The matter of identity politics is that it can be done two ways, one is an isolated view on which each oppressed identity seeks an, often short sighted, improvement of their reality dissociated from class struggle or even other identities struggles, this way is absolutely damaging to any sort of impactful struggle.

The other, and better, way of doing it is an identity struggle that looks into how that targeted and specific oppression relates both to the broader wide reaching class oppression, and to other similar specific oppression, in a way that multiple oppressed identities see each others as allies instead of rivals, and hopefully they'll see the ones fight class oppression as allies as well, in that way the fight is stronger with more support and aims higher.

Just as a footnote, the first and undesirable way of identity struggle , is likely to have been developed organically, but any sort of reactionary force that identifies how damaging this sort if struggle is to a unified class struggle, they'll nudge and amplify this version whenever it's convenient, makes them look more humane on the surface while still contributing to oppression. So it isn't a conspiracy but it's likely amplified by our enemies at times

None of the occupy wall street people changed their mind because they were told they had to help minorities.

"Identity politics" is bullshit, the problem of 8dent8ty politicis gets solved over night of people stop being bigots.

Any suggestion of "let's make our movement stronger by throwing the most vulnerable members under the bus to try to appeal to racists" is the actual psyop.

Idpol can divide the working class under bourgeois dictatorships but it's also necessary to unite the working class through solidarity between different groups that make up the working class. For example, a working class movement that is racist cannot win the widespread support of black people, who are by and large part of the working class. Movements need to adequately address the needs of and contradictions facing various identity groups that make up the working class.

the bastards may have used idpol this way, but i think idpol is just what you get when you disallow any movement to the left. if liberation for rich lgbtq+ people is all that you can achieve, all that you can imagine achieving because you live in the US and capitalism is an unquestionable orthodoxy... well, you get idpol.

A good heuristic for deciding whether a position is reactionary or not is by asking whether it’s uniting or divisive. The importance of class analysis is that it provides a common thread that unites people across different cultures, demographics. All workers can understand that they are being exploited because they experience it, and rising up against the exploitation is a unifying idea.

Meanwhile, what often happens with identity politics is that people end up being laser focused on their particular cause and see anybody championing a different cause as competition. This leads to the fracturing of the working class into small groups that fight each other.

This is precisely why issues such as racism, sexism, and so on, must be contextualized within the overarching class struggle as opposed to being seen as individual issues to rally behind.

As Parenti so eloquently put it:

Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploita­tive one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.

Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impres­sive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;' "upper class;' or "moneyed class." And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the "ruling class." The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion's share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are them­selves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.

Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a sim­ple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into "conspiracy theory." The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually removedrdly wages, the "working class," a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;' for then one is talk­ing about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.

The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the sooth­ing adjective "middle." Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt con­cern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of soci­ety. By including almost everyone, "middle class" serves as a conve­niently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actu­ality of class power.

The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimiza­tion: the "underclass." References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society's most vulnerable elements.

Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpe­trated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinc­tiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds

I don't have anything to add, because there are excellent answers below, but this Gabriel Rockhill interview by Zhao Dingxi has an interesting few paragraphs on liberal idpol:

ZD: How do you understand the role and function of identity politics and multiculturalism, which are currently prevalent in the Western left?

GR: Identity politics, like the multiculturalism affiliated with it, is a contemporary manifestation of the culturalism and essentialism that have long characterized bourgeois ideology. The latter seeks to naturalize social and economic relations that are the consequence of the material history of capitalism. Rather than recognizing, for instance, that racial, national, ethnic, gender, sexual, and other forms of identity are historical constructs that have varied over time and result from specific material forces, these are naturalized and treated as an unquestionable foundation for political constituencies. Such essentialism serves to obscure the material forces operative behind these identities, as well as the class struggles that have been waged around them. This has been particularly useful to the ruling class and its managers as they have been forced to react to the demands of decolonization and of materialist antiracist and antipatriarchal struggles. How better to respond than with an essentializing identity politics that proposes false solutions to very real problems because it never addresses the material basis of colonization, racism, and gender oppression?

The self-proclaimed anti-essentialist versions of identity politics operative in the work of theorists like Judith Butler do not fundamentally break with this ideology.36 In purporting to deconstruct some of these categories by revealing them as discursive constructs that individuals or groups of individuals can question, play with, and re-perform, theorists working within the idealist parameters of deconstruction never provide a materialist and dialectical analysis of the history of the capitalist social relations that have produced these categories as major sites of collective class struggle. They also do not engage in the deep history of actually existing socialism’s fight collectively to transform these relations. Instead, they tend to draw on deconstruction and a practically dehistoricized version of Foucauldian genealogy to think about gender and sexual relations discursively, and they are at best oriented toward a liberal pluralism in which class struggle is replaced by interest-group advocacy.

By contrast, the Marxist tradition—as Domenico Losurdo has demonstrated in his magisterial work Class Struggle—has a profound and rich history of understanding class struggle in the plural. This means that it includes battles over the relationship between genders, nations, races, and economic classes (and, we could add, sexualities). Since these categories have taken on very specific hierarchical forms under capitalism, the best elements of the Marxist heritage have sought to both understand their historical provenance and radically transform them. This can be seen in the longstanding struggle against the domestic slavery imposed upon women, as well as the battle to overcome the imperialist subordination of nations and their racialized peoples. This history has played itself out in fits and starts, of course, and there is still much work to be done, in part because certain strains of Marxism—such as that of the Second International—have been tainted by elements of bourgeois ideology. Nevertheless, as scholars like Losurdo and others have demonstrated with remarkable erudition, the communists have been at the vanguard of these class struggles to overcome patriarchal domination, imperialist subordination, and racism by going to the very roots of these problems: capitalist social relations.

