Recently an opinion piece by CC member Erik Edman has stirred some debate inside my movement DiEM25. Its title “Identity politics is killing the left” had the merit of being very clear on the bottomline position defended in the text itself.
The question is not new and is actually widely spread within the left in many countries. To this day it still hasn’t found a definitive answer, but is it really accurate? And most importantly what does it say about the maturity of our movement on these questions? Let me invite you to indulge in a critical analysis and provide answers from my position of privilege as a white heterosexual man who will never experience police violence or get kicked out of my parents house for just being who I am.
Identity politics has been around for a long long time, one could argue for centuries, way before the term itself was coined. It has often been viewed by the Left as a divisive topic, and even sometimes as an obstacle towards Revolution. Recently, political analysts like Owen Jones have made the point that identity politics has been used and co-opted by social liberal parties (formerly named social democrats) to promote isolated symbols of equality while enforcing brutal austerity measures strengthening our current capitalist system.
So let’s address this burning question : Is identity politics, sometimes referred to as intersectionality albeit these are two slightly different concepts, inherently an individualist pro-capitalist philosophical argument?
Let’s go back to a very early revolutionary time where identities clearly influenced the results of classic class struggle
Back in 1791, as the French Revolution was still on an ascendant phase, black slaves in the french colonies had to revolt against the french first National Assembly to assert their right as fully fledged citizens. The first abolition of slavery that followed their uprising wasn’t universally accepted. Furthermore, when Napoleon -- a man who had sworn to protect the conquests of the Revolution -- came into power it wasn’t long until slavery was once more reaffirmed and black people were burdened with chains for nearly 50 more years. And as symbols matter just as much as emancipation it was in a french prison that Toussaint Louverture, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution and of slave uprisings everywhere, died in 1803.
Sadly, oppression never has only one face and while universal voting rights were already a central debate of the time, it was and remained for another century, a debate centered only around enabling the male white working class with full political power. Olympe de Gouge, who dared to oppose that fact, clairvoyantly stated that if a woman can be guillotined just like a man she should also be able to vote like one. It was obviously a fully masculine jury who offered her the first and not the latter.
Olympe de Gouge’s instinct in sensing that her identity as a woman of the third state was exposing her to additional prejudice compared to a man of the same social class did not stop there. Similarly she was quick to identify slavery, poverty and extreme wealth as antagonist to the democratic ideal of the first Republic. These arguments found new defenders half a century later on the other side of the Atlantic when white women’s clubs for women liberation decided to join the fight against slavery. This age of American politics, brilliantly described by Angela Davis in “Race, class and gender”, saw intense debates linking the end of slavery to the accession of women to the status of legitimate citizens. However this age and its contradictions quickly demonstrated that the struggle of white women and black women were not the same, and also that the struggle of rich white women and white women working in factories were deeply different. It is from this time that we can trace the birth of the first black feminists figures who had to fight not only against patriarchy and capitalism, but also against white feminists who were at best silent in regard to their sisters’ oppressions, or actively reinforcing them as the lynching of black men after the Civil War clearly demonstrated (note: while white feminists were demonstrating for their rights, their kids were home being looked after by their black maids and nannies).
History goes further of course. The flexible stance of the Second International on colonialism as the failures of Vladimir Lenin (see the Soviet in Russia by Oskar Anweiler) to understand the specificities of minorities in Russia should be stark reminders that when the left considered discriminations as a side issue or worse a threat to the progress of the Revolution it led to a betrayal of its own values. Our first conclusion here is that far from threatening collective emancipation, caring for discriminations based not only on class but also on gender and/or skin color is a precondition to making collective emancipation possible. What would the US be like today if 19th century white feminists and the first american socialist party had been more demanding on equality for all no matter one’s identity? One can only dream.
But let’s fast forward a little and move to the time in History when the term “Identity politics” was coined, in 1977, by the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist lesbian and socialist organisation. Based on their gender, sexual orientation, skin color and class belonging they identified that the discriminations they were subjected to were not independent from each other but interlocked. As a result, reaching collective emancipation would entail a bitter struggle not only from the working class against the bourgeoisie, but within the working class itself, and within working class women to suppress all forms of discrimination. This finding was critical in coining the concept of Intersectionality.
Intersectionality, as explained by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw in 1989, describes how society is divided along multiple lines of discrimination of which class is just a segment. In that model, political freedom and social emancipation relies on your belonging to a group and the lines of discrimination it suffers. The more discriminations a group is affected with, the more difficult it is for that group to express itself, and the more its individuals are affected by oppression and the risk of life threatening aggression. The proximity of those two concepts, and the fact that the latter clearly draws its origins from the former, explains why they are interchangeable in the eyes of many political commentators.
Since social democratic parties have betrayed their ideals to become social liberals, tackling the issues raised by identity politics and intersectionality has been seen as an easy way to appear progressive. Indeed when the fight to end the vertical oppression imposed by capitalism was abandoned, the only progress remaining was that of horizontal discrimination between those who are dependent on their work for a living. But was it all in vain? Sure, legalising gay marriage, or having a black president doesn’t end the systemic oppression of capital owners. But is it not new seeds of emancipation when homosexuality and racial (in the sociological sense of the term) diversity become normalised? Has it not also helped clarifying the complex structures of oppression of capitalism compared to the sometimes overly simplistic view of early marxism? Another question to ourselves is if the claim that identity politics is at the roots of our currently receding left is justified.
