The left keeps getting identity politics wrong – and the right is benefiting from that | Ash Sarkar

R.Here are many things that should be grateful to the musician Sam Fender: reviving the composition of socially conscious songs, highlighting the brutality of austerity and the call for a ceasefire in Gaza before being a political comfortable. However, selfishness, the most important thing he did is to take my place to inherit the Internet. in A recent interview With the Sunday Times, Fender took the goal of the identity policy compared to the layer.

“We are very good in talking about the privileges – white, male or direct concession. We are rarely talking about separation, though.” This is a lot of the reason that all young boys are lured by Demagogujis like Andrew Tate … People preach some children in a town in Durham who got everything and tell him that he is distinguished? Then Tate tells him that he deserves something? It is seductive. “

Why, for some people, do this prove this controversial? A violent reaction on the Internet included accusations that Fender is wrongly raising minorities against the working class, and that he justifies women’s hatred as a reaction to deprivation, and that he is arguing against fake – no one is already preaching children in the cities of the hole that have obtained a white concession. Some of these criticisms are fair: not only children of the white working class from the north who are attracted to Tate, but children are also inner colors in London. But Vader set something real. We have seen the rise of a type of identity policy that is a line. The extremist oath benefit from it.

Although the working class is not homogeneous (shock – it includes all kinds of ethnic and sexual minorities!), The identity policy has been peeled in one way or another as a separate source of anxiety. It is often seen by the representation of one’s interests as in the struggle with the same thing to the other. Pollen is blatant – research from Financial times It indicates that at the same time there was an increase in people who believe that Democrats defend marginalized people (i.e. identity minorities), there was a decrease in those who believed they were defending the working class.

In any small part, this is due to the right to fill a kind of their identity policy: in talking about the white working class, anger is re -directed about economic inequality into an ethnic complaint. It is not wealth taxes, investment in education or the promotion of collective negotiation that will help the white working class: it makes minorities be silent about injustice. But this is also the case in the fact that a straight/white/male/male language does not allow a great room for the experiences of white men from the working class backgrounds. Sometimes it seems to be the only vision of those who coincide with being white, male and straight in the world of modern politics are the wicked (see, “men are garbage” of feminism in Instagram), or “allies” in the political movements led by identity minorities. It is not as if these speeches come with a stars to indicate that they do not mean the working class men.

It should be noted that you are less likely to confront preaching with distinction, through the thin barrier, in the trade unions, housing and the campaigns of the tenants or the Palestinian Solidarity Movement – where people are organized, b) focusing on material damage, and) they do not interact with each other by repeating the borders from social media. . But we live at a time Political parties and Workers unions It was declining for decades. What we face on the Internet is, for most people, the main way we deal with with politics. Weakening collective policy is not a coincidence. It is according to the design.

like Margaret Thatcher once said: “The economy is the method; the goal is to change the heart and spirit.” Our economic circumstances deeply change how we think and feel about ourselves. Conservatives did not have a problem with the inequality of the layer. The class awareness was that they wanted to destroy. Forty -five years was intended to make aggressive neoliberal policies – breaking the back of the trade union movement, selling housing in the council, and destroying industrial workers into bits – to take heavy marble to societal engines for teamwork and solidarity. What was left behind is a mixture of separate identities, which are not inherited from any feeling of the conditions of common materials.

These separate groups are now competing to verify their conflicts, which are often expressed through online hostility. Attention has always been a psychological wage. To be recognized by others, you should be told that you are important. But social media has turned this natural human need to pay attention to a trap. Silicon Valley created a economy for craftsmanship, as the eyes are converted into advertising revenues and delicious mature data for harvesting. Feeling insecurity and loneliness drives us to Instagram and Tiktok and dating applications; These platforms intensify these feelings to keep us there for as long as possible.

Other users are our competitors. We compete with each other for followers, controls, status and central position in public conversation. What does this mean for politics? This means that, instead of looking at people who are not like us as possible opportunities to build the coalition, we imagine them as threats.

There was a tendency to spend a lot of time wandering on our feelings. Whether it claims all white yoga chapters “Shock” for people with colorOr insist that a climate activist make a file Choose the constitutional oath It brings “violence” to an area, or David Badil accuses an Australian Arab poet of having wiped out and trampled Jewish Jesus For his saying that resembles a familyThe modern identity policy has developed a significantly low threshold for damage.

Competition in attention motivates us to convert the mixture into the mountains, and the worship of the living experience makes it difficult to question the victim’s ads. I assumed “I” a policy of identity: Instead of seeking to liberate material discrimination and persecution, we only want to inflate the value of the vision associated with suffering. The retreat to self -experience determines to us the policy of discontent, competitive grievance and weapons victim. Although the character is political, the self is a dead end if what you want is social change. It is worth remembering the Narcissus lesson: to be very interested in your thinking that will kill you.

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