In anticipation of this blog's imminent one year anniversary, I've been looking over my older posts to see what, if anything, I might do differently twelve months later. In particular, the piece "Identity Politics, a Second Look", which was conceived at the height of the Bernie Bro v Hillarycrat post-election acrimony, caught my eye. It's one of the more popular and controversial older posts (with >100 views), and I stand by its conclusions: intersectionality, as a practice, is vital and necessary but pure identarianism is both illiberal and undemocratic and is correctly disavowed by everyone to the right of "dictatorship of the proletariat" communists and to the left of ethnic supremacists. However, today's I'm going to offer a refinement of part of my earlier analysis that I now feel was undercooked.
The Politics of Difference
In short, I was too dismissive and imprecise in the central part of the analysis regarding the liberal version of identity politics. By this I meant redistribution policies predicated on the demonstration of significant statistical differences in outcomes for socially defined groups of people, for example: the underrepresentation of women and other minorities in positions of political and corporate authority. In this form, identity politics or the politics of difference is consistent with both the liberal universalist tradition and limited redistributionary policy aims. To summarise: if all citizens are equal in formal opportunity, then measurable group-level differences in outcome must have a hidden or informal cause. We can argue about what those causes are, and what mix of redistribution or prevention is best to prevent those differences from recurring, but the acknowledgement of structural-level privilege and oppression, whether it's called the patriarchy, structural racism or the capitalist mode of production, is the sine qua non of left-of-centre politics (and its denial the sina qua non of right-of-centre politics).
The struggle for LGBT rights is the most salient example, here, because it's so fresh in the memory of most people. The lifting of legal prohibitions on homosexuality and the granting of marriage equality sees LGBT people treated equality before the law, but outcomes for LGBT people remain challenging in many areas: LGBT individuals are more likely to be living in poverty, to be victims of violence, and to self-harm. The job of activists, at least in the West, will likely change from a fight for recognition to fighting for policies to remedy these persistent economic, cultural and historical patterns of disadvantage, so long as they persist. In much the same way as legal equality for women left the greater work of challenging the second-class status of women undone, and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the United States kept the economic structure of African-American disadvantage intact, all movements transition eventually from fighting for equal recognition to fighting for equal distribution.
As a socialist, I see the politics of difference as necessary but insufficient. Discovering LGBT individuals or ethnic minorities have a greater than expected chance of living in poverty is important, but it doesn't answer the question of why *anyone* is living in poverty. Any measurement of structural disadvantage for particular sub-populations takes as an implicit reference point the status quo division of resources. The politics of difference is relational, not absolute: we can say that the relative deprivation of minorities is unjust, but liberal identity politics lack a framework to critique the justice of the entire social order. Without linking these individual struggles together to see the bigger picture, we risk leaving an otherwise unjust system intact or, worse, setting it as our explicit goal!
From Distribution to Recognition
Already, however, I have made a distinction between struggles for equal recognition and struggles for equal opportunity. Logically, the former must precede the latter. A person must be recognised by others as a social subject, entitled to equal regard by both the law and other citizens, before the conditions of equal opportunity laid out in the liberal social contract can be tested and remedied. This excellent explainer video by Ollie at PhilosophyTube sets out the argument and its origin in Hegel. Achieving recognition as a social subject is not only a feature of liberal societies: expansionary empires with religious characteristics typically regard their 'heathen' colonial subjects as less than human. It's only after colonial subjects convert to the faith of their colonizer that they win some level of minimal social status.
Liberalism played this role for the European colonial empires, at least in their later stage. It justified, for the conquerors, the overthrow of "pre-modern" societies but it in turn provided tools for colonised people to re-claim recognition from their oppressors. By fighting for acknowledgement of their dignity as equal human subjects, Gandhi, Nkrumah and the other products of a colonial education re-established the sovereignty of their peoples in terms recognised, albeit begrudgingly, by the imperial centers (It goes without saying that colonialism and the denial of their common humanity was unjust from the outset). But the winning of recognition, of sovereignty, did not redress the vast material inequality of social outcomes between newly liberated states and the metropolitan powers.
Charles Taylor, the communitarian philosopher, coined this version of the politics of recognition in a 1994 article. I'm not a fan of Taylor or his work in general, but this aspect of it is so widely referenced that it deserves discussion. Taylor recognised that an individual's identity is not somehow intrinsic to themselves but rather worked out through dialogue with others, and that therefore our sense of ourselves is defined relationally. The denial of this mutual recognition generates harm to oneself and one's sense of identity, which for a social species like humans leads to a wide variety of destructive behaviours and outcomes. Kant, Rawls and the other social-contract liberals have transformed this philosophical or psychological need into a universal principle: dignity under liberalism means that, prior to any other consideration, we enter into a society on the basis of the mutual recognition of each other's shared humanity.
Not Just One or the Other
Prior to any engagement as political subjects of a liberal democracy on matters of distributional justice a marginalised group must therefore fight for recognition of its dignity: it must win legal equality for its members and the right to have rights, free of discrimination. But while equal recognition and material equality are distinct components of justice, they are not entirely separate ones. Denial of recognition generates material inequality, and sufficiently severe levels of substantive inequality may constitute an de facto denial of equal dignity. Dignity is not an absolute category, but rather relative to the dignity afforded to other members of society.
In Chapters VIII and IX of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", I argue that a similar distinction lies at the explanatory heart of the difference between poverty and inequality. Poverty, like dignity, is often articulated in terms of the absolute denial of an individual's rights, whereas equality is relative to a society's overall level of affluence. But, as I argue in the book, poverty is also relative. What constitutes the denial of an adequate education, housing or standard of medical care can only be defined with reference to what is broadly possible in a given social and economic context. Poverty can exist by chance in even relatively egalitarian societies, but poverty becomes structural under conditions of high inequality. I wish I could claim credit for this argument about the twin bases of injustice, but I've learned subsequently that it's also the view of American feminist and philosopher Nancy Fraser.
So too with dignity and recognition: if the material conditions under which a group is disadvantaged are so severe that their deprivation is not even acknowledged to be unjust by society as a whole, then they are not being afforded equal dignity. For example, while indigenous groups mostly enjoy equal citizenship in settler states, their social and material conditions are often so poor that it's easy to argue that the colonial society does not recognise them as equal human subjects. So too when the West granted women the right to vote, but continued to control and limit their sexuality and to grant spouses violent dominion over the household: it's straightforward to argue that under those conditions society had not fully acknowledged the status of women to be equal with that of men. Dismantling slavery was a win for African-Americans, but Black Lives Matter argues that disproportional state violence demonstrates that their community is still not being treated as equal social subjects.
To wrap up, if I was re-writing my earlier piece on identity politics today, I'd hold on to my critique of the politics of difference as providing an insufficient critique of structural inequality. However, where inequality of outcomes is so severe as to represent a de facto denial of a group's equal citizenship, or where that denial of equal dignity is established by law and norms, I think both affected groups and supportive allies have a responsibility to put higher priority on redressing their alienation from the social contract.