Identity politics failed the left
By: Hein Htet Kyaw (Workers Liberty)
When real socialists turn their backs on the Democratic Party then the doo-doo has gotten really deep. If anyone bothers to wade through the stilted, passive aggressive elitist language popular with the enlightened left, Democrats are being blamed for engaging in racial/cultural identity politics instead of focusing attention on class identity.
The promised Socialist Revolution desired by the left and feared by the right can never be in the United States. The means of production have been outsourced, offshored, and free-traded away. In modern America, class identity is determined by what fashion is worn, which celebrities are followed, what brands are endorsed, which politicians are supported, and whose endorsements are sought. Credit cards have become the economic equalizers in American culture. There's no longer any need for Karl Marx.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Recently, Trump won both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote. Does it mean a significant majority of United States is full of fascists or far-right bigots? It would be too elitist, shallow, and superficial to conclude that. As Dr. Cornel West once said "you can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people".
If everyone not voting for a bourgeois party that's neoconservative and out of touch with the common people is considered fascist, there is no working class, peasant class, and petit bourgeois class to organize for class struggle anymore. Without these classes, organized class struggle becomes a daydream.
So, what went wrong? The analysis of Bernie Sanders where he said "Democratic party, win or lose, have got to take a very hard look at themselves and ask how it could be that a very significant majority of working-class people in this country are prepared to vote for Donald Trump" indeed offer a perspective in favour of the working class and the peasant class. He continues suggesting a possible alternative to fix the situation by offering as follows: "Instead of worrying about big money interests and campaigns contributions from billionaires, we've got to stand with the working class of this country". Even though the elitist identity politics left from the Democratic Party refused to accept the analysis offered by Bernie Sanders, it's indeed represented the objective reality.
I remember talking to a friend of my parents who was a seafarer and literally jumped off the ship, swimming his long way to America 2-3 decades ago. Hearing a story of an Asian illegal immigrant, who has worked shitty jobs for decades and finally managed to become a small business owner, voting for Donald Trump was quite a experience for me. The bigger issue was to understand how could it happen objectively? This unique experience debunked the narrative that GOP is for white racist people along with some rich people whereas the Democratic Party is for the immigrants, and the minorities.
Ana Kasparian shared as follow in her conversation with Meghan Daum (an American female author) and Sarah Haider (the founder of Ex-Muslims of North America): "The left-wing narrative is dominated by privileged people who tend to live in beautiful gated communities. They are untouched and insulated from the policies that they pushed for". Ana Kasparian definitely hit the nail on the head.
Just as German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin put it, the rise of fascism is the left's failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, which the left was not able to mobilize. Putting into context, Trump winning the election is the fault of no one else but the fault and shortcomings of the Democratic Party and their identity politics.
The Democratic Party and the identity-politics left are pushing the white working class, white peasant class, white petit-bourgeoisie class, the immigrant working class, the immigrant peasant class, and the first-generation immigrant petit-bourgeois class population to a point where they had to express their angers and dissatisfaction about the economic issues and the cultural issues via the right-wing groups and the fascist groups. The elite identity-politics left is only left with second or third generation petit-bourgeois population who are professional salaried full time academic revolutionaries who majored in subjects related to identity politics or neoconservative NGO founders who are spreading their ideologies to third world countries like Myanmar and Bangladesh.
The same left that is supposed to organise the working class and peasant class is pushing them to the right-wing with their gatekeeping saviour-complex elitist mentality.
What went so wrong to reach to a point in history that even working-class people from the minority and immigrant communities are considering an anti-immigrant and right-wing nationalist political party that is led by a white billionaire as their political agent? Why don't the working-class people from the minority communities such as the immigrants consider the Democratic Party and the broader left as their agent?
Probably, that's due to the fact that the white working class, white peasant class, white petit-bourgeoisie class, the immigrant working class, the immigrant peasant class, and the first-generation immigrant petit-bourgeoisie class haven't read enough books by elitist so called six-figure-salaried academics who earned their income by talking or writing about genders, critical race theory, and superficial social justice while the actual working class and peasant class of any colour are undergoing the depression of not being able to pay their next rental dues or electricity bill or struggling to pay the deposit for their first homes.
The working class, the peasant class and the immigrants will choose the right-wing populist groups and conservative lefts as their agents over the left-wing progressive groups in the near future due to the fact that the right-wing populist groups, and conservative lefts are not excessively addicted to identity-politics but offer class-centric policies. It's not that the working class, peasant class and immigrants are not in favour of identity politics but they have understood the connection between the identity politics and the socio-economics, unlike the ignorant privileged saviour complex identity politics left. As a result, the working class, peasant class and immigrants will become more and more attracted towards the conservative lefts.
The conservative lefts (left campism) are really similar to the alt-right on a lot of levels especially when it comes to nationalism, binary gender values, religious fundamentalism, and anti-establishment narratives. The tendencies within left campism will find their allies in the religious left tradition of Christianity and Islam due to their sexist religious values and anti-woke cultural conservative values. George Galloway, Sahra Wagenknech, Jackson Hinkle, and such neo-Stalinists could serve as the perfect examples of populist left that managed to unite the Christian left, left campism and the Islamist left with political agenda and values little different to the right-wing populists.
The left's obsession with identity politics and saviour complex should be re-examined. The left-wing tradition of universalism needs to be resurrected. Unless the progressive left-wing groups admit their privileged bourgeoisie class nature and put a halt to their self-righteous mentality on identity politics by revisiting the dialectical relationship between universalism and intersectionality, it's inevitable that global politics in the future will reach to a point where the working class, the peasant class and the immigrants will only have two choices between conservative lefts and the conservative right-wing groups as their agents.
Summing up, identity politics has its roots in nazi-affiliated fascist conservative revolution thinkers like Carl Schmit. Intersectionality as a concept was invented by some intellectuals within the Marxist-Humanist tendency such as Raya Dunayevskaya, C. L. R. James and etc long before the term was formally introduced by landlord academics like Kimberle Crenshaw through the perspective of identity politics. However, it's important to acknowledge that both intersectionality and universalism could work hand-in-hand with each other and it's possible through the dialectic relationship between the two to get a synthesis of intersectional universalism that could resurrect the tradition of Marxist-Humanism that does not leave room for any form of reductionism towards any oppression.
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Rather amazing that Donald Trump has become the leader of the revolution. Isn't Trump promising to reshape and rebuild the American economy so that class identity has meaning again?
Today, workers seizing the means of production would first require bringing those means back to the United States.
They've traded their class based belief system for a race based one.