Here's a thread, written while ago, hadn't published.

Relevant now bc overemphasis of *liberal* identity politics on representation rather than material change, was *factor* in another tema

Note that this's as much towards the rearing their ugly heads. Behave.

1. Liberal id.pol is often seen as representative of the whole Left. But the exclusionary practices of liberal id.pol stands in sharp contrast with the revolutionary tradition of emancipatory politics; of struggle against exploitation *and* oppression.

2. Where liberal identity politics takes as a starting point the impossibility of distinct social groups to overcome the differences between their group-identities, the revolutionary variant emphasizes the place of those differences in a larger whole:

3. This short text by Mychal Denzel Smith is good place to start for understanding the difference between the two. https://newrepublic.com/article/144739/liberals-get-wrong-identity-politics

4. Smith notes regarding the whole: [Revolutionary identity politics viewed through the lens of intersectionality] “helps us to understand that class oppression will look different for those who also exist at the intersection of marginalized race, gender, and sexual identities.

5. "Any coalition worth forming has to take stock of those differences or suffer an agenda that is insufficient to liberating all people.. While the terms [id.pol] and intersectionality have taken hold of our discourse, the substance of these theories has been left behind.”

6. Also helpful here is Sharon Smith’s article ‘The politics of identity’. It's more theoretical in its approach to understanding why liberation cannot be attained if we don’t understand oppression as fundamentally joined with exploitation, and vice versa.

7. “Both theories are in agreement that all oppression is based on genuine inequality. Men and women are not treated as equals in society. Whites and African Americans are not treated at all equally."
http://www.isreview.org/issues/57/feat-identity.shtml

8. And then follows an important observation regarding the recent tema: "Oppression is not a matter of perception, but of concrete, material reality. Nor is there any doubt that struggles against oppression should be led by the oppressed themselves”.

9. Oppression doesn’t operate in a vacuum: it is conditioned in and reproduces exploitation: “Class inequality is not a side issue, but rather the main by product of exploitation, the driving force of the capitalist system.

10. "Class inequality is currently worsening by the minute, as the economy edges its way toward a deep recession. Yet the theory of identity politics barely acknowledges the importance of class inequality [..] The point here is not at all to

11. trivialize racism, sexism, or homophobia—but to understand that the entire working class faces oppression and has an objective interest in ending it. [Yet] The only organizational strategy [liberal] identity politics offers is for different groups of oppressed people..