The origin of identity politics or intersectional justice theories themselves beg to differ. They all identified class as a defining feature of oppression, and the founders of identity politics explicitly stated socialism as a necessity to reach a better system. But it’s not only that. Historically speaking, social democratic parties abandoned the goal of socialism before they emphasised their actions on diversity issues. Indeed it was in 1959 that the SPD decided to abandon class struggle, and it was not until the 2010's that the fight for gay marriage appeared in parliament.
It is not identity politics that killed the power of the working class, it was the abandonment of the post-capitalist ideal
Laying the blame on historically discriminated groups is not only inaccurate but deeply unfair. It is also strategically dangerous. Our societies are more diverse than ever before, and blaming identity politics for the failure of the working class rather than the heads of political parties who decided to abdicate their ideals, is a sure way to maintain divisions and stop the formation of a powerful social coalition that could topple the current balance of power.
Fatima Ouassak in her latest book “The power of mothers” demonstrates that demographics affected by multiple strings of discriminations have a powerful revolutionary potential against racism, capitalism and climate extinction. She also clearly warned political parties, including those on the radical left, that failing to address the issues most often branded as identity politics, such as police brutality, will further alienate these segments of society from candidates claiming to represent a political alternative.
The victory of Joe Biden heavily relied on the organisational power of such communities which will without a doubt hold him accountable on his decisions regarding the violence of law enforcements in the US. On the same topic, many Gilets Jaunes in France acknowledged that anti-racist movements (always branded as identity politics in France, it’s important to stress it again) had been warning for decades against the violence of the french police but they simply didn’t listen because it was identified as ‘not their problem’. Yet, when these antiracist movements (like the Adama justice committee) joined the Gilets Jaunes they formed a coalition that shook the Macron presidency to its core. The coalition for change was there, and the bourgeois establishment instinctively sensed it.
DiEM25 cannot ignore social inequalities created by power dynamics not directly linked to class
Do we have the political maturity in DiEM25 to foster the creation of a coalition of differently oppressed social groups into a new working class powerful enough to democratize Europe? The answer is no. Discriminations are well entrenched in our movement at every level. When Mame Faye resigned from the CC last year the warning sign was not fully grasped. Past members who had warned about our shortcomings have very often left the movement due to our inability to properly listen and understand the depth of the issue. When former Belgian National Collective member Dalia Zoch and I pushed for an article warning about police murdering people of color during lockdown, we both heard accusations of identity politics from our respective National Collectives. The deliberate use of slang in the writing was not understood for what it was, a challenge to our conventional upperclass-shaped way of writing. And how many times have I seen on the forum or in messaging threads basic antisemitic stances? I dare not to count them.
Because discriminatory attitudes are still deeply rooted in this community that constitutes DiEM25, my word as a cisgendered mostly white male is more likely to be heard by my counterparts who remain at the center of power. From 2019 to 2021, I tried this experiment using exactly the same argument as a comrade of another gender, or another skin color, or both, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes in coordination with them. Every time the result was the same. My word was immediately listened to with respect, when that of my comrade was dismissed sometimes with open disdain. And you know what was the scariest thing about that? Sometimes I was myself enforcing the tropes of the hysterical woman by advising my comrades to cool down when their voice was not heard, instead of acknowledging the validity of their exasperation.
How would I feel if I were permanently dismissed because before heeding my word, people would first have to go beyond the buffer of my gender, my ethnicity or my sexual orientation? It is abhorrent that I literally have to take the words out of someone else’s mouth so that their valid opinions are heard. I also anticipate that my privilege will mean that this text has more chances to have an attentive audience, including to reach our leadership .
It is time for the members of this movement to wake up. We have lost good people already, including very valuable voices that would have helped to defend the interests of those most impacted by discrimnation. As Barbra Boustier, one of the coordinators of the Feminist, Diversity and Disabilities Taskforce (TDD Taskforce) kindly told me, I have the luxury of opinions on most forms of discriminations. But for people targeted by state and social violence on a regular basis, this is not a question of opinion -- it’s a life or death topic as BLM powerfully proved. We will lose more political ground if we do not address these issues with ambitious changes that tackle the discriminatory attitudes that remain inside of our movement, and supply radical proposals for change that tackle social injustices on the outside. Worse than this, without these changes we risk not providing a space for emancipation and safety for those that most urgently need it. As a result, we as a movement will not fulfill the promises that we made. This is why our TFF Taskforce is actively working on a proposal to tackle these issues. This is why, in light of this debate that has sparked controversy and pain in our movement, the best answer is to offer them our full support in providing us the most ambitious text they can come up with and to challenge our own entrenched discriminations as deeply as they can. A clear commitment to identity justice in a post-capitalist movement will not kill us, it will lead us to victory.
Carpe Diem.
Brice Montagne