We have come to the conclusion of Elite Capture. Now that radical identity politics has been co-opted, deference politics doesn’t cut it despite our good intentions, and identity-reductionism is deployed to uphold systems of uneven power— what can be done?

Throughout the book, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò weaves in the history of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and their anti-colonial fight as an example of constructive politics. Let’s see what that means.

Deference politics can be observed at all political orientations and levels today, due to the misuse, neutralization, and co-optation of the original revolutionary identity politics.

First, though, we’ll lay the context with his critique of a popular identity-based practice that is all too familiar to many of us, which he calls deference politics. This deference politics can be observed at all political orientations and levels today, due to the misuse, neutralization, and co-optation of the original revolutionary identity politics.

That original meaning of identity politics as a means of solidarity and to address the demands of Black lesbian feminist socialists has since been neutralized and co-opted—elite captured—for various non-liberatory purposes, even to uphold the very systems of capitalism and imperialism that the Collective was fighting against.

The CRC developed their stance, which they called identity politics, because they were sidelined both in the feminist movement and Black nationalist movement, and because their political priorities were devalued in the political organizations they participated in.

Combahee is the name of a river in South Carolina where Harriet Tubman led a military raid and freed more than 700 enslaved people during the U.S. Civil War in 1863. The CRC did not just want to fight for women’s rights in the U.S., they aspired to the overthrow of capitalism. The term identity politics was first used in their 1977 manifesto, establishing themselves as an organization of queer, Black feminist socialists.

The point of fighting elite capture, is the quest to achieve radical equality in the distribution of resources and power in our world.