The politics of identity

[Hannah Bell]

As the experience of the 1960s shows, it is not necessary to personally experience a form of oppression to become committed to opposing it.

Yet the central premise of the theory of identity politics is based on precisely the opposite conclusion: Only those who actually experience a particular form of oppression are capable of fighting against it.

Everyone else is considered to be part of the problem... The underlying assumption is that all men benefit from women’s oppression, all straight people benefit from the oppression of the LGBT community, and all whites benefit from racism...

The flip side of this assumption, of course, is the idea that each group that faces a particular form of oppression—racism, sexism, or homophobia — is united in its interest in ending it...

Whose interests have these women, gays, and African Americans represented once they have achieved some power within the system? ...Rather than fighting against the racist, sexist, and homophobic policies of the system, they become part of enforcing them. For example, when the city of San Francisco began handing out same-sex marriage licenses in 2005...openly gay Barney Frank...called a press conference to attack gay marriage as “divisive...”

Nor does Condoleezza Rice hesitate to perform her duty as she wanders the globe in her role as U.S. imperialism’s key international enforcer...

What all of these examples show is that there is no such thing as a common, fundamental interest shared by all people who face the same form of oppression. Oppression isn’t caused by the race, gender, or sexuality of particular individuals who run the system, but is generated by the very system itself—no matter who’s running it...

Class inequality is not a side issue, but rather the main byproduct of exploitation, the driving force of the capitalist system. Class inequality is currently worsening by the minute, as the economy edges its way toward a deep recession. Yet the theory of identity politics barely acknowledges the importance of class inequality, which is usually reduced to a label known as “classism”—a problem of snobbery, or personal attitude. This, again, should be confronted when it occurs, but such confrontations do not change the system that relies upon class exploitation.

In contrast to the inconsistencies and contradictions of identity politics, a class analysis bases itself on materialism — a concrete and objective measure of systemic benefits derived from racism, sexism, and homophobia. In short, the ruling class has an objective interest in upholding the capitalist system, which is based upon both oppression and exploitation, while the working class has an objective interest in overthrowing it:

*For the special oppression of women, Blacks, Latinos, other racially oppressed populations, and the LGBT community actually serves to increase the level of exploitation and oppression of the working class as a whole.*

The ruling class has always relied upon a “divide and conquer” strategy to maintain its rule, aimed at keeping all the exploited and oppressed fighting against each other instead of uniting and fighting against their real enemy. At the most basic material level, no one group of workers ever benefits from particular forms of oppression. The historic role of racism in the U.S. provides perhaps the clearest example.

The prevailing view is that if Black workers get a smaller piece of the pie, then white workers get a bigger piece of it. In fact, the opposite is true. In the South, where racism and segregation have traditionally been the strongest, white workers have historically earned lower wages than Black workers in the North.

The same dynamic holds true for men and women workers. When lower paid women workers enter an occupation, such as clerical work, in large numbers the wages in that occupation tend to fall. The dynamic is straightforward: Whenever capitalists can force a higher paid group of workers to compete with a lower paid group, wages tend to drop.

The same dynamic also holds for the global capitalist system. When U.S. capitalists force their workers into competition with workers in the poorest countries, U.S. workers’ wages do not rise; they fall. And that is precisely why U.S. workers’ wages have been falling in recent years. The only beneficiaries are capitalists, who earn bigger profits, while ensuring the survival of the rule of the profit system...

Whenever the levels of racism, sexism, and homophobia rise, the working class as a whole loses out. Workers do not unite to fight back, and living standards drop. Conversely, when workers move into struggle against the system in large numbers, false consciousness is challenged by the need for class unity, and class-consciousness rises—affecting mass consciousness as a whole. This process was demonstrated at the highest point of class struggle in the 1930s and again at the height of the movements of the 1960s. And it will be demonstrated again with the next rise in mass struggle...

http://www.isreview.org/issues/57/feat-identity.shtml