‘OUR LIBERATION IS A NECESSITY, NOT AN ADJUNCT TO SOMEBODY ELSE'S'
CW: Discussion of prejudice, discrimination and oppression in all its forms, including sexism, racism, and anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination.
N.B. In the spirit with which I have aspired to write this article, I would like to begin by acknowledging a few things.
Firstly, I would like to acknowledge my privilege within capitalist social structures as a white-cis-heterosexual-male and the fact my identity means I can avoid many of the structural oppressions other comrades face. I have tried to write this post with care and consideration. It is an attempt to offer a small contribution to the wider intellectual project made by others to reclaim identity politics and its radicalism and reject pejorative and problematic understandings of this concept. I hope it is understood as having solidaristic intentions, even if you feel my analysis falls short.
Secondly, I would like to acknowledge the structural oppressions I face within the context of my privilege. Particularly in relation to my ongoing struggles with my embodied/subjective/mental health. I would like to extend my solidarity to anyone reading this who is struggling through similar issues.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the overarching and universal needs we all share. The need for safety, the need to love and be loved, the need to live meaningful and fulfilling lives together in relationship with others.
YOURS, PARTLY
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new left party (placeholder name: Your Party) has got off to a torrid start. My initial optimism quickly waned when I realised the coalition of individuals they were attempting to bring together in its formation. Corbyn as an old-guard Bennite-leftist and Sultana as a more modern iteration of progressive politics sounded all well and good, but their allegiance to the wider Independent Group of MPs was problematic. MPs such as Shockat Adam and Adnan Hussein, whilst united with Corbyn and Sultana in their solidarity with Palestine, are certainly not dyed-in-the-wool socialists. Both are landlords, working against socialist aims by extracting value from the working classes via rent payments in a way that is key to the reproduction of class inequality in the UK. Furthermore, Hussein has publicly stated that trans women are “Not biologically women” and that “women's rights” (by which he means, cis women) “and safe spaces should not be encroached on.” A clearly transphobic and exclusionary line of thinking. Not a good start for a party that claims that “all human life has equal value".
Now throw in the extra-complication of the growing rift between Team Corbyn and Team Sultana and there’s the possibility that we will never see an actual party emerge from this mess. Archie Woodrow, left-wing London based activist, in a series of tweets outlined how Corbyn’s team have attempted to take power within the emergent new party by taking control both the mailing list and the finances (for more information see this article). It appears as if Sultana attempted to wrest back a level of control by launching the Your Party membership system in a way that redirects power to her allies but that this has been squashed by Corbyn allies.
Despite rolling back on threats of legal action, Sultana has clearly stated that she feels shut out of key decision making processes within the party formation, describing Your Party as a ‘sexist boys club’, an accusation that holds weight when we see the way the battle lines have been drawn (one woman MP vs 5 male MPs). Grassroots leftists have been left feeling frustrated and disappointed by the ways in which a big opportunity for progressive politics is being wasted due to petty factionalism and the self-interest of those shoring up their own power bases, no doubt attempting to ensure they have a paid role in the future party apparatus.
It has to be said, one of the biggest problems for Your Party through all this is just how incredibly boring internecine political wrangling is for ordinary people who just want society to function properly. Public bickering will be a massive turnoff for the vast majority, and to the hostile press it will be a field-day of tired ‘People’s Front of Judea' jokes as the left adheres to the historic cliches they’ve been unfairly branded with over decades.
What is interesting though (to me, at least), is the way Corbyn’s camp responded to Sultana’s accusations of sexism, stating that there were “many women” involved and that “the sexism charge is identity politics nonsense.” Such a quote sounds more at home in a right-wing newspaper alongside phrases such as “why wokeness really is like fascism” or “welcome to the insane world of identity politics”. Such a response is incredibly telling about the problematic way those around Corbyn understand how left-wing politics work. But it also speaks to me more widely about the ways in which the phrase ‘identity politics’ is invoked in my own profession of educational psychology and society at large. Everyone knows the phrase, it’s a concept that we all engage with, but in my view, it's often not very well understood or defined. With this in mind, I felt it might be useful to write some words about the emergence of identity politics as a concept in the 1970s and how it has been gradually co-opted by various forces to act as a barrier, upholding the problems it was initially meant to solve.
