https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/13/gxyx-o13.html
EXCERPT:
The audio of the meeting makes clear that identity politics has nothing to do with improving the conditions of workers. It is about weaponizing identity to enrich the affluent upper middle class. The Los Angeles Democrats’ racist comments took place in the context of proposing ways to use racial identity to win patronage over government contracts and secure domination of various union locals so as to gain access to dues money and staffing positions.
It is not accidental that the racist conversation included the head of the county AFL-CIO, and it took place at its headquarters. Over the same period that the Democratic Party has made identity politics the axis of its operations, the trade unions have overseen massive losses in jobs and wages on behalf of American corporations, blaming foreign workers and promoting nationalism. De Leon and Cedillo were both longtime union bureaucrats before running for office, De Leon with the California Teachers Association and Cedillo with the Service Employees International Union.
Two of the figures exposed in the audio have close ties to the pseudo-left, which has long promoted nationalism and identity politics within the Democratic Party. In the audio, Cedillo talks about his former membership in the Stalinist Communist Party USA alongside previous Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. De Leon, for his part, spoke at a DSA-Los Angeles event in 2017. The Ventura County DSA hosted a “meet the candidate” event in 2018 to promote de Leon’s run for the US Senate.
Though the leaked audio exposes the racism of leading Latino Democrats, the Democratic Party is steeped in racialist politics. African American Democrat Stacey Abrams declared in 2018 that there are “inherent racial differences.” The New York Times’ 1619 Project is devoted to a racialist reinterpretation of history, presenting the past as well as the present as characterized by irreconcilable racial conflict.
The audio proves the Democrats’ racial politics and the open racism of the increasingly fascist Republican Party are only two sides of the same coin. Reading the transcript of the Los Angeles Democrats’ conversation on redistricting, one would hardly know that the slurs and jokes did not come out of the mouth of Trump himself.
Identity politics has greatly enriched the wealthiest minority of each racial group, but it has been a disaster for the working class of all races and nationalities. Nowhere is this truer than Los Angeles, where there are over 50 billionaires and 70,000 homeless people, where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $2,800 and gas costs $6 a gallon, where public transit is in shambles and 96,000 Angelenos have died of the coronavirus. Masses of undocumented immigrants confront daily the threat of deportation.
The depraved incident shows that racial and identity politics have nothing to do with the interests of the working class. A powerful movement of the global working class is emerging across every continent, and the task of socialists is to unite the working class across all racial, national, gender and ethnic lines into one movement for social equality. This means turning to class politics based on the real, economic divisions in society. It means waging a ruthless struggle against identity politics in all forms.
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