By Spike Barrington
(Dedicated to Charlie Kirk)
Identity politics is a political mobilization and power/rights advocacy movement centered on group identity labels and affiliations. It is often seen as a uniquely modern phenomenon, but from a long-term perspective of political development and its intrinsic essence, identity politics has always been a key logic and primary method in human political mobilization. In classical eras, identity already served as an efficient form of political mobilization. Classical political communities were often bound by natural or “quasi-natural” identities such as blood ties, ethnicity, and religion, distinguishing communities or collectives from “others.” For example, citizenship in ancient Greek city-states was limited to adult males; Rome strictly divided Romans from the conquered through citizenship; medieval Europe maintained order through the hierarchical identities of nobles, clergy, and commoners; and the Indian caste system similarly reflected early societies’ heavy reliance on identity. As eras evolved, the specific manifestations of identity politics continually changed, but they always retained consistent intrinsic values and logic.
This article proposes an analytical framework, dividing real-world identity politics into three historical stages, and points out that this identity mobilization logic exhibits and will continue to exhibit characteristics of cyclical regression and recurrence. These three stages are: the first stage, primitive identity politics based on natural attributes like blood ties, ethnicity, religion, and weakly abstracted constructed identity labels; the second stage, high-level abstract class politics represented by Marxist class analysis; and the third stage, the contemporary resurgence of primitive identity politics under the banner of “cultural Marxism.” Notably, the second stage’s Marxist class analysis represents a tremendous leap in identity politics theory, while the third stage’s cultural Marxism is not a continuation or development of Marxism, but rather a regression and repackaging of earlier primitive identity mobilization.
In early human societies and traditional societies, political mobilization was mainly built on intuitive and low-abstraction identity labels. For example, people from the same patrilineal or matrilineal clan were seen as natural political and social communities, with alliances, conflicts, and inheritance almost entirely based on such blood identities. Identity labels in this stage had natural intuitiveness; people often joined political conflicts or formed action alliances due to birth, ethnicity, or ritualized religious affiliations. The Crusades in medieval Europe were largely mobilized based on the religious identity opposition between the Christian world and infidels; during the rise of modern nation-states, nationalism became the primary identity appeal, with 18th-19th century European countries mobilizing around linguistic and cultural identities to construct nation-states. Additionally, more primitive racial identity constructions based primarily on visible skin color and physiological features also took shape in this stage as primitive label forms. For instance, in American slavery and South African apartheid systems, “black and white races” were constructed as foundational identities determining social status and rights allocation, with their enormous political effects still influencing today.
In this stage, the characteristics of identity construction for launching political mobilization were low-level abstraction and strong emotional mobilization: identity labels were often directly drawn from innate physiological features or unchosen primitive cultural affiliations. Such political mobilization based on primordial identities often led to social division and solidified conflicts, as different groups, and even within the same group, lacked and found it difficult to establish universal political value consensus, merely flowing naturally from instincts and biological impulses.
However, although primitive identity politics lacked sophisticated theoretical packaging, it possessed a natural “structural mobilization advantage.” Humanity’s need for community belonging made calls based on ethnicity or religion highly resonant; moreover, these identities were often linked to basic emotions like survival security and honor, as well as aggressive instincts, thus more capable of sparking rapid and widespread political responses than abstract ideas. Many historical power shifts stemmed from conflicts or integrations of identity affiliations—from the cohesion of ancient tribal alliances to the rise of modern national independence movements, all embodying the power of natural identities in political mobilization. Yet, the inherent limitations accompanying this power are evident: it takes distinguishing “us” from “them” as its theoretical limit, with ubiquitous partisanship and attacks on differences accompanying nearly the entire pre-modern human history, also providing soil for the exploration and birth of humanistic civilization.