This is my first contact with Gabriel Rockhill, and that was also the impression I had as I was reading. I see this sentiment sporadically, that class struggle and the overthrow of capitalist social relations will usher in a new wave of equality that all of these islands of identity are struggling for. It often rings to me as a kind of shallow assessment of these struggles and their relationships to society at large. I’ve been subconsciously building this list in my head of shibboleths within Marxist commentary in online spaces, and things like “class struggle” or “improve material conditions” tend to give me pause if there isn’t much elaboration as to what the writer means by this exactly. I think if challenged, we would see folks with limited theoretical understanding unravel as they try to explain exactly what “material conditions” need to change and why, or exactly how “class struggle” will ultimately emancipate marginalized communities. That isn’t to imply that I think Rockhill is guilty of this here, but I can see how someone would read this and parrot it without much critical thought.

Here I do see where Rockhill is coming from. This idea that “identity” is a construct of the ruling class and its efforts to stifle collective class consciousness rings “true” to the ears. However, I feel identifying it simply as “politics of the imperialist ruling class” does nothing to change the realities of those who fall into these “identity” groups. Each group has its own unique history and development, each one solidifying under decades or even centuries of repression from various ruling classes. They struggle against real forces that will persist even after this supposed working-class revolution in the west.

His adoption of this notion of the “diversity industry” cuts really close to the current right-wing obsession with “DEI”. It almost implies that diversity equity and inclusion initiatives are strictly performative in their nature. Except that there is a growing body of research that shows companies with a highly diverse workforce see higher productivity, higher levels of “innovation”, workers with diverse leadership see their ideas developed and implemented, and so on. It’s clear that CEOs believe these initiatives are worth investing in. This to me reads as a kind of emerging social relation under capitalism, that to maximize earnings, it may become necessary to include as many different perspectives as possible to eventually appeal to the widest number of people across demographics, or to become better at hyper-targeting these demographics individually.

This brings me back to the social relations of capital. Often we frame the actions of the ruling class as what I would call “intentioned”. That is to say, in this context, that identity politics is something the ruling class engages in with the intention to sow discord. However, I think identity politics have organically formed through the evolving capitalist social relations of history. As more and more people were driven out of the rural areas and into the industrial factories, it also forced all these diverse groups of people together for long periods of time. In this highly competitive space, I think it is only natural that this large group would collect together into smaller groups based on how they relate to each other. Their shared experiences acting as the foundation of their group, binding them together. Existing divisions, such as the divisions between the poor whites and newly emancipated slaves, were only worsened as both social groups now competed in the labor market. Queer people now lived and worked in much tighter groupings than ever before, allowing them to find each other and build a community, where before they had none. Women, pulled into the workforce as a result of war production during WW2 found community among their fellow women, sharing their struggles and building up their solidarity among each other. These are only some examples from the past that show how these groups form as a result of the demands of capital, I’m sure much smarter people than me have written volumes on this topic.

As these groups became more solidified, it also made them more visible, drawing them in contrast to the “norms” of society. Through their communities, they finally could express their individual struggles to sympathetic ears, building solidarity among each other, transforming individual struggle into collective struggle, and eventually engendering a feeling of empowerment born out of the security that comes from community, allowing them to advocate for their existence. All of these groups put forth a challenge to the white heteronormative hegemony that dominated society. Their integration into greater society naturally won them sympathies outside their communities, sympathies among other repressed groups.

At some point, the ruling class has to address these growing social contradictions. The risk of leaving them to fester would only lead to more civil unrest. There are, I think, only two obvious positions to take on these matters: embrace these identity groups and by virtue bestow them an amount of your power to make incremental change on their behalf. Or reject these groups and appeal to the norms, granting those members of societies hegemonic identity a bulwark against change. The adoption of these two paths, born out of real struggle for acceptance, shaped the electoral landscape. It created new incentives inside the electoral process, new pathways to exploit to secure victory. These pathways open up at different points in history, and not all at once. However, the desires and needs of these groups are always secondary to the primary goal, which is maintaining the empire. This shelving of social responsibilities might have the appearance of “intention”, but I think it truly is a matter of prioritization. The demands created by these social relations are not equal, and the demands of maintaining empire far out weigh the demands of the imperial core’s social fabric.

To believe that all of this rhetoric about identities or social issues, even down to issues surrounding the Second Amendment, are all part of a conscious, and collaborative effort to undermine revolutionary change, I think robs the individuals within the ruling class of their own identities. It creates a kind of conspiratorial collective hivemind who all equally understand that they are putting on a very well-rehearsed play. The notion that there isn’t a single agent within the ruling class who believes exactly what they say, that are just as uninformed and prejudice as they present themselves, seems hard to believe. The demands of empire and the demands of capital ultimately drive these individuals. I think this is why you see this kind of transformation within representatives. Once you are awash in this culture long enough, the pressures within this group, the goals inherited by the past, and the demands of maintaining empire, eventually take a person like AOC for example, and shape and warp their perspective, filing away all the sharp edges, leaving only a dull and toothless version of their original worldview intact. Their goals are reprioritized, but their rhetoric must remain, as that is what earned them their place within this group to begin with.

The clandestine organizations and their cutouts understand the nature of this history. In many ways, they practice a kind of dark materialism. Their goals, however, are not destabilization within the imperial core, but destabilization on the edges of the empire, in service of the empire’s goals. They recognize how destabilizing the struggle of these marginalized groups can be, and weaponize this history in modern times against states like Bangladesh. It is the only explanation as to why a Conservative NGO would be engaging in the promotion of Queer rights in foreign lands. They haven’t suddenly become allies of the Queer movement. Instead, they understand history, and understand the power these marginalized groups have to press for change. They understand that capturing that energy and directing it carefully can create the right conditions for “revolutionary” change. In their case, bourgeois revolutionary change. Left on their own, they understand that these movements eventually become socialist movements. Our own history shows us this time and time again, and shows what these clandestine groups are willing to do to preserve the bourgeois character of these struggles.

I say this regularly to people I know regarding Third-Party candidates. The idea that someone like RFK Jr. or Jill Stein could ascend to the role of president, and somehow overcome the demands and priorities of the empire so that they can perform real change in the four short years they would have, is a silly notion at best. The empire is a moving object, forever in motion, and to change its course in another direction is a task worthy only of Sisyphus.

So to me, there is no “conspiracy” of division at play here. The division is a byproduct of the long history of evolving social relations under capitalism. They are deeply engrained within the minds of the citizens of the imperial core. The competing ideological frameworks within each faction of the ruling class is hinged on these divisions. Their ideological character born out of these relations of identity. They are as vital to their respective movement as air and blood are to the body. To change rhetoric now only sharpens the contradiction at play, and we may be seeing some of that playing out in real time. As the Democratic Party adopts more right-wing positions, it creates a vacuum waiting to be filled by some other political force willing to take up the progressive crown they once adorned. Adopting these right-wing positions chains them to right-wing demands built up over decades of electoral politics.

I guess I’ve run out of things to say on this topic, but that covers my perspective on the matter.

These are def sensitive topics, and the class-essentialist politics (which often turns into outright racism, sexism, and anti-lgbtq takes) of a lot of western communist parties like CPGB makes people not want to dive into those debates. Its hard too because social media platforms intentionally twist all the debates around them into hair-raising ragebait, so that it becomes difficult to parse out what. Even during the 1960s, they had better terms for what rockhill is calling idpol, like tokenism, that ppl like Malcolm X rightfully called out.

I had that reaction at first until I read how he’s using the term, which to me seems to be more close to liberal tokenism.