division
Dear friends,
We live in a time of intensifying identity-based conflict, where every social and political issue becomes refracted through the lens of personal identity and group affiliation. Look no further than headlines shared here on mind reader every day. The deployment of identity politics – both by the ostensible “left” and the increasingly mask-off right – has become a primary mechanism through which hegemonic power maintains its grip on civil society while forestalling any genuine movement toward working class solidarity (let alone anti-capitalist movements). I think it is worth us spending additional time examining this phenomenon and its implications for building an intersectional movement capable of challenging capitalism’s death grip on our collective future. Because our future is collective, identities be damned.
Identity politics, in its current manifestation, represents both a genuine expression of marginalised groups’ experiences and grievances under capitalism and a tool cynically wielded by power to fragment class consciousness. What began as important movements highlighting specific forms of oppression – from feminist critiques of patriarchy to queer resistance against heteronormativity to racial justice struggles against white supremacy – has been co-opted and transformed by hegemonic forces into battles over representation and recognition that leave fundamental power relations untouched. Capitalism marches on, and indeed, intensifies, subsumes and co-opts in the wake of these divisive rhetorics. The right deploys reactionary identity politics centred on nationalism, whiteness, and “traditional values” (read: rape, plunder, pillage) to redirect working class anger toward marginalised groups, while liberal identity politics often reduces systemic critique to demands for more diverse faces in positions of power. Both varieties serve to obscure the material basis of oppression in capitalist relations. Don’t @ me.
The emotional power of identity as a mobilising force is incredibly significant in our current political context. The assumptions, roles, and realities of communities are important and they colour how we see the world. Our sense of self, our experiences of marginalisation or privilege, and our community affiliations shape our social epistemology – which is equally shaped by a capitalist ontology. The right understands this viscerally – their appeals to white grievance, xenophobia, and moral panic over gender and sexuality tap into deep wells of fear and anger among their base. The “mainstream media” amplifies these cultural conflicts, with Australia’s Murdoch-dominated landscape taking particular glee in stoking hatred toward LGBTQI+ folks through endless inflammatory coverage. One need only look at how trans people have been demonised and scapegoated, basic human dignity turned into fodder for manufactured outrage designed to drive engagement and distract from capital’s continued pillaging of our planet. Oh, and to sell Murdoch’s rags.
The Australian media’s complicity in amplifying identity-based division represents a textbook example of manufactured consent in action. By framing every issue through a culture war lens – whether it’s gender-neutral bathrooms, Indigenous Voice, or immigration – the corporate media ensures that genuine class analysis and critique of capitalism remains off the table. To them, that’s all this is – a way of keeping “the proles in their jobs, asking no questions, and hating each other” – you can’t make this shit up. The endless cycle of inflammatory coverage creates a feedback loop where legitimate grievances get twisted into weapons for attacking other marginalised groups rather than challenging the very system that creates the marginalisation in the first place. Headlines about “woke ideology” and “gender ideology” serve as convenient distractions while – in our case, both major political parties continue implementing anti-worker policies – and revelling in the hate they have manufactured to grab more power at the next election.
This devolution into identity-based warfare has devastating consequences for building working class solidarity. Not to mention on the mental and physical health of “minorities” and marginalised peoples across the gamut of the political spectrum (even when they vote for the leopards which eat their own faces). When workers are convinced that their real enemies are immigrants, trans people, or “cultural Marxists” (guilty) rather than the capitalist class stealing the surplus value of their labour, the prospects for unified resistance plummet. And that’s what we’ve seen deployed time and again over the last thirty years, particularly as the Labor party undermines any affective worker movement through it’s monopoly over (bourgeoise) “unions”. The right’s concomitant deployment of reactionary identity politics serves to actively prevent the development of class consciousness, while liberal identity politics often reduces intersectional analysis to performative representation that leaves capitalism’s core operations intact. Both varieties in their pernicious creep into identity battles only strengthen rather than challenge hegemonic power – thereby simply reinforcing the damaging power imbalances that created the issues in the first place.
The cost of this fragmentation falls hardest on those facing multiple, intersecting forms of marginalisation. When movements for social transformation devolve into competing claims of oppression rather than building genuine solidarity, it is invariably the most vulnerable who suffer – Indigenous workers, disabled folks, queer and trans people of colour, and so on. Their specific experiences of exploitation and exclusion demand an intersectional analysis that holds both the particularity of identity-based oppression and the universality of class struggle. We cannot build effective resistance by either ignoring difference or reducing everything to identity – we need an educative praxis that fosters deep understanding across lines of difference while maintaining focus on our shared enemy –capitalism. And this doesn’t mean “reasoning with the right” who are hellbent on running the globe into climate-based destruction just for shits and giggles (masochistic and religious nut jobs alike).
