Identity Politics in Poland

Identity politics refers to political positions based on the interests and perspectives of social groups with which people identify. Identity politics includes the ways in which people's politics are shaped by aspects of their identity through loosely correlated social organizations. Examples include social organizations based on age, religion, social class or caste, culture, dialect, disability, education, ethnicity, language, nationality, sex, gender identity, generation, occupation, profession, race, political party affiliation, sexual orientation, settlement, urban and rural habitation, and veteran status. Not all members of any given group are involved in identity politics. Identity politics are used by minority and civil rights organizations to form a coalition with members of the majority.

The term identity politics came into being during the latter part of the 20th century, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States.

There is a significant set of concerns emerging, for example in this HUFFPOST blog:

Identity politics, long well entrenched in the liberal arts circles of academia, have seemingly broken out of the confines of campus debates and critical theory textbooks, and emerged into the mainstream, suddenly becoming a heated theme in the media. Some of the discussion, on the tails of Trump's election, has come from dissident leftists' reflections on what has gone wrong in the left, such that the American electorate could become so polarized.

While I'm not sure that even the worst excesses of left's currently in vogue tactics could push fence-sitters into the arms of Trump, certainly extreme political correctness has contributed to a politics of divisiveness. Yet ironically, elements of the right too - elements once on the outer fringes but now invited to the inner hearth with Trump's election - are also embracing identity politics to their own ends. Shuja Haider makes a compelling case in Jacobin that the tactics of the so-called "alt-right" and those of the far left are increasingly hard to distinguish. Haider points out: "It should go without saying that left-liberal identity politics and alt-right white nationalism are not comparable. The problem is that they are compatible."

Both demand an appeal to difference, hard lines around separate distinct identities, and both say: you are allowed to speak on these matters only after you've shown your race card. As Haider refers to it: "Your right to political agency is determined by your description."

Intersectional critiques

In her journal article Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color (Crenshaw, Kimberle),  Kimberle Crenshaw treats identity politics as a process that brings people together based on a shared aspect of their identity. Crenshaw applauds identity politics for bringing African Americans (and other non-white people), gays and lesbians, and other oppressed groups together in community and progress.

However, Crenshaw also points out that frequently groups come together based on a shared political identity but then fail to examine differences among themselves within their own group: "The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend differences, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences." Crenshaw argues that when society thinks "black", they think black male, and when society thinks feminism, they think white woman. When considering black women, at least two aspects of their identity are the subject of oppression: their race and their sex (Crenshaw, Kimberle (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. pp. 139–68).

Crenshaw proposes instead that identity politics are useful but that we must be aware of intersectionality and the role it plays in identity politics. Nira Yuval-Davis supports Crenshaw's critiques in Intersectionality and Feminist Politics and explains that: 

"Identities are individual and collective narratives that answer the question 'who am/are I/we?"

This phenomenon is impacting Journalism in Poland too!

Poland’s media is becoming highly divided, polarised and tribal. New research, based on interviews with leading journalists, has found objectivity is being replaced by an emerging “journalism of identity” – ideologically engaged narratives that help build a community of like-minded audiences – developed and introduced by the country’s right-wing media.

The changes reflect the recent transformation of the Poland’s media landscape, accelerated by the 2015 parliamentary victory of the conservative, populist Law and Justice party (PiS). Over the last two years the PiS government has taken control of state broadcasters and promised a shift from public to “national” media. In a recent move, Poland’s media regulator, the National Broadcasting Council, last week fined the US-owned private television broadcaster, TVN24, PLN 1.48 million (approx EUR 350,000) over its coverage of protests outside parliament in 2016.  TVN24 was accused of “promoting unlawful activities and encouraging behaviour that threatens security”.

The Rise of Poland’s Right-Wing Press

My paper, Is there a chance for non-partisan media in Poland? argues that Poland’s media landscape began to change after the Smolensk plane crash in 2010 which killed Lech Kaczyński, then the country’s president. Kaczyński was also the twin brother of Jarosław Kaczyński, current leader of the PiS party.

Based on interviews with six leading Polish journalists – three from liberal media outlets, (Gazeta Wyborcza, Polityka Weekly and Onet.pl), and three from conservative outlets, (Wnet Radio, Sieci Weekly and Belsat TV) – the report describes how the right-wing press – politically insignificant between 1989, after the collapse of communism, and 2010 – became highly visible and partisan after the 2010 Smolensk crash. The change was partly driven by the internet, which removed barriers to the media market, thus encouraging an economy driven by social media, speed and simplification. Since then, partisanship and political bias have become sought-after commodities.

In this new media order, the Smolensk crash proved a potent catalyst for the resurrection of the old pre-1989 divisions that still run deeply through Polish society. Since 2015, the Law and Justice party’s moves to reshape the country’s media system, alongside its broader change to the judiciary and the way civil society functions have brought widespread international criticism.

The state media, now largely controlled by the government, have swung their coverage to the right, and its message is now largely (and unsurprisingly) pro-government. In the polarised and politicised world of Polish media, those who stand on the right of the political spectrum see this as a positive change, enhancing pluralism and giving a voice to the underrepresented sections of the conservative Polish society. However those on the left see it as an attack on free media and democracy.

