Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide 9781040035818, 1040035817

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Class Struggle and Identity Politics

Contemporary bipartisan politics undermines socialist solidarity by ignoring class issues and pitting advocates of social justice against ethno-​national chauvinists. This guide to the recent wave of “woke” culture wars provides a radical class analysis and critique of the most popular academic trends around diversity and inclusion: radical democracy, intersectionality, privilege theory, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. The book further explains the complexity of today’s cultural conflicts by examining how these issues are viewed across the political spectrum, including populist and postmodern perspectives. Exploring historical, cultural, political and economic developments since the postwar era, this follow-​up to Identity Trumps Socialism provides the reader with everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about the campus wars that have gone mainstream. Marc James Léger is a Marxist cultural theorist living in Montreal. He is the author of Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (2022), as well as Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of PostRepresentation (2022), and editor of Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2023).

Class Struggle and Identity Politics A Guide Marc James Léger

Designed cover image: A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) by Marc Quinn and Jen Reid, 2020. Photograph © Lee Hutchinson, Curator of History, Bristol Museums. Concept by Marc James Léger. Vector design by Cayley Sorochan First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Marc James Léger The right of Marc James Léger to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​75277-​8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​75158-​0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​48392-​2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003483922 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: The Identity of Politics

vi 1

Part I  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics

19

Part II   Diversity Across the Political Spectrum

85

1 Identity Politics  20 2 Radical Democracy  30 3 Populism  34 4 Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory  42 5 Intersectionality and Decoloniality  56

1 Conservatism and Fascism  86 2 Liberalism and Neoliberalism  102 3 Postmodernism  116 4 Anarchism  130 5 Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  140 6 Socialism and Communism  158

Part III Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left 185 1 The Problem of Anti-​Universalism  185 2 The Difference Between Socialist Politics and Identity Politics  196 3 Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism  207 Class, Class, Class  220

Conclusion: Theses on Class Struggle and Identity Politics Bibliography Index

235 239 257

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Acknowledgements

This publication began as an addendum to the book I edited titled Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism (Routledge 2023). Although the distinct contributors to that volume cover most of the best arguments one can find on the question of class, identity and left universality, specific topics remain unaddressed and readers might wonder why there is no discussion of privilege theory, decoloniality or critical race theory. As a standalone monograph, Class Struggle and Identity Politics complements Identity Trumps Socialism by filling in those gaps while pursuing the same programme of emancipatory universality. I would like to mention here a mistake in my introduction to Identity Trumps Socialism where I attribute to Walter Benn Michaels’ concept of post-​history the substitution of political beliefs for matters of ontology (19). What was intended is the opposite: the replacement in post-​history of political beliefs with matters of ontology. No one works alone. I take my inspiration here from those scholars who have brought valuable insights to contemporary discussions of identity and class. Given that there are very few people on the academic left today who maintain a commitment to Marxism and universalism, I am especially grateful to Michael Gibson and Craig Fowlie at Routledge for making this publication possible. Thanks also to Lewis Hodder at Routledge, Priyanka Durai at Newgen and Lesley Hay Editorial. Special thanks to Cayley Sorochan for helpful comments on the draft manuscript.

Introduction The Identity of Politics

American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. … The left has a lot to answer for here. There’s been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics. – Noam Chomsky For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its abolition, not the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of the existing society but the foundation of a new one. – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Contemporary progressive politics are increasingly difficult to understand. Part of this difficulty relates to postwar and postmodern developments in identity politics, which complicate traditional left-​ to-​ right spectrum categories. Whereas the “democratic invention” that was inaugurated with the Enlightenment established the “rights of man” as the privilege of propertied white men, the notion of civil and human rights was gradually extended to working-​class men, women, children, minority groups, immigrants and refugees. Political liberalism added the notion of group rights to that of individual rights and national sovereignty. In the nineteenth century, socialism and anarchism challenged the principle of natural rights as falsely universal. The purpose of this challenge was not to cast conservative doubt on the principles of Enlightenment universality, emancipation and progress, but to overcome obstacles to their full realization. While the left argued that the discourse of civil society protected economic inequality and capitalist exploitation, twentieth-​century fascism refashioned the Hegelian notion of totality into an organic conception of the master race. The fascist appropriation of Marxism through the contrived politics of national socialism assailed liberal universality as well as bourgeois materialism, distorting the history of class struggle to suggest, on the evidence of the First World War, that the masses would prefer to die in wars against other nations than in a struggle against domination by their own national bourgeoisies. DOI: 10.4324/9781003483922-1

2  Introduction One of the problems that socialists face today is the ways in which postmodern theories and social movements have inadvertently revived fascist ideology, albeit in micropolitical forms that do not seek to take over the state but that instead work in capillary, horizontalist or anonymous ways, through relations of desire rather than relations of production, through unofficial means rather than formal institutions, and through the regulation of dispositions rather than political ideology, religion or law. The fascist rejection of Enlightenment universality and internationalist class struggle is now noticeable in postmodern practices that emphasize cultural and social relativism, race and identity reductionism, the classless rhetoric of power and empowerment, and cross-​class allegiances within identitarian silos. While postwar anti-​foundationalism was not intended to support reactionary politics, but was instead designed to foster new forms of opposition that do not draw upon the dogmas of Stalinist parties, its theoretical innovations are now the presuppositions of dubious anti-​universalist intellectuals, methodologies and political agendas. The resurgence of the far right in Western democracies is cause for us to consider whether, how and to what extent the postmodernization of identity politics away from concerns with equality and civil rights, and towards difference and incommensurability, has contributed to these circumstances. Anti-​Enlightenment fascism rejected the notion that all people are created equal and adapted a discredited social Darwinism to prop up mythical archetypes. After the second major battle for European hegemony and the dropping of the first atomic bombs, a significant global realignment took place. In the East, the communist struggles that erupted in the first half of the twentieth century were reconceived in nationalist geostrategic rather than revolutionary terms. In the West, the need to present capitalist democracy as the better of the two Cold War options led to several interrelated phenomena that one could consider moderately progressive: welfare state Keynesianism, the development of critical possibilities for social change through the interventions of the professional-​managerial class, and the remediation of prewar forms of discrimination. At the same time, there arose throughout the world anti-​ colonial struggles for liberation and self-​ determination. Depending on the nation-​state in question, liberation struggles tended in the direction of liberalism, socialism or fascism, with traditional concerns like religion or ethnicity combined with scientific and technological advances. Claims to particularity and epistemological injustices notwithstanding, none of the newly independent nations, not even longstanding Indigenous struggles, developed outside and beyond the intellectual, socio-​economic and technological developments of European modernity. Reorienting the Left Project In the Western nations, New Left countercultural and protest movements borrowed liberally from communist and anti-​ colonial struggles in their

Reorienting the Left Project  3 attack against all forms of authority. In the context of postwar affluence and consumerism, a distinctly petty-​bourgeois and neo-​bohemian approach to radicalism transformed and weakened a beleaguered socialist movement. Identity struggles flourished at this time, revising the traditions, mores and hang-​ups that defined the generation gap. As economic decline, structural transformation and global migrations displaced the premium on the dialectic of conformism and rebellion, neoliberal policy led the “me generation” into the maw of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, which then led to the rise of New Right conservative movements that assailed previous challenges to social and ideological norms. In that critical conjuncture, from the 1950s to the 1980s, a wave of pessimistic intellectuals ratified the abrogation of the inheritance of the revolutionary left. The “cultural turn” that emerged in the form of “French theory” and that was designed to dislodge the grip of Marxism on intellectual and social life now became the lingua franca of a seemingly progressive yet thoroughly neoliberal academia, wherein one’s identity could hardly be separated from the maximization of life chances within relations of competition. This reflexively postmodern generation accepted the revival of nihilism as the best means to motivate every conceivable tendency. In the decade of preppies and yuppies, a possibly countercultural yet thoroughly integrated generation witnessed the dismantling of the Soviet Union and closed the book on the social, cultural, political and intellectual legacy of the radical left. Marxism and the dialectic were consigned to history and deemed by the apologists of class restoration the junk of used car salesmen. Despite the occasional stirrings of increasingly weaker labour organizations, it would not be until the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the indignados, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street that the left made a significant comeback. However, as new social movement activists and non-​governmental NGOs had over the decades adopted the intellectual software of postmodern academia, from phenomenology to semiology, structuralism, deconstruction, discourse theory, post-​structuralism and new materialisms, the identitarian race, gender and sexuality agendas –​now transformed into diversity and difference politics –​mixed rather poorly with the unreconstructed materialism of Marxists. Not that anyone on the postwar left actually thought this way, but women, the post-​postmodernists proclaimed, would not go back into the kitchen, gays and lesbians back into the closet, racial minorities to the ghetto or immigrants where they came from. Whereas in the late nineteenth century, races were slotted into their respective classifications, the same happens today with gender and sexual identities, now governmentally identified and numbering in the dozens. Very few think anything of this since such sociological positivism is institutionalized as social policy. The scientific sensitivity shown towards identity groups is accompanied by the political uses of identity, writ large, for the sake of political regulation and manipulation. One cannot but notice some strange developments: money magazines like Forbes celebrate the Bolivian coup leader and genocidal criminal Jeanine Áñez as a feminist icon; Hillary

4  Introduction Clinton hails the election of fascist leader Giorgia Meloni as the first woman Prime Minister of Italy; the administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau adopts the rhetoric of feminist foreign policy as it doubles military spending to meet Canada’s NATO commitments; the United States Army and the CIA advertise the diversity and woke credentials of its staff; war hawks around the Joe Biden administration call for the decolonization of Russia; Western intellectuals approve of the reclamation of UNESCO monuments like the Byzantine Hagia Sophia for the sake of authoritarian Islamic politics; statues of Enlightenment and revolutionary figures like Voltaire, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are vandalized in the name of a racial reckoning that has no clear political orientation; the leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom prevents its members from defending workers’ interests at the same time that it celebrates the monarchy. Similar cases of lesser note create an atmosphere of fear and loathing in even progressive circles. These phenomena are not merely the co-​optation by establishment demagogues of concepts incubated in progressive academia. They represent the consequences of decades of assault on the legacy of Enlightenment universality and the revolutionary left. On what now seems like the precipice of a nuclear conflagration and irreversible climate catastrophe, the postmodern permutations of identity politics make “the left” seem like a confused if not contemptible contrivance. Postmodern theories declared that history has ended and meta-​narratives like class struggle have been replaced by language games, irony, undecidability, indeterminacy, multiplicity, hyperreality, and so on. The category of politics itself underwent intellectual recombination. Claims concerning objective reality have been treated as naïve if not dangerous. Related to this, claims concerning universal principles are said to mask pernicious interests. One is not surprised to discover that those postmodernists who make bourgeois autonomy the scapegoat of their social criticism consider social progress to be a matter of subjective choice and self-​fashioning. This contributes to the belief that political commitments are determined by identity and experience. In fact, it is difficult to appreciate the ways in which identity politics are understood and practised today without this postmodern framing. If one was to take Kwame Anthony Appiah’s short essay on “The Politics of Identity” as an impromptu reference to what identity means for ­politics today, we would have to consider the counter-​ intuitive hypothesis that ­identity politics is often not about identity at all.1 Rather, according to Appiah, ­identity politics tends to be concerned with the identity of other people. In identity politics, therefore, we find that women are opposed to men, blacks to whites, gays to straights, Americans to Mexicans, Christians to Muslims, etc. We can extend this to include considerations of age, ability, Indigeneity, body size, parental status, pregnancy, marital status, home ownership, and so on. As part of modern politics, these oppositions are involved in haphazard and confused ways with the creation of an ideal or at least better world. However, the notion of progress implies that politics and culture cannot be

Reorienting the Left Project  5 limited to identity. This presents a problem for politics since, although it is true that we all have an identity, or a changing set of identifications, the purpose of politics is to create adherence along partisan lines for the sake of common goals. A politics of equality is concerned with sameness, not difference –​the same rights, opportunities, freedoms and protections for everyone. But then again, equality and freedom from domination do not imply the absence of difference, negativity and contradiction, which is why there is no equality or freedom without limitation and determination. In Negative Dialectics, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that the rationality of identity-​thinking, which binds subjectivity to nature, or objective reality, is often more concerned with what exists than what ought to exist.2 Rather than a return to prelapsarian wholeness and unity, culture, language, politics and philosophy are means through which identity is dialectically mediated. In Hegelian terms, Adorno surmised that while there can be no particular that is identical to the universal, the particular cannot be understood or defined without recourse to the universal. Since particularity cannot be discarded, Adorno’s concern was that it not be identified with the false totality of a bureaucratically administered world.3 The question for the socialist left is the extent to which identity politics is amenable to socialist theory and practice. Whereas the task ahead involves the struggle against the combined tendencies of neoliberal capitalism and a renascent far right, it also involves struggle against the kinds of post-​politics –​politics that avoid the difficulties and responsibilities of politics –​that make leftism into a flexible ideology that dissolves theory and practice into the ambient mists of postmodern relativism. In most cases, such post-​politics poses as radical while defending the status quo against socialism. Radical left solidarity, especially when it is committed to anti-​oppression, cannot be built on nihilism, relativism and the ideology of empowerment, which for Adorno would be little more than a distorted universality. For socialists, identity cannot be conceived without a critique of the totality of capitalist universality. Much of the concern with identity in contemporary activist and academic circles champions the abstract universality that corresponds to the illiberalism of a reified democratic ideology. This is why, paradoxically, what we refer to as the politics of identity goes about its work –​in scholarship, in policy, in culture or in social exchange –​in ways that are largely the same regardless of the identity in question. The affirmative diversity that coincides with a politics without politics is a difference without difference –​that is to say, a difference that is conditioned, tautologically, compulsively, by dominant rather than emancipatory conceptions of the universal. Identity, Appiah argues, is a nominal label that is used by politicians to create norms and mobilize pride. What norms? Because politics must be based on principles and cannot be nominal, opportunistic politicians who betray a cause bring shame upon a social movement. In such situations, as with Joseph Stalin or Tony Blair, the principles outlast the politicians. Contrary to the conquest of the new in the culture and knowledge industries, politics

6  Introduction are not always changing but have, like cultural milestones and valid scientific formulations, durability over time. In contrast to what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defines as the current fad of deference that transforms norms of mutuality into a “racial Reaganomics” of trickle-​down social change, one can respect individual persons without respecting their political views or their cultural dispositions.4 Nothing about politics requires that we respect fascists so that we do not hurt their feelings and sense of identity. In such cases, exclusion is preferable to inclusion. As Appiah suggests, the politics of recognition can go too far and become oppressive. People who insist that you organize your entire life around your gender, race or sexuality are probably not good comrades, and this is true even when you are being discriminated against on account of your gender, race or sexuality. According to Appiah, such cognitive divisions of labour are one reason why class-​based political movements have declined. Socialist politics, in any case, has never been as relativistic as that and has never been concerned, first and foremost, with questions of recognition. To use the concept of division of labour loosely, it is possible to assert that there is a division of labour at work today between politics and identity. One might even think that identity is doing much of the work and politics, like a greedy capitalist, simply collects the profits produced by identity. The culture war is indeed a class war. In this respect, identity politics is a problematic of the left. This is represented by the left’s commitment to the struggle against all forms of oppression. However, identity politics is also a problem for the left, as is the case when identity politics poses a challenge to the success and viability of left politics. Let us be perfectly clear, at the outset, that a Marxist approach does not oppose class struggle to identity politics. What Marxist materialism does is provide a class analysis and critique of social problems like labour exploitation and gender or racial oppression. What we today casually refer to as the political spectrum is a product of the French Revolution and the arbitrary division of the National Assembly into two sections: on the right, the defenders of monarchy, and on the left, the revolutionaries. Political ideologies exist in specific forms in particular contexts and have evolved over time as the product of changing circumstances. Liberal politics typically represents the extreme left and the extreme right as the point of contact where the “totalitarian” poles of the ideological spectrum unite to form the shape of a horseshoe or circle. This is sometimes countered by the so-​called fishhook model, where the extreme right pole of the continuum folds back only enough to join the liberal capitalist centre from which it emerged as an immanent contradiction. According to this model, the purpose of fascism is to save capitalism from socialism and from its own constitutive instability. However, the fishhook model ignores the overlaps that have existed between socialism and national socialism. For this reason, it is more accurate to think of the three modern ideologies –​liberalism, socialism and fascism –​as forming a set of ideal types. In practical instances, any political regime can draw from various aspects of each

What Is to Be Done  7 tendency. Political parties, for example, routinely borrow and steal from one another’s policy agendas to secure the consent of the population. The concept of populism and the theories associated with postmodernism are inadequate as ideal types of politics and so tend to reinforce one political tendency or another. The pretence of postmodernism is that it challenges all the modern forms of politics. The demand for ideological purity and party discipline, and the difficulties that this can create, is the stuff of modern history. This has led in the postwar era to the rejection of mass political parties and of the utopian projects of the early twentieth century. This then led to the reprise of individualism, relativism, pessimism and nihilism within post-​Fordist consumer societies. For much petty-​bourgeois, countercultural and postmodern thinking, the significant difference in politics is between authoritarian and liberal social forms. Although anarchists and communists are both on the radical left, they typically differ on this distinction. However, the difference between freedom and necessity should not be accepted at face value. As scholars since Sigmund Freud and the Frankfurt School have demonstrated, presumably anti-​authoritarian attitudes can be as oppressive as any other, and those who subscribe to authoritarian politics are often themselves hyper-​conformist and submissive. In practical terms, every political orientation and organization brings together individuals with different human characteristics. Communists are no more authoritarian than the capitalists they oppose, and fascists can love cinema or write poetry. The French philosopher Alain Badiou outlines a more helpful set of distinctions through the axes of tradition-​modernity and capitalism-​communism.5 Although capitalism belongs to modernity, emancipatory universality is decidedly on the side of modernity and communism. Badiou’s definition of communism elaborates a politics that sustains the contradiction within global capitalism, focuses on capitalism as the enemy, critiques state power and leads the fight against fascism. This basic programme for communism, which is the political orientation of this study, includes production beyond the division of labour, the organization of collective life around something other than property, social life beyond identitarian units like race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion and language, and free association beyond coercion, which represents the ultimate disappearance of the state. What Is to Be Done The transition from anti-​global protest movements towards intersectionality and decoloniality cannot be considered without reference to the influence of the U.S. in the realm of cultural politics. The recent success of identity-​ based social justice movements like Black Lives Matter cannot be adequately understood without considering how it is that the New Deal legislation of the 1930s influenced the Great Society programmes and Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, and how both are aspects of a postwar Democratic coalition of

8  Introduction liberal progressives, labour and minority voters that can no longer be taken for granted. Social democratic welfarism in the U.S. was under attack as soon as it took off, with the 1947 Taft–​Hartley Act calling for more control of organized labour and the 1950s McCarthyite red scare making sure that socialism remains a foreign phenomenon. Since that time, unionization rates in the U.S. declined from approximately 30 to 10 percent. De-​unionization correlates directly with the upward redistribution of wealth and control of politics by the billionaire class. Since the Reagan era, identity politics has become the only progressive policy area that the Democratic Party establishment is willing to support. As Touré Reed and others have noted, the Bernie Sanders campaigns and his agenda of wealth redistribution were attacked from the right by the Hillary Clinton camp as the class reductionism of “Bernie Bro” socialists.6 Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party were slandered relentlessly by the Tories as anti-​Semitic.7 Sanders later capitulated to Democratic Party centrists and Labour’s anti-​Corbyn majority pledged to further privatize the National Health Service and roll back employment rights. While liberals argue that gender and racial disparities are grounded in patriarchy, racism and the history of colonialism, and on this basis argue that economic redistribution would not eliminate those problems, the left perspective focuses on the ways in which liberal policies and postmodern theories abstract disparities from the political and economic forces that produce them. The influence of American Cold War policy on identity politics has thus been to organize political and economic interests around identity groups and proactive agendas like affirmative action that ignore the critique of political economy and accept class hierarchy and labour exploitation as a matter of course. As Adolph Reed Jr. argues, the clientelist politics of anti-​oppression identity groups is antagonistic towards universally egalitarian objectives. He writes: It is not oriented practically toward a vision of broad egalitarian social transformation, nor is it at all aligned with or congenial to any project of generating a political movement toward such ends. Even when packaged as opposing an abstraction like “racial capitalism,” this politics is incapable of adopting the standpoint of building the broad working-​class solidarities that are the sine qua non of any project of egalitarian transformation, on whatever scale.8 Extending the middle-​class politics of race representatives to identity politics more generally, contemporary struggles against oppression work in tandem, intersectionally one might say, to conflate the various forms of inequality within capitalism. Because it makes claims to radicalism, this identitarian populist front is obliged to define itself, to varying degrees, against the traditions of the socialist and labour left. Some, like the African American scholar Ta-​Nehisi Coates, do this openly, while others, like the feminist scholar Ashley Bohrer, do so in ways that appear to be Marxist.9

What Is to Be Done  9 Having accepted capitalism for the sake of identity, questions of social justice devolve into moral debates concerning underclass behaviours or post-​identity respectability, for example. If Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism is now widely used to explain the phenomenon of Reagan and Trump voters among the working class, it is because today’s identity politics finds it more advantageous to condemn the white working class and white capitalism than capitalism as such.10 The notion of racial capitalism seeks to explain racial disparities, and presumably to find solutions to these, by racializing black/​​ minority as well as white/​​majority populations. In doing so, it shifts the focus away from the problems that are specific to capitalism, which have any number of “racial” variations in different parts of the world. The solution to racial capitalism is not a “class first” or “class only” politics, but a politics that places capitalism front and centre. The problem with anti-​racist activism is that its approach to politics will not serve the constituencies it speaks for. As Walter Benn Michaels puts it: On the one hand we’ve had this tremendous commitment to and a certain amount of success in promoting an anti-​racist agenda, of which of course I completely approve, and cultivating a diversity agenda. But during that same period –​the last 30 years –​we’ve had another set of social developments. And that is, the U.S., which was never among the most economically equal societies in the world –​thirty years ago, we were way behind, let’s say, the Scandinavian countries –​has in fact become much less equal than it was then. If you look at the Gini coefficient, which is one standard measure that economists have of economic inequality within a nation, you will see that we have risen by leaps and bounds, and we are long since passed France and Germany, and we have actually, right now, caught up with China. And if we just work a little harder, we’ll soon be as unequal as Mexico.11 Only socialism and labour organization can put that Gini back into the bottle. And only internationalism can overcome the political boundary between China, Mexico and the U.S. From the left, the critique of race and identity reductionism leads to calls for a concrete analysis of political economy through which we can devise the most appropriate policies to bring material improvements to the lives of the majority –​a living wage job and guaranteed wage, universal health care, affordable housing and tuition-​free higher education.12 Why do the U.S. and many other nations not have these easily achieved features of an enlightened, modern economy? Capitalist politics is certainly to blame but so does identity politics play a role. It is perhaps not surprising that the nation which propagandizes its imperialist exceptionalism has also produced the kind of race exceptionalism that makes not only racism but capitalist democracy into transhistorical phenomena. With anti-​state activists and progressive identitarians underwriting the post-​representational ideology of neoliberal

10  Introduction governance, it is little wonder, according to Reed, that the U.S. is careening towards the far right.13 While there is no general programme and strategy that all leftists adhere to, many would agree with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.”14 The equally popular moto devised by Romain Rolland and attributed to Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” provides a clue as to why most Marxists only know the last of the eleven theses. A good Christian is expected to observe all ten commandments and not only the last one. How many leftists today understand Marxism? The problem is that by itself, the eleventh thesis can be made to serve almost any cause. As Humphrey McQueen argues, the eleventh thesis is often seized on as an excuse for not undertaking critical analysis and seeking a thoughtless path to megaphone militancy.15 Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” are a product of dialectical method and so what seems like formal, oppositional logic in the eleventh thesis –​materialism versus idealism, practice over theory –​should not ignore the question of ideas and thought in action. Marx was not interested in mere contradiction or in the instrumental implementation of ideas. If the left is to renew its organizational strength, it should also sharpen its intellectual readiness. The theses on Feuerbach is not a terrible place to start. The first of Marx’s theses addresses the defects of hitherto existing materialisms, in particular the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher and anthropologist who sought to demystify religion. For Feuerbach, humans invented God and thereafter alienated their own activity through the projection of human essence into the abstract heavens. Feuerbach’s goal was to bring humanity back to earth, much like pseudo-​avant-​gardists who think that radicalism implies the rejection of autonomy in favour of heteronomy. Marx later put forward a dialectical critique of this naïve form of bourgeois materialism. Idealism, Marx argues, developed the active side of materialism abstractly, and not realistically –​not in terms of human activity and practice. Marx adds to this the notion that idealism did not develop materialism subjectively. He could have said, politically or culturally. In other words, there is no question for him of crude materialism or the kind of historical “necessity” that might be used to justify something like the Gulag. Marxist dialectical materialism is therefore different from other kinds of materialism, like pragmatism, positivism, behaviourism or cybernetics. Subjectivism and idealism are not simply rejected by Marx since without them there is no dialectic and no social change, only mechanistic and as such meaningless transformation.16 It is postmodern nihilism and not Marxism that is committed to random, chaotic and anti-​form becoming. The problem with Feuerbach is that he wants the (phenomenal) material world to be absolutely distinct from the (noumenal) thought object. It is in addition to this, rather than in opposition to this, that Marx says we must add the question of human practice. What Marx understands as revolutionary, practical-​ critical activity implies the action of ideas on the material world. Marx is

What Is to Be Done  11 not elaborating a reductive materialism of objective and so-​called concrete reality so much as a theory of praxis. In thesis two, praxis is referred to as the “this-​sidedness” of humankind’s “thinking in practice.” The notion that writing books is isolated from practice, perhaps even a book of philosophy, is rejected in thesis two. He writes: “The dispute over the reality or non-​reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.” This makes some sense for Marx and Engels, who were known in the workers’ movement as intellectuals. As Andy Merrifield has discussed, Marx learned more about capitalism through self-​directed research at the British Museum than he did from his involvement in socialist agitation. Forced to sell what he could to survive, he routinely brought his old coat to the pawnbroker, which prevented him from accessing the British Museum and delayed his research.17 Likewise, the question of theory and intellectual work was not avoided by leading revolutionary leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Amílcar Cabral or Huey Newton, which is why anarchists play down intellectualism as a problem of organizational structure. For example, as if to somehow challenge Marxism, David Graeber claims that despite its materialist pretensions Marxism is profoundly idealist: The history of Marxism is presented to us as a history of great thinkers –​ there are Leninists, Maoists, Trotskyites, Gramscians, Althusserians –​even brutal dictators like Stalin or Enver Hoxha had to pretend to be great philosophers, because the idea was always that one starts with one man’s profound theoretical insight and the political tendency follows from that.18 Yet Marx was as much a part of the workers’ movement as Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon. As things stood in early nineteenth-​century Europe, the religion of the bourgeoisie was not Christianity but capitalism. This is why Marx dedicated himself to the study of capital. Marx could perceive what many others in his day could not see or refused to see, which is the fact that the providence bestowed on humanity by industry was a spiritualization of capitalist relations of domination. The contemporary anarchist tendency to reduce subjectivity to objective conditions simply updates this basic problem, where every new technology and material phenomenon allows the theorist to update a brutally factual philosophy.19 Questions of culture, politics and morality cannot for Marx be abstracted from material reality. Rather, the dialectical understanding of historical materialism offers a critical alternative to any one-​dimensional understanding of social mediation. Marx defines revolutionary practice as a dialectic of self-​ transformational human activity and changing circumstances. These contingencies may very well be beyond human control, like a meteorite that is dangerously threatening to destabilize the earth’s protective atmosphere. However, it is human cognition and human self-​transformation, as a universal phenomenon, that decides what can be done about it –​for example,

12  Introduction one can start praying to the meteorite, blame the Russians, build survival shelters, send a rocket to explode it in outer space, or make an ironic film about it. In thesis four Marx explains that Feuerbach’s materialism merely reinscribes metaphysics. Even if humanity is shown by Feuerbach to be its own prime mover, the dualism of materialism and idealism remains intact. The material world must instead be understood in its contradictory nature, as dialectical rather than dualistic and metaphysical. What is material and concrete cannot, for Marx, be wholly distinct from the realm of ideas, which is to say, subject and negativity are immanent to reality. There is no revolutionary practice that is separable from the spiritual, subjective or ideational realms. As he puts it: “after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.” In thesis five, Marx rejects the opposition between sensuousness and contemplation. The sensuous is not, for instance, a justification of capitalist exploitation and commodity fetishism. Just as Marx rejects the mutual isolation of matter and spirit, he rejects the mutual isolation of society and the individual. This does not imply that Marx is against the individual and only in favour of the collective. The reality of the individual, he writes in thesis six, is “the ensemble of social relations.” In other words, Marx offers a critique of the seemingly materialist rejection of the individual that is implicit in postmodern versions of anti-​humanist identity politics. Marx of course has a romantic understanding of subjectivity and the particularity of individual human beings. While the revolutionization of society cannot advance without also changing people, Marx is not prejudiced against people born in the bourgeois class. Marx for example collaborated with Engels and did not despise him because he was the son of a wealthy industrialist. The thrust of Marx’s philosophy of the human being is that we are social beings whose worldviews are based in the contradictory development of the historical process. To be human is to be implicated in the generality that unites all groups and individuals. When in thesis seven Marx says that Feuerbach does not perceive how it is that the religious sentiment is a social product, and that the individual belongs to society, what he is arguing is that Feuerbach fails to appreciate religious sentiment as something that is not simply false. Moreover, and more importantly, religion, along with other “superstructures” like politics, philosophy, law and aesthetics, is not an ahistorical realm of ideal absolutes but is subject, in its ideational form, to human transformation. Theses eight to eleven develop the question of practice as well as bourgeois notions of materialism and civil society. The tendency today, with students trained to think in terms of discourse theory, social constructionism and new materialisms, or in terms of the typically American emphasis on pragmatism, is to reduce dialectics to objectivity. The extent to which socialism can be reduced to material incentives rather than the complete transformation of society is for some a matter of

What Is to Be Done  13 strategy and for others a matter of political difference. Others still replace the question of socialist strategy –​the general strike or the parliamentary road –​ with the kind of activism that presumably solves the problem of alienated representation. The latter, like most culture warriors, do not care to be taken too seriously. That is why such politics is the preoccupation of the middle class, which affords itself the indulgence. This cynicism reflects the neurotic busyness of people who make sure that social change remains constrained within the limits of what already exists. Progressives thereby blackmail the socialist left into countercultural and culture war scenarios. Some of these scenarios now include: attacks on free speech; campus mobs and dubious accusations; shutting people down for minor issues; cancellations for the sake of career building or on the basis of rumour; making identity struggles a matter of exclusion and exclusivity rather than broad social transformation; falsely equating universality with domination; the shift of politics from commonality to marginality; the restriction of pride to minority groups and shame to majority groups; the exclusive ownership of topics and histories of oppression against charges of appropriation; the attribution of exclusive blame for the tragedies of previous generations; demands that people check their privilege rather than assert their rights, defined as unfair privileges; replacing policy with interpersonal dynamics or group therapy; funding expensive consultancies that fuel identity conflicts; competing group oppressions rather than solidarity across struggles; the retreat into tribalism and in-​group preoccupations; the appeal to experience and feelings over the better argument or social convention; banalities like X/​Twitter activism; the pretence that when you start a national conversation you start from zero; the weaponization of identity and harm to avoid solving solvable problems; forcing people into identity boxes; the denial of people’s achievements for the sake of equity; enjoyment of speaking truth to power while taking on none of the responsibility; the public performance of awareness; gaining social credit through sycophantic rituals of self-​humiliation; preferring ally humility to worker militancy; reframing questions of freedom as questions of risk and consent; replacing ideals of progress with crude affirmations of the worst aspects of reality; the falsification rather than illumination of history on the basis of contemporary agendas; politics defined by what you are rather than what you stand for; the repressive desublimation of culture and politics; equality of outcomes rather than struggle over politics and culture. That the far right invents dodges that are worse than the above scenarios gives these an ersatz legitimacy that is only slightly more astute than telling Marxists that they are not Marxist because they buy things. The administration of postmodern versions of difference politics that take activism beyond the commonality of civil rights can lead to mutually contradictory expectations and results. One is the enforcement of correctness on identities that are presumed to be always in flux. Another is the conflation of private matters with public concerns. While postmodern identity politics not only deconstructs but assails the achievements of modern society –​autonomy,

14  Introduction self-​determination, freedom, equality, objectivity, truth, competence, reasonableness, secularism, rights, debate, due process –​idiosyncratic positions have difficulty living up to the requirements of authority, that is, except when indulged for the sake of competition. When reason and sense are no longer applied and only power is recognized, endemic problems lead the left to try to outstupid the right. In a world where history and society are said to have chosen capitalism as the lesser evil, identity politics becomes the official site of progressive social change. However, a permanent revolution in mores will not bring about equality. In contrast to civil rights struggles, culture wars weaken the left because they encourage people to become attached to the prejudice they suffer. Culture wars, like all wars, thrive on enemies. Excellence in giving and receiving offence fosters division and paranoia. Sensible people in positions of authority become terrified of anything that might offend. Whereas in the 1980s it was the conservative New Right that encouraged self-​censorship, a cold wind is now blowing from the left. Lack of faith in progress, on the fault of what is manifestly real, leads to a depressive state of being. Having replaced historical materialism with biological reductionism, those progressives who in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s developed the contemporary versions of identity politics have inadvertently changed politics in ways that have allowed anti-​working-​class attitudes to develop. It is not that socialists are against divisiveness and call for social unity. To be anti-​capitalist is to be divisive. The goodwill revolution that emerged through the postwar counterculture and that allowed for progressive change in social attitudes has achieved much of what was achievable. Since the 1980s, the politics of cultural transgression has become rather decadent, serving not only the neoliberal agenda but also pseudo-​left attacks on the radical legacy of universality. The postmodern left should accept some of the blame for these developments. One task for the socialist left, moving forward, will be the evaluation of the progress that has or could be achieved by postmodern difference politics. The first line of attack of an identitarian is to deny their own and someone else’s universality. The goal of academic and professional experts on diversity is to make leftists –​the only true universalists because the only true progressives –​fight the diversitarians on their terms. This privatization of public life, deregulation of social mores and outsourcing of responsibility has generalized social constructionism and discursive materialism into a radicalism beyond recognition. Our task then is to elucidate the ever more complex terrain of identity and politics in this late neoliberal era. Outline of the Book The following book, according to the problematic and problem of identity politics for the left, is divided into three parts. The first part of the book addresses five variants of what we can refer to as identity politics. These are: the genus of identity politics as such; the theory and politics of radical

Outline of the Book  15 democracy; privilege theory and the related field of critical race theory; intersectionality and the related approach known as decoloniality. A brief description of each and some criticism that is specific to these variants makes the left critique of identity politics more comprehensive. Populism, which is not a distinct political ideology, is addressed in relation to the theory of radical democracy. In the second part, these different variants of identity politics are related to the standard ideologies of the political spectrum. Starting with the political right and progressing leftward, representative views by today’s conservative, neoliberal, liberal, postmodernist, anarchist, social democratic and communist social critics are presented in terms of their respective approaches to issues in and around contemporary identity politics. The purpose of this exposé is to help clarify the different understandings of identity politics and what its standing is on the socialist left. While for most postmodernists the left-​to-​right spectrum represents intellectual rigidity and is deemed a depoliticizing and instrumentalizing set of assumptions, the following observations are consistent with Marxist as well as common-​sense understandings of macropolitics. The third part examines some of the more complicated issues facing leftists who very rightly refuse to choose between anti-​oppression struggles and class analysis. As should be clear by the end of the book, this is not simply a false choice between two options. The relation between class and identity cannot be conceived in dualistic terms, nor can it be considered a set of intersecting terms in a continuous process of negotiation. Something of Marxist class analysis and historical-​dialectical materialism must be understood and accepted if a socialist perspective on these issues can be developed. This perspective is systematically denied in most academic discussions, in mainstream media and very often on the journalistic left as well. To help guide this analysis, three caveats are introduced against the notion of a postmodern left: 1) the problem posed by contemporary anti-​ universalism; 2) the problem with efforts to collapse the difference between identity politics and class politics; and 3) the problem with theories that are premised on an eclectic notion of materialism. In the first of these three I address the shift from mass politics to interest group politics and the way that the latter has the potential to undermine the universality that gives it legitimacy. At both the level of analysis and strategy, today’s identitarian trends are shown to undermine universality. This is due to anti-​Enlightenment attitudes among a third wave of postmodernists, which developed after the original wave of French theory in the 1960s and 70s, followed by its institutional recuperation and dissemination in the 1980s and 90s. The failure of latter-​ day postmodernists to consider the capitalist context in which their work is situated, and the rightist politics it enables, has cultivated a tendency to abandon the notion of progress, allowing identity politics to shift from liberationism towards a pessimistic politics of power based on discourse theory. I consider the limitations of three approaches that combine left politics with anti-​oppression: left identitarianism, left anti-​essentialism and a

16  Introduction politics of recognition that is not concerned with the distinction between essentialism and anti-​essentialism. I also address the problems of cynicism and eclectic materialism on the postmodern and anarchist ultra-​left. While this book presents the complexity of the class and identity debate as it currently exists, one of its functions as a guide is to identify the several strands of contemporary theory that are not Marxist or socialist but that are at times associated with the left. While in the U.S. the term left is often used to imply “not conservative” or “not Republican,” it is used here in contrast with both liberalism and conservatism. Marxism argues that where capitalism is the predominant form of social, political and economic relation, class retains a distinct explanatory value. This is as true for considerations of identity and oppression as it is for the vagaries of social status or occupational dynamics. While each of the sections in Parts I, II and III describes the topic at hand, this book does not provide a complete analysis of any of these new trends, nor does it function as an introduction to Marxist theory. What this guide nevertheless provides is a comprehensive introduction to the class and identity debate as it has developed in the twenty-​first century. It demonstrates that there are different meanings and political uses of the all-​encompassing term “identity politics.” It also demonstrates that there is much that is excluded, ignored and suppressed when culture war controversies are manufactured and discussed in the media. What this book also makes clear are the ways in which diversity is used to legitimize the politics of the ruling class. My purpose, overall, is to distinguish those ways that are part of the liberal-​democratic-​capitalist order and those that challenge that order. In basic macropolitical terms, the Marxist approach rejects the means by which culture wars have sidelined the radical left and trapped politics within an intramural skirmish between the extreme, neoliberal centre and the various incarnations of the political right: conservatism, libertarianism, right-​ wing populism, postmodern nihilism, the alt-​right, the political far right and outright fascism. The following guide breaks down some of today’s heady topics and confrontations for the sake of elucidation and socialist critique. In conclusion, I offer a set of theses that review and summarize the socialist approach to the class and identity debate. Notes 1 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Politics of Identity,” Daedalus 135:4 (Fall 2006), 15–​22. 2 Deborah Cook, “Adorno, Ideology and Ideology Critique,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 27:1 (2001), 12. See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, [1966] 1973). 3 Cook, “Adorno, Ideology and Ideology Critique,” 5. For a critique of the Frankfurt School’s approach to materialism and science, see Helena Sheehan, “Totality: Decades of Debate and the Return of Nature,” Monthly Review (September 1, 2023), https://​monthl​yrev​iew.org/​2023/​09/​01/​total​ity-​deca​des-​of-​ deb​ate-​and-​the-​ret​urn-​of-​nat​ure/​?mc_​cid=​279​26a2​7ec&mc_​eid=​bb7​17ef​364.

Notes  17 4 Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “Being-​in-​the-​Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference,” The Philosopher (January 1, 2020), www.the​phil​osop​her1​923.org/​ post/​being-​in-​the-​room-​privil​ege-​elite-​capt​ure-​and-​episte​mic-​defere​nce. 5 See Alain Badiou, Greece and the Reinvention of Politics, trans. David Broder (London: Verso, 2018). 6 Touré Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (London: Verso, 2020), eBook, 27. 7 David Graeber, “The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’,” The New York Review of Books (January 13, 2020), www.nybo​oks. com/​onl​ine/​2020/​01/​13/​the-​cen​ter-​blows-​its​elf-​up-​care-​and-​spite-​in-​the-​bre​xit-​ elect​ion/​. 8 Adolph Reed, Jr. “ ‘Let Me Go Get My Big White Man’: The Clientelist Foundation of Contemporary Antiracist Politics,” nonsite (May 11, 2022), https://​nons​ite.org/​ let-​me-​go-​get-​my-​big-​white-​man/​. 9 See, for example, Ta-​Nehisi Coates, “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?” The Atlantic (January 19, 2016), www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​polit​ics/​ arch​ive/​2016/​01/​ber​nie-​sand​ers-​repa​rati​ons/​424​602/​; Ashley Bohrer, “The Class Politics of Abolition: Police, Property, and the Racial Politics of Communism,” Crisis & Critique 10:1 (2023), 30–​44. 10 See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North California Press, 1983). 11 GBH Forum Network, “Walter Benn Michaels –​Celebrating Difference: The Trouble with Diversity,” YouTube (August 9, 2012), www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​ -​k-​I4kaL​lwc. 12 See Preston H. Smith II, “Which Black Lives Matter?” Catalyst 4:3 (Fall 2020), 122–​41. 13 Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Whole Country is the Reichstag,” nonsite (August 23, 2021), https://​nons​ite.org/​the-​whole-​coun​try-​is-​the-​reichs​tag/​. 14 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​marx/​ works/​1845/​the​ses/​the​ses.htm. 15 Humphrey McQueen, “From Hegel to Lenin,” Monthly Review (July 8, 2022), https://​mronl​ine.org/​2022/​07/​08/​from-​hegel-​to-​lenin/​. Originally published June 30, 2022, at RedSails.org. 16 A considerable sector of Italian and Deleuzian post-​Marxism has taken this route, disingenuously ceding the question of agency to material processes. See for example, Frederick Harry Pitts, “Beyond the Fragment: Postoperaismo, Postcapitalism and Marx’s ‘Notes on Machines’,” Economy and Society 46:3–​4 (2017), 324–​45. 17 Andy Merrifield, Marx, Dead and Alive: Reading Capital in Precarious Times (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 10, 24. 18 David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland: AK Books, 2009), 214. 19 See for instance Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Neuro-​Totalitarianism in Technomaya: Goog-​Colonization of Experience and Neuro-​Plastic Alternative (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014).

Part I Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics

This first part of Class Struggle and Identity Politics considers the various streams through which postmodern identity politics has worked, intentionally or not, to displace the universalist class politics that was developed through the Marxist, socialist, communist and social democratic traditions. It addresses the difficulty of squaring identity with class.1 In the following, I identify seven frameworks through which identity politics has an active presence in contemporary social theory: identity politics as such, radical democracy, populism, privilege theory, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. In each case I present the central concepts of the tendency and contrast these with a critical Marxist viewpoint. If politics is typically understood in terms of the left-​to-​right spectrum, then one is compelled to subject all forms of identity politics to a consideration of the class politics they serve. The politics of socialist feminism, for example, suggests that the term feminism too readily designates a liberal or status quo approach to women’s issues. On the other hand, the notion of women’s struggles suggests that issues that are of universal concern to all women are the same across different political frameworks. The term identity politics confuses these two problems, the universal dimension of women’s issues and the political framework within which this universality is understood. Abortion rights, contraception and economic independence are examples of common concerns among women that do not lead to consensus across political tendencies. Of course, historical developments and different geographical locations complicate any presentation of these issues. The same can be said concerning the struggle against racism, with for example the black nationalist Marcus Garvey having a very different attitude towards politics from a post-​race neoliberal like Barack Obama, a cosmopolitan postmodernist like Paul Gilroy, a radical Christian universalist like Cornel West or a trade unionist like Adolph Reed. Despite their respective commitments to the struggle against racism, there is no singular politics to which all of them adhere. For this reason, I begin with the generic concept of identity politics.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003483922-2

20  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics 1  Identity Politics It is now commonly accepted that the phrase “identity politics” was first coined by the Combahee River Collective in 1977. For those who believe that the term and the meaning of the term cohere around the politics of the CRC, this definition of identity politics has contracted around the concerns of black feminists and the theory of intersectionality. The CRC was formed in 1973 as a section of the National Black Feminist Organization and as part of struggles against segregation, sexism and colonialism. Sensitive to homophobia within the NBFO, the CRC organized as a black and lesbian socialist feminist collective. Concerned primarily with the strategy of bringing lesbian issues into black women’s politics, the CRC nevertheless gave tactical importance to the notion that the different forms of oppression –​racism, sexism, heterosexism and capitalist exploitation –​are co-​implicated. The CRC’s 1977 “Statement” presents identity politics as a tool of resistance to oppression that is based on the distinct experiences and knowledges of black lesbians. This shared “structural” relation is the premise of their definition of identity politics: This focusing on our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and politically most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.2 The CRC not only believed that sexual politics was as important as class and race politics, but that for black lesbians in particular, sexual politics was central to lived experience. The related notion that no form of oppression could be separated from the others articulated identity politics in what we now refer to as intersectional terms. This integrated analysis posits the centrality of sexual politics and the interconnection of forms of oppression: “As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”3 Socialist workers, they argue, are not sexless or raceless. While the CRC addressed questions of race, gender and sexuality as matters of oppression, one should not overlook the ways in which the various forms of identity politics at that time also celebrated difference, sometimes defining identity struggles in the terms of nationalism and national liberation. It is more appropriate to define the CRC as early proponents of intersectionality than as the originators of identity politics. Norman Finkelstein points out that according to its own “decentralized” model of multiple categories of oppression, the CRC was preceded by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist Frances Beal’s 1969 essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Beale’s Third World Women’s Alliance newspaper, Triple Jeopardy, combined class, race and gender issues many years before the CRC devised its landmark statement.4 Finkelstein argues against contemporary tendencies that consider socialism to be class

Identity Politics  21 exclusive. Countless debates within the international workers’ movement on “the national question,” “the woman question” or “the Negro question,” for example, give credence to his contention that the CRC was not the first to conceive the problem of overlapping forms of oppression. This issue is addressed by Charisse Burden-​Stelly and Jodi Dean in their anthology on the participation of black women in the American communist movement in the period 1919 to 1959.5 For example, Claudia Jones’s well-​known 1949 essay, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!, was preceded by Grace P. Campbell’s 1928 statement, which argues that black women workers are more exploited and discriminated against than all other American workers. However, even in Burden-​Stelly and Dean’s decidedly socialist contribution to the history of black feminism, one finds the influence of contemporary intersectional thinking and the argument that capitalism has always been raced and sexed. Anything that does not follow this line of thinking is denounced as “intellectual McCarthyism.”6 The combination of socialism with liberation is indeed fundamental to the workers’ movement. If specific questions arise at different moments in time and place, like the politicization of the struggles of black women domestic workers in the United States in the early twentieth century, these should not be thought to undermine the centrality of class analysis in socialist politics. A multi-​ dimensional approach to the different forms of oppression is not as simple a matter as intersectional thought would like us to believe. The CRC is in this respect several degrees removed from the more radical approach of Burden-​Stelly and Dean, which defines universality in terms of political emancipation from capitalist exploitation as well as racial and sexual oppression. Unlike socialists, the CRC did not define emancipation in universalist terms. They were first and foremost concerned with self-​emancipation, which, in this case, implies a contradictory denial of universality for the sake of emancipation. For Slavoj Žižek, this element of anti-​universalism is the essential flaw of identity politics. “Identity politics reaches its peak (or, rather, its lowest point),” he argues, “when it refers to the unique experience of a particular group identity as the ultimate fact which cannot be dissolved in any universality: ‘only a woman/​​lesbian/​​trans/​​Black/​​Chinese knows what it is to be a woman/​​lesbian/​​trans/​​Black/​​Chinese’.”7 Žižek takes this problem one step further. Although identitarianism opposes the openness and indeterminacy of universality, it effectively retains the white/​male/​hetero position as the universal standard. Resorting to identity, or particularity, he argues, means that we cannot get rid of universality. Privilege is not the crux of this issue. The kind of identity politics advocated by the CRC asks people, both normative and non-​normative, to give up or ignore their universality. It is odd then that many who now advocate for black feminism take as their starting point Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech “Ain’t I a woman?” Combining the concerns of suffragettes and abolitionists, Truth addressed the hardships borne by black women who did not live up to nineteenth-​century ideals of femininity and argued that the strength and intelligence of black women made

22  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics them equal to anyone. The point of universality, however, is that someone is politically equal to someone else whether or not they have the same strength and intelligence.8 Likewise, the kind of identity politics that is advanced by the CRC does not constitute a politics but rather a form of morality. It is the tendency of such identity politics to misconstrue political universalism that gratifies postmodern intellectuals and activists who have elevated the minor writings of three women –​Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier and Margo Okazawa-​Rey –​to the pantheon of radical leaders and thinkers. One problem with the CRC model of identity politics is the presumption that the oppression one experiences is unique to the group that one is associated with. Oppression is here considered in its abstract particularity. Unlike the black Civil Rights, women’s rights and gay rights struggles, which were based on a universalist (individual and group) rights model, the CRC model of activism failed to advance the interests of anyone, including black lesbian women. Among the many drawbacks of the CRC approach is the combined effect of anti-​universalism with the presumption that black lesbians are uniquely qualified, based on experience, to understand a) social relations, b) the nature and forms of oppression, and c) themselves. The CRC model is a form of identity politics that leads away from class struggle by obscuring the totality of relations under capitalism. It is easy to see how this differs from the Marxist critique of capitalism. Karl Marx’s theory of value considers that the substance of value (the abstract form and material content of labour) relates to its magnitude, measured in terms of socially necessary labour time (which requires the concept of totality), and that the form of its appearance is exchange value, measured by money. This problem is not solved through higher wages or the focus on diversity in the workplace, however beneficial these may be. The vulnerability of the left to the anti-​left tendencies of intersectionality means that Burden-​Stelly and Dean are correct to reorient the black feminist conversation in the direction of socialist politics. Although class struggle is not grounded in individual or group experiences, it nevertheless has a universal dimension that is radically inclusive and is as such preferable to identity politics. One cannot assess the contemporary popularity of the CRC model of identity politics without also tracing the shift from early twentieth-​century communism through to the postmodern counter-​revolution. There is a certain kind of circularity at work when concepts that were pioneered by ambivalent leftists are used by contemporary scholars to redefine the left agenda. This has occurred largely under the aegis of discourse theories and genealogies that retroactively justify contemporary culture wars. It is often difficult to disentangle the politics of contemporary leftists from the influence of intellectual developments like discourse theory. Although identity struggles are essentially the product of modernity and Enlightenment universalism, today’s identity politics has been shaped by the Cold War and the postwar fragmentation of mass politics into new social movements. Whatever the benefits of the American civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s, it should be recalled

Identity Politics  23 that these were in part the result of the repression of the radical socialist and communist movements of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. This is not to suggest that civil rights struggles were not linked to these leftist movements, nor that they did not also encounter the repression of discriminatory and capitalist forces. However, unlike their socialist predecessors, these movements won the support of progressive liberals who did not put into question the capitalist system. By and large, civil rights struggles were treated as civil society politics that appeal to matters of conscience and that strengthen liberal democracy. This led to disenchantment as newly acquired rights did not lead to economic equality or to more democratic forms of organization. From the 1950s to the 60s, the wages of the average black worker fell by six percent and black unemployment increased.9 These factors led black leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King to tighten the connection between the black Civil Rights movement and labour-​based struggles for economic equality. The American war in Vietnam and the overthrow of communist regimes in Guatemala and Iran further convinced American radicals that racism and fascism were at work in American imperialism. This led some social movement leaders to become more radicalized and to take their political inspiration from either the classic Marxist-​Leninist and Trotskyist tendencies or from Third World revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. Others opposed imperialist war because of its immorality but not as a fundamental problem of capitalism. Although American women had won the right to vote since 1920, by the 60s fewer than half of women were working outside the home and most of them worked in underpaid jobs as domestic servants and secretaries, earning less than half of men’s average wages. Experience in the black Civil Rights and anti-​war movements gave the women’s movement the knowhow to bring about equal pay and equal rights legislation. Persistent discrimination in even radical leftist groups led many women towards separatist organizations, which, here too, did not threaten the economic and political status quo. Among mainstream feminists, the prominent leader Gloria Steinem worked from 1958 to 1962 for a CIA-​backed research organization. Socialist feminists, on the other hand, believed that sexist attitudes perpetuated the capitalist system, which led in some instances to dubious uses of psychoanalysis, as in the work of Shulamith Firestone. Marxists could agree with their feminist and anti-​racist comrades, as they had since the nineteenth century, that divisions within the working class weaken the socialist movement. The consensus among socialists was that sexism, racism, homophobia and xenophobia could not be overcome within capitalism. This same insight applied to the emerging ecology movement of the 1970s. The difference, then, between socialism and intersectional identity politics is the emphasis placed on class struggle as the framework through which to understand and oppose the forms of oppression that are based on difference and identity. This makes sense because ideologies of identity are used within capitalism to justify social inequality.

24  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics Postmodernism reshuffles the concepts that are used to understand social conflict. The radical critique of capitalism, however, tends to break down according to liberal versus socialist positions. While postmodernism has distinct and competing ways of addressing questions of power and cultural politics, Marxist socialism maintains to this day its premier place in the critique of economic inequality and labour exploitation. When one then considers the importance of economic power in technological development, international relations, militarism, imperialism, climate change, media concentration, political campaigning, the legal order, and so on, Marxist materialism and dialectics maintains its theoretical grasp on the totality of social relations, that is, without at the same time reducing one area of social metabolism to all the others. Identity politics, in contrast, shares with liberalism the tendency to think of each social problem in isolation from the others. Specialists and experts are assigned to study and manage different departments, leading to bureaucratic solutions that leave capitalist ideology and structures in place. Government studies and reforms are proffered as ways to self-​correct a fundamentally unshakable social relation based in exchange relations and private property interests. Because postmodernism insists that there are no primary or fundamental structures, it is politically compatible with this liberal tendency. Left radicals, in contrast, consider the private ownership of major capitals to be the significant locus of power and the main problem to be overcome. Collective social control of production relations would lead to socialism, and this, it is believed, would help to alleviate the various forms of oppression that many advocates of identity politics believe should not be made to wait until a revolution takes place. Since the 1960s, the prominent role played by identity politics in the U.S. was exported worldwide through America’s formidable academic and culture industries. While Frankfurt School thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas looked to psychoanalysis and other forms of mediation to deepen the Marxist critique of political economy, none of their theoretical analyses weakened the forces of commodification and consumerism in the global market. According to Marie Moran, people in the pre-​WWII era were typically concerned with individuality, subjectivity and social relations, but not identity.10 The postwar politicization of identity displaced the philosophical concept of particularity, which was still tied to universality. Identity, as we now know it, accompanied the commodification of lifestyles and consolidated around the development of new social movements, which developed forms of politics that look beyond the socialist focus on class struggle. Differences of identity, worries about bureaucratic standardization and resistance to conformity accentuated a petty-​bourgeois mode of class distinction through consumer practices, leisure, lifestyle, fashion, popular culture and politics. Advertising and the promotion of new ideas about the good life absorbed the working class into the mainstream ideology of consumer capitalism.

