Yahoo News Rightwing identity politics ignores the fact the ‘working class’ is not just white men
In the wake of Labor’s election defeat, strategists and commentators have called on the party to abandon “identity politics”.
Paradoxically, many of them simultaneously demand more identity politics, though perhaps without realising it.
Take Nick Dyrenfurth, from the John Curtin Research Centre.
He’s issued a widely-publicised denunciation of Labor’s embrace of identity politics, which he defines as “the idea that we are all essentially defined by our membership of an intersecting set of categories based on gender or race”.
Instead, he wants the ALP to reconnect with the working class.
What does “working class” mean?
The early theorists of social democracy understood the term as referring to all those who sold their labour power to others. Class wasn’t, in other words, a static identity so much as a relationship, an antagonism between employers and those reliant on a salary.
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It didn’t necessarily involve particular activities or attitudes. Almost any skillset can be performed as wage labour. Workers can be blue-collar or white-collar. They can live in the city or the outback. They can be any race or any gender; they can be Muslim or atheist or Rastafarian; they can vote Greens or read the Australian.
In the past, leftwingers emphasised the universalism of class as the basis for collectivity, enabling and motivating the “99%” to resolve differences and unite against the “1%”. Insofar as the process created a class “identity”, it was a fluid and inclusive one, shaped by the struggle itself: think about how Malak Alaywe Herz became an icon of the protests in Lebanon after a photo of her karate-kicking a cop went viral.
The early advocates for women’s liberation, black liberation and gay liberation often embraced some notion of class unity, precisely because the working class seemed able to facilitate the structural change they saw as necessary to overcome oppression.
By contrast, the identity politics of the late seventies and early eighties tended to rely on academics, writers or others from relatively privileged positions to advocate in the name of an oppressed bloc.
Identity politics, in other words, focused more on the symbolic or cultural issues important to the intelligentsia than the material reforms crucial to combating the sexism and racism affecting the less well-off.
Class can, then, provide a model of social change quite different from the preoccupations of “identity politics”.
But that’s not Dyrenfurth’s argument.
Rather than discussing class as a social relationship, he treats it as a static category, defined primarily by educational levels, types of labour and geographical locations.
In other words, he sketches out a class “identity”: a set of traits, values and attitudes that he ascribes to workers as a bloc.
For him – and the others making similar arguments – real workers have blue-collar jobs, live in outer suburbs or regional Australia, and harbour such socially conservative ideas that they’re shocked – shocked! – at Labor’s unpatriotic radicalism.
Most of these descriptors are quite arbitrary. According to the 2016 census, some 56% of people aged 15 and over now have a post-school qualification. In other words, an awful lot of Australian workers have some experience of higher education – but when a pundit talks of the “working class” they’ll never discuss, say, the casual staff on an IT help desk.
Similarly, the nostalgic invocations of “Labor’s traditional working class base” inevitably focus on blue-collar Tories rather than the militants of the CFMEU.
Whatever Dyrenfurth thinks he’s doing, he’s not posing class as an alternative to identity politics: he’s offering class as identity politics.
Rather than arguing that identity arises from politics, he’s positing a politics that arises from identity, exactly like the people he claims to oppose.
That’s why he adopts the same strategies, arguing, for instance, that Labor should embrace a quota system to elect MPs from the particular identity he favours.
Michael Thompson made the same argument in his 1999 book Labor Without Class, insisting that the ALP would only reconnect with blue-collar workers by moving further to the right.
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Similarly, Mark Latham has built an entire career out of performative identity claims.
He might never have held down a normal job but, as he’s cannoned crazily from one political party to another, he’s anchored his reactionary ideas to his supposed lived experience in the western suburbs of Sydney.
That being said, there’s a reason why the identity politics of the right are enjoying something of a moment with the ALP still reeling from the electoral defeat.
“Labor lost support amongst its traditional base of lower-income working people,” explains the just-released post-election review.
“Economically vulnerable workers living in outer-metropolitan, regional and rural Australia have lost trust in politicians and political institutions. Indeed, they are often resentful of the attention progressive political parties give at their expense to minority groups and to what is nowadays called identity politics.”
Rightwing identity politics can seize hold of such passages to justify ever more conservative positions.
By presenting class through identity politics – describing an essentialised identity based on scrabbled together clichés about working class life and then deriving your policies to match – you can use the moral weight of inequality to legitimise anything you want.
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If, for instance, you present the “real workers” as white, socially conservative men living in small towns, then, almost by definition, you’ll agree with Paul Kelly that “Labor must get more like Morrison: it needs to listen … to the ‘quiet Australians’.”
Yet if you think of class in structural terms, it’s immediately obvious that many of Australia’s most vulnerable workers themselves belong to minority groups.
Think of the revelations about systemic underpayment within the 7-Eleven franchise. That saga centred on members of the modern working class who just so happen to be young, urban and predominantly brown-skinned.
Such people don’t consider racism or Islamophobia or, for that matter, border policy “irrelevant” to their lives.
The working-class queer kid driven out of home for his sexuality is not indifferent to homophobia, any more than Indigenous workers are indifferent to the history of colonialism.
But precisely because they are vulnerable, they’re only going to embrace a political party when it offers them real, material change rather than platitudes.
In other words, bridging the gap between progressives and the modern working class requires a commitment to structural transformations that will genuinely affect the lives of ordinary people.
Everyone knows that the wealthy will be able to minimise the worst aspects of climate change. Everyone knows that the poor won’t.
But it’s crazy to expect working-class people to enthuse about an environmental strategy that’s either symbolic or places the burden of change predominantly on the less fortunate.
As counterintuitive as it may seem to most pundits, workers – even those who are currently apathetic or conservative – are far less likely to care about a Liberal-lite climate policy than one that promises economic change alongside environmental change, in the manner of a US-style Green New Deal.
A fresh outbreak of class-based identity politics will only accentuate the distance between working-class people and those who claim to speak for them.
Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist
