Concept

Identity politics

Overview

Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, opinion, intelligence, and social class. The term encompasses various often-populist political phenomena and rhetoric, such as governmental migration policies that regulate mobility and opportunity based on identities, left-wing agendas involving intersectional politics or class reductionism, and right-wing nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic "others".

The term identity politics dates to the late twentieth century, although it had precursors in the writings of individuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Frantz Fanon. Many contemporary advocates of identity politics take an intersectional perspective, which they argue accounts for a range of interacting systems of oppression that may affect a person's life and originate from their various identities. To these advocates, identity politics helps center the experiences of those they view as facing systemic oppression so that society can better understand the interplay of different forms of demographic-based oppression and ensure that no one group is disproportionately affected by political actions. Contemporary identity labels—such as people of specific race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age—are not mutually exclusive but are, in many cases, compounded into one when describing hyper-specific groups. An example is that of African-American homosexual women, who can constitute a particular hyper-specific identity class.

Criticism of identity politics often comes from either the center-right or the far-left on the political spectrum. Many socialists, anarchists and Marxists have criticized identity politics for its divisive nature, claiming that it forms identities that can undermine their goals of proletariat unity and class struggle. On the other hand, many conservative think tanks and media outlets have criticized identity politics for other reasons, such as that it is inherently collectivist and prejudicial. Center-right critics of identity politics have seen it as particularist, in contrast to the universalism espoused by many liberal politics, or argue that it detracts attention from non-identity based structures of oppression and exploitation.

A leftist critique of identity politics, such as that of Nancy Fraser, argues that political mobilization based on identitarian affirmation leads to surface redistribution—that is, a redistribution within existing structures and relations of production that does not challenge the status quo. Instead, Fraser argued, identitarian deconstruction, rather than affirmation, is more conducive to leftist goals of economic redistribution. Marxist academics such as Kurzwelly, Pérez, and Spiegel, writing for Dialectical Anthropology, argue that because the term identity politics is defined differently based on a given author's or activist's ideological position, it is analytically imprecise. The same authors argue in another article that identity politics often leads to reproduction and reification of essentialist notions of identity, which they view as inherently erroneous.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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It is not for nothing that the word "democracy" has a double meaning in the political vocabulary. On the one hand, it means a state system founded on universal suffrage and the other attributes of formal "popular government." On the other hand, by the word "democracy" is understood the mass of the people itself, in so far as it leads a political existence. In the second sense, as in the first, the meaning of…
Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy
States what Identity politics is.
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Each side honestly believes that it deserves to triumph, because two theories of society exist side by side in our thought, and men choose, unconsciously, the theory which fits their case. Because the battle is long and arduous all general theory is gradually forgotten; in the end, nothing remains but self-assertion, and when the oppressed win freedom they are as oppressive as their former masters. This is seen most…
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
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For popular use this definition is amply sufficient, but it still falls short of the complete accuracy required for the purposes of the philosopher. Political Economy does not treat of the production and distribution of wealth in all states of mankind, but only in what is termed the social state; nor so far as they depend upon the laws of human nature, but only so far as they depend upon a certain portion of those…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
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Identity politics

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