Identity Politics  25 It is the postwar consumer era, which generated American versions of pop psychology, that also produced the “me generation” and the slogan “the personal is political.” While 60s identity-​based separatism and radicalism were articulated against “the system,” by the 70s identity politics became compatible with a nascent neoliberalism, which moved away from state welfare policies towards deregulation, privatization and globalization. Labour parties lost their raison d’être through pragmatic alignment with the needs of transnational corporations. Official communist parties replaced international class struggle with the autonomy of instances, conjunctures, culture and even economics. The neoconservative ideology of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan made entrepreneurialism, individual responsibility, and the rhetoric of a market freed from the diktat of “big government” the background for conservative forms of New Right identity politics that capitalized in their own nefarious ways on postmodern lifestyles and the rhetoric of empowerment. Marking these ideological shifts, women’s fashion in these decades shifted from Mary Quant to Thea Porter to Laura Ashley, cinema from François Truffaut to Martin Scorsese to James Ivory, music from Bob Dylan to the Doobie Brothers to Madonna, and television from Star Trek and M*A*S*H to Dallas and Diff ’rent Strokes. Likewise, the television personalities Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey were popular versions of the New Democrat policies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The collapse of the Soviet Union secured the ideological gains of the neoliberal and neoconservative agendas. Freed from the demands of radicalism and the counterculture, black capitalists, corporate feminists and gay yuppies could aim for more than their fair share of the pie with a blank conscience. The exciting topics of Cultural Studies appropriated the radical legacy to underwrite reception studies and new subjectivities. The high-​tech sector further secured these victories as the new communications technologies enhanced the capacity for market differentiation and decentralization. As socialist radicalism made a small but significant comeback in the early 2000s, the debates of the 1960s, 70s and 80s were now available to Foucauldian historicists as a bulwark against Marxism. Postmodernists now insisted that because oppression is endemic and cannot be overcome, any and all forms of resistance would develop alongside the dominant forms of capitalist power. To distinguish themselves from Marxists, who are denounced for presuming to know where society is headed, or where it should be headed, postmodernists prided themselves on never knowing anything in advance and instead mining conditions of possibility. It is for this reason that a postmodernist is not likely to have the foresight of someone like Frederick Engels, who anticipated in 1887 the First World War and the Russian Revolution, writing: Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other’s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years War compressed into three to four years and extended

26  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics over the entire continent: famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute misery, irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of trade, industry and credit, ending in universal bankruptcy, collapse of the old states and their conventional political wisdom to the extent that crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen. […] Only one consequence is absolutely certain: universal exhaustion and the creation of the conditions for the ultimate victory of the working class.11 Marxists like Engels have no predictive powers beyond the materialist approach to historical events and the study of objective causes. As Žižek argues, the pessimistic attitudes of postwar intellectuals did more to bring about the defeat of communism than to predict anything.12 Wondering in 1994 if identity politics could liberate anyone, the socialist writer Sharon Smith argued that postmodern activists had become comfortable with the tendency to disparage Marxism and the centrality of class in struggles against oppression. Smith writes: “identity politics is a rejection of the notion that the working class can be the agent for social change, and a pessimism about the possibility for significant, never mind revolutionary, social transformation.”13 Identity politics, she says, opposes oppression to exploitation, creating cross-​ class alliances to disturb the masses that are deemed oblivious to their own concerns. She mentions several of the points that have been outlined above: 1) the idea that only those who directly experience a specific or combined form of oppression can define it or fight against it; 2) the belief that prejudices cannot be overcome; 3) the view that people benefit from oppression; and 4) the argument that identity issues can be separated from class issues. Smith makes the important observation, which is avoided in identity and micropolitics, that fascist politics betrays one of the key weaknesses of identity politics, specifically, the defence of capitalism in the interest of an identity group that is held to be the organic basis of politics and in some cases the totality of meaning and experience. The use of shock tactics by identity groups to agitate the masses has nothing to do with political economy and instead promotes liberalism under the banner of radicalism. Moreover, through the influence of postmodernism, class politics is rejected as reductionist and oppressive. Reality, objectivity and reason are replaced with subjectivity as the medium of transindividual “flows” that are programmed by capitalist bureaucracies. These forces are welcomed for their ability to “liberate” subjectivity from supposedly fixed cultural and ideological coordinates. In this regard, the 60s movements combined with postmodernism to undermine socialism and emphasize instead anarchist politics as well as middle-​class individualism. Exodus from trade unions and left parties into ad hoc forms of subversion have made postmodern identity politics hostile to the organizational demands of socialism. For Smith, identity politics is contradictory because it is inherently anti-​ political. The kinds of contradictions it produces are evident throughout the

Identity Politics  27 history of new social movements. For example, as a feature of its middle-​class and individualistic character, the women’s movement split from the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, which by and large had placed its radical hopes on anti-​imperialist movements in the Third World. Radical feminists compared themselves to colonized peoples, leading SDS to agree that women were more oppressed than the working class. The lack of gender equality in socialist countries gave feminists cause to break from left politics, resulting in splits along cultural and class lines. Feminist separatists who argued that capitalism was not the cause of women’s oppression advanced the independent analysis of patriarchy, which led to debates on integrated versus dual systems analysis. As feminist politics developed around consciousness-​ raising groups, organizations dwindled in size and turned against one another. Criticism of everything, from leaders to lifestyles, led to arcane demands, like the Boston-​based Cell 16’s insistence that members should be celibate and give up their male children if they have any. According to Smith, feminist separatists targeted their male counterparts, encouraged divisiveness and fragmentation, ignored class differences and extended these problems to the analysis of racism and heterosexism. Efforts to combine analyses led just as often to identity groups going their separate ways. Similar problems informed the Civil Rights and gay liberation movements. Former radicals who joined academia, Smith says, excelled at finding new ways to demonstrate that class politics was reductionist. Discourse theory and the politics of difference, for example, informed the queer politics that later came into conflict with homonormative gays and bisexuals. Likewise, American black power nationalism, which was at one time the most proletarian orientation, eventually made Afrocentrism into a vehicle for upward mobility.14 Anti-​ racism, or racialism, is now distinct from the socialist and labour politics that supported the Civil Rights movement since the 1930s. Identitarian social movements define their struggles beyond the compass of socialist struggles against the capitalist state and collaborate with the centre-​right. Its proponents reduce leftist analysis to the caricature of a one-​sided economic determinism and a putatively white male worker. By avoiding class struggle, identity politics obscures the workings of capitalism. It also limits the meaning of oppression, which can include phenomena as far from identity as pollution or underfunded schools and hospitals. When these are addressed, the strategy is always to show how such disparate problems affect specific identity groups. Socialism, in contrast, emphasizes the class function of oppression. The notion that class politics is indifferent to issues of oppression is disproved by the history of the labour movement, least of all by the October Revolution, which, Smith notes, granted women political equality, equal pay for equal work, free and legal abortion, divorce on request, the revocation of age of consent laws and relief from domestic duties. It also decriminalized homosexuality and prevented the state from interfering in people’s sexual affairs. For Smith, Marxism offers far more to radicals who want to end oppression than does

28  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics identity politics.15 By supposedly radicalizing the level of the personal, identity politics engineered a raft of depoliticizing ideas and behaviours: elitism, exclusivity, moralism, divisiveness, fragmentation, scapegoating, outing, structurelessness, avoidance of the state, anti-​intellectual voluntarism, petty criminality, counter-​ oppression, oppression Olympics, atavism, collusion with the right, biological reductionism, freak power and aesthetic solutions to political problems. It goes unremarked by contemporary activists how all of these problems, which should be part of the recollections of those who experienced the 60s, 70s and 80s, are not rejected but instead incorporated into the post-​political tendencies of intersectionality and decoloniality. For Smith, the rise of postwar identity politics is bound up with pessimism about the possibility of solidarity among the downtrodden. Not only is socialist class struggle more effective than identity politics in achieving the reasonable goals of identitarians, it is the only genuine basis for social equality. The critique of oppression must therefore move from the realm of personal experience to the realm of the political without at the same time remaking politics into a revised form of identity politics. Since the experience of oppression does not by itself have a progressive content, one must not have experienced a specific form of oppression to be opposed to it or to militate against it. Socialism is therefore the universalist politics that is best able to address particularist needs and demands. Although identitarianism is accommodated easily enough by liberal pluralism, it is almost impossible to define as Marxist, which is why so many have simply abandoned Marxism. Some identitarians have nevertheless sought to reprogramme Marxism to make it fit their agenda. One example of this is the work of Cedric Robinson and the concept of racial capitalism that he developed in his book on black Marxism.16 As a contributor to a recent anthology on Robinson’s work, Angela Davis contends, in Foucauldian terms, that the concept of racial capitalism allows us to excavate histories that derive from contemporary problems like the carceral state.17 While Davis is correct to lament the resurgence of narrow black nationalism, she is more intersectional than internationalist when she celebrates the diversity of black, youth, feminist and queer practices. She argues that Robinson taught us that there can be no unified theory and that perhaps only culture can represent the multiplicity of possibilities. Rather than be satisfied with the politics of Occupy Wall Street and the Sanders campaigns, she argues, the goal should be to complicate them. On this count, however, there is no reason why one could not complicate socialism with almost anything else, from shamanism to geology or artisanal production. One would indeed wish to further radicalize the politics of OWS and Bernie Sanders. However, the concept of culture need not be limited to the question of identity. The difficulty with Robinson’s account of black Marxism is that, unlike Marxism, it is defined as a narrative of non-​Western and anti-​Enlightenment resistance that begins in pre-​capitalist times. In that regard, it has a good deal more in common with the postmodern politics of resistance than with

Identity Politics  29 class analysis. According to Adolph Reed, there always were and always will be forms of resistance for the simple reason that people do not like to be oppressed or exploited. “That and a buck fifty,” he says, “will get you on the subway.”18 The overestimation of concepts like racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity are symptoms of the absence of a radical left movement. Reed associates the inconsequential concepts and practices that this leads to as part of the stock-​in-​trade of black public intellectuals whose Cultural Studies “twaddle” provides quietistic alternatives to concerted political action. Climbing the tenure ladder and generating vicarious pride is correlative to a disenfranchised citizenry that is incapable of articulating its own agenda. The fact that the left does not have a popular-​based political movement is not a problem that should be indulged so as to remain satisfied with the conservative politics of people like Henry Louis Gates, Shelby Steele and Michael Dyson, or the defeatist strains of culturalist thinkers like Frank B. Wilderson III and Fred Moten. Claims that politics is everywhere and in everything are quietistic, Reed argues, and substitute furtive rituals for concerted action in the workplace and government. In contrast, Davis and like-​minded activists criticize leftist universality as assimilationist and therefore complicate class struggle with notions like racial capitalism. While scholars like Reed cannot appeal to a radical movement that does not exist in any considerable measure, those like Davis make much ado about the popularity of intersectionality among contemporary activists and within postmodern academia. By over-​emphasizing the importance of slavery to the development of capitalism, and under-​emphasizing the knowledge derived since then through the socialist movement, such scholars inscribe the ontological thinking that is fundamental to racialism and thereby legitimize capitalism. What poses as critical theory becomes an unintended apologia for slavery and an alibi for establishment notions of racial justice. One is not altogether surprised that Davis, the former communist member of the Black Panther Party, endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. In another version of leftist pluralism, the socialist writer Richard Seymour considers whether there is a materialist politics to identity.19 Acknowledging that identity is now a public obsession, he wonders why the left continues to argue against it. The left, according to Seymour, seems to be caught in a catch-​22. While New Labour is accused of abandoning welfare and shifting from the workplace to the academy and identity issues, or from bread and butter to bruschetta, the Tory right is promoting its own version of identity and community. Seeking to solve the class and identity conundrum, Seymour argues that identity expresses shared interests and not only unshared oppressions. Rather than a depoliticizing anti-​universalist tendency, identity politics should be viewed in materialist terms, he thinks, as the politicization of identity. Dedicated to a class project, the left fails to produce a materialist analysis of culture and identity. It is not realistic, he argues, for straight white men to tell people to drop their identity and think of themselves as workers. However, one would have difficulty finding leftists who are telling anyone to

30  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics do that. The problem is rather with middle-​class professionals who specialize in diversity and side with neoliberal institutions against the legacy of socialist strategy. Sadly, Seymour and materialists like him pretend that our choice is between an ‘either-​or’ option, class against identity, and a ‘do both’ option, class with identity. The latter is very problematically defined as taking identities as starting points for politicization and a universal project. What class analysis and class struggle have to do with this is anyone’s guess since such views are more compatible with liberal pluralism than socialism. Seymour rejects the strategic priority of class, which he ascribes to the idea of reductionism and expressive totality. This contradicts his assertion that identities have a material basis in the process of capitalist production. And the latter contradicts his assertion that identity is based in corporeality. This eclectic approach to materialism is more or less reductionist when the mood strikes. It is simply false, or non-​ Marxist, to suggest that socialists consider oppression to be less material than exploitation –​or more material, for that matter. Such anti-​communist rhetoric which suggests that leftists want a class struggle that is “cleansed” of race and sexuality reflects the kind of twisted logic a pseudo-​left is likely to engage in once identity has trumped socialism. This strawman reflects the petty-​bourgeois and middle-​class directions taken by left politics since the 1960s and 70s. You know you are in a jumble when for the sake of identity politics your definition of materialism reinscribes neoliberal governance. Marxist materialism does not pretend to settle all matters of social inequality, but it does reject the depoliticization of class antagonism that is at work in neo-​bohemian protest politics. Seymour’s rejection of the concept of totality does not leave him without a totality to contend with, it leaves him without an effective theory of socialist change. Identitarian blackmail is not more progressive when it is given a leftist veneer as materialism, which in the end is designed to compel the left to submit to the politics of the middle class. Fascism, it should be noted, also accepts a cheap version of historical materialism and also makes identity a primary principle of antagonism. The argument that the left ignores problems of oppression and questions of social difference is a postmodern red herring. What is even more pernicious is the notion that workers should suffer more so that inequality can be more evenly distributed. 2  Radical Democracy The identity politics of the 1960s and 70s, especially the more excessive tendencies, ran into so many difficulties that legitimate concerns about oppression could have been and were better settled through conventional civil rights avenues. As postmodern theories made their way into the academic milieu, a new opportunity arose to distinguish identity struggles from the traditional Marxist left. Postmodernism allowed identity politics to renew its radical credentials through the rejection of Enlightenment and Marxist principles. The post-​Marxist scholars Ernesto Laclau and Chantal

Radical Democracy  31 Mouffe rose to the occasion with their 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which outlined a discourse theory-​based definition of radical democracy.20 Making use of a post-​communist version of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Foucauldian discourse theory and Derridean deconstruction, Laclau and Mouffe argued that, as Mouffe put it elsewhere, socialism “should be conceived as a discursive surface rather than an empirical fact.”21 Their approach to universality emphasized a logic of contingency that engages political identity in any number of different communities at different times. Contingency is linked to their notion of articulation, which asserts difference and relationality. The third term they introduced is the idea of an equivalence between different forms of struggle, whether based on class, gender, race, sexuality, or some other rallying point like ecology. The theory of radical democracy offered a pragmatic and opportunist model for coalition building. It was compatible with postmodernism because it did not presume a unified field of emergence. The keystone to this, based on the work of Claude Lefort, was to reimagine the place of power –​or universality –​as empty and therefore subject to a continuous struggle for hegemonic articulation and rearticulation. Žižek, who in no way avoided the challenge of postmodern theory, made the important observation that Laclau and Mouffe conceive the space of the universal as empty because they do not renounce capitalist democracy.22 Postmodern socialism met with some resistance on the part of public-​ minded scholars and activists in the 1990s, leading to debates about postmodern culture, urban gentrification and theories of social space and the public sphere. In response, radical democrats used Marxist materialism against bourgeois humanism, but also used discourse theory against Frankfurt School Marxists like Jürgen Habermas. Whatever the success of radical democracy in the debates on publics and counter-​publics, it was doubtful, as Terry Eagleton argued, that the proliferation of public spheres had any political benefit.23 Counter-​publics were more likely to be absorbed into the capitalist hegemony they were at times directed against.24 In fact, Laclau and Mouffe’s refurbishing of identity politics came at the expense of any effort to explain, let alone transform, the totality of social relations. In The Retreat from Class, Ellen Meiksins Wood described Laclau and Mouffe’s method as the replacement of working-​class struggle with the struggle for power.25 According to Wood, radical democracy’s post-​ Althusserian and Eurocommunist acceptance of capitalism is not concerned with class formations but with post-​ class alliances of students, academics, identity groups and single-​issue groups. Radical democracy replaces the analysis of modes and relations of production with the analysis of social reproduction. Its reformist analysis is characterized by the voluntarism and defeatism of the counterculture. If this strand of democratic socialism opposes economism, Wood argues, it is for the sake of the autonomization of the political and an anti-​dialectical understanding of material conditions. Bourgeois political parties respond positively to this populist challenge by readily adopting its

32  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics culturalized objectives. The promotion of the interests of the new petty bourgeoisie and the professional-​managerial class –​white-​collar service workers, professional groups and salaried employees –​galvanizes a politics of popular alliances among mainstream social elements. Eliminating class exploitation as the focus of political contestation, these “middle” class strata are enlisted by bourgeois hegemony. Labour parties and trade unions cease to be working-​class organizations and look instead to the corporate state to defend “radical” democracy. Wood singled out Laclau as one of the first Marxist theorists to combine social indeterminacy with ideological autonomy. Advocating popular democracy and populist nationalism in the struggle against fascist movements in Latin America, Laclau championed the class-​ neutral character of the petty-​bourgeois middle class. Identifying with nationalism, the intermediary middle class polarizes along class lines and according to struggles that can be disarticulated from one another. Laclau’s de-​ ideologization of truth claims remade socialism into a class-​neutral politics. His method was further relativized when his collaborator, Mouffe, transformed the social bases of political theory into discourse analysis. The resulting pseudo-​Gramscian theory of hegemony abrogated class politics. The consequence was competition among declassed postmodern intellectuals over non-​class issues in the realms of analytic theory, phenomenology, linguistics, structuralism, cybernetics, semiology, discourse theory and any number of ad hoc “studies” fields. If such trends were consistently “counter” to anything it was the Marxist left. Wood described Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as the repudiation of socialism and the idea of the proletariat. Now popular among social justice activists, radical democracy accepts the Althusserian autonomy of ideology and the Foucauldian postulate that power is diffuse, two strands of thought that undermine notions of causality. Rather than the exploitation of individuals through the concentrated power of capital, the dispersed effects of power are thought to constitute subjects in multiple, intersecting relations of difference. Even identity groups are downgraded as the non-​foundational and anti-​essentialist thrust of discourse theory attacks every form of ideological suturing in favour of endless ideological-​cultural mediation. Due to its postmodern orientation, radical democracy complements the neo-​anarchist tendencies of new social movements. The immanentist assumption that productive forces are neutral construes capitalism as a merely ideological obstacle to their full development and socialization. Whereas Marx’s account of capitalism includes its sordid development in the history of dispossession and expropriation (the separation of people from the instruments of labour), the development of exploitation (the capitalist transformation of the mode of production), and class struggle (organized resistance to the former), radical democracy refutes the idea that conflict gives labour a privileged relation to the economic and other spheres of capitalist society. Radical democracy attacks the association of socialism with working-​ class interests, an argument that it defines as reductive and even capitalistic.

Radical Democracy  33 Since the plurality of interests does not cohere into a unified perspective on capitalism, radical democracy recommends that proletarian internationalism should be abandoned. The revolutionary organization and education of the working class is replaced with the anti-​foundational deconstruction and discursive reconstruction of material interests around equivalent and negotiable social identities. Culture wars and hegemony contests thus come to have an all-​of-​the-​above plurality and flexibility that rejects Marxist class analysis. Radical democracy is better defined as a “floating,” “nomadic” and “technocratic” democracy that conflates social structures with political institutions and radical movements. According to Wood, this intellectual mishmash of political agendas encourages practices that are acceptable to the dominant forces of global capitalism. Since the working class is held to no longer have a privileged role to play in the building of socialism, its history is no more important than that of various marginalized groups whose heterogeneous stories are articulated against the background of a supposedly white European hegemony. That these stories shore up middle-​class individualism is less a contingent accident than it is a product of the assault on class consciousness. In her 1995 book, Democracy Against Capitalism, Wood reasserts the idea that the fragmentary insistence on race, gender and sexuality does little to explain the historical foundations of capitalism.26 Decentring class fails to refine socialist theory and instead dissolves critical social theory into ahistorical materialism and metaphysics. Whereas postmodernists accuse Marxists of a mechanical application of the (economic) base and (ideological) superstructure metaphor in their thinking, it is rather the postmodernists who have abandoned critical theory to technique and escaped history into discursive contingency. While twentieth-​century communism failed to emancipate the working class at the level of production relations, Western Marxism underscored this same failure at the level of ideology and culture. Louis Althusser’s project of superstructural autonomy and causation, balanced with overdetermination in the last instance, and shorn of the Hegelian concept of totality, did not solve this dilemma but resulted in a dualism of empiricism-​history and humanism-​theory that lacked a proper subject. With the theory of radical democracy, discourse replaced material production as the foundation of social life.27 In contrast, Wood’s method advocated the avoidance of teleology, determinism and empiricism in Marxist theory by deepening historical knowledge and improving theoretical elaboration. The contradictions between theory and practice, philosophy and historicism, continue to animate debates on the Marxist left. Contrary to the views of many social democrats and anti-​imperialist nationalists, Marxism cannot be limited to material gains within capitalist social relations. This is not what Marx understood by the transition from socialism to communism. However, Marxism does not deny the fact that workers have a material interest in changing social relations. In the hands of Laclau and Mouffe, the relations and mode of production are no more consequential to workers than anyone else

34  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics and are relativized through ideology along with other material contingencies. According to Wood, radical democracy severs the connection between the working class and socialism. This better allows radical democrats to redefine the left project as consonant with identity politics. As the civil society discourse of citizenship loses its viability in neoliberal and neo-​fascist times, liberal democratic pluralism separates rights discourse from the critique of class domination, leading haphazardly to diverse political aspirations and justifying the capitulation of the left. The fact that capitalism now seems to us to be gendered, racialized, colonialist or extractivist is more a problem than a solution. The discourse-​theoretical notion that there is no single or objective way to establish the cause of oppression allows billionaires to pose as defenders of the public interest. Socialism is reduced to populist electoral alliances, anti-​state tendencies and single-​issue platforms. What radical democracy therefore fails to address is the specificity of capitalism as a historical process and the theoretical elaborations through which understanding can be transformed into political praxis. 3 Populism The success of the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 gave a much-​ needed boost to the morale of progressives of various sorts in the United States and internationally. Around this time, the Democratic Socialists of America increased its membership from a few thousand to around 80,000 members organized in local chapters. The Sanders campaign witnessed the rise of what was referred to as the “Bernie left,” generating alternative media that challenged the political regression enabled by legacy and corporate media. By accepting only small individual donations, the Sanders campaigns provided a democratic socialist alternative to the “rigged economy” of neoliberalism and to the racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-​ immigrant and Islamophobic chauvinism of the Republicans. However, the progressive populist character of the Sanders campaign, which was focused on the needs of ordinary working-​class Americans, was countered by the reactionary populism of the Donald Trump campaigns of 2016 and 2020, which led, on January 6, 2021, to a concerted effort by right-​wing militias and elements within the Ideological and Repressive State Apparatus (elected representatives, government officials, Supreme Court justices, police, intelligence agencies and the military) to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the next president of the nation. The fact that Trump, like Sanders, also campaigned on the promise of economic nationalism, which would bring back the millions of jobs that had been downsized and offshored over the last several decades, presents limits to the change that can be achieved through populism. If conditions in the period 2020 to 2024 only worsened through NATO militarism, anti-​labour inflation policies and the Supreme Court assault on political and social rights, among the many issues that marked the Biden administration, it is partly due to the overestimation of populism as a political strategy. Our concern here is

Populism  35 the way that contemporary populism adopts features of radical democracy, or postmodernism more generally, and can thereby function as a variant of identity politics. In addition to the phrase “new social movements,” the uses of populism among contemporary progressives suggest that identity politics are accepted in the same breath as democratic socialism. However, political realities are not so simple. The ideology of populism is not distinct from liberalism, socialism or fascism. As such, it works to evade the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour, displacing class struggle onto a conflict between a nebulous construction of “the people” and an equally nebulous construction of “elites,” usually the billionaire class as well as corporate and government elites, but in the case of right-​wing populism elites can be anything from elected officials to university students or welfare recipients. Citizen collectivism opposes conservative and constitutionalist defences of various forms of oppression, from class inequality to pollution, corruption, police violence and hate speech. In contrast to the fascist assault on constitutional rights, only socialism combines constitutionalism with revolutionary transformation. Otherwise, folk ideologies confuse the eclectic politics of single-​issue causes with leftist radicalism. Like any other ideology, populism can be hybridized, creating new formations such as feminist populism, for example, or black populism. Although right-​wing populism is the most dubious of populist concoctions, it is nevertheless a real phenomenon and one of the best reasons to reject populism as a path for radical politics. The 2020 Sanders campaign ended the moment the Vermont Senator fell in line behind Biden and endorsed the policies of the Democratic Party establishment. Yet, even before that, the Sanders campaign had rebranded democratic socialism along identitarian and intersectional lines, leaving voters confused when it comes to what makes leftism different from progressive neoliberalism. The problem, then, is that the vitriol levelled against corporations and moneyed elites is empty when it is disconnected from the critique of the capitalist system as such. On the other side of this, Trump’s supposed economic nationalism led to unprecedented tax cuts for the wealthy, producing an additional 7 trillion dollars in government debt. When in 2023, the African American philosopher Cornel West announced his presidential candidacy as the potential Green Party nominee, Sanders fell in with the CEOs, war hawks and polluters in the Biden administration. Among the difficulties of populism is the Manichean opposition that it creates between the people, presumed to be benevolent, and the elite, presumed to be corrupt. Populism very problematically divides people along the lines of us and them, abstracting the material relations or production and global divisions of labour. In addition to the problem of charismatic demagoguery at the level of leadership, populism is more moralistic than scientific. Originating among the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s, the agrarian form of Narodnik socialism idealized the peasantry and advocated terrorism as means to build solidarity. Populist ideology was later denounced

36  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics by communists as a petty-​bourgeois, nihilistic and self-​elevating evasion of class struggle. The lesson of the failures of Russian populism means that while socialists should support identity groups against oppression, they should also defend socialism against appropriation by identity groups. The populist definition of politics as a struggle between the people and the elites creates a powder keg of confusion. This is why sympathy for ordinary people is today expressed across left and right versions of populism, from the Pink Tide governments of Latin America to Syriza, Podemos and the Five Star Movement in Europe, or the reactionary governments of Geert Wilders, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi and Javier Milei. In The People, NO: A Brief History of Anti-​Populism, Thomas Frank objects to the association of populism with mob rule and with the anti-​ democratic politics of right-wing governments. He defines anti-​populism as the politics of a technocratic elite that fears a grassroots mobilization against their mostly economic interests. “The backlash against populism typically comes down to us from the citadels of higher learning, but it is not,” he argues, “a disinterested literature of social science.”28 Instead, Frank’s distinctly American version of populism was born in the 1890s as the politics of insurgent farmers against the two-​party system. The populist People’s Party demanded democratic economic reforms. Its neo-​ Enlightenment legacy, according to Frank, lasted through to the welfare state policies of the New Deal. As the first and to date last significant effort to build a third-​party alternative in the U.S., populism targeted the wealthy: bankers, railway barons, commodity traders and corrupt politicians. Though it focused on economic issues and was part of the labour movement, populism, according to Frank, should not be confused or conflated with socialism. Populism “is our radical tradition,” he writes, “a homegrown Left that spoke our American vernacular and worshipped at the shrines of Jefferson and Paine rather than Marx.”29 Frank is well advised since Marx very clearly rejected populism, writing in his Critique of the Gotha Program: the different states of the different civilised countries, in spite of their manifold diversity of form, all have this in common, that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. … The question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? … This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-​hop to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word state.30 Unlike radical democracy, Frank’s version of populism avoids culture war issues, like prohibition in the late 1800s, or campus radicalism today, and rebuffs politically correct snobbery. This extends to socialism since, according to him, anti-​populism is as insidious as communism. The purpose of Frank’s American version of populism is to rescue common-​sense democracy from extreme versions of the left, right and centre. His programme of reform,

Populism  37 unfortunately, is little more than a lament for an inoperative liberalism. A cursory glance across the pond reveals a broader, more global process than Frank is willing to entertain. In his assessment of the development of global protest movements, Paolo Gerbaudo views today’s populism as a response to neoliberal globalization.31 He defines citizen politics as the ideology of the indignant who denounce political institutions as the instruments of oligarchs. Its use of folk idioms allegorizes the unification of atomized individuals. In contrast to the no-​ border rhetoric of anarchists, this “citizenism” appeals to national identity and extends civil disobedience from activist groups to the population at large. The slogan of the 99 percent, or the rich and the rest of us, for example, assembles minority groups into a majoritarian bloc against hegemonic politics. Gerbaudo’s citizen populism, however, is more a symptom than a solution to neoliberal globalization. As OWS became mainstream, it soon broke down into dozens of fragmented expressions, the most enduring of which have been Black Lives Matter, MeToo and Extinction Rebellion. This means that even when new social movements cohere around a populist agenda and populist leaders, they have difficulty becoming effective as a hegemonic bloc. This is in part due to the fact that citizenism preserves something of anarchism’s libertarian suspicion of institutions and so today’s insurgencies quickly devolve according to the leaderless and horizontalist modalities of digital activism. The anarcho-​populist rejection of “abstract” ideologies in favour of lived experience, localism, communitarianism, ordinary values and inclusiveness is in this regard similar to the radical democratic repudiation of “old left” ideology. As one of the architects of radical democracy, Mouffe did not fail to appreciate the deep connection between today’s populism and the post-​class logic of new social movements. In For a Left Populism, she suggests that socialist parties that have advocated class struggle and the elimination of the state have been “unable” to understand demands that were not based on class, almost as if to suggest that Marxists are inveterate philistines.32 Like most liberals and postmodernists, Mouffe makes the worst aspects of Stalinism stand in for the radical left. With the socialist left out of the way, and with labour parties now governing like neo-​Thatcherite bourgeois parties, the post-​2008 “populist moment” intervenes, she says, as a “discursive strategy of construction” that establishes a frontier between “the people” and “the oligarchy.” The left project is once again redefined as a “set of heterogeneous demands” that includes the same groups that were addressed through the concept of radical democracy.33 The main difference is that left populism constructs a transversal chain of equivalence against right-​wing populism. Although Mouffe views left populism as a return to politics after many decades of post-​ politics, she shows no sense of responsibility for the latter. Whatever was achieved in the 2000s by those groups that rejected the postmodern end of ideology, Mouffe reinscribes into the fold of the professional-​managerial class, which tends to rule out socialism. As with

38  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics radical democracy, left populism is based on the discursive construction of hegemonic practices. It has no ideology, she admits, and no programme. It is compatible with different ideologies and is dominated by the multiplicity of unsatisfied demands. Abstracting from political history, Mouffe suggests that liberal democracy can be used against the worst tendencies of liberal democracy. In other words, for her, liberal democracy contains everything we require to fight the oligarchization of Western societies. Mouffe is correct that the critique of the populist right is convenient for the centre left. Left populists, she argues, must not be satisfied to demonize enemies but must win populist passions over to egalitarian objectives. However, the idea that working people will respond positively to being discursively constructed by the PMC ignores the reality that the precarious are more than tired of being flexibilized by the new regimes of post-​Fordist accumulation. There is nothing about a nominally “radical” democracy and a nominally “left” populism that has anything to do with socialism. For Mouffe’s new hegemonic bloc to be created, the left, she says, must “relinquish the [class] essentialist conception of politics that prevents it from grasping its hegemonic dimension.”34 However, the only way for the left to do this is to accept capitalism. And to make capitalism acceptable one must emphasize the “populist” multiplicity of “concrete” agendas, shifting from a politics based on relations of production to a politics based on relations of power. Despite her use of radical-​sounding terminology, Mouffe is more concerned to fight communism, viewed as an “internal enemy,” than to fight capitalism. As she reassures us that the “movements of the squares” did not advocate socialism, she connects left populism to the values and aspirations of the masses. Although left populism does not advocate unfettered free markets and seeks to appropriate the means of production, it remains within the liberal democratic framework. The only advantage that this theory claims over socialism is that whatever left populism may turn out to be, it cannot be known in advance of its “performative articulation,” or, in the words of Stathis Kouvelakis, its “ostentatious radicality.”35 Unsurprisingly, this post-​ structuralist conceit is nevertheless certain that it cannot be based on the conventional labour and capital antagonism. Unfortunately, Mouffe’s populism mostly reiterates the norms of liberal democracy. In keeping with all populisms, left populism establishes its radical democratic chains of equivalence by designating an adversary. The “people” are constructed through an us/​them division that mobilizes affective energies against the political right and calls on citizens to influence the institutions of the state. In his critique of populism, Žižek acknowledges the different arguments put forward by people like Frank, Gerbaudo or Mouffe and suggests that these are merely aspects of the same problem.36 Today’s populism cannot be a basis for emancipatory universalism because it mobilizes people in the name of an institutionalized post-​politics. “Its basic gesture,” he argues, “is to refuse to confront the complexity of the situation.”37 Rather than being presented with the political option of a communist left, people are

Populism  39 blackmailed to ratify technocratic expertise. The political struggle is limited to the inevitable and is focused on a pseudo-​concrete enemy that functions to obscure the possibility of genuine alternatives. For example, in today’s U.S., the false choice is limited to the party of war and austerity or the party of fascism and austerity. In the case of the Ukraine crisis, the choice is limited to the Russian conservative oligarchy or the NATO (US/​EU) neoliberal oligarchy. Against this blackmail, people sometimes choose Trump rather than Clinton–​ Obama–​ Biden, or Brexit rather than Corbyn–​ Starmer. The only thing that we learn from the political right, Žižek argues, is the fact that neoliberal global capitalism does not consign us to the end of politics. The Sanders and Corbyn campaigns had this potential, but for various reasons, both internal and external, they failed to win the political struggle against the extreme centre. The trouble with populism, according to Žižek, is that it can defend the national economy while at the same time being anti-​immigrant or regressive on foreign policy. While liberals focus on the public interest and the democratic process, those whose livelihoods are being destroyed sometimes turn to right-​wing populism, which in the end serves the interests of neoliberal and authoritarian elites alike. Populism is therefore the result of the incapacity to distinguish between the left and the right. For fear of being associated with the right, populism blackmails workers to support the agenda of the liberal-​technocratic elite. For instance, after the “back to brunch” Biden administration made good on its promise to campaign donors that effectively “nothing will change,” the populist pseudo-​left hangers-​on of the Democratic Party propagated the nefarious illusion that “Dark Brandon” (Biden) is “based” (for the people). The flaws in Mouffe’s version of left populism were already apparent in Laclau’s 2005 book On Populist Reason.38 Well before this, Laclau had written Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, a 1977 tract in which the signature achievement of radical democracy –​the separation of ideology from class relations –​had already been devised.39 In this book the working class is replaced by the people. Whereas Nicos Poulantzas had emphasized the function of social reproduction played by the petty bourgeoisie through the phenomenon of class polarization, Laclau considered the relation of the petty bourgeoisie to the conflict between labour and capital as an ideological division rather than a class contradiction. He criticized Poulantzas for avoiding the radical potential of nationalism, and by implication, identity struggles, in the fight against fascism. However, Laclau’s combination of nationalism with labour politics also allowed left energies to be confused with mainstream and rightist tendencies. He considered national identity to be class neutral and populist interpellations to be apolitical. In this regard, he argued that both national identity and populist interpellations could be used to oppose bourgeois rule by winning the consent of the petty-​bourgeois class in cross-​ class alliances against various forms of domination. Since the petty bourgeoisie does not identify as a class but in terms of (national) identity, Latin American populism was advanced by Laclau as a more effective ideology

40  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics than socialism. The theoretical move, as Wood discusses in The Retreat from Class, was to make ideological struggle autonomous from class struggle. The politics of this class-​neutral popular struggle, or populism, became the prerogative of declassed intellectuals who called on the people to forget about class analysis and socialism. The universality of the proletarian project was thereby made to seem not only arbitrary but unpopular. In On Populist Reason, Laclau redevelops his theory of populism after the conceptual jumps that were advanced with Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. His reworking of Gramsci defines politics as the overlapping of the universal and particular. In this regard, a people is constructed when competing demands are combined to produce a universal political subject. Because Laclau’s theory is based on a neutral-​formal frame for hegemonic struggle, whose content cannot be known in advance, populism can be articulated around any demand, from anti-​immigrant racism to decolonization. This makes populism ultimately different from socialism, Žižek argues, which privileges class struggle as the locus of opposition and the working class as the privileged agent of change. With populism, in contrast, any signifier can become the contingent placeholder that totalizes the chain of equivalences. MAGA populists, for example, rallied around the refusal to wear pandemic protective masks. OWS activists rallied around the refusal to answer the Adbusters query: What is our one demand? Today’s political establishment also plays the populist game by transforming policy proposals into political products that one tries to sell to voter consumers, as with for example Andrew Yang’s promotion of UBI within an otherwise run-​of-​the-​mill neoliberal platform. In Canada, the leader of the New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh, pandered dental care insurance at the same time that he locked his party into a five-​year deal with the Liberals when they set off with NATO allies in the Ukraine proxy war. While Laclau’s radical democratic definition of populism avoids the usual us/​them antagonism, its only advantage is the multiplication of reasons to be outraged, which results in a more incoherent set of demands. Populism nevertheless requires an enemy whose elimination would restore the desired state. This contrasts with both Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist class analysis, in which the pathological element (the symptom or economic crisis) is inherent in the normal functioning of the system. Marxism and psychoanalysis would in that regard offer better explanations of Trump’s popularity than populism does. Rather than focus on the political and economic process, populism fixates on “pseudo-​concrete” fetishes, like Trump’s orange skin or his offensiveness. The bogus concreteness of bodies and affects condenses the multiplicity of socio-​economic and political factors. In this sense, populism has a pseudo-​political need for the intruding, contingent or ontic element at the formal level, where it is reified as a sublime object. It is easy enough to see how today’s culture wars bait and blackmail people into populist forms of antagonism. As Žižek puts it:

Populism  41 populism by definition contains a minimum, an elementary form, of ideological mystification, which is why, although it is effectively a formal frame or matrix of political logic that can be given different political twists (reactionary-​nationalist, progressive-​nationalist), nonetheless, insofar as, in its very notion, it displaces the immanent social antagonism into the antagonism between the unified people and its external enemy, it harbors in the last instance a long-​term protofascist tendency.40 Communism, in contrast, is not populist. Its unifying element can be a leader or a party, but communist leadership is secondary to the idea of communism and the historical necessity –​not inevitability –​of what needs to be done. Another problem with the Laclau and Mouffe approach to populism, according to Žižek, is the way in which the people are constituted by the performative raising of demands. In contrast to populism, revolution does not demand something from the big Other of power but seeks to destroy the system of power that the demand refers to. This is fundamentally different from feminist and anti-​racist hysteria, where the big Other is positivized in the form of patriarchy or white supremacy. In contrast to revolutionary politics, the liberal avoidance of politics inscribes antagonism into procedural and institutional mechanisms. The threat to democracy today is inherent to liberalism through the commodification of politics and the purchase of political power by the donor class. The inability to move beyond neoliberal capitalism is what makes U.S. politics the most populist and post-​political agent of economic stagnation and universal antagonism. The capitalist nature of American populism explains the legitimizing need for a rotating cast of identity constituencies to occupy the place of institutional power. Its purpose is to simulate change as the system essentially stays the same. Although the right-​ wing version of populism appeals to violence and the transgression of institutional rules, it by and large serves the same purpose. Žižek’s criticism extends to the new social movements that articulate their demands in a populist way, often resorting to metaphorical and narrative frameworks rather than facts and reason. From the perspective of emancipatory universality, the question is not which group will hegemonize the place of power, but rather, which form of universality will prevail. In other words, the choice is not between white supremacy and black capitalism, but between capitalism and socialism. Capitalism cannot be reduced to self-​interest, as liberal ideology conceives it, since capitalism disregards social reproduction. Self-​interest, in a capitalist system, and like the system itself, is abstract and anonymous. As Žižek has it, capitalism, as a system of permanent self-​overcoming, is inherently antagonistic. The only political struggle is therefore the struggle against capitalism. Whatever the gains that were achieved by identity struggles in the 1960s and 70s, identity politics has for the most part lost its connection to common concerns. Freedom cannot be restricted to shareholders, specific interest groups, nations, or exclusive fraternities. The left therefore cannot be based on diverse and competing demands but must define and advance

42  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics the common interest. When the left fights against oppression it does not do so on behalf of one group and against another. It fights in the name of all. By the same token, the left is not a coalition of interest groups. One does not support a party because it is the best defence against a worst party. One supports the party that best represents the common interest. Now that many people have been convinced that the neoliberal state will do nothing in the public interest, they are compelled to think that they have nothing but the people themselves –​populism –​as their salvation. Those who argue against the socialist left on the charge that it is blind to differences reduce politics to the logic of group interests. The core of a socialist politics is not opposition to discrimination, it is the critique of capitalism and the decommodification of big capitals and public services. When in February 2021, more than 5 million people in the state of Texas lost their privatized power utilities to winter storm Uri, the mayor of Colorado City condemned citizens who were “looking for a damn handout” from a non-​ existent “socialist government,” stating that power providers owe them nothing and that only the strong should survive.41 Worse still was the government mishandling of the COVID-​19 epidemic, which began before the Democratic Party did everything it could to prevent the nomination of the only candidate advocating universal health care. The commitment to diversity contributes to inequality by indirectly justifying class inequality. In a capitalist system, identity politics is a petty-​bourgeois politics that does not accept discrimination but that does accept class exploitation and economic inequality as an essential feature of liberal democracy. Even in its neo-​populist forms, the function of identity politics is to deradicalize the left. As Alain Badiou argues, the word “people” is not in the least progressive.42 For this reason, denouncing people like Marine Le Pen as populist does not by itself advance the cause of emancipation. For Marx, Badiou reminds us, the workers have no country. The people, in contrast, is an argument for the persistence of the state, its system of elections, wars and economic plunder. Against this passivization of the signifier “people,” the declarative “we the people” can be used instead to affirm a revolutionary politics. This happens when a radical detachment, or vanguard, assumes the tasks of politics and the capacity of the progressive masses to act against the oppressive mechanisms of bourgeois society. 4  Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory The two remaining variants of identity politics to be addressed are privilege theory, examined here alongside critical race theory, and intersectionality, along with decoloniality. Because privilege theory is the more conservative of the two, it has fewer implications for socialist theory. This is no doubt the reason why privilege theory, along with similar strands of analysis, like whiteness studies, has caused more mainstream discussion. The Ur-​text of privilege theory is Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”43 The article argues that men and whites refuse

Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory  43 to acknowledge their privileges. Because this learned behaviour prevents them from recognizing interconnected hierarchies in society, McIntosh recommends awareness of privilege as a remedy to social ills. Beginning with herself as the target of conscientization, she uses the metaphor of an invisible knapsack to describe the unearned assets that people like her possess without even knowing it. The knapsack contains maps, passports, visas, clothes and blank cheques that allow her to move more easily through life than others. For example, she says that she can take it for granted that people of her race will be represented on television or that she can go shopping without the worry that she will be followed or harassed. Since the invisibility of these assets allows privileges to become tools of oppression, the goal of privilege theory is to make asset holders accountable for those privileges, which means giving up some of their power. Those who wield power should not seek to make women or blacks more like themselves. Rather than working on a societal level, McIntosh’s reader is called upon to do what she has done and work on themselves. She writes: “I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-​color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined.”44 Giving up the myths of meritocracy and the comforts of cultural norms, one should share positive advantages –​ like protection from hostility, distress and violence –​and avoid the negative advantages that subtend hierarchies. Since advantages and disadvantages are not the same across class, gender, race and sexuality, McIntosh defers to the CRC model of intersecting forms of oppression, which causes some forms of oppression to be more or less visible than others. Racism, for instance, is obvious to people in the form of individual behaviour but less so as a problem of systemic and institutional domination. The goal of privilege theory is therefore to reconstruct the systems of power on an egalitarian basis. It is surprising that a trend that has caused such a stir should be premised on such shaky foundations. Contrasting particularisms without any reference to universality, but then conflating whiteness and masculinity with universality, McIntosh says that her concern when she wrote the essay was that men were willing to advocate on behalf of women but were not willing, as part of this, to scale back their own privileges. Anyone familiar with social policy will immediately recognize that this logic is a regressive, conservative approach to social justice that takes identity categories for granted and ignores class domination. This direction in even leftist discourse is noticed when the word equality is replaced with the word equity. Rather than acknowledge the social totality within which privileges are deployed, McIntosh makes privilege into matters of upbringing and unconscious denial. Having swept the social bases of her discussion under the rug, she then explains her metaphor of the knapsack as a set of “unearned assets” that she herself, as a white woman, can count on but does not need to think about since privileges have not been withheld from her. Among the many advantages that people from the normatively white “oppressor race” benefit from is the assurance that they will

44  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics be able to afford buying or renting a house and that their neighbours will be pleasant. As a white scholar McIntosh says that she is never expected to represent her race and she can find at the pharmacy bandages that match her skin colour. The privileges that she can enjoy, through no effort of her own, including social mobility, are what she says we should want for everyone. However, as with many such theories, advantages and disadvantages are defined in terms of a zero-​sum calculus. One would not be wrong to think that the avoidance of principles of universality allows privilege activists to remake institutions into protection rackets. Creating a level social playing field means placing emphasis on both outcomes and opportunities. The liberal and conservative emphasis on opportunities instead of outcomes should not blind us to the fact that new approaches like privilege theory trap politics within a liberal and conservative framework at the expense of a socialist perspective. At worse, McIntosh’s seemingly progressive argument facilitates a reactionary return to notions like birthright, heredity and philanthropy. The critical response to privilege theory only emerged when social justice advocates attempted to make these ideas actionable. Although one cannot dismiss a scholar’s ideas because of their background, William Ray mentions that McIntosh came from an upper-​ class family, received a Harvard education and married a well-​connected doctor.45 These facts need not invalidate her theory. Regardless, McIntosh’s list of mostly economic privileges conflates her racial identity with her advantages as a member of the upper-​middle class. She does not, for all this, advocate the redistribution of wealth. Assuming that her privileges are the same as those of poor whites, McIntosh’s flawed methodology ignores the growing economic gap between the wealthy and the poor. Furthermore, her theory pits the “high-​minded” middle class against the working class and turns sections of the working class against one another. “The apostles of this ludicrous doctrine,” Ray writes, “cherry-​pick narrow snippets of history and count on the decline of classical education and the meretricious imprimatur of obscurantist pseudo-​scientific jargon to ensure the doctrine is never carefully examined.”46 Privilege theory focuses exclusively on white, male, heterosexual and European privileges. Doing so, it disables organizational efforts on the left and contributes to an atmosphere of tribalism and mutual distrust. It asks leftists to emphasize what makes people different rather than what they have in common. As Ray argues, privilege theory has handed the radical right an effective recruitment tool and surrenders progressive politics to demagogues. One of the reasons privilege theory has been successful is that it is suited to the needs of neoliberalism. The attack on welfare and the emphasis on personal responsibility blames poverty on individual behaviour and life choices rather than government policies. According to Phoebe Maltz Bovy, privilege theory is now accepted at elite universities and in corporate diversity and sensitivity training.47 McIntosh has gone on to develop diversity training for K-​12 education, college, the non-​profit sector and activist

Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory  45 organizations. Privilege theory now constitutes an academic field of its own, with specialized journals and conferences. Although, according to Bovy, privilege theory reveals something of the gap between the ideals of democracy and the realities of inequality, its attack on individuality has more in common with authoritarianism. Privilege theory demands conformity rather than solidarity and projects the guilt feelings of the elite onto the rest of society. Ultimately, Bovy argues, privilege theory transforms ideological debate into culture war spectacle.48 Trained to detect micro-​level offences, which can be found anywhere, the privilege police ultimately protect the wealthy. Regardless of where people are situated in the social hierarchy, privilege activists adopt the righteous stance of championing the underdog. Like right and left populists, they can target anyone, from elites to the underclass. The actual function of privilege, according to Bovy, is to obscure class hierarchy. It impedes social progress by making the interaction between men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor, more fraught than it need be. Privilege theory “works,” Connor Kilpatrick argues, because it is suited to the populist language of capitalist egalitarianism.49 Since privilege is not about labour exploitation, the cost of rents, cuts to social services, corporate crime, and so on, it is suited to the petty-​bourgeois ideology of classlessness. One of its advocates, the racialist philosopher George Yancy, perversely offers “the gift of loss” to white Americans who should make themselves vulnerable and thereby engage “honestly” with their racism.50 Yancy’s encouragement to dwell in the space of black trauma and to make blackness into a transcendental norm is a form of special pleading and psychoanalytic charlatanry. Trauma is involuntary and only a sadist would seek to impose it on others. The demand that whites grapple with their repressed inner traumas is a form of “exposure therapy” in which psychologists exploit patients and leave them more traumatized than they were before therapy. People who criticize McIntosh on the basis of her class politics, but who otherwise endorse the concept of whiteness that privilege theory advocates, leave the problems with her article intact. This is the case with Asad Haider, who argues that it is the contents of the knapsack, rather than skin colour or race, that confers to McIntosh her whiteness.51 This post-​structuralist move is a seemingly more refined critique of liberal white guilt than what is offered by privilege theory. The problem for Haider is that privilege theory comes around, one way or another, to make everything about good versus bad whites. He delves into the history of socialist radicalism and the American Communist Party to unearth the theory of “white-​skin privilege” that was developed by Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev for the CPUSA’s Provisional Organizing Committee. The theory advocated fighting white supremacy as an instrument of class division and a crime against the working class. This approach was modified in the 1960s when radicals around Students for a Democratic Society preserved the concept of white guilt but rejected the working class as a revolutionary force. In contrast, Ignatiev accused student radicals of white skin privilege since they substituted themselves for the

46  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics masses and the labour movement. Against identitarians who accuse socialists of defending white privilege, Haider argues that only a multicultural alliance of the working class that is against white supremacy and private property can provide an alternative to lifestyle liberalism. His critique of McIntosh is that her approach to the concept of privilege offers no insight into organization because it does not distinguish between white privilege and privilege in general. A more thorough criticism of privilege theory than Haider’s is provided by Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad.52 Rather than consider those who are privileged to be racist by default, as argued for instance by pessimistic advocates of self-​awareness like Frances Kendall and Tim Wise, socialists should not presume that people benefit from oppression or that the privileged are complicit in oppression.53 Insofar as privilege theory easily slides from one identity category to another, it neither explains the causes of inequality nor defines an adequate means to fight against it. For instance, what good are brown-​skinned bandages to the one out of ten New York City schoolchildren who are homeless and have no health insurance? People who are oriented to this kind of thinking and who accept capitalism are most likely to think of inequalities as anonymous and inevitable. It is widely recognized that modern racism and white supremacy were invented to justify social hierarchy and class domination at a time when slavery was being contested. The notion of whiteness that is essential to contemporary whiteness studies rejects economic reduction and adds to materialist analysis a psycho-​cultural element, for example the notion of the psychological wage defined by W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America and later developed by David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness.54 The argument here is that racism gives poor racists a psychological satisfaction that undermines interracial class solidarity and reinforces white domination. This approach to class and identity, which is noticed in Haider’s work as well, accuses Marxism of making class more fundamental than race. Whiteness studies, according to Choonara and Prasad, cannot explain why it is that racial equality coincides with periods of class struggle and worker militancy. Marxism, in contrast to whiteness studies and radical democracy, does not explain oppression as a relation of power and individual competition. In cities where there is the greatest inequality between blacks and whites, there are also the highest levels of inequality within each group. Unlike racialists, who argue that oppression must be diminished before class inequality can be addressed, socialists argue that only class struggle is effective against exploitation and oppression since it clarifies social contradictions while also rejecting chauvinism. Capitalism relies on the perpetuation of regressive and pseudo-​therapeutic solutions to social problems like owning up to and giving up privileges. Unlike the advocates of guilt, Marxism does not reduce people to the oppression they cause or suffer. This implies, according to Choonara and Prasad, that those who suffer oppression do not have a more lucid or more progressive understanding of inequality.

Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory  47 Privilege theory, they argue, is inherently elitist. Focused on education rather than struggle, it panders novelty, replacing equality with personal feeling and moral imperatives. It justifies oppressive behaviour in the name of justice and diminishes the quality of debate to an essentialist and narrow understanding of a person’s identity. People’s ascribed identities become more important than what they think, say or do. Identity also presumes to know what people will think, say or do in the future. Because privilege theory rests on a theory of power rather than emancipatory universality, people can become allies but not equals. Privilege theory also valorizes the marginal more than it does a balanced understanding of the uneven and contradictory aspects of social life. Privilege theory and whiteness studies offer a reductive social theory that focuses on the inequality between groups and offers nothing to real struggles against the various forms of discrimination, like anti-​immigration, that are the result of neoliberal policies. Privilege theory also gives ideological cover to neoliberal governments that replace welfare policies with symbolic recognition, as was the case with the Australian government’s proposal of an Aboriginal (Voice) advisory board, which promised little more than the inclusion of an Indigenous elite into the ranks of the bourgeoisie.55 Privilege theory not only divides the working class, but it condemns leftists as complicit in the various forms of discrimination. It serves conservative forces by alienating potential comrades from one another, forcing people to fight amongst themselves and contributing to social anomie. Most socialists who are not postmodernist agree that privilege theory should be rejected. If some have been compelled to follow this line of thought, it is because it borrows from Marxism the idea that consciousness is influenced by social being. The difference, according to Tad Tietze, is the way that privilege theory dispenses with a differentiated and contradictory totality of social relations –​economic, political and ideological –​thereby rejecting the Marxist focus on the mode and relations of production as the ideological and political foundation of the overall social structure.56 Nothing about the Marxist approach, he argues, denies empirical variables. Nor does the phenomenon of financialization alter this basic structure. However, all versions of privilege theory reject the centrality of class. As a form of social theory, privilege theory does not hold a candle to Marxism. It defines social interaction in functionalist terms as a stable system of hierarchies. Against this, it advocates consciousness-​raising, moral exhortation and censure. In keeping with the social constructionist jargon that privilege theory makes use of, its approach to ideology is inherently mechanical and reflectionist. Whereas the relation between social groups is accepted as malleable, the condition of one social group is evaluated in relation to another social group without reference to the totality. Contrary to the cheap rhetoric of some social theorists, privilege theory is a far more reductionist method than Marxism because it does not explain oppression in relation to the social totality. Since class struggle is not about the redistribution of privileges within capitalist social relations, privilege theory is in the process of reinventing the bourgeois

48  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics reform movement of the early twentieth century for the age of neoliberal austerity. A struggle against social evils that is backed by neoliberal governments and corporations advocates a regressive understanding of equality that is shorn of universalist principles. Like privilege theory, as well as intersectionality, critical race theory (CRT) emerged in the late 1980s but only became a mainstream academic topic in the 2010s. In 2021, CRT made headline news when American conservatives sought to ban the teaching of CRT in grade schools, a claim that met with a certain amount of consternation to the extent that it was difficult to disprove something that was not actually taking place.57 Regardless, several U.S. state legislatures and the former Trump administration passed regulations against the teaching of CRT as well as other supposedly divisive concepts like social class. The attack on CRT education by the Republican Party has led to its defence by the Democratic Party, with for example, General Mark Milley stating in June 2021 that the white people like himself in the Pentagon wish to understand white rage. Showing his fearless open-​ mindedness, Milley added: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”58 As in many other instances, such bickering obscures the collusion between the two major parties. It also occludes socialist politics by presenting CRT and its defenders as leftist. CRT puts forward concepts that its leading theorists would like to make actionable. The “godfather” of CRT, Derrick A. Bell, was a pessimistic advocate of racial justice who believed that racism is a timeless and permanent condition. Whatever gains are made for racial equality, he contended that they will eventually become meaningless as white supremacy is reasserted. As a lawyer and civil rights activist, Bell also believed that African Americans have never fully enjoyed equal rights and so highlighted the growth of racial disparities since the 1970s. This led him to treat race categories as social class categories. Along with this, a key characteristic of CRT is a transformation of the narratives that we use in the quest for justice. The use of unreason and fantasy are advocated in storytelling practices that look beyond Enlightenment paradigms.59 Along with the “godmother” of intersectionality, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Bell believed that allegories and metaphors help to displace the legal jargon that distorts truths and maintains racial hegemony. The slow pace of racial progress, he argued, reveals the inability of constitutional rights, voting rights and litigation to bring about change. Along with advocates of reparations, Bell argued that disadvantages have accrued because of past oppressions and that these should be remedied. The usual criticism of reparations is that they would be difficult to implement, in part because they are not universalist. The racialist character of CRT is revealed as Bell retorted that Civil Rights victories were created to serve majority white interests, for example, since the U.S. could not legitimately lead the free world against communism while blacks suffered under segregation laws. The legitimate critique of conservative uses of colourblind policies caused Bell to keep the black baby but throw out the Civil Rights bathwater by

Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory  49 dismissing universal policies for the potential they harbour of shielding discriminatory intentions. As for socialism, Bell considered all talk of revolution to be unrealistic bravura that is useless to black Americans. Despite its moniker, there is no connection between critical race theory and the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, especially since the broad acceptance of postmodern theory in academia has severed the link to Western Marxism. CRT is “critical” to the extent that its advocates consider the upward mobility of a black upper class and the existence of a black millionaire club inadequate as post-​racial evidence that racism has been overcome. In this regard, CRT is more comprehensive than privilege theory since it potentially includes class structure as a cause of racial injustice. It nevertheless remains the case that CRT is not concerned with social justice in general but with racial justice in particular. This leads Bell to dismiss capitalism as a causal explanation of racial injustice, which he defines as a problem of subordinate status. Like whiteness studies and other postmodern theories, CRT rejects the idea of neutral policies, the argument goes, so long as we live in a racist society. Why give equal rights, for example, to white supremacists? The pretext and the real historical experiences that here justify a proactive approach is the argument put forward by conservatives that blacks are seeking unearned privileges for wrongs suffered by their predecessors, or put forward by whites who reject special measures to help blacks. However, and to paraphrase Frederick Douglass, socialist policy cannot be purchased with the ignorance of racists or conservatives. Bell is not so conservative as to think that no racial and social progress has been made since the end of Jim Crow segregation. However, where black gains have been achieved, like black participation in politics and culture, it must, according to his theory of “interest convergence,” be congenial to the white majority and to profit interests. If the needs of the black underclass were addressed, along with those of poor whites, the solutions would disrupt the entire power structure. Police forces would be reduced, prisons closed and profits lost. Integrated schools, in this regard, have disadvantaged black schoolchildren. Affirmative action policies have been more beneficial to the institutions that implement them than the minorities they are intended to serve. And so on. Such policies are to him remedial, dutiful, charitable or obliging, but do not displace white domination. Why then buy into a morally corrupt system? The solutions to the problem of black subordination are addressed by Bell in “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?”60 While black pride and black power are not foreign to him, as a lawyer he argues that the goal of black liberation must be pursued through government reform and the legal system. Race is central to his analysis because it is the best way to understand the U.S. as what he deems to be a white nation. Black poverty, he contends, helps to make all poverty acceptable to a racist society. Likewise, differences in intelligence test results would be viewed differently if blacks consistently tested better than whites. This “what if ” scenario is irrelevant given the reality of the disparities in access to resources, but Bell is adamant

50  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics that whites cannot tolerate black success and instances of black superiority. Like the Bell Curve research that he builds his case with, which argues for race-​based scientific research, Bell advances his argument with a hypothesis of hierarchy rather than equality.61 The point of such conservative politics is to affirm prejudice for the sake of demonstrating the problem. Is this a problem of racism or of reasoning? Can these be separated? The problem with Bell’s approach is not his “racist anti-​racism,” as it were, but his conservative politics. As opposed to the white liberals who obsessed over the racist implications of The Bell Curve, Bell advances CRT as a “balm” for illiberal black shame. If this illiberalism were socialist, the theory might not seem so tragic. The question is: What good can come of it? This institution-​ based struggle against racism, which calls on whites to “overthrow their own privilege,” uses creative and disruptive means that go beyond liberal civil rights measures and deconstructs legal scholarship for the sake of black resistance, empowerment and redemption.62 Rejecting the idea of rights, universality and normative standards as indeterminate and vague, and emphasizing instead aspirational oppositionality based on positionality and experience, CRT takes the risk of undermining the social gains that have been achieved through universal and civil rights. However, advocacy for the oppressed cannot ignore the universal grounds of advocacy. As Žižek often points out, elevators in the U.S. count the (neutral) ground floor as the first floor, avoiding the universal dimension for the reassurances of the particular. Along these lines, Bell’s equation of whiteness with property allows him to view race differences as caste divisions. When Bell wrote his first texts they were aimed primarily at liberalism. Political struggle in the U.S. is conceived as a contest between two sides only, liberalism and conservatism, with race in this case acting as the mediating third term. If CRT pretends to solve uniquely American problems, it proposes to do so through the equally American avoidance of socialism. Two of Bell’s “criticalist” compatriots, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, benefit from a more advanced stage of postmodern theorizing, which allows them to more easily criticize liberalism without coming across as conservative. In fact, Delgado and Stefancic consider themselves to be postmodern leftists. In one of their introductions to CRT, they emphasize how “mainstream” scholars privilege universalism over particularity and abstract principles over perspectivism.63 While shaking up the legal academy by challenging its liberal premises may be done for the sake of racial justice, one should not ignore the consequences of doing so and the overlaps with regressive politics that are thereby allowed. How can the de facto denial of equal opportunity be preferable to its theoretical presupposition? The hypothesis that racism is “normal” and “ordinary” rather than “aberrant” does not make Delgado and Stefancic’s social constructionist critique of liberalism a progressive form of politics. The premise that civil rights are “normative” because “fact sensitive,” should not, they argue, lead to the assumption that courts are oblivious to the contextual bigger picture.

Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory  51 As a decidedly postmodern movement that is dedicated to the study of race, racism and power, that is, rather than a civil rights movement, CRT questions the foundations and not simply the uneven application of constitutional law as part of a more programmatic attack on notions of equality and Enlightenment rationalism.64 Extending its scope to encompass Latino, Asian, LGBT, Arab-​Muslim and Indigenous perspectives, CRT multiplies the ways in which self-​interest can finesse social constructionism to demonstrate legal indeterminacy and the arbitrariness of racism. In particular, colourblind and formal conceptions of rights are accused of ignoring the ways in which minority groups are racialized differently and thereby marginalized. Such “differential racialization,” like stereotypes that are modified over time to serve changing needs, unintentionally reveals the constructed nature of race and identity. Storytelling, appeal to experience and attention to language, tone or affect are used to challenge the apparent monumentality of law and better redistribute social benefits. However, the related notion that the power structure will only tolerate benefits for blacks if they coincide with benefits for whites leads Delgado and Stefancic to conflate economic determinism with racial determinism in an eclectic understanding of interest convergence. The “critical” in CRT is thus a form of pragmatic opportunism that takes race for granted. It also takes capitalism for granted as nothing less than a collection of narratives, for instance, about self-​interest as the essence of human nature or about the market as the best means to redistribute resources. So-​called “criticalists” understand that the category of race is a reified construct, but they accept this reification for the sake of black survival. The false choice that presents itself is a) continue to ignore particularity and uphold the status quo (the Booker T. Washington option) or b) insist on particularity and risk the reification of race (the W.E.B. Du Bois option). What is left out of view is the universalist option of Frantz Fanon and the universalism of emancipatory socialism. Having avoided this third choice, the initial conflict, which in the American context refers to Democratic and Republican Party tendencies, pushes politics ever further to the right. The fact that Bell adduced the victory of Brown vs. Board of Education and the softening of attitudes towards minorities to the needs of American capitalism and imperialism can hardly be separated from the forces of world communism during the Cold War. This history is conveniently bracketed from CRT’s analysis of “material determinism.” How many other postwar phenomena are occluded in this narrative? One might consider the influence of the Beat movement and the revulsion with fascism at home and abroad, the government promotion of consumerism and suburbanization, the revelations of Stalinist crimes, McCarthyism and communist purges, the ties between the Civil Rights movement and the labour movement, the promotion of a black middle class by state agencies as part of Cold War liberalism, the shift by New Left groups and the counterculture towards identity politics, the rise of Third World independence movements, and so on. In other words, even if Bell was correct about the interest convergence strategies of the U.S. State

52  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics Department and Department of Justice, why make their suspect motives the basis of a movement that narrow-​mindedly ignores the totality of social phenomena? This lesson should apply to other revisionist and post-​historicist uses of the past, in particular slavery and colonialism, to pander pseudo-​ materialist and à la carte alibis for neoliberal politics. The trouble with postmodern approaches for the socialist left is that the postmodern “critique” of liberalism has two nefarious results: first, it ignores socialist and Marxist materialism and reinscribes liberalism as the status quo position while at the same time absconding political liberalism’s progressive dimensions; second, as it attacks neutrality and constitutional principles, it undermines universality and mimics the tactics and ideology of the far right. What is avoided through the rejection of neutrality is not the routines of bureaucracy or the technocratic management of the institutions of advanced mass societies, but the solidarity that would be required if such tasks were overseen by workers’ organizations, which likewise would give no privileged place to any one identity group, and this without ignoring special needs. Reducing universality and equality to concepts like colourblindness and equity generates culture war excitement and fuels the careers of those who do a better job at generating problems than finding solutions. In Delgado and Stefancic’s bathetic words, “Only aggressive, colour-​conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery.”65 Such self-​promoting histrionics should be dismissed as petty-​bourgeois decadence rather than celebrated as means to redress historical and contemporary injustices. Current trends that heighten the significance of identity markers work to desublimate culture and politics in the direction of post-​political and post-​representational ends that reinforce the dominant order.66 Wise counsel suggests that two wrongs do not make a right. If blacks and other minority groups are losing ground in the U.S. it is because the working majority is losing ground. In anticipation of the second part of this book, it is worthwhile considering how CRT is viewed differently by a liberal and a Marxist scholar. Helen Pluckrose provides a useful guide to the main tenets of CRT according to Delgado and Stefancic, Payne Hiraldo, the British Educational Research Association and the Encyclopedia of Diversity Education.67 Combining these different approaches, Pluckrose argues that the main tenets of CRT include: 1) the omnipresence and permanence of racism: the notion that racism is ordinary and not aberrant, even among people of colour; 2) the centrality of racism: the idea that we live in a white supremacist society, and that white supremacy serves material and psychic purposes; 3) the notion that race is a social construct and the related notion that society is constructed through narratives; 4) the authenticity of voice and the counter-​ stories told by people of colour: the idea that the experience of oppression, as a form of knowledge and in the form of narratives, gives more credibility to minorities when it comes to questions of discrimination; 5) interest convergence: majority groups offer equality to minorities only when it serves their

Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory  53 purposes; 6) intersectionality: variables of subordinated status based on race, class, gender, sexuality, etc., should be considered to be overlapping and simultaneous; 7) the notion that whiteness is a form of property: attributed to legal theorist Cheryl Harris, this concept enhances white supremacy theory; 8) the critique of liberalism: the rejection of individualism and universality, as well as related notions like neutrality, colourblindness and meritocracy as the basis for the study and overcoming of racism; 9) the focus on social justice rather than universal principles. Pluckrose argues that we cannot have serious discussions about race and racism if we do not understand the differences between the theories that we use to analyse them. She makes the observation that there is a slight difference between critical race theory (CRT), which tends to be situated within legal studies, and critical social justice (CSJ ) approaches, which are more common in Cultural Studies and pedagogy. The former, according to Delgado and Stefancic, is divided between postmodern (or idealist) and materialist orientations. The “postmodernists” emphasize the ideational aspects of racism and discrimination, like attitudes and discourses, and so seek to create change through the use of images, words, education and so on. The “materialists,” in contrast, emphasize economic determinations as well as policy decisions that affect the distribution of benefits such as education, housing or employment opportunities. Whereas the postmodernists draw extensively on Foucauldian discourse theory and express scepticism towards modernity, reason and rights discourse, the materialists cherry-​pick aspects of social reality and government policy to inflate the political significance of disparities. Because Pluckrose is concerned to discuss racism rather than capitalism, her liberal humanist approach, as she defines it, is attentive to the implications of CRT and CSJ to liberalism but not to socialism. For instance, she notes that people who agree with Bell and Crenshaw would likely disagree with the libertarian economist Thomas Sewell and the conservative critic Shelby Steele. But so would Marxists disagree with the latter without at the same time agreeing with the former. When it comes to counter-​narratives, her concern is that not all stories told by people of colour are given equal value. This point tends to obviate the question of what is being said, or in the case of art, how it is being said. In no society can all stories receive the same validation –​ nor should they. Likewise, Pluckrose believes that intersectionality could be applied in a reasonable way, if only it did not reject liberal universalism. One has to ignore a great deal of the last 150 years to think that liberalism seeks to achieve a level playing field by removing identity-​based barriers to social advancement. To say this is not to reinforce the notion of interest convergence. On the contrary, identity barriers are removed by capitalism so that business is enhanced and so that the ruling class can rule more effectively. Every national liberation struggle has had to confront this problem. Further distinctions made by Pluckrose between the “materialist” approach of Ibram X. Kendi, who views every policy document as either racist (sustaining

54  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics inequality between racial groups) or anti-​ racist (creating equity between groups), and the “postmodern” approach of Robin DiAngelo, who argues that the positionality that informs institutionalized inequalities must be subject to continuous interrogation, do not settle on any one method but appeal to the diversity of viewpoints in common contention and with the goal of addressing racism ethically and effectively. Based on her work with the Counterweight advocacy group, Pluckrose does not think that CSJ activists are open to other ideas or that CRT theories reduce racism and further the goals of social justice, social cohesion or the right to dissent. She raises but leaves unanswered the question regarding how much influence these theories should have. Her liberality in this regard could not be more different from the Marxist perspective of Tom Carter, whose answer to this question is none. In Marxism vs. Race Theory, Socialist Equality Party member Tom Carter offers a wider range of analysis for understanding CRT than that which the practitioners themselves are concerned with.68 Not only is the philosophical and ideological content of CRT uncovered, but so is the time and place of its emergence taken into consideration. Against the mythologies of Christian American theology and market capitalism, CRT counterposes a mythology of antagonistic races. Both of these, Carter argues, conceal the objective factors that best explain the dynamics of American and world history. CRT came to prominence after the dissolution of the USSR, when postmodern anti-​ Marxism took hold on the academic “pseudo-​left,” which he defines as the privileged sections of the middle class whose analyses are not based on the working class but on the diverse identities that provide activist scholars with access to institutional privileges. Because CRT is compatible with nationalism, capitalism and imperialism, it cannot be said to have any relation to socialist politics. The not so ironic consequence of the political debate over CRT in the U.S. is that it has allowed the state to target Marxism as a divisive ideology. For Carter, all versions of CRT are postmodern and none are properly materialist. Like other versions of identity politics, CRT is now omnipresent in academia, in Hollywood and the media, in corporations and even in trade unions such as the American Federation of Teachers. While Carter’s conflation of postmodern theories with the Frankfurt School is unclear and sectional, CRT does maintain the postmodern aversion to meta-​narratives of universal progress and emancipation, with some further implications that cannot be automatically attributed to postmodern thinkers, like the attack on science or the focus on narrative to validate epistemological claims. “Speaking one’s truth” and “naming one’s reality,” however, and as advocated by CRT activists like Jeanette Haynes Writer, does undermine the materialist effort to link human consciousness to objective reality, even if not in a direct and unmediated way.69 On this score, Marxism and CRT are for Carter completely incompatible.70 However, it is not only that CRT seeks to construct an “alternative reality” according to subjective standpoints and individual desires, as Carter argues, but that this “construction” relies on structuralist methods

Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory  55 like semiotics, linguistics, discourse analysis and deconstruction that are also not easily reconciled with Marxism, though many have tried. The politics of CRT are evidently not solidaristic since arbitrarily granting minorities special standing presumes that an incoherent concept like race or the traumatic experience of oppression can be used to make sense of the world. Nothing about race and oppression should be thought to be empowering, except perhaps for the small coterie of theorists like McIntosh, Kendi, Crenshaw and DiAngelo who have profited from over-​priced lectures. In addition to CRT’s flawed theoretical foundations, one of its biggest problems is its contribution to racial chauvinism and separatism. Delgado and Stefancic argue tautologically that “separation from the American mainstream” will help to preserve diversity and separateness.71 This, they say, would be beneficial to everyone and not only ethnic groups. In recent years, such racial sectarianism has been implemented through segregated floors in student residences, in blackout performances for black-​only audiences, in quotas established by the film industry, and in political demands for racial reparations. For Carter, such separatism revives the reactionary segregationist policies that Civil Rights struggles had hitherto demolished. The use of privilege theory to collapse the class differences among white people suggests that everything in society is organized according to racial principles. Race is not simply central to CRT theorists, it is all-​encompassing. This race determinism has difficulty explaining phenomena like police violence, low wages, rising rent and food prices, underfunded schools, climate change and rampant militarism. Rather than acknowledge this failing, CRT argues that white supremacy is the cause of all of these, leaving the economic interests of the international capitalist class conveniently camouflaged by the concept of whiteness. On the uses of intersectionality within CRT, Carter argues that the concept of patriarchy performs the same function for middle-​class feminists as the concept of white supremacy does for racialists. Competing identity frameworks can be reconciled through their shared enthusiasm for the displacement of socialism. This is most apparent when the analysis of class exploitation is replaced by the concept of “classism,” which transforms the critique of capitalist relations of production and the materialist study of the history of socio-​economic development into moral disapproval of class prejudice and snobbery. Further, any attempt to bring the discussion back to socialism is denounced as changing the subject and resistance to social justice pedagogy. In Is Everyone Really Equal? Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo entrench their method by arguing that the Marxist emphasis on the centrality of class is designed to protect white privilege.72 Just as one cannot imagine a social revolution being carried out against prejudice, Carter makes the valuable observation that there is no historically revolutionary race. By the same token, there is no historically reactionary race. Efforts to base politics in race, gender or sexuality are not only obscurantist but serve reactionary purposes. By denying whites a progressive role to play in social struggles, theories like

56  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics privilege theory and CRT pander dubious formulas that are the equivalent of gay conversion therapy, calling on whites to reflect on their sinful condition and to wrestle with their unconscious racism. With interracial mixing and cultural exchange subjected to moral extortion, one wonders why it is that CRT has maintained a leftist veneer among intellectuals, artists and activists who have the benefits of university education. Carter’s explanation is that racialism and identity politics have become a mainstay of the neoliberal New Democrat tendency within the Democratic Party. Having abandoned its commitment to social reform, especially for the working class, Democrats have begun to target the working class as deplorable white people and sexist males, unworthy of respect on the part of millionaires like Nikole Hannah-​Jones, the key figure behind the New York Times 1619 Project, which rejects the progressive role played by the American Revolution against feudalism, and by the Civil War against slavery. The emphasis on issues of race, gender and sexuality allows the Democratic establishment in and out of the party to mobilize middle-​class advocates of race and gender ideology, like Alexandria Ocasio-​Cortez and Ta-​Nehisi Coates, to support capitalist and imperialist policies. Directing mistrust of the establishment back into official channels, CRT leaders focus on the needs of American imperialism, attack Marxist internationalism and divide the working class through the kind of racial sectarianism that belongs to the political right. Although Carter is perfectly correct to argue, as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky once did, that it is capitalism, and not the members of specific ethnic groups, that is the enemy of the working class, his essay does not address the views of many leftists within today’s anti-​globalization new social movements who have commitments to identity politics that are different from those advanced by scholars like McIntosh, DiAngelo, Kendi, Crenshaw or Hannah-​Jones. I examine some of these views in the second part of this book. 5  Intersectionality and Decoloniality The concept of intersectionality is similar to critical race theory in the sense that it originated among legal scholars and was later developed as a form of postmodern theory. Because it is emerged out of black feminist criticism, intersectionality has drawn upon Afrocentric influences that like CRT discredit liberal institutions as inadequate to the demands of black survival. Black women have criticized mainstream feminism for ignoring the ways that race and class issues add to the burdens faced by black women within what the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins refers to as the “matrix of domination.”73 According to Collins, the intersecting forms of oppression have institutionalized racism in areas like housing, education, policing and employment policy. Colourblind universalism and the liberal principle according to which fairness implies treating everyone the same way have, according to “black women first” advocates of intersectionality, made inequality invisible and justified racism. One of the assumptions of intersectionality, which

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  57 follows from the critique of universalism, is that people who have suffered particular forms of discrimination have developed a distinct group knowledge and consciousness. Collins thus refers to intersectionality as “a form of identity politics” and “worldview that sees Black experience as important to crafting critical Black consciousness and crafting political strategies.”74 What is missing from intersectionality, as was the case with privilege theory and CRT, and as is also the case with decoloniality, is a comprehensive political praxis. This is noticeable in the way that black feminism is contrasted with either black experience or women’s experience, but not the experiences of the working class, against which it can claim no unique standpoint. These factors make intersectionality a distinctly American phenomenon that like populism is predisposed to anti-​Marxism and thrives in the realm of academic cultural theory. To the extent that intersectionalists acknowledge universality, they recognize only the abstract universality of particular identities and not the concrete universality of capitalism that shapes those particulars. The intersectional thought that has emerged through black feminist politics is an outgrowth of bourgeois ameliorism, Church-​based morality and therapeutic self-​help, all of which reinforce conservative tendencies by foreclosing socialism. For example, in Collins’ classic book on Black Feminist Thought, the word socialism is used only twice, once to refer to socialist countries outside the United States, and once to say that Angela Davis is more a black feminist than a socialist. While Collins acknowledges the contradictory location of middle-​class black women in the American political economy, the problem with this group, according to her, is that it tends to side not with the bourgeoisie, but with “white superiors.”75 Despite its criticism of binary thinking, intersectionality tends towards reversals of hierarchy while at the same time dissolving the specificity of political economy into politicized, or culturalized, “economies” of race, gender and class oppression. Attaching racial meanings onto racially unclassified processes, such as the COVID-​19 pandemic for example, impairs disciplinary knowledge. In addition, intersectionality replaces the Marxist focus on capitalism with the more nebulous concept of power, which is defined by Collins and Sirma Bilge in pseudo-​Gramscian terms as “a matter of mutual construction” that intersectionalists associate with the term “relationality.”76 Marxists also define class relations as relational. This means that the greater power of the bourgeois class has an undue influence on the consciousness and political strategies of the working class. Workers can work harder without their effort in any way making them more wealthy or empowered. That is why workers benefit from unions and socialist parties. However, class politics is incompatible with intersectionality because socialism is oriented towards the elimination of class differences through the socialization of production. This cannot be said of an intersectional politics of relationality, which is a politics of coalitions rather than class struggle. Intersectionality rejects Marxism as an attempt by elitist white males to define the experiences of black women. If the strategy of black feminists is to

58  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics work downward from the general to the particularity of the group, why stop there and not go further to the level of individual experience? Collins laments the focus on the experiences of individual black women, usually middle-​class, as a failure to put up a united front. But a united front against what? If intersectionality is not to be accused of racism, a united front against white supremacy must also become a united front against the manufacture of vague targets like whiteness, institutional racism or racial capitalism. The ambiguity of the analysis and the targets easily leads to pernicious, harmful and self-​defeating forms of activism. If power operates through an intersecting matrix of domination, then resistance should likewise be intersectional. But resistance cannot be genuinely intersectional when universalist class politics is replaced with a will to empowerment that is relativistic at every level. Predisposed to the cross-​class opportunism of nationalism and micropolitics, the concept of an intersectional “matrix” of domination is as helpful to the internationalist left as the supernatural Oracle in the science-​fiction film of the same name. Intersectionality is attractive to leftists because advocates present it as not merely a mode of critical inquiry, but a form of engaged scholarship and critical praxis that is focused on power relations. While intersectionality developed alongside CRT, its interdisciplinary approach has been used by neoliberals and white supremacists to justify social inequality. Collins and Bilge acknowledge this problem but insist nevertheless that intersectionality is oriented towards social justice work in grassroots and social movement organizations. The work of the ethnic “power” movements of the 1960s and 70s –​Black Power, Chicano liberation, Red Power, Black Women, the Combahee River Collective, Chicana feminists or Asian Women –​is cited as precedents to current manifestations that, on the one hand, make racial classifications into political terms, and on the other, reject feminism and Marxism as white ideology. From the “jeopardy” of racial designation, intersectionality adds double, triple and multiple jeopardies to signify simultaneous and mutually reinforcing terms of oppression. Not surprisingly, intersectional political coalitions are fraught with mixed commitments. Intersectionality is thus a multi-​ faceted version of particularist politics. Rejecting universality, intersectionality assembles different vectors of standpoint epistemology into the shifting elements of social movement coalitions, replacing solidarity and autonomy with a rather nebulous understanding of relationality. There is of course a particularist tradition that accepts, and sometimes indulges, the universality of every particularity, and this independently of whether the concept of universality emerged in Europe.77 Black feminists have been correct to recognize the way that this tendency, which emphasizes the universal qualities of every particularity, very often supports a status quo agenda. This can be the case with egalitarian nationalism and cosmopolitan individualism. Intersectionality makes a similar mistake to the latter by avoiding the lessons of class struggle and by seeking an identity-​ based alternative to international class solidarity.

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  59 Unlike some theorists of identity politics, Collins and Bilge are not concerned with the radical left foundations and affiliations of the various “power” movements of the 60s and 70s. The institutional location of intersectionality in postmodern academia and the media is therefore euphemized as a matter of sensible adaptation rather than as a matter of political deradicalization. These scholars accept that as the neoliberal and market-​oriented university promoted the mainstreaming of diversity, many leftists abandoned intersectionality as no longer critical. In response, they argue that the hostility of socialist feminists and Marxists to intersectionality is racist in nature and class reductionist.78 However, the fact that Collins and Bilge’s introduction to the topic says nothing significant about Cold War anti-​communism or the rise of neoliberalism, and that they approvingly refer to the Organization of American States, an imperialist organization, leads one to consider that this problematic orientation, which has no known accomplishments other than the politicization of some of the blind spots of feminism and anti-​racism, is less politically radical than the socialist and Civil Rights traditions it pretends to have displaced. While advocates argue that there is no authoritative version or history of intersectionality, the originator of the term is the feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. In her 1989 essay, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” Crenshaw developed this concept to describe the way that American courts interpret cases put forward by black women plaintiffs.79 Since specific cases could only be considered on the basis of race or sex, but not both, Crenshaw devised the metaphor of a street intersection. In the case of a hypothetical accident that takes place at an intersection, the refusal by judges to understand the specificity of complaints of discrimination on the part of black women is comparable to a doctor who arrives on the scene and who can only assist the victim if it is known whether the driver who caused the accident is responsible for race or sex discrimination. Based on jurisprudence, the doctor can only treat the case on the basis of gender or race, but not both. Crenshaw developed a new approach to black feminist criticism that rejects the propensity to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience. With this concept she not only sought to address problems in anti-​discrimination law, but to transform feminist and anti-​racist politics as well. Against single-​axis frameworks, Crenshaw’s essay draws attention to cases that cannot be understood as deriving from only one source of discrimination. Through the description of several cases, she reports on a system of distribution that excludes black women from better jobs. She then reverses this perspective to suggest that black women have a unique vantage point from which to challenge discrimination. Her conclusion is that single-​axis forms of analysis make it more difficult to end racism and patriarchy. In the process, she rejects “liberal” universality as “white male subjectivity masquerading as non-​racial, non-​gendered objectivity” and “reified white male thought.”80 Whereas the critique of patriarchy privileges white women over minority women, the politics of black liberation privileges black

60  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics men and gives priority to racial subordination over gender subordination. According to Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, piecemeal approaches to identity politics can be faulted for defining discrimination in normative ways. Intersectionality, she argues, is not a theory of identity, but is instead “a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory.”81 Rather than a social constructionist critique of essentialism, which can be oblivious to the way that categories can be used against people, its purpose, she says, is to disrupt tendencies that see race and gender, or other categories like class, age, ability and sexual orientation, as distinct and separable.82 The literature on intersectionality is extensive, with the writings of Claudia Jones, Barbara Smith, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Deborah King, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde and bell hooks cited as important antecedents. According to Jennifer Nash, intersectionality is now a requirement in most women’s studies departments.83 Its flexibility as a concept, rather than a method or a politics, has allowed it to be readily institutionalized if not co-​ opted by the corporate university to serve liberal notions of multiculturalism, she argues, and some contend that intersectionality has commodified the work of black feminists. Its critique of middle-​class white feminism as well as simplistic forms of postmodern anti-​essentialism is for most advocates its main contribution. Others charge intersectionality for being too deconstructive and overly concerned with the experiences of black women. This makes intersectionality an essentially bourgeois academic phenomenon.84 The success of intersectionality in academia has led Walter Benn Michaels to refer to it as “the opiate of the professional managerial class.”85 More specifically, the marginalization of black women in law, as well as in social theory more generally, presumes that whiteness and maleness, rather than the category of employers, are categories of privilege. The labour lawyer Mike Macnair has therefore argued that Crenshaw overlooks the way that judges play black women against black men and white women in favour of employers. Because she leaves the ruling class out of her analysis, Crenshaw ignores the way that identity issues are weaponized against the left and in favour of reactionary policies.86 Even on its own terms, Crenshaw’s legal concept is not particularly helpful to people outside this specific field. Her test case of a black female plaintiff was rejected by the court as “hackneyed” since, on the basis of new permutations and combinations, it would create “new classes of protected minorities.”87 Enlisting the aid of a mathematician, Finkelstein has calculated that someone who can be classified black, female, lesbian and paraplegic could be said to suffer according to 32,767 irreducible categories of oppression.88 Centring groups like queer black trans folk, who are presumably the most oppressed, is not a royal road to social progress for the rest of society but rather centres the concerns of politically correct, middle-​class liberals. Solutions to the problems of oppression, for whichever group, cannot be defined in opposition to the rights of other groups and without reference to an emancipatory conception of universalism.

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  61 Marxist feminists have criticized intersectionality for failing to adequately explain how and why social categories intersect. While it is accepted that the effects of capitalism are not uniform, there is disagreement concerning whether intersectionality improves Marxist theory or not. As diversity is corporatized and leveraged by the neoliberal state, capitalism is reinforced. It is difficult to see how intersectionality can improve on Marxist theory without repeating the flawed accusation of class reductionism and contributing to the dismantling of Marxism through discourse analysis and post-​structuralism. For example, in Marxism and Intersectionality, Ashley J. Bohrer argues against “orthodox” versions of Marxism that make the factory labour of white European males into a universal standard, which she argues is used to marginalize the particularity of other forms of work and experience.89 Ironically, the same book tends to privilege the value of theoretical insights if they emanate from someone who is not white, European and male, with, for example, an 1833 statement by Maria Stewart that is said to precede Marx by two decades when in fact the statement merely confirms the bourgeois labour theory of value. Bohrer is conscientious enough to say that intersectionality, as a politics of power relations rather than a socialist politics, is not Marxist but has “Marxish” aspects that allow for overlaps between Marxism and intersectionality.90 Her approach eliminates the difference between various forms of oppression and capitalist exploitation, inclusive of the capitalist uses of oppression. It avoids acknowledging the ways in which intersectionality not only undermines socialism but dovetails with difference politics, postmodernism and neoliberalism. In a similarly problematic version of intersectional leftism, Nancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: Intersectional Political Economy relies on systems theories to evade the issues that are germane to Marxism and simplifies politics in favour of demands for more equitable forms of redistribution, including the monetization of reproductive and domestic care work.91 Not only does this “diversification” of political economy sidestep the importance of production relations to the understanding of capitalism and socialist strategy, but the integration of ever more facets of life into economic calculation can only do more to entrench capitalism than to transition away from it. One can speak, in this case, of intersectional reductionism. Not all Marxist feminist scholars have climbed on board the intersectionality bandwagon. The proceedings of the Intersectionality Symposium that were published in the April 2018 issue of the journal Science & Society were in this regard particularly insightful. The question posed to the contributors is whether intersectionality is an advance on identity politics or single-​issue thinking.92 Hester Eisenstein argues that some of what we see happening today with intersectionality relates to efforts by feminists to develop gender issues in relation to the mode of production and social reproduction. To the extent that racism and sexism intersect with class, she argues, the work of intersectionality has only begun. However, she adds that on the whole intersectionality undermines the centrality of class analysis, whether one is

62  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics talking about traditional blue-​collar labour, informal labour or precarious no-​collar work.93 It is not therefore incidental, as Eve Mitchell argues, that the 60s politics of identity developed as a consequence of the fact the people no longer wanted to be defined by their occupation, which is not to suggest that class analysis can be limited to the parsing of occupations and status categories.94 The danger with intersectionality is that it is satisfied with the superficial level of a checklist and uncritical inclusiveness. This “culturalization of inequality,” according to Martha Gimenez, obscures class relations and reinforces ideological divisions among workers.95 For Lise Vogel, intersectionality is but one of countless flawed concepts that have been introduced over the last eighty years.96 Vogel disputes the notion that second wave feminism was a monolithic phenomenon and argues instead that socialist feminists, as distinct from radical feminists, have since the 1930s argued that race, class and gender intersect. In the 60s, interactions between the labour movement, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-​war movement and black liberation involved the study of issues around sexuality, gender, age and ability. It is only after the conservative 80s that feminists who never participated in 60s struggles rewrote history, only this time around, with little regard for class analysis. Previously, black and white women who were active in the CPUSA referred to “triple oppression” to describe the status of poor black women. According to Vogel, the version of this history offered by the Combahee River Collective and Kimberlé Crenshaw relies on the construct of “white women” to advance a much weaker understanding of race, class and gender than had been advanced beforehand by Marxist theorists, who did not consider these categories to be ontologically comparable or interchangeable. Vogel’s 1983 book Marxism and the Oppression of Women addressed the debates between the “dual systems” approach and the “social reproduction theory” that extends the categories of Capital rather than dispense with them.97 Unlike race, Vogel argues, gender is biologically necessary for social reproduction even if it is not logically necessary for capitalism. Leftists should understand that intersectionalists have unjustifiably elevated the status of the CRC as a model of radicalism. According to Choonara and Prasad, the black feminist critique was an echo of the white liberal feminist view that all men are oppressors, which was itself a conservative turn in social theory and a consequence of the weakness of the socialist movement in the 1970s.98 Intersectionality’s “relational” promotion of a contradictory and differential approach to solidarity makes political theory incoherent. Emphasizing experience at the expense of left theory and strategy merely affirms reality as it is experienced and overlooks how the forms of oppression, which are shaped by capitalist relations, change over time. Calls to move beyond singular perspectives to develop “anti-​categorial” and “intra-​ categorical” strategies against oppression are thus criticized for serving the neoliberal agenda in times of austerity.99

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  63 The problem with intersectionality is not that it challenges liberal values but that the way it goes about this also challenges socialism. Intersectionality cannot contribute to the emancipation of labour. Jessica Cassell argues that although struggles must be inclusive and no form of oppression can be overcome in isolation, intersectionality can neither explain the origins of oppression nor provide adequate solutions.100 Marxists, she insists, should not avoid challenging intersectionalists. As identity is now used to promote career advancement and is used by the trade union bureaucracy and post-​left political parties to fend off challenges from socialists, the capitalist foundations of anti-​oppression discourses are reaffirmed. Crenshaw, it should be noted, did not indict the capitalist aspects of legal institutions. She defined the resurgence of BLM activism in June 2020 as evidence of the failed universalism of the Sanders 2020 campaign.101 Black disparities, however, cannot be separated from the downward pressure on wages that is part of neoliberalism’s attack on labour and the defunding of social services. Artificially engineered scarcity, according to Cassell, compounds psychological jealousies, resentment, scapegoating and social violence. What makes intersectionality seem like legitimate social science is its reference to structural forms of oppression. However, its approach to social structure is idealist, she argues. Those who experience less oppression are scapegoated for perpetuating and benefiting from inequality. As the largest social group, the working class bears the brunt of intersectional analysis. Rather than attack privileges, socialists should defend the human rights of all and should struggle against efforts to make different identity groups fight for the scraps of an unjust system. Instead of promoting racial justice, socialists should fight against all forms of injustice.102 “Don’t equalize down and create an equality of poverty,” Cassell argues. “Equalize up and take what we need from the exploiting and oppressing class!”103 The wealthy benefit by stealing surplus from all productive workers, including black women. Rather than the separatism that calls for “allies,” Marxists call for collective struggle through socialist organizations, parties, trade unions and movements. Comrades do not let comrades divide people into competing intersectional groups whose common denominator is privilege and oppression. Capitalism is not a moral but a political and economic social relation. In contrast to the tokenistic endgame that is demanded by intersectionalists, only socialism unifies the struggles of the oppressed. Like the sprawling clusters of research around privilege theory, critical race theory and intersectionality, the concept of decoloniality has taken off in the years after Occupy Wall Street and the movements of the squares as a left-​ seeming initiative. Focused primarily on histories of colonization, the activist sector that rejects the left-​to-​right spectrum seeks to transform institutions through alliances that combine struggles against sexism and racism with decolonial awareness. Although decoloniality began with the efforts of ethnic studies scholars and postcolonial theorists to make academic curricula in the West more multicultural and global in scope, decoloniality seeks to go much

64  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics further than this by dismantling the Western canon. As with intersectionality, decoloniality is conceived in terms of situated knowledges, or positionalities, that are relational in modality and that seek to centre non-​Western forms of knowledge that have been marginalized over the centuries by European and American domination. As with intersectionality, decoloniality is pitted against liberal institutions that are deemed to be white supremacist and that lead to colonial and settler forms of knowledge. And so, while decoloniality addresses histories of colonization and conquest that are factual and that no socialist would dispute, it adds to this a decolonial perspective that very problematically rejects modernity and universality as Eurocentric. In decolonial theory, the common experiences of former colonies replace the common experiences of black women in intersectional theory. Struggle is not limited to gaining independence from metropolitan centres but extends to those formerly colonized places which must now dismantle legacies of oppression. The process of decolonization could involve official refutations of the Christian doctrine of discovery that justified genocidal colonial policies, the rem/​patriation of looted artefacts and artworks, or reparations for the descendants of migrant “arrivant” slaves who had no choice in being brought to colonies where their presence contributed to the displacement of Indigenous peoples.104 Key themes within the interdisciplinary project of decoloniality include: the violence of the encounters that shaped colonial societies; modern theories of racial hierarchy and cultural supremacy; the link between Christianity and secular universalism; the notion of the frontier, as well as the settling and cultivation of land; the aesthetics of landscape; colonial forms of administration and military recruitment; the importation of labour; strategies of dispossession, assimilation and genocide; national myths and discriminatory welfare policies.105 Decoloniality also explores legacies of Indigenous resistance, anti-​colonial and national liberation struggles, self-​government, ecology, land management and sustainability, land rights activism, restitution and restorative knowledge, critical memory and new subjectivities. All of these themes bring privilege theory and critical whiteness studies to bear on decoloniality. According to Anne Bond and Joshua Inwood, the concepts of whiteness and white privilege should be extended to include settler colonialism since white supremacy has been institutionalized through colonial settler projects.106 While white supremacy is geographically specific, it is also an ongoing modality with implications for the present and the future. Unlike colonial and neocolonial relations, settler colonialism implies the permanent occupation of territory and continuous control of Indigenous populations, usually through the seizure and privatization of land. The violence of white supremacy is thus considered to be the precondition for white privilege in settler colonies. From the perspective of decoloniality, contemporary multicultural and post-​racial theories ignore the foundational and structuring aspects of whiteness. As an activist approach to scholarship, the concept of decoloniality is often used in the form of a transitive verb: to

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  65 de-​colonize. It exists among other related agendas, as is the case with the DSA slogan: decarbonize, decommodify, decolonize and democratize. Theories of decoloniality were preceded by postcolonial theory, which is an academic discourse with a strong presence in literary criticism and Cultural Studies. One of the originators of postcolonial theory is Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual who developed the concept and history of Orientalism along Foucauldian lines.107 The scholar Homi Bhabha used literary and performativity theory to explain the structures of nationalist ideology, an approach to this topic that was reinforced by Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities, which explored the way that institutions like archives and museums help to “construct” the sense of national belonging.108 Another prominent figure in postcolonial theory is Gayatri Spivak, a Derridean scholar whose well-​known essay on the theory of subaltern knowledge spearheaded the field of subaltern studies that separates anti-​ colonial struggles from the kind of leftist internationalism that once characterized postwar anti-​ colonial movements.109 The long period of modern national independence movements, which stretches from the end of the nineteenth century through to the 1970s, came to an end with the shift in Global South countries towards anti-​secular and anti-​Marxist nationalism, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the use of the CIA to destroy socialist insurgencies in Latin America and elsewhere. While postcolonial theory attempted to carry the mantle of critical theory through the 1980s and 90s, and as such advanced a critique of identity, decoloniality works in tandem with different forms of essentialism to produce a more abstract and less materialist understanding of colonization. Decoloniality is also different from postcolonial theory insofar as it insists on the ongoing impact of colonial structures. Decoloniality builds on whiteness studies, CRT and intersectionality to unmask power relations and expose whiteness as a state-​sanctioned and normative category. Following Stefancic and Delgado, decolonialists consider European white supremacy to be an ordinary aspect of everyday life and a necessity in settler states, such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Israel, to maintain settler colonial identities. As with the concept of racial capitalism, the idea of settler capitalism suggests that capital cannot be challenged without at the same time advancing an anti-​racist agenda of decolonization. Among the growing list of decolonial thinkers, the semiologist Walter Mignolo has achieved something like guru status. This is in part because his work includes a touch of the surrealism and existential jazziness that defined anti-​ colonial struggles in previous generations. Among his many books, The Darker Side of Western Colonialism is presented as a reconsideration of the idea of developmentalism.110 Mignolo distinguishes decoloniality from Marxism, psychoanalysis and postmodernism, all of which are deemed “Eurocentred” critiques of modernity. His purpose is the elaboration of a non-​Western critique of Western civilization that focuses on coloniality as a system of knowledges that encompasses theology, philosophy and the academic sciences. Against the view that what emerged from Europe is simply

66  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics part of the universal history of humanity, the colonial dominance of Europe since Columbus inscribes those “developments” in a system of knowledge which Mignolo names “the Western code.”111 Western epistemology is programmatically hierarchical, he argues, and so decolonization cannot begin with modernization but only with the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Non-​Alignment Movement of 1961 that looked beyond the imperialism of both First World capitalist and Second World communist nations. More ominously, Mignolo claims that the breaking of the Western code began in 2001 with the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center buildings in New York City. Rather than the history of social classes, Mignolo’s theory of decoloniality is a history of civilizations. The Western civilization, which consolidated in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, is the product of medieval Christianity and the distinction, first, between the civilized world and barbarians, and then, between the ancients and moderns. While Mignolo says that it does not make sense to be against European modernity, he also rejects the notion that the values of European modernity should be thought of as salutary and everlasting. Reversing the opposition of civilized to barbarian, Mignolo champions “the rest of the world” against Euro-​American modernity.112 It is perhaps not surprising that Samuel Huntington, who developed the idea of a “clash of civilizations,” was the teacher of Francis Fukuyama, whose theory of the “end of history” is an unacknowledged pillar of Mignolo’s postmodernism.113 Replacing Collins’ “matrix of domination” with a “colonial matrix of power,” he extends his analysis of Western norms to include norms of gender, sexuality and racial classification.114 And like most paradigms that derive from identity politics more generally, he redefines global multipolarity in terms of diversity, from a polycentric world order to pluriversal world orders, where for instance Christianity coexists with Islam, liberalism with Marxism and feminism with ecology. Rather than inclusivity, Mignolo’s version of decoloniality implies reciprocal rights based on local knowledges. The purpose of decoloniality is to “dispel the myth of universality” on the basis of a self-​constructed knowledge that binds epistemology to ontology.115 This zero-​degree anti-​humanism recognizes as human only those whose humanity, he says, has been called into question. This he argues is what makes decoloniality different from Marxism: the Marxist left confronts capitalism first within Europe itself; with the imperial expansion and the exportation and importation of Marxism to the colonies, the confrontation of capitalism and the focus on social class was simply adapted to the new context. The decolonial confronts all of Western civilization, which includes liberal capitalism and Marxism. And it does it from the perspective of the colonies and ex-​colonies rather than from the perspective internal to Western civilization itself, be it Spengler’s

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  67 decay of Western civilization or the postmodern critique of Western modernity.116 Even if it is capitalism and not socialism that dominates the global economy, the question of power implies that decoloniality is not limited to matters of political economy, but extends to questions of authority and knowledge, and to gender, racial and sexual liberation “beyond class struggle.”117 Rejecting dialectics as binary thinking, Mignolo dismisses the political left and the right as pillars of Western knowledge that reify reality through concepts like truth and objectivity. Mignolo’s decolonial project is no longer the modernist radicalism of anti-​ colonial liberation movements but is thoroughly postmodern in its emphasis on hermeneutics, language and narrative. Modernity, for example, is defined as a narrative that makes Europe the point of origin and that hides its so-​called darker side. Themes that are drawn from Foucauldian discourse theory, like embodiment and biopolitics, are made central to efforts to understand the forms of hierarchized body-​knowledge, which of course are opposed to the Cartesian strawman of disembodied thought that is said to characterize Western epistemology. The postmodern premises of Mignolo’s decoloniality are as such anathema to Marxism. It is not difficult to recognize that Mignolo’s work shares with most other post-​structuralist approaches the inability to understand, let alone explain, socio-​ economic changes. Postmodern anti-​Cartesianism ignores the simple fact that Marx’s critique of political economy could never have been accomplished without the resources of philosophy and mathematics. In Marxist materialism, which is based in part on Hegel’s Science of Logic, money does not exist in its brutal material simplicity, but only makes sense at the level of its “notional” realization, which is the form of capital in the world market. Likewise, classes, races and societies do not exist at the basic level of material reality, abstracted from the totality of history, place and human knowledge, but only truly exist in their concrete determination, which is universal. It is at this higher level that the particularity of money or of identity becomes adequate to its unfolding concept. In Marxist analysis, it is the commodity, which Marx defines as a “concrete abstraction,” that mediates the capitalist mode of production. The Marxist literary theorist Neil Larsen argues that Mignolo’s work only makes passing references to anti-​colonial thinkers like Mahatma Gandhi, Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, which we can associate with the tradition of radical, emancipatory universality.118 Even if for Mignolo the end of Western epistemology begins with twentieth-​century anti-​colonialism, his politics is premised on the 500-​year legacy of European conquest and colonization. This makes it easier for him to recommend delinking from Western epistemology and its institutions, which according to Larsen follows the Carl Schmitt logic of friend/​enemy that one finds in Mignolo’s theory of the “Third Nomos of the Earth,” defined in terms of civilization-​states after the era of nation-​states. This allows Mignolo to claim affinity with current processes of geopolitical

68  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics multipolarity and de-​dollarization in the BRICS nations that have been hard hit by Western economic sanctions. Mignolo’s agenda, according to Larsen, does not imply the reversal of colonialism, but the denial of its historical referent, reducing politics to the kind of culturalism that avoids material-​historical analysis in favour of epistemic projection.119 Making culture and race the basis of what needs to be explained, Mignolo’s supra-​historical version of decoloniality reduces universality to the status of a Western artefact, creating paralysis within social theory since one cannot properly theorize without the category of the universal. The sinister implication of the rejection of universality as Eurocentric is that it clears the path for right-​leaning perspectives that are acceptable so long as they present themselves as anti-​West. In other words, for Larsen, decoloniality’s ban on universality is designed to salvage capitalism as an alienated universality that persists through the culturalism of authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, Turkey, India, Israel, Iran, Brazil, Colombia and elsewhere. Larsen’s purpose is not to prop up Western nations as the defenders of democracy, but to recognize the political limits of decoloniality and acknowledge the unfinished work of socialist internationalism, which he refers to as universal communism.120 To the extent that non-​Western regimes accept capitalist economics without question, debates and splits within the international communist movement have become a moot point. Mignolo is not oblivious to the problems of geopolitics. Like intersectiona­ lity, however, decoloniality wishes to have its class perspective and eat it too. Along the lines of neoliberal theories that redefine social problems as questions of consumer choice, Mignolo argues that the purpose of decolonial politics is not to consolidate and eliminate options, but to multiply them. In this anti-​Western version of eclectic materialism, decoloniality is presented as simply one option among others, which includes coexisting options like the micropolitics of postcoloniality, ethnic studies or gender studies, and macro-​ narratives like Islam, Christianity and liberalism, or perhaps even Marxism. However conflicting these may be, Mignolo believes that societies can build communal futures according to their own desires. Along Deleuzian lines of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, he defines the relations of force on a global scale as processes of “dewesternization” and “rewesternization,” both of which accept capitalism as the default social relation: “in the domain of the dispute for the control of knowledge and authority, dewesternization can make a difference beyond the fact that the economy of accumulation and development is not questioned.”121 Dewesternization therefore implies economic independence within global capitalism and knowledge within the sphere of identity. The demise of communism in 1989 announces new agendas like the struggles of the EZLN in Chiapas or the nationalist left in Argentina. And along the lines set out by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the proletariat is reconceived as a multitude whose goal is to free the commons from neoliberal governance. Opposing difference to equality, the project of decolonization is achieved through cultural, psychological and bureaucratic divestment from colonialism.

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  69 One could go on at length enumerating the many concepts that Mignolo has devised to free the world from the destitutions that he claims have been brought about by universal norms and homogenization. However, his is not the only version of decolonial theory. Equally popular is the essay by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang titled “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”122 Like whiteness studies, this account of decoloniality sets out to render the invisible dynamics of settler colonialism and the assumptions of settler worldviews. Decoloniality is distinct from rights-​ based social justice agendas, they argue, which merely reproduce dominant theories of social change. Unlike universalists, Tuck and Yang argue for the dissimilitude of experiences of oppression. Not all struggles against oppression are decolonial and so Indigenous people, they argue, should not be conflated with other minority groups through activist acronyms like BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) that reinforce the multicultural and diversity dynamics of settler nation-​states. They make a great deal in this regard of the notion that decoloniality “unsettles” the knowledges and practices of all settler “trespassers” who are non-​Indigenous. A key motif that they share with Land Back advocates is that allies must not appropriate Indigenous struggles. Solidarity itself must be unsettled so that grievances and future conflict are not foreclosed. It is this politics of antagonism, irreconcilability and incommensurability that has made the work of Tuck and Yang attractive to social movement activists.123 Making solidarity easy means making decoloniality into a metaphor rather than a reality. Reducing decoloniality to an activist trope is therefore denounced as colonial equivocation and means to alleviate settler guilt. Like Mignolo, Tuck and Yang distinguish their project from both liberalism and socialism, which they argue are colonial projects that have produced settler empires. Even the benign OWS encampments and social movement theories of commons are criticized for being 99 percent settler.124 Nor are terms like the Global South helpful, they say, insofar as such terms conflate First Nations with Third World migrants. This non-​intersectional exclusivity goes all the way down to include settler notions of warfare, religion, race, gender and sexuality. This is because nothing about Western and Third World theories of liberation addresses the cosmological specificity of Indigenous lifeways.125 The repatriation of land is therefore essential to the recognition of how land and Indigenous relations to land are differently understood. Against para-​political or deliberative notions of debate and dialogue, Tuck and Yang argue that colonized Indigenous people are in no way obliged to answer settler questions and expectations. This absolute incommensurability, no matter how resolute it may seem, is simply another dimension of postmodern cultural relativism. One can easily draw a list of reasons to dispute Tuck and Yang’s assertions. For one, like any other ethnic category, Indigenous groups are not homogenous. For good and bad, they have participated in the events of the last 500 years and have also been part of anti-​colonial liberation movements. Further, the rhetoric of decoloniality is

70  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics an academic discourse that is not necessarily pertinent to Indigenous people and may in fact contradict some of their political goals or cultural beliefs. The fact that Indigenous people cannot restore all pre-​contact ways of life or regain the sum of lost territories betrays the self-​defeating nature of separatist attempts to replace universalism with identity. Lastly, the political immaturity and opportunism of decolonial “futurism” will fail to make the working majority of non-​Indigenous people identify with an agenda that makes them guilty for almost everything and that disincentivizes solidarity.126 Postmodern decoloniality cannot be conflated with Indigenous struggles for cultural survival and political self-​determination. However, the decolonial rejection of liberalism and socialism as different versions of the same Western European modernity exposes longstanding tensions between Indigenous leaders and the socialist movement that are glossed over by theories of decoloniality. Indigenous-​led protests over Chevron oil spills in Ecuador, against the Dakota Access Pipeline in the American Midwest, or against the Coastal GasLink Pipeline in British Columbia strengthen the connection between Indigenous groups, environmentalists, socialists and human rights activists. As Steve Estes remarks, political elites and corporate media have an interest in depicting poor whites and poor Natives as enemies competing over scarce resources.127 This much is widely understood among new social movement leftists, who are quick to draw the connections between settler colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. As Estes also remarks, the revolutionary potential of colonized peoples is not limited to civil rights or to the status of Indigenous people as economically poor, but derives from the intersection of race, class and colonialism. Indigenous politics therefore cannot be defined as the removal of settlers. Notwithstanding the revolutionary left’s advocacy of the right of colonized peoples to declare independence and assert sovereignty, what is less appreciated among leftist identitarians, both Indigenous and non-​Indigenous, is the specificity of capital. In “Eurocentric Anti-​Eurocentrism,” Wood argues that histories that focus on the critique of Eurocentrism have not produced convincing histories of capitalism. The former are counter-​productive since they weaken legitimate critiques of European colonialism and imperialism.128 Perhaps the most noted instance of this, not mentioned by Wood, are the jeremiads of Ward Churchill, Russell Means and Vine Deloria in the 1983 book Marxism and Native Americans.129 Eurocentric and liberal accounts of the origins of capitalism define its advent as the stage at which commercial trade in growing towns became widespread. Such accounts do not explain capitalism as a historically specific social form with specific relations of production and property, with unique laws of motion that are based on the compulsion to profit maximization and the need to revolutionize the forces of production. Given the realities of commercial society, capitalism is retroactively taken as inevitable, or latent, and bourgeois ideology is championed as the mindset that called for the overcoming of feudal obstacles to trade.

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  71 In this reverse teleology, the Western bourgeoisie is credited with having succeeded in overcoming the legal, political and religious impediments to progress that were imposed by feudal monarchies. Anti-​Eurocentric histories add to this flawed thesis the notion that non-​European powers would have done the same had they not been prevented from doing so by Western imperialism. Anti-​Eurocentric accounts that focus on 1492 as the beginning of the rise of capitalist imperialism thereby reinforce Eurocentric and bourgeois histories of capitalism. Among the terms that economic historians use to define colonial imperialism is primitive accumulation, the process by which wealth was accumulated by force through theft, plunder, enslavement, enclosure and other means. At a certain point, when this basic form of expropriation and hoarding becomes unproductive, the conditions are in place for the shift towards industrial capitalism. The theory of primitive accumulation adds to anti-​Eurocentrism the notion that Europeans were exceptionally violent and acquired their economic power through colonial plunder. Wood argues that such accounts give retroactive credence to bourgeois ideology and fail to explain the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Like the labour theory of capital, Marx borrowed the concept of primitive accumulation from classical political economy. Marx broke with the bourgeois paradigm by defining capital as a social relation. In the first volume of Capital, Marx argued that wealth by itself, no matter how much of it is hoarded, does not define capital as a social relation.130 The mere accumulation of wealth is therefore not a decisive factor in the transformation of social property relations. For Marx, who does not deny histories of colonial violence and profit through commercial trade, primitive accumulation only begins with the direct expropriation of producers. As he stated in an 1865 speech to the First International Working Men’s Association: “We should find that this so-​called original accumulation means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a decomposition of the original union existing between the labouring man and his instruments of labour.”131 This process first takes place in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as conflictual class relations between landlords and small producers led to new property relations that then led to imperatives of competition, profit maximization and the systematic development of productive forces. In this process, common lands that were exploited according to egalitarian principles by peasant communities were converted into private ownership. Between the 1500s and 1800, nascent capitalist relations transformed land, animals, forests and even labour into commodities. Forced off common lands, unprotected peasants and artisans were made to comprise a market in “free” labour. For Marx, this process was neither desirable nor inevitable. Rather, laws to protect private property were brutally enforced by the ruling class against the resistance of those who were expelled from their lands. The English then exported this socio-​economic model to its American, African and Asian colonies, where it gradually became the way of the world.132

72  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics According to Wood, it is the inescapable dependence of capitalist markets on social property relations and the consequent compulsion to self-​expansion that makes capitalism historically different from feudalism. This explains why capitalism first emerged in England, and later the Netherlands, and why the commercial empires of Spain and France, not to mention Renaissance Italy, China, India and the Arab empires, remained feudal in nature until they were absorbed into global capitalism. She writes: “once British capitalism, especially in its industrial form, was well established, it was able to impose capitalist imperatives on other economies with different social property relations.”133 Contrary to the fever dreams of decolonialists, European hegemony had nothing to do with Christianity, racist attitudes, cultural arrogance, bourgeois philosophy, violent predispositions, superior knowledge or advanced technology, but with specific historical conditions that emerged in England and that expanded through English colonization. That the English justified these developments with an ideology of productivity –​dispossession for the sake of improvement and production to create national wealth –​ means that contemporary anti-​colonialists need not accept capitalism or take it for granted. The fact that capitalism was not inevitable means that there are alternatives to what has become capitalist imperialism. However, for us to seriously struggle for a world beyond capitalism, it is necessary to understand that it is capitalism, and not Eurocentrism, that is concretely universal. One might paraphrase Jesus Christ in this regard: It is easier for a capitalist to appreciate the implications of Marxism than it is for a decolonialist to understand the meaning of emancipation. For reasons that only Marxism can explain, it is not possible to add class sensitivity to race and gender analysis and thereby produce a happy intersectional family of coalitions. A postmodern relativist like Mignolo, who presents socialism as one among other options, has nothing to say about authoritarian and undemocratic regimes. One question that remains is whether or not global capitalism has subsumed all cultural differences within its system of abstraction, integration and labour exploitation. This relates to the claim that colonialist primitive accumulation, which includes the exploitation of nature, is an ongoing process even within socialist regimes. Against those social constructionists who wrongly confuse universality with chauvinism, it is possible for socialists to demonstrate the relevance of Marxist socialism to anti-​colonial struggles. In a review of Sean Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman demonstrate that Marx and Engels developed their thinking in accordance with national and popular struggles.134 In “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” Marx argued that colonial plunder and enslavement were indeed aspects of primitive accumulation. In “So-​Called Primitive Accumulation” he addressed imperialist plunder and criticized the frightful “extirpation” of Indigenous populations by white settler colonies.135 Familiar with the writings of William Howitt, William Prescott, Thomas Fowell Buxton, Herman Merivale, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Thomas Stamford Raffles, Marx

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  73 was aware of the mistreatment of Native populations in most regions of the world. He focused his research on Dutch and English colonialists because they had led the way for industrial capitalism. Marx understood that their methods of slavery, looting, genocide, forced starvation, trade monopoly, the removal of aboriginal populations, land speculation, the exploitation of land through agriculture and labour through manufacturing were all pursued for the sake of profit. In Capital, Marx declared that what concerned him the most about colonialism was its relation to the capitalist mode of production through the property regimes that rely on unsustainable forms of expropriation. The removal of Indigenous populations from land was for the sake of land speculation in white settler colonies where the labour of workers and the fruits of nature could be profitably exploited. Whereas many of Marx’s contemporaries were concerned about the moral impact and religious implications of colonialism, Marx was focused on questions of property, production and exchange. For this reason, he was particularly interested in “artificial communism” and “natural economies,” such as Russian peasant communes, that existed before the introduction of capitalism. His unpublished Ethnological Notebooks contained 1700 pages of notes on tribal societies in the Pacific Northwest, North and South America, Algeria, the Near and Middle East, India, Asia and Indonesia. He studied their languages, kinship relations, gender relations, ecological views, material culture, farming methods, political principles, forms of organization, non-​commodity trade practices and communal land ownership, all in the interest of producing a comprehensive critique of bourgeois capitalism. The authors therefore claim that critiques of Marxism which attribute to historical materialism an uncritical and teleological commitment to developmentalism, and an emphasis on labour at the expense of peasant and Indigenous lifeways, simply ignore the writings of Marx and Engels. Although Marx and Engels anticipated the spread of capitalism as part of the universal movement of history, they avoided notions of evolutionary development and were instead concerned with the preservation and reconstitution of non-​capitalist cultural formations and production relations. They defended and helped to organize support for anti-​colonial struggles in China, India, Algeria, Egypt and South Africa. And they hoped that those struggles could be connected to the struggles of European workers. This was in stark contrast to the majority of Europeans who supported colonialism. While Marx admired the equality he found among Algerian Muslims, he believed that this would disappear if they did not build a revolutionary movement. Engels was more technologically determinist and developmentalist than Marx, but he also rejected the oppression of one nation by another, writing in 1882: “the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing.”136 Vladimir Lenin’s subsequent insistence on the right to national self-​determination, which he did not support where there was little chance for worker struggles,

74  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics further developed organic connections between socialism and national liberation movements throughout the twentieth century. Despite the historical coincidence of European colonialism and capitalism, colonialism should not be conflated with capitalism. Doing so makes it all too easy to reduce European imperialism to white supremacy and sheer brutality. The related notion that Marxism is white supremacist because it issues from Europe confuses universalism with chauvinism.137 The idea here is that European particularism masks its specific interests as universal. This basic gesture of social constructionism, which owes a great deal to Marxist theory as a form of ideology critique, is nevertheless not Marxist because it reinforces the conservative view that human nature is essentially selfish and self-​interested. This has nothing to do with the historical processes described above. And this is the reason why Marxist socialism is universalist in principle, internationalist in scope and emancipatory in aspiration. As David Michael Smith has argued, the explanatory power of the Marxist critique of capitalism has had an unparalleled contribution to liberation movements throughout the world, in China, Russia, Africa, Eastern Europe, India, East Asia and Latin America.138 Revolutionary theory has been a cornerstone of national independence movements in thousands of different contexts. What Marx and Engels demonstrated was the contradictory and uneven aspects of capitalism. Although they believed that most societies would likely undergo the barbarism of capitalist development, they did not, ultimately, consider developmental stages to be evolutionary or inevitable. The rejection of socialism on account of its association with destructive industrialization in Soviet Russia and communist China is little more than capitalist propaganda garnished with ecological thought. Socialists have always combined the development of productive forces with the democratic decision-​making of associated labours in the interest of meeting human needs and sustainability. According to Smith, socialists should stand in solidarity with oppressed First Nations and work for the liberation of those who are trapped within capitalist states. This becomes more difficult as Indigenous communities become divided between proletarianized workers who are deprived of means of subsistence and an Indigenous business elite that is implicated in resource exploitation and land management.139 In addition to this, an intellectual, cultural and religious elite contributes to deradicalization by convincing the majority about the potential for capitalism to empower Indigenous peoples. This is known as red capitalism and red washing, where Indigenous economic behaviour is thought to defy capitalist laws of motion by conforming to Indigenous cultural values. Taking no responsibility for the global capitalist system that was imposed on them, Indigenous communities have abandoned revolutionary ideas and plunged headlong into cultural relativism. Contemporary debates over representation and appropriation reinforce the reduction of culture and politics to questions of ontology. Ultimately, the project of decoloniality is not so distant from academic postcolonial theory. According to Sagar Sanyal, postcolonial theory argues that ideology and culture are as significant to

Intersectionality and Decoloniality  75 “materialist” analysis as relations of production, consumption and distribution.140 What is put forward in this sort of culturalism is a non-​dialectical approach to ideological superstructures, a weakness in progressive social theory that the far right has latched onto with the term “cultural Marxism.” It is perhaps simpler to refer to today’s social constructionism as postmodern theory, which makes random, anti-​ disciplinary use of Lévi-​ Straussian and Althusserian structuralism, Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian discourse analysis and Baudrillardian reversals to describe the various ways in which subjects are “constructed” through language, ideology, culture and economic processes. Rather than treating forces of production and divisions of labour as historical realities, postmodern theorists identify forms of hierarchy and then perform a deconstruction of how these relations were constructed. This is often done without very much historical knowledge and in the speculative manner of comparative literature. Questions of freedom and alienation, the development of social classes, the state and global capitalism are replaced with the idea that power is diffuse and spread immanently across the entire social field. Attacking liberal humanism as though they were attacking capitalism along with it, the pessimistic anti-​humanist philosophers of the postwar era spurred postcolonial thinkers to do the same with regard to Western culture. Vacillating between the discursive and the non-​discursive, postcolonial thinkers used formal logic to deconstruct Western hegemony, making Enlightenment universalism and revolutionary Marxism anathema to postcolonial agendas. The point of contention between Marxists and postcolonialists is whether phenomena like red capitalism leave Indigenous workers trapped within “pre-​capitalist” cultural contexts. Sanyal argues that postcolonialists exaggerate the differences between the West and the postcolonial world. The idea that Indigenous and Third World masses are dominated by local and global elites on account of cultural differences distorts the importance of universalism in Marxist notions of emancipation from capitalism. Ironically, postmodern theorists have rejected all Marxism as Stalinist totalization while at the same time promulgating theories that reinforce the Stalinist concept of social change restricted to state governance within one country. Like their radical democratic counterparts, postcolonialists presume that the popular classes have been absorbed into capitalism and have no interest in pursuing class struggle. This convenient fallacy presumes that the class interests of workers in every geographic location are non-​existent. The rise of far-​right and neo-​fascist movements in the 2000s, spurred by the corruption of elites who capitalize on the crises they have generated, merely reinforces the neoliberal blockage of socialist forces. As working-​class parties and organizations are demobilized for the sake of the global class of investors, different and newly invented versions of identity politics slice and dice the historical record to concoct any concept that is different from the fundamental categories of Marxism. The wilder and the more outlandish the mental gyrations, the better to fuel a creative knowledge economy that is no longer based on the notion of social progress and makes hay of the latest culture wars.

76  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics Notes 1 See also my introduction to Marc James Léger, ed., Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism (London: Routledge, 2023). 2 From the Combahee River Collective “Statement” (1977), cited in Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 169. 3 The CRC cited in Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 170. 4 See Norman X. Finkelstein, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom (Portland: Sublation Press, 2023), 71. 5 Charisse Burden-​Stelly and Jodi Dean, eds, Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing (London: Verso, 2022), eBook. 6 Burden-​Stelly and Jodi Dean, eds, Organize, Fight, Win, 18. 7 Slavoj Žižek, “Troubles with Identity,” The Philosophical Salon (May 28, 2018), https://​thephi​loso​phic​alsa​lon.com/​troub​les-​with-​ident​ity/​. 8 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981). 9 E.K. Hunt, Property and Prophets: The Evolution of Economic Institutions and Ideologies, sixth edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 190. 10 Marie Moran, “Identity and Identity Politics: A Cultural Materialist History,” Historical Materialism 26:2 (July 2018), 21–​45, www.histor​ical​mate​rial​ism.org/​ artic​les/​ident​ity-​and-​ident​ity-​polit​ics. 11 Frederick Engels, “Introduction to Borkheim” (1887), www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​ marx/​works/​1887/​12/​15.htm. 12 Slavoj Žižek, “What Lies Ahead,” Jacobin (January 17, 2023), https://​jaco​bin. com/​2023/​01/​sla​voj-​zizek-​time-​fut​ure-​hist​ory-​cata​stro​phe-​emanc​ipat​ion. 13 Sharon Smith, “Mistaken identity –​or can identity politics liberate the oppressed?” International Socialism 2:62 (Spring 1994), www.marxi​sts.org/​hist​ory/​etol/​newsp​ ape/​isj2/​1994/​isj2-​062/​smith.htm. 14 On this subject, see Cedric Johnson, The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now: Debating Left Politics and Black Lives Matter (London: Verso, 2022). See also Adolph Reed, Jr., “Du Bois and the ‘Wages of Whiteness’: What He Meant, What He Didn’t Mean, and, Besides, It Shouldn’t Matter for Our Politics Anyway,” nonsite (June 29, 2017), https://​nons​ite.org/​du-​bois-​and-​the-​wages-​of-​whiten​ess/​. 15 Sharon Smith, “The Politics of Identity,” International Socialist Review 57 (January–​February 2008), www.isrev​iew.org/​iss​ues/​57/​feat-​ident​ity.shtml. 16 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, [1983] 2000). 17 See Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, “Angela Davis: An Interview on the Futures of Black Radicalism,” Verso Blog (June 23, 2020), www.ver​sobo​oks.com/​ blogs/​3421-​ang​ela-​davis-​an-​interv​iew-​on-​the-​futu​res-​of-​black-​rad​ical​ism. See also Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, eds, Futures of Black Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017). 18 Adolph Reed, Jr., Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: The New Press, 2000), 4. 19 Richard Seymour, “Cultural materialism and identity politics,” Lenin’s Tomb (November 30, 2011), www.len​inol​ogy.co.uk/​2011/​11/​cultu​ral-​mate​rial​ism-​and-​ ident​ity.html. 20 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

Notes  77 21 Chantal Mouffe, “Citizenship and Political Identity,” October 61 (Summer 1992), 30. 22 Žižek addresses the problems of pragmatic opportunism and totalitarian closure in Žižek, “Lenin Navigating in Uncharted Territories,” The Philosophical Salon (May 1, 2017), https://​thephi​loso​phic​alsa​lon.com/​lenin-​nav​igat​ing-​in-​unch​arte​ red-​terr​itor​ies/​. See also Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999). 23 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 128. 24 On this subject, see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 25 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso, [1986] 1998). See also Ralph Miliband, “Constitutionalism and Revolution: Notes on Eurocommunism,” Socialist Register 15 (1978), 158–​71. 26 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 27 Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 10. 28 Thomas Frank, The People, NO: A Brief History of Anti-​ Populism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), eBook, 17. 29 Frank, The People, NO, 53. 30 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The Marx-​Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 537–​8. 31 Paolo Gerbaudo, The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 32 Chantal Mouffe, For a Leftist Populism (London: Verso, 2018) eBook, 12. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière has a similar position to Mouffe. See Véronique Radier, “Jacques Rancière: Je n’attends plus rien de cette élection,” L’OBS (January 16, 2022), www.nouvel​obs.com/​idees/​20220​116.OBS53​286/​jacq​ ues-​ranci​ere-​je-​n-​atte​nds-​plus-​rien-​de-​cette-​elect​ion.html. 33 Mouffe, For a Leftist Populism, 18. 34 Mouffe, For a Leftist Populism, 62. 35 Stathis Kouvelakis, “Against Populist Reason: Ernesto Laclau’s Blind Alleys,” trans. David Fernbach, Verso Blog (August 24, 2021), www.ver​sobo​oks.com/​ blogs/​5138-​agai​nst-​popul​ist-​rea​son-​erne​sto-​lac​lau-​s-​blind-​all​eys. 36 Slavoj Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006), 551–​74. 37 Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” 567. 38 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). 39 Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977). 40 Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,” 557. 41 Guardian staff, “US mayor quits after telling residents it’s ‘sink or swim’ amid deadly snowstorm,” The Guardian (February 17, 2021), www.theg​uard​ian.com/​ us-​news/​2021/​feb/​17/​texas-​mayor-​tom-​boyd-​quits-​storm-​sink-​or-​swim. 42 Alain Badiou, “Twenty-​Four Notes on the Uses of the Word ‘People’,” in Alain Badiou, et al., What Is a People? trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, [2013] 2016), 21. 43 Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace and Freedom (July/​August 1989), 10–​12. See also Michael S. Kimmel and Abby Ferber, eds, Privilege: A Reader (Boulder: Westview Press, 2010).

