The Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM) is a comprehensive Marxist lexicon which, upon completion, will span 15 volumes and over 1,500 entries. Of the nine volumes published so far in the original German, two volumes have been published in Chinese since 2017. In 2019, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung teamed up with the HCDM team to advance its "globalization" into English and Spanish, with the ultimate aim of recruiting a new generation of Marxist scholars from around the globe to the project and expanding its readership and reach. The below entry is one of a selection of these translations that are made available on our website.
For more information about the project and other translated entries, check out our HCDM dossier.
A: siyāsat al-huwīya. – F: politique d’identité. – G: Identitätspolitik – R: politika identifikacii. – S: política identitaria. – C: tongyixing zhengce 同一性政策
In the context of the New Social Movements, forms of political debate were shaped that make individual and collective identities both the basis and the object of political negotiation processes. Often motivated by the rejection of established (statist/class-bounded) political forms, IP is – in diverse forms – centred around the categories of ethnicity and gender or sexuality. Impulses sprang from the anti-colonial movement, the black liberation movement in the U.S., and the women’s, gay, and lesbian movements. The first critical debates took place in the women’s movement in the 1970s by black feminists. The concept also gained significance in the discussions about the organisation of ethnic and cultural minorities (multiculturalism). Newer debates involve the attempt to locate IP between the poles of “recognition and redistribution” and to more clearly determine its relationship to “difference”. In the struggle over hegemony, resistance, and liberation, IP assumes an ambivalent position: While initially, the goal was to move beyond a reductionist political understanding, and to transcend the conflict between interest politics and IP, a not seldom outcome was division and fragmentation, which considerably eased its integration, within the framework of a “plural” state-civil society power arrangement.
1. Beginning with the anti-colonial liberation movements in the mid-20th cent. and the rise of the new social movements since the late 1960s, IP has had a growing influence upon political debates. Eric Hobsbawm identifies its origins in the decline of the national state and parties and movements oriented around the class-antagonism, as well as the “cultural revolution” during the societal transformation after the second world war (1996, 40). According to Eli Zaretsky, it is a ‘post-68 phenomenon’, which – on the basis of a globalising capitalism characterised by a re-designation of public and private spheres – grew out of the failure of the ‘new Left’ (1994, 198). For Craig Calhoun instead, IP is not a new phenomenon, but a centuries-old, central element of everyday life and politics in modernity (1994, 23). Significant to the conceptual frame of the new political form was the unfolding of the identity concept in the social sciences since the 1950s (Gleason 1983). While traditional political forms do not view a common cultural and/or social basis to be necessary, IP sees this as the starting point of political action. Historically, the reference to such (ostensible) “primary” (e.g., ethnic, religious, or national) commonalities has come to the fore as the outcome of challenges to and the destruction of traditional forms of collective belonging, especially to what was regarded to be the unassailable unity of the nation state, to social milieus, and classes – at a time when ‘communities in the sociological sense become hard to find in real life’ (Hobsbawm 1996, 40). Ultimately, the capitalist crisis of the 1970s triggered a process of transformation, which led to the rapid opening of new global commodity and financial markets, to the undermining of the previous forms of state sovereignty, to severe ruptures in the world of work and to strong movements of migration (especially labour migration; see Hall 1991, 24). Developments such as these have greatly increased the contingency of human existence. According to Zygmunt Bauman, the ‘need’ for clarification of individual and collective belonging increases, while also the hitherto dominant ‘identity-generators’ – the territorial-bound nation and the national state (which were in a position to integrate “gender” and “tradition”) – lost their function (1992, 692). In comparison, the ‘new’ identities are largely independent from a specific territorial anchoring (ibid.). However, this is not a uniform process, but instead the playing out of a struggle with an ‘older, embattled, more corporate, more unitary, more homogeneous’ conception of identity in the ‘global postmodern’ (Hall 1991, 32).