RADICAL IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE
It's broadly accepted that the first writings clearly articulating the concept of identity politics were that of the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement. It’s a concise, well-theorised, nuanced and challenging document, still as relevant now as it was almost 50 years ago. Anyone interested in identity politics as a concept should read it.
The Combahee River Collective were a Black feminist lesbian socialist group based in Boston, Massachusetts and active between 1974 and 1980. The central assertion they made has resonance with Sultana’s description of Your Party as a ‘sexist boys club’. They argued that progressive movements in the United States held within them their own prejudices, abuses, and oppressions. The white feminist movement, for example, marginalised women of colour and, within its ranks, racism was common. The Civil Rights Movement was rife with sexism and anti-LGBTQIA+ prejudice. Consideration of the needs and emancipatory aims of oppressed groups within the Civil Rights movement ranged from arguing that these were secondary objectives to be considered at a later date, to an active belief that systems such as patriarchy should be kept intact. In just one example reflecting the chauvinist sentiment of the time, Stokely Carmichael stated in 1964, “the only position for women in the movement is prone.”
Identity politics challenges the bigotry and oppression of movements with progressive aims by taking the lived experience of oppressed groups traditionally shut out of such organisations as its starting point. As the Combahee River collective state:
“Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's may because of our need as human persons for autonomy…Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, Indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere….This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression.”
It is from this wellspring that incredibly influential theories such as that of intersectionality first find their articulation:
“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.”
Here, an individual or group can experience multiple intersecting and overlapping oppressions due to their multiple identities (e.g. as say black, homosexual and female), that often go ignored by those in the dominant group.
Also from the concept of intersectionality emerges the very psychological idea that the personal is political. That, by listening to the lived experiences of those whose voices often go unheard, we can understand how oppression works in a more nuanced and multi-faceted manner.
“In our consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white women's revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex. Even our Black women's style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political. We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters has ever been looked at before. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black women's lives.”
But, in my view, what makes the Combahee River Collective’s statement so radical is its incorporation of these new concepts back into a wider Marxist analysis of society.
“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 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.”
Thus, identity politics here can be understood as a way of incorporating often marginalised voices, views and aims into the wider movement to ensure it remains true to emancipatory causes. Once a dominant group emerges within the movement, its organisational structures end up abandoning their representation of less dominant groupings, debasing the truly revolutionary goal of equality for all.
'IDENTITY POLITICS NONSENSE' – WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IDENTITY POLITICS GETS DETACHED FROM RADICAL POLITICS?
The above, however, is a far cry from how identity politics is understood in the modern context and how Corbyn’s team used it as a pejorative a few weeks ago. In emphasising the fact ‘many women were involved’ in Corbyn’s camp, they invoked the idea that diversity of identity in and of itself leads to some kind of progressive politics, despite the kind of politics such a formation might produce (e.g. in this instance one dominated by transphobia, sexism and landlordism). They then hurl ‘identity politics’ as an insult in a way that tries to undermine an actual structural criticism from a woman of colour that could be easily considered in line with identity politics as outlined by the Combahee River Collective. This is a warning for those that seek to detach identity politics from its radical roots.
It seems to me that, once this detachment happens, identity politics ends up being misused in 3 key ways. The remainder of this post will outline these positions, and I will finish by calling for a return to identity politics as conceived by the Combahee River Collective.
The Leftist Betrayal of Identity Politics
There is a long history of the left diverting from their revolutionary and radical aims by betraying identity politics in favour of some transcendent cause (often economic justice – but the question then becomes, for whom?). We can see this happening in the formation of Your Party. The text on their homepage mainly focuses on ‘mass redistribution of wealth and power', whilst founding member Adnan Hussain has made transphobic comments on X and Sultana (the only female MP participating in the founding process) appears to have been shut out of decision making. No doubt, this will be all justified ‘for the cause’. As tends to happen with these kinds of movements, the argument goes ‘once we’ve got into power and sorted out our key issue (in this case economic redistribution) we will worry about the other ‘less important stuff’ later.
