Revolutionary Suicide: Risking Everything to Transform Society and Live Fully
by Lynice Pinkard
Tikkun, October 22, 2013
Global capitalism is a system, or rather, an interlocking network of systems. Permeating every area of our lives, it operates much like the Catholic Church operated in Europe before the Reformation. It transcends nationhood but is immersed in politics. Its faults and hypocrisies can easily be pointed to, but that does little to sway the hearts and minds of the vast majority of people who have faith in its ideals or power. Its influence permeates every aspect of our daily lives. It forms a universe that controls our entire life cycle and rituals that guide the cycles of our days. It shapes what we have come to expect and to view as “normal.” Indeed, it is more powerful than the church ever was; Marx nailed his theses on the door and capitalism has only grown in power, crushing its reformation in a way the Catholic Church never could.
It is, of course, ludicrous to believe that identity politics as it is conventionally understood could do much at all to halt the voracious appetite of a force this powerful. But it is similarly ludicrous to believe that all we need to do is to “give up identity politics” and do “real” and “important” work on capitalism, or to believe that if we address the economic system, racism will be resolved because it is secondary to economic oppression. White supremacy constantly works against our efforts to build principled coalitions to confront global capitalism.
The problem with narrow forms of identity politics is that they assume that groups of people organized around identity can achieve liberation from oppression in silos—in other words, as separate, individual identity groups. But the truth is that we are not individually salvageable.
I’d like to present an alternative to conventional identity politics, one that requires that we understand the way that capitalism itself has grown out of a very particular kind of identity politics—white supremacy—aimed at securing “special benefits” for one group of people. It is not sufficient to speak only of identities of race, class, and gender. I believe we must also speak of identities in relation to domination. To what extent does any one of us identify with the forces of domination and participate in relations that reinforce that domination and the exploitation that goes with it? In what ways and to what extent are we wedded to our own upward mobility, financial security, good reputation, and ability to “win friends and influence people” in positions of power? Or conversely, do we identify (not wish to identify or pretend to identify but actually identify by putting our lives on the line) with efforts to reverse patterns of domination, empower people on the margins (even when we are not on the margins ourselves), and seek healthy, sustainable relations?
