1. Adding Insult to Injury
   Debating Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2008
   This volume collects the responses of leading American social theorists to issues dealing with the rise of identity politics. Nancy Fraser's widely-cited work looks at ways to combine multiculturalism with a commitment to egalitarianism.
2. Against multiculturalism 
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 2002
   Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.
   
3. Amazing Brexit: Identity and Class Politics 
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 2016
   This shell of a once fighting left embraces the culture of identity but excludes the entity of class. As a result poverty has become the P-word, and the poor the pariahs of neoliberal dystopic utopia. When we talk about class in a Marxist, materialist, scientific sense, we are talking about a relation of power, specifically about who does and who doesn’t have power to shape society. Identity politics makes this conflict of interests in society invisible. Neoliberal economics, however, is class war. It has advanced in part because identity politics depoliticized the public.
4. "American Thought": from theoretical barbarism to intellectual decadence
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 2017
   Juraj Katalena argues that direct transposition of ideological frameworks developed in the specific cultural and economic context of the USA, to Eastern Europe (and other regions), is misguided.
5. An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto 
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2003
   An extended argument about what the anti-capitalist movement should stand for.
6. Away with the gatekeepers!
   The bane of cultural appropriation
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 2016
   On the the controversies over 'cultural appropriation' and what they reveal about the degradation of contemporary campaigns for social justice.
7. The beginning of the end for identity politics?
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 2017
   While the millennial left’s preoccupation with identity has not disappeared, the moralistic fire has grown dimmer.
8. Beyond Neoliberal Identity Politics
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 2017
   Neoliberal identity politics (NIP) is a great weapon on the hands of the privileged capitalist Few and their mass-murderous global empire.
9. Beyond the Sacred
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 2012
   A transcript on Malik's talk "Beyond the Sacred" at a conference on blasphemy.
10. Beyond the Spectacle
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2015
    Our initial reaction to the Rachel Dolezal story was: what's the big deal? America has always been a land of shape shifters, and if she isn't stopped for "driving while black" or followed while shopping, and if her sons are not targeted by cops, then how is she different from the politician who is Italian on Columbus Day and Irish on Saint Patrick's Day?
11. Black Immigrants, 'Model' Minority? Plus: Don Imus
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    'Black' is a label which obscures more than it illuminates.
12. Buy Banned Books
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2018
    The article takes a look at 'banned books' in the social media era, where the 'imagination police' dominate and a form of 'fictional aparteid' is taking place, and moreover why we have a duty to buy them.
13. Chasing a Mirage
    The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    According to Tarek Fatah, "Morality is doing what is right, regardless what we are told; Religious dogma is doing what we are told, no matter what is right." Fatah argues that since Islam's advent, there have been two parallel strains of the religion that are in clash. The first "state of Islam" is a person's moral compass; the way Islam governs an individual's personal life. By contrast, the yearning for "an Islamic state" has been bloody and fruitless.
14. Class is More Intersectional than Intersectionality 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    The Left as it exists currently is often ashamed of and apologetic for its class struggle orientation, chasing after demographic-specific oppression issues. An approach that leans toward greater emphasis on a class struggle focus is actually more intersectional than a focus which gives more attention to demographic-specific issues than to class.
15. Class Notes 
    Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2001
    Reed argues against the solipsistic approaches of cultural or identity politics, and in favour of class-based political interpretation and action. Class Notes moves on to tackle race relations, ethnic studies, family values, welfare reform, the so-called underclass, and black public intellectuals.
16. CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2018
    C.L.R. James railed against the superficial nonsense that masquerades as 'anti-racism.'
17. Common Sense for Hard Times 
    The Power of the Powerless to Cope with Everyday life and Transform Society in The Nineteen Seventies
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1976
    Presents a vision of society as it is and as it could be. Putting the problems of contemporary daily life in historical perspective, it reveals that they have their roots in the way our society is organized, and thereby enables us to re-examine our own situation and experience.
    