2. In the framework of IP, demands for redistribution and reallocation of resources are advanced in the broadest sense (economic, political, social, and cultural). The starting point is the call for recognition of a different way of life, in support of its unfolding from which redistributive motifs are derived (see Fraser 2000, 109 et sqq.). It is the perceived devaluation of one’s “own” group membership, upon which societal and political conflicts and struggles ignite. In contrast to the social movements in the transition from the 19th to the 20th cent., oriented around universal principles – especially, the labour and women’s movements – which formulated demands for the change of the entire society, particular interests are placed in the foreground in IP: IP is ‘not for everybody, but for the members of a specific group only’ (Hobsbawm 1996, 43). The initial formulation of a common identity, which expresses a position within the existing power relations, is connected to a distinction from other groups: ‘Each movement appealed to the social identity of its supporters. Thus feminism appealed to women, sexual politics to gays and lesbians, racial struggles to blacks […] and so on. […] – one identity per movement.’ (Hall 1992, 290) The primacy of one’s own interests is legitimated by an “emancipatory deficit” to which the respective group is subjected as a result of a history of persistent oppression and degradation.
3. IP articulates itself in distinction to both Marxist traditions of societal analysis and liberal political models oriented towards the nation state. On the basis of social and/or cultural distinctions, differences are accentuated which cannot be derived from the social forms allegedly fundamental for politics – class as the economic, or nation as the political relation of domination – but which rather emerged ‘on the basis of a “politisation of the public and the private”’ and refer to ‘transversal forms of oppression’ (Buci-Glucksmann 1982, 46). Occasionally, as with “race” or “gender” constructions, it is a matter of distinctions which were (more or less under the surface) already central to the structure of modern societies (Balibar/Wallerstein 1991, chapters 2 and 3; Geisen 1996) but which are then taken up anew by the (ethnic etc.) minorities and turned around, imbued with “positive” meaning (e.g., in multiculturalism, Black Panthers, and the Black Consciousness Movement).
An identity cannot be constructed arbitrarily. Instead, specific elements – oscillating between external attributions and self-attributions that are important for the group – must be present, upon which reference can be made. As Erving Goffman (1963, chapter 1) had shown, such attributions derive from a basis of actual or construed divergences from social norms and have quite ambivalent effects, as they can both reveal the ‘damaged identity’ and stabilise its existence (individually and collectively). Through this discursive construction, traversed by power effects, “carriers of attributes” are embedded into the identity-community. This embedding on the one hand often creates a consciousness about common political goals in the first place, and on the other hand forcefully asserts itself upon the individuals, provided such embedding forecloses the participation of those differing from what is demanded by the dominant identity. Stuart Hall emphasises the contradictoriness concealed by an apparent naturalness: ‘Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of identical, naturally-constituted unity.’ (1996, 4)
The dynamic the construction of “forced communities” is able to assume, can be shown, among other things, by the example of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, where, under relations determined by violence, political mobilisations driven by IP brought about new ethnic communities. Eli Zaretsky distinguishes accordingly between movements with universal orientations in the political field, which, however, insist on cultural differences (as it happens in multiculturalism, for example), versus movements which seek full self-determination in an independent state (1994, 199).
4. Approaches for the theoretical foundation of IP in the context of resistance and emancipation are found in the theorists of the anti-colonial liberation movements, especially in the works of Frantz Fanon. Against the total negation of colonial exploitation, which takes on a ‘totalitarian nature’ and which makes of the colonised a kind of ‘quintessence of evil’, which ‘dehumanises’ them and ‘reduce[s] [them] to the state of an animal’ (2004 [1963], 6-7; see Memmi 1957), Fanon demands the formation of self-confident forms of ‘national culture’, which crystallise through the recuperation of older, devalued traditions during the liberation struggle (175 et sq). The development of one’s own cultural identity and its societal positioning – ‘to assert myself as a BLACK MAN’ (2008 [1952], 87) – is for Fanon imperative, in order to develop a perspective for resistance.