78  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics 4 McIntosh, “White Privilege,” 10. 4 45 William Ray, “Unpacking Peggy McIntosh’s Knapsack,” Quillette (August 28, 2018), https://​quille​tte.com/​2019/​06/​14/​unpack​ing-​peggy-​mcinto​shs-​knaps​ack-​ by-​will​iam-​ray/​. 46 Ray, “Unpacking Peggy McIntosh’s Knapsack.” 47 Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017). See also Sean McCann, “Choose and Be Damned: Responsibility and Privilege in a Neoliberal Age,” The Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2, 2017), https://​lare​view​ofbo​ oks.org/​arti​cle/​cho​ose-​and-​be-​dam​ned-​res​pons​ibil​ity-​and-​privil​ege-​in-​a-​neo​libe​ ral-​age/​. 48 Phoebe Maltz Bovy, “Why ‘Checking Your Privilege’ Doesn’t Work,” The Walrus (April 5, 2020), https://​thewal​rus.ca/​why-​check​ing-​your-​privil​ege-​doe​snt-​work/​. 49 Connor Kilpatrick, “Let Them Eat Privilege,” Jacobin (April 11, 2015), www.jac​ obin​mag.com/​2015/​04/​1-​99-​perc​ent-​class-​ine​qual​ity/​. 50 See Alex Blasdel, “Is white America ready to confront its racism? Philosopher George Yancy says we need a ‘crisis’,” The Guardian (April 24, 2018), www.theg​ uard​ian.com/​world/​2018/​apr/​24/​geo​rge-​yancy-​dear-​white-​amer​ica-​phil​osop​her-​ confr​ont-​rac​ism. 51 Asad Haider, “White Purity,” Viewpoint Magazine (January 6, 2017), https://​ viewp​oint​mag.com/​2017/​01/​06/​white-​pur​ity/​. 52 Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad, “What’s Wrong with Privilege Theory?” International Socialism (April 2, 2014), http://​isj.org.uk/​whats-​wrong-​with-​privil​ ege-​the​ory/​. 53 See Frances Kendall, Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race (London: Routledge, 2006); Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004). 54 See W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–​1880 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, [1935] 2013); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2007). 55 Jordan Humphreys, “The Voice to Parliament: stuck between symbolism and conservatism,” Red Flag (August 4, 2022), https://​redf​l ag.org.au/​arti​cle/​voice-​par​liam​ ent-​stuck-​betw​een-​symbol​ism-​and-​conse​rvat​ism. Note that Red Flag is an organ of Australia’s Socialist Alternative. The SA decided in September 2023 to side with the pro-​austerity Labour Party and reject its own, and correct, argument that the Voice will not make a difference for ordinary Indigenous people. It decided that this point is “ambiguous” if not “racist” because it was taken up by the political right in its advocacy for the ‘no’ vote in the referendum on this issue. In this instance, Australia’s SA performs the same role as the DSA in the U.S., which is to use fear of the far right to redbait workers to support bourgeois parties that are nominally democratic. In instances like war with China, the January 6 coup attempt, the COVID-​19 pandemic or tax policy –​which align with the interests of neoliberal centrists –​such groups ignore or downplay the real dangers posed by the far right, calling not for socialism but for populist agitation and protest. When Israel responded to Hamas attacks in Fall 2023 with attacks against civilians,

Notes  79 the Indigenous scholar Marcia Langton, one of the leading proponents of the Voice referendum, denounced Indigenous Australians who express solidarity with Palestinians and defended the neocolonial war crimes of Israel. 56 Tad Tietze, “What Privilege Theory Doesn’t Explain,” Socialist Worker (January 14, 2014), https://​soci​alis​twor​ker.org/​2014/​01/​14/​what-​privil​ege-​the​ory-​doe​snt-​ expl​ain. 57 Anthony Zurcher, “Critical race theory: the concept dividing the US,” BBC News (July 22, 2021), www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​us-​can​ada-​57908​808. 58 Alex Horton, “Top U.S. military leader: ‘I want to understand White rage. And I’m White’,” The Washington Post (June 23, 2021), www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​ powerp​ost/​repu​blic​ans-​joint-​chi​efs-​chair​man-​criti​cal-​race-​the​ory-​congr​ess/​2021/​ 06/​23/​84654​c34-​d451-​11eb-​9f29-​e9e​6c9e​843c​6_​st​ory.html. 59 Derrick A. Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1987), eBook, 20. 60 Derrick A. Bell, “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” University of Illinois Law Review 1995:4 (1995), 893–​910. 61 See Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994). 62 Bell, “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” 898. 63 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, “Introduction,” in Delgado and Stefancic, eds, Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, third edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 3. 64 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, third edition (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 3. 65 Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 27. 66 See Marc James Léger, Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-​Representation (Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2022). 67 Helen Pluckrose, “Demystifying Critical Race Theory So We Can Get to the Point,” Counterweight (July 2, 2021), https://​count​erwe​ight​supp​ort.com/​2021/​ 07/​02/​demys​tify​ing-​criti​cal-​race-​the​ory-​so-​we-​can-​get-​to-​the-​point/​. 68 Tom Carter, Marxism vs. Race Theory (Oak Park, MI: World Socialist Web Site, 2023). 69 See for example Jeanette Haynes Writer, “Native Resistance through Art: A Contestation of History through Dialogue, Representation, and Action,” International Journal of Education & the Arts 14:2.4 (September 6, 2013), https://​ files.eric.ed.gov/​fullt​ext/​EJ1039​596.pdf. 70 Carter, Marxism vs. Race Theory, 18. 71 Delgado and Stefancic cited in Carter, Marxism vs. Race Theory, 22. 72 Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011). 73 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, second edition (New York: Routledge, [1990] 2000), 23. 74 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 204. 75 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 65. 76 Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 75.

80  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics 77 See for example Ato Sekyi-​ Otu, Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays (London: Routledge, 2019). 78 Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 262, 459. 79 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 [Vol. 1989, Issue 1, Article 8] (1989), 139–​67. 80 Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 154. 81 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43:6 (July 1991), 1244. 82 See Sharon Smith, “A Marxist Case for Intersectionality,” Socialist Worker (August 1, 2017), https://​soci​alis​twor​ker.org/​2017/​08/​01/​a-​marx​ist-​case-​for-​inters​ ecti​onal​ity. 83 Jennifer C. Nash, “Institutionalizing the Margins,” Social Text 118, 32:1 (Spring 2014), 45–​65. 84 Nash, “Institutionalizing the Margins,” 58; Sara Salem, “Intersectionality and Its Discontents: Intersectionality as Traveling Theory,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25:4 (2018), 409. 85 Michaels cited in Richard Kreitner, “What Is the Left Without Identity Politics?” The Nation (December 16, 2016), www.thenat​ion.com/​arti​cle/​arch​ive/​what-​is-​ the-​left-​with​out-​ident​ity-​polit​ics/​. 86 See Communist Party of Great Britain, “Mike Macnair: The dead end of intersectionality,” Vimeo (2018), https://​vimeo.com/​300339​126. 87 Cited in Finkelstein, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!, 74. 88 Finkelstein, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!, 73. 89 See Ashley J. Bohrer, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality Under Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). See also Ashley J. Bohrer, “Intersectionality and Marxism: A Critical Historiography,” Historical Materialism 26:2 (July 2018), 46–​74. 90 Bohrer, Marxism and Intersectionality, 18. 91 See Nancy Folbre, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: Intersectional Political Economy (London: Verso, 2021). 92 See Editors, “Intersectionality: A Symposium,” Science & Society 82:2 (April 2018), 248. 93 Hester Eisenstein, “Querying Intersectionality,” Science & Society 82:2 (April 2018), 255. 94 Eve Mitchell, “I am a woman and a human: A Marxist feminist critique of intersectionality,” libcom.org (September 12, 2013), https://​lib​com.org/​libr​ ary/​i-​am-​woman-​human-​marx​ist-​femin​ist-​criti​que-​inters​ecti​onal​ity-​the​ory-​eve-​ mitch​ell. 95 Martha E. Gimenez, “Intersectionality: Marxist Critical Observations,” Science & Society 82:2 (April 2018), 265–​6. 96 Lise Vogel, “Beyond Intersectionality,” Science & Society 82:2 (April 2018), 275–​6. 97 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Leiden: Brill, [1983] 2013). 98 Choonara and Prasad, “What’s Wrong with Privilege Theory?” 99 Birgit Sauer, “Intersectionality,” Krisis 2 (2018), https://​arch​ive.kri​sis.eu/​inters​ecti​ onal​ity/​.

Notes  81 100 Jessica Cassell, “Marxism vs. Intersectionality,” Fightback (July 12, 2017), www.marx​ist.ca/​arti​cle/​marx​ism-​vs-​inters​ecti​onal​ity. 101 See Sydney Ember, “Bernie Sanders Predicted Revolution, Just Not This One,” The New York Times (June 19, 2020), www.nyti​mes.com/​2020/​06/​19/​us/​polit​ ics/​ber​nie-​sand​ers-​prote​sts.html. 102 See Alison Assiter, “Why Universalism?” Feminist Dissent 1 (2016), 35–​63. 103 Cassell, “Marxism vs. Intersectionality.” 104 The term arrivant, as distinct from settler, was coined by Kamau Brathwaite and developed by Jodi Byrd. See Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) and Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 105 Annie E. Coombes, “Introduction: Memory and History in Settler Colonialism,” in Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa, New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 4. 106 Anne Bond and Joshua Inwood, “Beyond White Privilege: Geographies of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism,” Progress in Human Geography 40:6 (2016), 715–​33. 107 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). 108 Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 109 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), 361–​ 5. For a Marxist critique of Subaltern Studies, see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013). 110 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). See also Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018) and Walter D. Mignolo, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). 111 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Colonialism, xii. 112 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Colonialism, xiv. 113 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs 72:3 (Summer 1993), 22–​50; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). See also Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 114 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Colonialism, xv. 115 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, xvi. 116 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, xviii. 117 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, xix. 118 Neil Larsen, “The Jargon of Decoloniality,” Catalyst 6:2 (Summer 2022), 56. 119 Larsen, “The Jargon of Decoloniality,” 63. Larsen identifies similar strands of decolonial thinking in the work of Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-​ Torres, Santiago Castro-​Gómez, Catherine E. Walsh and occasionally in the more substantial work of Enrique Dussel and Aníbal Quijano.

82  Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics 20 Larsen, “The Jargon of Decoloniality,” 76. 1 121 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 48. 122 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity and Education 1:1 (2012), 1–​40. 123 See for example, Unsettling Minnesota, eds, Unsettling Ourselves: Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality (Unsettling Minnesota, 2009), https://​unse​ttli​ngmi​nnes​ota.files.wordpr​ess.com/​2009/​11/​um_​so​urce​ book​_​jan​10_​r​evis​ion.pdf. 124 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 23–​8. 125 For a discussion of the origins of Indigenous rights movements and their affiliation with Third World anti-​colonial movements, see Jonathan Crossen, “Another Wave of Anti-​ Colonialism: The Origins of Indigenous Internationalism,” Canadian Journal of History /​Annales canadiennes d’histoire 52:3 (2017), 533–​59. 126 Some of these insights were gleaned from Editors, “A Questionnaire on Decoloniality,” October 174 (Fall 2020), 3–​125. 127 Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019), 30. 128 Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Eurocentric anti-​Eurocentrism,” Against the Current (May–​June 2001), https://​agains​tthe​curr​ent.org/​atc​092/​p993/​. See also Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, [1999] 2017). 129 Ward Churchill, ed., Marxism and Native Americans (Boston: South End Press, [1983] 1992). 130 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, [1867] 1976). 131 Marx cited in Ian Angus, “The Meaning of ‘So-​Called Primitive Accumulation’,” Monthly Review (April 1, 2023), https://​monthl​yrev​iew.org/​2023/​04/​01/​the-​ mean​ing-​of-​so-​cal​led-​primit​ive-​accum​ulat​ion/​#en3. 132 See Ian Angus, The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023). 133 Wood, “Eurocentric anti-​Eurocentrism.” 134 John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review (February 1, 2020), https://​monthl​yrev​iew. org/​2020/​02/​01/​marx-​and-​the-​ind​igen​ous/​. See also Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 135 Available in Marx, Capital, Volume I. 136 Friedrich Engels, Letter to Karl Kautsky (September 12, 1882), www.marxi​sts. org/​arch​ive/​marx/​works/​1882/​lett​ers/​82_​09​_​12.htm. 137 This conflation of universalism with chauvinism is noticed for example in Christopher Mott, Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism (The Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, 2022), https://​pea​cedi​plom​acy.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2022/​06/​Woke-​Imper​ium.pdf. 138 David Michael Smith, “Marxism and Native Americans Revisited,” Sixth Native American Symposium (November 10, 2005), www.se.edu/​nat​ive-​ameri​can/​wp-​ cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​sites/​49/​2019/​09/​Proc​eedi​ngs-​2005-​Smith.pdf.

Notes  83 139 Scott Simon, “Indigenous Peoples, Marxism and Late Capitalism,” New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 5:1 (November 2011), 8. 140 Sagar Sanyal, “Marxism and post-​colonial theory,” Marxist Left Review 18 (Winter 2019), https://​marxis​tlef​trev​iew.org/​artic​les/​marx​ism-​and-​post-​colon​ial-​ the​ory/​.

Part II Diversity Across the Political Spectrum

The left is seemingly placed on a defensive footing when political leaders like Hillary Clinton and Justin Trudeau adopt the academic politics of diversity. To the extent that feminists and anti-​racists in positions of power serve global capitalism, socialists must insist on the centrality of class and the need to transform the underlying social relations. As the gains that have been achieved from the struggles of the past have been undermined by five decades of neoliberal class restoration, identity struggles have lost some of their novelty and are increasingly made to serve power. In this context, right-​wing politicians and the neoliberal media have reanimated culture wars as false solutions to the conflict between labour and capital. Even leftists have begun to adopt conservative and rightist positions in the name of fighting oppression. The supposed similarity between the universalist left and universalist right leads progressive neoliberals and post-​political activists to think of the socialist left and conservative right as strange bedfellows. From a Marxist perspective, it is rather the case that even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. Or, as Vivek Chibber has jokingly said, Donald Trump’s critique of critical race theory was one of his better moments.1 Although it may be that the excesses of woke correctness and cancel culture are now played out, it is nevertheless important to elaborate why this is and should be the case. This second part of this book addresses the misadventures of identity politics across the left-​to-​right spectrum. Although there are conservative, liberal, postmodernist, anarchist, social democratic and socialist positions in favour of identity politics, the following is concerned with criticisms of the various modalities of identity politics that have previously been described, and with the class, identity and universality debate more generally. The above critiques have examined how the socialist movement understands struggles against oppression and the ways in which ideologies of identity can distort the goal of fighting capitalist exploitation. The following section will further contextualize these issues by juxtaposing the socialist approach to exploitation and oppression with that of its political opponents.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003483922-3

86  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum 1  Conservatism and Fascism Socialists argue that the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in a progressive dismantling of feudal institutions and religious superstition. Despite their romantic tendencies, socialists do not deny the benefits of the industrial revolution and modernization through science and technology. Instead, socialists criticize and seek to radicalize bourgeois materialism to achieve a more just and egalitarian society. Fascism developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a reaction to bourgeois decadence, on the one hand, and against socialism’s progressive vision of social equality, on the other. Fascism appropriated the socialist critique of bourgeois materialism to cynically reject rather than improve upon its emancipatory goals. For socialists, the fascist enemy of the bourgeoisie is not a friend. Other than historical anomalies like the 1939 Molotov–​Ribbentrop non-​aggression Pact between Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, there is no such thing as a “red and brown” alliance against capitalism. Fascism opposes liberalism, materialism, intellectualism, Enlightenment and universalism. Pretending to champion the cause of the oppressed masses, fascism serves as a bulwark against capitalist economic crisis, using militarism and violence to “purify” a chauvinistically defined organic community. While conservatism cannot be conflated with fascism –​there are liberal conservatives, conservative liberals and conservative socialists –​right-​wing conservatives share with fascism the atavistic rejection of egalitarian social progress in the name of self-​interest. Conservatives are therefore doubtful about human progress, and this extends to the realm of identity struggles. Whereas Marxists typically take great care to distinguish between theory and pretence, the right is on the whole anti-​intellectual and predisposed to deception as a strategy to take power. There is thus a tendency among conservatives to conflate and reject everything that is to the left of self-​interestedness and libertarian free-​ market ideology. Universalism is thereby restricted to constitutionalism and constitutionalism is limited to the protection of private property and private interests from public accountability. Conservatives do not appeal to the rhetoric of meritocracy because they are humanistic and believe in social progress; they do so to abstract private individuals from the rest of society. The fascist right goes further than this, rejecting constitutionalism and meritocracy as restraints on the will to power. This abstraction of the individual or the nation distorts the principle of sovereignty and legitimizes domination. Although the far right is known to be voluntaristic and makes a virtue of irrationality and sacrificial violence, usually in the name of a specific nationality or herrenvolk ethnic group, fascism has its own distinct ideology from socialism and liberalism. The Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell argued that fascism is a form of radical conservatism which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century borrowed from Marxism aspects of its revolutionary ideology and theory of historical materialism.2 Many of the first fascists were in fact syndicalists and trade unionists who had patriotic and

Conservatism and Fascism  87 nationalist leanings. For those “national socialists” who were socialist in name only, the experience of the First World War caused them to reinterpret Marxist historical materialism. The working class, they concluded, was more willing to fight workers from other countries than they were willing to fight against the bourgeoisie of their respective nations. This determinism of the particular, rather than of the economy, separates culture and politics from the totality of social relations. Attacking institutions of liberal democracy, like individualism, equal rights, utilitarianism, parliamentary deliberation, and principles of majority rule, fascism appeals to plebian notions of popular will, construed and propagandized as national spirit. Although fascism is articulated against bourgeois ideology, it is in actuality the contradictory, illiberal underside of capitalism. It is for this reason that fascism and conservatism are primarily directed against socialism. To win the working masses to a politics that is not in their own interest or in the interest of international cooperation, right-​wing forces mobilize the masses through the nationalist conquest of scapegoats. The use of racism and xenophobia to build unity and overcome internal divisions means that the struggle between labour and capital is supplemented by so-​called “secondary” contradictions related to gender, race, sexuality, nationality and religion. While such triangular complexity is not unique to fascism, fascism intentionally manipulates secondary contradictions to mask the conflict between labour and capital in the interest of the ruling capitalist class. The ideologies of nationalism and nativism –​or identity politics on the right, which could include religious fundamentalism and racist or gender supremacy, often attributed to ahistorical notions of tradition and custom –​are not what is understood by identity politics and therefore have their own distinct terms. The term identity politics refers instead to the politics of minority constituencies who are denied equality within the predominant social order. Just as right-​wing populism is considered by many to be a contradiction in terms, since populism is supposed to be egalitarian, the notion of a nationalist or dominant identity politics is also an oxymoron. By and large, this form of right-​wing politics posits the incommensurability of cultural differences and the superiority of certain groups. In other cases, conservatives posit the irrelevance of cultural differences and reduce politics to the level of individuals who compete to maximize self-​interest. Both of these right-​wing forms of majoritarian cultural politics give minority politics an ideological function in liberal society since a claim to equal opportunity on the part of those who have suffered historical injustices is automatically perceived to be progressive. This demand is accepted so long as claims to equality do not disturb social hierarchy, in particular, through economic redistribution. The nature of contemporary culture wars, with New Right and alt-​right attacks against feminism, LGBTQ rights and immigrant rights, not surprisingly implicates conservative and libertarian attacks on political freedoms, democratic civil rights as well as labour rights. Because the ambition to dominate with impunity is a fundamental feature of fascism and

88  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum imperialist nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and criminality are weaponized to divide the working class and defeat any socialist challenge to the power of the ruling elite. Conservatives also make use of pro-​ minority and anti-​oppression rhetoric to defend reactionary politics within conditions of competition. Fascists and far-​right conservatives have been known to target intellectuals and artists, who most of the time hold progressive views. Contemporary conservative intellectuals rarely self-​identify as reactionary or as fascist –​though that is changing as twenty-​first-​century neoliberalism becomes increasingly authoritarian. The conservative attack on identity politics should not be confused or conflated with leftist critiques of identity politics. In addition, leftists should not shy away from the elucidation of contradictions for fear of contributing to conservative ideology. As this section will demonstrate, conservatives do not seek to explain the problems of identity and class but are rather concerned to attack progressive politics in the interest of defending property rights and capitalist power. Because so much of the contemporary academic and activist left is engrossed in identity issues and cultural politics –​ often of a convoluted and self-​defeating kind –​the far right has an easier time mocking the inanities of the “loony” left than it would if the left was focused on making political and socio-​economic gains. One of the scarecrow concepts developed by the contemporary far right is the notion of “cultural Marxism.” The critique of cultural Marxism emerged among alt-​right conservatives in the 2000s to dismiss Marxism along with new social movements, identity politics and anything that derives from postmodern theory. Critics of cultural Marxism begin with the critique of postmodernism and trace its origins backwards to critical theory, then Marxism before this and then Hegelian idealism. Without question the significant differences between Frankfurt School critical theory and postmodern “French” theory are obscured when conservatives cloak regressive politics through the defence of objectivity, truth, facts and reason, ostensibly to protect these from ideology critique or anti-​foundational deconstruction. This is the case, for example, with an article published in 2018 by Georgi Boorman in The Federalist.3 Whereas most Marxists criticize the way that the post-​1960s New Left dismantled revolutionary radicalism and accommodated “end of meta-​narrative” theories according to which “there is no outside” to capitalism, the rise of progressive “left” neoliberalism has allowed the authoritarian right to counter-​attack by misinterpreting the ideological decline of the radical left and suggesting that trends like privilege theory or critical race theory are stalking horses for socialism. Not that anything stands in the way of feigned outrage and intellectual distortion, but Boorman makes some arguments that she, or anyone else, can legitimately demonstrate. She rightly states that privilege theory has shifted from academia to popular culture and the workplace, and moreover, that its demands for redress run counter to conventional conceptions of individual merit and hard work. This, what she deceptively calls “neo-​Marxism,”

Conservatism and Fascism  89 replaces the standard opposition of proletariat and bourgeoisie with the more flexible and adaptable categories of oppressor and oppressed. Movements like Black Lives Matter and MeToo are said to owe something to Marx for targeting the “eternal truths” of our age, deconstructing social constructs that have been naturalized and ideologized to serve the needs of those in power. Such an argument is not entirely wrong, but the Marxism aspect of postmodern social constructionism vanishes as soon as it is suggested that radical struggles seek to devalue individuality, work, human achievement, social progress and other virtues. It is true that for Marxists individual inputs are displaced by the theory of socially necessary labour time, or socialized labour, but that in no way implies a rejection of individual contribution. As for the mutual imbrication of class exploitation and the various forms of oppression, the goal of economic redistribution is not, for Marxists, established through affirmative action and diversity policies that are oriented towards “horizontal equality,” wherein social justice is defined as racial and gender equity within highly unequal class strata. Boorman is right to argue that privilege theory leads to zero-​sum demands for preferential treatment. What she does not mention is the fact that privilege theory demands this without seeking to change the existing polity, which, on this count, serves the ruling class by dividing workers and making them compete for scarce resources. Boorman’s article is therefore consistent with the general scheme of conservative critique and its purpose is to prevent readers of The Federalist from understanding the difference between socialism and postmodernism, and between a leftist and a rightist conception of universalism. The cherry on top of her bitter confection is the threat of “big government,” which she warns can only lead to communism, which she defines as inherently genocidal. A characteristic case of the conservative critique of identity politics is Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds.4 Credited by a liberal Guardian reviewer for its “conservative tone of genteel civility,” the book is nevertheless denounced for pretending to not understand why intellectuals, academics and minority groups are oppositional.5 Whatever the ideological muddle among the masses, Murray is only slightly less conspiratorial than Boorman, arguing that cultural Marxism filled a void that was created by neoliberalism. Not unlike a Marxist, Murray emphasizes social contradictions rather than blaming social conflicts on bad apples or evil spirits. However, Murray does not use his thinking skills to address and resolve contemporary tensions; he rather laments social conflicts while at the same time asserting very problematic assumptions. The overall result of his work is therefore the exacerbation of problems. The co-​editor of the right-​wing magazine The Spectator, Murray is known for his Islamophobia, support of Israeli genocide against Palestinians, and advocacy of the U.K. version of “Great Replacement” theory, which warns that non-​white immigration threatens to displace the white majority.6 A neoconservative, he has the dubious honour of being Viktor Orbán’s favourite writer.7

90  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum The Madness of Crowds is divided into four chapters, neatly categorized by identity category –​Gay, Women, Race and Trans –​all of which are informed by three interludes, one on the supposedly Marxist foundations of identity politics, another on the impact of social media, and a final interlude on the ethics of forgiveness. Since each identity group raises a distinct set of questions, the chapter on gay issues will suffice here to describe Murray’s approach. Why, he wonders, are people today acting in herd-​like and irrational ways? The causes that he identifies, which he says are deeper than symptoms like Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, are not the contradictions of global capitalism but the confusion caused by the collapse of grand narratives like religion and political ideology. Culture wars against anyone who seems to be on the wrong side of an issue are the false solution that too many have chosen. Niche demands have created a “new metaphysics” around questions of identity politics, intersectionality and social justice.8 Social justice, he argues, is the most comprehensive ideology to have emerged since the Cold War. Murray would be closer to the truth if he understood today’s social justice activism as a feature of Cold War liberalism rather than something that is distinct from it. One reason why he misses this, perhaps, is because most of the social justice advocates that he targets do so as well. In other words, the insight provided by conservative criticism only goes as far as the self-​ understanding of identity politics activists. The mark of a conservative is that they never do more work than required to maintain social advantage. Their purpose is not to build and share knowledge but to wield it and profit from it. Murray makes some credible critiques of the worst aspects of intersectionality. This would include the assumption that identity and experience provide a heightened moral knowledge or the fact that intersectionality invites people to commit their lives to working out impossible demands. Activism around LGBTQ issues, he argues, enforces assumptions that lead not only to fear and loathing but to dire social consequences. The American Psychiatric Association, for example, now provides training on how to prevent “traditional (toxic) masculinity” in men and boys. Rather than encouraging people to get along, he says, justice advocates place “tripwires” across the culture, waiting for the moment when someone can be accused of misogyny, transphobia or whatever may be the latest obsession. Anything having to do with homosexuality, he adds, is easily used to destroy someone’s life. This, he says, is why GLB became LGB, then LGBT, LGBTQ and now 2SLGBTQIA+​, becoming more rather than less conservative over time. Murray is less adept at explaining this phenomenon than he is at denouncing its excesses. Inequality is accepted by diversitarians as one way to level the playing field, he argues, avoiding the fact that reality is more complex and unstable than people care to admit. Rather than allow crowd madness to create more atomization and violence, and against strategies that respond to discrimination with discrimination, Murray advocates listening to people and trusting them. Defining social justice activism as Marxist, he would likely recommend to workers that they should listen to their capitalist bosses and trust them more. But the

Conservatism and Fascism  91 problem is that identity-​based social justice is not the same thing as Marxism and there is little to gain by trusting sexist and racist homophobes. In the chapter on gay issues, Murray disparages those who assail voluntary conversion therapy or bisexuality because these practices betray the cause of gay liberation. Seeking to make up for histories of inequity, institutions force discussions of gay issues on the mainstream public, he claims, in ways that are condescending and retributive. Baiting audiences rather than dealing intelligently with issues that are now overdetermined –​like the propensity to celebrate coming out but to condemn people who were gay at one time but who later decided to live a straight life –​avoids questions concerning the fluidity or fixity of sexual identity. The insistence that people are “born this way” works for some groups but not others. The anti-​normative strain of sex and gender politics thus pushes LGBT further into the realm of religion, he thinks. Contrary to community-​based activists, Murray argues that the LGBT “community” barely exists within each letter group, let alone between them. Whereas left critics of communitarian politics replace the latter with socialism, workplace democracy and political organization that can scale beyond the local and parochial, his point is that sexuality cannot be the foundation of a liberal society.9 This mishmash of LGBT stereotypes is distracting enough but the way that Murray ignores queer theory while at the same time judging queer politics comes across as manipulation rather than disinterested or committed reasoning. On these issues and many others Murray serves up controversies that point to problems but do little to delineate a position or advance social theory. His rejection of the idea of the gay man as a “magical elf who reminds us of our prejudices” has less to do with a desire for social harmony than with an anti-​woke counterpart to woke blackmail.10 Murray’s high-​mindedness plummets when he tries to account for why it is that gay men are ostensibly threatening to straight men. His explanation: because the gay man understands the straight woman’s “secret” of penetrability. Of course, the opposite could be claimed: because men can experience both, penetration and penetrability, they cannot understand women. Either formula ignores psychoanalysis and much more. However, Murray is less concerned to explain sexuality than he is interested in perpetuating the stereotype that gay men are allied with women and against straight men. Such a coalition is not for the sake of equality and rather reflects the pessimistic character of conservative politics. His discussion of the “Grievance Studies Affair,” in which Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay published hoax articles that define the penis as a gender-​performative social construct and that combined feminist social justice theory with passages from Mein Kampf, proves less that academia has become a playground for frauds whose publicly funded theories have debauched reason than the fact that the corporatized university increasingly reflects the confused and conflicting values of the broader society. Neoliberalism has assailed the university and the museum in much the same way it has attacked the welfare state. As Stanley Aronowitz stated about Alan Sokal: he played a hoax on

92  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum himself insofar as he believes that reason, logic and truth are transparent and unproblematic.11 Likewise, the Grievance Studies Affair had less to do with the neoconservative attack on public institutions and academic freedom than it is a new version of the conservative defence of these same institutions and principles. Were Boghossian and Lindsay nevertheless duped by their own stunt? Debates around the Grievance Studies Affair are partly defined by what big Other (anonymous system of social rules) one presumes is observing and judging us. The fact that there is no big Other only makes this worry more unbearable and disorienting. Today’s post-​politics, in which the postmodern left has abandoned socialism, makes the fantasy of a Marxist plot all the more compelling to conservatives like Murray, who detect communism in the most unlikely places, only to fuel paranoia and conspiracy. In his interlude on the “Marxist foundations” of today’s minority madness, Murray identifies a leftist worldview and a neoliberal plan of action as points in common. Claiming that none of the scholars who advocate identity politics and intersectionality have come from the conservative right, he establishes the “ideological bent” of academia with statistics which show that some 18 percent of American scholars identify as Marxist, 21 percent as activist and 24 percent as radical.12 He identifies Foucault, Gramsci, Deleuze, Derrida, as well as Laclau and Mouffe, as the main sources for the theories that have informed queer theory, women’s studies and black studies, and that propelled the ideas of Peggy McIntosh and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Among these, however, only Gramsci was Marxist and the uses of his work by radical democrats are essentially non-​Marxist.13 In contrast to socialist critiques of new social movement horizontalism, Murray agrees with revisionists that the New Left politics of women, students, youth, minorities and immigrants has allowed Marxism to survive alongside anti-​oppression struggles. Like a “disaster capitalist” of the intellect, Murray never lets a good culture war scenario go to waste. The fact that many have allowed intersectionality to redefine left politics is not only a product of apathy on the part of workers but, Murray argues, a characteristic of Marxist thought: Marxists have always rushed towards contradiction. The Hegelian dialectic only advances by means of contradiction and therefore all the complexities –​one might say absurdities –​met along the way are welcomed and almost embraced as though they were helpful, rather than troubling, to the cause.14 Identity politics and intersectionality are deemed by conservatives like Murray to be the progeny of the International. The consequence, he thinks, is that much of academia has ceased to be concerned with scientific research and is more oriented towards propaganda. Flimsy ideas are camouflaged with jargon that no one understands. And all of this metaphysics is served

Conservatism and Fascism  93 up online, where bullying constitutes activism and censorship replaces argumentation. Even corporations have awokened. Google’s Machine Learning Fairness, Murray informs us, biases image search results so that majority subjects are exposed to minority content they did not request. An image search for “white working class” that I performed in 2021 and that Murray does not suggest yielded images of Trump and Trump supporters, which indicates that image searches, with their algorithmic links to corporate media, are inherently “biased” in countless unexpected ways. What is a conservative to do about all of this (corporatized) mob justice? Rather than show compassion for only those in our tribe or prostrate ourselves to the new Internet gods, Murray takes advice from Hannah Arendt, who argues that since our actions are both unpredictable and irreversible –​ lest we begin to treat ourselves as machines –​the only recourse we have to improve our lot is forgiveness. Otherwise, Murray warns, the intersectionality crusade is going to continue to cause immeasurable pain.15 Ruining people’s lives for insincere and contrived reasons is bad enough, but intersectionalists do not require reasons. This new religion, according to Murray, is influential because it convinces people that they are on the side of justice. Indifferent to the destruction of liberal freedoms, our era promotes doubt, derangement, relativism, conformity, unfairness, victimhood, hostility, fear, paranoia and mistrust. Appealing to decency and generosity of spirit against all of this woke mayhem, Murray admonishes his readers to reject social justice activism and depoliticize everyday life. His promotion of conservative politics is consistent with the way that the right has always defined popular insurgencies as a politics of resentment and demands for what does not belong to them. Making worst-​case scenarios the basis for politics lowers standards so that fewer among the majority benefit. Against people who complain about “the system,” Murray suggests that anti-​leftists should ask the complainer: The system –​or other issue –​is terrible when compared to what? His assumption is that the elimination of a prelapsarian Eden can be used to lower the level of invective. This is easy enough to think when you are prepared to accept that there can be no better system than the one we have. But is this not also a standard post-​structuralist ploy? The problem with this reasoning is that it is used to deflect corrective measures. Marxists do not think that the slave societies and feudal era before capitalism are preferable to industrial capitalism’s productivity and bourgeois liberalism’s interest in human potential. However, it is the revolutionization of social forces in the interest of humanity rather than Wall Street investors that defines socialism. If post-​ structuralism suggests that the past was no better or more unified than the present, it is less because it offers a vision of progressive change than that it simply troubles the foundations of any claim. Douglas Murray is hardly the only conservative social critic whose arguments have something in common with the neoliberals he denounces. For example, writing for the online magazine Reason, which promotes “free

94  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum minds and free markets,” Shikha Dalmia warns that the tribal politics of both the left and the right threaten liberal democracy.16 Advocating pluralism rather than leftist political correctness, she adds to this the worry that ethno-​nationalism of the MAGA variety is far more dangerous. What binds the American nation, she argues, is civic nationalism and the ideology of capitalism. This democratic pluralism that is open to diversity is distorted by the leftist obsession with oppression, which she says is incoherent and self-​undermining. The left will either come around to liberal capitalism or it will perish. Although Dalmia makes the correct observation that no one has a one-​dimensional identity and that nothing about the experience of oppression obliges people to turn to group politics, she makes this argument in the interest of the majoritarian politics of the neoliberal centre that rejects anti-​discrimination laws along with ethno-​nationalism. She writes: “When minority identity politics overreaches, it lamentably forces Christians to bake cakes for gays. When a majority united by ethno-​nationalistic passions does so, mass violence, often with the overt or covert complicity of the state, isn’t off-​limits.”17 Just as Murray criticizes progressive neoliberalism in the interest of conservatism, Dalmia criticizes Trump’s white identity politics in the interest of neoliberalism. The point here is that the socialist perspective is always eclipsed in the bipartisan pseudo-​struggle between neoliberals and conservatives. Writing for the conservative National Review, Ralph Peters takes the next illogical step and associates right-​wing identity politics with the interests of the working class.18 Having taken politics to the level of absolute demagoguery, Trump is credited for giving the masses that are left behind by neoliberals the recognition they are otherwise denied. Offering them revenge against the government they despise, they repay him by indulging his charlatanism. The cultish metaphysics that Murray perceives on the woke left Peters recognizes among right-​wing citizens who are offered populist catharsis as an alternative to elitist condescension. Another thinker who engages in culture war debates for the sake of advancing conservative politics is John McWhorter.19 A Columbia University linguist with a considerable list of book publications and magazine articles, McWhorter is a long-​time advocate of (black) capitalism and critic of (black) radicalism. Although he identifies as a liberal democrat, McWhorter’s affiliation with the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI) as a fellow from 2003 to 2008 allows us to appreciate the conservative political orientation of his diagnosis of woke anti-​racism. Formerly known as the International Center for Economic Policy Studies (ICEPS), the MI is a corporate-​funded think tank that promotes anti-​communist propaganda through books, articles and publications like City Journal. Neoconservative MI ideologues argue that Keynesian welfare programmes cause rather than alleviate poverty. Against this they offer non-​scientific, social Darwinist “alternatives” to social spending. In addition to conventional conservative principles like individual freedom, private initiative, personal responsibility, privatization, supply-​side economics, free markets and limited government, the MI

Conservatism and Fascism  95 advocates monetarist economic policies, low corporate taxes, low wages, urban gentrification, the charterization of schools, standardized testing, pharmaceuticals, tough on crime policing, fossil fuel extractivism, climate change denial, economic inequality for the sake of prosperity, the security state and “intelligence fusion” for the promotion of corporate capitalism through business schools. Affiliates of the MI have included Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William F. Buckley, Rudolph Giuliani, Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush and Charles Murray. As a popular commentator and public intellectual, McWhorter has repeatedly demonstrated his liberal-​ to-​ conservative values, while occasionally acknowledging the views of his left-​wing colleagues. As someone who speaks as a black American and about black issues concerning housing, education, poverty and crime, it is easy to mistake McWhorter’s politics as socially responsible, along the oxymoronic lines of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” By targeting mainstream black anti-​racists like Ta-​Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and Nikole Hannah-​Jones, McWhorter would seem to share some common ground with left-​wing critics. But that is hardly the case and that is why it is necessary to elucidate the difference between a leftist and a conservative critique of woke anti-​racism. Like much of his writing, McWhorter’s 2021 book, Woke Racism, offers more than enough to demonstrate that his conservative politics have little in common with the class politics of leftist universalism.20 Woke Racism is premised on the claim that the contemporary American racial justice movement has the characteristics of a religion. The book begins with five assertions, to which one can easily add a left counterpoint: 1) McWhorter’s argument that the ideology of woke anti-​racism is best understood as a destructive, incoherent and seductive religion mitigates critical explanation; 2) his argument that black people are attracted to a religion that treats them like simpletons ignores the class function of anti-​racism (and racism) within a multiracial society; 3) his suggestion that the woke religion harms black people avoids mentioning those social groups that it benefits –​namely, the black middle class and the multiracial professional-​managerial class, and ultimately, the capitalist upper class; 4) his argument that a woke-​free Democratic Party-​ friendly agenda can advance the cause of black Americans ignores the link between capitalist exploitation and the Democratic Party; 5) his suggestion of ways to lessen the grip of woke religion on public culture avoids the problem that a flawed analysis cannot lead to effective solutions. Woke Racism reassures McWhorter’s readers that he is not against religion, even in its BLM incarnation. It also reassures liberals and leftists that McWhorter is not a supporter of the conservative right. He rather seeks to convince people that virtue signalling about racism will not help black people. He thus marshals Martin Luther King’s idea that character is more important than skin colour and he opposes the kind of victim politics that construes injury as a reward. While a critique of the culture of complaint is perhaps helpful to personal integrity, it is also an alibi for those who seek to

96  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum restrict advantages to those who already benefit from them. As with Murray’s discussion of trust and forgiveness, McWhorter recommends that we learn to “live graciously” among anti-​racist power brokers. Dedicated to building an anti-​woke in-​group to buttress society against the woke mob, the first chapter of Woke Racism establishes who these “woke” people are who for example cancel nurses who say innocuous things like everyone’s life matters. What kind of people are they? Why do they get away with their righteous attacks and should others allow them to continue? These questions are in some ways their own answer, but the devil is in the details insofar as the mounting of any challenge must appreciate the distinct aspects of today’s postmodern variants of anti-​racism. Although nothing about political purges or encounter groups is new, McWhorter is correct to say that some of what we are witnessing did not exist only five years before his book was published. One of the shifts, as Angela Nagle has argued, is that countercultural transgression is now also common on the right, while the liberal left has become more censorious than it was in previous decades. To take one example described by McWhorter, the data analyst David Shor was fired in 2020 for tweeting a study by a black Ivy League scholar which demonstrates how violent 60s protests were more likely than nonviolent protests to deliver voters to the Republicans. The fact that Shor was not endorsing this study did not prevent his critics from arguing that it was inappropriate for a white man to make this information available. What defines the new phase of anti-​racism is the shift away from Civil Rights struggles towards the kind of “third wave anti-​racism” (TWA) that considers whites to be inherently complicit with structural racism. The obverse to this is the assumption that the facts of embodiment make blacks inherently radical. McWhorter rightfully decries the zealous sort of micropolitics that brands even leftists as backward. Wokesters do more damage than they advance the cause of anti-​racism when they define mathematics and punctuality as “white” or reduce Shakespeare and Lincoln to racism. That this heightening of performative politics, of giving and taking offence, has led to denunciatory rituals is an indication of the illiberal shadow of conventional liberalism. McWhorter is correct to say that the woke serve a purpose that is different from the one they proclaim. However, his critique does not address the contradictions of capitalism. His anthropological realism is instead populated by bigots, power-​mongers and social justice slayers. McWhorter contends that only religion explains why it is that today’s anti-​racist public policies are not enough for the woke. He adopts Joseph Bottum’s concept of “the Elect” to define those self-​interested missionaries who consider themselves the “chosen” ones who can lead their people to the promised land. A moral critique is thereby devised to strategically detract from the class critique. Liberals in fact share this kind of moral critique with conservatives as much as they do the concern with tax cuts. McWhorter ignores the reality that making waves is today not only a matter of social justice but also a career strategy in the creative and knowledge industries. To take only one

Conservatism and Fascism  97 example, the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag campaign of 2015 did not do much to improve working conditions in Hollywood, as attested by the 2023 SAG-​ AFTRA strike, but it did lead to diversity quotas being implemented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which ostensibly improves the lives of people who see more minority representation at the cinema. McWhorter predicts that the woke will have to temper their Elect nonsense if they are not to lose more people to the Republican right. In the meanwhile, the best defence against the Elect is knowing how to identify them and understanding that they operate like a religious sect. The woke do not know they are religious, yet they unquestioningly accept doctrine and demand the submission of their followers. Their clergy includes gifted orators who denounce the sin of white privilege, going the extra mile to denounce the presence of this within themselves. Their evangelism teaches that the discussion of racism is in and of itself a matter of revelation. Donations to the church of woke by corporate America are accepted as signs of the infallibility of the Elect view of the world. As the list of heretics increases along with the number of words that constitute blasphemy, the power of the Elect increases. In practical terms, this means that unless one is actively committed to issues of race, gender and sexuality, one can be suspected of heresy. While the Elect can be found anywhere, their presence among university faculty adds intellectual cachet to their prosecutorial might. However, because it undermines solidarity, TWA accompanies and facilitates the managerial deskilling, commodification and marketization of education. If religion has no place in the classroom, which is not a claim that can be fully sustained, what about the presence of race metaphysics in social justice activism? McWhorter claims that the woke do not play according to the rules of Enlightenment reason. However, if the classroom is to remain a place of critical inquiry, it does not serve anyone to limit what can and cannot be studied. As Slavoj Žižek often says, it takes religion to make good people do bad things. McWhorter says the same about woke anti-​racism. For this reason, he insists that trends like critical race theory can not only be taught, but that they can also be criticized. The question for us is whether the extended metaphor of religion is fair in that regard. If one was to accept the premise, it could lead to further problems, like for example Vivek Ramaswamy’s practical advice for legal defence against the woke church on the grounds of freedom of religious belief.21 The definition of woke anti-​ racism as a religion allows McWhorter to generously add that its advocates are not simply insane. His rejection of TWA allows him to make a second, arguably more ideologically significant move, which is to relate the “performative ideology” of the woke Elect to literary deconstruction and then extend this critique of postmodernism to the entire academic left.22 If woke activists can claim that seeing a white man hold a black baby hurts them, or claim that cisheteropatriarchy justifies looting, then the shift from a socially reformist to a culturally conformist left transforms the politics of equality into a guerrilla war against reason and accountability. Wokeism is not a

98  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum politics of speaking truth to power but a will to empowerment through the relativization of truth claims through concepts like standpoint epistemology. Postmodernism’s suspicion of meta-​narratives has become a meta-​narrative of suspicion. Like Murray, McWhorter argues that Electism is today more powerful than the possibility that Marxist ideology can still offer a comprehensive worldview. The woke are thus identified and identify themselves as the left in contemporary American politics. So long as there is no mass socialist movement that contradicts this claim, the woke can present themselves as the redeemers of humanity, filling the left-​wing gap that was created with the political shift to neoliberalism. Deconstructing privilege, the woke have come to view their struggle as the activist dismantling of hegemonic structures. However, the woke do not accomplish anything much since they have given themselves the easy task of denouncing everything as racist, sexist and homophobic. McWhorter argues that buzzwords like structural and institutional racism anthropomorphize the term racism and require that people suspend their belief that not everything is driven by prejudice. This suggestion does nothing to alter the reality that these concepts are products of the same Cold War liberalism that McWhorter ascribes to but does not address.23 And why should he when so many of the more critical voices among academic and activist leftists do not do so themselves? Woke anti-​racism is now an ideological support of neoliberal institutions that have undergone a thorough legitimation crisis. Since McWhorter defends this system, his sleight of hand on the issue of anti-​racism replaces class politics with disingenuous concern about the fate of black people. While nothing about his own politics has much in common with the labour politics and anti-​imperialism of the Civil Rights generation, the fact that BLM also has little to do with them allows him to pose as a defender of black interests. The transformation of black radicalism in the form of TWA difference politics now finds “allies” among whites who gladly engage in sycophantic rituals of humility and demand that others do the same. Although not all black people want or expect this from whites, the focus on the condition of being psychologically broken, according to McWhorter, is advanced as proof that one has not sold out to the white power structure. The loyal opposition to woke anti-​racism is therefore not the Marxist left or white liberals but right-​wing whites. The Elect ultimately associate all heretics with this group, regardless of the actual reasons for them having fallen out of favour. The only group remaining that can advance the cause of blacks, McWhorter claims, is black conservatives. Along postmodern lines, today’s blackness is more a deconstructed category than it is a matter of black essentialist authenticity since blackness is not defined by the woke in terms of what it is, but rather in terms of what it is not, namely: not white and not racist.24 “Elect ideology,” McWhorter writes, “requires non-​white people to found their sense of self on not being white, and on not liking how white people may or may not feel about them.”25 Like the hysteric in Freudian analysis, anti-​racists do not call

Conservatism and Fascism  99 on people to stress their universality but instead to vindicate their condition of secondariness. Although someone can genuinely be said to be victimized, victim politics counter-​ defines McWhorter’s definition of individualism. One is an individual because one is not a victim or because one refuses the status of victim on the partial basis of ascriptive racial category. However, one can be both an individual and a victim. The experience of victimization need not lead to the fragmentation of the self but a social world in which this would be a desirable outcome –​where your race, gender, sexuality or nationality defines who you are –​is one in which Marxism has lost all purchase on reality and praxis. That this can be reverse engineered by the kind of zealotry that McWhorter otherwise accurately describes merely underscores the reactionary frames of reference in which these social phenomena and discussions take place. This explains why woke anti-​racists make being oppressed the essence of black identity –​because victim status is a seemingly winning hand in a game that blacks cannot lose given the postulate that majority subjects cannot make similar claims. If majority subjects do so, they by default identify with reactionary racist whites and lose the game of oppression twice over. McWhorter is correct to say that there is nothing progressive about a performative game of victim politics that is gloomy, illogical and pointless.26 However, a different game cannot be played when people insist on these unwritten rules. Changing the game means changing the rules of the game. On this point, McWhorter is no help at all. While he does not wish to insist on “the race thing” in the same way that people like Kendi do, he is self-​ admittedly short on solutions to black disparities.27 Rather than the long list of policy demands that defined the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, for example, which would disproportionately improve the lives of black Americans along with the majority, McWhorter is satisfied to identify three policy proposals: 1) end the War on Drugs, 2) teach phonics to improve literacy, and 3) value working-​class jobs and get past the idea that everyone needs to go to college. McWhorter offers only these few planks because platforming too many good ideas, he argues, is more performative than actionably pragmatic in a polarized parliamentary system. Although Great Society efforts are facts of history and some Democratic Party liberals advocate a return to reformism, McWhorter dismisses this as unsophisticated utopianism. Better to keep your sights on the realistic future rather than bygone times, he advises, adding that those gains achieved by the labour struggles he cannot bring himself to mention have not, in his estimation, had any lasting effect. Only a limited number of policy proposals that have a chance of making it through Congress and come with built-​in gains should be pursued. One can see from this why it is that working-​class jobs need to be valorized. If nothing can realistically advance the interests of the working class in corporate America at the level of employment, wages, paid time off, holidays, pensions, affordable housing, free college tuition, universal health care, criminal justice reform, ecology, day care and elder care, and other progressive

100  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum policy issues, then conservatives do well to minimize demands for equality since any one major gain for the working class, like those hard-​won labour and civil rights that were not simply utopian, threatens to lead from one victory to another. Woke Racism offers no real solutions to our problems. It is not even a good analysis of them. It just says no to woke anti-​racism and yes to neoliberal and conservative policy agendas. McWhorter is right to say that opposition to racism is not by itself a politics. What would do the most to alleviate the problems that are exacerbated by racism or that lead to racism is not something that he addresses head on. Rather than the broad set of phenomena that cannot be limited to minorities or to racism, he prefers to think of woke anti-​racism as an exaggerated form of virtue signalling. If the performance of black authenticity is inoperative as the substance of left politics, it is not, as McWhorter suggests, because it lacks logic, but because it does not, by itself, provide a radical perspective on social relations. While there are different approaches to the identity and class debate, Žižek’s Heaven in Disorder offers a useful summary of the fundamental dilemma.28 In the entry “Class Struggle Against Classism,” Žižek mentions the political divide between progressive neoliberals like Biden –​ who give lip service to identity and demographics but are otherwise the same as the Republicans –​and progressive populists, who mobilize constituencies on the basis of progressive policy as well as cultural competence, meaning the kind of postmodern equity that replaces universalist equality with attention to disparities based on ascriptive differences. An ostensibly “inside-​outside” populist like Alexandria Ocasio-​Cortez can criticize the Biden administration while simultaneously rejecting the “class essentialism” of socialists. This critique of class reductionism, Žižek argues, is the old liberal-​left trick of accusing the left of serving the right. It is reflected in Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara’s downplaying of the January 6 coup attempt and warning to the left that too much criticism of the Democratic Party only serves the far right.29 The accusation of class essentialism, Žižek says, misses the mark. Without dismissing ecological, feminist, anti-​racist, decolonial and national struggles, class should be understood as the dynamic that overdetermines these interacting and multiple struggles. Class is not simply one in a series of antagonisms. When class is reduced to one among other identities, Žižek argues, it becomes another version of identity politics. The resulting “classism” advocates (self-​)respect for workers, which Žižek says is a characteristic of both populism and fascism. He writes: We should reject this solution for a precise reason: there is a formal difference between class antagonism and other antagonisms. In the case of antagonisms in relations between sexes and sexual identities, the struggle for emancipation does not aim at annihilating some of the identities but at creating the conditions for their non-​antagonistic co-​existence, and the same goes for the tensions between ethnic, cultural, or religious identities –​their goal is to bring about their peaceful co-​existence, their mutual

Conservatism and Fascism  101 respect and recognition. Class struggle does not function in this way: It aims at mutual recognition and respect of classes only in its Fascist or corporatist versions. Class struggle is a “pure” antagonism: the goal of the oppressed and exploited is to abolish classes as such, not to enact their reconciliation.30 The problem with John McWhorter’s Woke Racism is that it tacitly accepts racial oppression because it defends class exploitation. Since capitalism makes use of both anti-​racism and racism to divide the working class and defend the interests of the ruling plutocracy, internationalist class solidarity is the excluded dimension of his study. Class overdetermines the relation between race and class in McWhorter’s analysis. Because he avoids any discussion of capitalist class exploitation, his description of race politics has no explanatory value. Not only is his theory regressive with respect to the possibility of improving people’s lives, but it must rely on anthropological guilt structures, couched in the terms of religion, to make wokeism seem fleeting but capitalism eternal and unchanging. In the end, McWhorter becomes the unwitting ally of woke anti-​racists since both rely on a static view of the social order. The racialist emphasis on the original sin and eternal damnation of racism is echoed by the economic libertarian’s conservative ratification of capitalist social relations as the norm and telos of social progress. Further right than the conservative discourse of figures like Murray and McWhorter, reactionary officials and politicians now openly proclaim fascist ideas. In addition to political attacks on democracy and the left, fascists seek to reverse the historical gains of anti-​oppression movements, with offensives against abortion and contraception, gay rights and sexual education, immigrant rights, anti-​racist initiatives, public services, anti-​militarism and the defence of oppressed peoples like the Palestinians, Romani and Kurds. According to Walden Bello, far-​right movements are not based in the working class but in elite interests and middle-​class movements.31 It is through establishment channels that fascism has historically gained political hegemony. Far from being in contact with ordinary people, right-​wing authoritarianism rejects insurgent mass movements. This has been the case in Italy in the 1920s, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, Thailand in 2001, India in 2014, the Philippines in 2016 and the United States in 2021. Repudiating constitutional rights and Enlightenment values, Joseph Goebbels declared in 1933 that the goal of fascism was to erase the French Revolution from history. How ironic is it that contemporary anti-​racists seek to do the same? Spurning secularism, minority rights and liberal democracy, counter-​ revolutionary movements use racism and xenophobia to advance elite interests. When capitalism is in crisis, the middle class prefers to make alliances with the right rather than the left. The popularity of anti-​globalization movements and the renewal of left energies in the early 2000s have been rolled back since then through neoliberal collusion with the far right. However, this “dialectic of revolution and counter-​revolution” is inadequate to describe the features

102  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum that are specific to what Enzo Traverso defines as today’s post-​fascism.32 Neo-​fascism is now a global phenomenon that has spread to France, Sweden, Spain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Italy, Austria, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Whereas elites have allowed the conditions for the far right to return, post-​fascism is different from previous forms of fascism insofar as it combines conservatism with republican rhetoric within a global “rules-​based” order. Post-​fascism mixes parliamentarism, individual rights and populism with authoritarianism and nationalism. As a product of neoliberal policies, Traverso argues, problems of global financial capitalism are made into crises of individual countries whose public agencies are transformed into for-​profit enterprises. The attack on immigrants and the promotion of ethno-​national identity politics through authoritarian security regimes have allowed the most brutal tendencies of capitalism to return.33 This defence of conservative, authoritarian and reactionary values on the part of neoliberal bureaucracies reflects the cultural pessimism of an ideology that is bereft of progressive collective imagination. Without a grounding in militant and universalist left movements, identity politics likewise careens towards perdition. 2  Liberalism and Neoliberalism Unlike fascists who are dissatisfied with the status quo because it limits their deranged desires and conservatives who are concerned primarily with themselves, liberals are generally satisfied with the status quo even if they are distrustful of institutions. In theory, liberals support social reforms that are oriented towards progressive change. As part of this overall framework, liberal ideology advocates personal improvement through education and volunteer association. Optimism about incremental change is based in Enlightenment values of reason and the public interest. Classical liberalism locates the source of these values in the natural law that asserts the fundamental moral intelligence of all human beings. This ontological premise of social equality was transformed through legal theories of political right, which emphasize equality before the law and state intervention as means to assure social harmony. In cultural terms, the development of bourgeois individualism and nationalism in the Romantic era cultivated a predisposition towards self-​transformation, advancing social change through subjectivism, aestheticism, secularism, anti-​heroism and the critique of materialism. At the same time, market relations entered the realms of scholarship and culture in unprecedented ways, making the rapid transformation of mores a matter of business. The dynamic between the cult of Romantic authenticity and Enlightenment reason gives the liberal tradition an organic link to the illiberal tendencies of conservative ideology. The two combined most dramatically in late nineteenth-​century philosophical pessimism and political decadence. The impact of the work of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, as well as two world wars in the cradle of Western Enlightenment, further

Liberalism and Neoliberalism  103 shook the foundations of liberal ideology. The subsequent Cold War was a period of protracted denial about the contradictions of bourgeois ideology and the crisis of capitalist democracy. American democracy extended these contradictions by further associating the maximization of human freedom with technological rationality. In the neoliberal era, political elites abandoned political liberalism in favour of a purely economic definition of liberalism. The pre-​eminence of the United States as the world’s military superpower combined the new communication technologies with the tradition of reform liberalism and free-​market ideology. Nancy Fraser refers to this hegemonic combination as “progressive neoliberalism,” a powerful alliance, she writes, that is based on the odd coupling of an expropriative globalization agenda with a liberal politics of recognition: on the one hand, mainstream liberal currents of the new social movements (feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ rights); on the other hand, the most dynamic high-​end “symbolic” and financial sectors of the U.S. economy (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood).34 There is no reason to not add the military-​industrial complex to this list. Political scientists who think that debates over CRT are insignificant when compared to economic decisions, for example, ignore how social and cultural policies are strategic components of neoliberal ideology. In fact, diversity has become official neoliberal ideology, as represented by the following statement made by Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign: “You are wrong to look at these crowds and think that means everyone wants fifteen dollars an hour. Don’t assume that the answer to big crowds is moving policy to the left … It’s all about identity on our side now.”35 Note that Palmieri defined her statement as an identity politics of the left. Framing this discussion as opposition to the Trump Republicans, the same Clinton campaign experts manufactured the stereotype of the Bernie Bro to signal to voters that the universal policies of the Sanders left were not progressive, since, as Clinton claimed, separating the commercial banks from the investment banks on Wall Street would not end racism, sexism or make people more welcoming of immigrants.36 The class and identity debate is therefore adjusted by liberals to serve the bipartisan conflict between neoliberalism and the conservative right. Assessing the writings of Francis Fukuyama, Mark Lilla, and Helen Pluckrose with James A. Lindsay, we find that the liberal and illiberal line on universality recognizes but programmatically excludes socialism. The politics of identity has hence become one of the ways in which neoliberal governance has ignored the working class while encouraging post-​class alliances among identity groups. The former Reagan adviser and famed advocate of Alexandre Kojève’s theory of the end of history, Francis Fukuyama, published in 2018 a rigorous

104  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum argument concerning the way that identity politics has contributed to the rise of the far right and potentially undermined liberal democracy. Fukuyama’s Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment is despite itself an analysis of the illiberal contradictions of liberalism.37 While one should not expect from Fukuyama a socialist critique of global capitalism, his book attempts to be comprehensive by grounding his analysis in world history. Written in the context of Brexit, the Trump election victory and the rise of populist nationalism, Fukuyama explains the reversion to authoritarian traditions as a problem of thymos that has not been solved by modern liberal democracy. Thymos, he writes, “is the part of the soul that craves recognition and dignity.”38 He contrasts this with isothymia, which is the demand to be treated as equal to others, and megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as superior. Although political rights and the rule of law allow for a minimum of isothymia, the feeling that some individuals and nations have of being disrespected leads to megalothymia. Troubles with thymos is how Fukuyama accounts for phenomena like culture wars, campus politics, political Islam and white nationalism. In contrast to the Marxist argument that the latter are displacements of the conflict between labour and capital, or the distorted means through which this struggle is expressed, Fukuyama argues that what appears to be an economic problem is in reality rooted in the “politics of dignity” and in demands for recognition.39 In this way, Fukuyama displaces politics onto the pathological aspect of human psychology –​narcissism and aggressivity –​and protects liberal democracy from the challenges of socialism and critical theory. Fukuyama’s account makes the (Hegelian) struggle for recognition the driver of universal history. There is abundant evidence for his thesis. In the midst of unprecedented inequality within and among nations, the postmodern left has ignored economic issues and promoted the interests of minority groups outside the usual egalitarian frameworks. Liberal centrists, for their part, think that minority rights are best advanced by neoliberal policy objectives. The right, in contrast, defends “traditional” majoritarian identities, as is the case for example with the aptly named white supremacist group the American Identity Movement.40 While Fukuyama believes that this latter phenomenon is in fact driven by economic decline and inequality, the policies of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump nevertheless have something in common with BLM and MeToo. The left and right advocates of the politics of resentment, he says, understand one another. Fukuyama further defines the politics of respect as a question of utility maximization. It is difficult to pass this problem over to accountants, he argues, since what we are dealing with are matters of the soul. Sociologically speaking, this way of thinking comes around to similar canards like deciding whether it is Protestantism that created capitalism or vice versa. Fukuyama’s solution is an inside-​outside formula, where the pineal gland of Rousseauian subjectivity is opposed to Hobbesian total war and the Lockean defence of property as the kingdom of ends. The recovery of the self and divestment from social