18. Connexions Library: Race, Racism, Ethnicity, Multiculturalism Focus 
    Resource Type: Website
    First Published: 2009
    Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on race, racism, ethnicity, multiculturalism, identity.
19. A critique of anti-assimilation
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    In this piece, Gayge Operaista critiques how anti-assimilation politics of many radical queer tendencies ignores class struggle, and recasts queer liberation in terms of the class struggle, countering the worst excess of identity politics with an introduction to models of class struggle.
20. Dances with Guilt: Looking at Men Looking at Violence 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1991
    Why are some men violent?
21. Democracy Against Capitalism 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1995
    Wood provides a brilliant explication and defense of the key theoretical concepts relevant to socialism, understood to be the most radical social and economic democracy.
22. Don't Let Blackwashing Save the Investor Class 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2020
    I could care less about these memorials to slavery and empire. Good riddance. The demonstrators have reinvigorated a process of recognition and historical consciousness that is long overdue, but their chosen targets also reflect a relative powerlessness in the face of contemporary forces. The gestural politics of the moment, reflected in terms like "white skin privilege" and "post-traumatic slavery disorder" have been heartily embraced by the investor class precisely because they deflect from the actual corporate decisions that justify exploitation, rationalize obsolescence and waste, and reproduce inequality all in pursuit of profit.
23. Endarkenment: Postmodernism, Identity Politics, and the Attack on Free Speech
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Many today find the idea of free speech appalling -- an awful fact to those who believe in freedom, quaint as it sounds. Left-liberals agitate to prevent disagreeable expression. Their masked street allies physically attack those who engage in it.
24. Endarkenment: Postmodernism, Identity Politics, and the Attack on Free Speech
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Both postmodern thinking and identity politics, towards overthrowing their respective enemies, use ideological forms that mirror or caricature those of their enemies. identity politics adopted a basic characteristic of racism and bigotry (essentialism) in order to attack racism and bigotry.
25. Exiting the Vampire Castle
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2013
    This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself drifting through social networks, feeling my depression and exhaustion increasing.
26. 'Free speech' - as long as it doesn't offend anyone 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2009
    On the issue of free speech most of the right and much of the left are in agreement, and so too are many liberals, activists, and human rights apparatchiks. They hold essentially the same position on freedom of expression - they are for it -in principle-, but only so long as it isn't used to express views that they find unacceptable or offensive. What they disagree about is merely who gets to decide what ideas are unacceptable, i.e., who gets to censor who.
    
27. Free speech for me - you shut up
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    The right to express offensive views is at the very heart of the principle of free speech.
    
28. Free Speech in an Age of Identity Politics
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2015
    Transcript of Malik's TB Davie Memorial lecture on academic freedom at the University of Cape Town.
29. From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2015
    As is ever clearer and ever more important to note, race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do.
30. Full Democratic Rights for Transgender People!
    "Bathroom Bill" Bigotry
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    Transgender and gender non-conforming people -- that is, anyone whose appearance, behavior or dress falls outside of bourgeois gender norms -- face an exceptionally high degree of harassment. Around 75 percent of transgender students report being verbally harassed at school and more than 30 percent physically assaulted. Transgender individuals are vulnerable in public spaces, especially if the difference between their preferred gender identity and their biological sex is apparent. Barring them from bathrooms would turn them into criminals while inviting further harassment and physical violence. Everyone -- regardless whether they match the skirt-clad or pants-clad signage on the door -- should be able to go about their business in peace.
31. How 'diversity' breeds division
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2004
    Diversity training is supposed to help 'promote good relations' between different ethnic groups and capitalise on workforce diversity. However, there is warranted scepticism about whether such training alleviates tensions or exacerbates them. Much of the content of this training is overreliant on pop sociology and pseudo-therapeutic techniques. Participants are expected to talk about stereotypes they harbour deep in their subconscious, and disclose feelings of harassment and victimisation. Trainers claim to eliminate stereotypes in the workplace, yet in talking about 'different cultural perspectives' they end up generating new and more insidious stereotypes in their stead.
32. How French 'Intellectuals' Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself.
33. I Am a Woman and a Human: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of Intersectionality Theory 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2013
    In the United States, during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a specific set of politics among the left reigns king. Today, you could go into any university, on any number of liberal-to-left blogs or news websites, and the words “identity” and “intersectionality” will jump out you as the hegemonic theory. But, like all theories, this corresponds to the activity of the working class in response to the current composition of capital.
34. "Identity”" -- the bane of the contemporary Left
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2013
    Historically, identitarian ideology is a product of the failure of the Left. The various forms of identity politics associated with the “new social movements” coming out of the New Left during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s (feminism, black nationalism, gay pride) were themselves a reaction, perhaps understandable, to the miserable failure of working-class identity politics associated with Stalinism coming out of the Old Left during the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s (socialist and mainstream labor movements). Working-class identity politics — admittedly avant la lettre — was based on a crude, reductionist understanding of politics that urged socialists and union organizers to stay vigilant and keep on the lookout for “alien class elements.” Any and every form of ideological deviation was thought to be traceable to a bourgeois or petit-bourgeois upbringing. One’s political position was thought to flow automatically and mechanically from one’s social position, i.e. from one’s background as a member of a given class within capitalist society.
35. Identity is that which is given 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    In this age of globalisation many people fret about Western culture taking over the world. But the greatest Western export is not Disney or McDonalds or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of culture.
    
