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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
How can the left be credible when it can’t decide what a woman is? How can antiracists fight for equality if they promote fictions about race? If identity politics is the answer, why are so many Western left organizations being damaged by it?
As the culture wars rage, this compelling book examines why much of the Western political left has foundered because of identity politics. Identity issues have mired many good organizations in intractable conflicts and deflected them from their purpose. In ignoring poverty and inequality, the Western left has lost its way. Meanwhile, powerful social movements from the past – black, women’s, gay, and lesbian – are reduced to corporate slogans.
Attuned to the needs of activists and academics, this book offers intelligent explanations for how we got here. It examines serious problems with antiracism, transgender rights activism, and the work of LGBTQ+ groups. In showing how identities are outcomes of social and institutional forces, it argues that technofinancial capitalism uses identity politics to mould new labour processes for the Western middle class while accelerating economic inequality. Clearing a path through the vagaries of identity politics, the book offers arguments the Western left must face amidst formidable far-right and right-wing authoritarianism, climate emergency, and severe inequalities.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
1 The Heat of Identity
Introduction
Identitarianism
Compounded contexts
Outline of the book
Notes
2 The Self, the Group, and Identity Politics
Introduction
Consciousness and self
The social self
It’s all about ‘me’
Disruptions
Authenticity
Liberal persons
The self-owned person
The contained person
Moral and virtuous persons
Atomized persons
Revolutionary persons
Are ‘persons’ Western?
Moral excellence
The morally excellent group
Notes
3 Identitarian Technocracy and the Liberal Middle Class
Introduction
The split institution
The forces of identitarian technocracy
The NGO organizational field
Speaking power to truth
Force fields
Rent-seeking power
The impacts of identity zealotry
The moral corporation
The ‘progressive’ labour process
The safety of the psyche
Training the moral corporation
The diverse corporation
The liberal middle classes
Moral drones
Notes
4 The Queer Empire and Post-truth Politics
Western sex/gender
Queering the pitch
Power and reality
The very issue of survival
Nevertheless, we persist
The coloniality of gender
Political imaginaries
The misogyny of the Western left
Dimensions of trans rights activism
Emergence
Whose conversion?
Feed my desire
The political styles of woman-hatred
Violent misogyny
Genocide and political hyperbole
A pastiche movement
Notes
5 Proximate, Immediate, Emotional: Identitarian Anti-racism
Introduction
Racism–anti-racism
Race-makers
I am an anti-racist
Liberation training
The tribal ‘race’
Microsigils
Notes
6 Culture, Identity, and Anti-racism
Unremembering Bandung
Interweaving left and right
Decolonial fascism
Differentialism
Political ethnicity
Life and cultural life
The romance of nativism
The powers of authenticity
Culture-making
Notes
7 Diminishing Utopias
The moral and the virtuous
Mythologies
Moving coalitions
Identity and social movements
Global persons
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
1 Civil rights, social action and advocacy 501(c)(3) private charities – to...
2 LGBT 501(c)(3) private charities – total contributions (grants and gifts)...
Chapter 4
3 Frequency of selected phrases in HRC Annual Reports, 1999–2021. The Annua...
4 Recorded hate crimes, England and Wales, 2011–23, Office of National Stat...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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The Revolutionary Road to Me
Identity Politics and the Western Left
Chetan Bhatt
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Chetan Bhatt, 2025.
The Author hereby asserts his moral right to be identified as author of the Work.
First published by Polity Press in 2025.
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5954-1 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6518-4 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024936342
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people whose work I use enthusiastically in the book or who I thank below will have disagreements, perhaps profound ones, with many of its arguments and even the spirit of the book. I would like to thank Steve Cross, Rob Merrett, Jonathan Moore, Robert Mitchell, Jayne Egerton, Stephen Cowden, Pragna Patel, Steve Hubbell, Kristina Harrison, Stuart Parker, Colin Defreitas, Lata Mani, Levi Pay, Paul Gilroy, Suresh Grover, Judy Wajcman, Michael Biggs, Fran Tonkiss, Biju Mathew, Suzanne Hall, Patrick McGovern, Deeyah Khan, John Solomos, Shonagh Dillon, Kum Kum Bhavnani, Monika Krause, Gita Sahgal, Charles Stafford, Karima Bennoune, Subir Sinha, Rashmi Varma, and anonymous reviewers. I especially want to thank my editor at Polity, Elise Heslinga, for her intelligent insights and patient support, and my agent Caroline Hardman for her encouragement and assistance. There are many extraordinary activists in the UK, North America, and elsewhere who want to remain anonymous but whose thoughts and criticisms are reflected in the book. Some wonderful people have helped me in diverse ways during the writing of this book – you know who you are. Enduring love and thanks to Lilavati Bhatt, Parul Goldsmith, Mike Goldsmith, Bina Carlish, Roland Carlish, Alisha Bhatt-Smith, and to the beloved no longer with us – Robert Lee, Sabiha Aanchawan, and Jonesy.