What Do Polish Journalists Think About Poland’s Media Landscape

All of the journalists interviewed share a belief that there should be a greater distance between politics and  journalism in Poland. But in a country where there have historically been blurred lines between the two professions, there is no immediate or foreseeable end to the political and journalistic crisis.

Objectivity – however desired – no longer appears to be an end goal for Polish journalists, instead advocacy and political engagement continue to dominate the country’s media landscape.

What does it feel like, personally and politically, to be gay in Poland?

The only occasions when the Warsaw gay pride, called the Equality Parade, was banned was in 2004 and 2005, during the late Lech Kaczynski’s term as mayor.

In 2005, a right-wing youth organization, the All-Polish Youth, planned what they called "Parada Normalności," or "The Normalcy Parade.”

The consequence of the images are the images of the consequences . . . 

What does it "mean", personally and politically to be "normal" in Poland?

and the images say it all . . . 

Protesters blow whistles and shout during the 'normalcy parade', a protest against homosexuality in Poland, 18 June 2005. About 1,000 supporters of the right-wing party 'Polish Families League' marched in the centre of Warsaw against Warsaw Gay Pride . . .

Normalcy!

Normalcy!

Angry white men - the radicals tended to be white, straight men with links to neo-Nazi groups.

Transgender issues and the world's only transsexual MP

What is Polish identity?

Poland's culture war! Women's rights and the battle of the sexes?

What is it like to be a part of the Jewish communities in Poland?

Muslim population in Poland? 0.1%! Not 7%!

Why are Polish people so wrong about Muslims in their country?
 

Poland's Tatars

What does it feel like to be a Kashubian?

And Poland's Roma?

Poland's Roma community battles discrimination

    

End Notes:

GLOBALIZING CAPITALISM AND THE RISE OF IDENTITY POLITICS
Frances Fox Piven

For more than a century, the Left has been guided by the conviction  that industrial capitalism would inevitably homogenize social life, and thus lay the basis for a universalizing politics. Capitalism meant the expansion of a bourgeoisie whose search for profit would steadily penetrate the social life of traditional societies, and  eventually reach across the globe, in the process  wiping  out 'all fixed  relations and their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions.'

Meanwhile, industrial capitalism would also nourish an ever larger working  class based in the  mass production  industries that  would  bind  diverse people  together in class- based  solidarity. And this  class would reap  the harvest of capitalist destruction and possibility, for it  would become the carrier of an emancipatory creed uniting all humankind.  Capitalism itself, by obliterating ancient differences and polarizing humanity into two great classes, would pave the way for the universalizing mission of the proletariat. This model now seems  shattered. Capitalism  has  indeed  penetrated societies and spanned the globe. In this sense, it is homogenizing social life. But instead of universalizing popular politics, capitalist expansion is weakening and conceivably destroying working class politics.

The advance of international markets and technological change are eviscerating the mass production industries, at least in the mother countries, diminishing the working class numbers and organizations which once gave life to the idea of the proletariat as the hope of humankind. And the new mobility of capitalist investment is also reducing the autonomy of the nation state, with a crushing impact on existing forms of working class organization and influence. Moreover, instead of wiping out all ancient prejudices, a globalizing capital is prompting a rising tide of fractious racial, ethnic, religious and gender conflict.

It is contributing to an identity politics which expresses not only the ancient and venerable  prejudices and opinions which were presumably to be swept aside, but the apparently inexhaustible human capacity to create new prejudices and opinions, albeit often in the name of an imagined ancient past.  

We can see this most awesomely in the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, Hindus and Kashmiris in India; between Xhosa and Zuli, Christians, animists and Muslims in Africa; or between Germans and Turks, French and Algerians, Serbs and Muslims and  Croats in Europe; or between Chechens, Ossetians, Abhkazians and Russians; or between Jews and Blacks, Gays and fundamentalists in the United States.

Even the Cossacks are on the move again, demanding recognition, in the words of their supreme leader, 'as  a distinct people'  with  'our territory, property and traditions  all restored.''

 

Taras Bulba is a 1962 film loosely based on Nikolai Gogol's short novel, Taras Bulba, starring Yul Brynner in the title role, and Tony Curtis as his son, Andriy, leaders of a Cossack clan on the Ukrainian steppes. The film was directed by J. Lee Thompson. The story line of the film is considerably different from that of Gogol's novel, although it is closer to his expanded 1842 (pro-Russian Imperial) edition than his original (pro-Ukrainian) version of 1835.
 
Two decades ago, even a decade ago, such proclamations from the past would have seemed exotic. Now they seem unremarkable. No people, no place, is immune from the tide of identity politics.

The debate continues . . . 

Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider review – the best criticism of identity politics

This riveting and inspiring study of race and class in the age of Trump argues that an emphasis on identity should lead to one on solidarity

Ben Tarnoff (Thu 31 May 2018)

A boy speaks one language at home and another at school. The white kids want to know where he is from. The answer is “here”, same as them, but that’s not what they’re asking. After 9/11 they call him Osama. His parents are from Pakistan. When he visits Karachi, his relatives point out his US accent. He lives between two worlds, belonging to neither.