36. Identity politics
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    Refers to political arguments that focus upon the self interest and perspectives of social minorities, or self-identified social interest groups.
37. If I Am Not For Myself 
    Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    In a journey through family memory and leftwing history, Marqusee introduces us to Jewish heretics and heroes. In proudly reclaiming the Jewish radical tradition, he reminds us that cultures are not the exclusive franchises of nation-states, and that Zionists and anti-semites share the same sinister, racialized concept of group identity.
    
38. If this is feminism...
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Part of the problem with the response to Tuvel's article is that some seem to feel that they are the only ones who have the legitimate right to talk about certain topics. At best, this is identity politics run amok; at worst it is a turf war.
39. In Defense of Cultural Appropriation 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    It is just as well that I’m a writer, not an editor. Were I editing a newspaper or magazine, I might soon be out of a job. For this is an essay in defense of cultural appropriation. In Canada last month, three editors lost their jobs after making such a defense.
40. Inclusión o exclusion?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    
41. Inclusion or exclusion 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    People who advocate a vision of distinct communities that speak different languages, keep apart from each other, and communicate with the structures of the larger society only through interpreters, are doing more harm than good. What they are advocating is not diversity but entrenched division.
    
42. Integracja czy wykluczenie?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    
43. Intégration ou Marginalisation?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    
44. Interview with Ellen Meiksins Wood 
    Democracy & Capitalism: Friends or Foes?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1996
    Postmodernist pluralism, just like the old variety, obscures the realities of power in capitalist societies. It also disarms and disintegrates the opposition to capitalism. Postmodernism brings us back to the old and uncritical forms of capitalist ideology, which leave the system fundamentally unchallenged. Marxism -- historical materialism -- is the best foundation for an understanding of the society in which we live and therefore also the best guide in our search for a better one.
45. Is intersectionality just another form of identity politics?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2015
    Feminist Fightback has for many years described itself as seeking to practice an 'intersectional' form of feminism, whereby we argue that the struggle for gender liberation must take account of, and join with, struggles against all other forms of oppression and exploitation around the axis of class, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism etc. We began to use 'intersectional' in place of 'socialist feminist' in about 2007-8 because we felt that the latter term implied an interest in gender and class but did not give due emphasis to race. We continued to be inspired by a variety of Marxist and class-struggle anarchist currents, and we did not feel these to be in contradiction to a commitment to intersectionality.
46. John Pilger on Class Vs "Identity"
    Resource Type: Film/Video
    First Published: 2016
    Award-winning journalist & film-maker, John Pilger describes the corrosive impact of "identity" politics and the loss of "class" as a tool to understand the world we live in.
47. The left-wing case against identity politics
    It is time progressives stood up to the racism, classism and misogyny of wokeness.
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2022
    Book review of The Identity Myth by David Swift.
48. The Lessons of the World Cup for our Victim Culture
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2018
    That we are living in an age of victim culture is well-exemplified by an article recently published by the CBC suggesting that minorities "feel apprehensive about heading into the wild because they don't see themselves reflected in the outdoor industry and media." The underlying premise is that a paucity of representations of members of these groups constructs the outdoors as a kind of "unsafe space" of which people from these communities ask, according to the African-American author of a book called The Adventure Gap, James Mills, "'Do I belong here? And if somebody believes that I don’t belong here, will they do something to harm me?'"
49. Malik, Kenan
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    Writer, lecturer and broadcaster. (Born 1962).
50. A Marxist critique of the theory of 'white privilege' 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2015   Published: 2020
    Candace Cohn outlines the origins and problems of privilege theory. She aruges that In holding white workers co-responsible for systemic racism, the privilege model attributed a power to white workers they manifestly do not have: control over the institutions of American capitalism – schools, jobs, housing, factories, banks, police, courts, prisons, legislatures, media, elections, universities, armed services, hospitals, sports, political parties – all of which function in a racist manner. These institutions are owned and controlled by the capitalist class.
51. The Meaning of Heritage in an Age of Identity
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2018
    A discussion of the meaning of heritage in the current age of identity politics, and why there is a need to reject the nativist, or clash of civilizations, and the multicultural approaches to heritage.
52. Mistaken Identity
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today's multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have 'conflicting credos but the same vision of the world'. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to 'confine individuals to their group of origin'. Both undermine 'any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples'. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.
53. Multiculturalism or World Culture? 
    On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1991   Published: 2000
    Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
54. The Myth of 'Cultural Appropriation' 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Arguing that certain people don’t have the right to tell certain stories is a distraction from the real menace: inequality.
55. The OIC does not speak for Muslims
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2008
    Tarek Fatah says that "To suggest that any criticism of Islamism, the political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Ayatollahs, is anti-Islamic is a bogus and fraudulent position. I would contend that my religion Islam demands that I stand up to these bullies and take away from their right to put padlocks on poetry and chastity belts on independent thinking."
    
