Socialist Standard No. 1391 July 2020
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‘Friendly’ response on Facebook to the editorial: Working class lives matter.
“This is idiotic. There is an underlying socio-economic cause for high crime and murder rates in the black community which claim not marginally, but vastly more black lives than police brutality, a mere side effect of the real ailment. All this BLM IDPOL nonsense serves to do is divide the working class so that the real issues which are economic take a back seat to marginal race and gender issues. Alienating the ‘white male’ and driving him to the far right in white majority countries is political suicide for socialists. You dickheads really need to wake the fuck up!”
I don’t think our critic has read the article but has just assumed what it was going to say. The title of the article itself — ‘Working class lives matter — makes it clear that we don’t support ‘IDPOL nonsense’. It is an aspect of the poverty problem. Misidentity politics is a dangerous divisive distraction.
Incidentally, perhaps unexpectedly, David Aaronovitch’s column in the Times of 25 June was headed ‘Poor lives matter whatever their colour’.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/poor-lives-matter-whatever-their-colour-g2p7vv572
That is the real issue, it is not a matter of the color of the skin, race, identity or racial nationalism
Probably they did not read the article in the proper context because the socialists party does not support that concept either
Looking at the situation in the US it seems that neo-leftism ultimately sets its sights on communitarian egalitarianism, such that, taken to a logical conclusion, the various IdPol demographic categories would obligatorily be represented in government and other public bodies in proportion to their respective weights in the population. Not only monetary compensations awarded to entire ‘communities’ are a possibility. It is also possible that in the interests of just historical compensation that the non-‘POC’ representation-proportion would be downgraded to one degree or another*. The result: the exact same capitalism as before, but with a redistribution of genealogically-coded power throughout the hierarchies of state and economy**. And this would be called ‘justice’. ‘* Cf positive descrimination / affirmative action / quota systems in Tsarist Russia (against number of Jews in universities) / anti-non-Malay employment-measures in Malaysia.** Especially if the system were somehow extended to the private-sector economy, a more complex affair.To say that this is class-divisive is an understatement. And People like Kevin McDonald (not the film director!) would welcome such tendencies — including just the ongoing emotionalist cancelism over symbols). For him and his ilk: at last a way to bring the stupidly liberal-minded White Race, kicking and screaming, to its senses!It’s not just a question of these groups being proportionately represented (by those promoting the idea of course) at the top of the power structure but also at the bottom. Unemployment, bad housing, poor education and ill health are to be proportionately shared out too, but this can only be done by making some non-black people worse off. Obviously they are not going to stand for this and so a squabble, in fact a nasty internecine struggle, will inevitably develop between two sections of the working class. White identity politics is already beginning to get a wider hearing.
The present situation or this are the only alternatives under capitalism and why the way out can only be socialism where there will no poverty and misery to share out evenly.
It is hard to imagine a more blatantly divisive and anti-working-class political doctrine and practice than IdiotPol or misidentity politics. Socialism, on the other hand, promotes working class unity to end capitalism.
A new article from the autonomist-colored left-communist group Mouvement Communiste/Kolektivně proti Kapitălu:
“RACES” AND THE WORKING CLASS IN THE USA
https://mouvement-communiste.com/documents/MC/Letters/LTMC2148 ENvH.pdf ENvH.pdfIt includes these sections:
An antiracist movement against the police but in defence of the state
BLM, a stack of anti-worker ideas
The present situation of Blacks in the USA (with 11 subsections)
Capital and imaginary communities
Intersectionality, a counter-revolutionary instrument for dividing the proletariat
An ideology soaked in philosophical indifferentism
Intersectionality and the politics of identity
Intersectionality and antiracism: a pillar of racialisation
A counter-revolutionary impasse
There is a talk this evening by a Socialist Party member denouncing “identity politics” as a dangerous diversion.
Identity politics: the new communalism
7:30pm, Thursday 13 MayYou can listen by going to
http://www.communistcorrespondingsociety.org/audio.html
The talk will be posted there at 7.30 BST (GMT + 1) and remain there for seven days.
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