Hannah Arendt emphasised – as did Jean-Paul Sartre in his Anti-Semite and Jew (1948, 78) – the ‘inescapability’ of social designation processes under conditions of force: ‘“If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.” Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever.’ (1969/2013) On the question of violence, however, Arendt sharply counters Fanon who emphasised its ‘totalizing’ character: everyone turns themselves into a ‘violent link in the great chain, in the almighty body of violence rearing up in reaction to the primary violence of the colonizer’; the armed struggle mobilises the people ‘in a single direction, from which there is no turning back’ (2004 [1963], 50). For Arendt, violence is exclusively a means to self-defence. In contrast to power, which ‘corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert’ (1969, 44), violence ‘is distinguished by its instrumental character’ (46). It cannot establish commonalities and stable relationships, but rather destroys politics itself. As long as IP is based on previously established (often times naturalised or biologised) commonalities rather than common agreements, Arendt takes a critical stance; however, if a social group is (forcefully) designated a specific identity from the outside and its members are attacked on the basis of this identity, she sees in it a legitimate form of defence.
5. Since its emergence in the New Social Movements, IP has led to forms of institutionalisation and juridification. This has particularly occurred in the U.S., at the end of the 1960s, where, in the framework of ‘affirmative action’, legal measures were introduced against ethnic, racist, and sexist discrimination (see Davis/Graham 1995, 245 et sq.). This was integrated into the existing liberal social order and system of rights, supported by the U.S. constitutional tradition and the civil rights rulings of the 1950s (see Hobsbawm 1996, 39). Against the background of the liberal appropriation of IP, bell hooks offers a critical assessment of the black U.S. civil rights movement; she detects a narrowing of the original aims: ‘Much civil rights reform reinforced the idea that black liberation should be defined by the degree to which black people gained equal access to material opportunities and privileges available to whites—jobs, housing, schooling, etc.’ (1990, 15 et sq.).
In Europe, some countries have attempted to use anti-discrimination laws to advance the social equality of ethnic minorities, including the Netherlands and Great Britain. For equality between men and women, a variety of support programs for women were established which (partially by way of a quota system) were meant to disrupt existing mechanisms of discrimination. In this way, the realisation of (partial) goals of IP can stabilise society and strengthen the integration of marginalised groups. The positive discrimination of these groups, however, often also means that exclusive forms of IP develop, which lead to further societal segmentation and deepening of existing discriminations. To a certain extent, affirmative action measures can also come back to harm the affected persons themselves, as Nancy Fraser describes for the U.S., with the example of the stereotypical image of the female black welfare recipient, whose special treatment is presented as actual proof of her “individual” ‘deficient and insatiable’ character (1997, 25).
6. A critical engagement with IP was conducted especially within the feminist movement. The starting point was the critique by black feminists of the “identity-postulate” of the women’s movement, meaning that feminist analysis problematised the role of women within patriarchal societies implicitly from the standpoint of “white”, heterosexual, middle-class women and lost sight of the forms of exploitation and oppression which women from other social strata were subjected to, as well as their problems, demands, and goals, or treated these as secondary (see Maurer 1996, 76 et sq.). Within this critique, it was also problematised whether, in the sense of the thesis of ‘triple oppression’ (Meulenbelt 1988), oppression as a woman was actually more significant than oppression as a member of a certain class or race. But even ‘theories of multiple identities’, Sabine Hark replies, do not suffice to challenge ‘the traditional, metaphysical understanding of identity as unity’, for ‘even though the subject is now comprised of multiple identities, these are still thought of as unities (of “race”, class, sexuality)’ (1999, 58). According to her, within political models which profess to be able to “adequately” portray and represent a group, dealing with differences always remains problematic, because it is always the alikeness of the members rather than their differences which is central. ‘An IP that is operating according to a representational logic is consequently necessarily based on repudiating the difference which is always already present within the same.’ (Ibid.) ‘Queer theory’ emerged as a principal critique of such political models (see Jagose 1996; Weed/Schor 1997). It posits that the notion of permanence and consistency itself must be deconstructed and that ambivalence and contingency become part of the actual content of “identity”. – Comparable concepts of “decentralised” identities were developed in Cultural Studies and negotiated in the multiculturalism debates (see Taylor 1992; Rex 1997), where the concept of “hybridity” gained significance (Hall 1992, 310 et sq.; Bhabha 1996, 58). Homi K. Bhabha draws attention to the incessant interweaving in other symbolic systems as sign of cultural difference, through which a ‘logic of intervention and interpretation’ is set in motion, which knows no ‘unitary or individual form of identity’: ‘The frontiers of cultural difference are always belated or secondary in the sense that their hybridity is never simply a question of the admixture of pre-given identities or essences.’ (1990, 313 et sq.)