56. On the Second Coming of Religion
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    The question we should ask is not just: ‘What is it about religion that makes people believe or behave in certain ways?’ It is also: ‘What is it about contemporary societies that draws many people, both religious and non-religious, towards nihilistic, narcissistic, anti-modern forms of belief?’
57. Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social 
    Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2001
    We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
    
58. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - June 18, 2015
    Corruption
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2015
    Corruption - or at least some types of corruption - are much in the news, with the ongoing scandals in the Canadian Senate and the recent U.S. targeting of the Swiss-based football federation FIFA for alleged bribery. In this issue, we look at these and other forms of corruption. Diana Johnstone writes about the double standards displayed by U.S. institutions, which happily target enemies and rivals, while ignoring the much greater corruption that underlies the power structures in Washington. We feature an article detailing how much money U.S. Senators received from corporations prior to their vote on the TPP negotiations, as well as materials on criminal conduct by some of the world's biggest banks, and an article on the work of investigative journalists in exposing corruption.
59. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - December 5, 2015
    Ecosocialism, environment, and urban gardening
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2015
    This issue of Other Voices covers a wide range of issues, from the climate crisis and the ecosocialist response, to terrorism and the struggle against religious fundamentalism, as well as items on urban gardening, the destruction of olive trees, and how the police are able to use Google's timeline feature to track you every move, now and years into the past.
60. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - March 5, 2016
    International Women's Day
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2016
    In this issue of Other Voices, we mark International Women's Day. An article written by Alexandra Kollontai in 1920 talks about the early history of this event, which grew out of a proposal put forward by Clara Zetkin at the 1910 International Conference of Working Women. A key focus at that time was winning the vote for women, with the slogan "The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism". The link between women's rights and socialism became even clearer a few years later, in 1917, when a Women's Day march in St. Petersburg turned into a revolutionary uprising which led to the overthrow of the Czar and the Russian Revolution.
61. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - June 18, 2016
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2016
    This issue of Other Voices features a wide range of issues. The topic of the week is homophobia, the hate that led to 49 deaths in Orlando last week, but which is present in greater or lesser form in every part of the world.
    We are always concerned, not only with what is wrong with the world, but what to do about it.
    This issue carries an excerpt from Umair Mohammed's book 'Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism' in which he warns against the pitfalls of individualist and consumer-oriented approaches and argues in favour of collective action to build an effective movement.
    Derrick Jensen considers some of the arguments in favour of pacifism and finds them wanting. He agrees that creative approaches to social change can oftentimes make violence unnecessary, but that sometimes violence is a necessary response to violence.
    Another article looks at the decline of liberation theology, targeted as a threat by both the Vatican and secular power structures.
    Kenan Malik considers the issue of "cultural appropriation" and asks why so many on theso-called left are more interested in criticizing Justin Bieber's hairstyle than in fighting capitalism.
62. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - February 12, 2017
    Race and Class
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2017
    Class conflict - first and foremost, the relationship between the capitalist class and the working class -- is the fundamental contradiction that defines capitalist society. Class is a reality which simultaneously encompasses and collides with other dimensions of oppression and domination, such as gender and race. The relationship between race and class, in particular, is the theme of this issue of Other Voices.
63. Political Correctness: Handle with Care 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    Racial, gender, and ethnic diversity matters, of course, but political correctness (PC) tied to bourgeois identity politics can be deadly to left thinkers and activists and to the causes of peace and social justice.
64. The Political Is Political: In Conversation With Yasmin Nair
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    An activist and writer based in Chicago, Nair is one of the founders of Against Equality, a group that was born in 2009, initially as an online archive of pieces that were critical of the gay-marriage movement and mainstream gay politics.
65. Privilege politics is reformism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    A critique of privilege politics, which the author sees as a demobilizing force that boils down issues of oppression into what happens between individuals.
66. The problem with identity politics
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    An examination of identity politics, and how experience alone is an inadequate foundation from which to develop an analysis of oppression or to devise political strategies to end it.
