For years, when I thought identity politics, I didn’t think class. This is not to say that class wasn’t present in my thought, but it wasn’t named as such. Part of this is about being working-class, and channeling all political concerns through nothing short of a hatred of class-systems which, historically, often became conflated with (I’ll say it) a simple hatred of the rich themselves. This class-hatred formed the very fabric of my orientation toward politics and, well, modes of living, but like most things that are most fundamental, it existed as simply present, taken-for-granted, unaccounted for. I felt, deeply, the sentiment expressed by Mother Jones, and quoted on that ol’ Ani Difranco/Utah Phillips collaborative album, about encouraging laborers and the poor the position themselves at the doorsteps of the wealthy in order to “shoot or stab them upon leaving their homes.” Utah followed it up, on record, with “well now, I’m a pacifist, but I appreciate the sentiment…” Despite this, I didn’t think of what I understood as “class politics” as the fount of the foment of identity politics. This is, of course, because for a “third-wave” feminist teenager/post-adolescent in the southern U.S., it simply wasn’t. My access to Marxist thought was mediated through the the writings of black radicals, riot girls, women of color, and reams of feminist critique that, while often centering on the necessity of intersectional thought, made “labor politics” seem like a beret-wearing white-boys club stuck with its collective nose in the formulas that comprise so much of the Grundrisse. Embarassingly enough, this attitude came with me to grad school wherein, during my first week, I was invited to participate in the long-running Materialist Workshop at Binghamton University, and I went “eh, whatever. Marx wasn’t a feminist” and refused to go.That said, encountering an analysis that critiques identity politics, but begins its critique with the figure of the worker (rather than the woman, the queer, the racialized, the colonized – again, the litany) was compelling. For folks who cut their political teeth on Italian workerism, I’d imagine this wouldn’t be the case. Alas, me is not those folks.
In Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri enumerate and expound three tasks for identity politics. I’ve written on the first two, in detouristic fashion, in this post. The third runs as such, quoted at length:
a third political task is necessary in order to support the first two tasks, keep the rebellious function of identity moving forward, and carry identity politics toward a revolutionary project: to strive for its own abolition. The self-abolition of identity is the key to understanding how revolutionary politics can begin with identity but not end up there…the revolutionary communist tradition gives us perhaps the clearest example for understanding this paradoxical proposition. The proletariat is the first truly revolutionary class in human history, according to this tradition, insofar as it is bent on its own abolition as a class…the primary object of class struggle, in other words, is not to kill capitalists but to demolish the social structures and institutions that maintain their privilege and authority, abolishing too, thereby, the conditions of proletarian subordination (332).
What does it mean to strive for the abolition of identity? A part of me cringes. A large part. I think of all the embattled and terse spaces/nomenclatures I’ve inhabited, I’ve had placed upon me, and those I struggled to rework, reclaim, to affirm as positivities. And then I think, moreover, that regardless of these reclamations, I still have to grapple with these ID’s, in their violent and subordinative valences, in the daily. How do I then find it a politically desirable to work for the abolition of these ID’s when I’ve spent so long within the space of and building upon a set politics that places them centrally? This third task seems, at first, commensurable with erasure of self.
Things get more complicated, though. I also have an empathic connection with this injunction, because, the thing is, living in relation, living engaged deeply with other folks, has already undone so many of these identificatory points – chief among them, that of dyke. And not for a movement into a privileged realm that dictates the disavowal of these reclaimed/repurposed identities, but for a more textured, variegated erotic and political life. Now, one of my primary political tasks has become the creation of existential space for more complicated erotic relationalities, more gender, more of the time, more difference, more of the time more attempts to get closer to each other’s complicated realities more of the time. More complicated, sensorial, and felt ways of engaging – in other words, committing to the space of encounter, rather than filtering encounter taxonomically (within the dictates of categorial identity) about who to engage and how to engage them.
As I do this, then, I shift, move, become something else – and this is maybe what it means to seek the abolition of identity. I didn’t will it, though, I didn’t strive for it as a product of political struggle; rather, the method, the political ethics I try to work with and through, are gradually accomplishing this abolition, on an intimate, perhaps even molecular level. This doesn’t mean I’m not posited, positioned, or interpellated, nor that I find these positings more or less comfortable, but it means life-trajectories have learned me well that I’ve got to be dispossesive about this concatenation we call identity.
To get closer to the singularities that we, indeed, are, to live and work in a deeply convivial way, to not fuck each other over, to learn from one another, to transform one another, we need to think through identity politics, toward singularity.
–HJM
Filed under: Uncategorized, Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri, Identity Politics, queer
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