2 THE SELF, THE GROUP, AND IDENTITY POLITICS
We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.1
Introduction
A common identitarian way of announcing oneself on social media is by using a template like this:
[Gender ambiguous first name] [Second name] [academic credentials] they identify as [trans] [masc/fem] [bi/pan] [queer/queerAF] [genderqueer/non-binary] [physical disability] [neurodivergent condition] [white/BIPOC] [migrant status] [ethnic status] living/surviving in [indigenous name of colonized territory] also known as [US state, Canadian territory, or New Zealand]. They are [creative words] [employment]. They host [podcasts] and their work is available at [social media links / website]. [BLM hashtag] [trans flag emoji] [rainbow flag emoji] [clenched fist shaded emojis]. You can follow them on [social media accounts]. Their agent is [name]. [link to Patreon or similar account]
This perfect illustration of left-wing identity politics is based on an anonymized example. The overriding message is, ‘I want you to like me – look at what a morally excellent person I am.’ The text declares oppression and affiliation with the three main groups valorized in Western identity politics: LGBTQ+, ‘BIPOC’, and Indigenous people. It is throwing out into the world a particular kind of ‘person’ who knows about some oppressed groups and ‘colonization’. Within the text, identity labels function as credentials: ‘B.Sc., M.Sc.’ segues into ‘bi, queer’; emojis work like apotropaic magic. Overall, it is a rationalized declaration of creed. While containing political content, politics is not being done here. By its very nature, its understanding of oppression is superficial.
The text is also a good example of the self as an autophotogenic mask – the machined self that one wants to present to the world which is also the ideal that one wants to see in the mirror. This self scavenges scripts about oppressed groups to bring itself together. Political issues are imbricated with the individual such that the self is inextricable from them: ‘I am living in colonized territory’, ‘I am queer as fuck.’ Affiliation to others occurs through a declaration about the self and is intimately tied to one’s excellent moral qualities. Others matter because they say something about me. How has such narcissistic politics emerged on the left?
Identity politics begins with asking, ‘who am I?’ and ‘who are we?’. We must therefore elaborate the ‘I’, the self, and the person to understand what is at stake in identity politics. Therefore, this chapter’s primary focus is the meaning of the social self and the severe problems its excavation causes for identity politics. We first consider the self and its consciousness and, from this, archetypes of modern liberal personhood: self-owning, moral, virtuous, inward-looking, contained, authentic. Opposed to them are other ‘persons’: revolutionary, anticolonial, and non-Western. Many of these templates of personhood condense into the contemporary, morally excellent identity group.
This chapter shows ways in which older ideas about selfhood and personhood contribute to identity politics, but it also shows how tensions in thinking about the self, persons, and identity destabilize contemporary identity politics. We consider, for example, how ideas about oppressed consciousness drift into the privileged insight of an identity group, or how the revolutionary subject of modernity becomes the identitarian vanguard. An important theme of this chapter concerns the striking associations between left-wing identity politics and conservative, communitarian virtue ethics.
In considering debates about the self and personhood, including the ‘African self’, we tease out strands of thinking about consciousness, oppression, equality, the self, and the group that are resistant to capture by banal identitarianism. Considering the self philosophically is also different from viewing it sociologically, biologically, psychologically, or historically. A non-reductive, multidimensional understanding of the self2 is an essential corrective to identitarianism.
Consciousness and self
In contemporary identity politics, a definitive moment is the declaration of one’s authentic identity – the moment of self-recognition by ‘consciousness raising’, becoming ‘woke’, coming out, or affiliating with a movement. But what is being said when someone says, for example: ‘I am Christian’? They announce some attribute about themselves or an affiliation to some beliefs. They also declare associations with histories, ideologies, institutions, and sectarian traditions within Christianity of which they may not be fully aware, but which could be assumed by others.
The social or political horizons of who you are collapse and expand through the identity labels you choose. Identity labels constrain the person within the ascribed meanings of the label, but they also expand the person through the meanings and histories of that label. The label condenses many affiliations – with histories, institutions, cultures, aesthetics, and political beliefs. It makes a universe of meaning available to the person, which expands in manifold ways. This expansiveness is part of the constitution of the ‘new’ self, its potential and agency.
Significant also is the inhabitation of identity such that you make it ‘become you’. In so doing, you might add new meanings which change it, creating a cycle of ascription, meaning, inhabitation, and reconstitution. There is a dynamic relationship between identity labels and the people who choose them such that both transform – a looping effect inherent to ‘human kinds’.3
Yet a core part of you remains the same, or so you must believe. You persist in time from before your identity declaration, during it, and into your future.4 Your future self will recognize its past self. This ‘you’ seems independent of any identity declaration you make and is always excessive to any identity label you might use to describe yourself.
What is this core? Many philosophers consider consciousness as a ‘thing’ with the property of awareness of itself.5 This reflective self-consciousness is irreducibly an outcome of us as physical bodies, but irreducible to those bodies. Some have argued that we do not need this idea of a self or person that is a natural kind different from what a human being is, and that there are good grounds for rejecting the idea of ‘persons’ different from individual human beings.6 Some psychologists say our sense of self is surprisingly variable and contextual.7 From a different line of argument, the idea of a whole, persisting ‘I’ is a fiction. The ‘I’ is never fully grasped, only fleeting perceptions of oneself doing things. The mind stitches together these perceptions to create an illusion of a self moving forward in time, like the individual frames of a film reel that, when projected, create the illusion of temporal contiguity.8
Nevertheless, reflective self-consciousness seems fundamental to who we are. Furthermore, as the early medieval philosopher Ibn Sina argued, your reflective self-awareness is not necessary for the self to be aware of the self:9 you are already aware before becoming aware of your awareness.10 Therefore, you have prior awareness and reflective self-awareness and both seem fundamental. The ‘I’ is the name for the thing you create when you give an account of your reflection on yourself. ‘I’ has the property of being simultaneously a subject that reflects and the object of its reflection. In telling others about it, the ‘I’ is generated situationally in the moment of reflection through something like an internal mirror.11 The ‘I’ is also socially relative, and you typically use it in relation to others – ‘I and you’, ‘you and me’.12
But is the ‘I’ that you think you are the same as that which you are? The twelfth-century philosopher Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi asked a fundamental question: ‘Can I know myself?’ His answer is striking: when you think ‘I’, you are creating a representation of yourself to yourself. This representation is an ‘it’. But it is not and cannot be ‘you’. In your prior awareness, you are not an ‘it’ to yourself. The self seemingly can never know itself,13 an idea called the paradox of self-knowledge: ‘On the one hand, the self must be known prior to everything else, since anything known must presuppose a subject for which it is known, while on the other hand, for something to be known it must be an “object” – which leads to the paradox that while everything is known through the self, the self itself remains forever unknown.’14
One consequence, we can argue, is that the self is independent of any identity, and no identity can be identical with the self. This is one of the ways in which every identitarian claim is a fiction. Identity politics reduces the self to the identity to which it claims affiliation, confusing the ‘I’ with the identity it claims to be. If ‘I’ has several properties related to awareness, these don’t include ethnicity, culture, sex, gender, background, or social class. Furthermore, with extremely rare exceptions, awareness is felt universally as continuous and ‘whole’. A vital consequence is that consciousness isn’t binary, though the bodies creating consciousness are (chapter 4).
The argument here isn’t that the self cannot know itself. Al-Suhrawardi argued that the self ‘knows certain things directly and without mediation’ through a ‘mode of cognition’ called ‘knowledge by presence’.15 Knowledge also emerges from reflective self-awareness or our senses. These were not a problem for al-Suhrawardi because they produced ‘its’ that we can know.
