A learned and interesting even while poorly organized and ultimately unsatisfying look at intersectionality, or rather his views of the primacy of Marxist economics over ethnic identity. By the end of this short book (which seemed longer than it is and which would have benefited from more footnoting), he has debunked race as a basis for organizing, but that's where he ends - a smart guy who has spent too much time in academia. This is a great second draft, that would have benefited from a hard-nosed editor. I hope his next book will take the same wide-ranging reading and insights, and package them with a forceful, affirmative argument for how he things the next battles should be fought and won. ( )

"Our political agency through identity is exactly locks us into the state, what ensures our continued subjection. The pressing task, then, as Butler puts it, is to come up with ways of "refusing the type of individuality correlated with the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state."" ⁣

This is a short and readable book that I'd recommend as a read for a critique of contemporary identity politics. Haider includes historical examples of how certain categories did not exist before until they were created & how it completely changed the relations between communities (like the category "white" which was created to dissolve the potential of working class solidarity between indentured white labour & coming slave labour!)⁣
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IdPol was started as a revolutionary way to organise from below by Black feminists from the Combahee River Collective as existing (male-dominated Black Power & white-dominated Feminist) movements did not acknowledge their unique experiences. In its present form however, IdPol reifies identities & seeks inclusion into existing systems & the assertion of rights is made for the injured individual, so the advocacy is thus done (painstakingly slow too) through the level of the individual while also fixing them always as the oppressed & injured instead of also political agents. In this process of flattening, individual "categories" like race, gender, class risk being seen as possessing similar materialist relations when in fact they possess completely different social relations & history & ought to be understood as such.

IdPol is always seen as something that comes from the margin, thereby always setting the most privilege identity as "neutral" when it's untrue (white nationalism is identity politics too). It does not adequately challenge the fact that identity categories are created by existing powers in order to aid in the way they aim to distribute resources or enact certain polices/relations.

I do wonder however if his critique is already dated. I do agree with many of his critiques of the limitations but I’ve also seen people manage to self organise on the basis of identity while also maintaining an insurgency from below, though a lot of problems do persist in terms of lack of collective organising, solidarity, & the persistence neoliberal logic in activism, I feel like we are entering into new territories of organising that people are trying to figure out together! ( )

A fun polemic, though not particularly well ordered or memorable. I suspect I just enjoyed reading someone who agreed with me on identity politics, which seems to be pretty hard, when your options on the topic are so often Mark Lilla or people complaining about Mark Lilla. Not sure I learned anything theoretical, then, but a good bibliography, which I'll be able to dig into later. ( )