- The Guardian
- Issue #2116
Photo: RDNE Stock project – pexels.com (CC0)
It’s clear that some comrades are concerned about identity politics.
The failure of liberal identity politics is its rejection and concealing of class relations, however I do not believe it is the correct line to ignore the role of identity entirely and risk taking a class reductionist position.
The primary role class plays on identity is protection from consequences. A rich homosexual can pay off reporters or sex workers to keep their position, a celebrity can use their social capital to turn their gender transition into a virtue. This is not true for the trans worker who is fired due to their identity or the lesbian couple who are denied a home loan. Bourgeois queers live free of systematic oppression while the thousands of queer proletarians are left to rot.
This creates two main benefits for global capital, firstly it allows non-queer workers to imagine themselves at holding a higher status in a social hierarchy and thus makes it easier to ignore their own oppression, as well as creating a permanently desperate underclass. One needs only look at the vigour with which some liberal portray NATO as some kind of bastion of Queer liberation simply due to the US and Australia having legalised marriage equality. They were thrown a bone, and like an abused puppy they defend their new master despite how quickly they will be abandoned if it becomes politically convenient.
This dynamic mirrors most of the identitarian struggles of past communist movements, Sexism, racism, colonialism and Queer oppression are all threads in a net that prevents capitalism from falling too far towards its own death. It is the role of the communist to sever all these threads at the same time as smashing the Economic Base.
An injury to one is an injury to all, the liberation of one is the liberation of all.
