As part of our Radical Reads series, we speak to Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond about their book, Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics.
Radical Reads is our new Patreon-only series where we discuss political texts – both old and new – that have either influenced the WCH project, or texts that we generally think that people involved in radical and working-class movements should be engaging with, discussing, and using to inform their activism.
The term ‘identity politics’ is often used as a negative term by people on both the right and the left, usually to suggest that something is either divisive or overly concerned with the sectional interests of specific groups. While the right’s hypocrisy on this issue is obvious (they have no problem with ‘identity politics’ when it comes to supporting Israel, or the effect of immigration on national culture), left-wing anti-identity politics positions are more confusing: despite acknowledging issues like racism and sexism, movements against those oppressions are dismissed out of hand, often by pointing towards wealthy or powerful people with those identities, or by gesturing to an abstract idea of class unity based around economic issues.
Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley’s book pushes back against these positions. Instead, they show how ‘identity’ is not just a ‘subjective’ idea that exists in people’s heads, but the result of real, material ways the working class is structured according to race, gender, nationality etc by the various divisions of labour, immigration laws, etc. As we discuss with Michael and Alex in this episode, what often gets called ‘identity politics’ is actually an attempt to think through how class functions and is acted upon in the reality through which it’s lived.
Episode
- E101: Radical Reads – Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics – Available now exclusively for our Patreon supporters
- Listen to a preview of the episode below:
E101: [TEASER] Radical Reads – ‘Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics’ – Working Class History
More information
- Buy Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics from an independent bookshop
- ‘Aliens at the Border’ – a lightly edited version of Chapter Four from Fractured, looking at Jewish immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century
- ‘Fascism and the Women’s Cause: Gender Critical Feminism, Suffragettes and the Women’s KKK’ – piece by Alex and Michael looking at the link between contemporary transphobic feminists and the far-right by placing it against reactionary elements within the women’s suffrage movement, and trajectories which led some into the Ku Klux Klan and British Union of Fascists
- Listen to an earlier Radical Reads episode with Michael, discussing David Baddiel’s hilariously terrible book, Jews Don’t Count
- Books and merch related to Black history and struggle
- Books and merch related to women’s history and struggle
- Books and merch related to LGBTQ history and struggle
Glossary
- Abolitionism/Abolitionist left: a form of politics that seeks to abolish institutions like the police and prisons through the radical transformation of society as a whole. It takes its name from the 18th and 19th-century movement to abolish slavery, it was popularised during the Black Lives Matter movement and particularly after the 2020 US riots in response to the police killing of George Floyd
- Adolph Reed: Marxist politics professor specialising in race and US politics. Anti-‘identity politics’ in favour of a broad left social democratic platform
- Ambalavaner Sivanandan: pioneer of the UK’s Black liberation movement and director for many years of the Institute of Race Relations
- Angela Nagle: writer who started out on the left but whose positions against trans rights, in favour of immigration controls and appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show have since distanced her from it. Adolph Reed, during a livestream on the Katie Halper Show, described Nagle as having been “got” by the far-right
- Claudia Jones: Black Trindadian communist who lived both in the US and UK, and co-founded London’s famous Notting Hill Carnival
- Diane Abbott: left-wing Black female Member of Parliament for the UK Labour Party
- Lord Balfour: British Foreign Secretary after whom the ‘Balfour Declaration’ was named which promised Palestine to the Zionist movement. Also the Prime Minister who passed the 1905 Aliens Act, an immigration act specifically targeting Eastern European Jews
- Occupy Movement: an international movement against economic inequality that started in New York in 2011
- Rootless cosmopolitans: insult originating from Stalin’s postwar campaign against cosmopolitanism, widely considered to be a thinly-veiled antisemitic campaign against Jewish intellectuals
- Walter Benn Michaels: Marxist anti-identity politics literature professor
Acknowledgements
- Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman, Fernando López Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano, and Nick Williams.
- The episode image of a London Black Lives Matter protest, 2020. Credit: Katie Crampton, Wikimedia UK (with additional design by WCH). CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Edited by Louise Barry
- Our theme tune is Montaigne’s version of the classic labour movement anthem, ‘Bread and Roses’, performed by Montaigne and Nick Harriott, and mixed by Wave Racer. Download the song here, with all proceeds going to Medical Aid for Palestinians. More from Montaigne: website, Instagram, YouTube
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