7. In the context of resistance and liberation, the ambivalence of IP becomes noticeable. It unfolds its emancipatory character especially in response to exclusion, cultural dominance, or political oppression, as the example of the anti-colonial liberation movements shows. Here, in the course of the liberation of the social group to which the individual is associated by means of processes of ascription, the subjective situation can become the object and starting point for solidarity-based action.
In the response to the ascription processes, however, also lurks the danger of essentialisation and fundamentalist separation. This is because IP is generally based on biological or naturalising categories, ultimately the body and its (alleged) “attributes”, such as in the case of “sex” or “gender”; but also cultural distinctions, as they underlie multiculturalism and ethnicity, are often inscribed in bodies as “mentality” or “character”. Right-wing social movements, whose division and exclusion strategies are based on biological, national, and cultural markers, have this as one of their central structural elements. They too represent forms of IP, albeit not asserting an emancipatory deficit for their individual members but instead one for themselves (the “community”) – for a “self-contained” and unchallengeable “organic” unity, to which the individuals are supposed to subordinate themselves. Especially in the newer theoretical development within the so-called New Right (e.g., De Benoist 2001, 237) increasingly patterns of IP-based forms of recognition (ethno-pluralism) can be found. – IP therefore always runs the risk of providing points of association for ‘biopolitical’ conceptualisations (compare Foucault 1992; Magiros 1995).
Overall, the IP-based integration of marginalised social groups is mostly limited to the level of cultural representation and hardly leads to fundamentally overcoming political, economic, and social marginalisation. The ‘simple positive reframing of a stigmatised identity’ leaves not only ‘the ruling principal behind it in place’, but in so doing, relinquishes the ‘interrelationship to the liberation of all’ (Koppert 1996, 120). Especially in the context of capitalist competitive societies, there is increasing risk of community policies based on unified identities becoming immune to questioning. ‘When the articulation of coherent identity becomes its own policy, then the policing of identity takes the place of a politics in which identity works dynamically in the service of a broader cultural struggle towards the re-articulation and empowerment of groups that seeks to overcome the dynamic of repudiation and exclusion by which “coherent subjects” are constituted.’ (Butler 1993, 117) The ever-present danger of adopting (forcibly) ascribed models of identity and remaining rigid in them can only be avoided when, in awareness of the mutability of identities, political commonalities are successfully formulated which counter societal exclusion and contribute to concrete changes in social and political conditions.
Bibliography: H.Arendt, On Violence, San Diego-New York-London 1969; ead., ‘“What remains? The language remains”: A conversation with Günter Gaus’ (1964), ead., The Last Interview and Other Conversations, New York 2013; Z.Bauman, ‘Soil, Blood and Identity’, The Sociological Review, vol. 40, 1992, no. 4, 675-701; E.Balibar and I.Wallerstein, Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities London-New York 1991; H.K.Bhabha, ‘Dissemination: time, narration, and the margins of the modern nation’, id. (ed.), Nation and Narration, London 1990, 291-322; id., ‘Culture’s In-Between’, St.Hall and P.du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, London 1996, 53-60; Chr.Buci-Glucksmann, ‘Formen der Politik und Konzeptionen der Macht: Entformalisierung der Politik, Demokratie und Hegemonie’, W.F.Haug and W.Elfferding (eds.), Neue soziale Bewegungen und Marxismus, Argument special volume 78, Hamburg 1982, 39-63; J.Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”, London-New York 1993; C.Calhoun, ‘Social Theory and the Politics of Identity’, id. (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford 1994, 9-36; A.L.Davis and B.L.Graham, The Supreme Court, Race and Civil Rights, London 1995; A.De Benoist, Schöne Vernetzte Welt: Eine Antwort auf die Globalisierung, translated by C.Michel, Tübingen et al. 2001; M.Foucault, ‘Leben machen und sterben lassen: Die Geburt des Rassismus’, Diskus, vol. 41, 1992, no. 1, 51-58; F.Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London 2008 [1952]; id., The Wretched of the Earth, preface by J-P.Sartre, translated by C.Farrington, New York 2004 [1963]; N.Fraser, ‘Rethinking recognition’, New Left Review, vol. 3, 2000, no. 107; ead., Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition, New York-London 1997; Th.Geisen, Antirassistisches Geschichtsbuch: Quellen des Rassismus im kollektiven Gedächtnis der Deutschen, Frankfurt/M 1996; Ph.Gleason, ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, The Journal of American History, vol. 69, 1983, no. 4, 910-39; E.Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity, New York-London-Toronto 1963; S.Hall, ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’, A.D.King (ed.), Culture, globalization and the world system: Contemporary conditions for the representation of identity, Minneapolis 1991, 19-40; id., ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, id., D.Held, and T.McGrew (eds.), Modernity and its Futures, Cambridge 1992, 273-326; id., ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”?’, id. and P.du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, London 1996, 1-17; id., D.Held, and A.G.McGrew, Modernity and its Futures Cambridge-Oxford 1992; S.Hark, Deviante Subjekte: Die paradoxe Politik der Identität, Opladen 1999; E.Hobsbawm, ‘Identity Politics and the Left’, New Left Review, vol. 217, 1996, no. 38, 38-47; b.hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Boston 1990; A.Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York 1996; C.Koppert, ‘Identität und Befreiung’, beiträge zur feministischen theorie und praxis, vol. 42, 1996, no 19, 113-26; A.Magiros, Foucaults Beitrag zur Rassismustheorie, Argument special volume 233, Hamburg 1995; S.Maurer, Zwischen Zuschreibung und Selbstgestaltung, Tübingen 1996; A.Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, London 1957; A.Meulenbelt, Frauensexualität, Reinbek 1988; J.Rex, ‘The concept of a multicultural society’, id. and M.Guibernau (eds.), The Ethnicity Reader, Cambridge et al. 1997, 205-19; J.P.Sarte, Anti-Semite and Jew, New York 1948; C.Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, Princeton 1992; E.Weed and N.Schor, Feminism meets queer theory, Bloomington-Indianapolis 1997; E.Zaretsky, ‘Identity Theory, Identity Politics: Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Post-Structuralism’, Calhoun 1994, 198-215.
Thomas Geisen
Translated by Robert Ogman
→ anticolonialism, Black Marxism, class reductionism, collective action, colonialism, community, conformism, contingency, culturalism, emancipation, ethnic/ethnicity, feminist movement, fundamentalism, gay liberation movement, gender, identity, independent living, lesbian liberation movement, liberation, migration, minorities, multiculturalism, nation, nation state, national identity, New Left, New Right, New Social Movements, oppression, politics outside the state, power, private/societal, queer theory, quotas, race and class, recognition, self-determination, self-organisation, sexuality, social movements, universalism, violence, women’s movement
→ Anerkennung, Antikolonialismus, Befreiung, Black Marxism, Emanzipation, Ethnie/Ethnizität, Frauenbewegung, Fundamentalismus, Gemeinschaft, Geschlecht, Gewalt, Identität, Independent Living, kollektives Handeln, Konformismus/Nonkonformismus, Kontingenz, Kultur, Lesbenbewegung, Macht, Migration, multikulturelle Frage, multikulturelle Politiken, Nation, nationale Spezifik, Nationalstaat, Neue Linke, Neue Rechte, Neue Soziale Bewegungen, Politik außerhalb des Staates, privat/gesellschaftlich, Queer Theory, Quotierung, Rasse und Klasse, Schwulenbewegung, Selbstbestimmung, Selbstorganisation, Sexualität, soziale Bewegungen, Universalismus, Unterdrückung
Originally published as Identitätspolitik in: Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, vol. 6/I: Hegemonie bis Imperialismus, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Argument-Verlag, Hamburg 2004, col. 671–680.