Identity politics, as it has developed in the leading imperialist countries and particularly the United States, has sought to bury this history in order to present itself as a radically new form of consciousness, as if communists had not so much as thought of the woman question or the national/racial question. Theorists of identity politics thus tend to assert arrogantly and benightedly that they are the first ones to address these issues, thereby overcoming an imagined economic determinism on the part of the so-called vulgar reductionist Marxists.37 Instead of recognizing these issues as sites of class struggle, moreover, they tend to use identity politics as a wedge against class politics. If they do make any gesture toward integrating class into their analysis, they generally reduce it to a question of personal identity, rather than a structural property relation. The solutions that they put forth therefore tend to be epiphenomenal, meaning that they focus on issues of representation and symbolism, rather than, for instance, overcoming the labor relations of domestic slavery and racialized superexploitation through a socialist transformation of the socioeconomic order. They are thereby incapable of leading to significant and sustainable change because they do not go to the root of the problem. As Adolph Reed Jr. has often argued with his signature biting wit, identitarians are perfectly happy to maintain extant class relations—including imperialist relations between nations, I would add—on the condition that there is the requisite ratio of representation of oppressed groups within the ruling class and the professional managerial stratum.

In addition to helping displace class politics and analysis within the Western left, identity politics has made a major contribution to dividing the left itself into siloed debates around specific identity issues. Instead of class unity against a common enemy, it divides—and conquers—working and oppressed people by encouraging them to identify first and foremost as members of specific genders, sexualities, races, nations, ethnicities, religious groups, and so forth. In this regard, the ideology of identity politics actually is, at a much deeper level, a class politics. It is the politics of a bourgeoisie aimed at dividing the working and oppressed peoples of the world in order to more easily rule over them. It should come as no surprise, then, that it is the governing politics of the professional managerial class stratum in the imperial core. It dominates its institutions and informational outlets, and it is one of the primary mechanisms for career advancement within what Reed insightfully calls “the diversity industry.” It encourages everyone involved to identify with their specific group and advance their own individual interests by posing as its privileged representative. We should note, moreover, that wokeism also has the effect of driving some people into the arms of the right. If the dominant political culture encourages a clan mentality combined with competitive individualism, then it is unsurprising that white people and men have also—as a partial response to their perceived disenfranchisement by the diversity industry—advanced their particular agendas as “victims” of the system. Identity politics devoid of a class analysis is thus absolutely amenable to right-wing and even fascist permutations.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention that identity politics, which has its recent ideological roots in the New Left and the social chauvinism V. I. Lenin had earlier diagnosed in the European left, is one of the principal ideological tools of imperialism. The divide-and-conquer strategy has been used to splinter targeted countries by fostering religious, ethnic, national, racial, or gender conflicts.38 Identity politics has also served as a direct justification for imperialist intervention and meddling, as well as destabilization campaigns, if it be the purported causes of liberating women in Afghanistan, supporting Black rappers “discriminated” against in Cuba, backing purportedly “ecosocialist” Indigenous candidates in Latin America, “protecting” ethnic minorities in China, or other such well-known propaganda operations in which the U.S. empire presents itself as the benevolent benefactor of oppressed identities. Here we can clearly see the complete disconnect between the purely symbolic politics of identity and the material reality of class struggles insofar as the former can—and does—provide thin cover for imperialism. At this level as well, then, identity politics is ultimately a class politics: a politics of the imperialist ruling class.

Read 'ill burn that bridge when I get to it' by Norman Finkelstein. He makes a pretty convincing argument about this. Focus on identity, forget about class.

The meme isn't wrong that identity politics were used in this way, but that has been true way way WAY before Occupy and will stay true in future as the lines of whose sexuality is and isn't demonized move forward. That has no bearing on the socialist struggle in and of itself though, except that socialists also support equality for all races and genders, because it's clearly hypocritical not to. the fringe idiots that don't do so aren't really socialist but some weird flavor of reactionary using socialism as a smoke screen.

What happened with occupy is that it was ridiculed by the media so that broader society turned away from it, seeing the movement as a powerless fringe. This has also been a pattern before and after OWS and would have happened with or without identity politics existing. Identity politics was and is simply a way for one of the two identical parties in the USA to distinguish itself from their so-called opponents. Let's shout about gay rights but do every other policy exactly as the people who a<re giving both of us money want it. If identity politics wasn't something chuds hate, they would need to invent some other issue to do it with.

I think others covered the subject well. I will just add: Lots of things can get warped in order to be used as an op, while the original is not. Even communism itself. If those trying to liberate abandoned everything that has ever been distorted and used against them, they'd have virtually nothing left (in more than one meaning of the word).

Or as Michael Bolton put it so eloquently in Office Space, "Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."

If you let the oppressor speak for you, they'll keep moving the goalposts until you have nothing left to fight with or for. Investigate where stuff originates from (an easy-to-trace modern example is the distortion of the term "woke"), how it has been used, where it comes from where it came from and by whom and for what purpose. Without that clarity, you might be basing your analysis on being pleasing to the oppressor.

A few things to commend it (I'm being devil's advocate for the thread, rather than asserting a conviction I have):

• The whole thing of Marxism is to focus on class and the economic base, not on non-class-based contradictions. And non-class-based contradictions are detrimental to class consciousness –

• https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm – "And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this."

• It seems to have mostly grown out of the USA (correct me if I'm wrong on this), a country that doesn't really have a left, and where state-agencies have a long history of meddling in leftist movements with dirty tricks. You can't imagine Mao or Lenin banging on about identity politics; Latin American leftists do talk about it, though not as obsessively as North Americans.