Identity Politics, Criticism, and Self-Criticism

If one of French Maoism’s main contributions to the sixties’ cultural turn was a theory of the relative autonomy of ideology, one of US Maoism’s main contributions was identity politics. A product of the application of Mao’s theory of contradiction to US circumstances, identity politics also represented a reinvention of ideology critique by US Third World and Black feminist movements, though in this case directed to practical ends.