Interventions - "Identity Politics: The Uses and Abuses of a Term" 

This warrants a response! I take it that a politics that *begins* with identity does not have to think of itself in terms of defending that identity. That is, identity politics is a strategic response to a particular instance of domination. My point was really to show that those who think identity politics is always uch a defense of identity are perhaps not reading closely enough. Identity isn't an end in itself, and we should understand ourselves as trying to resist it - I'm just not sure we can cast it aside as if we had already escaped identity!

@@billiecashmore Agree, I was intentionally being a little provocative. For me, the double-bind is akin to how Lenin thought about nationalism or how communists might conceive of money: however fake, you can't just wish either nationality or fiat currency away. There will be times, as with Marx's support for Irish independence, when we should strategically seek to affirm national identity - even though we eventually want the workers of the world to unite. Similarly, you might find a communist protesting alongside a liberal to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour - even though the former advocates the abolition of wage servitude itself and the elimination of money. Anyway, I'll be citing the above video in an article I'm writing on Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and identity politics, alongside William Clare Roberts' critique of class abstractionism, Ian Haney López's call for race-class political messaging, and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's account of elite capture. The Audre Lorde quotation is helpful as well. I follow this basic line...

“Consider gender relations. In developed capitalist countries, women have become more independent from men and more equal, both legally and economically, than ever before. Nevertheless, they still are subject to sexual predation - as Trump has helped to highlight - and they still do the bulk of caring labor, whether for free or for low pay. Now low-paid care-work fits the account of exploitation found in Marx’s ‘Capital’, but the work they do for free does not. Feminists have often criticized Marx on this point, but since ‘Capital’ is intended to elucidate what makes the capitalist system tick, so to speak, unpaid labor is irrelevant; so this criticism is not to the point, in my opinion. Marxist and socialist feminists have, however, developed an enriched account of social reproduction which tries to supplement the account given in ‘Capital’, showing the importance of this labor, both in human terms and for capitalism. The extraordinary improvement of gender relations within capitalism raises the question of whether women and men could ever be totally equal within a capitalist society. Liberals think so. And some Marxists seem to imply it by their contention that, unlike class oppression, sex and race oppression are not essential to capitalism. But, while they’re not *logically* essential - that is, we can imagine a gender-, race-neutral version of capitalism - it does not follow that they’re incidental. Indeed, as Marxist feminists including myself have argued, they’re very likely *historically* or *pragmatically* necessary. Consider what women have and have not achieved. What they’ve achieved are their basic democratic rights, which do not threaten profits. But care-work in the US is still largely a private responsibility, because supporting care-work as the public good it certainly is would seriously cut into profits. In other countries with more generous social supports, the advent of global neoliberalism has meant drastic cutbacks. The nature of capitalism has thus put constraints on gender and racial equality. Today, while individual women and minorities have moved to the very top ranks of society, class differences among women and among Blacks have actually increased. Any movements that could reduce sex and race oppression must be based on working class struggles, integrating other forms of oppression. Thus the counterposition of class and so-called ‘identity politics’ is misleading - indeed, counterproductive.” - Nancy Holmstrom, ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-me_mZCUz_9M.html/?t=45m47s, 2017