Liberalism and Neoliberalism  105 constraints, we are informed, also has a biological basis in serotonin, where the neurotransmitters of the wilful, who impose their personal vision on the rest of us, are given sociological value. For Fukuyama, Enlightenment universality and the institutionalization of the concept of dignity in the Rights of Man resulted in the political ratification and secularization of Christian morality. The individual capacity for moral choice through the use of reason makes humans autonomous agents. The question of morality was extended by Hegel to all of human history, where struggle culminates in the recognition that is embodied in rights and laws. Of course, not all citizens and not all governments respect the humanity or rights of others, which opens liberalism to the problem of inequality. Along with the loss of religion and traditions, Enlightenment modernity also unleashed the critique of institutions. This led to efforts to re-​establish collectivism around the notion of an authentic self or an authentic nationality. The split that nineteenth-​century Romanticism created between universal recognition and assertions of particularity is the source of countless catastrophes, according to Fukuyama, from two world wars to the Arab Spring and the Ukrainian Maidan. After liberalism and communism emerged as the two poles of postwar conflict, their ethno-​national counterpart re-​ emerged around 2000 in Germany, Serbia, Poland, Hungary and Russia. The illiberal aspects of postcolonial struggles also asserted themselves in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. For Fukuyama, twentieth-​century fascism as well as twenty-​first-​­century post-​ fascism are species of identity politics that demand recognition for members of particular nations and groups. Populist leaders who emphasize national sovereignty, religion and tradition are on the rise worldwide. Given the declining support for social democracy and the increasing rates of economic inequality, Fukuyama is surprised by the weakness of the left, writing: Under these circumstances, one would expect to see a huge revival of a populist left in those countries experiencing the highest levels of inequality. Since the French Revolution, the left has defined itself as the party of economic equality, willing to use state power to redistribute wealth from rich to poor. Yet the aftermath of the global financial crisis has seen something of the opposite, a rise of right-​wing populist nationalist forces across many parts of the developed world.41 Notwithstanding the popularity of leaders like Hugo Chávez, Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, the left does not have the same kind of support it had in the previous century. Deindustrialization, widespread poverty, the decline of the middle class and the rising power of oligarchs have caused socialism to lose out to nationalism, religion and identity politics. Fukuyama correctly argues that humans are motivated by more than economic concerns. He does not consider that people opt for the opiates of identity only after they have lost their faith in the possibility of

106  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum social progress. Moreover, there are many historical factors that Fukuyama could consider but that he does not, including: 1) the fascist appropriation of historical materialism, 2) the Stalinist betrayal of communism, 3) the weakness of Popular Front strategies, 4) the Cold War and the rise of mass consumerism, 5) the petty-​bourgeois rejection of ideology, 6) the postmodern end of ideology, 7) neoconservative and neoliberal attacks on the welfare state, economic justice and international law, 8) the post-​politics and culture war agendas of new social movements, 9) network logics and media spectacle, 10) mass awareness of the possibility of species extinction through climate catastrophe and nuclear war. The socialist left not only has a better analysis of history, but also a more practical answer to the economic dislocations that are caused by globalization. However, because of the association of the left with progressive neoliberalism, Fukuyama does not attribute its decline to the neoliberal assault on social welfare but rather to the left itself. He writes: The problem with the contemporary left is the particular forms of identity that it has increasingly chosen to celebrate. Rather than building solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, it has focused on ever smaller groups being marginalized in specific ways.42 With the rise of countercultural movements in the 1960s, the shift away from labour towards a therapeutic model for improving self-​esteem and actualizing individual potential made identity politics into a neurotic placebo. Demanding to be treated the same as others, yet differently, identity and intersectionality became incoherent solutions to neoliberal precarization. As the liberal left made its peace with capitalism, the diminished hopes for reform were channelled into entrepreneurialism, personal responsibility and social climbing. Fukuyama overlooks the many ways in which the demands of identity groups have been accommodated in different ways by socialism, neoliberalism and authoritarianism. Although much of what he says about the left’s cultural agenda is accurate, Fukuyama protects the category of universality from political criticism. He is right to say that identity politics on the left has given rise to reactionary tendencies, diverted attention from serious problems and cheapened culture and politics. However, this is not strictly speaking a problem of the left so much as a problem of neoliberal capitalism. The foibles of leftist political correctness are about as enlightening as mass-manufactured support for the plutocracy and hostility to socialism. Fukuyama’s critique of culture wars is advanced for the sake of liberal democracy, which is not only threatened by populist reaction but also by working-​class dissatisfaction. Against ethnic and religious conflicts, and rather than accept diversity as an unalloyed good, Fukuyama recommends that nationalism should be built around liberal democracy, universal rights, security, an assimilationist

Liberalism and Neoliberalism  107 culture based on common norms and values, knowledge and the arts, and government in the public interest. Its best model, he argues, is the “creedal philosophy of American identity.”43 In other words, identity should be subordinated to capitalist universality. That Fukuyama’s political liberalism is essentially an economic liberalism finds him advocating economic development and international trade along with social safety nets. His politics leaves the system we already have intact but adds to it a missing element: the welfare state reforms that disappeared around the same time that the Soviet Union was dismantled. Rather than reject the neoliberal consensus, Fukuyama calls on us to be more vigilant in mitigating its cross-​border excesses, like disease control, drug trafficking, terrorism and environmental degradation. As for those who want their pound of thymos, their desires would be better served, he says, if they were integrated with shared values and aspirations. The problems with Fukuyama’s reformist vision of the now not so New World Order were recognized as early as Herbert Marcuse’s 1934 essay on “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State.”44 Rather than recognition, the volkish realism that had been attacking bourgeois values since the turn of the last century was nourished on atavistic values and obedience to authoritarian leaders. Notions of “justice” looked “beyond good and evil” and interpreted historical change as natural-​mythic processes that are unrelated to socio-​economic forces. Rather than a telos with no known outcome, universalism became a doctrine of justification, Marcuse argues, a programme of mystification that blocks reasoned social criticism. It is not difficult to appreciate how network logics as well as Baudrillardian simulation, a favourite theme of the entertainment industry, play this role today. The totalitarian state replaced the Marxist concept of totality with the organic unity of the volk, a sentimental artifice that is now used by neoliberal politicians on the left and the right. Its purpose, then as now, is to obscure class conflict and distinguish social groups in a menagerie of abstract universals that are managed from above. Because neoliberal capitalism is readily recognized as destructive, even liberals make demands for national unity against the forces of globalization. Neo-​ liberalism toggles between its rationalist system of post-​industrial production and its irrational speculation, exploitation, environmental destruction and militarism. The latter are justified as the unfortunate consequence of the former. Security in economic conduct only, often protected from competition, makes the philosophy of freedom and happiness a sham as millions are made to suffer needlessly. The ultimate purpose of theories of identity that are independent of socio-​economic critique is therefore the legitimization of a destructive class system that imagines itself in non-​class terms. Perhaps the best refutation of Fukuyama’s politics of thymos is his expression of support for the Ukrainian neo-​Nazi Azov brigade that visited Stanford University in June 2023.45 When in September 2023 the entire Canadian Parliament applauded Yaroslav Hunka, who during WWII served as a Nazi member of the Waffen SS, the illiberal tendencies of contemporary neoliberalism were on full display.46

108  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum As the normative Enlightenment belief in equality and democratic values now comes under attack by the activist left, the extreme centre and the fascist right, Fukuyama’s prescription of classic republicanism, constitutionalism and public-​ spiritedness transforms conventional citizenship into chicken soup for the neoliberal soul. So how does one go about reinventing the wheel? Honorifics in that department go to Mark Lilla, whose The Once and Future Liberal is the best thing since American pie.47 Our biggest problem today, according to Lilla, whose analysis is restricted to the U.S., is that the public has contempt for liberalism. His solution, not unlike Fukuyama’s, is a more rigorous application of democratic liberalism. Arguing that right-​wing populists like Trump are symptoms of a more fundamental crisis and therefore not the biggest of our worries, Lilla narrows the left-​right opposition to a more manageable version of the already existing two-​party deadlock. The two sides of the problem, as he sees it, are referred to as “dispensations,” which, like isothymia and megalothymia, and in this era of partisan polarization, are defined as feelings and perceptions rather than principles and arguments. The “Roosevelt Dispensation” is the product of the New Deal, the Civil Rights movement and the Great Society programmes of the 1960s. Although this democratic reform dispensation is no longer supported by affluent suburbanites, it at one time created electoral majorities around welfare, rights, solidarity, opportunity, freedoms and a vision of equality. As the postwar compromise between labour and capital fell apart, democracy became prey to imperialist foreign policy, structural unemployment, urban decay and a reliance on courts rather than public opinion and legislation. Beginning in the 1980s, the “Reagan Dispensation” championed individualism, family values, entrepreneurialism, business and small government, leading the attack on principles of shared responsibility. The Reagan Dispensation was then ratified by the New Democrats (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden), whose free-​market discipline and military Keynesianism detached wealth from morality. However, unlike the conservatives, the Democrats did not build think tanks, media networks and intellectual cadres. Instead, they promised nothing, promoted diversity and campaigned on the platform that they are the only alternative to the Republicans. On the question of identity politics, Lilla approves of the group politics that sought civic rights for people who had historically been denied equal citizenship. By the 1980s, however, identity struggles gave way to an exclusionary pseudo-​politics of difference and nihilistic relativism. According to Lilla, the Democrats are not losing because they have shifted too far to the right on economic issues, they are losing because they have failed to offer a comprehensive social vision and retreated into demographics. He notes that whereas the website of the GOP has a unifying patriotic message, the Democratic Party homepage has links to 17 different identity groups –​women, Hispanics, LGBT, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, etc. –​with a separate message for each constituency. Lilla revives John F. Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”

Liberalism and Neoliberalism  109 message to disparage counter-​productive and pseudo-​political identity liberalism, which he says is encapsulated by the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement. Disdain for the working class and withdrawal into resentment accompanied the transformation of the university into departments that encourage the obsession with marginality, political correctness and distorted history. Just as New Left localism leaves the existing state apparatus intact, the commodification of personal issues has done little to prevent the university from going the way of the culture industries. The modus operandi of identity politics is to relate identity to broader social forces and, even if you are middle-​class, he argues, claim victim status. The mistrust of universality, in this respect, is less ironic than it is extortionist. “Identity is not the future of the left,” Lilla writes. “It is not a force hostile to neoliberalism. Identity is Reaganism for leftists.”48 Lilla rejects the claim that identitarians are actually challenging anything. They have rather reversed the gains of the 1960s and replaced debate with authoritarianism. Instead of engaging intellectually with class, science or politics, identity rhetorically trumps everything in advance. So that liberalism does not self-​sabotage in the same way as identity politics, wasting energy on symbolic victories and alienating the public, Lilla proposes building institutions instead of movements, relying on democratic persuasion rather than shaming, and placing citizenship ahead of personal identity. Although he also blames Marxian vanguards for their suspicion of the democratic process, he, like Fukuyama, acknowledges the fact that the socialist left has a commitment to social progress. He adds that people like Martin Luther King and Angela Davis did not study identity politics but received a standard education and advocated solidarity, even if through “wooden” Marxist rhetoric.49 Not so with the social justice warriors whose evangelism and censoriousness does not resonate with fellow citizens. Those who play the game of identity, he argues, should be prepared to be trumped by another identity.50 Claiming that the first identity movement in the U.S. was the Klu Klux Klan, he adds that those who play the identity game should also be ready to lose to universalism.51 Lilla contrasts today’s cultural politics activists with a previous generation of leaders who did not advance identity claims but instead denounced double standards and demanded equal rights. Rather than mobilize angry mobs to “shake things up,” citizens must demonstrate their obligations towards others. As the U.S. swaggers towards the condition of a failed democracy, with nothing more to champion than the free market, its citizens are being depoliticized. Something can be learned from Lilla, especially since his critiques of identity politics are already well rehearsed on the left. The difference is that his critique is free-​floating and not grounded in sociological class analysis. Although he says he would not dispute a Marxist interpretation of the period 1945 to 2017, he does not contribute to one either. His analysis of identity politics glosses over and whitewashes capitalist ideology. It gives identity too much explanatory value and gives socialism not enough political value when

110  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum he suggests that it may be up to the left to save liberalism from itself.52 As long as the capitalist economy is doing well, he says, an unconvincing class consciousness evaporates. It takes a bourgeois thinker to believe that a capitalist economy has ever been an unassailable benefit to society. One would not look to Lilla any more than Fukuyama for lessons that meet the standards of Marxist social theory. Even when it comes to identity politics, his short book is hardly an intellectual history. Unique in this respect is Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s 2020 book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity –​ and Why This Harms Everybody.53 Although in this book Pluckrose presents herself as a liberal writer, she at one time identified as Marxist. A libertarian with a background in mathematics and physics, Lindsay has since this publication lurched towards the far right. Although these authors ignore how it is that neoliberal capitalism validates postmodern theory and identity politics, their at times disingenuous exploration of social justice activism nevertheless offers valid insights that one is hard-​pressed to find in politically correct academia. The problem, at the outset, is that their alarmist critique of the attack on truth, reason and objectivity serves conservatism more than the cause of emancipation. Pluckrose and Lindsay frame their discussion as a defence of the liberal consensus that for the last two centuries has engendered universal human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and the use of reason as a principle of inquiry and debate. Liberal democracy has defended the cause of social justice on the basis of universal values and the public interest. This tradition, they argue, is now at risk due to the spread of illiberal and reactionary ideas by a social justice movement that has drawn upon leftist ideas, from critical theory to postmodernism, in order to dismantle the project of universalism, liberalism, secular democracy and Enlightenment science. The authors are concerned that the reactionary tendencies of postmodernism have spread from the academy and the activist milieu to government and grade schools. The main problem with the spread of this movement is that postmodern theories –​structural linguistics, semiotics, discourse analysis and deconstruction –​are being “applied” directly to social contexts. The methods of postmodern theory that have been used in social fields like queer theory, critical race theory, intersectional feminism, disability and fat studies, make identity markers into the stakes of zero-​sum struggles, they argue, that attack social categories of knowledge, like science, reason and human nature, and categories of people, like men, whites, individuals and humanity. The authors propose defending liberal values and evidence-​based scholarship against the illiberalism of the social justice movement. Ironically, their coda is that it is pointless to give people material advantages without championing the principle of equality. This amounts to an indictment rather than a defence of the political liberalism that they unproblematically conflate with capitalism. Regardless, the fact

Liberalism and Neoliberalism  111 that illiberalism is inherent to liberalism does not disprove their critique of postmodernism. While much postmodern theory is philosophical and cultural in nature, the most that one can say about it for certain is that it is not a coherent body of knowledge. This is programmatically the case since most of its practitioners sought to dismantle the intellectual and social foundations of the political modernity that produced the Holocaust, the Gulag and the A-​bomb. Much like the artistic avant-​gardes of the twentieth century, postmodernist thinkers looked for ways to bypass official ideology, on the left and right, and reveal what all ideologies have in common. Against modernity’s drive to oblivion, the postmodernists produced highly idiosyncratic, counter-​intuitive and typically difficult to understand theories. The need for academia to manage the intellectual chaos they unleashed led to the adoption of Gilles Deleuze’s idea that these competing and mutually incompatible theorems constitute a “toolkit” of some sort through which methods can be used on an ad hoc basis, depending on the question at hand. This is by and large the intellectual orientation of Cultural Studies and most other “studies” departments. Pluckrose and Lindsay argue that social justice activists have taken different postmodern methods and made these into a cynical set of formulas. They encapsulate their critique of “applied postmodernism” in two principles and four themes. The first of the two principles, the postmodern principle, emphasizes scepticism about the accessibility of objective truth and the insistence that everything is a social and cultural construct. This reduction of humans to their epistemic frameworks, and to conditions of possibility for knowledge, attacks the notion that truth can be established through correspondence with other realities. Despite the fact that not all knowledge is comparable to the scientific method, postmodernism attacks science directly and elevates scepticism into an absolute. The second principle, the postmodern political principle, adds the emphasis on power to the insistence on scepticism. Power is thought by postmodernists to inhere in binary opposites, in language, in flows of capital, in diffuse social networks, in systemic social structures or in scientific method. Ironically, this leads postmodernists away from politics and towards a nihilistic pessimism that eschews belief in progress as inherently oppressive. The postmodern political principle is therefore deconstructive in essence, especially with regard to official discourses and social norms. The first of the four themes is the blurring of boundaries between categories like subject/​​object, belief/​​truth, culture/​​science, artifice/​​ nature or humans/​​machines. The second theme is the power of language, which makes words and ideas materially true and therefore unreliable. Pluckrose and Lindsay satirize postmodern analysis as “nitpicking at words in order to deliberately miss the point.”54 The third theme is a cultural relativism that disputes the possibility that one set of norms can be superior to another, thereby disarming reasoned criticism as a form of oppression. Lastly, the loss of the individual and the universal makes everything about

112  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum small and local groups, minorities or even non-​human categories that reject the possibility of autonomy and the existence of society. For Pluckrose and Lindsay, it is ironic that applied postmodernism emerged well after the trendiness of postmodern ideas had died out. What we are seeing today is not postmodernism but its instrumentalization by social justice scholarship. In fields like women’s studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory and critical race theory, postmodern methods are put to work to deconstruct social injustice. After most civil rights causes have begun to confront diminishing returns, activism shifts from legal norms to more sublime indexes of power like language, attitudes and assumptions. The worry that is caused by the reversal of historical gains, like voting and abortion rights, the right to free speech and to assemble, leads to a paradoxical inflation of social justice hysteria. For instance, the mere use of the N-​word by the New York Times science writer Donald McNeil, in an informal context and in a sensible reply to a question posed to him about the N-​word, was used ten years later by a gang of New York Times employees to have him fired after four decades of reliable reporting. That such initiatives on race, gender and sexuality have become more goal-​oriented than critical brings about moral crusades that abjure common frames of reference. The motto “I suffer, therefore I am” could be said to define our contemporary anti-​Copernican turn as the Galileo in all of us is “shown the instruments” by today’s academic and activist enclaves. According to Pluckrose and Lindsay, justice research is less playful and more aggressive than French theory, insisting for example that institutions, the media, corporations and the public should give preference to minorities. Those who resist betray not only their privilege, but their complicity in oppression. The sadistic glee with which tables are turned makes converts out of innocents, like the frustrated individual who defaced the Dickens House Museum in Kent with the graffito: “Dickens Racist Dickens Racist.”55 Anti-​Enlightenment indulgence is not only patronizing but fascistic. This makes no difference to people who are committed to “genderfucking” and disabusing others from “queer-​impossible” concepts like universality.56 At the outer edges of intersectional demands for equity is the rehabilitation of a caste system where there can be something inherently wrong with you because of what you are: gay men because they are white, black men because they are straight, trans men because they benefit from male privilege, queers because they are Western, and so on and all the way back up this neofeudal “chain of being” where fealty is demanded and spectacles of self-​flagellation are observed with righteous indifference. This work on the self can never be complete because it is unreasonable to begin with.57 The demand for self-​humiliation and alms from every individual who does not belong to a social group that feels it has been historically wronged in one way or another, according to these authors, is “not likely to end well.”58 In the interim, the view that all knowledge is situated can also have dire consequences, least of all the vindication of the right to hate straight,

Liberalism and Neoliberalism  113 cisgendered men for no other reason than the fact that they are straight, cisgendered men, as expressed in the Washington Post by Suzanna Danuta Walters, the editor of the feminist journal Signs. In other fields, like disability and fat studies, the assertion that someone might have a weight problem, or a handicap, is denounced as discriminatory oppression, leading to rejections of scientific advice and prideful celebrations of self-​harm as an unintended consequence of the culture of victimhood. The use of reified postmodern methods by social justice research and by standpoint epistemology, defined by Pluckrose and Lindsay as the new “fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left,” is said to contribute to the rise of anti-​intellectualism, demagoguery, populism, honour culture or victimhood culture.59 The solution to the morass that Pluckrose and Lindsay describe is the same as that proposed by Fukuyama and Lilla. Stay the course with liberalism and man the ship past the Scylla of the radical (actually, neoliberal) left and the Charybdis of the radical right. The two come together, they argue, in a social justice movement that revives right-​wing identity politics because it infantilizes minority groups and encourages divisiveness. A liberalism that is purged of identity hysterics and that instead advocates impartiality, tolerance, rights, debate and equal opportunity is far more likely, they contend, to correct the problems of authoritarianism and fundamentalism than contribute to them. Since liberalism ostensibly opposes illiberalism and encourages progress in politics, culture and science, the universalism of liberal humanism is deemed preferable to postmodern cynicism, despair and nihilism. Against today’s pathologies, they suggest, not unlike Murray, that we oppose the institutionalization of social justice research by battling its ideas fairly, without unrealistic expectations and without revolutionary hastiness. There is nothing that is progressive within postmodernism, they argue, that did not already exist in modernity. There is something at work in Pluckrose and Lindsay’s Cynical Theories that has the same limited value as what occurs when politicians on the extreme right speak truths that neoliberals avoid as a matter of course –​ like for example Trump’s admissions that the U.S. kills a lot of people or that it stole oil fields from the Syrians. Its value is the acknowledgement of what everyone in academia already knows, but, as Žižek puts it, does not know. However, by limiting their insights to a liberal democratic register, Pluckrose and Lindsay turn the known unknowns of postmodernism into the unknown knowns of liberalism. This ignores the fact that both macro and micro versions of fascism are given a pass by middle-​class technocrats for reasons that are not unrelated to the vicissitudes of liberal ideology in the post-​postmodern era. While there is much to appreciate about political liberalism, which is implicit in left universality, the neoliberal commodification of culture and education, the contradictions of global capitalism and the desperation of a declining middle class cannot be avoided when discussing the problems of cynical power.

114  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum Among the many sources that one could turn to for a more comprehensive description of the context in which postmodern theory became mainstream, Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity reminds us that the postmodern world is not quite as new as one might assume.60 The first formulation of postmodernism, according to Anderson, was around 1870, when the industrial working class first challenged bourgeois hegemony. This was followed by anti-​colonial movements through to the early postwar period, when talk of postmodernity began in earnest as a collectivist and visionary undertaking, soon to be eclipsed by the likes of C. Wright Mills, who theorized the collapse of both liberalism and socialism in a world of conformity. Others diagnosed high culture’s inability to sustain its critical difference from the culture industry. With the resulting relaxation of standards, overblown claims of “demotic emancipation and instinctual release” belied postmodernism’s complicity with big business.61 On the other hand, the rejection of aesthetic formalism and conservative politics defined much of the notable art of the 1960s, leading Ihab Hassan to suggest that what postmodernism does best is not in the realm of politics but culture. This bad news for Marxism was not much better for everyone else insofar as culture, according to Hassan, turned into kitsch, fun and irony. Semi-​leftists like Jean-​François Lyotard advocated libidinal desire as the only way to survive one’s exploitation and ultimately chose the grand narrative of capitalism for the sake of pluralist hedonism. By 1980, the postmodern was widely accepted as a condition that none could escape. Yet, up to that point, it had required and received no historical explanation. Its theoretical and ideological incoherence, euphemistically understood as play and indeterminacy, was attributed by Marxists to its conservative character. Reaganism, which coincided with the apogee of postmodern culture, marked the triumph of an ideological offensive against the left. Anderson writes: “Far from grand narratives having disappeared, it looked as if for the first time in history the world was falling under the sway of the most grandiose of all –​a single, universal story of liberty and prosperity, the global victory of the market.”62 For Jürgen Habermas, the capitalist desublimation of politics and culture blunted their emancipatory potential. Young conservatives like Foucault revived whatever archaic powers they could against bureaucratic reason, all the while “becoming neoliberal,” as Deleuze, his one-​time ally, might have put it. Most of Anderson’s book is concerned to establish the value and impact of Fredric Jameson’s writings on postmodernism. The conclusion of Jameson’s 1982 lectures was that neither realism nor modernism were adequate to contemporary needs. Although postmodernism could not solve the contradictions of modernism or the destruction of autonomy by consumer capitalism, it could resort to techniques like figuration, narrative and pastiche to suggest a new kind of realism that coincided with ideological détente and computerization. Advertising, television and the service economy restructured class conflict in such a way that existential dilemmas were defused. Adumbrated by Jameson in 1984 as “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” the postmodern

Liberalism and Neoliberalism  115 was deemed: 1) the result of objective economic changes, 2) a mind-​bending dissolution of social meaning and vicarious depthlessness, 3) an overhaul of all differentiated fields of endeavour into the interdisciplinary circuits of global capitalism, 4) new post-​class compositions based essentially on the service sector and financial speculation, and lastly, 5) a rejection of politics as intellectually and politically disabling. Instead of implausible vanguardism, Jameson sought to work through the apocalypse with a cognitive mapping of its increasingly unfathomable totality. A return to political economy and historical periodization would be in order if contemporary trends could be used to criticize consumerism and make some sense of human hopes. The particulars of recession, globalization, the flexibilization of labour markets, outsourcing, privatization, financialization, militarism, bipartisan consensus, and so on, are more or less absent from liberal critiques of contemporary identitarianism. Yet the postmodern character of contemporary efforts to rewrite reality, past and present, with yourself or your identity group as the protagonist, owes something to Jameson’s diagnosis of the postmodern. The defeat of radicalism and the recuperation of the avant gardes led to an embourgeoisement of the working class and an encanaillement of the ruling elite. The resulting petty-​bourgeois hegemony of yuppie managers and NGO activists created new adversaries –​such as white men and factories –​and new heroes –​such as minorities and mobile phones. With new media ensuring ideological saturation, even modest protest tactics could yield big returns, at least on the order of spectacle. The postmodern culture of consumer media, however, is less democratic than plebeian. It is not the result of mass political struggles but of economic pressures. Its stock of anti-​essentialist and anti-​foundational formulas markets history as a random rewrite-​it-​yourself process which denies the idea of universality. Contrary to the worry that truth and objectivity have vanished, Anderson suggests that the objective truths of the economic order are paramount. While they allow for individual modulation, they replace the humanist subject with a post-​ human body that is conceived as the effect of power and desire. At the same time, everything in Jameson’s Marxist account of postmodernism rejects the idea of class reductionism. As Jameson writes: “There is nothing that is not social and historical –​indeed, everything is ‘in the last instance’ political.”63 As the Frankfurt School anticipated, postmodernism is the stage of capitalism where culture becomes coextensive with the economic. So that politics is not evacuated, Anderson says, social criticism should: 1) not be concerned with subjective preference, 2) examine historical conditions of possibility, and 3) take contemporary culture seriously but without giving it special importance. In this regard, Jameson views new social movements with both understanding and caution. Neither easy denunciations nor concessions to the euphoria of populism allow one to refine the faculties of Marxist criticism. One should therefore not be overly enthused if a journalist like Matt Taibbi comes along to criticize Robin DiAngelo’s postmodern handbook of cynical theory, White Fragility, as “America’s smash-​hit #1 guide to egghead

116  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum racialism,” the “dumbest book ever written” and “tricked up pseudo-​ intellectual horseshit.”64 One bribe may be as self-​righteous or as toxic as the next. If John McWhorter is convinced that “the virtue signalers won’t change the world,” it is likely because, as Catherine Liu argues, they are a professional-​managerial proxy for the ruling class that is fighting a class war against the working class.65 Criticism that derives political advantage from the inanities of woke activists is one that is fully adjusted to the logic of neoliberal capitalism. This has less to do with the fact that postmodern theories of sublime undecidability shifted into the pragmatic mode of virtue signalling and de-​platforming, and more to do with ruling-​class efforts to defend capital markets by attacking even the liberal political legacy. Just as cancel culture became a topic of cultural criticism, its methods began to be used after 2021 by establishment institutions and neo-​McCarthyite governments to cancel anything Russian and principled opposition to Israeli genocide. 3 Postmodernism After liberalism the next step to the left is social democracy and socialism. In today’s post-​political universe, however, there are forces at work that confuse people about what socialism means, especially in academic, artistic and activist milieux. One common contrivance is the idea that Marxism, socialism and communism are not what they used to be and that the political left is now a postmodern left comprised of new social movement activists who accept that identity struggles and single-​ issue campaigns are the only legitimate forms of resistance to capitalism. In other words, the struggle against capitalism is no longer based in class analysis and labour struggle but is immanent at all levels of global capitalism. This postmodern perspective accepts that capitalism is inevitable and more desirable than communism. It is difficult to say where on the traditional political spectrum to situate postmodernism since it has progressive, capitalist and reactionary dimensions. The trouble with postmodernists is that they refuse to be identified with any modernist political category. Indeed, categorical thinking is targeted by postmodern motifs like play, chance, anarchy, process, dispersal and openness. Although contemporary culture wars are often fought as though the terrain of struggle is defined by left and right commitments, the advent of postmodern theory, if not the postmodern condition as such, makes political contention complicated. As David Harvey has argued, the intensification of industrial development, technology, urbanization and mass culture has altered the way that we experience everyday life as well as the cultural forms through which we understand the shifts that are conditioned by the flexible modes of capital accumulation.66 This means that the critique and revolution of everyday life, as conceived by Henri Lefebvre in the 1940s or by Raoul Vaneigem in the 1960s, can no longer resist bureaucratic dirigisme through the kind of ludic disalienation that inspired the generation of May 68 but must consider the integration of capitalist relations on a global scale, a question that links international

Postmodernism  117 struggles against capital.67 The problem then is that the postmodern “waning of historicity,” in Fredric Jameson’s terms, finds that people have “forgotten how to think historically,” which means that questions of historical materialism, as Marxists have understood this, are dissolved in advance.68 Instead, historical pastiche and practices of bricolage allow people to write their own micro-​narratives whose self-​fulfilling aestheticization of reality is modelled on prosumer-​based practices. The principle of exchange overtakes questions of authenticity as the latter is marked for cultural and touristic consumption. Affirming the malleability of human personality and appearance, the postmodern subject rejects rationalistic, avant-​garde and political modernism in favour of irony and difference. In this context, according to Guy Debord, and along lines that were previously established by the philosophy of Marx, Engels and Lenin, abstraction is the condition that envelops the concrete.69 Now charged by social media networks, post-​Fordist spectacle relativizes everything and controls knowledge, culture and politics through algorithmic data flows that are mined and manipulated for profit. Defying the modernist notion that progress is linear, the postmodern recycling of the past is not limited to the genre film, but includes antiquated social policy, neo-​liberal economics, the neoconservative attack on the professions, New Right claims to family, nation or religion, and pre-​Enlightenment philosophy in academia. The growth of the service sector and the flexibilization of the labour force through privatization, deregulation, de-​unionization and offshoring means that the postmodern economy has little to recommend it to most except for the claim that differences can more easily proliferate and that the gig economy makes everyone into their own entrepreneur. The purported death of the autotelic, humanist, bourgeois subject, however, has not brought down capitalist class relations nor the politics that support them. As Arthur Kroker wrote in his panic theories on the Nietzschean antipathy towards time that characterizes the “postmodern scene,” resentment at the inability to go backwards represents the limit of postmodernism and the reason why the death of the social implies a descent into violence.70 The neoliberal marketing of cultural relativism and the re-​emergence of fascism in the form of alt-​right transgression put inordinate pressure on socialism to salvage what is unfinished about the modernist project. The unreconstructable postmodernists in the academy and activist milieu, however, are convinced that class struggle is over. This leads to a strange conversation with thinkers who are radical enough to look beyond bourgeois liberalism but conservative enough to avoid Marxism because they consider it to be tainted by Enlightenment universalism. Progressive postmodern intellectuals like Robin D.G. Kelley, Gerald Horne, Angela Davis, Lawrence Grossberg, Bruce Robbins, Nikhil Pal Singh, Joshua Clover, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler are today on the rather dull edge of left politics, dutifully playing to the gallery while also pandering to those in the orchestra pit. They are, to all intents and purposes, the intellectual leaders of today’s petty-​bourgeois post-​ politics. However,

118  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum they could not play this role if they did not mix radicalism with identity politics and postmodern theory. Let us take one example of how it is that postmodernism attacks liberal universalism and thereby distorts socialism at the same time. In July 2020, Harper’s magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” that was signed by many notable individuals, including Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, David Brooks, Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Todd Gitlin, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Ignatieff, Laura Kipnis, Mark Lilla, Greil Marcus, John McWhorter, Cary Nelson, Orlando Patterson, Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie, Cornel West and Fareed Zakaria.71 The letter states that cultural institutions are coming under increased pressure on the part of social justice advocates for greater inclusion. It warns that morality and politics weaken norms of debate and social tolerance in favour of ideological conformity. The Trump presidency and the forces of illiberalism heighten defensive forms of dogma and coercion among progressives, thereby causing conflicts that can be exploited by right-​wing demagogues. Democratic inclusion must therefore not come at the expense of the free exchange of information and ideas, which the letter says is the lifeblood of a liberal society. The increase in censoriousness, calls for retribution, the firing of competent people with unpopular views, and so on, narrow the bounds of speech and produce a repressive atmosphere that weakens democratic participation. Anyone who is left of centre understands that liberal tolerance has its limits and its own protective dogmas. This does not imply that socialists should not also defend norms of public debate and the freedom to criticize. It has become common practice in postmodern academia, however, to programmatically undermine normative claims –​least of all those that favour good faith disagreement for the common good. For postmodernists, the notion of disinterestedness is an impossibility. However, the Kantian use of reason does not suggest that people do not bring their private interests to public deliberation; what it defines is the use of reason in the public sphere, without pressure from state powers, and in the public interest.72 This liberal approach to civil society was displaced by Marxism, which advanced a critique of formal freedoms. Feminism and civil rights movements were different from Marxism insofar as they were premised on the vindication of formal freedoms and rights. The relationship between Marxism, feminism and minority rights revolved around contested definitions of universalism. With the development of postmodern theories, however, Enlightenment notions of equality were replaced with the paradoxical contention that the private interests that underwrite universality are suspect. This contradiction leads the public dimension of disinterestedness to be doubted and rejected, while the private dimension of interestedness is blown out of proportion. It is not difficult to appreciate that postmodern cultural theory accompanied and legitimized neoliberal politics. To take one example, the postmodern inversion of the humanist subject of reason is referred to by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as a “non-​linguistic language-​based” notion of “whatever

Postmodernism  119 singularity” that no longer has any reference to identity, politics or law.73 Needless to say, such convoluted theories make no reference to socialist politics. Weighing in on the question of free speech from a postmodern left perspective, the scholar Asad Haider responded to the Harper’s letter with an article on the uses of free speech.74 Haider rejects the liberal universalist presuppositions of the letter with the sort of post-​structuralist discursive historicism that is bereft of dialectics and bypasses the post-​transcendental break with metaphysics that defines Marxist science. He responds to cancel culture with a return to Spinoza’s defence of freedom of expression, which Haider claims inaugurated the Enlightenment. He then criticizes the First Amendment for being formalistic and obscuring the difference between law and social practice. Haider therefore adopts the “flat earth” approach to cultural and political theory that is now common on the discourse theory left. He criticizes in para-​materialist fashion the liberal values that are invoked, arguing that such timeless ideals must be historicized to be properly assessed. He reminds us that throughout history, liberal values had to countenance legal norms, superstition, popular opinion, government persecution, gossip and accusations. Although the aim of the Harper’s letter is the hope that people will be judged fairly, Hader argues, its reasoning underscores the hegemony of bourgeois ideology. Not satisfied with the critique of liberalism, Haider also takes issue with an article by Osita Nwanevu, which contends that socialism is the best way to realize the liberal principles of autonomy that are otherwise impossible under capitalism. He retorts that cancel culture is not a matter of formal laws but of informal social processes. He thereby makes the common mistake that materialism implies ignoring questions of form. What, he wonders, allows anyone to say that cancel culture is not a form of speech? Playing relativism against absolutism, Haider says that it is impossible to decide once and for all what counts as free speech. The problem with the Harper’s letter is its liberal rights framework, he argues, which prevents the “reconciliation” of liberalism with socialism. Like all presupposing postmodernists, Haider attacks the notion of bourgeois subjectivity that the signatories cannot seem to do without. Unlike socialists who wish to overcome the limits of liberalism, however, postmodernists simply deny liberalism. Rights, for Haider, belong to the atomized, egoistic individual of the market. Not content with the abstract rights that reinforce existing inequalities –​since, for example, the freedom of the press belongs to those who own media platforms –​Haider advocates overcoming the separation between the individual and society. While this recommendation sounds praiseworthy, there are few fascists who would disagree. Overcoming alienation is one thing, a horizon of possibility, but overcoming the separation of the individual and society, in and of itself, by itself, is fool’s gold, or rather, the kind of pseudo-​materialism that one finds in contemporary intellectual trends that look beyond traditional disciplines.

120  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum This includes new materialisms, assemblage theory, cyber-​feminism, post-​ humanism, animal studies, trauma studies, digital humanities, and the like, none of which meets the standards of Marxist theory. In this general direction, Haider defines his social utopia as “compositions of collective bodies,” an amorphous and meaningless formulation.75 In addition, he argues that the formal framework of liberal values extends market logic to the realm of ideas. This is true enough, to whatever extent, but in today’s post-​Fordist capitalism, if one was to make this leftist-​sounding criticism into policy, one would have to issue an edict against cogitation. The problem with discursive historicism is that it evacuates politics precisely at the moment of politics, which, incidentally, is the definition of cancel culture. One might argue that cancel culture is as old as any form of censorship and even any rejection of something that one does not like. What makes this a new problem is the avoidance of judgement, which transforms ethics into the exercise of power rather than the exercise of discernment. The defence of free speech, so long as liberal values are taken for granted, is for Haider the demand for better commodities. On this count, defending the freedom of speech is a reactive response to today’s post-​postmodern woke wars. Against this, Haider invokes Spinoza and defines society as the mutual constitution of the individual and the collective. What good is freedom of speech if what you do with it is lie to people the way that Trump does? The devaluation of speech, and thought, is in this regard not dissimilar to the devaluation of labour under industrial capitalism. This by itself does not make the case against better products, arguments, artworks or scientific inventions, simply because they appear in the form of commodities.76 The rejection of the category of form is the rejection of the prospect that some ideas, innovations, works of art or politics are better than others. The reason this is rejected is because, and falsely extrapolating from the concept of universality, it is deemed undemocratic to think that some people are better at something or more important in some field of endeavour than others. There can be no freedom, however, if people can never be correct or incorrect, if they can never be better or worse. There can be no quality or equality if nothing can be judged better than something else. Defeatist postmodern populism rejects humanist competition, in part, because it has no concern for the difference between what is human and what is inhuman, between, as Karl Kraus once put it, a chamber pot and an urn. As the masses, and the capitalists, yearn for the next best thing, it is discursive historicism that is elitist because it accepts whatever power exists, including egomania, as definitional of culture and knowledge, indexing critique to the game of power and resistance that reproduces the system. Such backward-​looking pseudo-​materialism represents the worst kind of indeterminacy. Spinozist immanentism is neither inherently beneficial nor definitional of socialism. What it advocates is not collectivism but rather the further deregulation of social relations, which many postmodernists accept as an accelerationist gambit or as anarchistic disturbance.

Postmodernism  121 Postmodern nihilism restores susceptibility to tyranny and superstition. As Žižek would argue, Haider’s postmodern leftism only sees the deconstructive, false consciousness half of dialectical materialism and avoids the reality of commodity relations. This makes the left defenceless against anti-​intellectualism and pre-​theoretical voluntarism. Post-​individualist anti-​ humanism constitutes a hodgepodge of pre-​ Enlightenment and counter-​ Enlightenment gimmicks that are not only not Marxist, they are not progressive either. However, the agreement of horizontalist activists and left neoliberal scholars on the methodological orientation of post-​structuralism gives cause to conservatives to falsely associate the social justice movement with Marxism. When even leftists are too arrogant to properly represent the arguments of the Communist Manifesto, the right more easily junks theoretical differences and intellectual achievements into a “cultural Marxism” dumpster. What newer generations fail to appreciate is that today’s post-​ structuralists attack the Enlightenment because before them the New Left had attacked the modernist old left, thereby rehabilitating the intellectual traditions of conservatives. Unbeknownst to people like Haider, counter-​ histories that ignore the Enlightenment break with metaphysics are also the theoretical foundation of fascist ideology. One could only wish there were better commodities available for comrades than Haider’s presentation of the class and identity debate in his 2018 book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump.77 It is worth looking further into this work because it represents the most that can be expected from left postmodernism. Haider’s internationalism is less Marxist than it is radical democratic and discourse theoretical. Although his work has garnered deference from reviewers thanks to his criticism of capitalism, it meets the criteria of the contemporary post-​left because it also functions, disingenuously, as a form of postmodern leftism. One would not know this, and perhaps Haider does not know it himself, because he calls for universal emancipation and revolutionary solidarity against nationalism, imperialism and fundamentalism. That sounds socialist enough. Mistaken Identity advances this cause, however, by using the critique of class reductionism to avoid a class analysis of today’s identitarianism. The clearest indication of this is his redefinition of class struggle in the terms of the 1977 CRC “Black Feminist Statement,” which argues that revolutionary socialism is undermined by racism and sexism. Socialism, according to Haider, has been fundamentally transformed by the black lesbian politics of intersectionality. Workers, he insists, are not raceless and sexless. Coalition building must therefore acknowledge intersectional realities even if they have to some extent been appropriated by the neoliberal centre. Capitalists, one notices, are not raceless and sexless either. Nor are reactionaries like Elon Musk, Candace Owens, Milo Yiannopoulos or Giorgia Meloni. Haider’s subject is Foucauldian and defined primarily in terms of power relations. This very problematically makes his critique of capitalism more neoliberal than Marxist. Citing the work of Judith Butler, he defines the

122  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum individual subject as “the basic political unit of liberalism,” which falsely implies, for him, that the forms of resistance to oppression or exploitation can only be articulated through bourgeois notions of rights.78 Identity, he argues, has consequently become the basis of liberal politics. He also cites Wendy Brown, who criticizes this subject of liberal rights for seeking: 1) educational and vocational opportunities, 2) upward mobility, 3) protection against arbitrary violence, and 4) reward in proportion to effort.79 According to this argument, people of colour are obliged to make their demands to the state in the terms of a bourgeois masculinist ideal. Such middle-​class “conservatism,” according to Brown, naturalizes capitalism. The prospect that job security, freedom from harassment, and housing as a human right might reinforce a white masculine middle-​ class ideal, according to these thinkers, turns civil rights demands into the most pernicious form of capitalist hegemony. A counter-​revolution that is defined as immanent to neoliberal biopolitics is thus presented as the intellectual foundation of Haider’s politics of universal insurgency. That any of this could be confused with leftism is a testament to the ideological bankruptcy and neoliberal orientation of postmodern academia. One problem with the postmodernist use of Marxist materialism against Marxism, if not against cishet white men, etc., is that liberal individualism is not an identity politics. To think so is to be working backward from a contemporary anti-​Enlightenment and anti-​humanist perspective. Butler and Brown, in their faux-​Marxian critique of the state, are less concerned with ownership of the means of production and socialization of the surplus than they are with the association of the individual, defined as a bourgeois construct, with the modern state apparatus. Because their target is essentialism rather than capitalism, their analysis leads to a moral blackmail of the socialist left in the interest of what can only result in the kinds of political analysis that are hamstrung to cybernetic theories of control. The related paradox is that this historicist discourse theory has more to do with the exaltation of vitalism and voluntarism than with the critique of bourgeois individualism. Haider’s solution to this problem is to make it sound more materialist by suggesting that our mode of investigation must “go from the abstract to the concrete” because categories like race and class are abstractions that can only be explained in terms of specific material histories. Haider’s materialism, however, is eclectic and naïvely empirical.80 Since Haider has abandoned Marxism for the postmodern methods of contemporary academia, he is obliged to walk an erratic line between different tendencies to produce a uniquely devised approach to troubles around identity. His effort can nevertheless be indulged for the sake of clarifying contemporary confusions. The gist of his thesis is that identity politics reinforces liberal individualism rather than collective struggle against a social system that relies on the kinds of social and political norms that identity politics is supposed to oppose.81 His elaboration of that thesis, on the view that identity politics is a politics of recognition and not a politics of redistribution has its

Postmodernism  123 flipside in the critique of Marxism as an essentially economic programme. His solution is to ground identity struggles in mass movements. The risk here is that class politics is made equivalent to identity politics within a radical democratic left populism. Among the approaches that animate Haider’s call to break with identity and move towards mass organization is the analysis that Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies provided on the rise of Thatcherism. One of the key concepts of the collaboratively produced document Policing the Crisis is the slogan that “race is the modality in which class is lived.”82 As neoconservatives increased repressive means against workers and the poor in the 1970s, so did the uses of racism increase against immigrants and inner-​city minorities. For Hall, racial division was also a crisis within and between classes. Other than the problematic notion that there can be more than one working class, Haider contends that black workers develop class consciousness through race issues. This argument ignores the way in which Cultural Studies advanced, at the same time as the critique of Thatcherism, a “politics” of difference and representation. Authoritarian populism was explained as a culture war rather than a class war that makes use of culture war methods. The question for socialists is whether one can win the class war by using culture war methods. The ideological victories of Thatcherism and the rise of progressive neoliberalism should be reasons enough to reject this approach. However, the clinging of new social movements to identity politics compels people like Haider to broker new arrangements through the work of people like Hall. Haider does not himself assess what it is, in the long run, that was achieved by those people who in the 1980s became aware of their class consciousness through the experience of racism, and this in comparison to those racial minorities who before postmodernism understood that their best chance of advancement was through the labour movement. The brokering of alliances between labour and identity groups did more to standardize the bad affinity of coalition politics than it did to counteract dispossession through the global division of labour. Haider twists this reality when he argues that neoliberalism defeated new social movements as much as organized labour. He writes: “Enormous progress was made at a cultural level, fundamentally changing our language. But the underlying material structures were spared.”83 This is true and not true. Both the material structures and social mores have changed within the parameters that were set, for the most part, by capitalist democracy, but not without the class struggles that cannot be taken out of the picture. The question remains: What if the new social movements had been radically socialist? The charge of class reductionism cannot be wielded only when it is convenient. The culture war explanation of authoritarian populism ignores how it is that family, nation and church can also act as bulwarks against economic exploitation. Haider writes: “To confront the white identity politics [of Trump] that make up the right-​wing populism currently occupying the White House, we need to provide alternative visions, languages, and practices –​and responding with a

124  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum contrary, pluralist identity politics has not been successful.”84 Indeed, in the 2020 election Trump increased his percentage of support among all identity groups, especially the LGBT constituency, with a decrease of support among white male workers. The cynical view of Brown and others who think of the white male working class as a group that has become melancholy because it is being displaced by minorities constitutes intellectual, political and cultural redbaiting. Efforts to convince the working class that it is worthless, on the basis of sexual politics or white privilege, and on the part of people who long ago abandoned class militancy for just about anything else, results in the kind of moralism that socialism does better without. It is not the protection of individual comforts that should worry Haider but the fact that the academic and activist left has become so programmatically anti-​Marxist that soon there will be no means to protect those comforts that may still exist for the majority of working people worldwide. Haider’s complete rejection of formal universalism is anathema to Marxist dialectics. Marx, Engels and Lenin were not discourse theorists. This leads to problems in Haider’s approach. Whatever the flaws in the application of principles, liberalism does not grant rights to specific individuals but to all citizens. This has allowed liberal rights to be extended to all, including immigrants, foreigners and refugees, and to citizens who challenge the system from within. However, the neoliberal state is less concerned with rights than with the management of markets in the interest of capital. Foucault very mistakenly defended economic liberalism as a system that encourages the development of new subjectivities.85 If discourse theorists were less prejudiced against the individual, their notion of collectivism might be less haphazard and more communist. Radical socialists do not advocate the capitalist flexibilization of subjectivity. To fight against oppression is not to reject rights discourse. The irony is that those who attack the bourgeois state and rights discourse because they consider it to be the foundation of identity end up reasserting identity. The philosophical notion of particularity and the reality of individuality is camouflaged by discourse theory, which smuggles neoliberalism into left analysis. Ironically, because he worries that mass movements are oriented towards rights, Haider’s theory of insurgent universalism is more neoliberal than communist. So that the working class is not thought to imply white men, a premise that would presumably attract minorities to the socialist movement, Haider reinvents the notion of collective struggle on the basis of the CRC model rather than the revolutionary tradition.86 Pre-​empting identity is what performativity theory does, not Marxism. As well, scholars who make overblown claims about the Haitian Revolution as the litmus test for Enlightenment principles often forget that Enlightenment philosophers were not only fascinated with Ancient Greece but also with North American Indigenous cultures. Their ideas were defined against the power of the monarchy and the Church. They were neither for nor against identity. Warning against an uncritical defence of European Enlightenment on the part of Marxists, Haider does not make sense of history so much as

Postmodernism  125 motivate fashionable concepts like diasporic cultures and alternate modernities that simply displace problems and benefit the ruling class.87 One could revisit Stuart Hall’s work to consider whether the idea of race as the modality in which class is lived is worthwhile. By the late 1980s, after Thatcherism had taken root, Hall was extolling phenomena like fragmentation and suggesting that British whites envied blacks who look as though “they own” the place.88 The emphasis on deconstructive approaches that construe identity as marginal, relational, fictional and always colonized, said less about either class or race than it underscored trendy postmodern themes of displacement, instability, dispersal, difference, provisionality, arbitrariness, articulation and constructedness. In Hall’s estimation, class politics provided a false sense of closure to a fictional self and defended against a “new” politics that is related to the decline of Western culture. What we would today more readily ascribe to the narcissism of small differences was for Hall a challenge to British hegemony. This sociological version of ego psychology was more accommodationist than radical. In “Brave New World,” Hall stereotyped the old left so that he could more easily hinge his “new subjectivities” to the post-​Fordist reorganization of capitalism.89 The new politics of social movements would be informationalized, flexibilized, repackaged, raced, feminized, sexualized and culturalized. The maximization of consumer choice, he argued, would empower a decentred subjectivity in such a way that twenty-​first-​century socialism would no longer be based on class struggle but on diversity. Hall’s reflectionist acceptance of objective contradictions as the basis for subjectivity was postmodern in the worst sense of the word. For him, revolutionary impulses had become an image contained by pop culture and the museum. Liberation would not come through political parties or trade unionism but through commodification, which allows people to separate history from subjectivity and open the self to the cultural, rather than economic, character of politics. His theory underscored the radical democratic idea that there was no longer, and need not be, an automatic link between class position and political consciousness. By the mid-​90s his complete capitulation to discourse theory and theories of representation remade politics into cultural practice. The interrogation of stereotypes and the understanding of blackness as a culturally constructed category became quite distant from anything having to do with class as it is lived. Black liberation turned instead into studies of Cosby and the erosion of meaning.90 According to Esther Leslie, the more Cultural Studies became cultural, the less Marxist it was.91 With the concept of totality proscribed, Marxism was systematically downgraded to reductionism, economism and Eurocentrism. Western Marxism was appropriated by Cultural Studies, overturned and redeployed as textual and consumer politics. Having made culture the basis for a new politics, Leslie says, Cultural Studies abandoned the autonomy of culture that allowed it to function negatively and critically. The enemy was no longer Wall Street but hackneyed understandings of authenticity.

126  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum People who write from the comfortable perspective of discourse theory tend to ignore the ways in which postmodern identity politics changed how racism is practiced and understood. If white supremacy is worse now than ever, as people like Coates, Kendi and DiAngelo contend, what sort of racism corresponds to postmodernism? In the essay “Is There a Neo-​ Racism?” Étienne Balibar describes the transnational phenomenon of neo-​racism as the way in which racism has taken the traditional features of the “racism complex” –​intolerance, contempt, stereotypes, hate speech, exclusion, exploitation, acting out and violence –​and adapted it to contemporary circumstances.92 The racism complex combines an undisciplined will to know with misrecognition. It emanates from both elites and the masses. Balibar defines neo-​racism as cultural racism, which for example can replace the outmoded scientific definition of race with demographic categories like immigrants and refugees, or with the discriminatory functions of ethnicity, culture and difference. In a globalized and decolonized world, the pseudo-​ scientific concept of race is replaced with cultural difference and the incompatibility of lifestyles. One difficulty with this shift is that the multicultural emphasis on diversity has reified differences into transhistorical essences. A new form of differential racism argues for cultural preservation, which is considered preferable to change or conflict and is defined as anti-​racism. Shifting from biological to psychological “race relations,” a naturalized form of racial belonging replaces traditional racism with meta-​racism. Difference racism is defined by tolerance thresholds and cultural distance as means to show respect for the bearers of different cultures. Cultures are thereby defined as incompatible. It is less a matter of hierarchy than a matter of respecting boundaries and lifestyles. Protecting European values from cultural transformation, for example, is presented less as an obstacle to growth than as defence against an invading culture. Genetic ancestry and health issues, defined as underlying conditions, can add to neoliberal neo-​racism a biological and genetic veneer. This naturalistic model of culture associates neo-​racism with themes like family, territory, survival, health, contagion and evolution. Ironically, and in a language that is common among the postmodern ultra-​ left, Balibar considers that universalism must evolve if it is to remain healthy. His book Des universels resumes the non-​Hegelian and post-​Althusserian opposition between the universal and particular, and conceives universality, like Laclau and Mouffe did before him, as compatible with the notion of hegemony. Any claim to the universal is therefore “constructed” as an enactment of the universal. The editor of the journal Social Text, Bruce Robbins, happily contrasts this with the work of Alain Badiou and Žižek, whose “theological” and “messianic” politics are too much for the reform-​minded pragmatist to bear.93 Robbins champions Balibar, and his co-​author Immanuel Wallerstein, for going along with mainstream liberalism and the language of rights. Balibar advocates citizenship rights against those post-​humanist philosophers who reject the individual subject. Without abandoning politics,

Postmodernism  127 he also seeks to please the identity constituencies that are active in new social movements. Balibar’s neo-​Keynesianism is said by Robbins to be dull in comparison with Žižek’s and Badiou’s provocative talk about communism, which for him is equivalent to quietism since it is not pragmatically actionable. The fact of the matter is that Robbins gets these thinkers wrong so that he can deprive them of the benefits of ideas that they have defended many times over. However, this rejection of the communist left is no more tilted in favour of reform than revolution. By leveraging the post-​Fordist destabilization of identity, postmodernists have mostly liberated capital, and liberalism, from political and ideological challenge. Jacques Rancière adds further insight into the contemporary form of what he refers to as “cold racism,” which takes the matter of neo-​racism somewhat further away from radical democracy and closer to the analyses of Badiou and Žižek, if not Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well. In “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” Rancière introduces the distinction between politics (or emancipation) and police (or policy) that would later become the basis of his 1995 book Mésentente.94 As an anti-​essentialist thinker, Rancière argues that the people “is always more or less than itself.”95 Policy is unable to account for this virtual dimension of the people. It can only refer to the distribution of shares in the social hierarchy. This to some extent also describes the setting of Balibar’s notion of differential racism.96 Both of these concepts, politics/​policy and differential racism, risk a certain postmodern depoliticization of the left by transforming class struggle into an abstract problem of change and stasis. Rancière defines politics as practices that are guided by the principle of equality. On this basis, and along with Badiou and Žižek, he rejects the logic of victimization.97 Whereas police and policy logics confirm (describe) wrongs, politics and emancipation refers to the way that wrongs are handled (explained and resolved). Since Rancière rejects the Marxist base and superstructure metaphor, he defines the formal separation of law, culture and politics from the broader social reality as a problem of theory. If politics is not for him a primary structure (arkhê), nor is the political economy given any greater importance. What are the implications of Rancière’s work for identity politics and political theory? Rancière rejects the association of identity with politics. This applies to all levels of identity –​individual, group and nation –​and all aspects of politics –​government, law and universality. The logic that is advanced here is not what most postmodernists are concerned with, which is the universal limitation of particularity. What Rancière is concerned with is the opposite: the damage that is done to universality for the sake of particularities. For the philosopher, emancipation does not confirm identities, but is heterological. This is only slightly different from Badiou’s claim that political universals are generic. Both thinkers define means to verify the principle of equality. For Badiou, this occurs through the truth procedure that confirms fidelity to the event. Political events do not affirm individual or group differences but universal sameness, like for instance a scientific fact,

128  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum an aesthetic invention, or a political principle that either applies to everyone or fails the test of politics. Equality, or communism, can exist in politics even if it is not enacted universally. Badiou refers to intervallic periods as times when the people have ceased to struggle. For Rancière, politics exists only when it is enacted, demonstrated and verified. Universality is therefore a polemical principle of social construction, which for Rancière implies subjectivization rather than identitarian fixity. Universal equality is verified when, for example, the rights of one are affirmed as the rights of all. The proletariat is Marx’s name for the enactment of the principle of equality. Today’s racisms arise when the polemic of equality has been abandoned and replaced with conflict and violence. Against this, Rancière advocates strong “collective subjectivations” that look beyond cultural differences and the neoliberal destruction of the polemic of equality.98 And of course equality is not to be confused with resentful miserabilism, the reactionary subjection of others or everyone to misfortune. Insofar as post-​politics represents the rejection of universal solidarity, neoliberalism contributes to the re-​emergence of fascism by convincing people that only regressive measures are effective. The culture of identitarian expiation, atonement and reparation accompanies the obsession with technique and technocracy as the material structure of emancipation. Rancière concurs with Badiou and with Marxism more generally that politics cannot be limited to economic questions. However, the category of totality has not been eradicated from his thought but re-​emerges through his definition of politics. Rancière’s definition of police-​policy is related to his concept of archi-​ politics.99 The distribution of powers within a system legitimizes politics by replacing contention –​the claim that there is a wrong –​with social harmony, the verification and resolution of wrongs. In archi-​politics, organic communal harmony presumes an arkhê, an origin that conditions government and authority. Archi-​politics precludes social division. From Platonism to Aristotelianism, or formal logic to dialectical logic, archi-​politics passes into para-​politics, where the fact of social inequality unsettles the presumption of organic unity. The purpose of para-​politics is to use policy so that the political community can be re-​harmonized. When the social contract is broken, police measures are used to conquer politics, which can lead to tyranny, where the rights of the people are appropriated by state authorities. Where rights become a matter of law, the bearers of those rights are abstracted from themselves and others. The response to this problem is a meta-​politics that seeks to give back to the demos what has been stolen by authorities through police functions. Meta-​politics is the revolutionary organization of the people against the tyrannical exercise of sovereign power. It goes beyond politics (the verification of the principle of equality) by complementing politics with science. In Marxist politics, for example, the matter of inequality is explained as a function of the mode and relations of production. As opposed to archi-​ politics, Marx views production relations as a principle of political organization. This positive account of social difference, which is based on materialist

Postmodernism  129 analysis rather than on organic notions of community, and which critiques civil society discourse as a politics of the bourgeois state, leads Rancière to reject the utopian aspect of para-​politics as neither possible nor desirable. Marxists who agree with Rancière on this matter would include Hegelian Marxists and post-​Marxists. The upshot is that there is always a division between politics and policy. Žižek adds to Rancière’s three principal forms of political philosophy the category of ultra-​politics, which he defines as “the attempt to depoliticize conflict by way of bringing it to an extreme via the direct militarization of politics.”100 In such situations, he writes, the “foreclosed” political returns in the real, in the guise of the attempt to resolve the deadlock of political conflict, of mésentente, by its false radicalization, i.e. by way of reformulating it as a war between “Us” and “Them,” our Enemy, where there is no common ground for symbolic conflict.101 Not discussed by Rancière, post-​politics refers to the avoidance of politics as harmful because universalizing. If in archi-​politics everyone has his or her proper place, the contemporary “neo-​racist” version of this is woke identity politics. Ideological struggles are replaced by piecemeal gains for a small number of individuals from different minority groups who advance their interests through para-​political notions of equity and reparations. As labour rights, environmental standards and international laws are eroded to meet the demands of capital markets, activist protesters attempt to close the gap between policy and politics. Neoliberal cold racism replaces the defence of cultural identity with the state’s recognition of that identity, and this, as a substitute for the state’s inability or refusal to control the destructive effects of the free market. The cold racism that is used by progressive left neoliberalism to defer the problems of meta-​politics is now a feature of the discursive historicism advocated by the academic post-​left. For Rancière, cold racism defines the replacement of subjective heteronomy with a positively defined identity –​the replacement of demos with ethnos. When ethnos is made into a group or a national politics, archi-​politics can transform into ultra-​politics. This adversely affects socialist politics, for instance, when workers are pitted against immigrants or foreign workers. When national markets are threatened, meta-​politics reverts to para-​politics as governments are compelled by the middle class to police increasingly precarious and rebellious populations. The discourse of universal human rights is thus for Rancière the arkhê of international archi-​politics and para-​politics. Powerful nations can uphold or break rights laws as they wish, as in the case of disaster relief or extra-​judicial killings. Neoliberal global capitalism is a sometimes para-​political and sometimes post-​political order that is bereft of the emancipatory dimensions of universalism. As protests become more parochial and politically confused, the virtual dimension of subjectivity and

