More than forty years ago the Combahee River Collective (CRC), a Black lesbian feminist social- ist group in Boston, coined the term “identity politics.” For much of those forty years, it was largely forgotten that identity politics arose as a variety of Marxist politics. Instead, identity politics appeared to us as the ruination of all universal political proj- ects, whether these were to be conducted in the name of the citizen, the proletariat or the human. But both to celebrate identity for its subversion of homogeneity and to lament its corrosion of soli- darity is to reduce identity to difference. For Mao, on the contrary, identity had the dual aspects of particularity and totality, and indeed is the very name for the contradictory relationship that unites them. Mao’s dialectical sense of identity, I will argue here, was also the CRC’s. The CRC’s 1977 statement in which this first use of “identity poli- tics” appeared can be read as a document of US Maoism, registering the moment of the latter’s passing from a phase of a strategic politics to an ideological politics.
The CRC reasoned that since the oppression experienced by Black women was not of one kind but several—they mention specifically racial, sexual (by which they meant what we would now call gender), heterosexual and class oppression— reflection on personal experience would be a means for generating a future theory of how multiple oppressions “interlock” in the “synthesis” that “cre- ate[d] the conditions of our lives” (Taylor 2017: 15). In the Third World revolu- tionary nationalist context of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, “Black” was understood to be synonymous with “Third World.”3 As such, Black femi- nism was the proposed “logical political movement to combat the simultane- ous oppressions that all women of color face”
Though Mao is not explicitly named, the CRC’s mention of “criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice” would have been rec- ognized by readers at the time as an obvious allusion to him. Nor would such an allusion have been exceptional. In alluding to Mao, CRC would have been using a rhetoric common to 70s US feminism many strands of which, far beyond “hard Maoist” circles, drew inspiration from the Chinese communist revolution that subjective work was a primary precondition of wider social transformation. The historiography of the Second Wave has made note of Chinese communist inspirations for 70s feminism’s practice of conscious- ness raising and the idea that personal is political (Echols 1989; Lieberman 1991; Van Houten 2015).13 Meanwhile, scholars of Black Power are taking an interest in the Black Panthers’ uses of the Little Red Book and the travels of several US Black revolutionaries to Mao’s China (see Wu 2013; Mullen 2014; Frazier 2015). Strangely, least researched is global Maoism’s uptake by US Third World feminism even though, arguably, it was in this sector of US social movements that Maoist ideas took deepest root and through which it had the widest theoretical impact (cf. Chow 1993: 10–20; Ross 2005).
Reading the CRC statement in light of (their reading of ) Mao, we can see how identity held out the practical prospect of unity, as a way of linking particularity to totality. As Mao wrote: “It is so with all opposites; in given conditions, on the one hand they are opposed to each other, and on the other hand, they are interconnected, interpenetrating, interpermeating and inter- dependent, and this character is described as identity” (Mao 1937: 338). Fur- thermore, when we read the CRC statement in light of Mao, we can discern more clearly its Janus-facing historical quality, as a stepping stone or switch point between the New Communism of the early 1970s and the Critical Race Theory of the late 1980s. Traces of the strategic temporality of Beale’s use of contradiction are still present in the CRC statement where “criticism and self-criticism” is offered as the road to revolution. But also present is the pre- sentiment of a process of social change so protracted that the “lifetime of work and struggle” it requires may be historically unnarratable, stranding us at Crenshaw’s violent crossroads where collide “manifold and simultaneous oppressions.” More than ever, the truth value of multiple oppressions’ tem- poral simultaneity in the realm of experience calls for something more than the reflective realism of intersectionality’s analytical simultaneity—though what that is has not yet been born.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-at...Self-Criticism
Re: The latest anti-liberal rant thread (get your daily dose here)
Originally Posted by The spartan
that today is illegal literally everywhere.
