This writer, activist, and historian from Oakland provides a history of the struggle for identity liberation within Marxist inspired organizations. Although such organizations were not always on the right side of these struggles in terms of both theory and practice, he argues convincingly that they generally were. I would argue and make clear that this history is in sharp contrast to capitalist ruling classes' desire to exploit such issues to divide workers using various social identity issues.
However I have noticed a new ploy used by the liberal or subversive operatives within the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that has been used very effectively to promote an imperialist agenda. I am referring to the insidious use of support for social identity movements by the Democratic Party as an effective way to recruit especially young people to the party which otherwise promotes a very aggressive imperialist agenda throughout the world.
Such an analysis accounts for the following paragraph by Blanc:
Today it is far more common to dismiss the working class than to idealize it. Liberal identity politics has spread so widely that even a corporate politician like Hillary Clinton can plausibly discuss intersectionality. This climate demands that we rediscover the hidden history of the labor movement’s struggle against all forms of oppression.Thus capitalist agents of this strategy have used a selective history of working class movements to discredit them, and simultaneously using the Democratic Party to promote social identity politics to recruit young people to the party. Instead of capitalist agents using social identities to divide and rule working people as they have so frequently throughout history, nowadays there is a section of the ruling class that cynically promotes the issue of social identities as a method of recruitment and co-optation of young people in support of a party that otherwise is a driver of imperialism. Hence we have seen liberals/agents in this party championing the causes of gay lifestyles, sexual identity, feminism, and others more rhetorically such as ethnicity/race and religion--even the legalization of marijuana which they demonized for years as a gatekeeper drug that led people to all kinds of hellish ends!