130  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum humanity is replaced by questions of identity and victim status.102 Aside from these postmodern forms of racism, nothing about global capitalism is news to the socialist left, for which ideologies of identity that undermine social solidarity and justify socio-​economic inequality have been rejected since the time of the First International. 4 Anarchism Cold racism and culture wars are now means by which neoliberalism undermines the workers’ movement and maximizes market definitions of human capital. Neoliberalism defines even geopolitical conflict as an effect of identity. It goes without saying that one of the most powerful and earliest versions of identity politics is nationalism. Nationalism is typically ascribed to a group of people with similar regional, linguistic, ethnic or cultural characteristics. There are no nations that are entirely homogeneous, and every nation is divided in various ways, by class status, ethnic diversity, gender, sexuality, administrative regions, religion, and so on. The common understanding of nationalism is social rather than political. In the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder identified the volk as the fundamental unit of nationalism. Defined by language, culture and religion, rather than politics, Herder’s relativistic definition of national culture established authenticity in opposition to migration and mixture. It also justified the racist ideas of nineteenth-​century conservatives who opposed socialist challenges to the ruling order by associating democracy with hierarchy and tradition. Nationalism is nevertheless complicated by its coincidence with the state apparatus, which manages the relations between classes and between class issues and identity issues. Despite conflicts over rightful belonging, social diversity gives liberal pluralism and multiculturalism a spontaneous legitimacy in the modern world. Settler nations like the United States have an identity that is founded on the state rather than ethnicity. Its overall cultural policy is assimilation into the melting pot of capitalist rather than cultural values. Regardless, state sovereignty and distinct political regimes are often supported through ethnic, popular, cultural and historical identifications. As a modern political institution, the state apparatus has evolved to protect property interests. In pre-​modern terms, however, the concept of state implied forms of government that allowed people to pursue common interests, even when these were hierarchically arranged. The organic theory of state rights gives the state a power over any single member or group. The state monopoly on violence privileges the most powerful sectors of any political community. That these sectors are today multinational corporations and billionaire investors with mostly opportunistic commitments to nationalism makes classical theories of the state, or statism, outmoded. Globalization implies that identification with nationalism is increasingly reduced to economic calculation on the part of all class factions. In this regard, the capitalist

Anarchism  131 function of nationalism coincides with the class function of identity politics in the context of neoliberalism. Patriotism and xenophobia are two different but related ways that people react to the instability of the contemporary world, often leading to emotional and chauvinistic expressions of (national) identity. Such prideful identifications obscure broad-​based material processes and work to suture presumably natural properties with political ideologies. While socialism is internationalist in principle, nationalism tends to be associated with conservative politics. Nationalism therefore gives identity politics a complex and dubious inheritance. Among anarchists, the critique of government and capitalism extends to nationalism. The general goal of anarchism is the maximization of individual freedom and progress by reducing and eliminating the power of government at the state level. Like socialists, anarchists criticize the institutions of private property as detrimental to social harmony. Although some rightist anarchists are individualist and libertarian, the general tendency of anarchism combines with progressive liberal and left groups. Anarchists are divided about identity politics, but their emphasis on subjectivity and autonomy coincides with all forms of anti-​oppression. While the capitalization and commodification of identity is readily criticized, the horizontalist, communitarian and anti-​state logic of anarchist politics, which rejects technocratic solutions as well as social democratic wealth redistribution as inadequate, shores up organicist and voluntarist conceptions of politics. For this reason, a significant segment of the academic anarchism that is associated with new social movement affinity groups has customized Marxist theory to suit its needs. This combines with identity politics on a micro level and anti-​imperialism at the macro level. Parallel to socialism’s advocacy of working-​class internationalism, those anarchists who have engaged extensively with Marxist theory are known as workerists. Italian workerism, or operaismo, has gone through different phases of development and is known today as postoperaismo and as autonomist Marxism. These thinkers tend to emphasize Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” which is found in his 1857–​58 Grundrisse.103 In this draft for the several volumes of Capital, Marx is concerned to show how it is that capital transforms living labour, now defined as a commodity, into capital. The formal subsumption of industrial labour that is involved in the contracting out of labour to employers whose interest is the maximization of profit implies changes to the length of the working day, to the speed of work, the division of tasks and the replacement of living labour (variable capital) with machines (fixed capital). Against the bourgeois labour theory of value, Marx defines socially necessary labour time as the aggregate profit derived from exploitation in society as a whole. On this basis, the “Fragment on Machines” has been helpful to anarchist theorists who have sought to understand the shift from Fordist forms of factory production to post-​Fordist forms of post-​industrial work, a transformation that is referred to as the real subsumption of labour. While one can dispute the extent to which autonomist Marxists have understood Marx correctly, and also the extent to which

132  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum the world has actually shifted from industrial to post-​industrial labour, the notion of “general intellect” has been used to refer to the combined labours that produce through cognitive and immaterial labour.104 As the educational, cultural, health, care, tech and other sectors of a knowledge-​based society proliferate, the argument that is made by autonomist anarchists is that value is no longer measured by (socially necessary) labour time. The tendency within autonomist anarchism has therefore been to reject orthodox Marxist theory and to look for sources of anti-​capitalist agency outside traditional working-​class parties and unions. Unlike many New Left groups, however, autonomist anarchists have a contradictory, one might say Oedipal, fixation on the need to make Marxism contemporary, in particular, due to the strength of the Marxist intellectual legacy when compared to anarchist voluntarism, which Lenin rejected as an “infantile disorder.”105 Against this prejudice, autonomists present themselves as the only legitimate twenty-​first-​century Marxists, proselytizing the view that as post-​Fordism liberates humanity, labour can no longer be distinguished from capital. For autonomist Marxists, communism can no longer organize labour as a power against capital because work and leisure have become immanent to post-​ industrial capital. Communism is redefined as communization, the development of new forms of insurrection after traditional forms of class struggle have hypothetically ceased to be effective.106 Autonomists therefore interpret the relation of general social knowledge to questions of class struggle and identity politics in unique ways that are distinct from most socialists. In the context of anti-​globalization struggles against neoliberalism, anarchists have drawn from the writings of Félix Guattari with Gilles Deleuze and devised the postmodern concept of the “multitude” to describe a dispersed, horizontal and collective social power that is opposed to the forces of global capitalism and the state. The concept of multitude was developed by the literary theorist Michael Hardt and the autonomist theorist Antonio Negri to explain the links that capitalist social relations now create between new subjectivities through the new information and communication technologies.107 Unlike the proletariat, which is construed as a category of unity, the multitude is said to be chaotically dispersed by the differentiated circuits of contemporary capitalism. Analogous to this is the concept of “empire,” defined as the global form of sovereignty where nation-​states are replaced by the control networks of supranational institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the G20.108 Although successful with alter-​global activists, Hardt and Negri’s postmodern anarchism is antagonistic towards classical Marxism and state socialism, and so tends to solidarize more easily with radical democrats and left populists. As BLM and MeToo surreptitiously became more influential than OWS, Hardt and Negri sought to increase the popularity of autonomism by leaning more heavily into identity politics. In “Empire, Twenty Years On,” Hardt and Negri, not unlike Stuart Hall before them, make a reductionist argument that presumes a homology between the state of the global economy

Anarchism  133 and subjectivity.109 Although they praise alter-​global activism, they acknowledge that summit-​hopping and the encampments of the squares failed to produce any sustained forms of organization. However, they also, and very fashionably, suggest that this same global protest movement failed to develop intersectional characteristics. Whereas the fall of the Soviet Union made the U.S. the enforcer of free markets, the resumption of trade wars, banking crises, crumbling infrastructure and the return to economic nationalism threaten the neoliberal order of global governance. An emerging multi-​centred system of great powers has caused empire to be recomposed around failed democracies and oligarchies. Socialist economics and reactionary nationalism serve state regimes that seek to rise in the global hierarchy. Against this, they argue, the new internationalism is defined as proletarian, anti-​colonial and feminist. Making use of the tools of the digital commons and the resources of the general intellect, activists are now advised to go beyond the horizontalism that Hardt and Negri advocated for decades and construct a more unified and centralized political movement. It could be a leadership council, or an electoral party, they say, contradicting themselves, but it cannot be a traditional form of organization since this is rejected by the activists themselves.110 The shift, then, from proletariat to multitude and now, from multitude to intersectional alliances, transforms the proletariat into a multiplicity of informal compositions that reflect the new kinds of precarious labour and social commons created by post-​Fordist capitalism. The passage from class to multitude, they argue, means that anti-​capitalist struggles must be built alongside feminist, anti-​racist, decolonial, queer, anti-​ableist and other struggles. Hardt and Negri therefore content themselves to rely on the sensibilities of activists. In addition, they argue that the working class is already and has always been a multiplicity. Because they abandon the centrality of class, they are not concerned with the ways in which issues of identity obscure class politics. Although Hardt and Negri were at one time more Deleuzian in their wariness of identity as a means through which capitalism controls subjectivity, they later adopted intersectionality as an idea that is allied with the concept of the multitude. This acquiescence to a compromising formula, on the view that each axis of oppression is equivalent to all of the others, recapitulates the politics of Laclau and Mouffe. The “multiplicity of mutually constituting structures of domination,” they write, “offers a superior lens for grasping social reality.”111 Intersectionality and radical democracy, we are told, is superior to Marxism. Why, then, are we also told that multiplicity is not enough to be politically and organizationally effective? Class, they say, is not only a socio-​economic category but is created by all of the relations of domination and oppression. In actuality, class subjects and class relations are created by capitalist social relations. Achille Mbembe’s concept of “racial class” and Christine Delphy’s notion of “sex class” are fine as far as creative writing is concerned but whether they are convincing as materialism might depend on how comfortable someone is with arbitrary and inconsistent uses

134  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum of class theory. While scholarly debates can be had concerning whether, and to what extent, this intellectual dabbling is more opportunist than disciplinary, it has an undeniable popularity in activist circles. Against the postulates of Ellen Meiksins Wood, and in concert with Cedric Robinson, Hardt and Negri argue in their 2018 essay, “The Multiplicities within Capitalist Rule and the Articulation of Struggles,” that race and racism are constitutive of capitalism.112 They cite an essay by Cinzia Arruzza that reiterates the claims of Adolph Reed against Wood, in this case for feminist purposes, which Hardt and Negri accept since multitude, they say, also concerns the problem of patriarchal capitalism. Not that Reed accepts the concept of racial capitalism –​he does not –​but what Hardt and Negri present as Arruzza’s adoption of Marxist feminist unitary theory more accurately describes radical democracy and intersectionality, which have nothing to do with Reed’s minor disagreement with Wood. They also cite the liberal theory of the feminist scholar Iris Marion Young, going in the direction of black feminist bell hooks to suggest that anti-​patriarchy, anti-​racism and anti-​capitalism should be treated as praxiological equivalents. Whereas Hardt and Negri make this argument in relation to the notion of real subsumption, they abstract from it the concept of labour. Marx’s work addressed the formal and real subsumption of labour rather than formal and real subsumption of society. While their approach addresses the ways in which identity markers and subjectivity are generated by real subsumption inside the global capitalist “social factory,” along with the attending problems of alienation and competition, their theoretical deference to logics of race, racism and anti-​ racism, or gender, patriarchal sexism and anti-​ sexism, becomes yet another means by which they acquiesce to neoliberal governance and biopower as the immanent state of things. With this, Hardt and Negri make the same kinds of mistakes with identity politics that they previously did with the concept of cognitive labour. They accept the accelerated capitalization of identity under post-​Fordism to underscore the heightened potential of rupture. One could, on this basis, accuse them of the same procedure as progressive neoliberals and conservatives, which is to win people over to ultra-​left radicalism through the narcissism of identity. For racial and patriarchal capitalism, one must also consider anti-​racist and anti-​patriarchal capitalism. Contrary to their postulates, not only is racial and gender hierarchy not a threat to capitalism, neither is racial and gender equality within capitalism, which is the purpose of equity policies. However, racial and gender hierarchy is a threat to socialism. A Marxist politics of class solidarity, which anarchists reject in various ways, should instead refuse the articulation of identity and class in a rhetoric of political equivalence. One might then begin to conceive the forms of class struggle that resist and reject the uses of “post-​ Marxist multiculturalism,” as Barbara Foley calls it, which, like nationalism, has been a one of the major weaknesses of the socialist left.113 Not only does postmodern leftism tend to reinforce political fragmentation, it rejects the universalist grounds of identification that make solidarity

Anarchism  135 possible in the first place. This redoubles the capitalist universality that reifies identity and markets difference. Since Hardt and Negri’s Spinozist immanentism accepts that there is no outside to capitalism, their presumably more accurate description of the realities of twenty-​first-​century capitalism and of the desires of new social movement activists is a strategically debilitating response to a capitalist hegemony that is not in anyone’s interest. In the absence of mass political organizations of the left and of strong collective subjectivations that look beyond cultural differences, the fate of identity politics as a politics of the left has been analogous to that of the European Union. In a prescient 2014 interview, Franco Berardi argued that the “European experiment” is over and that this reality is certain to have effects on the Middle East and elsewhere.114 Because of the financialization of capitalism and the neoliberal destruction of the welfare state, European nationals no longer feel at home in their respective milieux. Federations are breaking apart as Yugoslavia did previously. Identitarian rage is the way that nationalists respond to the power of the oligarchs. It can take the form of localism, but the “identitarian body,” he argues, also takes the form of fascism. This, Berardi argues, is what the Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol asserted through their fraudulent claims that the election had been stolen from them.115 Berardi has also given in to the rhetoric of intersectionalists when he suggests that Trump followers cannot be distinguished from average American consumers. If the American Creed is attributed to the whiteness of its adherents, who consume more electricity and beef than any other nation on the planet, and who cling to their SUVs in the same way they fear that their white privilege is fading –​so much so that they are willing to help a fascist topple democracy –​then the creeping civil war that Berardi sees in the making would by his definition be a race war. Trump, he says, is the soul of white America. If that is the case, then how does anarchism account for the multicultural agenda of the Democratic Party, which conspired over two consecutive elections to prevent the nomination of Bernie Sanders, who also ran a multicultural campaign? The African American voters in South Carolina who defeated Sanders before Super Tuesday voted for Biden, a former ally of the racist politician Strom Thurmond and advocate of the wars in the Middle East, whose best asset was his association with Barack Obama, the neoliberal “deporter in chief” and defender of torturers and bankster thieves. At the second Trump impeachment, the Democrats made sure to not allow the trial to damage the reputation of the Republican Party since fascist Republicans give the Democrats the leverage they require to carry on with their anti-​democratic policies. The reality is that Americans of all political persuasions are less conditioned by racism than they are by Cold War hostility to socialism. This leads even nominally leftist groups to attack the radical left. Another figure with an abiding presence on the autonomist left is Maurizio Lazzarato. A co-​founder of the journal Multitudes and the originator of the

136  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum contested term “immaterial labour,” Lazzarato has produced a detailed programme for an identitarian approach to multitudes.116 In the 2023 book The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution: Minorities and Classes, Lazzarato has developed a heterodox version of Marxism that looks for continuity rather than discontinuity between the struggles of 2011, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, and the struggles of 2019–2020, especially Black Lives Matter and the Gilets Jaunes.117 Lazzarato adds to the belief that the working class can no longer be the subjective force that would carry revolution the idea that it never was a privileged force since the important revolutions of the proletariat took place in underdeveloped nations like Russia, Mexico, China, Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria. These revolutions were more anti-​colonial than anything else, he argues, adding the idea of multiplicity to these, for him, so-called “communist” revolutions. Along Foucauldian lines, and following a post-​68 mode of thought, Lazzarato replaces the concept of class in the singular with classes in the plural, which he defines as a set of dualistic oppositions: capitalists/​​workers, men/​​women, whites/​​racialized, wage labour/​​unwaged free labour, metropolitan centre/​​colonized periphery and nature/​​culture. Lazzarato argues that “the passage from ‘class struggle’ (between capital and labour) … to ‘struggles of classes’ in the plural,” has made the objectives of the labour left inoperative since at least the 1960s and 70s.118 Lazzarato retains from the Marxist left the notion of revolution, which has otherwise been abandoned by the post-​60s generation. The hypothesis of revolution, as he calls it, must now work to complete the work that was left undone by previous revolutions, which is to combine the political revolution and the social revolution. This mistaken and ahistorical argument is nevertheless correct about the fact that previous revolutions were thwarted. It is incorrect to think that state mechanisms, by themselves, are the reason why radical politics were abandoned. Beyond this, Lazzarato obfuscates when he defines sexism and racism as modes of production. The argument that because the working class has always been constituted by minority groups patriarchy and heterosexuality should be reconceived as modes of production suggests that these could only be overcome through the disappearance of gender and sexual differences. It also ignores the obvious fact that the working class is also comprised of majority groups and insofar as it does not, it presumes that workers are beneficiaries of the forms of oppression that exist in capitalist societies. Anarchist metaphysics here abandons materialism and replaces historical analysis with binary constructs of various sorts that work to indiscriminately reject and justify everything. In contrast, Marxists have never argued, as suggested by Lazzarato, that racism and sexism no longer exist, that race and gender would cease to exist in communist society, or even, on the way there, that Marxism can eliminate every form of oppression. One cannot look to Lazzarato to understand Marxism and the history of the radical left. Marxist class struggle is concerned with the centrality of class in capitalist society. Because Lazzarato mistakenly

Anarchism  137 interprets this to imply the exclusivity of class, he can more easily offer formulas that underestimate the difficulty of fighting against class exploitation while at the same time fighting against all forms of oppression. Indeed, he must redefine class so that it refers instead to a more malleable but in this case less significant concept of subjectivation. Ignoring the ways in which multitudes politics encouraged a deradicalization of revolutionary left politics, Lazzarato wants to pre-​empt any return to labour radicalism by acknowledging the limits of postmodernism and situating its identitarian dimension within materialist feminism. There is unfortunately nothing relevant here concerning universality, the overcoming of feudal societies, rights discourse, international law, or the contributions of the socialist left to identity struggles. This is not even a theory of struggle since that would imply the concept of strategy. For Lazzarato, one can only know what one is fighting when it occurs. The “non-​dialectical” appearance of women and anti-​colonial movements in the social revolution –​as theorized by Carla Lonzi and Frantz Fanon –​asserted their autonomy from the labour movement, he argues, as if one could understand particularity without reference to universality and totality. Presuming that Marxism conforms to the views of Hegel and the eighteenth century, the dictatorship of the proletariat is charged with Eurocentrism, the domination of women and heterosexual norms. Only a theory that can champion the Combahee River Collective as the micro and macropolitical actualization/​​experimentation with “new possibilities of life” can also define dialectics as a “homogenizing machine” that has no sense of contradiction.119 Lazzarato never considers that contemporary capitalism allows for multiplicity since this could only be a (fraudulent) non-​ revolutionary “realization” of these terms, as Marxists would argue. Even situated knowledges are problematic for him in that regard. If one was to schematize what Lazzarato is proposing with his theory of classes, one would have to think that the relation between identity and class is one of mutual extortion. While this is perhaps true for capitalist relations, and Lazzarato quotes Sylvia Walby to the effect that even welfarism is racist and sexist, is it true for revolutionary politics as well? The need to avoid this question explains Lazzarato’s opportunist reversion to 70s feminism after postmodernism because it allows him to conflate politics and epistemology with ontology. On this score, his belated critique of Butlerian performativity theory, queer constructivism, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuze and Guattari’s minor politics, Hardt and Negri’s cognitive labour, and Bruno Latour’s ecological theory, on the view that these have abandoned the revolutionary perspective that is uniquely provided by materialist feminism, advances a parasitic relation to Marxism: While we can no longer manipulate these concepts as Marxism taught us, it is nonetheless necessary to keep the concept of struggle and class by expanding them and reconfiguring them, following in the footsteps of materialist feminism.120

138  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum Whereas most intersectionalists do not give class any preferential treatment as one term among others, usually ignoring it entirely, Lazzarato’s anti-​ Marxist ontology makes class the most virulent of the brood parasites that Bruce Dixon associated with intersectionality. Dixon writes: In the context of the real left, the community of those aiming to overthrow capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire –​not two or three out of four but all four, the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric and branding to deceive the unwary and ensnare many bright, serious and sincere leftists into defending and promoting its fundamentally hostile project.121 It should come as no surprise that in this imprudent version of May 68 thought, the categories of economy and political economy vanish in an amorphous cloud of power, force and violence, as if to suggest that materialist feminism genealogically exceeds Marxism. Lazzarato’s contentious brouhaha comes to a head in the last chapter on the struggles of classes, capitalist disasters and the global dimension of any possible revolution. In the first of these, the conflict of capital and labour is replaced by the “multiplicity of conflicts of classes and the minorities that compose them,” transforming a law-​ oriented intersectionality into a set of dualistic oppositions that define conflict.122 The problem with intersectionality, Lazzarato claims, is that it stabilizes fixed positions and mobilizations, renaturalizing political subjects and objectivizing black women as subjugated. While the struggle of classes is seemingly more radical than intersectionality, Lazzarato accepts the Foucauldian obsession with power, but only to the extent that it is deterritorializing and not reterritorializing, to put it in another set of unhelpful Deleuzian terms, which are theoretical enhancements of the Cold War cybernetic logic of open and closed.123 As Carl Sagan famously stated: It’s good to have an open mind, so long as your brains don’t fall out. Or as Adolph Reed would say, Lazzarato’s suggestion that gender and race are modes of exploitation brings to mind historian Barbara Jeanne Fields’s objection to the mindset among historians and others who “think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations –​as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco.”124 The avoidance of historicization, in this case, conveniently ignores the uses of anti-​oppression discourses by anti-​revolutionary elites to undermine rather than strengthen left solidarity. It is easy enough to understand that changing class to classes gives a pass to minority and female “activists” in the ruling class. As with woke critics of “class reductionism,” what we have here is academic flimflam. For one

Anarchism  139 thing, workers are not caught up in a dualistic conflict with capital, a claim that is simplistic in the extreme; for another, calls for a dualistic clash of women against men, blacks against whites, and so on –​a conflict that is to be continuously made, broken and remade –​have nothing progressive about them, but reduce critical social theory to race and gender metaphysics. Lazzarato’s supposed anti-​normativity is a perverse and tautological appropriation of the concept of classification itself. It is also more Butlerian than he lets on or cares to know. Not only does it have nothing to do with the CRC, but this social construction of non-​identity through non-​dialectics, which disintegrates everything through violent desublimation, or conflict for the sake of conflict, is simply boorish and insulting to the people it purports to inform. No wonder then that the agent of change he announces is an “unexpected subject,” since the abandonment of universality brings with it the abandonment of meaning and particularity.125 This is why the Marxist definition of class has nothing to do with identity and instead refers to humanity, organizing social labours according to shared needs and interests rather than through equally unexpected (Schmittean) enemies that make revolution more paranoid and fascist than egalitarian and confident. Along with every other helpful concept, Lazzarato rejects the notion of organization in favour of the more amorphous idea of a coming revolution, wherein a maximum of micropolitical passivity, organized against the state, demands tests of allyship, beyond interests, within actually existing capitalism. Lazzarato’s theory of revolution is rather an ethnography of what we already have. And he is right to consider what we have today to be a series of capitalist crises and disasters. But as with all flat earth immanentists, it is the disasters that are radical, not the people who could avert them. Progress, he argues, “is progress towards the disasters of now possible extinction.”126 And who is to blame? The fault is attributed to those Marxists who find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, a gibe that stupidly confuses this observation, first made by Jameson, with those who articulate it as a problem of ideology. To further muddle things, Lazzarato ignores Marx’s writings on species being, which would explain why it is that humans might seek to avoid catastrophe, and instead says that Marx identifies being with labour and production. Not only is labour not a Marxist ontology, since politics cannot be conflated with ontology, as psychoanalysis would also explain, but the suggestion that anarchist ontology is better than socialist ontology betrays why it is that Lazzarato’s version of class must be conflated with identities. Despite their sophistication, one of the main problems with contemporary anarchist writings that make use of Marxism is that they are rarely concerned with accurate explanations. In his essay “Listen, Anarchist!” David Harvey argues that anarchist tactics and sentiments should be supported when appropriate and rejected when inappropriate, especially when it comes to misrepresentations and ad hominem criticisms.127 Since the 1970s, respect for diversity and the ecological relation to nature has transformed Marxism for

140  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum the better, which is not to suggest that no progress had ever been made in these areas before the 1970s. Only an ignoramus would think so. However, since the 1980s, most radicals have become neoliberal, Harvey argues, especially the postmodernists. Contemporary theories like Lazzarato’s offer caricatures of Marxism as teleological, positivist, functionalist and mechanistic. Such criticism ignores transformations within Marxism that are not limited to the usual range of New Left groups. A prominent anarchist intellectual, Murray Bookchin, broke his ties to anarchism because according to him it had no coherent theory of society. Anarchism tends, instead, to advance ahistorical theories of a self-​propelling social ego divested of constraints. Bookchin writes: “Indeed, today, many anarchists celebrate their theoretical incoherence as evidence of the highly libertarian nature of their outlook and its often dizzying, if not contradictory, respect for diversity.”128 Harvey finds this to be the case with autonomist Marxists especially, who define autonomy as impossibility, with nothing preventing the state and capital from appropriating this autonomy for its own purposes. Against the trendy ultra-​left in academia and the activist sector, we find that social democrats like Sam Gindin increasingly appreciate the need for socialist parties, whose purpose it is to replace the capitalist state. Radical change can only happen if state power is altered from top to bottom, he says, “acting as an instrument for the democratic transformation of work and community.”129 In contrast to this, contemporary anarchism locates resistance to capitalism in almost anything at all and considers all forms of authority –​including social norms and laws –​ to be illegitimate. The postmodernization of anarchism, Harvey argues, has therefore, along with identity politics, turned anarchism against its own best traditions and against the potential for the ultra-​left to make common cause with socialists. 5  Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism The Trump MAGA phenomenon is often compared to the United Kingdom’s Brexit from the European Union. The U.K. withdrawal became official at the end of December 2020. In the referendum of 2016, 52 percent voted to Leave the E.U. In the 2019 general election, the Labour Party said it would hold another referendum to renegotiate the deal and Remain, an unpopular strategy that allowed the Conservatives under Boris Johnson to win 365 seats and Labour under Jeremy Corbyn to lose 60 seats, the Labour Party’s worst defeat since 1935. The debacle led to much speculation concerning the significance of Brexit. Like Bernie Sanders, Corbyn had the support of young Remain voters but came under intense pressure from the establishment and the media for being too left-​wing. Attacks on the National Health Service and against organized labour by both the Tories and Labour indicated that the left had lost touch with popular discontent. Although Labour proposed an agenda that promised material advantages, the masses opposed the E.U. institutions that they associated with Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair,

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  141 giving mass politics a populist dimension that Corbyn failed to confront. Pundits took advantage of this defeat to attack socialism. Like the 2016 Trump vote, Brexit was a vote against the neoliberal establishment and its reorientation of politics towards culture war topics. The abandonment of class politics reared its ugly head as both Scottish and British nationalism returned as the herald of working people. Social democracy has been in retreat in the U.K., France and Germany for decades. As the progressive neoliberal parties now offer people little more than a multicultural version of upward wealth redistribution, the working majority has come to resent middle-​class elites and political careerists. Both the Labour Party and the Democratic Party, as well as their equivalents in France, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, have become the parties of corporate donors and the professional middle class. Reducing election campaigns to demographic pandering, class struggle has been remade into the kind of activism that disciplines even unemployed people for their various privileges. With official labour parties having abandoned social democracy for political products, like a higher minimum wage or abortion services, the activist left is increasingly beholden to the class of media elites and academics who lead radicalism back into the fold of a centrist “liberal-​left” consensus that is more neoliberal than socialist. Those who refuse to countenance their contribution to this rightward shift in the balance of class power avoid ideology and cling to stereotypes of an ignorant and prejudiced working class. Contrary to the perception created by the media, which was repeated thoughtlessly by even leftists, only 10 percent of the mob that stormed the Capitol building on January 6 were working-​class. The vast majority were former intelligence, military and police officers, elected officials and well-​ off businesspeople. The Canadian Freedom Convoy was likewise concocted by political elites to redirect working-​ class concerns in the direction of right-​ wing populism. What mainstream discourse has difficulty acknowledging, even though everyone knows it, is the viciousness of capitalist social relations. When all you have as political options are economic liberalism and the kind of populism that swings from left to right, ethno-​national bigotry by itself does not tell you very much and begs the question as to its meaning and causes. For example, Ashley Jardina, the author of White Identity Politics, takes for granted the notion of white identity as the premise for her research.130 One can imagine the can of worms that the practice of ticking demographic boxes leads to, such as the fact that 30 to 40 percent of white Americans say that white identity is important to them and half of these show signs of racial resentment. What does one make of such data? Though these numbers represent a decrease in white self-​identification, the reasons for this are unclear since some whites, who may also be prejudiced, do not identify as white. One of the inconvenient truths is that many Trump supporters, according to Jardina, and contrary to Berardi’s assertion, do not show signs of racial resentment. While one might think that white supremacy has existed in the United States since the seventeenth century, Jardina suggests that many

142  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum are borrowing their sense of identity politics from racial minorities and so have begun to think and organize along racial lines to maintain their sense of belonging. Her research, therefore, mostly confirms the post-​structuralist definition of universality as a category that hegemonizes an invisible norm. Since much contemporary discourse on identity is the product of postmodern theory, it might, given the circumstances, make some sense to question the wisdom of doubling down on identity as the socialist left attempts to regain some momentum. In his review of Patricia C. Williams’ book White Working Class, David Roediger points out that after the 2016 election, this constituency was suddenly used to explain everything.131 The media narrative that Hillary Clinton’s defeat was due to the racism and sexism of the working class dulled class issues, he argues, in conformity with the interests of the political elite. Despite the tens of thousands of voters in the Rust Belt who switched to Trump, most working-​class voters simply did not vote. Williams, he says, accepts the media’s emphasis on the inadequacies of voters rather than the inadequacies of the political class. Since the New Democrats have helped to end welfare as we know it and sought to criminalize the poor as the solution to the problems they helped to create, the only alternative is for people to identify as socialists rather than as whites or any other identity group. The worry that doing so will lead to a reversal of hard-​won gains for women, racial and sexual minorities simply helps the political right do just that. What research on Brexit and the Trump vote indicates is that there is no reason to blame the working class. According to Gurminder K. Bhambra, the Leave vote was led by affluent Eurosceptics and well-​off white middle-​class voters from Southern England.132 About the American case, she argues that “the swing to Trump was carried not so much by the white working-​class vote, but the vote of the white middle class, including college educated white people.”133 Opposite this, many who voted Remain and for Clinton had been impacted by austerity. The fact that Williams’ research defines working-​ class people as those with annual earnings between $41,000 and $132,000 indicates that such researchers are more concerned with the identity aspect of the issue, where whiteness, Bhambra suggests, trumps class issues. Similarly, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land emphasizes white resentment and cultural grievances, which confuses the concerns of the middle class with those of workers, many of whom are not white.134 In much research, Bhambra argues, class is used as a euphemism for racialized identity. She makes this point, however, to highlight the fact that capitalism racializes class privilege. Against “methodological whiteness,” she suggests that class analysis should begin with racialized histories that do not presume that class is more important or more universal than race. For Barbara and Karen Fields, in contrast, too much research takes the category of race for granted.135 The liberal discourse of anti-​racism avoids the class character of American society. Although the Fields sisters agree that talk about the working class often presumes white people, the clarification

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  143 of the matter leads to discussions that emphasize attacks on poor minorities rather than attacks on working people. The connection between labour and the Civil Rights movement that was once taken for granted has shifted to the notion of racist victimization. The success of such anti-​oppression identity politics is that it leaves the economic system intact and undermines political alliances on the left. If everything comes down to white psychology and black prejudice, then the prospect of liberation will be replaced by tribalism, they say. False solutions emerge when people can no longer explain economic processes and their impact on social relations. The history of black struggle in the U.S. has not, strictly speaking, been one of identitarian self-​ affirmation, but has been fought against both racist exclusion from universality and against capitalist exploitation. The notion that today’s capitalists should be equal opportunity exploiters is surely not the best path to equality. Since the Obama and Trump presidencies, much of the theoretical discussion around class and identity in American politics has focused on the success of the Democratic Socialists of America in galvanizing a new generation of activists around struggles that impact representational politics. The DSA added momentum to the Sanders campaign and came under internal and external pressure about the fact that some of its members were pressing for a “class first” agenda. Between 2016 and 2020, the DSA’s membership grew from 6500 to 85,000. In addition to some high-​profile members like Cornel West and Frances Fox Piven, the DSA has been successful in having some of its members elected to Congress, including representatives Alexandria Ocasio-​ Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. As a Morenoist-​type organization with a revisionist interpretation of internationalism, the DSA is often criticized by socialists for toeing the Democratic Party line on questions relating to imperialist foreign policy and the domination of the rank and file through the union apparatus. It strays from the Democrats, however, when it comes to the diversity agenda. According to Miguel Salazar, fault lines exist within the DSA between those who insist that anti-​capitalism must be anti-​ racist, those who criticize liberals for pandering to minorities and avoiding class politics, and those who criticize the universalism of Marxist theory.136 When members of the DSA had been debating Haider’s Mistaken Identity, Adolph Reed raised eyebrows by stating on a podcast that the book smelled like “a truckload of rotten fish.”137 A review of the book in the DSA-​affiliated magazine Jacobin, which was written by Melissa Nascheck in consultation with Reed, was criticized by DSA member Daniel Denvir as class reductionist. By 2018 the class reductionism versus race reductionism game ended with something of a stalemate. The Marxist caucus in the organization, known as Bread and Roses (formerly Spring Caucus and Momentum), was decidedly in favour of a class-​based approach. Other factions, like the NYC DSA Socialist Feminist Working Group and the DSA Afro-​Socialist Caucus, rejected the Sanders-​style focus on economic issues and pressed for more support of BLM. Pointing to those instances where the communist left has failed to defend the cause of anti-​oppression, these caucuses underplay the ways in

144  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum which neoliberalism has taken up identity politics. Class-​wide demands like Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee are deemed oblivious to the problem of systemic racism. This charge tends to come with politicized, revisionist and uninformed descriptions of the ways in which the New Deal underserved black constituencies. Since the Democratic Party does not do enough to mitigate police violence, the BLM and reparations wings of the DSA advocated organizing the black struggle outside the party.138 The race versus class reductionism debate has both paradigmatic and historical references. For some, this has to do with the development of identity struggles since the 1960s. For others, it has to do with the shift from the old to the New Left and therefore with different versions of left politics. For others still, the debate is over postmodern theories, which now pose a problem as people attempt to rehabilitate political analysis along class lines. The class approach, combined with identity politics and postmodernism, causes even people who self-​identify as leftist to attack any form of anti-​capitalist politics that is universalist in orientation rather than differentialist. For example, writing in the radical democracy magazine New Socialist, Uday Jain attacks the “white Marxism” of Jacobin.139 Jain warns that so long as the left refuses to engage with identity politics it will repeat the mistakes of the “white” socialist movements of the Western world. The left should be involved in the struggles of Indigenous, black, queer, feminist, disabled and immigrant movements against all of the above forms of oppression. Although Jacobin is not against anti-​oppression efforts, its tone, he argues, resembles the polemical interventions of people like Vivek Chibber, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed. Jain suggests that the idea that the left has been betrayed by identity politics has the status of a fable. Once upon a time there was a class struggle that was untroubled by identity issues. The fable also narrates how in the 1960s identity struggles were appropriated by the bourgeoisie and weaponized against the left. Obsessed with marginality, the New Left retreated into the academy. According to this narrative, academic leftists have come to misunderstand the nature of class struggle. Jain’s fable of white Marxism is full of elisions and confusions. Jacobin, whose senior editor is of East Indian descent, is now an ostensibly white socialist magazine that is intent on erasing the gains that have been made by feminist, black and Indigenous radical movements in favour of white-​centric class reductionism, which Jain associates with anti-​ Marxist idealism. Jain defends the arguments of scholars like bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, Silvia Federici and Robin D.G. Kelley, arguing that radical feminists and black scholars are being dismissed along with neoliberal centrists. Since identity groups are politically divided and not uniformly leftist, white Marxists refuse to engage with the work of radical queers, black feminists and intersectionalists. Unfortunately, Jain and likeminded angry young identitarians fail to distinguish between the refusal to engage with the work of identitarians and basic disagreement. What makes the aforementioned “white male” intellectuals notable contributors to these

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  145 discussions is the depth of their engagement with what they criticize, which contrasts notably with the premium placed on prejudice in everyday neoliberalism –​a hyperreal form of morality policing that is as hypocritical as it is confused. Even if many leftists now acknowledge the political liabilities of postmodern theories, nothing in today’s pathological public sphere is ever settled it seems. Even the Trump coup attempt has its adherents and deniers. Many on the Jacobin and podcast left denied the significance of January 6, only to correct their mistake after the House Select Committee investigations much later confirmed what had already been revealed by the international press before, during and after the event. In the era of woke hysteria, the merest indiscretion is enough to meet with social condemnation and career destruction. While neoliberal governments have rooted out all genuine socialism, one can only imagine what will soon happen in academia to young scholars who have the acumen and courage to uphold radical leftist principles. It is not only that cooler heads must prevail but that culture wars are not predisposed to such outcomes. Writing for Jacobin, Nivedita Majumdar insists that capitalist exploitation is the same worldwide.140 The best way to advance socialism is not to begin with identity but with capitalism, private property regimes, work conditions and the loss of autonomy. The charge that socialism is Western, she argues, is an idea that is itself Western and that is now used by elites in non-​Western nations to defeat left solidarity. The internationalism of the left was understood by past revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Che Guevara. The notion that socialism is Western, and to extrapolate, that Marxism is white, or male, or heterosexual, is a result of five decades of neoliberal assault on working people, leading to an overall weakening of the left, its organizations and its intellectual cadres. Today’s anti-​racism is by and large an ideology of clientelist race brokerage that was developed by Cold War liberals and is now supported by neoliberal elites. This can be seen in the debacles around the corruption of BLM leadership and the uses of pro-​BLM donations by economic elites to further their own interests. That some advocates of intersectional anti-​racism have socialist values does not by itself convince all leftists of the same things or to the same extent. For the sake of political clarification, the contributions of left intellectuals cannot be evaluated, strictly speaking, on a case-​by-​case basis, and so clusters of agreement must be discerned. The case of Viewpoint magazine, for example, is one in which certain tendencies cohere, albeit, in this case, around methodologies that have been generated by postmodern academia and that are now retrospectively applied to the history of radicalism. For all its fiery rhetoric, Viewpoint tends to reinscribe the petty-​ bourgeois politics of the postwar generation. This can be noticed in David I. Backer and Kate Cairns’s discussion of the class and identity problem.141 As these authors correctly understand, it is the resurgence of the left that causes problems between class politics and identity politics. Taking a CRC stance that supposedly challenges the universalist vision of socialism, they propose

146  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum a “coalition” between the universality of class struggle and the positionality of identity politics. They write: Whereas universalism constructs flattening generalities and identity deconstructs wholes into fragmented histories and experiences, we propose a rearticulation process: acknowledge differences, permit fragments to break apart, and then work with the pieces to build a collective aiming at liberatory change. Universalism and identity can work together as concepts –​since they do in reality.142 This combination of leftist anti-​ capitalism with radical democratic discourse theory is a strange mix indeed. To begin, positionality, by itself, is not a radical politics. The notion that class consciousness is an early form of standpoint epistemology is exemplary of the kind of confusion that emerges when Enlightenment concepts are processed in the postmodern blender. The ­universalism that Backer and Cairns refer to is not an emancipatory universalism but capitalist universalism. In other words, what they understand as universalism is rather the concept of hegemony. Universality is a philosophical and not a post-​structuralist concept. To understand universality in the terms of discourse theory is to avoid what it is that discourse theory does and does not offer, and to then funnel the riches of Marxist social theory into the coffers of those who would bankrupt socialism. Socialism represents the destruction of class society, not its diversification. The postmodern leftism that is promoted by Viewpoint magazine is the type that makes the black feminism of the CRC the lever that renders socialism suspect. Those who are not convinced that Marxism and socialism will make the world a better place for feminists and anti-​racists are those who are not convinced that socialism and Marxism can make the world a better place. The pseudo-​Gramscian theory of articulation that was once put forward by Laclau and Mouffe is ultimately a bourgeois politics that either shores up identities or flexibilizes them. As most “sectarian” leftists understand, it is not identity that gives stability to politics, it is principles, organizations and programmes. In the 1960s, identity issues were known as identity struggles and not identity politics. Much of today’s confusion can be attributed to the mistaken notion that forms of oppression that are based on differences of identity have a political dimension that is distinct from the idea of politics as a specific sphere of knowledge. Postmodern understandings of social justice lead to identity-​based forms of opposition that repress the universal dimension and thereby legitimize forms of injustice that one would have hitherto criticized on moral terms or condemned as regressive. This is how Leon Trotsky, in his criticism of fascist nationalism, rejected what we would today refer to as the reductionist aspect of identity politics: In order to raise it above history, the nation is given the support of the race. History is viewed as the emanation of the race. The qualities of the race are

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  147 construed without relation to changing social conditions. Rejecting “economic thought” as base, National Socialism descends a stage lower: from economic materialism it appeals to zoological materialism. The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-​educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas. In order to create the religion of pure German blood, Hitler was obliged to borrow at second hand the ideas of racism from a Frenchman, Count Gobineau, a diplomat and a literary dilettante. Hitler found the political methodology ready-​made in Italy, where Mussolini had borrowed largely from the Marxist theory of the class struggle.143 In the postwar period, identitarians who were smart enough to perceive the affinity between Garveyism, Zionism, Hindutva and Hitlerism hitched their wagons to the left. This gave their concern to make a progressive politics out of identity some respectability. Today’s identitarians, who fight tooth and nail for a postmodern redefinition of the left, are not socialists but petty-​ bourgeois activists who presume a unique and special way of knowing. Their elitist displeasure with “white” radicalism is rather a conformist intolerance of politics as such. Feminists and anti-​racists can support Marxists and Marxism. A feminist can be Marxist. This does not imply that feminism is the same thing as Marxism. An anti-​racist does not necessarily distinguish between class factions and class interests. A Marxist does. Identitarians do not simply want to make the left more inclusive. Identitarians also put pressure on people to specify themselves and their demands from an identitarian perspective. As Shuja Haider puts it, people of colour on the nominal left are often told to narrow their demands from the universal to the particular.144 Haider rejects the idea of a “white” working class as a reification and a scapegoat that blames workers and exonerates the middle and upper classes for the shift towards right-​wing politics. The failure of the woke left, he says, is seen in the way that its strategies of social justice activism are now used by neoliberals and white supremacists. Also writing for Viewpoint magazine, Salar Mohandesi attempts to trace the roots of identity politics in the socialist movements of the pre-​WWII period. He similarly presumes that the “class reductionist” critics do not know what they are talking about and use only “hackneyed” formulas when they “brandish” words like class.145 Mohandesi suggests that identity politics should define itself against class reductionism, which he reduces to “the specific demands of a particular kind of skilled, male, and often white industrial worker in the capitalist heartland,” whose top-​down concerns are made to stand in for everyone else.146 He telescopes the anti-​racism efforts of the CPUSA with anti-​colonial movements, the Civil Rights movement and the separatist identity movements of the 1960s. This potted history allows the author to avoid the socialist critique of identity politics. Reducing socialism to the figure of the straight white male blue-​collar worker, and then mocking and

148  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum isolating that figure as the subject-​supposed-​to-​lead-​the-​revolution, results in making all workers more vulnerable. Rather than “returning” to class –​as if class society disappeared along with postmodern theory and neoliberal policy –​Mohandesi advocates the invention of more effective concepts, like class composition and articulation, which he argues do not oppose class to identity. For him, the fact that identity has no automatic link to politics helps to explain why people adopt alien or self-​defeating positions. Indeed. Yet for Mohandesi, it is this autonomy of identity that opens the space for politics and for contradictory alliances. One can see how this pseudo-​Gramscian and radical democratic approach turns socialism into lefty opportunism. Marxist dialectics is not a politics of articulation, it is a critique of bourgeois ideology and capitalist relations of domination. That supposedly left scholars attempt to use Marxist concepts like class reductionism, vulgar Marxism and economism against the socialist movement is less a reason to abandon class politics than to make a better effort to understand it. One of the most notable critics of identity politics on the social democratic left is Adolph Reed, Jr. A founding member of the U.S. Labor Party, Reed has for decades been involved in trade unionism and resistance to the ideology of black clientelism. His political analysis of the concept of institutional racism as a postwar liberal ideological construct has consistently opposed black capitalism and the tokenistic admission of African Americans to the class of political elites and the upper echelons of the economic hierarchy. In Class Notes, Reed criticizes the “flight from concreteness” in leftist theory, which he says is due to sectarian baggage and the defeatist pessimism of postmodern theories.147 In his view, the left has become satisfied with symbolic victories and has avoided the responsibility of building mass organizations around objectives that ordinary working people recognize as their own concerns. The transformation of left politics through post-​structuralism and deconstruction has led to a preference for strategies of resistance and the transgression of social norms that overestimate the relevance of identity and ignore the concerns of most citizens. As part of the linguistic and cultural turn in postmodern theory, the advancement of minorities at elite universities has strengthened the role of the professional-​managerial class whose interest-​group claims to representativity belies their commitment to decentring totalizing projects.148 For Reed, concepts drawn from Cultural Studies, like difference, destabilization and standpoint epistemology, lead to the kind of indefensible politics according to which being classified as X is supposed to give someone special insight into the understanding of X. Class categories, in contrast, do not make claims to separateness and at the same time cut across categories of gender, race and sexuality. “Cultural politics and identity politics are class politics,” Reed writes. “They are manifestations within the political economy of academic life and the left-​liberal public sphere –​journals and magazines, philanthropic foundations, the world of ‘public intellectuals’ –​of the petit bourgeois, brokerage politics of interest-​group pluralism.”149 What distinguishes his work on these issues is his contribution to understanding

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  149 how the elite brokerage of interest-​group politics and NGO activism has been developed as the “default mode” of American liberal politics, serving a small percentage of upwardly mobile individuals and undermining working-​class organizations. The politics of recognition have resulted in a limited upward redistribution of wealth for a small number of people, whose symbolic representativeness has little to no effect on advancing democracy and instead mitigates mass mobilization through organizational means. With regard to the identity reductionism versus class reductionism ping pong game, Reed is unambiguous: The crucial distinction is not that class is in some way more real or authentic than other identities, though it is certainly possible to argue that in this society class –​as functional location in the system of social reproduction –​is the social relation through which other identities are constituted and experienced within political economy. Even without elaborating that theoretical argument, however, there is a pragmatic justification that is sufficient for taking class as the identity around which to organize.150 In other words, anyone who is serious about progressive social transformation should be involved in building mass movements around universal issues like labour rights, unionization, employment, social services, health care, housing, education, child and elder care. In a co-​authored article with Merlin Chowkwanyun on the subject of racial disparity research, Reed and Chowkwanyun argue that neoliberal ideology is effective even when it highlights racial inequalities in economic insecurity, policing and incarceration, employment, health care and education.151 The left’s emphasis on institutional racism, they argue, does little more than virtue signal woke awareness of problems, leaving unhelpful analytical presuppositions intact. Debates that pit race analysis against class analysis, for example, transform class into a cultural and behavioural category, thereby making race into a static standard for measuring economic and cultural disparities. What appear as racial disparities are in actuality embedded in other structural variables. Tautological references to one disparity are used to explain others. The result is the kind of anti-​racist moral exhortation that leads to liberal policy solutions like affirmative action that have limited potential for understanding histories, institutions, labour markets, political regimes, gentrification, and so on. Thinking in race-​specific terms has become a growth industry, they argue, and now encompasses analyses of whiteness that ignore the problems of market imperatives. Advancing the interests of (black) capitalists ignores class inequality within racial groups. Racial disparity discourse is thus promoted by both conservative think tanks and by those who would defend affirmative action against conservatives and against ideals of meritocracy. Both positions ignore the broader political economy. In addition, appeals to the enduring legacy of racism and Jim Crow segregation have the unintended

150  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum effect of accommodating capitalist ideology. The rhetoric of racial uplift mirrors capitalist entrepreneurialism and recycles negative stereotypes for the sake of non-​left solutions. Through the obsession with identity politics, the left comes to accept neoliberal solutions to what is viewed as systemic and structural racism. People blame white racism rather than financialization. The discourse of racial disparity, they conclude, is a class discourse that is compatible with neoliberalism because it obscures the forces that increase inequality and undermines the methods that could challenge them.152 To the extent that the left has replaced a politics of social democracy with what Preston Smith refers to as a politics of racial democracy, Reed and his colleague Walter Benn Michaels refer to this and related trends as left neoliberalism. Left neoliberalism focuses on what economist Paul Krugman refers to as “horizontal equality,” the replacement of a more egalitarian distribution of wealth with the concern that every segment of class society has a proportional number of women and minorities. Because the anti-​ discrimination model of social justice legitimizes class inequality, it works to further impoverish the majority of women and people of colour that it is supposed to defend. But not just that. By impoverishing the majority of the population, it strengthens the political right by turning people against the politics of anti-​oppression. Racial sensitivity training and awareness sessions in the workplace become another means through which neoliberal ideology secures consent for relations of class domination. The work of Reed and Michaels is important to the class and identity debate because it issues from the U.S., where the history of slavery and segregation has given a significant role to ideologies of ascriptive difference that are used to stabilize and justify social hierarchies. As a materialist, Reed traces the need for such ideologies to their social foundations. While many postmodernists reject this as an approach that treats race as an epiphenomenon of the material base, postmodernists do not provide better explanations of the changing relation of narratives and classificatory schemes to political and economic conditions; they instead reify categories like race or whiteness and contribute to political obfuscation. Treating race as an independent variable leads to racial liberalism, Reed argues, to moralistic arguments that are idealistic and politically defeatist.153 The rubric of diversity thus legitimizes the pursuit of equal opportunity within capitalist relations. This leads in academic discourse to the resurgence of racial and biological determinism, which makes egalitarian aims even more difficult to achieve. For Reed, as for Michaels, anti-​racism and anti-​sexism are laudable goals but they have nothing to do with left politics. Insofar as these goals substitute for working-​ class politics, they ultimately increase disparities. Diversity serves the needs of a capitalist system in which discrimination is illegal, but poverty and labour exploitation are not. Anti-​racism and anti-​sexism become a politics of the class of people for whom equality can be defined in the terms of neoliberalism. As Michaels puts it: “identity politics is not an alternative to class politics but a form of it: it’s the politics of an upper class that has no problem

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  151 with seeing people left behind as long as they haven’t been left behind because of their race or sex.”154 Michaels and Reed therefore assert the centrality of class and argue that for anyone who is concerned with social progress, class matters more than race and gender. Since we live at a moment when neoliberalism is the ideology of not only the ruling class but most of the academic sector, Reed and Michaels have much to offer. However, there are debates that are internal to the left that they tend to avoid for what seems like pragmatic reasons. This is because socialism is so marginal in the U.S. that anything left of social democracy is thought to be a self-​defeating waste of time. From a socialist perspective, there are nevertheless limits to their approach. Indeed, Reed and Michaels’ conflation of “self-​satisfied, moralizing youthful” diversitarians with “decrepit troglodytes steeped in their nostalgic Trotskyite fantasies” is designed to clear the board when it comes to Marxism.155 An editorial statement by Jacobin magazine editor John-​Baptist Oduor in the online journal nonsite that was co-​founded by Michaels and Reed claims, on October 20, 2023, that successful United Auto Workers contract negotiations with the Big Three automotive industries in Fall 2023 (Ford, GM, Stellantis –​highly profitable companies, with annual profits in the hundreds of billions, whose shareholders are enriched by government tax cuts) demonstrate that such unions can help to build working-​class identity in the absence of radical political parties.156 Ignoring the fact that class is not a matter of identity, Oduor and the DSA tendency that he represents are not only beholden to the Democratic Party and its foreign policy criminality, but inflate the achievements of the UAW under the leadership of Sean Fain, a backroom negotiator who in this time period, as Trotskyists will remind social democrats, called for limited “stand up” strikes (rejected by 97 percent of workers, who voted for an all-​out strike) that allowed the manufacturers to avoid losses and then lied to union members that success means small gains that are below inflation (based on 2009 COLA formulas that fail to keep up with the 40 percent rise in inflation, which is part of a greater decline in real wages by 30 percent since the early 1990s), plant closures (19 facilities will be closed), relocations, mass layoffs (especially in the transition to electric vehicles and through retirement buyouts), rejection of the demand for company-​paid pensions and retiree health benefits, and the perpetuation of lower-​tiered “perma-​temp” workers. Eager to avoid further strike activity, the UAW sent striking members their remaining strike pay before the contract was voted on. Meanwhile, automotive executives reassured investors that these small gains will be offset by increased efficiency.157 Making the international connection between workers, William Lehman was the only UAW candidate for president who called on workers to join their allies in Belgium, Spain and elsewhere to halt the production and shipment of weapons to Israel during the 2023 assault on Gaza. This came after mass protests worldwide. The UAW, along with its affiliates in the AFL-​CIO, the American Federation of Teachers and the Teamsters, supports the defence

152  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum industry and imperialist misadventures abroad. It is not for no reason that the UAW tells its members to not read the rank-​and-​file-​focused World Socialist Web Site, and this while having no quarrel with the pro-​bureaucracy writers at Jacobin, or commentators like Jordan Chariton, Richard Wolff and Kshama Sawant. The proposed agreements that were hailed by Jacobin contributors Nelson Lichtenstein as an “unmitigated victory for the entire working class” and Dan DiMaggio as “a master class in how to flex worker power” were immediately voted down by UAW members in Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana, New York, Ohio and Maryland, many of whom had voted the same contract down one month earlier.158 When the contract was declared ratified, suspicions of ballot fraud and vote rigging immediately arose among the rank and file. As it happens, the writers at the WSWS have a line on identity issues that comes closer to the work of Reed and Michaels than any other news source. Trotsky’s critique of zoological materialism, mentioned above, predates their critique of race reductionism by almost a century. The problem here is not simply the absence of radical left parties, but the capitulation of those left parties we have to social democracy in the era of postwar welfarism and then to the political right in the era of neoliberalism, which Mike Macnair argues has shifted politics from what must be done to what is possible within the constraints established by capitalism, as argued by Sawant.159 The problem that Macnair identifies among today’s left is ideological opposition to socialism, which shifts the focus from militancy and councils to new social movement protest or labour struggles that are pre-​empted by anti-​strike legislation and begin to resemble single-​issue media campaigns. How can people fight for their class interests when, for example, a party like Syriza (Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left-​Progressive Alliance) implemented E.U. austerity and then handed the leadership to a banker (Stefanos Kasselakis) who had worked for an investment firm (Goldman Sachs) and then for an imperialist think tank (the Centre for Strategic and International Studies), celebrates capitalism as a tool of prosperity, promotes privatization, layoffs, tax cuts and wage suppression, and expresses solidarity with Israeli genocide? The Trotskyist movement has long argued that petty-​bourgeois scepticism about the role of the working class and revolutionary parties is the kind of labour party reformism that subordinates a revolutionary programme to trade union bureaucracies.160 This tends to reinforce the bourgeois ideology of pragmatism that since the Carter administration and globalization transformed unions into the tools of management. In terms of the Reed–​ Wood debate, Reed and Chowkwanyun reject the notion, as Wood put it, that race is not constitutive of capitalism.161 However, Reed elsewhere denies that he is either race first or class first and says instead that he is capitalism first.162 In saying this, he places himself in the same framework as Wood, in fact, who also does not ignore racial and gender exclusion. One reason why Reed has focused some of his criticism on Wood is that, despite their differences, her work falls within the same terms

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  153 of discussion as his. On this count, there would be far more disagreement between Reed and the dialectical materialism of Žižek than with a historical materialist like Wood. Reed’s advocacy of “problem-​driven research” rather than the “readymade narratives” of Marxist orthodoxy makes his praxis more historical and pragmatic than theoretical. The tendency of historians and political science researchers to reject theoretical abstraction is a problem that was addressed as early as Marx’s critique of Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy and Lenin’s critique of trade union economism in What Is to Be Done?163 According to Deborah Kelsh, social democratic economism is the context in which culturalism –​the sort that Reed criticizes –​emerges as a partial or immanent dimension of the social.164 Despite such considerations, Reed’s conception of a historical materialist analysis in which race and class are distinct “inflections” of capitalist hierarchy does much to dispel the moralism of anti-​oppression as an a priori ontology that is conceived independently of capitalist social relations. What happens though when identity becomes part of the post-​Fordist valorization process? What happens after identity politics have been broadly accepted by leftists and liberals alike, as we have seen to be the case with radical democrats, postmodernists, intersectionalists, populists and autonomist anarchists? Getting rid of a mechanistic identity-​class discussion is certainly a worthy goal, especially in the American context, but one has difficulty getting rid of something that has not been understood. Despite a strong defence of very reasonable claims, Reed has been subjected to an absurd amount of criticism by even those on the left. In one instance of this, Mike Harman attacks Reed’s work as an instance of “leftist anti-​wokeness.”165 Reed’s critique of the black political class, Harman argues, leads Reed to reject anti-​racist politics, defining the race line as consistent with neoliberal redefinitions of equality. For Harman, the indiscriminate rejection of all identity politics is fundamentally flawed about history and about how to overcome the limits of progressive neoliberalism. Many advocates of identity are also Marxist, he counters, and many 60s movements articulated their demands along internationalist class lines. To advocate a class politics that dismisses intersectionality and campus activism ignores, he argues, its emergence within the black feminism of the 1960s. Like Mohandesi, Harman gets his edge on Reed by drawing on the communist critique of state politics, which is common on the ultra-​left and radical black left. Such “sectarian” political movements, as Reed calls them, do not place any hope in political parties or in trade unionism. Even though Reed considers aspects of the Civil Rights movement to be worthy of emulation today, especially A. Philip Randolph’s 1967 Freedom Budget for All Americans, Harman draws on labour history to emphasize the fight against racism within the trade union movement. For the period 1960 to 1980, Reed criticizes mostly black politicians and –​supposedly –​ignores the recuperation of the labour movement. His target should therefore be, according to Harman, the representational sphere of government rather than identity

154  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum politics. However, just as Reed is not unaware of these issues, Harman is not likely unaware of the limits of those autonomous groups that have had far less of an impact on the totality than the workers’ movement. Harman wishes to locate race and gender struggles firmly within the history of class struggle, from the Spanish Civil War to the AFL-​CIO and BLM. The problem, though, is that race and gender, let alone sexuality, cannot be located firmly anywhere in politics. Marx and Engels have certainly written about race and gender, as has Reed. What Harman adds to the discussion is the Marxist rejection of redistributionist politics within the structure of the nation-​state. Criticizing Reed’s politics as “warmed-​over Lassallean social democracy,” which assesses the strength of the working class rather than the struggle for the abolition of class and wage labour, does not in any way undermine Reed’s critique of identity politics, however. One could ask Harman to provide examples of cases where, rather than the successful redistribution of wealth and improvement of social conditions, the radical left has effectively abolished capitalism. Contrary to Harman’s criticism, Reed is not indifferent to recognition. Rather, and in contrast to the way that conservatives and neoliberals tend to understand these issues, Reed has a leftist critique of recognition as a middle-​class politics. Like Harman, and far more radically in fact, Reed rejects the dichotomy of race and class. Rejecting class representation through trade unions and political parties, Harman’s ultra-​leftism is more sophist than sectarian. Referring to BLM as an example of the kind of single-​issue movements that help to build solidarity networks, Harman, like most ultra-​ leftists, would prefer to avoid the difficulties of leadership, co-​optation and demobilization that are endemic to all post-​left movements. These difficulties cannot be avoided with slogans like “no borders,” “abolish police” or “decolonize.” The notion that movements like BLM are essential to fight capitalism is simply dubious. When in February 2021 the Conservative government under Boris Johnson announced a review to criminalize left-​wing extremism in the U.K., which associated BLM and Extinction Rebellion with the far left, BLM representative Remi Adekoya stated that socialist left involvement is a “threat to the BLM movement” and that BLM has no interest in “bringing down capitalism.”166 The endless back and forth on these issues caused Reed and Michaels to issue a summary of their main criticism of the diversity agenda as it had been developing over the 2000s. Their co-​authored essay, “The Trouble with Disparity,” asserts how it is that racial disparity discourse, whether in relation to police violence or COVID-​19 deaths, systematically assumes that such disparities are caused by racism and that the solution is anti-​racism.167 The growth of class inequality, they argue, is a more important variable. Since anti-​racism cannot solve the problem of black poverty, and all that comes with it, anti-​racism inadvertently justifies inequality. To the extent that progress is limited to overcoming the wealth gap between racial groups, racial wealth equality would eliminate only 0.03 percent of the wealth gap. Since

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  155 disparity discourse does not identify or explain the causes of disparities, the insistence on systemic racism is pernicious. Black household income declined between the years 1968 and 2016 because of neoliberal policies. The fact that commentators of various sorts think of the economic advancement of a few blacks as valuable symbolic motivation says something about the depth of capitalist ideology in American politics. It is a hard pill to swallow for many to think that anti-​oppression validates inequality. Social democrats, Reed and Michaels argue, understand that since most blacks are working-​ class they would disproportionately benefit from redistribution policies. Against this, the Democrats and the PMC advocate racial democracy and reject universal programmes. Anti-​racism, as advocated by The New York Times and The Atlantic, naturalizes the capitalist system and liberal morality. When asking why it is that Americans use race as a proxy for class, Reed and Michaels tend to avoid the fact that practically all cultural and knowledge production, even political activity, has been affected by the neoliberalization of institutions. Identity struggles now function as neoliberal disinfotainment and police violence as neo-​fascist diversion. If nineteenth-​century racism is a failed project, so is today’s anti-​racism. However, just as science was needed to dismiss scientific racism, cultural theory is needed if one is to fully understand and criticize today’s woke wars. While the moralizing both-​and (race and class) posture of post-​class activists is certainly misconstrued, it is not enough to advocate political-​economic analysis and labour struggle above everything else. On this score, Michaels has some important ideas to add to Reed. It takes a postmodernist to understand one –​or at least someone who has done the reading. In The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History, Michaels offers a refreshing critique of what he refers to as contemporary post-​historicism.168 The essence of today’s ideology, he argues throughout this book, is the shift from belief, defined as political commitments and values, to difference, understood in terms of being and identity. Post-​ historicism defines the shift from questions of epistemology to ontology. The fact that we now speak about how it is that absolutely everything matters, from race to words and butterflies flapping their wings on the other side of the planet, indicates that our sense of materialism has lost sight of its object and has become a commitment to meaninglessness. The postmodern shift from writer and text to reader and interpretation, or from production to consumption, makes writing and production less meaningful than the variations among readers who read and interpret differently. Since different interpretations of something are solipsistic and do not tell us anything certain about it, the world of post-​history can be defined as a world in which the affect and identity of human subjects have become more important than the results of their reasoning. However, ontology can make matters of epistemology more confused since there is no subject that is fully independent of symbolic reality nor fully reducible to it. If the cogito is not to be completely subsumed as the effect of structures, as advocated by anti-​humanist

156  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum discourse theories, or by autonomist anarcho-​Marxism, then the identity of an author must not be more important than their intention. The fact that the identity of the author is what matters today is related to the way that postmodernism places more emphasis on the reader. Even if meaning can only ever be virtual, what is nevertheless evacuated in contemporary literary theory is the meaning of a work. Our disputes today are about identity rather than culture and politics. In culture as in politics, the premium placed on identity is directly related to the decline of socialism and the success of the idea that History and ideology have ended. “Only at the end of history,” Michaels writes, “could all politics become identity politics.”169 Novels by writers like Toni Morrison, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kathy Acker and Samuel Delaney, or theories by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Richard Rorty, prioritize culture, experience and reductive forms of materialism that reconfigure ideology around identity. This explains the resurgence of past experiences like colonial genocide, slavery and the Holocaust as efforts to reimagine history, and therefore the present, without the inconvenience of political beliefs. The crimes of the past, Michaels argues, gain salience today because they confer identity and distinctiveness. The past, understood genealogically, is less a matter of public history than a causal account of identity groups. Nothing illustrates this notion better than the failed New York Times 1619 Project, which reframes American history as a narrative about racism. Making history into a matter of possession, the American Revolution and Civil War are stolen from public consciousness as moments of universal emancipation and remade into shameful episodes that demonstrate the timeless condition of racism through the limitations of the founding fathers and leaders of the Civil War. Those historians who contested this rewriting of history with factual corrections were nevertheless denounced by the project leader, Nikole Hannah-​Jones, on the basis that most of them were white males.170 Today’s indulgent reimagining and rewriting of history is less instructive than it is disciplined by the neoliberal consciousness industry. The 2016 film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies inadvertently represents this invasion of ontology against the cultural legacy of the Enlightenment. The pseudo-​materialist emphasis on bodies and affects in contemporary theory –​genders, sexualities, races, languages –​only exists to underscore the post-​ political aspect of differences. Moreover, the anti-​ essentialist commitment to the idea that identities are fluid, hybrid, impure or inconsistent only underscores the primacy of identity over ideology.171 Dramas of inclusion and exclusion, Michaels argues, also function as techniques for the suppression of universality. Whereas all cultures and individuals are theoretically equal, socio-​economic classes are not and cannot be. One might think that this is why social justice activists feel compelled to emphasize the “whiteness” of the working class or of Marxism, as if class or ideology by itself does not satisfy the post-​political imperative to deconstruct politics and reconstruct all knowledge into cultural categories.

Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism  157 Michaels’ project is nothing less than the dismantling of postmodernism. Two questions that emerge from this are: 1) does this dismantling require that we return to modernism, and 2) how is avant-​gardism distinct from both modernism and postmodernism? The second question is difficult to answer given the decline of communism. The pretence that we live in a classless society allows people to more easily emphasize racism and sexism since it is not perceived that identity politics are advanced at the expense of social equality. This allows blacks for instance to reclaim the legacy of slavery, or Jews to reclaim the experience of the Holocaust, rather than repudiate capitalism and fascism. Slavery, Native genocide and the Holocaust confirm the notion of race, providing an exclusive, ethno-​national purchase on contemporary social problems. It can do this while at the same time upholding the idea of equal opportunity under liberal capitalism. Whereas the class struggle forces people to choose sides, differences of identity are not a matter of disagreement. One language, culture or identity group can be said to be equal to another but cannot be said to be superior. English is not more or less true than French. The same goes for the theory of performativity, which examines social practices without being concerned with questions of truth and meaning. A postmodern text, or a performance, like a code or a virus, can neither lie nor tell the truth. Since truth is viewed with suspicion, Michaels argues, campus politics have become more a matter of coercing people than convincing them. It is now enough in academia to have strong feelings, which require no justification, for experience to be accepted as the basis of knowledge. In what seems to be agreement with Badiou’s philosophy, Michaels says that we only disagree about what is taken to be true. He writes: “it is only the idea that something that is true must be true for everyone that makes disagreement between anyone make sense.”172 If someone is a communist, they must believe that communism is better for everyone than capitalism. Since the criterion of truth cannot reasonably apply to differences of identity, post-​historicists reject universalism as a way to determine agreement. Universalism is remade by post-​historicists into a white, male (masculinist) or Eurocentric conspiracy. Since universality cannot be occupied as a subject position, it is subject to disagreement on the meaning of what is true. Post-​ historicist post-​politics prefers identity because with identity there is only incommensurability, difference and language games, not disagreement. This is why, for Michaels, the argument that identity politics has been co-​opted by neoliberalism is irrelevant. The shift from different politics to different subject positions masks our post-​ideological condition. Social constructionism reinforces this fundamental problem by reducing ideology to questions of power. Some of what Michaels argues here, which tends to be formal in approach, would avoid how it is that we can understand nationalism as bourgeois ideology. By the same token, much of what is defined as identity politics can be understood in class terms as petty-​bourgeois ideology. Pierre Bourdieu’s

158  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum theory of petty-​bourgeois misrecognition describes the post-​Enlightenment habitus of a subject who does not know what they think they believe.173 Belief, contrary to what Michaels suggests, implies a gap between subject and object. One cannot directly confront the contingency of beliefs as one does one’s own identity, at least not in the terms of psychoanalysis. Belief is the zero degree of subjective destitution out of which a political subject decides what it is that defines and determines them –​what they believe. To the extent that Michaels’ cultural theory lacks a theory of the subject, the truth of subjectivity, beyond the question of intention, never enters his discussions of language or difference. In other words, what we have is difference without contradiction. This is not so much a criticism of his work as it is a point of limitation. The same could be said about Bourdieu’s sociology. In the conclusion to The Shape of the Signifier, Michaels mentions how the rise of terrorism is consistent with the shift from political beliefs, which were once tied to the fate of nations, to that of identities. Hardt and Negri’s Empire in this regard correctly describes the way in which ideology is replaced by neoliberal regimes with the biopolitical notion of struggles over forms of life. Reducing politics to the infinite multiplicity of bodies and languages, as Badiou puts it, Hardt and Negri see only processes of becoming, mutation and desire. Michaels includes in this Žižek’s analysis of 9/​11 in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, which Michaels says ignores the reasons for the attack and reduces the action to an inauthentic pseudo-​event. In Žižek’s defence, one would be hard-​pressed to describe Al Qaeda, and its American enablers, as anything more than a terrorist organization. There are causes worth dying for in Žižek’s work, but Islamist extremism is not one of them, because, and in Michaels’ terms, a religion that has become an identity politics fails the test of universalism. As someone who argues that revolution is defined by “what happens the morning after,” 9/​11 was hardly a radical act that changed the order of global governance. Nor was it meant to. Although Žižek’s thought cannot be made into an instance of post-​historicism, since Žižek’s work is stridently critical of historicism, Michaels’ critique of Hardt and Negri’s “ontological universality” of nomadism and deconstructive appeal to commonality describes perfectly how it is that today’s postmodernists have learned to appreciate the economically poor, the homeless and refugees rather than fight to eradicate the neoliberal governance that makes these conditions into matters of identity. 6  Socialism and Communism The Marxist and communist critique of identity politics is not only the most comprehensive, but also the most demanding. It is less an irony than a matter of political struggle that the most encompassing perspective is the one that is least understood and appreciated. Since the liberal bourgeois perspective is the dominant ideology, it can readily appeal to the abstract universality of cultures, languages and bodies as validation of the concrete universality of

Socialism and Communism  159 capital. Because of this, the Marxist perspective is called on to justify itself to identity groups in ways that capitalism need not since capitalism is the default, and therefore, most realistic orientation. The possibility that socialism can overcome the contradictions of capitalism is a problem that is inherent to capitalism. However, capitalism can revolutionize itself in many ways. New knowledge has been one of the ways that the Marxist method, and by extension communist politics, has been made to seem obsolete. Capitalism, one is led to think, never ages. Capitalism revolutionizes its own ideology, which is why the petty-​bourgeois orientation of post-​historical post-​politics makes leftist challenges to capitalist ideology more difficult. Communism requires far more than countercultural attitudes and the bohemian lifestyle politics of the intermediary professional-​managerial class, which recycles the motifs of nineteenth-​century Romanticism, fin-​de-​siècle decadence and modernist aestheticism. Add to this the “revolutions” in technology and financialization, which appear to some on the left as solutions to contemporary problems, and one comes to appreciate that the socialist movement has more difficulties to confront than only the demobilization of the workers’ movement since neoliberalization. At this point in our discussion, it may seem redundant to outline the socialist position on identity politics. A few themes nevertheless remain unexamined. There is in essence no difference between the terms socialism and communism, except for the developmental notion that socialism is a preliminary stage towards communism in which the features of bourgeois democracy remain active. This could imply parliamentarism, socialist ownership of some industries, a global order divided between capitalist and socialist nations, and so on. Marx believed that class contradictions and economic laws of motion made communism the progressive way to overcome the problems created by capitalism. Key to the question of politics was the view that ideas and ideology are conditioned by material interests. Whereas for Marxists this refers to the political economy and universal history, postmodern materialists have extended the idea of “material interests” and “needs” to encompass cultural differences. Capitalism and even fascism can accommodate different formulations of non-​Marxist materialism. For the most part socialist issues cannot be posed from the perspective of the way things are, but only from a class perspective that is oriented towards liberating society from capitalist class relations. The necessary conflict that Marxism describes between the working class and the capitalist class cuts across all identity issues, including religion and nationalism. In this regard, Marxist social theory is progressive, taking from bourgeois materialism and the scientific revolution the Enlightenment belief that the world is knowable and that social relations can be improved. The dialectical emphasis on the contradictory character of nature and human nature further allowed scientific socialism to combine with developments in science, technology, management, physics, philosophy and psychoanalysis. In addition, the application of Marxist ideology in different political contexts throughout the twentieth

160  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum century has caused Marxism-​Leninism to develop in variable and conflictual directions, with Stalinism, Trotskyism, Titoism, Maoism and Castroism being only some of the most well-​known. While these developments have had a profound impact on geopolitics, the differences among them tend to be irrelevant to contemporary academic theory, where even the basic tenets of Marxism are dismissed as “orthodox,” a tendency that developed in the postwar period when postmodern thinkers and many former communists went on the offensive against the doctrines of Stalinist parties. It goes without saying that left politics has suffered considerable setbacks due to the excesses of communist regimes. For many in neoliberal academia, the association of left politics with totalitarianism is enough to reject the politics of Marxism and socialism. Whereas many who remain committed to leftist principles and politics have made the pragmatic decision to persevere through New Left, radical democratic, postmodern, new social movement, NGO, populist and intersectional adaptation to an all-​of-​the-​above eclecticism that can have an anarchist, socialist, Marxist or social democratic orientation, sometimes as the need arises, a very small number continue to advance ideas that are worthy of the radical legacy. Among these is the critical theorist Gregory Meyerson. In an uncommonly lucid text, titled “Post-​ Marxism as Compromise Formation,” Meyerson describes how postmodern anti-​Enlightenment combined with post-​1989 anti-​communism to create the kinds of “postalities” we find today in practically every sphere of knowledge, culture and politics.174 The post-​Marxist attack on dialectics and against the universalism of class struggle has given prominence to thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Derrida. This has led not only to arbitrary pluralism but to a distorted understanding of Marxism. Among those who have advanced post-​Marxist identity politics to mediate questions of agency and structure are Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Cornel West, Stuart Hall and Stanley Aronowitz. In the works of such Cultural Studies authors, Meyerson argues, social structure is defined along the lines of discourse theory. While Meyerson also addresses the methods of Freudo-​Marxists, his criticism overlooks how it is that both capitalist and fascist ideology make use of identity to displace the class and labour conflict. Nevertheless, he is right to distinguish Western Marxism from communist internationalism.175 One problem for us today is that the Foucauldian deconstruction of norms also undermines psychoanalytic explanation. In addition, the schizanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari remakes Marxist criticism into theories of becoming that are bereft of explanatory value since everything is thought to be hyper-​contingent, defined by Deleuze in the terms of transcendental metaphysics. The thought of Foucault and Deleuze combines in post-​Marxist academia to produce the kind of discursive historicism that approaches difference as rhizomatic and rejects class politics as a form of totalizing abstraction. Marxism is disingenuously accused of what Marxism taught intellectuals to question.

Socialism and Communism  161 The reduction of Marxism by postmodernists to economism and to a mechanical or reflectionist application of the base and superstructure metaphor takes a problem that is internal to Marxist method and uses it against Marxism. The focus on the relations and mode of production, which Marx understood as both a world historical and an ideological phenomenon, is falsely said by discourse theorists and social constructionists to make Marxism unable to understand, let alone conceive, questions of difference. Cultural Studies scholars, however, have not rejected the base and superstructure metaphor but have found ways to adapt it to the purposes of advancing post-​Marxist versions of identity politics. Having falsely sequestered class politics to the realm of political economy, identitarians, whether they are anti-​ essentialist or not, emphasize superstructural questions of culture, ideology and politics in the interest of identity politics rather than socialist politics. They then argue that identity struggles are not reducible to class politics. According to Meyerson, historical explanations of racism and patriarchy are now replaced with ahistorical, often psychoanalytic, rejections of Marxism as a normalizing discourse that is incommensurable with experience. In the case of racialist research, this has resulted is a panoply of postmodern approaches such as postcolonialism, critical race theory, Afrocentrism, Afro-​pessimism and decoloniality. Insofar as capitalism is criticized by postmodernists, this often serves to underscore questions of identity. Capitalism becomes reprehensible because it is associated with colonialism, racism or patriarchy. Contemporary critical theory has performed this sleight of hand by getting rid of the category of totality. This is apparent to the extent that postmodern and post-​structuralist theories are committed to a logic of immanence. Having rejected the notion of a transformation of the totality, postmodern social constructionism has advanced a demotic totalitarianism that has not surprisingly served neoliberal capitalism. Because cultural identity has been detached from historical, social and class formation, class has been reconceived as arbitrary and therefore adaptable to a recombinant intersectionality. The philosopher Cornel West, for example, considers the economic overdetermination of identity to be a form of “explanatory nihilism.”176 Similarly, Laclau and Mouffe’s view of the contingency of explanatory categories leads to the arbitrary reduction of human and historical subjects to reified constructs. The real meaning of today’s reduction of Marxist politics to the figure of the white, male, blue-​ collar worker is the scapegoating of those who are resented by the middle class for having failed to lead progressive social change. Under neoliberalism, the professional-​managerial class would prefer that all of humanity be sacrificed than revolutionize their own practices. What they have achieved is both the decimation of the organized left and the transformation of trade unions into bureaucratized instruments of capital accumulation. Insistence on the diversity of the working class is for Meyerson another side of the same problem as the demonization of white workers. Even an organic intellectual like Stanley Aronowitz, who emerged through the workers’ movement, emphasizes the

162  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum relative autonomy that reduces class to economics, which then requires political, cultural and identitarian intervention. As Meyerson puts it, Althusserian determination-​in-​the-​last-​instance has become in the work of post-​Marxists no determination at all.177 For Meyerson, postmodern theories have done nothing to alter the fact that any challenge to the system of capitalism will be the result of class struggle, which itself is conditioned by the changing requirements of capitalism. Unlike liberalism and conservatism, socialism is the only ideology that is programmatically egalitarian, which makes Marxism the only revolutionary ideology. Marxism is not abstractly universalist but emancipatory. This is why Marxism is more comprehensive than political economy. The historicist emphasis on the conjunctural specificity of situations does not by itself offer any theoretical or methodological insight and can mystify class analysis. For example, although much has been made of the fact that poor white workers before and during reconstruction received a “psychological wage” for their racist attitudes and behaviours, Meyerson points out that racist acts by white workers could be punished by the planter class if it harmed their economic interests. The historical lesson is that capitalists and capitalist institutions exercise selective and arbitrary forms of pressure for the sake of whatever is profitable. A distorted understanding of capitalism has caused left Nietzscheans to make the principle of arbitrary power the keystone of critical theory and even critical practice. The result is an apologia for incommensurability and conflict between different ways of life, which leads to culture wars and the clash of civilization arguments of demagogues. The Marxist economist Samir Amin argued that the choice today is not between capitalist imperialism and parochial culturalism.178 The choice is between capitalism and socialism. If one has chosen socialism, there are nevertheless theoretical problems that will arise and need to be solved. Those who emphasize racial and gendered divisions of labour, or uneven development through national disputes, tend to undermine socialist solidarity for the sake of demands that are made to state regimes. Such demands, Meyerson says, accept class hierarchy as objective but make it seem ahistorical. Consequently, the historicity of contingency is detached from objective social structures and from class struggle. Rather than the result of class politics, class hierarchy is made to seem like the inevitable result of objective economic forces. This way of understanding society can lead to racial disparity research, for example, or to the kind of individualized politics that is premised on experience. Both approaches accuse Marxism of ignoring difference and so indirectly absolve capitalist elites. The emphasis on anti-​ immigrant racism, for example, ignores the problems of state power, capital accumulation and the international division of labour. When one points this out, Marxism is accused of reducing race issues to an epiphenomenon of the economy. It is business needs, however, and not racism that most significantly affect the flow of immigration and the labour supply. Marxism does not explain racism as a superstructural reflection of economic necessity.

Socialism and Communism  163 Marxism explains the uses of racism and anti-​racism by capitalism. Since there is no class structure without class struggle, and no racism or anti-​racism without class structure, the opposition between the objective hierarchy of social classes and historical contingency is false. A purely anti-​racist or feminist hegemony is in this regard an impossible goal. The desire on the part of identitarians to dislodge class from its centrality in Marxist theory, and to rearticulate class with race, gender, sexuality, ability, religion and nationality is symptomatic. Moving into a more contentious zone of theorization, Meyerson rejects Žižek’s thoughts on the Real of class struggle as a form of apocalyptic anti-​realism. Žižek’s definition of class struggle associates it with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic definition of the Real, which, in conjunction with the Symbolic and the Imaginary, escapes definition because it is anathema to the existing symbolic order. Meyerson’s failure to appreciate Žižek’s Lacanian approach to Hegel potentially limits Marxist theory. Žižek’s theory seeks to sustain what is incomplete in reality and therefore undetermined in dialectical materialism. The crux of contention relates to Žižek’s Lacanian modification of Hegel to include a psychoanalytic theory of the subject. In this regard, nothing in Žižek’s work reinscribes functionalist theories. His work rather contributes to our understanding of post-​politics by explaining how ideology is sustained through jouissance. Despite their differences, Žižek would agree with Meyerson that emancipatory politics is not concerned with psycho-​ affective rootedness in community. If it is true that identity cannot be its own justification, Meyerson nevertheless believes that an understanding of oppression can be developed independently of class analysis. Anti-​racism therefore does not negate or discredit class analysis. At the same time, anti-​racism is not inherently an identity politics. The problem today is that many leftist intellectuals resist Marxist explanations of oppression as somehow detrimental to the autonomy of experience. A white worker, for example, is deemed unable to understand how a black professional experiences racism. On this basis, a conservative society begins to accept reverse discrimination, or any other disadvantage, as a valuable lesson. The association of truth with experience is tautological and uncritical. The a priori rejection of meaning in anti-​humanist social constructionism abstracts history, politics and culture. Post-​structuralism’s concern with aporias, reversals, ironies and respect for the untranslatable abyss of the Other leads to double standards that potentially erase the difference between the oppressed and oppressors. Post-​political rejections of Marxism as an ideology of white, patriarchal or Eurocentric domination are more often than not an anthropomorphization of conceptual categories. Gender and race are sociological categories and not types of human beings. As Fanon understood, the association of a sociological category with an individual subject is nonsense, whether one accepts or rejects the identification. In many respects, today’s woke wars, cancel culture and virtue signalling are a direct consequence of such postmodern anti-​humanism.

164  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum Without even existentialism as a horizon, our contemporary politics are defined by what exists rather than what we wish to become. This despairing attitude makes woke atavism compatible with global capitalism. Against those who reject socialist internationalism as totalitarian, Meyerson denounces the kinds of “militant” particularism that are simply fascist. Nearly three decades ago, before the rise of postmodern forms of social justice activism, David Harvey had foreseen the erosion of social justice by postmodern theory. In an essay that begins with a description of a factory fire in a food plant in 1991, Harvey notes that despite 25 deaths and 56 injuries, the fire received only sensationalist media coverage.179 A similar incident in 1911, at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, led to a protest march of 100,000 people. Harvey notes that at the same time as the 1991 factory fire, the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Rodney King beating resulted in mass uprisings. What makes one form of injustice more salient than another, in practical terms, is the way that the concern with diversity has shifted politics away from universal to targeted programmes. Since the 1930s, the goal of the Democratic Party has been the absorption of working-​class politics into capitalism, which is why many people consider the Democracy Party to be the graveyard of social movements. Attacks on labour reform in the 1970s led to the business offensive of the 1980s. Dependent on corporate donations, the Democrats built a fragmented coalition of groups that abandoned class interests and conceded to the deregulation of labour, consumer protections, environmental standards and public services. Regardless of the public response, the fire in North Carolina was itself prepared by the neoliberal assault on labour rights as well as occupational health and safety. By the 1990s, Harvey says, working-​ class politics was on the defensive, with few people committed to organizing against such tragedies. The concept of social justice presupposes universal norms. Yet the concept of universality, Harvey argues, produces hostility among postmodernists. The fact that the Enlightenment project is rejected as totalizing and homogenizing makes social justice inoperative. Postmodernism criticizes egalitarianism as “the equal treatment of unequals.”180 In legal matters, the utilitarian maximization of the greatest good for the greatest number is counterposed to relative deprivation. If justice is heterogeneous, then any law or principle can be deconstructed. This multiplicity leads to a focus on power at the expense of generally agreed upon norms of social justice. The relativism of discourse for specific communities dismisses normative claims to justice in favour of competing and even inconsistent concepts. The result of this shift towards a postmodern understanding defines justice as an infinite process of revealing power relations, making injustice into something that is systemic rather than incidental. Since, according to postmodernists, injustice cannot be confronted on universal grounds, the quest for justice is transformed into an attack on universal principles and rights. This is similar to the way that business attacks government regulation and taxation as unfair, thereby undermining social solidarity.

Socialism and Communism  165 Harvey notes that Marx and Engels did not avoid talk of constitutional rights, even if they understood that formal rights were compromised by capitalist social relations. He defines the struggle for the eight-​hour workday as a struggle of one right against another. When this class-​based conception of justice is also deconstructed, the labour rights that would be needed to confront capitalism are diminished. Workers are not only exploited but are deprived of the means to hold the exploiting class accountable. For the left to resurrect the principles of social justice, Harvey argues that we need to avoid absolutes while also rejecting relativism. Even if society can be transformed to meet specific needs, not all manifestations of “otherness” are legitimate. The renewal of social justice must, on the one hand, break away from the obsession with the local, marginal and abnormal, and on the other, reject the ghettoization of individuals and groups through non-​dialectical concepts like situated knowledge, experience and authenticity. Marxists must reject postmodern theories of justice that disempower and harm marginalized people along with the majority. The feminization of poverty and the decline of women’s rights in countries like Russia are reasons for feminists to look to socialism as a vehicle for pursuing social justice. On other issues, like ecology, alliances can be formed between different groups to reclaim the terrain of common claims to universality. Since universal claims cannot be eliminated, particularism must be separated from capitalist notions of individual freedom and human capital. Left politics redefines what is particular in dialectical relation with universal conceptions of social justice. While concern with social progress obliges us to recognize that some are more privileged than others, Harvey says, the pursuit of identity politics for its own sake perpetuates the postmodern capitalist conditions that gave rise to identity politics in the first place and accelerates neoliberalization. In the 1990s, Harvey was one of a small number of Marxist scholars –​ including Fredric Jameson, Edward Soja and Mike Davis –​whose critiques of postmodern culture and urban gentrification earned them the enmity of Cultural Studies scholars, in particular feminist scholars working in psychoanalysis. Much of this criticism, which was written in a period in which radical democracy was still relatively uncontested, was dramatically displaced by the appearance of Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology.181 Žižek’s intervention, at the level of psychoanalytic theory and ideology critique, removed many of the obstructions to Marxism and dialectical materialism that had been imposed by what turned out to be an ill-​founded agenda. Along with Badiou, he reinvigorated a left agenda that then bolstered the work of Marxists like Harvey. Since the 2000s, Harvey’s prolific output allowed him to regain the credit he deserved as one of the leading Marxist scholars of this era. After the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and as the message of OWS became a widespread media topic, the resurgence of interest in Marx’s work made Harvey’s online courses on Capital and the Grundrisse essential reading and viewing.

166  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum Because his work tends to focus on economic theory, Harvey has come under fire by a new generation of postmodernists. In an article about his book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, he discusses the way that consumer markets respond to the interests of personal and group identities, but that none of this has anything to do with capitalism being gendered or racialized.182 Harvey stresses the fact that despite the reality of human alterity, the contradictions of capital cannot be reduced to issues of gender, sexuality, race or nationality. If being anti-​capitalist does not make someone automatically anti-​racist, being anti-​racist does not necessarily make someone anti-​capitalist. Many feminists, Indigenous groups, anti-​colonialists and anti-​ racists are pro-​ capitalist. Even if Marxists oppose all forms of oppression, none of these struggles can supersede the struggle against capitalism. The combination of anti-​oppression struggles with anti-​capitalism must move beyond the fragmentation of separate agendas if a coherent left is to emerge. In a symposium dedicated to Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Harvey was subjected to some of the same sort of criticism that feminists had wielded against him in the 1990s.183 One important difference from the postmodern feminism of the 90s is that the criticism is now posed as internal to Marxism. Kenneth Surin provided a useful summary of Harvey’s argument, which is that only the analysis of capital makes anti-​capitalism possible. Harvey identifies foundational contradictions between use and exchange value, private property rights, individual rights and the state monopoly on the use of violence. The fundamental contradiction between labour and capital expresses the contradictory unity between production and consumption. The moving contradictions of capital include technological changes, capital’s need for labour, the social division of labour, the conflict between monopoly and market competition, uneven geographical development and questions of social reproduction. Lastly, dangerous contradictions exist between debt and capitalist growth. The impetus to growth leads to privatization, competition and the monetization of all aspects of social and natural life. The combined impact of these three types of contradiction poses a threat to human well-​being and survival. Against this, Harvey calls for a revolutionary humanism and the protection of use values like education, housing, health and food against profit-​seeking. Rights regimes should be instituted that allow for the public control of goods and services, that lessen growth for the sake of profit and that therefore mitigate the conflict between labour and capital. The pace of daily life should be reduced to maximize free time, to lighten the load of social labour, to reduce the ecological footprint and to reduce the dependency on automation and artificial intelligence. Reducing competition among individuals and groups would enhance the diversity of ways of living through freely given relations of empathy as well as dignity in forms of work that revolutionize human capacities. It would improve the social relation to natural habitats. Without altogether abolishing borders, geographical movement would be freed. Social labour for each according

Socialism and Communism  167 to his or her own ability and needs would be enhanced in relation to non-​ monetized and non-​alienated household and communal work. None of what seems like “utopian” communitarianism is possible, according to Harvey, without capital-​centric analysis. For some of the participants at the symposium, Harvey’s focus on capital allows him to ignore issues of cultural difference. His “formal” and “orthodox” analysis is denounced by Alex Dubilet, for instance, as neoliberal. The question of police violence is cited as evidence that leftism ignores racist violence. F.T.C. Manning, for her part, uses the formal logic of post-​structuralism to argue that Harvey understands the workings of capital in isolation from its surrounding ecologies. He is said to use the term contradiction as a rhetorical tool with which to displace the problem of co-​implication. Harvey perceives the contradictions of capital as logically primary, which, she says, leaves race and gender outside the scope of his analytic method. For Harvey, on the other hand, race and gender are not definitive of the laws of capital. Arguing that race and gender are necessary to the reproduction of capitalism, Manning argues that nothing can be excluded from the analysis of capital. She considers any theory of capital that does not acknowledge the racialization and gendering of capitalist social relations to be idealist. Turning the tables on class analysis, as it were, Manning defends theories like racial capitalism by suggesting that if racism is not inherent to capitalism the same could be said about reformist labour politics. However, while nothing about Marxism requires the exclusion of considerations of race and gender in contemporary capitalism, Marxism cannot view the working class as incidental to capitalist social relations. Even reformism is conflictual and one need not be reminded that capitals compete against other capitals. In contrast, race and gender politics can be articulated as capitalist while at the same time falsely presenting patriarchy and white supremacy as eternal problems. Posing the problem in terms of what is internal or external to capitalism replaces Marxist dialectics with structuralism and formal logic. One could instead understand the issue in terms of the difference between reduction and reductionism. Reductionism explains the elements within a complex system with reference to their root causes. However, reductionism defines the relation between the parts and the whole in a mechanistic way that has very little to do with Marxist materialism. The notion of reduction, in contrast, allows for flexibility, for example, between elements of the economic base and the ideological superstructure, without presuming a direct and automatic continuity between these elements. Although the notion of reduction is concerned with causes, the advanced and unpredictable characteristics of a system or a society are not reducible to earlier or more “essential” forms. We can therefore speak of Marxism as a form of non-​reductionist materialism. Whereas complexity in dialectics is addressed through standard concepts like contradiction, overdetermination and uneven development, a philosophical or historical demonstration of actual dialectical contradictions helps to make a convincingly Marxist argument. This contrasts with the empirical,

168  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum metaphysical, phenomenological, structuralist and deconstructionist tendencies in contemporary theory –​especially their identitarian variants. For example, the uses of Hegelian dialectics and the theory of contradiction in Marxism find Žižek asserting that the contradictory logic of today’s free-​ market deterritorialization relates identity issues to regulatory mechanisms. As he puts it: Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position; even alt-​rightists who complain about the terror of liberal political correctness present themselves as protectors of an endangered minority. Or take the critics of patriarchy –​those left-​wing cultural theorists who focus their critique on patriarchal ideologies and practices: they attack them as if patriarchy were still a hegemonic position, ignoring what Marx and Engels wrote 170 years ago, in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” Is it not the time to start wondering why patriarchal phallogocentrism was elevated into a main target of criticism at the exact historical moment –​ ours –​when patriarchy definitely lost its hegemonic role, when it began to be progressively swept away by the market individualism of “rights”? … This means that the critical statement that patriarchal ideology continues to be today’s hegemonic ideology is today’s hegemonic ideology: its function is to enable us to evade the deadlock of hedonistic permissiveness, which is effectively hegemonic.184 For Žižek, not only are feminists and anti-​racists not inherently anti-​capitalist, they can also be corporate, neoliberal, imperialist or fascist. While Harvey is more conciliatory in his arguments than Žižek, he nevertheless considers the preoccupation with diversity on the American left to be analogous to religious and nationalistic fanaticism in other parts of the world. Questions of social identity are manipulated everywhere by capitalism and by those who control the means of production. Capitalism exploits social difference in various ways to divide and conquer oppositional movements. For instance, big business favours immigration as a means to undermine the power of organized labour. This is then exploited by the fascist right to gain working-​ class support for the same business interests. When anti-​racist groups in the U.S. became anti-​capitalist, Harvey says, their leaders were killed and the movements demobilized. Rights are therefore extended to minority groups only when this is not detrimental to capital accumulation. A company like Adidas might abandon a celebrity endorser like Kanye West after he has made racist and anti-​Semitic statements, but this is on the view that discrimination is bad for business. Not unlike Wood, Harvey argues that Marxism makes use of the power of abstraction to understand how it is that capital accumulation occurs regardless of specific social differences. Similarities across history and geography

Socialism and Communism  169 demonstrate the insights of Marx that the contradictory unity of supply and demand is not merely a rhetorical device, as Manning suggests, but structures the laws of motion of capital. Although Marx is not always dialectical and is sometimes positivist, Harvey says, no contradiction can stand by itself. Contradictions inform the conditions of possibility for the circulation of value. The thrust of Marx’s critique of political economy was to go beyond the positivist understanding of neoclassical economics. This required comparative analysis and the development of theoretical concepts. Such work is difficult enough and does not advance very much, Harvey says, when work on these issues is attacked as harmful to the (identitarian) left. He writes: I am immediately criticized for not taking on race and gender when I know only too well that I cannot get to an understanding of the global crash of 2007–​8 (or to an understanding of the movements in interest rates, the rise of fictitious capital and the penchant for perpetual compound growth) starting with the categories of race and gender but that I can get some way towards understanding them by starting with the categories of commodity and capital that Marx pioneered.185 Since nothing about Marxism prevents struggles against oppression, Harvey, like Wood before him, suggests that the onus should be on identitarians to demonstrate how their struggles contribute to socialism. More, he says, should be done to distinguish between what is anti-​capitalist and what is not. Since philosophy is concerned with the relationship between the universal and the particular, there are ways in which identity and politics inevitably overlap. In his review of Rancière’s Disagreement, written in the late 1990s, Žižek presents a problem that concerns contemporary political philosophy that we have yet to resolve.186 In his definition of equality, Rancière rejects the idea that intellectuals or vanguards should represent and speak for the masses. His distinction between politics-​ emancipation and police-​ policy means that politics involves, in Žižek’s terms, a short-​circuit between the universal and the particular. The particular cannot have direct access to the universal and so a third concept, the singular, is used to define the paradox of a particular that stands in for the universal. In doing so, the singular universal disturbs the order of police-​policy. Rancière defines the singular universal as the “part of no part” whose political action or speech is dependent on its being able to embody the universal. In other words, the politics of the singular universal is not selfish. It is not enough to transgress the order of police-​policy in a way that simply reaffirms social hierarchy. The particular becomes singular because it represents the ideals of society that have not been actualized. Activists and dissidents, for example, are often referred to as the finest citizens because they make themselves the representatives of the entire society and its progressive goals. In the Marxist tradition, Žižek says, the proletariat is the singular universal whose fortune is the test of universality. When a part of society is excluded from the possibility of emancipation, its

170  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum exclusion is politicized on behalf of the entire society. To be clear, this is not a matter of inclusion and exclusion but of universal justice. The exclusion of fascists, who define and divide society on the terms of prejudice, is the appropriate politics for leftist universalists. The singular universal, according to Rancière, is the claim of the part of no part to the status of true universality. Rancière distances himself from the kind of Marxism that reduces politics to the economy and the mode of production. He therefore rejects the meta-​politics of communist parties and bureaucracies. The paradox of the “democratic invention” and the bourgeois universality that extended rights to workers, women and minority groups is the way that it hinges on the gap between formal universal rights and their concrete social content. Marxist politics underscores the contradiction of the formal freedom that allows and obliges the vast majority of people to sell their labour in conditions of exploitation. This contradiction, Žižek argues, is expressed in two ways: first, the symptomatic, meta-​political view considers that formal rights are a necessary but illusory expression of class domination; second, the more subversive view accepts that formal rights are not only illusory but have an effectivity that can redirect socio-​economic relations through gradual reform. Different versions of the democratic invention, like the reduction of the length of the working day, the abolition of slavery and segregation, the right of women to vote and control their own bodies, are not merely bourgeois formalism but have material effectivity. The problem for us today is that the postmodern weakening of symbolic efficiency makes reality seem to be the same as its simulation. What is lost in this is not reality, but the dimension of illusion, or virtuality. If illusion is understood in terms of the Lacanian concept of the Imaginary (how we like to imagine society) and appearance is understood as the Lacanian Symbolic order (the unconscious social codes and rules that structure the social order), what the postmodern condition produces is a disintegration of the Symbolic order. Žižek writes: “The key to today’s universe of simulacra, in which the Real is less and less distinguishable from its imaginary simulation, resides in the retreat of ‘symbolic efficiency’.”187 One could also say, despite what seems like evidence to the contrary, that there is a weakening of the order of police-​policy. When this happens, the Imaginary begins to seem more Real (that which escapes symbolization). In a postmodern world, people lose a sense of who they are and what they want. In this context, identity functions like an ersatz that compensates for the pervasive sense of unreality. Just as multilingualism cannot resolve the alienation of the subject in language, the multiplication of identity coordinates in intersectional theory simply compounds and avoids more fundamental problems. Postmodernism changes the role played by the singular universal. The “formal” claim that the part of no part makes on the Symbolic order of appearances loses its virtual dimension as a claim on something that has not yet been achieved –​like Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech –​and instead affirms the police-​policy order of the multitude of identity positions.

Socialism and Communism  171 Rather than a part of society whose unfair exclusion and demands for justice could change the whole of society, the singular universal is reduced to one particular in conflict with other particulars for a bigger share of the social order. That is why the true universality of the part of no part is as much a matter of appearance, or virtuality, as of reality. It is this virtual dimension that allows other particulars to partake in its struggle for equality. Unlike the notion of the suprasensible in Hegel’s Phenomenology, which has a sublime, unfinished quality, everything that exists already in reality is present in its simulacrum. Like a hologram, the simulacrum does not allow for any other dimension to appear. In contrast, the suprasensible is not a positive reality but a negativity that transforms when it is sublated into another dimension. Contemporary post-​politics, according to Žižek, seeks to domesticate the idealistic dimension of politics by reducing all forms of politics to post-​politics. Post-​politics, he argues, forecloses politics as irrational and excessive. Political struggle is replaced by the rule of experts, markets and liberal multiculturalism.188 The repression of politics in a post-​ political society defines all state functions, from the economy to industry, immigration, ecology, health, education, and so on, as matters of security and market forces. This foreclosure of politics transforms working-​class demands into the kind of multicultural tolerance that prevents those who represent the part of no part –​immigrants, the homeless, the unemployed, poor countries –​from politicizing their predicament. Zahi Zalloua argues that the Palestinians are a critical example of the singular universal whose plight delegitimizes the existing order of global capitalism.189 One reason why global condemnation of Israeli apartheid and genocide fails to result in any significant improvement is because the contemporary left has rejected revolutionary politics as excessive and has fetishized cultural alterity instead. The pseudo-​left critique of liberal ideology as merely formal only demystifies universality, leaving the concrete universality intact and giving up on an important aspect of universality as the basis of solidarity. Decolonial denunciations of the “Eurocentrism” of Marxism, Zalloua notes, result in calls to respect difference and retreat behind identitarian boundaries.190 Without the universal dimension, political critique devolves into forms of special pleading and mutual extortion. Universality demonstrates an ethical indifference towards particularities. Žižek’s response to the limits of Marxist meta-​politics, according to Zalloua, is to add a Lacanian twist to the “non-​relationship” between the economic and the political. Concrete material processes are in a parallax relation to political-​ideological processes. It is not enough to condemn Zionist settlements in the Occupied Territories since the colonization of Palestine is a global neoliberal project that is defended by the U.S. and the E.U.191 Only international solidarity makes a difference to this situation since it is not premised on Palestinian particularity or on Zionist racism. Rather than universalization, today’s post-​politics results in globalization. Politicization is replaced by the fascination with corruption, crime and violence. To take a different example, those who focus on slavery as America’s

172  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum original sin and on systemic racism, as represented by policing and incarceration rates, do not define the problem in terms of politics but in terms of white supremacy, thereby placing social problems beyond the reach of normative claims to social justice. When BLM, for example, ignores the police murder of poor whites and fails to place policing in the context of neoliberal capitalism, race is made into a category of exception. The excessive aspect of police murders allows politics to be subordinated to morality and spectacle. Not only does post-​politics limit social life to the realm of police-​policy, but the police state is made into the embodiment of evil. What we could then refer to as petty-​bourgeois decadence would be defined by Žižek as: 1) the replacement of politics with a depoliticized servicing of goods, 2) the emergence of a depoliticized evil in the form of identity conflicts, 3) the speculative identity of technocracy and excessive evil. Against abject capitulation to post-​politics, Žižek argues that the left must appropriate the universalism of political modernity and remain focused on emancipatory goals. Politics is therefore a claim on equality and not an affirmation of particularity within the existing capitalist order. “The postmodern identity politics of particular (ethnic, sexual, etc.) life-​styles,” Žižek writes, “fits perfectly the depoliticized notion of society in which every particular group is ‘accounted’ for, has its specific status (of a victim) acknowledged through affirmative action or other measures destined to guarantee social justice.”192 The postmodern logic of resentment, by which one proclaims oneself the victim of a big Other –​or the reverse, as in someone like Ibram Kendi’s claim that today’s black creatives are breaking free from the white gaze –​also represents the end of politics-​emancipation and the apotheosis of police-​policy.193 Against this, an emancipatory universalism must, on the one hand, avoid machinations like Fukuyama’s framing of social conflict in psychological and identitarian terms, and on the other, avoid the identification of universality with globalization. The rule of the market combines the infinite multiplicity of particulars with relations of exploitation. The kind of left neoliberalism that attends to particulars without reversing the technocratic attack on welfare and socialism is pessimistic in the extreme. Politicization of the excluded aligns the interests of working-​class people worldwide against the re-​feudalization of social life. As neoliberals and postmodernists find new ways to demonize the radical left, its history, principles, institutions, intellectuals and political representatives, the growing attachment of the left to diversity obscures politics, destroys culture and makes identity into the hopeless refuge of a humanity on the verge of extinction. Against what he refers to as the totalitarian temptations of contemporary theory, which posits a return to naïve realism, Žižek follows the Kantian break with metaphysics through Hegel and Marx. Contrary to what postmodernism suggests, modern philosophy does not presume that reason gives us unmediated access to truth and objectivity. With the Hegelian concept of totality, Marxist theory leaves behind illusions of natural transparency.194 This allows Marxist science to be compatible with all other domains of

Socialism and Communism  173 knowledge. What Marxism seeks to do is make the inconsistencies of the totality more theoretically consistent. One way that Marxist theory advances is by adding a theory of subjectivity to the post-​transcendental understanding of the word science. Subject implies the incompleteness of reality and so defines what we describe as reality in terms of consciousness. Through consciousness we include ourselves in our reflexive understanding of the world. The trend in today’s academy, Žižek argues, is a metaphysics that dispenses with inconsistency and dialectics. The paradox of subjectivity, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, is that I never experience myself as objectively myself. I only experience myself as object through the Other. This is not reducible to the standard paradigms of self and other but defines a pre-​social decentring that the subject compensates for in various ways, including jouissance and fantasy. In relation to Badiou’s theory of the event, where the generic universality of love, politics, art and science rises above the shifting particularities of identity, Žižek argues that what we have with politics is not the universal order disturbed by evental exceptions.195 Rather, we have ontology disturbed by its own impossibility. This means that Marx’s (proletarian) subject “in itself, for itself ” is forever elusive and Žižek is among those critical Marxists who do not presume that a communist society could eliminate all forms of alienation.196 This added dimension does not in any way refute the postulate that the evental order of politics is generic, meaning, the same for everyone. However, for Žižek, any universality can only be posited retroactively. A generic event in politics is not there from the beginning except as a possibility. This is consistent with Badiou’s notion of truth procedure, which is a verification, as Rancière might say, of a claim to universality. The universal is more than the sum of its particulars. The universal, as cognition of the world, is self-​relating (consciousness) and self-​differentiation (negation). Politics is thus always more, or less, than a matter of identity. Žižek mentions in this regard the self-​relating negativity of Malcolm Little, who changed his name to Malcolm X. Instead of searching for his black identity, Malcolm X accepted the loss of identity –​symbolized with an X –​as “a unique chance to assert a universality different from the one imposed by the whites.”197 Contemporary post-​politics would seem to want us to do the same with politics. Forget the old left and the communism of the past, it says, and move on to new realities and new possibilities for politics. However, against those who would think that Hegelian Marxism subordinates inconsistencies into a totality that is defined as an identity, totality for Hegel is, again, self-​relating and self-​differentiation. The totality of universality does not vanish on account of material contradictions and inconsistencies. Žižek therefore contrasts left Hegelianism to the motifs of postmodernism, with its infinite semiosis, deterritorialization, dangerous supplements and resistance to norms. Hegelian totality, he writes, “is not caught in the eternal struggle to undermine or displace the power center, in search for cracks and ‘undecidable’ excesses that disturb and deconstruct the power edifice.”198

174  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum Unlike postmodern identity, which grounds inconsistency and multiplicity in relations of power, emancipatory universality confronts the totality of relations. Against both conservative populism and left neoliberalism, solidarity means self-​questioning and the raising of particular struggles to the level of emancipatory universalism. Notes 1 Jacobin, “Marxism Is Way Better Than Critical Race Theory –​Vivek Chibber,” YouTube (December 10, 2020), www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​jygI​2Xgn​sY4. 2 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 3 Georgi Boorman, “How the Theory of White Privilege Leads to Socialism,” The Federalist (June 26, 2018), https://​thefed​eral​ist.com/​2018/​06/​26/​the​ory-​white-​ privil​ege-​leads-​social​ism/​. 4 Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), eBook. 5 William Davies, “The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray review –​a rightwing diatribe,” The Guardian (September 19, 2019), www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​ 2019/​sep/​19/​the-​madn​ess-​of-​cro​wds-​rev​iew-​gen​der-​race-​ident​ity-​doug​las-​mur​ray. 6 Muslim Council of Britain, “MCB Expresses Shock at Home Secretary Endorsing Douglas Murray at Dispatch Box,” Muslim Council of Britain (September 8, 2023), https://​mcb.org.uk/​mcb-​expres​ses-​shock-​at-​home-​secret​ary-​endors​ing-​ mur​ray-​at-​dispa​tch-​box/​; Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, “Islamophobia as the racialization of Muslims,” in Irene Zempi and Imran Awan, eds, The Routledge International Handbook of Islamophobia (London: Routledge, 2019), 18–​31. 7 Davies, “The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray review –​a rightwing diatribe.” 8 Murray, The Madness of Crowds, 10. 9 Murray, The Madness of Crowds, 76. 10 Murray, The Madness of Crowds, 96. 11 The Alan Sokal Affair ignited a science war debate in 1996. See Stanley Aronowitz, “Alan Sokal’s ‘Transgression’,” Dissent (Winter 1997), 107–​10. 12 Murray, The Madness of Crowds, 108–​9. 13 See Perry Anderson, The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (London: Verso, [1976] 2017) and Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 14 Murray, The Madness of Crowds, 120–​1. 15 Murray, The Madness of Crowds, 471. 16 Shikha Dalmia, “The Right’s Identity Politics Is More Dangerous Than the Left’s,” Reason (March 17, 2019), https://​rea​son.com/​2019/​03/​17/​why-​the-​rig​hts-​ident​ ity-​polit​ics-​is-​more/​. 17 Dalmia, “The Right’s Identity Politics Is More Dangerous Than the Left’s.” 18 Ralph Peters, “Hegel, Sartre, Trump,” National Review (March 17, 2016), www. nat​iona​lrev​iew.com/​2016/​03/​don​ald-​trump-​hegel-​sar​tre-​expl​ain-​trump-​rise/​. 19 See also Marc James Léger, “Woke Antiracism: It’s a Gospel According to John McWhorter,” Hampton Institute (July 2, 2022), www.hampt​onth​ink.org/​read/​ woke-​ant​irac​ism-​its-​a-​gos​pel-​accord​ing-​to-​john-​mcwhor​ter.

Notes  175 20 John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (New York: Portfolio/​Penguin, 2021), eBook. 21 See Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (New York: Center Street, 2021). 22 McWhorter, Woke Racism, 121. 23 On this subject, see Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 24 McWhorter, Woke Racism, 204. 25 McWhorter, Woke Racism, 214–​15. 26 McWhorter, Woke Racism, 215. 27 McWhorter, Woke Racism, 218. 28 Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle Against Classism,” in Heaven in Disorder (London: O/​R Books, 2021), 151–​65. 29 Bhaskar Sunkara, “When American democracy crumbles, it won’t be televised,” The Guardian (January 6, 2022), www.theg​uard​ian.com/​commen​tisf​ree/​2022/​jan/​ 06/​us-​democr​acy-​capi​tol-​att​ack-​janu​ary-​6. 30 Žižek, “Class Struggle Against Classism,” 164. 31 Ben Wray, “ ‘We Have to Move to a Post-​Capitalist System’: An Interview with Walden Bello,” Jacobin (October 28, 2019), https://​jac​obin​mag.com/​2019/​10/​wal​ den-​bello-​interv​iew-​cap​ital​ism-​china. 32 Nicolas Allen and Martín Cortés, “Fascisms Old and New: An Interview with Enzo Traverso,” Jacobin (February 4, 2019), https://​jac​obin​mag.com/​2019/​02/​ enzo-​trave​rso-​post-​fasc​ism-​ideol​ogy-​conse​rvat​ism. 33 See John Roberts, The Reasoning of Unreason: Universalism, Capitalism and Disenlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 34 Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump –​and Beyond,” American Affairs 1:4 (Winter 2017), 48. 35 Zachary D. Carter, “Clinton Aide: Protesters Don’t Want $15 An Hour,” Huffpost (February 13, 2017), www.huf​fi ng​tonp​ost.ca/​entry/​trump-​pro​test​ers-​15-​hour​_​n_​5​ 8a1e​fe1e​4b03​df37​0d8d​b2b. 36 Eric Levitz, “What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About Identity Politics,” Intelligencer (December 1, 2016), https://​nymag.com/​intell​igen​cer/​2016/​12/​what-​ber​nie-​sand​ ers-​gets-​right-​about-​ident​ity-​polit​ics.html. 37 Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), eBook. 38 Fukuyama, Identity, 12. 39 Along these lines, see also Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–​ 73, and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 40 On this subject, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 41 Fukuyama, Identity, 128. 42 Fukuyama, Identity, 144–​5. 43 Fukuyama, Identity, 237.

176  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum 44 Herbert Marcuse, “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State” (1934), in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy S. Shapiro (London: MayFly Books, 2009), 1–​30. See also Marcuse’s discussion of the role that petty-​ bourgeois counterculture plays in capitalist integration in Herbert Marcuse, One-​Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, [1964] 1991). 45 Alec Regimbal, “Author Francis Fukuyama, a Stanford fellow, backs far-​right Azov group after school visit,” SFGATE (July 12, 2023), www.sfg​ate.com/​polit​ ics/​arti​cle/​fukuy​ama-​sen​ior-​fel​low-​stanf​ord-​far-​right-​group-​18193​614.php. 46 Chloe Kim, “Justin Trudeau apologises after Nazi veteran honoured in parliament,” BBC (September 27, 2023), www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​us-​can​ada-​66943​ 005; Luke Savage, “Canada Must Reckon With Its History of Harboring and Celebrating Nazi War Criminals,” Jacobin (October 6, 2023), https://​jaco​bin.com/​ 2023/​10/​can​ada-​nazi-​emig​res-​honor-​yaros​lav-​hunka-​mem​ory. 47 Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), eBook. 48 Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 96. 49 Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 139. 50 Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 129. 51 Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” The New York Times (November 18, 2016), www.nyti​mes.com/​2016/​11/​20/​opin​ion/​sun​day/​the-​end-​of-​ident​ity-​lib​ eral​ism.html. 52 Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal, 124. 53 Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity –​and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020). 54 Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 76. 55 Ian Driver, “Ex-​councillor who sprayed ‘Dickens racist’ on museum celebrating author says he will not apologise,” The Independent (June 30, 2020), www.inde​ pend​ent.co.uk/​news/​uk/​home-​news/​dick​ens-​rac​ist-​graff​i ti-​mus​eum-​kent-​tha​net-​ cou​ncil​lor-​a9593​271.html. 56 Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 217. 57 See for example Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2013). 58 Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 271. 59 Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 430. 60 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998). 61 Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 14. 62 Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 32. 63 Jameson cited in Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 127. 64 Matt Taibbi, “On ‘White Fragility’,” Substack (June 28, 2020), https://​tai​bbi.subst​ ack.com/​p/​on-​white-​fragil​ity. See also Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). 65 John McWhorter, “The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World,” The Atlantic (December 23, 2018), www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​ideas/​arch​ive/​2018/​12/​why-​third-​ wave-​anti-​rac​ism-​dead-​end/​578​764/​; Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional-​Managerial Class (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021). 66 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Social Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990).

Notes  177 67 Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, [1947] 1991); Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-​Smith (London: Rebel Press, [1967] 2001); David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012). 68 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), ix. 69 Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, [1967] 1992). 70 Arthur Kroker, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture in Hyper-​Aesthetics (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1991), 9. 71 Signatories, “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” Harper’s (July 7, 2020), https://​harp​ers.org/​a-​let​ter-​on-​just​ice-​and-​open-​deb​ate/​. 72 This is a different matter from the uncomplicated misuse and abuse of power, for example, as was the case when 100 Israeli medical doctors signed a letter that ignored the Geneva Conventions as well as the Hippocratic oath and encouraged the bombing of hospitals in Gaza in November 2023. See Julia Conley, “Doctors in Gaza Respond to Israeli Doctors Who Endorsed Bombing of Hospitals,” Common Dreams (November 6, 2023), www.commo​ndre​ams.org/​news/​gaza-​doct​ors-​let​ter. 73 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1990] 2007), 75. 74 Asad Haider, “The Use of Free Speech in Society,” Verso Blog (July 15, 2020), www.ver​sobo​oks.com/​blogs/​4793-​the-​use-​of-​free-​spe​ech-​in-​soci​ety. 75 Haider, “The Use of Free Speech in Society.” 76 On this topic, see Christina Kiaer’s discussion of Soviet products in Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005). 77 Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2018), eBook. 78 Haider, Mistaken Identity, 28. 79 Haider, Mistaken Identity, 50. 80 Haider, Mistaken Identity, 30. 81 Haider, Mistaken Identity, 54. 82 Hall cited in Haider, Mistaken Identity, 178. See Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978). 83 Haider, Mistaken Identity, 192. 84 Haider, Mistaken Identity, 196. 85 See Daniel Zamora and Mitchell Dean, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution (London: Verso, 2021). 86 See Rashmee Kumar, “How Identity Politics Has Divided the Left: An Interview with Asad Haider,” The Intercept (May 27, 2018), https://​thein​terc​ept.com/​2018/​ 05/​27/​ident​ity-​polit​ics-​book-​asad-​hai​der/​. 87 Haider, Mistaken Identity, 214–​16. 88 Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Lisa Appignanesi, ed., Identity: The Real Me (London: The Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987), 44. 89 Stuart Hall, “Brave New World,” Marxism Today (October 1988), 24–​9. 90 Stuart Hall, contribution to Editors, “The Work of Art in the Electronic Age,” Block 14 (1988), 11. 91 Esther Leslie, “Within Spitting Distance: Punks, Philistines and Professors,” lecture presented at the symposium Return(s) to Marx? held at the Tate Modern (June 1, 2002), www.milit​ante​sthe​tix.co.uk/​crit​lit/​spitt​ing.htm.

178  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum 92 Étienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-​Racism?” in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, [1988] 1991), 17–​28. 93 Bruce Robbins, “Balibarism!” N+​1 16 (Spring 2013), https://​nplu​sone​mag.com/​ issue-​16/​revi​ews/​bal​ibar​ism/​. 94 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1995] 1999). 95 Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” October 61 (Summer 1992), 58–​64. 96 Analogously, Kwame Anthony Appiah distinguishes between extrinsic racism, which establishes racial hierarchies, and intrinsic racism, which emphasizes racial difference. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Racisms,” in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 3–​17. 97 See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Human Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, [1993] 2001) and Slavoj Žižek, “A Great Awakening and Its Dangers,” The Philosophical Salon (November 20, 2017), https://​thephi​loso​phic​alsa​lon.com/​a-​great-​awaken​ing-​and-​its-​dang​ers/​. 98 Éric Aeschimann, “Getting Beyond Hatred: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” Verso Blog (February 17, 2016), trans. David Broder (originally published in Biblios (February 2, 2016), www.ver​sobo​oks.com/​blogs/​2505-​gett​ing-​bey​ond-​ hat​red-​an-​interv​iew-​with-​jacq​ues-​ranci​ere. 99 See Majid Makki, “Rancière’s Account of Identity Politics: Philosophical Techniques of Extinguishing Political Subjectivity,” Ethical Perspectives 21:3 (2014), 401–​28. 100 Slavoj Žižek, “The Lesson of Rancière,” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, [2000] 2004), 71. 101 Žižek, “The Lesson of Rancière,” 71. 102 See Alain Badiou, The Return of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, [2011] 2012). 103 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nikolaus (London: Penguin, [1857] 1973). 104 Martin Spence, “Marx against Marx: A Critical Reading of the Fragment on Machines,” tripleC 17:2 (2019), 327–​39. 105 Vladimir Lenin, “ ‘Left-​Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder,” Collected Works, Volume 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, [1920] 1964), 17–​118. 106 Benjamin Noys, “The Fabric of Struggles,” in Noys, ed., Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2012), 8. 107 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), xi–​xiv. 108 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 109 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Empire, Twenty Years On,” New Left Review 120 (November/​December 2019), 67–​92. 110 Hardt and Negri, “Empire, Twenty Years On,” 84. 111 Hardt and Negri, “Empire, Twenty Years On,” 87.

Notes  179 112 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “The Multiplicities within Capitalist Rule and the Articulation of Struggles,” tripleC 16:2 (2018), 440–​8. 113 Barbara Foley, “Roads Taken and Not Taken: Post-​Marxism, Antiracism, and Anticommunism,” Cultural Logic 2 (1998), https://​ojs.libr​ary.ubc.ca/​index.php/​ clo​gic/​arti​cle/​view/​192​712. 114 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Önder Özengi and Pelin Tan, “Running Along the Disaster: A Conversation with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi,” e-​flux journal 56 (June 2014), www.e-​flux.com/​jour​nal/​56/​60328/​runn​ing-​along-​the-​disas​ter-​a-​conve​ rsat​ion-​with-​fra​nco-​bifo-​bera​rdi/​. 115 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, “Bifo on the US Capitol Riots,” e-​flux (January 13, 2021), www.e-​flux.com/​announ​ceme​nts/​371​876/​bifo-​on-​the-​us-​capi​tol-​riots/​. 116 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–​47. 117 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution: Minorities and Classes (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2023), eBook. 118 Lazzarato, The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, 11. 119 Lazzarato, The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, 86, 189. 120 Lazzarato, The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, 133. 121 Bruce A. Dixon, “Looking Down that Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-​Pessimism, Part 2 of 3,” Black Agenda Report (February 1, 2018), www.blacka​gend​arep​ort.com/​look​ing-​down-​deep-​hole-​parasit​ ic-​inters​ecti​onal​ ity-​and-​toxic-​afro-​pessim​ism-​part-​2. 122 Lazzarato, The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, 180. 123 Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (London: Pluto Press, 2007); Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2006). 124 Barbara Fields cited in Adolph Reed, Jr., “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How ‘Cultural Politics’ Is Worse Than No Politics at All,” nonsite (February 25, 2013), https://​nons​ite.org/​dja​ngo-​unchai​ned-​or-​the-​help-​how-​cultu​ral-​polit​ics-​ is-​worse-​than-​no-​polit​ics-​at-​all-​and-​why/​. See also Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” in Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America (London: Verso, 2012), 117. 125 Lazzarato, The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, 185. 126 Lazzarato, The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution, 196. 127 David Harvey, “Listen, Anarchist!” Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey (June 10, 2015), https://​davi​dhar​vey.org/​2015/​06/​lis​ten-​anarch​ist-​by-​david-​ har​vey/​. 128 Bookchin cited in David Harvey, “Listen, Anarchist!”. 129 Sam Gindin, “ ‘Bidenomics’ Won’t Reverse Working-​ Class Decline,” Jacobin (November 6, 2023), https://​jaco​bin.com/​2023/​11/​bid​enom​ics-​ind​ustr​ial-​pol​icy-​ busin​ess-​subsid​ies-​work​ing-​class-​polit​ics-​china-​imper​ial-​riva​lry. 130 See the interview with Jardina in Isaac Chotiner, “The Disturbing, Surprisingly Complex Relationship Between White Identity Politics and Racism,” The New Yorker (January 19, 2019), www.newyor​ker.com/​news/​q-​and-​a/​the-​dis​ turb​ing-​surpr​isin​gly-​comp​lex-​relat​ions​hip-​betw​een-​white-​ident​ity-​polit​ics-​and-​ rac​ism.

