Co-opting and being co-opted: on critiques of identity politics

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I analyze three categories of narratives that seek to understand identity politics’ role on the American left through the lens of co-optation. The first, represented primarily by Fredric Jameson, Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels, sees identity as having always been foreign and harmful to the left. The second, represented by Asad Haider, acknowledges its original radical role in the 1970s, but sees contemporary identity politics as only a co-opting force. Despite their differences, both of these approaches consider identity politics to be the cause of the left’s decay and define anticapitalism as devoid of it. Audre Lorde, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond, representing the last category, turn the question around. They refuse a simple dichotomy between a pure political idea or movement and a co-opted one and ask not what identity politics is doing to the left, but how it works within and against capitalist co-optation. Drawing on a larger body of literature, I argue that such an understanding of co-optation as the starting point of any political theory or practice offers a more generative understanding of the possibilities of radical (identity) politics today.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity politics
• co-optation
• American left
• anticapitalism
• class
• failure
• defeat
• social movements

Acknowledgements

This paper and an older version of it benefitted greatly from the comments of Robin Celikates and the participants in his PhD work-in-progress colloquium, of Ashley J. Bohrer, Sonja Pyykkö, and Anisia Petcu, as well as of the three Distinktion anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank the organizers and participants at conferences where this paper was presented: at Marquette University, Queen’s University Belfast, Nuffield College (Oxford), the JFK Institute for North American Studies (FU Berlin), the University of the Witwatersrand, and at the European Association of American Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the reception and circulation of the CRC Statement, see Norman (2007, 109–17).

2 For overviews and rebuttals of the 1990s’ literature, see Kelley (1997), Bramen (2002), and Alcoff (2006, 5–83). For the post-Bernie moment, see Walters (2018).

3 Interestingly, while the general description of Haider’s argument is accurate, Fraser also misattributes to him a quote that in fact comes from an article by Reed (2016a).

4 See Richmond and Charnley (2022, 178–79) for a particularly crude example.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrei Belibou

Andrei Belibou is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, and holds a BA and an MA from the University of Warwick. He works on social and political theories of social change and political subjectivities, and his dissertation project is on identity politics and class politics in capitalism.