67. The Professor of Parody
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2000
    It is difficult to come to grips with Judith Butler’s ideas because it is difficult to figure out what they are.
68. Prospects for an Alt-Left
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    Examining the limitations and issues with prevalent approaches of younger progressives and how a more effective 'alt-left' movement might be formed.
69. Queer Progress
    From Homophobia to Homonationalism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2016
    A political memoir by a leading gay rights and AIDS activist.
70. A queer take on Safe Schools and identity politics
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    In recent weeks, the debate over the Safe Schools Coalition anti-bullying program has intensified, taking what is in many ways a bizarre turn. The brief suspension of program architect Roz Ward from her position at La Trobe University has reopened the debate about whether Safe Schools is 'cultural Marxism' by stealth, the program once again coming under fire from conservatives across the country. Even trans advocate and member of the ADF Catherine McGregor has weighed in. One of the more interesting elements of this, however, has been the debate it has created about the role gender and sexual politics can and should play within Marxism. Here enters Guy Rundle. In the pages of Crikey, Rundle penned a treatise on the program and what he considers the failures of 'queer theory'. Rundle believes Safe Schools (via queer theory) presents the view that 'gender and sexuality are infinitely fluid'. He argues, however, that such a view denies the material realities of sexuality and gender, not to mention his view that 'almost no-one really believes it -- and they certainly do not let it shape their lives'.
71. Race, pluralism and the meaning of difference
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1998
    Far from establishing a critique of racial thinking, the politics of difference appropriates many of its themes and reproduces the very assumptions upon which racism has historically been based. Most critically, the embrace of difference has undermined the capacity to defend equality.
72. Racialism, art and the Academy Awards controversy
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2016
    Should artwork be categorized and presumably appreciated according to whether it represents a male or female, black or white perspective? Many critics, influenced by the prevailing ideology, set up this basic standard: women gain more from art produced by women, Jews from work created by Jews, African-Americans from "African-American art," etc. In ideological terms, these critics, in their obsession with race, are spouting a conception of society and art identified historically with the extreme right.
73. Radical Digressions 
    Resource Type: Website
    First Published: 2006   Published: 2017
    Ulli Diemer's website/blog featuring comment from a radical left-libertarian Marxist perspective.
    
74. Radical Digressions 5
    Resource Type: Website
    First Published: 2008
    
75. The Real Value of Diversity 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2002
    The real failure of multiculturalism is its failure to understand what is valuable about cultural diversity. There is nothing good in itself about diversity. It is important because it allows us to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, make judgements upon them, and decide which are better and which worse. It is important, in other words, because it allows us to engage in political dialogue and debate that can help create more universal values and beliefs. But it is precisely such dialogue and debate, and the making of such judgements, that multiculturalism attempts to suppress in the name of 'tolerance' and 'respect'.
76. Rebels Without a Cause: The Assault on Academic Freedom
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Examining current academic culture which falsely labels "words as violence" and how it is affecting acedemic freedom, notably by some who think of themselves as being on the left, who are employing totalitarian tactics which ultimately cause professional and economic harm.
77. The Rushdie Affair and Its Aftermath
    Kenan Malik's "From Fatwa to Jihad"
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2011
    The Rushdie affair is shrouded by myths—that the hostility to The Satanic Verses was driven by theology, that all Muslims were offended by the novel, that Islam is incompatible with Western democracy, that in a plural society speech must necessarily be less free.
78. Selling Illusions
    The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1994   Published: 2002
    Since he immigrated to Canada, Neil Bissoondath has consistently refused the role of the ethnic, and sought to avoid the burden of hyphenation - a burden that would label him as an East Indian-Trinidadian-Canadian living in Quebec. Bissoondath argues that the policy of multiculturalism, with its emphasis on the former or ancestral homeland and its insistence that There is more important than Here, encourages stereotyping and division.
79. 7 Ways Social Justice Language Can Become Abusive in Intimate Relationships
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    A list of signs that social justice language is being used abusively in a relationship
80. SexSources.ca
    Resource Type: Website
    First Published: 2017
    A web portal featuring sexuality resources: articles, websites, books. The home page features a selection of recent and important articles. A search feature, subject index, and other research tools make it possible to find additional resources and information.
81. Socialist Register 1995
    Volume 31: Why Not Capitalism?
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 1995
    
