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Identity Crisis
The Politics of False Concreteness
From: The Socialist Register 2022
$1.80
Samir Gandesha examines what he identifies as ‘a fragmentation of the universalism that had historically underwritten the struggle for socialism’, leading to a what he terms a ‘politics of false concreteness’ centred on forms of identity politics on both the left and the right. Gandesha argues that increasing political and social polarization is already leading to accelerating authoritarianism, as right-wing demagogues mobilize support based on racialized grievances, turning people away from ideas of leftism and instead towards attacking one another. This is caused by ‘false concreteness’ which eschews universalism, and has thus contributed to the crippling polarizations of our times. On the right, this has taken the form of authoritarian ethno-nationalism. On the left, identity politics, far from challenging the neoliberal consensus, only reinforce its iron grip. Gandesha argues for the return to a ‘class identity’ that seeks a universalism ‘in its own self-dissolution’, that is, in the struggle against classes as they are now and thus and end to capitalism and the present neoliberal order.
