Pathways of Identity Politics and the Clandestine CIA Connections

From New Statesman 2012 February report by Lawry Penny

It is interesting to note that Ford and Rockefeller and the other foundations with strong CIA connections started giving grants in the early 70's to study race and gender. It was a sudden move towards identity politics by these organisations and the theory is that the reason they did this was to balk-anise the left and to prevent it from pursuing any kind of a class or economic analysis. 

Without denying the justice of what you're saying, this is not an irrelevant theory. I don't think, anyway. yearns for the good old days, when issues were big, women didn't want to be imperial spies, and idealism and ethical indignation were accepted from non victims. In 1977 the CIA notified eighty academic institutions that they had unwittingly been involved in surprise! -- mind-control research. The Women's Liberation Movement may be considered as subversive to the New Left and revolutionary movements as they have proven to be a divisive and factionalizing factor.It could be well recommended as a counterintelligence movement to weaken the revolutionary movement." 

This was from an August, 1969 report by the head of the San Francisco FBI office. Within several years, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations were pumping millions into women's studies programs on campus. Struck by how much time we'd spent on our (the panelists') race and gender, I made the point to note Brandt's argument that, in the Seventies, the student left may have been subtly guided toward race/gender issues as a way to get the movement not to deal with class or economics -- which, if they'd kept that focus, might have led to an alliance with the labor unions.

According to that argument, in other words, the rise of what we call "identity politics" was engineered to drive a wedge between the left and working-class whites, who now perceived the academic left as focused on "diversity" instead of economic justice; and this estrangement also made it easy for the right to woo white workers by playing on their racism and sexual anxieties (which had already started happening under Nixon, and which would soon help put Ronald Reagan in the White House).

Feminism was hijacked Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones

The Central Intelligence Agency played a key role in hijacking second wave feminism via the work of Gloria Steinem, who is still a noted feminist icon today. Steinem admitted that she was recruited by the CIA to infiltrate youth counter-culture movements in the late 1950’s, and subsequently emerged as a leading icon of second wave feminism in the 1960’s. Steinem subsequently received funding from the CIA and the Rockefeller foundation to set up Ms. Magazine, a feminist publication. The CIA’s role in steering and managing second wave feminism again underscores the fact that feminism is not a grass roots “people” movement, it is a top down system of control used to divide and conquer and is run by powerful individuals who care little for actual women’s rights.

Prof: S.Sudhish speech at the MN Vijayan Memorial Lecture 2014 - Part 1

If spying and snooping are not crime, how is censorship an offense?

Are we mere Social Media Goods? USAID think so!

First Story: 

iStrategyLabs, a digital consulting company has recently published the study that 'Facebook' is getting older and that 3 million teens leave Facebook in three years. This revelation had become instant sensation in the world of internet. As we read about the history of Facebook as the social networking pioneer, we see that it become a runaway hit in campuses in the early days of its inception. Hence this analysis may look harmless and just a routine fantasy study from those hundred odd social media analytics projects. However, teens being the most vulnerable section in a vulnerable society, Facebook, social media marketers and lastly USAID is interested in this trend. 

Second Story:

Flicker: Terry Robinson

USAID is one of the clients of iStategyLabs as we see in their web portal. In the Social Media week, USAID has briefed about the importance of social media for spreading the strategy and that video games are pivotal to extending the strategy in those societies with censorship. As Wikipedia says, Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems.Thus video games and gamification of ideas has been an identified as an area through which USAID can reach out to the dissidents in those nations. There are two clever reasons for this. Video analytics technology world over is in the nascent phase and that online video games can quickly bring together people and initiate networking among them.

Third Story:

There is another interesting link showing a possible USAID grant for developing a technology to identify atrocity related information. As we read further, we can see that USAID together with Humanity United has launched a program called tech challenge to find the best technical solutions for this requirement. As USAID is making huge investment in African, Asian nations with regional, ethnic, racial and all sort of instabilities and thenceforth to topple the soveriegn governments, this is hailed as a great achievement. As we read in the book, Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, US State Department has spend $50 million in a range of internet freedom programs since 2008 and congress has allocated another $20 million for the department in 2012. USAID has been mentioned as a strategic arm in flexing US interests in social media space. 

Social media has become the great market place of robbing citizens of their sovereignty in life and expressions. When identity theft and information spy craft are becoming the most effective tools in the intelligent warfare, we have to understand that the problem does not originate or end it in the surveillance tools and technologies, rather it stems from the age old imperial interests and their treacherous strategies for anti-sovereign interventions. The world must unite against these veiled designs in social networks.