82. Socialist Register 2003
    Volume 39: Fighting Identities
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2003
    
83. Some Basic Propositions about Sex, Gender, and Patriarchy
    New Books Highlight the Debate between Radical Feminism and Transgender Movement
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2014
    Within feminism there has been for decades an often divisive debate about transgenderism. With increasing mainstream news media and pop culture attention focused on the issue, understanding that feminist debate is more important than ever.
84. Sources HotLink - June 30, 2016
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2016
    Articles about the FBI and the information it gathers, Donald Trump and the media, and the role of pharmaceutical companies in suppressing information.
85. Strange Fruit 
    Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2008
    Malik makes the case that most anti-racists accept the belief, also held by racialists and outright racists, that differences between groups are of great importance. While racialists attribute the differences to biology, anti-racists attribute them to deep-rooted cultural traditions which are typically seen as inherent in the group. Malik argues that these positions are actually quite similar, and makes the case that racism and racial inequality are best combatted by focusing not on our differences but on what unites us. Malik also strongly criticizes the cultural relativism of many anti-racists, and their increasing tendency to reject science as some kind of western imperialist conspiracy to oppress the rest of the world.
86. Thinking About Self-Determination 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1994
    Does that familiar canon of the left, 'the right to self-determination', actually mean anything, or is it an empty slogan whose main utility is that it relieves us of the trouble of thinking critically?
87. Vote as the Class You Are, Not the Race You Aren't
    Scott, Frank
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2010
    Many upper middle-professional class members of society who truly wish for a more just nation are either helpless to, totally incapable of, or have little desire to confront real power or create social transformation beyond electing one or another member of their class to represent their interests on the board, the council, the congress or at the White House. And that class includes more multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-racial and gender fluid people than ever before. Hooray?
88. We Need to Talk about Women: The Problem with Western Liberal 'Feminists'
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Western women have fought hard and bravely for rights and privileges that were denied to generations of women before them and have made vast strides towards greater equality and representation in society. For this, western women and traditional feminism should be applauded. At the same time, the version of feminism that presently functions in the west -- liberal, consumer, mainstream feminism -- has become problematic.
89. What is the Left?
    Resource Type: Article
    Stephens argues that class struggle is central to overcoming oppression.
90. What's Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? 
    A Response to Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" (And Its Critics)
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2013
    Identity, like an occupation, is a trap, because it curtails human potential and bars workers from participation in the social totality as fully developing individuals. Identities are reified social categories from which we should emerge, not within which we should be compelled to remain. The problem with identity politics, then, is that it is one-sided and undialectical. It treats identities as static entities, and its methods only serve to further reify those categories. It aims to liberate identity groups (or members thereof) qua identity groups (or individuals), rather than aiming to liberate them from identity itself.
91. What’s wrong with privilege theory?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2014
    This article takes a critical look at some of the theories of privilege and concepts of intersectionality (the interaction of multiple oppressions) that increasingly dominate battles for liberation. These ideas are not new, but have grown in influence in recent years.
92. White Supremacy/ Identity Politics
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2017
    Can cop violence and anti-Black racism be permanently defeated so long as white supremacist ideology permeates the ruling class and society?
93. The Writings of David Roediger
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1997
    Roediger criticizes Marxists for too often reducing racial discrimination to conflicts over resources, such as jobs or housing, that are manipulated by a society's upper classes in order to divert attention from the real sources of inequality. Such a focus, he argues, ignores the manner in which race and racial consciousness is integrally tied to class formation and working-class consciousness.

Experts on Politique identitaire in the Sources Directory

1. Ulli Diemer