Then, in the sixth grade, something happens. He is doing a science project on Isaac Newton. He visits the public library of the small town in Pennsylvania where he lives, and, browsing books about Newton the scientist he comes across another Newton – Huey P Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party. In 1973, Newton published an autobiography called Revolutionary Suicide. Intrigued by the title, the boy picks up the book, and it changes his life.
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This is the scene that opens Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. It’s vividly drawn, and sets the stakes for what follows. Asad Haider has written a book about identity, politics, and the relationship between the two. In particular, he has written a book about “identity politics”, a phrase that, like “political correctness”, is extremely slippery, but which generally means an emphasis on issues of racial, gender and sexual identity.

Identity politics finds critics everywhere. Throw a rock at a rack of newspapers and you’ll probably hit an editorial condemning it. Conservatives such as Republican House speaker Paul Ryan blame it for polarisation, while liberals like the Columbia University historian Mark Lilla hold it responsible for Donald Trump’s victory, applying the baroque logic that letting people use their preferred gender pronouns is why Democrats struggle to be seen as the party of working people.

Haider is also a critic of identity politics, but with a crucial difference: he knows the history of the term and is working from within the tradition that produced it. As he explains, the idea has radical roots. It originated with the Combahee River Collective, an organisation of black lesbian feminist socialists in Boston who published a landmark statement in 1977: “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”

This is the original demand of identity politics, and it’s one that Haider embraces: for a revolutionary practice rooted in people’s identities as racialised, sexed, gendered and classed individuals who face interlocking systems of oppression. These systems have to be fought together, by organising people of different identities in what Haider calls “a project of universal emancipation” devoted to dismantling all of the structures that make them unfree, including and especially capitalism itself.

But if anticapitalist revolution is where identity politics began, it has since become something quite different, and is now invoked by certain liberals and leftists to serve distinctly non-revolutionary ends, Haider argues. It involves members of marginalised groups demanding inclusion, recognition, or restitution from above – a seat at the table. These demands are made in response to very real injuries endured by those groups. But their method, he says, ends up strengthening the structures that produced those injuries in the first place.

Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton in 1972.

Drawing on Wendy Brown’s idea of “wounded attachments”, Haider contends that identity politics causes people to become invested in their marginalisation as a source of identity, and to continuously enact that identity as a form of politics. This approach can extract occasional concessions from the system but cannot build the power necessary to transform it.

Building that power will require forging a “new insurgent universality”, Haider believes. This doesn’t mean pretending that everyone is the same. It doesn’t mean elevating one identity – that of the white male worker, say – above all others. Rather, the universality that Haider wants is built from below. It is “created and recreated in the act of insurgency”, as people come together to combat the common enemy lurking behind their particular oppressions. Freedom for ourselves – whoever “we” are – is inseparable from freedom for everyone. If emancipation is always self-emancipation, self-emancipation is always a collective endeavour.

Collective self-emancipation doesn’t require abandoning one’s identity – if that were even possible – but linking it with those of others in widening circles of solidarity. The story that opens Haider’s book is a good example: solidarity across identities is how a Pakistani-American boy could find inspiration in a long-dead Black Panther. Indeed, what Haider found so inspiring about Newton was precisely his vision of a solidarity strong enough to span the world. As an African American in a profoundly racist country, Newton couldn’t escape his identity. Neither could Haider, in a country convulsing with Islamophobic hatred. Yet “Newton did not stop with his own identity”, Haider writes. “His experience led him beyond himself – to take up a politics based on solidarity with Cuba, China, Palestine and Vietnam.”

Armed with the explanatory power of the black radical tradition, and Marxism more broadly, Newton connected the dots between different injustices. Haider follows this example, wielding the same tools to advance his critique of contemporary identity politics and make his case for a radical alternative. He draws on a wide range of sources, examining an interracial uprising in colonial Virginia and the riots in Newark three centuries later; exploring the ideas of WEB Du Bois, Judith Butler and Barbara Fields, among other great thinkers. And he regularly loops back to recent history, to analyse Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the other mobilisations that have moulded our political moment.

The result is riveting. Haider moves deftly over difficult terrain. His prose is precise and propulsive. His Marxism is not a mausoleum but a living, breathing thing, coursing with what Lenin called “the concrete analysis of the concrete situation”, faithful to the method of historical materialism while flexible in the face of a fluid social reality. And he writes as both a militant and a theorist, one who believes that theory is integral to political struggle and that theoretical rigour has political stakes.

The function of rigorousness, Louis Althusser once said, is to distinguish between “true ideas and false ideas”, between ideas that “serve the people” and ideas that serve its enemies. The American left has shown signs of life recently, but it has no shortage of enemies. Defeating them will require, among other things, ideas. Haider’s book contributes several. We will need more.  

      

A powerful challenge to the way we understand the politics of race and the history of anti-racist struggle