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License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Culture wars: what is identity politics?

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

The first time I met Rosemary Bechler, we sat on the grass of London’s Embankment, ate ice cream, and immediately understood each other. She was a former member of the Communist Party who had lost every hint of Stalinism, but none of her radicalism. The last time I spoke to Rosemary – one of openDemocracy’s founding figures and a key force throughout our 20 years until she died last month – we had a debate about identity politics.

“My generation of activists,” she said, “started their sessions with something which went from the planet right down to London N6. They had these grandiose analyses of the entire world, then it comes down to what you might do something about. And they were interested in the front line of class struggle.

“I think that leads to a totally different kind of politics than the one that identity politics, including of the Left, leads to.”

The term 'identity politics' was first coined by the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian socialist feminists in the US in the 1970s, who argued that, as Black lesbian women, their liberation would require overthrowing systems of power which oppress everyone. Therefore, they argued, "the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity".

In recent years, though, this meaning has been lost. The term ‘identity politics’ has become an insult, thrown around by people on both some of the Left and most of the Right. It always seemed to me that it was used to describe any version of liberation politics that the speaker didn’t like, the sort of flaccid phrase that can be bent to many uses but is too floppy to be picked up and closely inspected.

But for Rosemary, Black Lives Matter was “the front line of the class struggle”, as were the feminist movement that erupted after the death of Sarah Everard and trans rights activism. She supported almost all modern liberation movements, she told me, but not the “identity politics element of them”.

What she meant by identity politics was “the very basic, neoliberal premise that what you have to do in life is make yourself. And that you can make yourself. I’m talking about all the ‘do-it-yourself’ books [I think she meant ‘self-help’]. I’m talking about vast industries of consumerism, and choice. ‘Your choice is you.’ ‘What you eat is you.’ ‘The perfume you wear, everything is you’.”

Rosemary’s objection was a view of politics that, as she saw it, starts by asking ‘Who am I?’ rather than ‘Where is the world at?’

This definition pinned the idea to the wall and placed it within a firm taxonomy – one you can agree with. Or disagree with.

‘Pulling our society apart’

Strangely, there are echoes of this concern about individualism in a pamphlet of essays published by the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs this summer. In his contribution, the group’s chair, John Hayes, argues that identity politics is a hyper-individualist outgrowth of what he calls the “Blair Paradigm” – somehow ignoring that Blair himself confessed to being the heir to Thatcher, and that “there’s no such thing as society” was her doctrine first of all.

“On the surface,” Hayes argues, “the progressives of New Labour and the new liberalism of identity politics have little in common. Blair at least believed he was working to build a better society, while ‘identity liberals’ have the explicit objective of pulling our society apart. Yet, Blair was unable to reconcile his social democratic belief in community with his liberal conviction in the primacy of the individual. Gradually progressives, despairing of the public, have turned their back on social democracy, instead embracing an uncompromising liberalism.”

At the bottom of this pile of turf, we can feel more slippery terms slithering through our fingers: ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’.

Because, of course it’s true that there are parts of the broad progressive coalition who are overly individualist. In part because, inevitably, the dominant system of the past 40 years has shaped the manner and style of resistance to it. Generations who have been brought up knowing only the individualist world of neoliberalism will find themselves fighting that system with the tools they’ve been taught to use. We see this most obviously in environmental politics, where, for too long, individual and consumer action were promoted over citizens’ and workers’ movements for system change. But that trend has largely passed.
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