In Marxist theory this is understood as ‘economic reductionism’, whereby the Marxist only focuses on how economic factors produce inequality and ignores everything else (N.B. Your Party can’t even do that right – at least two of their MPs are landlords!). A really problematic example of this occurred only days ago when Gary Stevenson, millionaire ex-financial trader and wealth tax advocate, essentially argued that 'the left' shouldn't call Reform voters racist in case it damages the changes of them voting for a wealth tax.
It was this kind of logic that spurred the Combahee River Collective to write their statement in the first place when the male dominated civil rights movement side-lined other forms of oppression in favour of prioritising the sole cause of (male?) racial emancipation. Only it doesn’t work. It degrades the cause. It’s socialism or barbarism at the end of the day and how we treat the most marginalised in our communities and collectives is key to evaluating the radicalism and success of revolutionary politics.
Liberalism and Identity Politics
As many before me have noted, capitalism is incredibly skilled at capturing the revolutionary energy that threatens its dominance – defanging and neutering the threat and ultimately manipulating revolutionary fervour to serve its own needs.
To give an example, Gay Pride marches emerge out of the radical politics of the Stonewall riots back in 1969. Cut to the 2010s and the Glasgow Pride march has become so commercialised that the local LGBTQIA+ community had to start their own alternative event named Free Pride. (I note with optimism here that this is also an illustration of the fact that, whilst capitalism might always capture radicalism, radicals respond to such capture with their own agency and push-back creating new ruptures and opportunities for progressive change).
I would argue that the liberal conception of identity politics is encapsulated in this process of capitalist capture, where activism ends up becoming less about dismantling capitalism and more about subsuming marginalised groups into the structures of capital. What’s really dangerous about this process is that it disguises oppression via empty recognition of marginalised groups (we recognise you, but only if you play by our rules), making it harder for radicals to push back. This then leads liberals to make the case that ‘we have solved the problems of racism, sexism and other oppressions because now *anyone* can be a capitalist’. Indeed such notions are likely to have emboldened some establishment figures to try and do away with the concept of structural oppressions whatsoever (see the 2021 Sewell report, which incoherently and unconvincingly attempts to argue that structural racism does not exist in the UK).
It's worth noting that Corbyn’s allies essentially took this line (i.e. our sexist party can’t be sexist because there are women in it).
The obvious problem here is that this process helps to reinforce the system that is the real cause of racism, sexism, and LGBTQIA+ oppression in the first place. For example, the ‘girlboss’ who becomes a CEO reinforces the system by adhering to the sexist ethics of the workplace and is materially rewarded for doing so. The very creation of the notion of ‘girlboss’ has led to a social situation whereby women are not only expected to work full-time but often do all the domestic labour as well, which in some ways creates greater immiseration, not less.
Another example we might look to is the previous Tory government, with Boris Johnson introducing the most ethnically diverse cabinet the UK had ever seen in 2019. Yet what does this cabinet do? It continues ramping up the same old prejudicial policies the Tories have been promoting for decades that create structural oppression in the first place. It makes me think of the UN Rapporteur Philip Alston’s comment about austerity in the UK the year previously: “I think that if you got a group of misogynists in a room and say ‘guys how can we make this system work for men and not for women?’ They wouldn’t have come up with too many other ideas than what’s already in place.”
Please don’t think I am making a moral, ‘finger-pointy’ argument here. I’m not. At the end of the day people often do what they do because they have to survive in this world. I understand that the patriarchy works in oppressive ways that would mean women want to be financially independent of men. I understand my privilege as a man, where the concept of ‘boss’ is inherently male-coded (with ‘girl-boss’ presented as the exception) and therefore if I want to progress in my career I don’t have to become anything other than what I already am. Furthermore, I recognise the material reality that we all need to get paid so we can support ourselves and others, that many of the platforms available for us to speak on are linked to a long history of structural oppression, and that some of us are more financially comfortable than others for structural reasons. I also acknowledge that oppressed minorities often face the harshest consequences for pushing against pre-existing structural forces. Indeed, all of the above point to how vulnerable we end up being when individualised by capitalism – forced down paths of its choosing with little ability to push back.