Where might we go from here? The path forward requires developing forms of solidarity that can honour both our differences and our fundamental commonality as members of the working class facing extinction under capitalism’s death drive. This means creating spaces for genuine dialogue and political education that help people understand how their specific experiences of marginalisation connect to systems of oppression. Only the 1% has “got it made” in this system, and just because someone has a veneer of privilege, does not make them an exploiter – though idly leveraging that privilege for personal benefit is deeply problematic. The panacea isn’t more identity-based battling, or divisive rubbish, but rather building movements that centre the leadership of the most impacted while fostering collective understanding of how capitalism relies on and reproduces multiple, intersecting hierarchies. And, in case I haven’t been clear enough, most importantly, it means maintaining laser focus on the real enemy – not each other, but the capitalist class and their political enablers pushing us toward fascism and ecological collapse.
The tools for this work already exist in our theoretical traditions – from intersectional feminism to social reproduction theory to Gramsci’s insights about building counter-hegemony. What we need now is the collective will to deploy them in service of genuine solidarity rather than allowing our identities to be weaponised for capital’s benefit. The ruling class wants us fighting each other over pronouns, level of personal exploitation and disadvantage, and “others that look like you made this system” all while the capitalists steal the future from us, our planet and our children. If you choose the path of lateral violence over identity battles you choose capitalism, the system that oppresses you. An alternate path, one of radical education, deep solidarity, and unified resistance against the death cult of colonial capitalism is a panacea for resistance that allows our strengths to shine – not dividing us on our (perceived) identities, labels applied by others to keep us busy.
In closing, friends, none of us are free until all of us are free. The revolution must be intersectional or it will be bullshit. Platitudes, or action? I think action.
In solidarity,
Aidan
Dear friends,
I’ve been continuing to ponder the nature of identity politics, the flexibility of superstructural systems, and the ever more obvious role of hegemony in enforcement of ideology. A few topics for this evening’s post, but I think we can track something interesting in the overtly reactionary nature of (“left” and right) politics in Australia in the past few weeks, months and years. This month, between bullshit collusion of Albanese, Biden, Kishida and Modi [1], the monotony of Liberal failures [2] and the casual acceptance of Peter Dutton’s racism [3] we’re forever witnessing superstructural flexibility or “relative atuonomy”, or hegemonic consent and coercion (i.e., war of position). The ability of politicians to bend rules without significant pushback demonstrates the continued success of the ruling class in establishing their worldview as “common sense”. Gramsci, here, gives us some clarity in the form of the historic bloc: wealthy donors, political leaders, and state run systems collude to maintain their hegmeony. Seeing this enables us to critique the relative autonomy offered to hegemons while we are kept distracted by – you guessed it – identity politics. But let’s talk contradictions for a second.
Gramsci tells us that hegemony is never complete or stable. Quite deliberately the system flexes itself to accommodate the ruling class – the 1% – and there are always contradictions within the dominant worldview which may be exploited to challenge the existing order – largely this is done by the ruling class itself, but Gramsci advanced that the working class could use similar “tools”. Contradictions emerge from inconsistencies in ideology (or enactment therein), conflicts between different factions of the ruling class, or gaps between ideological claims and lived experiences. Identity politics intersects with this in several ways, it is both a tool of the ruling class to distract the working class, but also emerges from and in reaction to legitimate concerns. Consider Grace Tame speaking out against sexual abuse, and the subsequent women’s march for justice, which exposed contradictions between Australia’s (political society) “self-image” and the reality of gender-based violence and inequality which continues to escalate. Or, Australia’s purported identity as a “lucky country” because of the richness of natural resources which conflicts with the need for climate action, Aboriginal sovereignty and the necessity to shift away from fossil fuels. These movements leverage the contradiction between proclaimed values of equality and lived experiences to push for cultural and policy changes.
Identity politics plays an increasingly prominent role in Australian politics, deployed by “left” and right parties, in divergent ways. On the left, identity politics is enacted to leverage the genuine needs (emergent) of “identity groups” – a concept itself which could use further critique – to, in an idealist world, advocate for the rights and recognition of those marginalised groups. In reality, this often means the hegemonic mainstream co-opting “shiny” parts of the plight of marginalised groups on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. The false progress of, for example the purportedly “left wing” ALP, politicians is to propagandise progress while fostering in-fighting and collapse into reactionary politics within the already disadvantaged group. Importantly, we need to maintain that political leaders in this country are part of the ruling class zeitgeist, and have, at least more than we, power to challenge and transform the hegemony so the marginalised are less so.
