Identity, Allyship, and Difference
This is a special crossover between Spadework and European Alternatives. Earlier this year, our co-host Daniel Gutiérrez, had been a fellow at European Alternatives’ Academy of Migrant Organizing – a structure dedicated to bringing together migrant organizers and activists across Germany in order to talk about shared organizational and movement-building problems in the hope that we can develop a lasting forum of collective co-research and co-learning. As part of this forum, fellows were asked to collectively forge a toolbox addressing shared problems they highlighted and uncovered over the course of the fellowship. This episode functions as a contribution to that toolbox that you can find on Instagram and in the episode notes. In this episode, Daniel talks to Academy of Migrant Organizing fellow Berena Yogarajah about the difficulties of working across difference, allyship, comradeship, and problems that often surface through identity-based politics. Berena has been involved in grassroots political organization for almost a decade. She is currently based in Cologne, Germany, and is a member of Interventionistische Linke – an extra-parliamentary, emancipatory left-organization. She was most recently involved with Tatort Porz, a campaign aimed at securing the conviction of a right-wing politician who attempted to murder youth for racist reasons in Cologne, Germany – in a scenario not unlike that of the Treyvon Martin murder in the United States. She is mostly involved in anti-racist struggles and generally concerns herself with strategies of identity politics and grappling with the tension of universality and difference. Over the course of the episode, Daniel and Berena reflect on the tensions produced when politics begin and end with identity, rather than the destinations we’d like to reach from different starting points. While acknowledging the importance of having safe spaces within the ecology of the left, Berena emphasizes that spaces of struggle are those spaces where discomfort is produced by the differences we encounter and struggle with, towards common horizons of emancipation. Drawing from personal experiences and encounters, she cautions that too much of an emphasis on self-distinction can lead to self-referential navel gazing, rather than the cross-movement development of power we desperately need. It is this underscoring of contingency that Daniel appreciates throughout the discussion. For him – and those of us at Spadework – it is critical to understand that the ways in which discourses (in this case, those about and around identity) connected to practices are always contingent and politically negotiated.That is to say, what practices are generated through discourses of identity in Berkeley, California might be very different from those connections in Barrio Logan, San Diego or Neukölln, Berlin. In the same way that the practices articulated to Marxism looked different from context to context in, say the 1960s, so too must post-Marxist discourses like those around identity. Such an understanding of the contingent relation between discourse and practice allow the two to agree that the politics developed out of discourses of identity are not immune to authoritarian, moralistic, or dogmatic practices. And it is such connections that make power impossible to build.