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.”
This is the thing though. The movements Sivanandan documented of black and asian workers in the UK - the IWAs, British Black Panthers etc. are exactly the groups that someone like Adolph Reed (or Noa Rodman it seems) will lump in as 'identity politics'. Sivandan's not criticising those, a major part of his project was documenting autonomous working class black organisation - and he takes great care to do so in this essay - to show examples of what he thought was useful political work, while criticising the capitulation to the Labour Party and arithmetical representation from New Times.
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 we look since 1990, then there are ever more bizarre strands of 'identity politics' - the banknote stuff a couple of years back, Lean In, Hillary Clinton etc., but there's also been a knee-jerk productivist backlash from Bernie Sanders and supporters - who are just doing the mirror image in terms of electoral coalition building that New Times was reacting to in the '80s.
I've added this here btw: https://libcom.org/library/all-melts-air-solid-sivanandan
Well joining the Commission for Racial Equality you could put specifically down to identity politics.
But that's exactly my point - if trade unions, 'workers parties' suffer from the same problems as identity groups, is the problem the identity bit, or that they're trying to represent the group within capitalism? I think it's the latter the vast majority of the time. So then we could move away from a million boring boilerplate critiques of identity politics and look at representational politics in general - not leaving things open to crude workerist social democratic politics - something that's been pushed massively in the past three years.
I didn't say they weren't a class organisation, I just said they were social democratic. It's you who's obsessed with definitions.