The following is a response to Sharon Smith's (a steering committee member of the International Socialist Organization) critique of identity politics that originally appeared on Good Morning, Revolution. Posting here is not necessarily meant as an endorsement, but as an opening up of a discussion in the process of reconception and refoundation.
A Critique of ISO on Identity Politics
By Comrade Baba
In an article “The politics of identity” published in the journal of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a Trotskyist group in the US, Sharon Smith argues:
“At the most basic material level, no one group of workers ever benefits from particular forms of oppression.”(1)
Smith’s reasoning: “Whenever capitalists can force a higher paid group of workers to compete with a lower paid group, wages tend to drop. . . . The only beneficiaries are capitalists, who earn bigger profits, while ensuring the survival of the rule of the profit system.”
Smith’s argument, an attempt to undermine identity politics and “counterpos[e] to it a Marxist analysis,” greatly oversimplifies the problems of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Rather than a Marxist analysis, a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, the argument reduces social reality and its multiple contradictions into a single abstract contradiction between Labor and Capital.
While the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is the fundamental contradiction in capitalist society, the social relations in capitalist society are too complex and particular to be reduced to extensions of the fundamental contradiction. These social relations have their own histories and particularities. They have to be understood in their own right.
