Dan S. Wang on Fri, 2 Nov 2018 21:47:14 +0100 (CET) |
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Greetings Nettimers, For me, the question of identity politics–--what it is, where it comes from, what problems it creates or exacerbates, its political efficacy and purchase?cannot be addressed in any useful way without putting primary significance on what both Brian and Keith, in their different ways, emphasized. Which is to say, the concrete labor of organizing political formations. Modern identity politics--?for convenient periodization, let's say post-1968?--did not come out of abstract debates. Rather, it was the growing realization, happening in many parts of the mass movements then mobilized with the wind at their backs, that the movement work was itself undemocratic in so many ways. One of the originary myths of second wave feminism, for example, is the coming to consciousness among the women of early SDS (long before '68), who noticed that the female cadres always ended up serving the coffee while the male members went straightaway to the debates about strategy. Casey Hayden’s story of coming to feminist consciousness basically begins with this very story. She was already a vet of SNCC organizing, already had thought through the systemic issues vis racial segregation and Jim Crow. But the language for the rather more informal politics of interpersonal behaviors?--which basically governed the so-called private domain of the household, especially--?was yet to be invented. So, in that moment, with the fresh (but familiar) irritation of a tableful of dishes left by a bunch of white male so-called radicals hashing out movement plans, is it a debate about Marx vs Rousseau? Or is it a group of women looking at each other and thinking, what the hell is wrong with these dudes?? And then...hey, maybe WE should have our OWN meeting?! Identity politics? Why, Yes, I do mind dying! Asad Haider takes as his inspirational templates the Combahee River Collective and the late communism of Amiri Baraka. Keith writes of the pre-'68 masses in political motion in young African nations. Brian writes of the resistance in Chicago today. For my part, I’ve been taking memory trips to that poorly understood political interregnum we call the United States of the 1980s, the campus cauldrons from which identity politics grew teeth. This was the coming of political age for my cohort, Gen X. Identity politics was our achievement, but also, in the way that those politics were transmitted to the current youth without a context, our generational failure. And what was that context? It was a period in which the youth-driven Sixties and Seventies mass movements conclusively disintegrated, for a host of reasons both internal and external. Also, the decade advanced a parallel retrenchment of capital, at all scales. Examples– Macro: Volcker putting the stranglehold on inflation, with punishing interest rates, forcing austerity and massive industrial restructuring. Micro: elite institutions reclaiming authority eroded in the 60s, each in their own way, such as Stanford University deliberately reducing the admissions of humanities-oriented applicants and increasing their engineering enrollments as way to manage campus activism. Molecular: the individual who moves into responsible “straight" life, disawowing their youthful ideals?--a narrative much reinforced in the mass media products of the time (The Big Chill, thirtysomething, the Ballads of Rubin/Horowitz/Cleaver, etc). In the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher era, with wars fought by proxy, an obviously sclerotic Soviet bloc, and a total rollback agenda targeting every progressive achievement of the previous two decades?and no mass movements producing pressure for new initiatives?--battles over new terms and concepts like "sexual harassment" (the term itself hardly existed up until then) and LGB recognition (no wide use of T or even Q yet) came to the fore as productive grounds for organizing--?a process that of course further exposed the inherited dysfunctions of the activists themselves. In that time, as I recall, activist work meant a good deal of introspection and application of care to one's ways of speaking. So, for example, in addition to getting up to speed on the pros and cons of the Sullivan principles and the various tactics of disruption and escalation in the campus divestment movement, we took care to think through what, exactly, were our stakes (being privileged college students of the day) in the anti-apartheid struggle of black South Africa, and how to engage without patronizing those with whom we felt called to stand in allegiance. The latter being an identity politics problem, one that made the movement stronger. The one thing is, those struggles created space for real power, for making real changes. Until the campus activism of the 80s, colleges and universities, not to mention corporations and government, were almost wholly without sexual harassment policies. Ethnic Studies was born in the late 60s but Ethnic Studies *requirements* did not take hold until students demanded them a generation later. Apart from the two fresh but narrowly defined social movements of the day, ACT UP and the deep ecology/ancient forest preservation movement (in both of which identity fissures manifested as internal secondary struggles), the campaigns that foregrounded identity concerns were basically the only spaces in which new radicalism exercised consequential power. In short, I now regard the rise of identity politics in the 1980s as a rearguard politics, a zone of power left by the retreat of the mass movements of the 70s. What power there is in the #metoo phenomenon owes a debt to this history. This history has not been transmitted to the post-Millennials. Hence the ahistorical, moralistic version of today's identity politics--?a pseudo-politics, if you ask me. One that invests itself in a supreme claim to trauma (too easily appropriated by the hard right) rather than to an unfolding and contingent history. I'll say it again: this failure to pass along the history is the fault of my generation. As to the question of class, well, yes, of course class is the political answer. On that much, I agree with Alexander's return to Marx. But what is a class? As Brian says, it is not an unchanging thing. Clearly. More so than any other identity, class is a construction?--created in tandem and in tension by both capital and labor...and when I say labor in a grand way, I mean it in the way Alice may mean it: a universe of the marginalized, racialized and gendered, who are doing the shit work of capital--?even if that work is "only" passing time in a prison cell). This post is already long, so I will leave my thoughts on class as questions. If an agenda pushing for socialism and climate justice (maybe the same thing, ultimately?) can only be class-driven (and I believe that to be true), then what is the constitution of that class to be? And, given our tools and what we can control, how is that class to made? The full answers are long--?EP Thompson gave us eight hundred pages on just the English working class, covering really just its first thirty years. But the short answer is what Brian already said, which I put into Thompson's turn of phrase: it's not the class that matters, but the making of it. So let's get out there and make it. After all, Marx was no armchair Marxist. From sunny, catastrophic LA, Dan W. -- http://prop-press.typepad.com/ http://www.prop-press.net/ http://www.madmutualdrift.org/ http://midwestcompass.org/ Instagram: type_rounds_1968 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: