On Third Worlds as Political Strategy

Preliminary Theses on (the Continuing Appeal of) Identity Politics

Marx in 1844 Asked 'Emancipation or Assimilation'?

1. That 'identity politics' a la Francis Fox Piven sought to forge a 'third way': an emancipation through (a degree of) assimilation. This strategy sought to create extra-class social identities (the legacy of the Third World formation: political alliances such 'people of color', 'women of color', 'queers', etc.) within moribund social movements (Jefferson Cowie, Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, 2009; Dan Georgkas, Detroit I do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution, 1999) as victimized identity categories recognized by the state-- interestingly, not as a strategy for assimilation but one which assumed that by the state politically 'including the excluded' necessary contradictions within capital would be brought to the fore. As a consequence, this strategy shaped social movements as movements primarily focused on state recognition, Keynesian state legislation, an expansion of 'cultural politics', and broad alliances with sympathetic members of the capitalist class (George Soros Foundation, Ford Foundation, etc).

2. That this 'identity politics' milieu and its rights based strategy instead found that capital could in fact 'include the excluded' without contradiction-- to use David Harvey's terminology, capital 'turned a limit into a barrier it could overcome'. Capital's process-- of producing identities/fragmentation/difference and of 'overcoming barriers'-- is also a process of value production.

3. That a victimized identity category recognized by the post-Keynesian (and perhaps 'neoliberal') state will tend not to by its own logic generate social welfare programs, etc. That instead this strategy failed (and continues to fail) to address the 'counter revolution' of the past 40 years (a counter revolution that appears in many forms but in terms of race, in the form of the 'War on Drugs,' the 'War on Gangs', and the 'War on Terror'); post Fordist US deindustrialization (rise of credit/debt economy, concealing work hours as leisure hours, home into office, rise of high/low end service industry); and neoliberal social policies (for instance the transformation of public housing into a booming prison industry).