On the right, identity politics is easier to critique, as it takes less subtle forms, and can be seen as morally repugnant by traditional leftist (or even liberal, in instances) values. This manifests as appeals to nationalism, sexist and racist values, and a perceived threat to the dominant culture from minority groups and immigration. We’ve seen the continued inflammatory rhetoric of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, with its thinly-veiled xenophobia and opportunistic opposition to COVID-19 measures. Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party has bombarded the exclusively right-wing media with nationalist propaganda, while figures like Fraser Anning have shifted the goalposts for acceptable rhetoric with their extreme anti-immigration stances. The Liberal Party – god – exemplified in Dutton’s fearmongering about “African gangs” has only escalated in extremism in recent times. The growth of minor parties such as the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, of “freedom” rallies during the pandemic, and the outpouring of racists at the referendum [4]. These movements, cloaked in the language of defending “Australian values” represent a Gramscian war of position from the right. They leverage identity politics to reinforce existing power structures, exploiting genuine economic anxieties and cultural insecurities to maintain hegemonic control. This continued and escalating deployment of identity politics by the right serves to distract from class-based critiques (more on this soon) and to fracture potential solidarity among marginalised groups, all while preserving the interests of the ruling class under the guise of defending the interests of “real Australians” – ew.
The deployment of identity politics by both “left” and right parties reveals a deeper issue at play – the distraction from class-based critiques and the maintenance of capitalist hegemony. While identity-based struggles are important and often emerge from genuine grievances, their co-optation by political parties serves to fragment the working class and obscure the fundamental economic inequalities that underpin many social issues. This fragmentation is not accidental but a deliberate strategy of the ruling class to maintain their power. By emphasising differences based on race, gender, sexuality, or cultural background, the capitalist class diverts attention from the shared economic struggles that unite the working class. While this does not mean gender, race, ability, sexuality and so on are not important, their political deployment serves, currently, as a distraction regardless of purported political alignment. This divide-and-conquer approach is a classic example of what Gramsci termed the war of position – the ideological struggle for hegemony within civil society.
In our critique of how identity politics is deployed by political parties, it remains crucial that we do not inadvertently dismiss the very real and important struggles around race, gender, sexuality, and ability. Here, social reproduction theory offers us a valuable framework for understanding how these aspects of identity are fundamentally intertwined with class struggle and the reproduction of capitalism itself. Social reproduction theory, from scholars such as Silvia Federici and Tithi Bhattacharya, helps us understand how the work of maintaining and reproducing the working class is essential to the functioning of capitalism, yet deliberately goes unrecognised and unvalued. This work, which includes childcare, housework, emotional labor, and community care, falls disproportionately on women, particularly women of color and those from marginalised communities. Not only is is this a fundamental part of capitalist organisation, the oppression based on race, gender, sexuality, and ability are deeply integral to capitalist exploitation. This perspective shows us see that struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism are not, in fact, “identity politics” separate from class struggle, but are central to challenging capitalism itself. The fight for reproductive rights, for example, is not just about individual bodily autonomy, but about who bears the costs of social reproduction in our society.
In the Australian context, we see issues often framed in terms of identity politics connected to questions of social reproduction and class. The ongoing struggle for Aboriginal land rights, for instance, is not just about cultural recognition, but about the material conditions necessary for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to sustain themselves and their ways of life in the face of ongoing colonial dispossession. Similarly, the push for better support for disabled Australians through the NDIS is not separate from class struggle, but is about recognising and valuing the work of care that is essential to our society yet often invisible in capitalist accounting. The reforms to strip back the NDIS [5], by a now university vice-chancellor, show how the state, acting in the interests of capital, seeks to minimise its responsibility for social reproduction, pushing these costs back onto individuals and families.
As always, rather than fighting each other, racing to the ever most diadvantaged identity, and pointless backstabbing, our work should be to expose the contradictions within the ruling class hegemony – to show how the promises of equality and opportunity under capitalism are continually undermined by the system’s inherent and necessary logic (to its continuation) of exploitation and accumulation. By identifying and deflating the reactionary, empty, and capitalistic notions advanced by the ALP, LNP, and myriad racist, sexist, and religeously-extreme parties, we can begin to build a vision of solidarity that transcends the divisions fostered by these empty identity politics – including through identification of contradictions in the hegemony which benefit the ruling class, not the working class – thus, we can work towards building a counter-hegemony capable of challenging the capitalist order.
Identity politics has, for its crimes, enabled important issues to find the stage – even if they have been divorced from the authentic voices and struggles of those peoples. But these issues co-optation by both “left” and right parties in Australia serves only to maintain capitalist hegemony by fragmenting the working class – keeping us fighting and hating each other, not them – and obscuring fundamental economic inequalities.
Only through bona fide and transformative solidarity can we hope to challenge the capitalist system and create a more just and equitable society.
With love,
Aidan
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/22/china-testing-us-across-the-region-biden-tells-leaders-at-quad-summit ↩︎
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-nsw-liberals-mind-boggling-council-elections-drama-explained/qqmuxqxyu ↩︎
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/17/crikey-series-peter-dutton-racist-insider/ ↩︎
n.b. the right’s arguments were almost exclusively racist, but the whole proposal by and large purported to address historical injustices, ultimately sought to reinforce existing power structures – either way you sliced it: a consultative body without real decision-making power, or “more of the same” – colonialism all the way down. This exemplifies how the ruling class absorbs and neutralises challenges to its hegemony – Gramsci’s “transformismo”. ↩︎
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/21/labor-ndis-bill-shorten-reforms ↩︎