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identity politics is a huge problem.
whether you can really connect it to fascism in isolation is not obvious, however. using a factoid-level approach to mussolini is a not terribly new way to try to make this rickety equation operate--it amounts to a recapitulation of his political trajectory and a little tautology built into the sentence (identity in marx, identity in the--one-dimensional--fascim he made--the assumption, which is asserted in the sentence, not argued---is the consistency in the notion of identity across positions.)
the account of identity politics that you have here really doesn't say anything about what they are--where they come from, what they were supposed to do--but "left" identity politics--which is mostly an academic affair--was consistently pitched as an oppositional politics, emphasizing the particular AS OVER AGAINST more homogenizing patterns of solidarity building. the writer skips over or never understood that part.
so at bottom, i don't see a coherent understanding of fascism in that piece.
i see an interesting kernel of an argument about the problematic role of bourgeois conceptions of identity in mass politics--but there's so much one-dimensional stuff around it that i would think it'd require another writer to make it work.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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