Even so, I still feel that the ‘liberal’ conception of identity politics that I’ve outlined above is a political dead-end for progressive politics as it doesn’t seek to change structures. And the individualisation that forces us to become part of the system rather than change it based on our own communal and individual needs, to me is all the more reason we need to go back to the Combahee River Collective – to collectively think and practice in the way they did.
Identity Politics and the Right
And finally we get to the ways in which the right invokes identity politics. The tendency here is to just dismiss identity politics as a conspiratorial plot to take away the rights of white British people. The phrase identity-politics ends up being associated with other words taken and misappropriated from people of colour such as ‘woke’. The right create fears, predominantly within the white petit bourgeoisie (the class of small business owners who aspire to become fully bourgeoise but could easily be pushed down into the working classes in economic downturns such as the one we face today), creating divisions down identity lines to make it harder for them to identify that the cause of our unhappiness is not the fact that trans-people want to live in dignity or that religious groups want to practice their religion freely, but the establishment classes that exploit us.
The white petit bourgeoisie, feeling the economic squeeze and noticing their standards of living are falling as opposed to improving, become resentful and reactionary. Easy to manipulate with fascistic notions of a white ethnostate that never existed. Identity politics and any oppressed group that dares to say they want to live a decent life in modern Britain become hate figures for the petit bourgeoisie to project their resentments onto.
What’s worse is that (those broadly understood as) liberals in the Tory and Labour party fear the left much more than the right (who, when it’s all said and done practice a more extreme but logically similar version of their liberal politics). This means, in times when the right is ascendant such as now, liberals tend to drift rightwards in an attempt to appease the right, all the while dismissing leftist arguments.
We can see the effect right-wing attacks on identity politics have had on our liberal rulers in their sudden need to stand next to a flag, in their brutalising rhetoric and policies against migrants and in the way they cast the views of white racists as ‘legitimate concerns’. We see the results of such politics pouring out onto our streets, angry, red-faced, male and white.
CONCLUSION - ON THE MOLECULAR AND THE MOLAR
A system that produces safety for the most discriminated against of identities (e.g. the trans community) will also produce safety for the least discriminated against of identities (e.g. cis white men). This dictum cannot be reversed.
Such a world can only be created if we return to the words of the Combahee River Collective, familiarising ourselves with their philosophy and activism. If radical politics is to be progressive, it must encapsulate what Deleuze and Guattari call both the molecular and the molar.
To Deleuze and Guattari, nothing in the world is fixed and everything is in a state of flow. Objects or groupings we typically understand as fixed are here understood as ‘assemblages’ - the temporarily stable composition of a set of component parts. The body, for example is an assemblage. Though it appears outwardly fixed, it is in-fact a constantly changing group of components (organs, blood, inputs, outputs etc), renewing at various rates on a cellular level. Deleuze and Guattari refer to these two levels as the molar and the molecular. The molecular being the constantly changing group of components (cells, organs, blood etc) that gives rise to durations of molar stability (the body).
To apply this theoretical framework to our politics, we must come together in molar assemblages such as activist collectives and political parties and so on, but we must not lose sight of the molecular differences that produce this molar assemblage. The molar may form out of our universal interests – a need for safety, shelter, food, warmth, well-funded public services, psychological wellbeing, and the ability to go out into the world and live our lives freely. But we must simultaneously centralise the vibrant and beautiful molecular diversity from which the molar assemblage emerges. Recognising, celebrating and meeting the diversity of needs within the collective should be central to the wider project of socialist action.
As the Combahee River Collective recognised almost 50 years ago, a diverse yet collective class-consciousness which centralises often unheard subjectivities, is vital in dreaming up new and more ethical ways of being and fighting for their realisation. This shouldn’t be understood as a secondary objective; it should be understood as central to the production of the radical politics we so desperately need.