In many Western philosophical traditions, there is a fundamental division between the subject (the self) and the object (something that the self apprehends), an idea which emerged powerfully from the early decades of the eighteenth century in Europe due to the attention to self-consciousness in that period.16 The division also exists in many other non-Western philosophical traditions. However, in the Suhrawardian universe, something separate from the subject–object relation arises and points to the fundamental irreducibility of first-person subjectivity17 as a universal human attribute. This claim about first-person subjectivity does not require us to assume Western individualism.
Using Ibn Sina and al-Suhrawardi’s arguments, we can argue that identity is a secondary phenomenon, non-identical with and ontologically distinct from the self. Identity cannot be an ontological recognition of the self. This means that positions like the following are not easy to justify:
If coming out is a condition for the existence of community, then that community becomes a condition of possibility for a lesbian and/or gay ethos, being able to live one’s life as a lesbian or as a gay man, which is the goal of the coming out process. Coming out refers to an ontological recognition of the self by the self. It involves a recognition of one’s sexuality … and starting from this recognition, working on one’s sexuality so that the self appears and becomes.18
Here, the self is argued to be the final expression of some inner essence. But this cannot be the case since only the self could have brought that expression into being. What, then, was that self? How can the self be an expression of an inner potential that hasn’t realized itself if the self does the realizing? The expression which arises from the self’s actions is not identical with the ontology of the self.
One way of ‘resolving’ this issue is that the ‘I’ has intense desires – its avidity – that are fundamental to its being, some of which may emerge as political identities. There may be innate parts to your ‘I’ that express an avidity that has not had the opportunity to emerge or flourish, whether because of you or for other reasons. Or maybe something that is a part of you does not fit comfortably with how you are expected to be in the world. Or something ascribed to you does not sit easily with your ‘I’. In these cases, your identity (for example, in coming out) results in consonance and fluency between the self and what you believe to be your authentic identity.
Avidity is one of several ‘non-rational’ dimensions of the self. Our affects change constantly, and we don’t necessarily understand our emotional, irrational (or hyper-rational) self. The self may be a scattered emotional mess, unexpectedly lustful, unknowingly raging, dominated by uncontrollable, intrusive thoughts, incomprehensibly lost in a fugue of depression, disproportionately fearful or scared, or lost in the intensities of love or sex. The self is also akratic:19 ‘And thus the incontinent man is like a city which passes all the right decrees and has good laws, but makes no use of them.’20 This complex dimensioning of the self means that approaches to identity that are ‘rational’ or algorithmic – for example, teaching the right national ideas and values to create a particular type of national citizen – are subject to non-rational, destabilizing processes.
The social self
The self is socially embedded in a world of people and institutions. The ‘I’ can contemplate the existence of other entities and apprehends other ‘I’s as self-aware entities. That we know others are self-aware also means we can reflect upon ourselves from what we believe to be their perspectives – the ‘perspective of the generalized other’.21
According to much identitarian thinking, we need the recognition of others to persist in our existence (chapter 4). This orientation arises from the partial incorporation of ideas from Hegel. According to him, self-consciousness is, initially, ‘simple being for itself’ based on excluding everything else. But the excluded are other people who are also self-consciousnesses.22
Self-consciousness is in and for itself while and as a result of its being in and for itself for an other; i.e., it is only as a recognized being … For self-consciousness, there is another self-consciousness; self-consciousness is outside of itself … First, it has lost itself, for it is to be found as an other essence. Second, it has thereby sublated that other, for it also does not see the other as the essence but rather sees itself in the other. 23
For Hegel, you ‘exist’ in that another recognizes you. If that is the case, then your consciousness resides in another, so it is lost to you. If you exist in another person’s consciousness, then, in an important sense, you have come outside yourself. The other person is like a mirror for you. In acknowledging them, you also look at your consciousness in them looking back at you. You look back at yourself through (the you in) another person, and they are doing the same.
Hegel’s idea of recognition travels into, and often beyond, academic identity politics. It has often been stripped of its dynamic complexity and reduced to the truism that we need the recognition of others to survive (chapter 4). Because it rests on recognition, identity politics is inherently limiting since political, policy, and legal struggles are made coextensive with, but limited to, issues of recognition by social norms, law, and policy.
