I was born in the ’80s, which means I was a child during the ’90s. I remember them, but with the perspective of a child; I saw things on the news; I overheard grownups and parroted their opinions. I didn’t start to become politically aware in my own right until the early ’00s, and didn’t start to become an ‘activist’ until midway through university, by which point the “Coalition of the Willing” was deeply entrenched in Iraq. My first exposure to the broad Left, then, was the Stop the War movement. (I was also involved, actually rather more heavily, in an Injustice of the Day student campaigning group, but as they were mostly of an age with me, they didn’t have the depth of campaign experience that is relevant for what I want to discuss here.)
StW, or at least my acquaintances within it, seemed to be made up mostly of anti-nuclear activists, longtime pacifists (obvs.), socialists (or at least sellers of The Socialist Worker), and the regrouped remnants of the anti-globalization movement. Most of these, having found common purpose, seemed to share a collective scorn for the ‘Identity Politics of the ’90s’, which had so divided and derailed the movement from fighting the real enemy: capitalism, neoliberalism, the military-industrial complex. My memories of the ’90s include an awful lot of people emphasising their racial, gender, and sexual identities, and terms like ‘political correctness’ and ‘affirmative action’ were forever on everyone’s lips; and so I took these older campaigners at their word — their narrative certainly made a lot of sense, and helped me explain to myself how I could have reached the age of 18 without knowing that living socialists existed in the West, or how academics like Fukuyama could write bullshit like “The End of History”.
However, I am starting to grow skeptical of my activist elders. I know that, for all intents and purposes, I just wasn’t there in the ’90s, and therefore can’t really comment on what it was like, but when I see things like discussions about women’s safer spaces within the occupy camps repeatedly derailed by comments like “let’s not let this movement get bogged down in identity politics like the protest movements in the ’90s did”, I start to wonder. Did they? WERE the ’90s a time when anti-capitalists laid down their ideologies in order to focus on the colour of their skin or the composition of their genitalia, as the mainstream narrative would have us believe? Or was it simply that women, people of colour, and queer people of all acronyms looked around them and saw that the broad left, just like the rest of society, was silencing their voices and their concerns, patronizing them, and telling them that their problems would be dealt with after whatever other big problem they were protesting had been solved? The ’90s, after all, saw the rise of the anti-globalization movement, in opposition to the towering capitalist globalization movements coming out of the most powerful world government and inter-government agencies of the day (and now), as well as the same old pacifists and hard-bitten anti-nuke campaigners and all the other “yes that’s what I’ve been saying all along” fringe activist movements that are always with us. They clearly weren’t a time when no one was focusing on ideology. But, you know, what do I know. I was only a kid; I wasn’t really “there”.
