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"The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching."

, 2023

chrishedges.substack.com/p/wok

The Chris Hedges Report · Woke ImperialismBy Chris Hedges
Strypey

"Glen Ford, the late editor of The Black Agenda Report... called those who promote identity politics 'representationalists' who 'want to see some Black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society.... They want Black movie stars. They want Black scholars at Harvard. They want Blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it'.

The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con."

It actually made a lot of sense, in the political climate of the 1980s and 90s, for the left to play up identity issues and focus less exclusively on class. For one thing, the existing traditions of working class solidarity politics *did* need to be hauled out of the 19th century. They did need to come to terms with the fact that certain identity markers (eg being a PoC, homosexual etc) push people further down class hierarchies.

(1/?)

Also, the noisiest promoters of class politics in the 90s - when I was getting involved in political activism - were Vulgar Marxists. The last bastions of the 1950s version of the labour movement. Some of whom were saying disappointingly regressive things about our allies in movements focused on women's liberation, indigenous rights, and so on. Defending the CCP's brutal occupation of Tibet, even as they (quite rightly) condemned Indonesia's equally brutal occupation of Timor Leste.

(2/?)

Even they had to grace to be embarrassed about it a few years later, they initially dismissed the huge, global mobilizations against corporate globalisation. Which arguably peaked with the WTO shutdown in Seattle in 99 (the birth of the Indymedia movement). Before switching gears to become a massive, global anti-war movement, in response to 9/11 and its cynical misuse to action the Project for a New American Century plan to ramp up neo-colonisation of the Middle East.

(3/?)

Being strongly associated with the authoritarian, social-conservative politics of Vulgar Marxists, would have been damaging to left of the time. Just as being assimilated into the authoritarian, "liberal" politics of Clinton and Blair has been for the broader left in the last decade. Throwing working class people under the bus to get more Black CEOs in corporations that ought to be abolished, or a female President of an utterly corrupt empire in decline, is short-sighted at best.

(4/?)

At worst, this atomized style of politics - whose most iconic tactic is crypto-conservative public shaming against the "wrong" kinds of difference - has the unintended consequence of generating huge numbers of humiliated, frightened, angry people. Effectively grooming them as recruits for cryptofascist movements like this:
newsroom.co.nz/fact-checking-t

What's the reaction to this from the crypto-conservative "liberal left"?

Pour more of the same fuel on the fire:
change.org/p/the-stop-co-goven

🤦‍♂️

(5/?)

NewsroomFact-checking the co-governance roadshowWith a number of events planned down the length of the country, the scene at this weekend’s ‘Stop Co-Governance’ rally in Orewa could be just the first of many

We can't shame carbon emissions out of the atmosphere. We can't shame Putin into negotiating ceasefire with Ukraine. We can't shame down the price inflation amplified by these problems, and others, including the ongoing COVID pandemic, We can't even shame angry, politically-uneducated young white men away from fascists, neither the obvious ones on the right, nor those who masquerade as "left" (eg anglophone apologists for the CCP).

(6/?)

These problems can only be fixed by a left capable of organising to pursue justice for *all*. With full awareness of class hierarchies, within and between countries. Those foundations of the many forms and flavours of oppression that we *all* suffer under, if we don't have sufficient wealth (ie *capital*) to insulate ourselves. There is no place for public shaming of human beings in this.

I'll leave the last word to Francis Lee, who nailed it in this 2017 essay:

cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday

(7/?)

CBC'Excommunicate me from the church of social justice': an activist's plea for change | CBC RadioFrances Lee is a queer activist of colour, and a tireless campaigner for social justice. But these days Frances is fed up, and exhausted by the puritanical demands and strictures of fellow comrades.

"In his 1961 book Wretched of the Earth, black Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon writes about the volatile relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and about the conditions of decolonization. Fanon sharply warns the colonized against reproducing and maintaining the same oppressive systems of colonization after a successful revolution. I hear him."

, 2017

cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday

(8/?)

CBC'Excommunicate me from the church of social justice': an activist's plea for change | CBC RadioFrances Lee is a queer activist of colour, and a tireless campaigner for social justice. But these days Frances is fed up, and exhausted by the puritanical demands and strictures of fellow comrades.

"If we are interested in building the mass movements needed to destroy mass oppression, our movements must include people not like us, people with whom we will never fully agree and people with whom we have conflict. That's a much higher calling than yelling at people from a distance and then shutting them out."

Francis Lee, 2017