Identity Politics Is a Poor Substitute for Socialism

Yeah I support class reductionism -- the average ratio of kids per teacher in public elementary school classes is too damned high

I think there is a thin line were they are right, but it frequently can arrive into insensitiveness town or straight terf island. Liberal identity project is to get black ceo, woman ceo, non binary ceo whatever. Allow possibilities of ascendance into bourgeoisie of the out-group, thus equilibrating capital atavisms from previous eras.

Woman liberation in marxists term is about unpaid social labor, but capital managed to make it about profitable social labor by socialing those functions and making woman role to go to work same as man. Social labor inside the house still remains unpaid. But oprah is a billionaire, so thats fine.

Capitalism will slowly arrive at equilibrium gender/race ceo ratio with populace. And not lots of things will change.

But incidentally, after the revolution, racism, sexism, neurotypical preferences won't dissappear magically, it will still take work and work largely similar to the one performed by identity politics now (as in telling default people how other people are also real, though different from them). If revolution comes after society readjusts itself, it will make after revolutionary work easier shrug-outta-hecks

i think squaring the circle here might be realizing that liberal identity politics are not international at all, because at their heart they're still imperialists. A liberal's vision of eliminating racism is what you said, they want domestic access to positions of power for all of a nation's internal ethnic groups. They want equal access to imperialism (for those who are already within an imperialist nation)

That vanishes from their brains when international people are considered, since a western nation's spoils rely upon cheap foreign labor and goods. Liberals do not see monetary exploitation of Africa by western powers as racist. They tend to not consider it at all.
- Liberals do not see monetary exploitation of Africa by western powers as racist. They tend to not consider it at all.
  
  Well, to be “fair” to these ghouls, when they ARE considering it, they wouldn’t care if the people living there were black or white as long as there was lithium underneath their houses. But that’s only relevant to ideological racism, not systemic racism which I think is what you’re talking about
  
  Person literally named Adolph is definitely not right though
I think they would. Consider it is self reinforcing. If the revolution happens and we have falgsac and someone is being rascist or sexist people simply don't have to deal with them. Picture the police. They exist to opress minorities so that it is profitable to exploit them. Without that being a possibility they simply wouldn't be tasked to do that. So all those negative outcomes go away. Yeah you would still have some people in it for the love of the game. However the majority of the negative outcomes are profit driven. These people are ideologically incoherent foe the most part.
- Kinda, but for example soviet union didn't arrive natively to acceptance of gay people, despite it being null effect on economy one way or the other. So these atavisms can persist for 70 years or three generations without active fight. Same with neuro atypical people, left to its own devices it doesn't resolve itself.
  
  And obviously conclusion of "we should mass relocate these people" cannot be arrived without some "those people be like this".
  
  And usa experience of racial shenanigans at unions in 1890-1930s also doesnt point to automatic resolution.
  
  Now, if you were to say that in process of struggle workers would become better educated on those issues, thats very true, but that requires minority comrades being there to educate them and fight with them

I wonder what happened the last time America did something socialist-adjacent, and if any of those benefits reached Black people

oh they didn't, and they also stole a bunch of Asian people's land and houses, choke on your vomit and die

However, the broader point is that one can eliminate racial disparities while still maintaining a fundamentally unequal economic system that relegates the majority of black people to miserable and precarious lives.

vulgar workerism 🙄

Racism, among other bigotries, is a tool inherent to the superexploitation of colonized people (internally and externally) and inherent to the redistribution of superprofits to the privileged racial group. Imperialism literally can't work without racism and it is actually impossible to eliminate racial disparities once capitalism has entered its highest stage. Structural racism exists because its a requirement.

Anti-racism can't end inequality, but what the author seems to miss is that anti-racism is itself an inherent part of class struggle.

I haven't read the paper the author is talking about in that section, but that sounds like the most pudding brained nonsense I've ever heard. That's viewing capitalism as a frictionless, smooth concept that floats in a void. They're saying it's possible to neatly remove racism from capitalism? Yeah maybe in an alternate reality where the past 500 years didn't happen, problem is we live on Earth where racism is baked into capitalism inherently. It's already in there and it's not getting dislodged without overthrowing the whole thing at the same time.

“Which is a more progressive goal — a world in which only thirteen per cent of black people (instead of twenty-four per cent) live below the poverty line or a world in which none of them do?” Eliminating disparities alone cannot make society more equal; it will simply make society unequal in a different way.

Ok, I think I kinda get where this person is coming from. For some reason they're taking neoliberals seriously. It's entertaining the very idea that the neoliberal agenda of eliminating racial disparity from capitalism is achievable and is thus a concept even worth considering for more than three seconds. Yeah except neoliberalism as a project is implicitly tied to warmongering and immiseration of the global south. It's an ideology that western austerity and exploitation of poor nations will exist in perpetuity. Neoliberals claim there's no racism baked into their absolutely goofy ideas because they're convinced that African children working in a coltan mine is good for both western countries and the African children. They're convinced this arrangement is somehow not racist because they're not as vocally vulgar as western conservatives, but they still want cheap labor and seem to want that cheap labor contained to Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, etc.

