Socialism

People should probably just stop using the term identity politics, because its almost always used in a reactionary way.

• The right uses it to fear-monger about minorities, women, and gays being elevated to the same level as white men.
• The reactionary "left" uses it for the same way, but in a "class-essentialist" context, making the claim that only relation to production determines class (and not between colonizer and colonized, enslaved and not enslaved, domestic servitude to the male patriarch, etc).

Class essentialism (really it should be called wage-earner-essentialism) is wrong: race, ethnicity, sex, and gender minority should not be extricated from poverty. Just look at the US or Latin America, your skin color is completely correlated to your wealth and life outcomes, and any analysis that tries to ignore colonialism, slavery, or patriarchal servitude as "just idpol", is doing class collaborationism with the white rulers and the mostly white labor aristocracy, who have historically been beneficiaries of the women's oppression in the household, and colonialism.

A correct definition of class should be holistic, and include those other forms of oppression, not just the simplistic understanding of class as "anyone who makes a wage." Even Engels within his lifetime went beyond that original definition from his principles of communism.

There are leftist critiques of liberal tokenism, and things like "the nation of immigrants" / "multi-culturalist" US propaganda, when the US tries to say its a "melting pot", and not a nation founded on indigenous genocide. But that is distinct from identity politics, where the entire group is targeted and treated as a monolithic entity that should stay at its current level, or dissolve their grievances and become collaborators.

Regardless, all socialist countries have had affirmative-action style programs to reduce inequalities between ethnic groups, and women's rights (hopefully sexual minorities in the future too). In this way they're doing the opposite of collaborationism, or asking groups to dissolve their specific grievances.

The comic reminded me of this quote from Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti:

Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploita­tive one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.

Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and powaer are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impres­sive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage publiac awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;' "upper class;' or "moneyed class." And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the "ruling class." The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion's share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are them­selves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.

Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a sim­ple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into "conspiracy theory." The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the "working class," a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;' for then one is talk­ing about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.

The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the sooth­ing adjective "middle." Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt con­cern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of soci­ety. By including almost everyone, "middle class" serves as a conve­niently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actu­ality of class power.

The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimiza­tion: the "underclass." References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society's most vulnerable elements.

Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpe­trated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinc­tiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.