politics fails not because it begins with various subaltern groups and aims at their liberation, but because it ends with them and thus cannot deliver their liberation. It makes identities and their equality with other “privileged” groups the basis of political activity, rather than making the overcoming of the alienated identity, for themselves and all identity groups, the goal. The abolition of the one-sidedness of identity – as worker, woman, man, or what have you – represents real human emancipation. Always failing this, identity politics settles for mere linguistic emancipation, which is offered (and policed so assiduously, as Fisher notes) by the defenders of the sanctuary of identity.

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.
...
We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives.

I don't think Sivanandan (and Jenny Bourne) were criticising the Labour Party (or Democratic Party) for being the Labour Party (ie electoralists) and being "workerist". They were criticising them for IdPol (hence Red Marriott, who I understand is against IdPol, rightfully could cite Sivanandan).

Evidently according to you the vast majority of the time (even genuine) critique of IdPol falls short (and enables "attacks on the lifes of minorities"), so why does "which is which" matter? Genuine critique of IdPol in your view should not be a critique of the identity bit.

Quote:

The Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings,
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Adolph Reed dismissed the uprisings as pseudo-radicalism ... it was essentially a front for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders,

My guess is that Reed was talking about the utilisation/portrayal by the mainstream "Left" of the uprising, not the ordinary people actually on the street. You'd have to give a quote. As for the Right, they didn't portray the people on the street as IdPol, but as criminals. If they brought in IdPol, it was only to point out that the city/police force itself was largely black (and the Right's problem wasn't with the fact that blacks are in the police, but that it was corrupt).

Your argument against Reed is all over the place. First you say that Reed in his critiques of IdPol ignores/overlooks "class-based anti-racist organising", next you say that that the problem is that he criticises it.

You'd have to give a quote.

If you want to watch three bald men arguing over combs, then Jacobin's Birch and Heideman vs. Reed is possibly where I first really started looking into him:
http://nonsite.org/editorial/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sen...
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/adolph-reed-blm-racism-capitalism-lab...
http://nonsite.org/editorial/splendors-and-miseries-of-the-antiracist-le...

In fact, another, more richly grounded and textured perspective makes clear that their characterization of an initially conservative movement that became radical “through the course of struggle itself” is exactly the opposite of the movement’s trajectory. Preston Smith II’s important account of the constitutive tension between programs of racial democracy – an ideal of strict equality of opportunity within capitalism – and social democracy shows how the former tendency, under pressure of Cold War anti-leftism, the predominant class commitments among black civic elites, and positive reinforcement from the courts, liberal opinion-leaders, and the national Democratic coalition, became the dominant trend in the 1950s. The social-democratic tendency persisted; e.g., through the agency of A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and their Negro American Labor Council, that tendency was the originating and primary organizing force of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which became Martin Luther King, Jr.’s event only in posthumous reinvention.3 But the victory of the racial-democratic orientation in the mid-1960s – illustrated symbolically in the emergence of Black Power ideology and defeat of the social-democratic initiatives spearheaded by Randolph and Rustin — underwrote consolidation of a new black political class of public officials, functionaries, and race relations administrators as the central force in black political agenda-formation.4 And, contrary to Birch and Heideman’s odd contention that racial redistribution is actually intrinsically anti-capitalist, the record of the black political regime consolidated in the late 1960s and early 1970s is most markedly class-skewed and amounts to at best a sort-of racial trickle down. That is, on this front, Birch and Heideman simply do not know what they’re talking about.

Birch and Heideman do this regarding Occupy and Black Lives Matter, to the point even of projecting political profiles onto demonstrators in “cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and now Charlotte” to counter my arguments regarding the class character of anti-disparitarianism as a political program. Basing themselves on what they understand to be “the logic of [demonstrators’] actions,” they assert “[p]eople do not risk their lives just to tinker with the social order, just as civil rights workers in the South did not risk theirs merely in the hopes of registering some more black voters.” Of course, describing what opposition BLM protesters may confront as at all comparable to the dangers faced by campaigners in the high period of southern civil rights activism is absurd and trivializes the conditions those activists faced. Moreover, very many civil rights workers most certainly did risk their lives “merely” to fight for registering black voters, but that is beside the point at the moment and is only another illustration of how poorly the authors understand the political history they declaim about.

The idea behind the Labor Party was straightforward: to build an independent political party of the working class and to anchor it in the trade union movement. You can’t be a working-class party unless you’re anchored in the trade union movement; that’s where the working class is organized politically as a class, to the extent that it’s organized anywhere politically as a class. The immediate historical precipitants that it grew out of were networks of trade union activists who had been active in the anti-concessions movement in the 1970s and 80s; that’s why we were centered disproportionally in the industrial sector. The idea, as reflected in one of our popular slogans, was that the bosses have two parties so we should have one of our own. We tried to build around a program that was worked out in a participatory way but was shaped by a vision of pursuing class power. We were not interested in organizing the Left in the sense of aggregating left stances; we wanted instead to be a political party anchored in the working class. We always focused more on institutional affiliations from unions than on individual memberships because we knew that the key was to have the political capacity as well as the broader institutional capacity of the trade union movement. We were relatively successful in winning and retaining institutional affiliations.

More than a decade and a half ago I criticized similar formulations of a notion of “infrapolitics,” understood as the domain of pre-political acts of everyday “resistance” undertaken by subordinated populations, which was then all the rage in cultural studies programs. Proponents of the political importance of this domain insisted that, because insurgent movements emerge within such cultures of quotidian resistance, a) examining them could help in understanding the processes through which insurgencies develop and/or b) they therefore ought to be considered as expressions of an insurgent politics themselves. Several factors accounted for the popularity of that version of the argument, which mainly had to do to with the political economy of academic life, including the self-propulsion of academic trendiness and the atrophy of the left outside the academy, which encouraged flights into fantasy for the sake of optimism. The infrapolitics idea also resonated with the substantive but generally unadmitted group essentialism underlying claims that esoteric, insider knowledge is necessary to decipher the “hidden transcripts” of the subordinate populations; put more bluntly, elevating infrapolitics to the domain on which the oppressed express their politics most authentically increased its interpreters’ academic capital.

AR: I don’t really see anything useful arising out of it. On the “new Jim Crow” front, have you seen the recent news about the mental health problems suffered by the protesters in Ferguson?1 That’s indicative of where this sort of nonpolitics as politics is overwhelmingly likely to go. When all is said and done, its only political standpoint is self-referential. I have been at meetings on campus recently where earnest activist-ist kids full of the Holy Ghost of political righteousness rise to declaim on what the “Young Activists in Ferguson” want the rest of us to do, the rules of racial and gender etiquette they want us to follow, and to demand that we all declare our willingness to follow those rules, as well as meetings where faculty babble on about the lessons of “intersectionality” we should take from this nonexistent movement, e.g., how meaningful it is that the actual authors of #blacklivesmatter are black lesbians or whatever.

Quote:

It's not me who's all over the place, he does both of these things as a rhetorical strategy. Even in the same essay.
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The civil rights movement started off radical in the '40s to mid-'60s then became conservative'. This is at the time the Panthers, LRBW, DRUM appeared,
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Shitting on the Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings

These are two periods/things. If he were to pay attention to the first (1970s radical black workers), e.g. LRBW, then he would probably criticise the LRBW's black nationalism (or retroactively, IdPol), as done here and also see the link in the comment section here. That he doesn't pay attention to it, is because his main target is the vulgar (most-widespread) non-class form of IdPol.

I posit that when anyone rants about IdPol they don't have in mind the people on the street in Baltimore.