Terrains of Identity Politics: Some Thoughts

Identity in the times of latent capitalism...

Identity politics spells out various meanings. This convenience is used by different movements. It communicates something surreal yet ubiquitous in a society. It is used as a wrapper for many movements from its inception. Some treat it as a counter current for class politics; where as some others use it against nationalist politics. There are some others who consider it as a prelude to the class politics. Beneath this polymorphic composition and ambiguity there lay vexed questions on the terrains of identity politics.

In the works of Michael Keith and Steven Pile [Politics and Spaces of identity], modernist identity politics have created a sort of essential-ism that rests on the exclusivity of certain norms. They allege that this sort of exclusivity and selectivity of modernist identity politics have made it very divisive. This was not congenial for working toward a multiple, pluralized yet still radical conceptualization of agency and identity.

We can see an array of works on the national identity discourses. It may tempt us to think that identity politics have superseded the national polity. Simon Bekker defines Identity politics as the search of reconciliation between nation building and demands by different citizens for recognition of communal identity. He goes on to say that identity politics has emerged as a primary challenge in many nation states. He accuses the national tendencies to achieve homogeneity as the primary reason for the unrest and ethnic conflicts. This conveniently ignores the external interventions that stir ethnic unrest.

Moreover, homogeneity is an apparent ideology resting on the ethos of cultural nationalism. In that sense, the attempt for a cultural homogeneity itself is an identity politics. Rashtriya Swyayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which preaches a ‘Hindutva India’ is one instant example for this. They are the ones who raise voice for uniform civil code and hegemony of Hindutva ideology.

Thus any attempt to unify the nation based on culture or religion or language devoid of considerations of productive forces and the social relations will become identity politics in reality. Stanford Encyclopedia highlights that identity politics strive to achieve a political freedom for a specific constituency of marginalized people. But this fails to explain the causes of marginalization. The awareness that only a particular constituency of people is marginalized is because of identity politics. It confines the perspective to specific identity ignoring the totality in exploitation.

In a market economy, if someone says that only tribes are marginalized, it is a cruelty to slum dwellers and the millions in the unorganized sector. The process of marginalization acts as a time warp for all those who labor Only those outside the dominant mode of production will be in a perpetual state of marginalization. Detaching tribes from the dominant mode of production by way of identity politics will only worsen their plight.

The case of Narmada Bacho Andolan (NBA) is a grim example of identity politics. The apolitical struggle of environmental politics detached the struggling people from the political process and its dynamics. Their voices became unheard in the political ecosystem. What the identity politics has achieved in NBA is creating a perpetual apolitical site. This generates a question: who creates marginalization, NBA or National government?

Capitalism has evolved to become sustainable in ecology of unequal modes of production. It no longer standardizes the economy. As capitalism now thrives on the expanding market economy rather than nation states, it stimulates multiplicity of choices. It is in this focal point where the pluralism of identity politics and the market’s desire for multiple choices converge.

The question of identity rests on the epidemiological currents initiated by modernism. The essence of modernism lies in the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize itself, not in order to subvert it, but to enrich it more firmly in its area of competence [Modernist Painting, Clement Greenberg]. Thus it inherits a tendency to criticize itself. As self-criticism is the organic element of Marxism, it is easy to draw parallel lines between Modernism and Marxism. The awareness of identity is a dialectical process between objective knowledge and subjective experience. Identity is a subjective knowledge of objective experience as well. It is rooted in both of them. Thus identity is the dialectical product of objectivity and subjectivity. Identity of identity is nothing but the labor process and life process. Hence identity is both reflexive and self critical in nature. With the progress of either objective knowledge or subjective experience identity undergoes transformation in form and content. This means that identity of a child born to a religious family undergoes change if he studies in a national institution and it changes further if goes on to work in a multi-national corporate organization.

Thus if class is the dynamic product of self in labour, identity is the transient process by which self changes. It is this volatility of identity that becomes the instrument of imperialism. It captures one by its fractured identity and tempts to organize based on it. Fractured identity and identity crisis can be rooted in both crisis in knowledge and crisis in experience. It implies a crisis in the criticism itself. It is this fractured identity or identity crisis that is being targeted by the architects of identity politics. These formations of identity groups are not self made always. Imperialism purchases the identity formations through various funding agencies. And using the power of money, imperialism exercises hegemony over the identity groups. And using this funded economy, identity groups will be integrated to the imperial market economy. Collectively, these preys can be named as social capital. -- Gokul Alex