No, all politics isn’t identity politics - Brent Charlesworth
Eleanor Penny’s New Statesman article trots out the usual identity politics “Woke Warrior” obsessions with “whiteness, maleness and heterosexuality” and “white identitarianism (that) has a long, ugly history which stretches deep into the vengeful heart of Western society”. To her credit however, she declares this challenge. “We need to get used to the fact that all politics is identity politics – and it’s time to pick a side.”
“Pick a side?” Indeed I will, even at the inevitable cost being labelled a “privileged, toxic, racist white”. Come to think of it, since everyone with a white skin is a racist by default, I presume that whatever I do or say, I’m already condemned. And half-a-century of anti-racist campaigning doesn’t count in my favour either as it simply demonstrates the extent of my white racist delusion. (I’ll bet a few deluded racist whites years ago wished they’d known that before they got a good thumping from the National Front!)
As a socialist, the battle for me is not to secure spurious forms of racial or gender tokenism – for that’s all identity politics will produce - but to campaign for an end to gross material inequality; the oppressive cultural hegemony of the rich and powerful; levels of poverty that condemn large sections of society, black and white, male and female, gay and straight to homelessness, an abysmal lack of opportunity through inadequate, life-limiting educational provision, to failing, under-resourced medical services, continual illness and early death and the need for many in our society to have to scrape by with poorly paid service-type jobs or no job at all.
Politically, there’s a major battle to be fought against deregulated capitalism that’s facilitated by an absence of effective scrutiny and opposition. Most especially so when business and investment is moving to easily exploitable areas of the world in the search for profit from cheap labour and uncontrolled access to finite natural resources. I agree it’s all been said before, but that doesn’t make it any less relevant for today. What I have set out are fundamental practical economic and political issues of class, not after-thoughts for members of self-declared “victimised” race/gender groupings who are at war with UK society, with each other and Western society at large.
In the UK today, the gap has never been wider between the lived day-to-day reality of ordinary working people and the predilections of largely metropolitan-based bourgeois liberal political and media elites (grossly overrepresented in the Labour Party), who continually pump out "identity" spin yet wouldn’t have the slightest idea what it’s like to try to bring up a family of any colour or gender on benefits, not knowing from day to day if there’s enough in a pocket or purse to make ends meet.
Fraser Myers in Spiked exposes the irrationality and potentially dangerous consequences for society of the “racialisation” of whiteness and the use of race, gender and sexuality to replace class as prisms through which the world can be understood and injustices challenged. “The obsession with whiteness is dangerous not only because it obscures the truth about class relations, but also because it encourages the very thing it claims to fight against: a racialised white identity. Instead of blaming all the world’s ills on a nebulous notion of whiteness, we should be arguing to eliminate racial thinking altogether.”
Kenan Malik in the Observer points out the way we think about social problems and social solidarity has shifted from being framed by politics and class to being rooted in culture and ethnicity. He argues that “the racialisation of class – the very category “white working class” – is itself a product of identity politics, though many pretend otherwise.” So, he concludes that we need to stop thinking about the problems faced by “whiteness” and look upon class in a non-racialised sense. There is a complex interaction between racism and class disadvantage.“The reality of the one should not be used to deny the reality of the other.”
Segregation is surely the end point of identity politics, irrespective of the motivations of individuals, groups and political interests involved in its promotion. That’s why I contend that class relations should come first in any account of society but can hardly do so when confused with the inward-looking, blame-based, conflict-inciting demands of racial, sexual and individual lifestyle politics.
And, finally, when all “offending” statues have been demolished, icons from the past trashed, school and college curricula rewritten (History especially), museums cleared out, social and welfare structures radically altered, police defunded, those with the “wrong” attitudes/beliefs exposed, humiliated and sacked, when billions in reparations have been paid to wherever in Africa and the Caribbean (what about the Indian subcontinent?) and everything else dictatorial Woke Warriors demand be forbidden, removed or abolished, poverty, oppression and class conflict will still prevail.
Then what do we do?
Brent Charlesworth