AR: I don’t really see anything useful arising out of it. On the “new Jim Crow” front, have you seen the recent news about the mental health problems suffered by the protesters in Ferguson?1 That’s indicative of where this sort of nonpolitics as politics is overwhelmingly likely to go. When all is said and done, its only political standpoint is self-referential. I have been at meetings on campus recently where earnest activist-ist kids full of the Holy Ghost of political righteousness rise to declaim on what the “Young Activists in Ferguson” want the rest of us to do, the rules of racial and gender etiquette they want us to follow, and to demand that we all declare our willingness to follow those rules, as well as meetings where faculty babble on about the lessons of “intersectionality” we should take from this nonexistent movement, e.g., how meaningful it is that the actual authors of #blacklivesmatter are black lesbians or whatever.

Again, the black protestors were not criticised even by the Right for IdPol, but simply for criminality.

What we have here is that the Black Lives Matter protesters will take an unfortunate incident and use it as a way to express something much bigger, a much bigger concern that they have. Black Lives Matter is not really about police violence because it is not a problem in the US. What it is about is a Black power movement; you could say it is a Black identity movement. They are using police violence as, you could say, an excuse or as a spark, as a way of expressing their bigger agenda. And that’s what this is about. It really isn’t about these cases. Every time you look into these cases, sometimes they are ambiguous, sometimes they are not ambiguous. The fact is if you resist a police officer, you are effectively committing suicide. That’s not nice, but it is just the facts.

Unfortunately, identity is also the most primal, reliable form of political division. And Ferguson has provided a case study in exactly how powerfully it works.

There was a moment, early in the debate over the death of Michael Brown, when it felt as if this story might vindicate the case for optimism about racial politics — that the original tragedy might be sufficiently transparent, the subsequent police misconduct in quelling protests sufficiently clear-cut, for Ferguson to become a more powerful exhibit in the increasingly bipartisan case for various criminal justice reforms.

But then it became clear that the situation was murkier — that the cop had witnesses and physical evidence supporting his side of the story, that police had to deal with looters as well as peaceful protesters. As John McWhorter wrote in Time magazine, by the time the grand jury handed down its non-indictment the original narrative about Ferguson could only survive with “a degree of elision” and “adjustment.” Which meant, predictably, that the potential for consensus receded, and how people felt about the story became primarily a matter of identification instead.

Do you identify more with a black teenager or with a cop? With protesters menaced by playing-soldier cops or with business owners menaced by the protest’s violent fringe? With various government spokesmen or with, say, Al Sharpton?

A curfew went into effect for Charlotte, North Carolina during a third night of protests against the police. Unrest broke out in southeastern US city on Wednesday when a Black Lives Matter march spiraled out of control after Tuesday's fatal police shooting of a Black civilian.

...

Black Lives Matter protesters will take an unfortunate incident and use it as a way to express something much bigger, a much bigger concern that they have. Black Lives Matter is not really about police violence because it is not a problem in the US. What it is about is a Black power movement; you could say it is a Black identity movement.

As for the Right, they didn't portray the people on the street as IdPol, but as criminals.

Spencer is a proponent of white identity politics, so I don't think he's dismissing/criticising them (whether mere local protestors, or particularly activist groups - let's leave that minor point aside) for identity politics.

What it is about is a Black power movement; you could say it is a Black identity movement.

Progressives are now the most fervent promoters of racialised thinking.
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the most rigid racialised commentary has come, not from the police or the state, but from the protesting liberals and radicals.
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it hasn’t been American officialdom that has explicitly played the race card, talking about whole sections of society as homogenous entities with particular characteristics that need to be closely monitored and possibly corrected. No, it’s the supposedly progressive side in the debate that has done this, which has indulged in highly racialised political commentary and action. This tells us a great deal about where the racialising dynamic is really coming from today.
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But among the apparently more progressive sections of public life, racial thinking now comes naturally and causes little controversy.

I think Spiked is talking about the post-Ferguson activist/movement. Even if I were to grant you that Spencer is speaking also about the original local protests (not yet politicized)...