Welcome to another episode of confronting capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.

How's it going, V?

Still going good, Melissa.

Let's do this thing.

All right.

So one thing I've been thinking about a lot, as we're still sort of in this post-election, what the hell just happened mode, is the conversation

that's developing around identity politics. For basically a decade, not only was identity politics central to

Democratic Party center left politics, but you couldn't even criticize it without being

smeared as a racist, as sexist, whatever, whatever term could just instantly

discredit any criticism while shutting down any critical thought of what that criticism

represented.

And now that Trump is won, again, suddenly everybody's talking about what a problem identity

politics is.

Right.

So in order to be able to understand or analyze identity politics, you've got to first define it.

Yeah.

You want to define identity politics in as neutral a way as possible so that you're not seen to be building

into the definition your criticisms of it. So we want a definition that most people can

recognize as being legitimate. Now, how do most people understand identity politics? Well,

I would say there's a couple of things that people associate with it. The first is a attention on

discrimination as being at the essence of race domination. Discrimination disparities. By

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