We can contrast ‘needy’ recognition with an alternative approach. There is a more fundamental way in which other people are within us as we are within them: we come with other people, and they are a part of us. We are always already interconnected with others: ‘Out of the one, many. Into the one, every.’24 This is a statement against solipsism but also of ethics in that it registers our affiliations and commitments to others. You are constantly in a world that contains people, and you cannot exist as ‘I’ outside this world. You are ‘thrown into’, and always with your ‘thrownness’ in, the world.25 One approach to knowing that one is always in the world with others is to cultivate a higher state of being above that of the consciousness of ordinary people, a deeper understanding of one’s being.26 This is an inward turn towards an authentic self, a central theme in identity politics.
But this idea of authenticity is mistaken. You may decide to ignore others, but they are constitutive of you. Before the ‘I’ are other people. You ‘are’ also the people other to you, an idea that may compel you to think about others when you think about yourself. For them, you are a ‘you’, not an ‘I’; indeed, you are a ‘you’ before you are an ‘I’. The ‘I’ is not separate from others to which it has responsibility. The existence of others disrupts the ‘I’s’ coincidence with ‘I’, and this disruption is the possibility of ethics.27 The self is one ‘focal point’ for a world of many interdependent selves.28
These ideas point to how your ‘I’ is socially constituted from its inception. Yet we have argued earlier that first-person subjectivity is irreducible, so how do we reconcile it with its social determination? Though ‘I’, the most intimate part of you, is an outcome of social processes, you persist in your existence as self. Even if you are fully socially constituted, your prior awareness, reflective self-awareness, representation to yourself as an ‘I’, understanding of yourself in time, and projection of yourself into the future are each important and are the foundation for your agency.
So, while permanently socially embedded, your self-awareness as a person separate from others is not wholly subsumed by others, nor do they fully determine your thoughts and actions. The social world and the actions of people within it are not reducible to each other but are the conditions and outcomes of each other.29 You are socially constituted, yet you can make social changes through your agency, though not in conditions or with knowledge of your choosing and not necessarily with outcomes and consequences you intended.30 The irreducibility of first-person subjectivity also means a person can think and act otherwise to how social forces are compelling them. The essence of its agency is the essence of consciousness – its directedness towards something, its intentionality.31 In an everyday sense, it means that our intentions matter; for politics, it means our intentions, and the veracity of our account of them, matter, an idea that is often alien to identity politics.
The irreducibility of first-person subjectivity has other implications for identity politics. Prior and reflective self-awareness exist before, but are intermixed with, their social determination and continue to exist independently in and through their social determination. But this does not mean the self can be condensed to or subsumed under the social, cultural, institutional, or communal environments that produced it. The ‘self’ and its social determination are ontologically different phenomena, and neither can be ‘read’ in an unmediated way from the other. The ‘self’ is neither monist (as in liberal individualism) nor communal (as in communitarianism), nor simply a subject-effect of discourse (as in post-structuralism). If the self cannot be reduced to an identity label, it cannot be reductively identified with a ‘racial’, ethnic, cultural, or social group to which it claims affiliation: the socially embedded self is not the same as the communal self; making it so is an act of politics (chapter 6).
We will see claims in later chapters that identity groups have distinct perceptions and angles of vision. Identitarian theories, including decolonial, critical race, and queer theory, claim that different groups have unique ‘ways of knowing’. But can prior awareness and self-awareness change across groups and societies? Can it be true that other cultural groups have prior and reflective self-awareness that is fundamentally different to your reflective self-awareness and leads to a genuinely alternative ‘way of knowing’ to yours? Or is this confusing self-awareness, universal across humanity, with differing experiences and cultures? If the ‘I’ is prior and reflective self-awareness, where does its culture, ethnicity or sexual identity reside?
It’s all about ‘me’
We can think about these issues by using a distinction between ‘I’ and ‘me’ from the anthropologist George Herbert Mead:32 ‘The “I” is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the “me” is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitudes of the others constitute the organized “me,” and then one reacts toward that as an “I.”’33 There are good reasons to be critical of this approach,34 but the distinction is helpful for us when modified in this way: ‘I’ is the prior and reflective awareness discussed above, and ‘me’ is the result of the social world crashing into you, a version of the external world that you have metabolized to create your ‘me’. The ‘me’ is how you present yourself to the outside world. It can also be how people close to you know you.35 It is not strictly the ‘I’ that makes an identity claim, but the ‘me’. Identity resides in the ‘me’.
