During a recent public round table discussion, I was dismayed when a particularly well spoken civil rights activist made the claim that 'all politics is identity politics'. The problem wasn't that he was wrong. He was in fact quite right about that. The problem was what the statement was meant to imply. Now, people like to complain alot about 'identity politics'. Most people don't really understand what it is, and as a result and precisely because they don't, alot of people also have no idea what counts as an alternative to identity politics. That is: if not identity politics, then what? What other kind of politics is there?

Now, the civil rights activist's point was quite simple: all politics has an effect on the identity of those involved, therefore, all politics is identity politics. This is, in some sense undeniable. But here's the issue: this doesn't mean that identity politics exhausts what politics can involve. All politics is identity politics, but all politics isn't just identity politics. It's like how all humans have noses, but that doesn't mean that humanity is defined by their noses. So again, how do we cash this out? If not identity politics, then what? As examples of 'what else', we can consider two approaches to politics that are not immediately oriented to questions of identity: (1) Distributive politics; and (2) Participatory politics.

Let's begin with distributive politics. Distributive politics involves how societal goods are allocated in society. Societal goods might include: access to means of justice (courts, lawyers, legal information), availability of education (schools, libraries, funding for schools), ease of access to 'life-goods' like housing, electricity, water, food, and jobs, or else social and geographic means of mobility (transport, infrastructure like roads and highways, fuel), etc. Distributive politics is, in many ways, the most basic aspect of politics. Political fights simply often begin over who has access to what.

Now, just like how identity politics does not exhaust the scope of politics, neither does distributive politics. The main critique of distributive politics is that it doesn't put into question who is doing the distributing. Both democratic and fascist societies concern themselves with the distribution of goods. However, making it a question of who does the distributing, is a question of participatory politics. Who 'participates'. Politics at this level involves contests over who has the power of distribution, and how accessible and changeable that power is. A totalitarian state generally 'fixes' who has power here: an unchangeable state. A democratic state allows who has power to change: parties, at its most limited, 'the people', at its most expansive.

Alot of the above is, in many ways, politics 101. But it sometimes takes a little bit of 'back to basics' insofar as there seems to be alot of confusion about what politics can consist in. Neither distributive nor participatory politics exhaust what count as politics either, any more than identity politics. The last thing to add is that none of this implies identity politics is 'bad'. Only that it is one kind of politics among a range of possible political action, and that it is a question of tactics as to when and where it ought to be employed.