Identity politics has lead us to a dead-end, or worse in those cases where it has lead us to come against those who are allied with us broadly under the "Left" movement. The movements that go under the broad title of identity politics range in being a project of resentment and a creative drive for liberation. And as we constantly conceive of ever deeper differences, of ever more complex attributes to form identity we create divisions that lead to internal conflicts between would-be friends. This is the current state of identity politics and as such it has failed to bring about a lived freedom. However, all too often the step to heal this division comes in the form of negated these differences in an empty universalism of fantastical events. Of course, this doesn't actually heal the problem but aggravates it further. And though I agree with many in this position that too many proponents of identity politics or multiculturalism operate within the liberal ideology of rights and emancipatory justice, they fail to direct a way out of the current quagmire.

The concept of multitude as developed by Hardt and Negri deserves the recognition it has received because it has begun to show, in popular terms, this way out through the political action of the multitude. However, their two major works fail to show how the multitude is constructed to be a revolutionary subject, and so Negri's essay "Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo" is necessary reading in its explication of poverty. For Negri "Poverty is the multitude in action", that is Negri conceives of poverty as a universal for the multitude (which consists of all movements toward liberation). That is poverty brings us to a position of common-being with our fellow singular persons, without equalizing these singularities or flattening out difference. The way I read this, and I believe Dave Belcher shares this position as well, is not as a pure material poverty (though certainly this is a part of it), but as a poverty of the subject or a poverty of our very being (this makes Goodchild's view problematic that Negri - and other political theory - is primarily concerned with creating a proper political subject). That is, even though I may be white and a man, this is, in truth, an oppressive position by virtue of my being a part of oppression (though it would differ for each singular person). More radically, by proclaiming this poverty I resist this very oppression that I am subjected to. The famous dictum of Subcommandate Marcos expresses this more poetically:

Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a Jew in Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio.... A pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on Saturday night in any neighborhood in any city in Mexico, a striker in the CTM, a reporter writing filler stories for the back pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 pm, a peasant without land, an unemployed worker... an unhappy student, a dissident amid free market economics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains of southeast Mexico. So Marcos is a human being, any human being, in this world. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized and oppressed minorities, resisting and saying, 'Enough'!

At the end of Multitude Hardt and Negri write, "In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future. This will be the real political act of love." Unlike Hardt and Negri I conceive of this coming event not as a reproduction of May '68 or the Chiapas revolution, though both important moments of human liberation and the latter being an important moment of human autonomy. They, however, fail to give a universal ground of experience and the experience of poverty must be brought about by material condition. Thus I conceive this coming moment as the approaching ecological and economic collapse. Goodchild speaks of this as the site of universal experience and, thankfully, it can be that universal experience even in its very "to-come" for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. This brings the poverty of the subject out of abstraction and into its materiality. So, even though I am still far too racist (I refuse the title sexist since I don't see it, but my racism is all too apparent), I'm glad I live where I do: among black and Hispanics, among guilty proto-yuppies who want out, among the poor in transportation, the poor in style, the poor in education, the poor in friendship, etc.

To end on a personal note, I have to admit that if I were to take poverty seriously as this common place of the revolutionary subject, I would find some way to forget my whiteness that often leads me to avoid talking to the Hispanics and blacks in our neighborhood. Not because I distrust them, but rather because I always think, "They know I'm white. They know I'm tied up into this system that is fucking all of us." Poverty, for me, is found behind a black mask that I have yet to put on and I often wonder if I got all these tattoos as an attempt to cover over my whiteness, not out of guilt, but out of a desire to accept my poverty and have others see it too.