No War But Class War: Against Identity-Essentialism in the Communist Movement

We have no place for identity-essentialism. One can either fight a class war or fight a sectarian identity politics war, because you cannot do both at once against the same person: you cannot attack someone for their race, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, etc., and then turn around and demand that same person fight the capitalist class beside you. Pick your fight, so others know if you're friend or foe, because you cannot treat a recruit as the enemy and expect them to fight as an ally. Remember, no war but class war. Do not tell me class war requires waging a sectarian identity politics war against the very people you need in the ranks.

Hearing fellow communists say that communist movements cannot succeed because of men and white people makes me question motives, because you cannot alienate over half your potential base by sex and race and then blame that majority's demographic traits for the movement's inability to act and grow. They tell these groups that they need to stop associating with their gender or race because those associations are preventing conversations about oppression and organizing. They make comments about not taking personal attacks personally because it's about these two groups' culture, environment, and identity, that what happened in the past has nothing to do with these groups, and cling to their tribalism. They say identities evolve and ask why these groups associate with those identities.

However, comrades can be asked: why do they associate males and Europeans with being "men" and "white" when grouping them together as a whole with others from those two groups stereotypes and creates defamation toward their character and being? Why do they expect to be allowed to make personal attacks without consequence, when the mental health community says words can inflict as much damage on someone as if they were physically assaulted? I get identity-protective cognition, but people don't align with those who attack or degrade them to take on a shared enemy, because they're not going to get stabbed from two sides, and they don't naturally develop Stockholm Syndrome.

Telling people to completely abandon their identity and worldview is to tell them to abandon their character, because people are a product of their life experiences and environment. If they try to align with your movement and you're telling them to abandon the things that shaped their experience and the ideologies that led them to want to align with you, then what reason do they have to align with you? The people this message responds to know who they are, because treating everyone as though they have no reason and are wrong to act as victims when defamed and mentally, if not physically, attacked is victim-blaming and dehumanizing secondary victimization. And if that's how you treat those you're trying to build an equitable, egalitarian society with, what's different between you and the wage-masters who oppress and violate them? Naming a person by "man" or "white" as if that exhausts their political character is the same essentialist error as naming them by any other birth trait, and Marxism rejects birth traits as destiny in both directions.

Coerced self-abandonment doesn't build solidarity, it builds resentment and creates enemies; if that's the organizational structure you're trying to build, you're just rearranging the current hierarchy within the working class instead of abolishing it, reassigning privilege rather than eliminating it. A Marxist movement must meet everyone where they're at and lift them up simultaneously to the same level, not turn one section of the class into a permanent punching bag for others, for Marxists do not support prejudice, bigotry, or chauvinism, regardless of whether it comes from the systems or the people. Which is why it's "workers of the world unite," and not "workers of the world except ____, unite." This is not ignoring or diminishing anyone's struggles, it's keeping the fight and thought directed in the proper direction. The different vanguards are so worried about building a popular movement that they're not vetting or educating people to end the opportunistic petty-bourgeois moralism problem I have called out and addressed; instead, calling it out gets recast as gatekeeping itself.

Tailism is another issue on top of the one I laid out. We collectivists want the best for everyone, but others make it more and more impossible not to simultaneously dislike everyone, and people wonder how activist-misanthropes exist among communists and other secular humanists, and why our philosophical-ideological thought is more and more totalizing.