There really needs to be a new standard for if a person still has racist wiring in their head. It should extend to their international sympathies. If a person's racism kicks back into gear once you're on another side of a national border, they shouldn't be taken seriously or their claims considered. Consider how many liberals may vocally oppose domestic racism, and then all of that evaporates when they speak about Arabs, or where precious metals come from, or anything that happens in China. Apparently this Adolph Reed guy has some level of respect attached to his name?
- In my experience, a lot of liberals ARE taking themselves seriously and are actually trying to create a capitalism where the bourgeois "looks like America". Of course it won't work the way they think it will, but a real attempt is being made
- Just remembering there used to be a guy on the old sub who was absolutely obsessed with Adolph Reed and saying weird /r/stupidpol shit. I think he was the same guy who said that university students are the exploiters of their professors.
It seems like they make the same mistakes the sections of the Second International made when it came to national rebellions. They want pure social revolutions, ignoring the fact that in a colonized country, the social revolution is in part a national struggle. Now the national struggle can separate itself more or less from the social one, or at least attempt to in important decisions.

"identity politics" is a buzzword. It has no real meaning.

It absolutely has meaning. It's like rainbow capitalism. It is ridiculed here on this site all the time and is a prime example of how liberalism prioritizes the PR campaigniness of proving they are doing good vs actually doing anything good at all. We are in the deep end of it and it's fucking wild.
- Idk I've only ever seen reactionaries whinge about it, to me it's practically meaningless because it's not really an effective critique of capitalism, or liberalism in general. It's the same class of words like "woke," "SJW," "PC" etc.
  
  You already mentioned "rainbow capitalism" and that's already a better word for it because it at least describes it a bit better. That's just me though
- Identity politics is a vague term for any political discourse/movements centering race, gender, sexuality, etc. BLM is idpol. Palestinian nationalism is idpol. Feminism is idpol. Trans rights movements are idpol. Engaging in idpol doesn't mean you can't recognize class and intersectionality.
"identity politics" is just a white weasel word like "regime" or "expat"

when a mayo does the same thing a person from a 3rd world country does it's called "expat"
when a "bad country" has a government it's called a regime
when POC do even a fraction of what whites have been doing for the last 200+ years it's called "identity politics".

because you know rioting against desegregation and bussing and etc totally isn't identity politics

white people are obsessed with finding new words and phrases for the same old thing, because that obfuscates the centrality and longevity of the political struggle, and lets you frame it as "hey look at these wacky new identity politics that only started in 2010"
- I put in another comment that I found that the phrase itself dates back to the 70s from antiracist feminist groups using it to describe their politics and the struggles they face in the USA.
  
  Like the word "woke", the fascists have co-opted it's use to be derogatory and to mean anything that that they disagree with (usually that is either anti-racist or feminist in nature).

"Leftists" complaining about IdPol is a huge red flag to me.

it means they're dumb or racist

I see "identity politics" and my fuckin eyes roll back in my head, why are so many lefitsts like this cringe

Ngl shit like this kept me off of politics and leftism in general for a long time, seemed like a lot of the non-shitty people still didn't wanna include or consider me, which is fine fuck em

Adolph Reed

I really like him because every time I see his name, I know for a fact that what comes after is shit and ignore it.

Anytime I see the term "identity politics" I immediately translate that to "black people doing any kind of politics at all" cause that seems to be the only context when this garbage-ass term is used

Hasn't this been solved already? Don't be a lib and also being a bigot isn't leftist?

Not in Adolph's mind.

I like a lot of Reed;s stuff, but holy shit all he does at this point is talk about idpol. There could've been a defense that he is biased but making a not totally wrong point about the cynical use of minorities by liberal discourse, but no its been YEARS of the exactly same complaint over and over. Can't devil's adovcate that anymore.

I like a lot of Reed;s stuff
- His predictions on Obama as far back at 96 are great and his works are interesting as a part of history. Not when he is bitching about cancel culture, but having a body of work from a black leftist covering Jackson's campaigns, the start of Obama, occupy, Obama as president etc. But circa 2016 he went nuts and doubled down. He still has the occasional prescient point https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/06/22/remembering-operation-bagration-when-red-army-decapitated-nazi-front
  
  I think his take on Jackson for instance is wrong, but interesting to see as the frustration of a section of the american left and African American politics at that time. Honestly analysis of the Rainbow Coalition is a topic I love cause you have a shitload of left wing journals at the time and remnants of the new left and its splinters. makes for weird but interesting reading

h