The Identity Myth

We are in crisis.

As a society we have never been less connected.

The internet and globalisation fuel ignorance and anger, while the disconnect between people's reality and perceived identities has never been greater.

Karl Marx outlined the idea of a material 'base' and politico-cultural 'superstructure'. According to this formula, a material reality - wealth, income, occupation - determined your politics, leisure habits, tastes, and how you made sense of the world. Today, the importance of material deprivation, in terms of threats to life, health and prosperity, are as acute as ever. But the identities apparently generated by these realities are increasingly detached from material circumstances. At the same time, different identities are needlessly conflated through a process of reeling off a list of -isms and -phobias, and are lumped together, as though these groups all somehow have something in common with one another. Th is process is not just inappropriate but obscures the specific nature of problems being faced.

In The Identity Myth, David Swift covers the four different kinds of identity most susceptible to this trend - class, race, sex and age. He considers how the boundaries of identities are policed and how diverse versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends. Ultimately, it is not that identities are simply more 'complex' than they appear but that there are more important commonalities.

In a powerful call to arms, Swift argues that we must unite against these identity myths and embrace our differences to beat inequality.

“Swift persuasively argues that economic and technological trends have amplified the obsession with identity... [He] makes a convincing argument”

The Times
Swift makes a compelling case against the preoccupation with different identities of minorities, especially on the left, as he does in favour of greater focus on what unites rather than divides people in diverse societies like ours. And he offers numerous, convincing illustrations of how internally diverse in outlook, values and interest are those of the same class, colour, gender and age-group. Jewish Chronicle
A fun and clever book Spiked

David Swift is a historian and writer based in London who specialises on the history and contemporary politics of the British Left, in particular in relation to race, class, gender and popular culture. He has researched and taught at several universities in the UK and abroad. His first book, A Left for Itself, was released by the radical publisher Zero Books in 2019.

Swift has written on the state of the Left for a variety of traditional and digital media including The Times, Independent, LabourList, Fabian Review, Progress Online, Spectator, Jewish Chronicle, UnHerd, and The Critic.

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