180  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum 131 David Roediger, “Who’s Afraid of the White Working Class? Joan C. Williams’s ‘White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America’,” Los Angeles Review of Books (May 17, 2017), https://​lare​view​ofbo​oks.org/​arti​cle/​whos-​afr​ aid-​of-​the-​white-​work​ing-​class-​on-​joan-​c-​willia​mss-​white-​work​ing-​class-​ove​ rcom​ing-​class-​cluel​essn​ess-​in-​amer​ica/​. 132 Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Brexit, Trump, and ‘Methodological Whiteness’: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class,” The British Journal of Sociology 68:S1 (2017), S214–​S232. 133 Bhambra, “Brexit, Trump, and ‘Methodological Whiteness’,” S216. 134 Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016). 135 Daniel Denvir, “Beyond ‘Race Relations’: An Interview with Barbara J. Fields /​ Karen E. Fields,” Jacobin (January 17, 2018), www.jac​obin​mag.com/​2018/​01/​ racecr​aft-​rac​ism-​barb​ara-​karen-​fie​lds. 136 Miguel Salazar, “Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem?” The New Republic (December 20, 2018), https://​newr​epub​lic.com/​arti​cle/​152​789/​ameri​ cas-​soc​iali​sts-​race-​prob​lem. 137 Reed cited in Salazar, “Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem?” 138 Tatiana Cozzarelli, “Class Reductionism Is Real, and It’s Coming from the Jacobin Wing of the DSA,” Left Voice (June 16, 2020), www.leftvo​ice.org/​class-​ reduc​tion​ism-​is-​real-​and-​its-​com​ing-​from-​the-​jaco​bin-​wing-​of-​the-​dsa. 139 Uday Jain, “White Marxism: A Critique of Jacobin Magazine,” New Socialist (August 11, 2017), https://​newso​cial​ist.org.uk/​white-​marx​ism-​criti​que/​. 140 Nivedita Majumdar, “Is Socialism Eurocentric?” Jacobin (April 2017), www. jac​obin​mag.com/​2017/​04/​social​ism-​marx​ism-​rac​ist-​euro​cent​ric-​west-​int​erse​ ctio​nal. 141 David I. Backer and Kate Cairns, “Movement Pedagogy: Beyond the Class/​ Identity Impasse,” Viewpoint Magazine (December 21, 2017), https://​viewp​oint​ mag.com/​2017/​12/​21/​movem​ent-​pedag​ogy-​bey​ond-​class-​ident​ity-​impa​sse/​. 142 Backer and Cairns, “Movement Pedagogy.” 143 Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism,” (1933), www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​ trot​sky/​germ​any/​1933/​330​610.htm. 144 Shuja Haider, “From Identity Politics to Emancipation,” Dissent (March 22, 2018), www.diss​entm​agaz​ine.org/​blog/​from-​ident​ity-​polit​ics-​to-​univer​sal-​emanc​ ipat​ion-​respo​nse-​leo-​casey. 145 Salar Mohandesi, “Identity Crisis,” Viewpoint Magazine (March 16, 2017), https://​viewp​oint​mag.com/​2017/​03/​16/​ident​ity-​cri​sis/​. 146 Mohandesi, “Identity Crisis.” 147 Adolph Reed, Jr., Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: The New Press, 2000), viii. 148 Reed, Class Notes, xv. 149 Reed, Class Notes, xxii. 150 Reed, Class Notes, xxvii. 151 Adolph Reed, Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis: The Discourse of Racial Disparity and Its Analytical Discontents,” Socialist Register (2012), 149–​75. 152 Reed and Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis,” 167. 153 Adolph Reed, Jr., “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism” (2013), in Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., No Politics But Class Politics, eds, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora (London: Eris, 2022), eBook, 24.

Notes  181 154 Walter Benn Michaels, “The Political Economy of Anti-​ Racism” (2018) in Michaels and Reed, No Politics But Class Politics, 82–​3. 155 Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Trouble with Disparity” (2020), in Michaels and Reed, No Politics But Class Politics, 283. 156 John-​Baptist Oduor, “Democracy and the Working-​Class: An Introduction to Reed, Macnair, and Gindin,” nonsite (October 20, 2023), https://​nons​ite.org/​ democr​acy-​and-​the-​work​ing-​class-​an-​intro​duct​ion-​to-​reed-​macn​air-​and-​gin​din/​. 157 William Lehman, “Deals Between the Big Three and UAW Shine Light on the Global Class War,” Newsweek (November 7, 2023), www.newsw​eek.com/​deals-​ betw​een-​big-​three-​uaw-​shine-​light-​glo​bal-​class-​war-​1841​332. 158 Nelson Lichtenstein, “UAW Strikers Have Scored a Historic, Transformative Victory,” Jacobin (November 11, 2023), https://​jaco​bin.com/​2023/​11/​uaw-​ str​ike-​contr​act-​fain-​vict​ory; Dan DiMaggio, “The UAW Has Shown the Extraordinary Power That Workers Can Wield,” Jacobin (October 31, 2023), https://​jaco​bin.com/​2023/​10/​uaw-​str​ike-​big-​three-​histo​ric-​wins-​wor​ker-​power-​ tentat​ive-​agr​eeme​nts. 159 Mike Macnair, “Blind leading the blind,” Weekly Worker (July 27, 2023), https://​ weekl​ywor​ker.co.uk/​wor​ker/​1453/​blind-​lead​ing-​the-​blind/​; On Strike! “UAW Wins Historic Gains at Big Three,” YouTube (November 6, 2023), www.yout​ ube.com/​watch?v=​bxbL​IY56​Bes. 160 Evan Blake and Tom Mackaman, “Wohlforth’s renegacy, the renewal of the struggle against Pabloism in the Workers League, and the return to the working class,” World Socialist Web Site (September 13, 2023), www.wsws.org/​en/​artic​ les/​2023/​09/​13/​wohl-​s13.html. 161 Reed and Chowkwanyun, “Race, Class, Crisis,” 167. 162 Black Power Media (with Jared Ball), “Adolph Reed, Jr and Black Lives Matter,” YouTube (December 10, 2020), www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​D8cZ​bR6c​L28. 163 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the “Philosophy of Poverty” by M. Proudhon (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, [1847] 1978); Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done? trans. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna (London: Penguin Books, [1902] 1989). 164 Deborah Kelsh, “Desire and Class: The Knowledge Industry in the Wake of Poststructuralism,” Cultural Logic 1:2 (1998), https://​ojs.libr​ary.ubc.ca/​index. php/​clo​gic/​arti​cle/​view/​192​713. 165 Mike Harman, “Identity crisis: Leftist anti-​wokeness is bullshit,” libcom.org (August 22, 2017), https://​lib​com.org/​blog/​ident​ity-​cri​sis-​left​ist-​anti-​woken​ess-​ bulls​hit-​22082​017. 166 Laura Tiernan, “UK: Johnson government orders review of ‘left wing extremism’, targeting Socialist Workers Party and ‘far-​left entryism’,” World Socialist Web Site (February 9, 2021), www.wsws.org/​en/​artic​les/​2021/​02/​10/​extre-​f10.html. For more on this subject, see Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption,” nonsite (June 9, 2020), https://​nons​ite.org/​ the-​triu​mph-​of-​black-​lives-​mat​ter-​and-​neo​libe​ral-​red​empt​ion/​. 167 Michaels and Reed, “The Trouble with Disparity.” See also Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 168 Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 169 Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 24.

182  Diversity Across the Political Spectrum 170 David North and Thomas Mackaman, eds, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews (Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2021). 171 Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 29. 172 Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 31. 173 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1979] 1984). 174 Gregory Meyerson, “Post-​Marxism as Compromise Formation,” Cultural Logic (January 2009), https://​ojs.libr​ary.ubc.ca/​index.php/​clo​gic/​arti​cle/​view/​191​554. 175 See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1976). 176 Meyerson, “Post-​Marxism as Compromise Formation.” 177 Meyerson, “Post-​Marxism as Compromise Formation.” 178 Meyerson, “Post-​Marxism as Compromise Formation.” 179 David Harvey, “Class Relations, Social Justice and the Politics of Difference,” in Michael Keith and Steve Pile, eds, Place and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 1993), 41–​65. 180 Harvey, “Class Relations, Social Justice and the Politics of Difference,” 48. 181 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). 182 David Harvey, “ ‘The Most Dangerous Book I Have Ever Written’: A Commentary on Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism,” Davidharvey.org (May 19, 2015), https://​davi​dhar​vey.org/​2015/​05/​the-​most-​danger​ous-​book-​i-​have-​ ever-​writ​ten-​a-​com​ment​ary-​on-​sevent​een-​con​trad​icti​ons-​and-​the-​end-​of-​cap​ital​ ism/​. See David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 183 Symposium on David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Syndicate (March 30, 2015), https://​syndic​ate.netw​ork/​sympo​sia/​ theol​ogy/​sevent​een-​con​trad​icti​ons-​and-​the-​end-​of-​cap​ital​ism/​. 184 Slavoj Žižek, The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 14–​16. 185 Harvey in Symposium on David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. 186 Slavoj Žižek, “For a Leftist Appropriation of the European Legacy,” Journal of Political Ideologies (February 1998), www.lacan.com/​zizek-​left​ist.htm. 187 Žižek, “For a Leftist Appropriation of the European Legacy.” 188 See Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Žižek, The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume 2, eds, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 151–​82. 189 Zahi Zalloua, “Decolonial Particularity or Abstract Universalism? No, Thanks! The Case of the Palestinian Question,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 13:1 (2019), http://​zizek​stud​ies.org/​index.php/​IJZS/​arti​cle/​view/​1108/​0. 190 Zalloua, “Decolonial Particularity or Abstract Universalism? No, Thanks!,” 86. 191 In the context of the Israeli bombing of Gaza in Fall 2023, 121 countries in the United Nations General Assembly voted for a humanitarian truce. Excluding the 44 countries that abstained from voting, many of them fearing trade sanctions by the U.S. and the E.U., only 14 countries were against the cessation of genocidal ethnic cleansing, including the U.S., Ukraine, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy, Finland and the United Kingdom. See Ben Norton, “US votes against peace in Gaza, defying vast majority of planet at UN,” Geopolitical Economy (October 28, 2023), https://​geop​olit​ical​econ​omy.com/​2023/​10/​28/​us-​vote-​peace-​gaza-​un/​.

Notes  183 92 Žižek, “For a Leftist Appropriation of the European Legacy.” 1 193 Ibram X. Kendi, “The Renaissance Is Black,” Time (February 3, 2021), https://​ time.com/​5932​842/​ibram-​kendi-​black-​rena​issa​nce/​. 194 Slavoj Žižek, “Can One Be a Hegelian Today?” The Philosophical Salon (October 28, 2019), https://​thephi​loso​phic​alsa​lon.com/​can-​one-​be-​a-​hegel​ian-​today/​. 195 See Alain Badiou with Fabien Tardy, Philosophy and the Event, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press, [2010] 2013). 196 On this subject see Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2016). 197 Slavoj Žižek, “They Are Both Worse!” The Philosophical Salon (February 25, 2019), https://​thephi​loso​phic​alsa​lon.com/​they-​are-​both-​worse/​. 198 Žižek, “Can One Be a Hegelian Today?”

Part III Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left

The last part of this guide to class struggle and identity politics considers why there is a paucity of analysis on the problem and problematic of identity politics on the left. This is no doubt due to the considerable impact of identity struggles over the last several decades, including anti-​racist civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ rights and anti-​colonialism. A class perspective on all of these can neither start out from historicized accounts of the rise of each nor with a genealogy that picks and chooses among epochs and concepts to devise a timely counterpoint to any specific issue. Marxism cannot always be everything to everyone. If politics can be advanced according to a modernist left-​to-​right spectrum, then we can describe, in a general manner, left-​wing, liberal, neoliberal, right-​ wing and anarchist positions on identity issues. The postmodern shift from macro to micropolitics does not simply redefine politics but also entails practices that one could describe as microliberal, micocommunist or microfascist. As micropolitics, all of these are developed according to the changing determinations of class society. Beyond that, identity trumps socialism by repressing the category of politics, as happens for example when the difficulty of politics is replaced with pacifying ahistorical terms like self/​other and centre/​margin, or when the politics in question directly suppresses class considerations, for example, with the liberal ideology of individual self-​ advancement or the fascist ideology of war as a form of social purification. There are three ways in which the supposed divide between modernism and postmodernism impacts Marxist thinking on the issue of class and identity: 1) the political problem posed for the left by contemporary anti-​universalism, 2) the problem with efforts to collapse the difference between identity politics and left politics, and 3) the problem for the left of an eclectic approach to materialism. I develop these three caveats in addition to what has already been argued in the two previous parts. 1  The Problem of Anti-​Universalism Let us consider the first problem –​anti-​universalism on the left –​with an example of its opposite. The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm DOI: 10.4324/9781003483922-4

186  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left wrote in the 1990s a notable critique of identity politics.1 Identity politics, he argues, and whether it is named as such or not, begins in the 1950s with the baby boom generation and the crisis of identity that it experienced, especially in immigrant nations like the United States, as the connection to traditional authority was severed by a revolution in norms around civil rights and gender equality. Between 1960 and 1990, the number of Americans who defined their politics in the terms of identity rather than class or nationality quadrupled from 500,000 to two million. These identitarian identifications, Hobsbawm contends, are not construed in terms of commonalities but in terms of differences from other groups. Identity politics tends to ignore the fact that its groupings are not based on integral similarities and differences. Further, identity politics also ignores the reality that no one individual has a monolithic identity that determines their politics. From the opposite perspective, identity can be imposed on individuals and groups from without. In relation to both possibilities, either a self-​defined or an externally imposed identity, class politics does not require that individuals and groups delimit their sense of identity but allows different aspects of one’s social reality to be combined in ways that are not exclusive. When it comes to the question of universality, Hobsbawm argues that identity politics is not central to the left. He defines the left as the outcome of the mass movements that were created in the context of the bourgeois and socialist revolutions. Mass political movements are not organized according to identity but according to the universal causes that allow different groups to combine and achieve their aims. Socialist and labour parties, for example, gained the support of women, minorities and immigrants because they championed equality and social justice. In the postwar era, labour organizations began to resemble identity politics in the sense that they were reconceived as pressure groups rather than agents of a new society. As Thatcherism in the U.K. succeeded in representing workers as an interest group, the working class was separated from the cause of universality and thereby ceased to figure as the cause of humanity. We can appreciate the shift that is described by Hobsbawm on the basis of two contemporary examples: the demands for justice for George Floyd and for Julian Assange. As universal causes, one does not demand justice because one of these men is black and the other a journalist, but because the assault on their life and liberty does injustice to the cause of all. Identity politics, Hobsbawm contends, is designed for specific groups. In the frame of identity or group interest politics rather than mass politics, we have representation by Black Lives Matter and Journalists for Assange. This special interest representation enables politicians to shirk the cause of these individuals as the cause of all. If the demand for police reform or the protection of free speech was limited to Floyd and Assange, as representative members of specific groups, the cause of social justice would be exclusive and not universal. Who among us has the privilege or the duty to demand justice for Floyd or Assange? By expecting little or nothing from political liberalism, rights discourse or

The Problem of Anti-Universalism  187 socialism, pessimist racialists and free speech libertarians make claims to exceptionality by separating universalism from autonomous interests. According to Hobsbawm, the left cannot base itself on identity politics. On the other hand, for those groups that are most oppressed, the left is the most natural ally since the left fights for the rights of all human beings and not exclusively for the advancement of one specific group or nationality. This is what the term Black Lives Matter was intended to convey and why it so happens that in the summer of 2020 most of the 20 million BLM protesters were white. And this is why the cause of Julian Assange is universally recognized across national boundaries and fields of professional practice. A socialist programme retains from Enlightenment universality this concern with the common interest. However, since the decline of communist parties and the rise of New Left social movements in the postwar era, the left has shifted from universalist mass politics to coalitions of minority and interest groups, a phenomenon known as movementism. Because these groups are defined according to distinct interests, social solidarity is reconceived as a possibility that must be demonstrated rather than presumed. Not surprisingly, a politics that is premised on the reproach rather than the promise of universality leads to a fragmented polity in which resentment rather than respect becomes the premise and the telos of social relations. With support for feminism polling at 10 percent in the U.K. and 15 percent in the U.S. in the mid-​1990s, the idea of a feminist party, Hobsbawm argues, makes no sense. Despite its independent development, feminism nevertheless tends to function as a supplement to the more conventional politics of left, right and centre. However, the fact that there are socialist, liberal and conservative approaches to gender politics should not be a comfort to the left. The decline of Enlightenment universalism, whose horizon is justice and equality, is more detrimental to the majority, which is represented by the socialist left, than it is to the minority of bourgeois capitalists and fascist demagogues. The need for solidarity is greater among the subordinated working-​class masses than it is among ruling elites and their mercenary forces. Because the strongest and most common instance of identity politics is bourgeois nationalism, the left rejects the exclusivity of identity in the same way that it rejects nationalist chauvinism. At the end of WWII, it was the international left that represented humanity because it represented the rejection of imperialism, racism and xenophobia. It was socialist ideology that was the moral foundation of liberal versions of welfare policy, racial justice and gender equality. Since that time, neoliberalism has separated social solidarity –​ downgraded as undeserved entitlements –​from economic liberalism, leaving the postmodernists’ vaunted “new subjectivities” without a universally emancipatory perspective.2 In the countries of the former Eastern bloc as well as in the former colonial metropoles, neoliberal governments have ceased to take responsibility for the necessities of social reproduction. On the intellectual front, the postmodern deconstruction of universality has helped to intensify

188  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left capitalist relations. In this context, progressive politics goes into reverse. As Walter Benn Michaels puts it: the core of a left politics is its critique of and resistance to capitalism –​its commitment to decommodifying education, health care, and housing, and creating a more economically equal society. Neither hostility to discrimination nor the accompanying enthusiasm for diversity makes the slightest contribution to accomplishing any of those goals. Just the opposite in fact. They function instead to provide inequality with a meritocratic justification: If everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, there is no injustice when some people fail.3 For Michaels, identity politics cannot supplement left politics because it is the politics of a ruling class that has no difficulty leaving the majority of working people behind. Equal gender and racial representation in the middle and upper classes not only does little to make society more equal, he argues, but the struggle for equity through diversity makes society more unequal because it provides a veneer of legitimacy to capitalist politics. Who is it that assails universalism? The critique of universality has a spontaneous presence on the left as a critique of Enlightenment idealism and of the bourgeoisie as the class of people whose particular interests have become ideological common sense. This basic model of the Marxist critique of ideology, which has nothing in common with anti-​Enlightenment conservatism, has been transformed through postmodern theory into a generalized hermeneutics of suspicion that applies the lesson of ideology critique to all social realms, from bourgeois ideology to rights discourse, gender norms, heteronormativity, whiteness, ableism, ageism, settler privileges, and any form of institutional and cultural authority, now suspected of authoritarianism. In postmodern theory and interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, it is not only bourgeois capitalism but everything, including Marxism, that is subjected to various forms of theoretical disarticulation. As Vivek Chibber points out, the reduction of materialist analysis to the terms of meaning, language and culture corresponds to the avoidance of the kind of macro-​ level analysis that is associated with Marxist theory. “The focus on ideas and meaning,” he writes, “has encouraged a turn away from structural analysis and toward the valuation of [the] contingency of social phenomena, and further, an insistence upon the local and particular, as against the more universalizing claims of traditional class theory.”4 The point of Marxist class analysis is not to ignore questions of culture, but to not theorize culture in such a way that energy is channelled away from collective goals and organization. Postmodern challenges to Marxist materialism, however, do not simply locate class processes in the realm of culture, as Chibber argues, but also in the realm of identity, with the resulting shift from communist to “global” and “intersectional” variations on the theme of emancipation.5 While this would seem to revert from a Marxist materialism to a previous stage of bourgeois

The Problem of Anti-Universalism  189 materialism, along with empiricism or positivism, the postmodern disarticulation of materialism into matterism is an even more regressive move. A prominent example of postmodern anti-​Enlightenment is the work of the celebrated decolonial scholar Ariella Azoulay. In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Azoulay develops a reverse ethnography of what she deems the megalomania of Western civilization.6 Like most postmodern critics of universality, Azoulay limits this multiform concept to little more than a product of European modernity, that is, rather than thinking of it as a concept that can transcend its time and place of origin. It should be said that Azoulay is hardly unique when it comes to postmodern understandings of this subject. The same problem characterizes the liberal theorist Kenan Malik’s approach to the Enlightenment universality that defines the bourgeois revolutions. Rather than the Haitian Revolution “realizing” the ideals of secular universal emancipation, understood in a Hegelian sense, an abstract materialism leads him to perceive two limited definitions: the Haitian Revolution, in which the (freed) slaves of Haiti overthrew their European masters and declared independence, either demonstrates the greatness of Europe, since the Haitians did so in the context of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, or it is a reminder that its ideals are tainted by racism and colonialism, especially since France did everything it could to hold on to its colony. These definitions, which insist on laying bare the particularity that underscores universality, reject the possibility that the ideals of the Enlightenment belong to anyone who is committed to them, which is exactly what the Haitians demonstrated. Instead, Malik insists on the particularism of universalism, which means that no universal principle is ever or can ever be universal. If for Marxists, bourgeois ideals are determined by changing socio-​economic conditions, for contemporary anti-​ racist scholarship, the slaves of Saint-​ Domingue did not require anything more than the experience of oppression to define and justify their revolt. Malik is less concerned with the socio-​ political transition from feudalism to capitalism than he is with the contradictory relation of race to universality. This non-​Marxist materialism thus avoids the advantages of theory for the disadvantages of history. History –​ or rather, as Walter Benn Michaels defines it, post-​history –​is in this sense fixed rather than retroactively altered by contemporary struggles. And the binding agent, according to Malik’s best, pluralist intentions, is race. If for Marxists the bourgeois revolutions are determinately different from medieval peasant revolts, the Haitian Revolution is for racialists redemption of the hardships of slave ancestors. In other words, Enlightenment universality can only be vindicated by racial equality, which redefines the Enlightenment project as a contradictory means to maintain inequality rather than a result of the struggle against feudalism and superstition. While the bourgeois project was carried out nearly everywhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what matters to Malik about the Haitian Revolution –​and the same can be said about most other twenty-​first-​century interpreters of this event –​is the prominent role that race plays in its history. In other words, what matters to

190  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left this interpretation is by and large the postmodern problematization of universality rather than its historical realization.7 Whereas Malik relies on the methods of new historicism for his deconstruction of Enlightenment universality, Azoulay makes use of ethnography. Of course, even a reverse ethnography privileges the discipline of ethnography, and in this case, of post-​structuralist ethnography, which, as David Tomas contended, subjects culture and history to the corrosive effects of textual politics.8 Why should politics be replaced with ethnographic definitions of culture? This is only one of the traps laid before those who are enjoined to unlearn European Enlightenment and it is one that is missed by even a perceptive scholar like Susan Neiman, who makes the otherwise valid, if currently unpopular, argument that the lasting achievement of the Enlightenment was to give formal and institutional expression to a secular and reasoned understanding of those things that are common to all of humanity. It is an incontrovertible irony, Neiman writes, as well as plain factual inaccuracy, that Enlightenment universal ideals are today construed as a sham invented to disguise Eurocentric views designed to justify colonialism.9 Against those, like the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who rejected the concept of humanity as a Jewish plot, Neiman argues that universal humanity is an ideal, and not an empirical referent, through which Enlightenment intellectuals were the first to condemn Eurocentrism and the evils of colonialism.10 Just as postmodern anti-​humanist tribalism reduces people to that over which they have the least control –​usually their race or gender –​Neiman says that the politics of allyship asks that people ignore their convictions in favour of temporary connivances. To reject Enlightenment principles on the evidence that they were not upheld by the powerful ignores what they have allowed humanity to achieve, especially with regard to the injustices of racism and oppression. Nineteenth-​century slaveholders would not have required the development of justificatory theories of scientific racism had it not been for Enlightenment values of liberty. However, defence of the liberal or social democratic pluralism that Neiman champions –​in effect, multiculturalism –​goes some way in blinding us to another reason for the current attack on Enlightenment universality: its usefulness to those who seek to conceive socialism as Eurocentric as well.11 According to Nivedita Majumdar, capitalist exploitation and worker resistance is similar everywhere around the world. The assumption that because socialism originated in the West it has no resonance elsewhere only gains currency as the well-​off in the West abandon a defeated workers’ movement and make alliances with the “anti-​racist” cultural right in India and elsewhere, who now denounce socialism as a foreign idea.12 Debates on the left concerning the significance of the bourgeois revolutions to socialism, which cannot be evaluated without also considering the ideology of fascism, are brushed aside by thinkers like Azoulay who are more attuned to the postmodern zeitgeist. Having set her sights on European Enlightenment rather than capitalism and political economy, Azoulay makes universality into the mediating force of relations between oppressors and oppressed. The

The Problem of Anti-Universalism  191 author makes an ironic use of anthropology by counter-​intuitively presenting a timeless, ahistorical approach to European modernity through the extensive use of archives, which themselves are suspect as a vestige of the encyclopaedic orientation of bourgeois education. Against this, Azoulay proposes an “anti-​ imperial onto-​epistemological framework” in which identity and embodiment combines with knowledge to create a foundation for the unlearning of Europe’s colonial “habitus,” or way of being.13 Along the lines of reparations, reconciliation, rem/​patriation and restitution, unlearning means going 500 years back to the time before the great age of “discovery” but no more –​not back 3000 years to the epoch of slave societies or 1500 years to an age in which trade and Christianity was an option that many preferred to animal and slave sacrifices, nomadic raiding and wealth accumulation through tribute money. Along moral rather than political lines, this rejection of imperial plunder leads to the contention that all forms of retention are dubious –​a countercultural and New Age ethos of “letting go” now applied to notions like citizenship and humanity. One forerunner of this line of inquiry is Julia Kristeva’s application of her structuralist theory of abjection to the question of nationality in Strangers to Ourselves, a formalistic approach that fails the “Hitler test” insofar as its valid insights would nevertheless, in cases that she does not discuss, relativize and depoliticize anti-​imperialism.14 It is not surprising that a theory that mostly pretends to be anti-​bourgeois makes subjectivity the basis for solidarity. While the question of social justice that was raised with reference to Floyd and Assange was shown to be a question of universal interest, Azoulay remakes this into a moral problem of acquisitiveness: one must not be “possessive” about historical tragedy or the plight of others. Fair enough, but “unlearning,” as she writes, is also “a way of disengaging from political initiatives, concepts, or modes of thinking, including critical theory, that are devised and promoted as progressive and unprecedented.”15 Azoulay is only one of many identity-​ oriented theorists who pretend to reinvent the wheel of social theory but whose deconstructive license reaches further than their persuasiveness. One has to want to hear something that sounds completely different to welcome the call to “nonprogressive study” and the rejection of thinking about what ought to be so as to avoid the accusation of being “not radical enough.”16 As she puts it, with reference to Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the killing of the father in totemic rituals, the current destination of global citizenship, in which for example liberal democracies are now voting for fascist political representatives, causes us to reject both the revolutionary idea of progress and progress in the idea of revolution.17 She writes: If one contested the value of the citizenship achieved through the American and French Revolutions, one risked being misunderstood as, at best, a conservative echoing doctrines from Edmund Burke’s school, an accusation that assumes that Burke’s critique of the French Revolution should be altogether rejected.18

192  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left The least one can say about Azoulay, who is hardly the only anti-​racist intellectual who thinks that more attention should be paid to the Haitian Revolution than to its two predecessors, is that she does not present her anti-​ universalism as critical theory or political ideology. But what of the school of Edmund Burke? If the Haitian Revolution is one way to assess the merit of the French and American Revolutions, does that make it the only one? Surely there were other bourgeois revolutions after Haiti, but the point of the postmodern focus on Toussaint Louverture is less to affirm revolutionary theory than to cast doubt on the notion of universality. An event in politics is measured by the verification of its foundational claims and not by its flaws and limitations. David Walsh, the arts editor of the World Socialist Web Site, argues in Marxist terms that there is a material basis to contemporary intellectual and cultural production. As the imperialist war drive wreaked havoc in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and in Afghanistan, where the Donald Trump administration dropped the largest bomb since Hiroshima, and as NATO forces now move towards Great Power conflict with Russia and China, the middle class diverts attention from radical thinking on ideological struggle to instead focus on race, gender and sexual politics, which are now given academic cachet through rarefied concepts like whiteness, cisgender privilege and toxic masculinity. In the hands of neoliberal politicians, Walsh argues, identity politics plays a cynical role in foreign policy and masks the fact that society is most deeply divided along class and economic lines.19 The decline in the popular share of national income over the last 50 years and the rise of the billionaire class contributes to deteriorating living and work conditions. If it were not for the pressure to make scholarship seem innovative, scholars like Azoulay would have difficulty overlooking the far-​reaching significance of socialism’s opposition to racism, colonialism and imperialism. Socialism has advanced the cause of sovereignty through anti-​colonial struggles, of minorities through civil rights struggles and of women through suffrage, divorce laws and abortion rights. This causes the ruling class to look for new and intellectually sophisticated ways to divide the working class. Through the twisted logic of victimization, which cannot replace the import of progressive universality, neoliberal activists now go on witch hunts against minor indiscretions in all spheres of life at the same time that conservatives seek to overturn the right to abortion, divorce, gay marriage, the use of contraceptives, child labour laws, the right to protest, the right to criticize genocide or to read Shakespeare and Dickens, whose works are now being scrubbed by sensitivity readers. Affluent academics and institutions that first supported intersectional challenges to ostensibly white feminism and ostensibly class reductive Marxism have now targeted Enlightenment-​derived, universalist mass politics as the product of white, Christian and European colonialism.20 What one inadvertently unlearns through this wave of scholarship is the promotion of a global class of non-​, anti-​and post-​socialist elites. Whereas anti-​humanist

The Problem of Anti-Universalism  193 discourse theory had previously attacked the foundations of universal truths and objective reality with the idea of a politics of truth, the current scholarly flight from critical social theory into the unreality of suffering and trauma coincides with the post-​ideological ratification of poverty, famine, militarism and climate disaster, and this, despite all of the careerist virtue signalling to the contrary. This is only one reason why the working class, whose employment does not rely on ever more sophisticated forms of deradicalization, never quite measures up. It is not an accident that the rise of care studies in American humanities and social science research –​adjuncts of trauma studies and affect theory –​coincides with efforts to make health care as expensive and inefficient as possible. As financialized GDP in privatized health care increases, so does the maximization of profits. The sicker people become, the more money the health care industry makes. The more time and money people spend on health, the more effort is wasted on the study of care.21 The lesson here is not cynicism but the importance of politics. Walsh argues that while no truths are absolute, none are entirely relative either. The understanding seeks the closest approximation between thought and reality. In terms of “onto-​ epistemological frameworks,” as Azoulay puts it, Walsh states that not every human experience can be or needs to be grasped by everyone else. Cultural, national and linguistic differences are relative differences that are premised on the underlying sameness that allows us to appreciate differences. Material, physiological and psychological needs are common across cultures, even if the conditions and the particulars vary. Contrary to the postulates of decolonialists, the belief in universality has not always been part of European or human culture and its secular form is the product of Enlightenment philosophy. During the two centuries leading to the 1970s, secular universality was the premise of culture, politics and most scholarly learning. The universality of humankind was the premise of the view that cultural forms allow cultures to interact and that where there is discord among people it is society, economics, culture or politics that are at fault and not human nature. Current trends in anti-​Enlightenment thought which presume that whites cannot understand or make works about blacks, Walsh argues, have a very bad pedigree. Such trends rehabilitate the ideas of the reactionary thinkers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries but repackage them as new, progressive and postmodern. The rejection of the radical accomplishments of the European bourgeoisie did not begin with scholars like Gerald Horne and journalists like Nikole Hannah-​ Jones, but with anti-​ revolutionary, prejudiced defences of hierarchy, tradition, religion, irrationality and ethnic-​mindedness, and with the division of humanity into feudal camps. The counter-​Enlightenment views of Joseph de Maistre, for example, advocated monarchy and the terror of the executioner as the ballast of social order. De Maistre argued that there was no such thing as humanity, only Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, Persians, and so on. In the nineteenth century, Arthur de Gobineau rejected the 1848 revolution and expressed his disgust with egalitarianism. The racial question

194  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left was for him the overarching question of history and he viewed the mixing of races as the cause of civilizational decline. If conservatives in twentieth-​ century America considered white and black folkways to be inevitable, they did so to justify segregation, just as the French anti-​Dreyfusards considered the innocent soldier to be guilty on account of his race. Walsh quotes the national socialist Oswald Spengler, who writes: “Each culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it. There is no general morality of mankind. … Truths are truths only in relation to a particular human group.”22 The combination of philosophical pessimism with reactionary politics was the core of fascist ideology. This task is now being performed, in various ways, by left postmodernists who believe that the rejection of the notion of progress is somehow progressive. One can easily imagine how postmodern nihilism has contributed to the relativism –​or the onto-​ epistemological frameworks –​according to which people are now enjoined to “speak their truth.” In The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism, From Nietzsche to Postmodernism, Richard Wolin argues that anti-​ Enlightenment has implications for the present as the anti-​democratic orientation of figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man have made a comeback under the auspices of the academic left.23 While racialist decolonialists might not be surprised that many countries now have fascist parties and leaders –​Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Giorgia Meloni and the Brothers of Italy, the Alternative for Germany, Vox in Spain, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, the Svoboda party in Ukraine, Nigel Farage and UKIP in the U.K., Jimmie Åkesson and the Sweden Democrats, the GOP under Trump, ACT and New Zealand First in New Zealand, Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada –​one must ask how it is that both neoliberal class restoration as well as postmodern nihilism have contributed to this state of affairs. Wolin was perhaps premature to suggest that the “postmodern juggernaut has run aground,” that its “program of a ‘farewell to reason’ failed to take root” outside of academia, or that its “bold proclamation concerning the end of ‘metanarratives’ of human emancipation also failed to gain widespread acceptance.”24 In the 1980s and 90s the academic left sought to replace the vestiges of social democracy with anti-​universal identity politics and cultural self-​affirmation. This, Wolin says, was in some ways due to the privileges allowed by academic freedom in developed nations. While one might agree with him that since then the socialist left’s reorientation around democratic values and human rights represents the demise of postmodern cultural relativism, we might also wonder, as Slavoj Žižek says about the patient who convinces his psychiatrist that he no longer believes that he is a kernel of corn that is threatened by a chicken that wants to eat him: does the chicken know it? In this register, Angela Nagle has chronicled how transgression for its own sake migrated from countercultural quarters to the alt-​right, and this, before Trump goons attacked the Capitol building, Marjorie Taylor Greene trolled

The Problem of Anti-Universalism  195 AOC and Ron DeSantis punked the media by sending hungry Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Nihilistic cynicism, reactive irony and the schadenfreude of public humiliation, she says, attacked liberal call-​out sensibilities with fake and irreverent politics.25 Although it may seem that right-​ wing mockery and transgression exposes liberal hypocrisies more effectively than postmodern critiques of bourgeois humanism, the fetishization of moral righteousness in such cases ignores what has actually occurred over the last few decades. When the postmodern left conflates the conservative, capitalist and individualist universalism of the political right with the emancipatory, progressive universality of the left, it reinforces neoliberalism. The confusion this produces was demonstrated in September 2022 when Uju Anya was censored by Twitter and later by her employer, Carnegie Mellon University, for posting criticism of the British monarchy after the death of Elizabeth II. Jeff Bezos publicly criticized the scholar without thinking that her racialist separation of the critique of British colonial imperialism from the critique of British capitalism, about which she said nothing, serves his agenda. The irony of the moment was that after the American establishment had condoned the iconoclastic removal of statues of Washington and Jefferson, it was soon thereafter honouring the archaic, feudal institutions that these figures had deposed. And so it goes. There are parallels in the shift from modernism to postmodernism in the realms of culture and politics. Much of what the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton says in his 2016 book Culture could be applied to politics.26 While contemporary identity politics owes a great deal to the anthropological sense of the concept of culture, collective notions of culture existed long before the early twentieth century. Since the Romantic era, notions of national organic society challenged the idea of politics based on economic necessity and crude materialism. Romanticism reversed the standard opposition between civilization and barbarism, calling on culture to provide spiritual values and moral guidance. Its greatest exponent was not Jean-​Jacques Rousseau but Friedrich Nietzsche. However, just as the “plural contingency of postmodern political struggles” depends on the totality of capital as the terrain for their emergence, Eagleton reminds us that there was no nineteenth-​century literature without material factors like the printing press.27 Civilization is no less the precondition of culture than universality is the precondition of particularity. The paradox is that one does not directly presuppose the other, least of all because there are endless varieties of cultural particularity. This leads to struggles to define the universal, which can take the shape of anti-​poverty campaigns or notions of cultural authenticity. When culture, in either the anthropological sense or the aesthetic sense, understands itself as a self-​sufficient model of social structure and meaning, problems of social antagonism and alienation are only magically resolved. Modern culture has developed the sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are, appealing to reflexive notions of self-​division and improvement. Postmodernism, Eagleton says, takes the multiplicity of culture as a fact to be

196  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left celebrated. In doing so, he argues, it makes no distinction between better and worse forms of culture, allowing diversity to be compatible with social hierarchy. “It was not diversity that brought the apartheid system in South Africa to its knees,” he writes, “or plurality that toppled the neo-​Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe.”28 Eagleton defines postmodernism as a post-​revolutionary ideology that rejects forms of unity such as universality, nature and identity as essentialist. Its lack of enthusiasm for solidarity and dogmatic support of pluralism, diversity and marginality plays a key role in consumer capitalism. Seemingly democratic, the commodity refuses no one except those who cannot afford it. The totality that post-​structuralist authors like Azoulay reject returns in the uniformity of capitalism that is tempered only by its conditions of permanent destabilization. Anti-​universalist approaches reject leftist politics on the view that it suppresses difference. Instead, the replacement of politics and art with the contingency of cultural difference allows society and subjectivity to be conceived as more flexible, which legitimizes the ongoing academic obsession with non-​ leftist social constructionism. Postmodernism’s notion of culture, however, is relativistic, and, except for its basis in market relations, indifferent. Those who take social equality seriously should be suspicious of such deceptions. Whereas the post-​universal condition is thought to open onto a plane of immanence, the ideology of postmodernism, focused as it is on universal victimhood, cannot account for why it is, as Eagleton says, that slaves do not like to be enslaved, why the West seemingly does only bad things, and why anti-​universalism could be used to teach rather than unlearn colonialism. Partisanship, in contrast, assesses the cause of universal truths over and against the infinite heterogeneity of particular interests.29 2  The Difference Between Socialist Politics and Identity Politics Legitimate efforts to combine socialism with identity politics sometimes privilege identity and undermine leftism. While there is no single formula through which socialists have combined struggles against oppression with the struggle against capitalist exploitation, some approaches are more and less Marxist than others. The theory of intersectionality, for example, can hardly be said to be Marxist and tends to undermine class solidarity. However, there are identity and group-​oriented agendas that one would not want to exclude from a broadly defined left project. I consider here three versions of materialism that combine left politics with anti-​ oppression struggles: 1) left identitarianism, 2) left anti-​essentialism, and 3) a politics of recognition that is not concerned with the distinction between essentialism and anti-​essentialism. As methods that are primarily concerned with identity issues but that ground their concerns in Marxist theory and materialism, these approaches have the potential to contribute to the development of the socialist movement. However, these methods are built on fault lines that can also strengthen liberal models of pluralism, postmodern theories of radical

The Difference Between Socialist Politics and Identity Politics  197 democracy or a more robust version of intersectionality, and so leftists are advised to understand such developments in relation to the broad scope of Marxist doctrine and its changing circumstances. The first of these three models is left identitarianism. Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks presents a unique example of left identitarianism that relies on the distinction between the rights claims of Indigenous peoples and the more nebulous concept of multiculturalism, which does not typically present a challenge to state power.30 In Canada, Indigenous peoples are also known as First Nations and the designation Indigenous includes the concerns of Inuit and Metis groups. Coulthard’s Indigenous Marxism resists the effort of some Indigenous leaders, which Arthur Manuel refers to as the “professional Indian negotiating class,” to rebuild their societies through Wall Street and Bay Street multinationals.31 Although Coulthard distinguishes between Indigenous rights to self-​determination and more recent government overtures regarding the kind of legal “recognition” that reinforces liberal pluralism, his approach is more partial to Foucauldian discourse theory than Marxism. By incorporating critiques of settler colonialism into Marxism, he is more concerned to expand intersectional analysis than to develop the already substantial amount of Marxist theory regarding non-​capitalist ways of life and anti-​colonial struggles. This combination is now known as decoloniality, a theoretical agenda that is different from intersectionality but that also has overlapping and mutually reinforcing premises. Coulthard defines the colonial relation as “the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal and state relations converge to facilitate a certain power effect.”32 He challenges the Marxist “developmentalist” theory of primitive accumulation and calls for interaction between Marxist and Indigenous perspectives. In doing so, he avoids a rigorous study of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to present what is ultimately a deficient stereotype of Marxism.33 His version of standpoint epistemology, wherein one’s subjective perspective determines one’s politics, calls for a shift from the analysis of capitalism to that of white settler colonialism. This, he argues, makes Indigenous critique distinct from Marxism and the rest of Western culture. Even if Coulthard’s call for direct action beyond the state-​controlled recognition movement rejects capitalism and dispossession, his prefigurative approach to politics encounters the more general problems of nationalism, state power and global capitalist reinforcement. The fact that dispossession, as opposed to proletarianization, continues to inform Indigenous place-​based struggles should not be thought to detach socialism from the critique of colonialism and from the goal of ecological sustainability. Like many left identitarians, Coulthard accuses Marxism of economic reductionism. However, against discourse theories that falsely presume that power requires the normalization of subjectivity, only Marxism proposes the norms of solidarity that are required to effectively fight capitalism. Coulthard would seem to agree but this is mostly because the politics of recognition are too amorphous to address settler-​colonial contexts. Indigenous struggle

198  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left leads him to a politics of decolonial sovereignty that avoids the problems of nationalism and the state. Marxism has not ignored the importance of popular struggles and a materialist approach that is both historical and dialectical must consider the strengths and the weaknesses of classic approaches to class struggle. Marxism can avoid the presuppositions of developmentalist models of change without at the same time abandoning concepts like totality and universality. At the theoretical level, this means avoiding the conflation of capitalism with colonialism, racism, patriarchy and other phenomena. Doing so allows us to better understand the internationalist contribution to Indigenous futures. However, the fact that Coulthard structured his book on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks rather than the more anti-​bourgeois Wretched of the Earth leads him in the direction of an abstract universality.34 A second model that combines identity issues with materialist analysis is left anti-​essentialism. This perspective is represented very forcefully by Holly Lewis’ book on “queer Marxist” theory, The Politics of Everybody.35 Because Lewis proposes a unified theory that is based on historical materialism, she makes a much stronger case than Coulthard for a redefinition of Marxism. At the outset, the absence of references to psychoanalysis undermines her approach to queer theory. Moreover, her replacement of the concept of universality with the common-​sense term everybody only pretends to leave behind problems of philosophy. Still, there is much in Lewis’ work to be commended. Lewis defines her project as an internationalist feminist materialism that is queer, trans-​inclusive and grounded in the Marxist critique of political economy. She rejects the kinds of anti-​capitalism that promote equality on the terms of liberal ideology. Her politics is committed to the mobilization of working-​class organizations beyond new social movement activism. The cultural emphasis of decolonial activism and its rejection of proletarian universalism is itself rejected as inadequate to end colonization. So are liberal and conservative forms of communitarianism that either affirm diversity or the negative freedom from external interference rejected. Lewis opposes an emancipatory universality of solidarity to the “universalism” of the market. Lewis calls for class solidarity with queer, trans and intersex people on the principle of self-​determination. Queer culture is not a political principle, she argues, and is to be denounced as elitist insofar as it breaks with class solidarity. Although she believes that Marxism and queer theory are comparable versions of social constructionism, with Marxism construed as a precursor to standpoint epistemology, Marxism is neither a form of standpoint epistemology nor an all-​purpose theory of social construction. The Marxian standpoint is universal history and not the working class. Nor does Marxist politics advocate vitalism. Regarding social constructionism, the structuralist reaction to the subjectivist thrust of existentialism led to the anti-​humanistic themes of post-​structuralism, with ambiguity, undecidability, irony, relativism, difference, and so on, producing, as Lewis herself puts it, “a politically vague anti-​authoritarian communitarianism.”36 The cultural and linguistic

The Difference Between Socialist Politics and Identity Politics  199 turns in academia rejected economic reasoning on the grounds that it led to a raceless and genderless ideology. This encouraged the development of an academic and activist pseudo-​left. Post-​structuralism then filled the void that it had created with the pseudo-​concrete “matterism” of bodies, media and language, an equivocation of materialism that abstracts material reality.37 Although Lewis does acknowledge the fact that Marxist theory does not privilege individual (phenomenological) perception as the arbiter of reality, constructionism and the definition of ideology as the naturalization and reification of relations of domination is used by postmodern discourse theory to dissolve class analysis into an amorphous post-​Marxism that is focused on any and all power relations rather than on the historical, political, ideological, cultural and economic power of the capitalist class. Efforts to resist the dissolution of Marxism into post-​structuralism are typically countered by false and non-​dialectical distinctions between concrete reality and formal logic, a metaphysical dualism that is more intellectually disabling than the problems created by a mechanistic approach to the Marxian distinction between economic base and ideological superstructures. Fortunately, Lewis is a more sophisticated thinker than that. She addresses some of the middle-​class deviations from socialist feminism, such as lesbian separatism, the moral panics of anti-​porn feminists, and cisnormative TERFs who reject the rights of trans women. Against accusations of Marxist reductionism, which is most often a pretext for the avoidance of economic analysis altogether, she argues that what is reductionist is the conflation of morality with politics, which ignores the conditions of labour and replaces this with critiques of consumer behaviour. Failing to distinguish between science and quasi-​religious rhetoric, postmodernists view all politics as oppressive, which leads to depoliticized micropolitical training in anti-​oppression. Among the many problems with anti-​oppression and diversity training is a recent trend towards segregated training sessions, as was the case in 2023 with New York University’s “whites only” workshops on anti-​racism, which were premised on the thoroughly racist notion that white people are inherently racist.38 Marx, Lewis argues, does not contend that social life is determined by economics but that it is non-​teleologically conditioned by material reality. On the subject of the family, she rejects queer supremacist claims that the destruction of heterosexual reproduction has anything to do with ending capitalism. Marx and Engels did not advocate the abolition of the family but the creation of more egalitarian relations within industrial society. Categories of class, race and gender were therefore conceived as aspects of the development of capitalism. On the question of a unitary or dual system of oppression, Lewis favours Lise Vogel’s feminist analysis of relations of production and social reproduction. Rather than include domestic work into wage relations, as some feminists recommend, its costs should be factored into wages and the struggle for better living standards. The Marxist critique of abstract labour contends that due to the compulsions of necessity workers are only formally and not actually free to sell their labour. Against the accusation that the

200  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left theory of abstract labour is blind to particularity, Lewis reminds us that the Marxist critique of formal freedom is not empirical or normative but mathematical. One might be forgiven for also thinking that it is political. As for feminists who posit the centrality of sexual oppression as a timeless phenomenon, this ideologization of patriarchy does not exclude it from the historical transformation of the political economy. An ahistorical concept of patriarchy can do little to explain specific historical experiences. As New Left themes of sexual liberation, cultural diversity and anti-​ authority avoided Marxist political economy, academic postmodernism and the conditions of neoliberal precarity led to the replacement of universal ideals with minor, empirical narratives that deferred socialist solutions to widespread problems. This resulted in the development of a “vector model of oppression,” which Lewis defines as an intersectional approach to social vectors such as race, class, gender, sexuality and disability that are detached from socialist theories of exploitation.39 Because it tends to ignore the problem of nationalism, the vector model reinforces the post-​structuralist logic of incommensurability that is promoted by diasporic intellectuals, who use radical-​seeming concepts to advance nationalist, identitarian and racialist agendas. Because class is acceptable to such intellectuals only when it is combined with a marginal vector, the Marxist identification of the centrality of class is suspected of placing the experience of straight, white, hetero, wealthy, European, able-​bodied and non-​immigrant men ahead of the interests of women, queers, trans and colonized people. In addition, while queer theory replaces women’s studies with gender studies, the latter is accused of ignoring straight women’s issues. To now discuss women’s issues is to risk being criticized for ignoring gay men, black men and trans people. Queer “imperialists” criticize trans people for their “cis-​sexism” or they criticize homonormative gays for their assimilationism. Such radical posturing in academia is for the most part self-​indulgence, giving positive value to suffering and the body as the locus of disciplinary power, thereby reducing politics to interpersonal dynamics. As for wealthy gays, she says, it is less relevant to Marxism that they are homonormal than that they are bourgeois. Lewis identifies the contradiction at the heart of today’s virtue ethics: “left (neo) liberal politics promoted by the academy as a critique of neoliberalism.”40 On an institutional level, virtue ethics works to promote awareness of the many forms of power and commit people to the renunciation of privileges. Gramsci’s war of manoeuvre is replaced with an ever-​meeker war of position limited to ethical consumer practices and diversity hires. Devolving into timeless categories and symbolism, the intersectional vector model is incompatible with Marxism. Because the vector model is focused on oppression, class is the most difficult category to reconcile with intersectionality. The possibility of upward mobility is enough for most intersectionalists to limit the problem of class inequality to questions of individual merit or to problems of social snobbery and respect, an anti-​Marxist approach to class exploitation known as classism.

The Difference Between Socialist Politics and Identity Politics  201 Lewis’ analysis gets into some difficulties when she suggests that a truly flawed Marxism is one that reduces oppression to an epiphenomenon of the economic base. The problem with this way of stating the issue is that the critique of mechanistic reflectionism potentially leads to a social constructionism which considers that Marxism is limited to class issues and economic essentialism. A theory that is social constructionist can easily slide into an all-​purpose materialism. Lewis tends to avoid this problem, especially as she is careful to not confuse Foucauldian theories of power with the study of material relations conditioned by capitalism. The problem re-​emerges when she suggests that categories of race, gender, religion and nationality are equally co-​implicated in the conditions of capitalism. For example, she argues that maleness is conditioned by race, class, gender and sexuality. This unfortunately is not “the universalism of Marxism,” as she claims, but is a faux, because non-​Hegelian, materialism.41 The problem of social constructionism emerges again when Lewis discusses Barbara and Karen Fields’ theory of “racecraft,” which defines the ideology of race as the product of racism.42 Racecraft does not describe empirical reality but rather a self-​perpetuating social fallacy that is used to maintain a supply of cheap labour in a nation founded on the principle of universal rights. In contrast to Marxist theories of twentieth-​century racism, wherein an “extruding element” is scapegoated to displace the antagonism between labour and capital, modern slavery incorporated the slave as a figure that directly rather than indirectly serves the reproduction of capitalist relations. The most virulent forms of racist theory emerged in the nineteenth century at the same time that slavery was no longer economically necessary and in fact became detrimental to the efficiency and viability of capitalist democracy. Racism, not unlike police homicides today, was an ideological surplus whose function was to mystify social relations. This is why the Fields believe that we should downplay questions of race when discussing racism. Lewis models her notion of “sexcraft” on that of racecraft to suggest that sex is not a self-​ contained vector of oppression. This is correct, but the further contention that either whites or heterosexuals would have been thought of at one time as the universal class is theoretically misleading and disabling. The same goes for decolonial critics who argue that universality is the ideology of European imperialism. For Marxism, which has a Hegelian foundation, there is no particular group that can occupy the place of universality. In a secular world, the universalist function of Christianity, for example, is replaced by secular universalism. Universality can be claimed in defence of the rights of the excluded, but universality itself is not a category of belonging. That is why there is nothing in Marxism that opposes whites to blacks, men to women, gays to straights, or members of different nations to one another. Marxism is a theory of universal progress and solidarity directed against the totality of capitalist relations. Just as class is not a moral category, as Lewis states, resistance to gender norms is not in and of itself a politics. The imposition of norms, on the

202  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left other hand, can lead to forms of separatism that reduce left solidarity. Accepting that queer anti-​ politics, techno-​ libertarian anti-​ humanism and petty-​bourgeois nihilism are suited to the corporate deregulation of sexuality, Lewis nevertheless ignores how it is that different people have a greater or lesser need for stability. Militant versions of queering can therefore be socially reactionary, even if “gender trouble” does not necessarily intensify labour exploitation and even if anti-​capitalism does not require stable identities. The absence of any reference to psychoanalysis to address these issues is more than convenient. The opposition of identity and anti-​identity overlooks the more fundamental importance of collectively organized conditions for autonomy and disalienation, which can only be ideals and not absolutes. For the most part, Lewis’ internationalism is inclusive and rejects the notion that solidarity requires rituals of humiliation in the name of recognition and liberation. Rather, she says, solidarity requires the support of comrades. Left anti-​ essentialism comes around to a similar politics as left identitarianism but without presuming any subjective, onto-​epistemological basis for politics. Neither model does very much to address the question of ontological failure and the ways in which subjectivity can depend on modes of jouissance that defy not only discourse theory and materialist analysis but identity categories as well.43 This leads to a more cautious version of the combination of identity and left politics, which is the model of leftist recognition. This is best represented by Nancy Fraser’s notion of a non-​identitarian politics of recognition that avoids the reification of identity groups.44 In the context of claims for recognition that drive social conflict, Fraser argues, the shift from redistributive welfare policies towards the politics of recognition tends to eclipse socialism and reify group identities. However, the rejection of minority claims in the interest of a universalist class politics, she adds, mistakenly presumes that the politics of recognition is pernicious. Not all injustices, she says, are matters of redistribution. On the other hand, recognition by itself is insufficient as a normative basis for critical theory. Fraser’s combination of recognition and redistribution softens the edges of what seem like different agendas. She appeals to the left by acknowledging that identitarianism exaggerates culture, simplifies group differences and prevents external perspectives. But she also warns against the kinds of subordination that occur when people are prevented from participating as peers in social life on account of cultural inequalities. Claims for recognition have therefore less to do with identity or prideful demands for respect than with social justice protest against status subordination and exclusion. For Fraser, recognition is a materialist rather than idealist claim on universal recognition and is not specific to any group. The problem, however, is that universal claims are not divided between materialism and idealism, but rather between formal and dialectical approaches. The formalist tendency allows one to think of race, gender, sexuality or nationality as categories sui generis. The dialectical approach, as Lewis and the Fields sisters recognize, does not. The fact that the reification of group identities can serve to justify

The Difference Between Socialist Politics and Identity Politics  203 separatism, chauvinism and authoritarianism causes many to prioritize class over identity. Contrariwise, Fraser worries that a return to what she rejects as outmoded orthodoxy would lead to the more conventional forms and majoritarian norms of republican universalism.45 For her, the only solution to the problems of identity and class is to integrate struggles for recognition and redistribution. In contrast to the democratic deliberation of liberal critical theorists like Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, Seyla Benhabib and Iris Marion Young, and one can tenuously count Fraser among them, socialists tend to favour the revolutionary critique of political economy. As Eugene Debs argued in 1919, the revolution knows no race, no colour, no sex and no boundaries. The same approach extends to contemporary culture wars and rejects the view that socialism is labour essentialist and class reductionist. That such Marxist concepts are used by advocates of identity politics to bypass or attack Marxism does not suggest that Marxism avoids questions of representation but that Marxism itself should be recognized for what it is rather than reified along non-​materialist lines. To the extent that contemporary critical theory blurs the lines between liberalism and socialism, a struggle that seeks mutual recognition along the lines of the Hegelian master-​ slave dialectic can be used to displace the Marxist reasoning according to which the proletariat does not seek recognition by the bourgeois class. As David Ingram puts it, “Marx believed that a fully emancipated classless society would abolish the kinds of economic differences that underlie Hegel’s struggle for recognition entirely.”46 For Ingram, it is nevertheless the case that identity politics and struggles for group rights have a prominent place in contemporary politics. How and to what extent do struggles for recognition, which focus on culture, preserve the liberal forms of civil society that are constituted by private property regimes? It makes a difference to socialism whether we are dealing with civil rights struggles that seek universal recognition based on a common humanity or with identity politics that affirm difference based on a shared epistemology, even if this ontology is deemed “culturally constructed” rather than essential. These arguments also revolve around the politics that are presumed by the question of redistribution, whether this is understood in terms of democratic process, social movement activism or radical praxis. The fact that Fraser opts for social movement activism in the context of 1990s post-​ Fordism and post-​communism indicates that her integrated but nevertheless apologetic approach to redistribution is shy of socialist theory.47 One could rightfully question the potential of new social movement activism –​much of it anti-​state –​to alter neoliberal economic policies, increase corporate taxes, increase welfare provisions and consumer protections, raise wages, eliminate unemployment and homelessness. If on occasion the neoliberal state is willing to concede to such movements new rights like gay marriage, it is because gay marriage in no way affects all of these. However, as neoliberalism shifts towards authoritarianism, rightist versions of recognition make claims

204  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left to redistribution all the more unlikely. This only heightens the problem of a “politicism,” as Fraser refers to the prioritization of the dimension of politics, that relies on clear distinctions between an exclusively “culturalist” recognition and an exclusively “economistic” redistribution.48 Indeed, this problem becomes even more fraught in circumstances that are increasingly post-​representational, where recognition is construed as a symbolic remediation of the upward redistribution of wealth. This is not surprising in a culture that has difficulty making distinctions between victimhood and politics, or critical memory and resentment. The matterism of the vector model appears in what is otherwise a noteworthy document of left activism: Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser’s manifesto for a feminism of the 99 percent.49 The strength of this work is that it has something in it for everybody on the left. Its weakness derives from a methodology that combines pluralism, social constructionism, discourse theory and post-​Marxist radical democracy. A project that sets out to correct the Communist Manifesto by adding to it the “new” issues of sexuality, disability and ecology that the manifesto is said to ignore, and that does this because champions of difference have difficulty with the generic, misconstrues the meaning of universality for the sake of particularity.50 Why raise the stereotype of the proletariat as restricted to white male workers if your purpose is to dispense with it? They write: “Our Manifesto rejects both perspectives, the class-​reductionist left that conceives the working class as an empty, homogeneous abstraction; and the progressive-​neoliberal one that celebrates diversity for its own sake.”51 Instead, the authors propose a socially constructed universality that is produced by the multiplicity of struggles from below rather than the notion of a common humanity, which it rejects with reference to the way that white middle-​class women at one time “falsely universalized” feminist politics. The pluralist universalism of Feminism of the 99 Percent risks reducing class analysis to a capitalist, or liberal, discourse on anti-​oppression. Although opposed to class reductionism, it is post-​Marxist in its adoption of the slogan of the 99 percent rather than unpopular terms like socialism, socialist feminism or communism. One problem with the populist concept of the 99 percent is not only that this grouping is hardly politically homogeneous, but that it leaves out one percent of humanity. Marxism, in contrast, does not. These authors tend to ignore why it is that OWS fell apart and fragmented into dispersed agendas. The book is thus dedicated to the Combahee River Collective as well as the women’s strikes of 2016 to 2018 in Poland, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Turkey, Peru, the United States, Mexico and Chile, which it defines as a new form of transnational politics that broadens the concept of labour beyond waged work to include all of social existence. Its purpose, which it opposes to “lean-​in” feminism and corporate “femocracy,” is to overcome the opposition between identity politics and class politics, private life and the workplace. This is less a Marxist theory of contemporary post-​Fordist capitalism than it is a compendium

The Difference Between Socialist Politics and Identity Politics  205 of fashionable concepts like structural racism, institutional sexism, racial capitalism, heteronormativity and gender binarism. While opposing capitalist normalization and commodification, the manifesto rests on a mostly counter-​consumer hashtag politics that has done little to build durable left organizations. Proclamations of sisterhood are important but inadequate to effective organization when they obscure the sources of class exploitation. Efforts to conflate and combine left politics with identity politics reduce the specificity of Marxist materialism to a generalized conception of materialism in which class may or may not play a central and delimiting role. As we shall see with the case of Sara Ahmed and the Endnotes collective, this can lead materialism in reactionary directions. However comprehensive in its reach, Marxism is not absolutist. The fact that class is central to Marxist analysis but not exclusive can lead to much confusion and dissent among leftists. Ellen Meiksins Wood had one of the most coherent approaches to this problem. In “Why Class Struggle Is Central,” she argues that this problem combines the distinct issues of political goals and political strategies.52 If you are a socialist, class struggle and the abolition of capitalist exploitation must be your objective. Postwar left theorists, like Louis Althusser, André Gorz and Ernesto Laclau, sought to establish the autonomy of politics from political economy and the division of labour. Criticism of the lack of class consciousness among workers and reference to the fact that radicals need not be members of the working class led such postwar leftists to search for alternative sources of social agency. Discourse theorists added to this the shift from the Marxist critique of political economy to the more malleable notion of power. These two tendencies, structuralist and historicist, argue that workers are not necessarily socialist and have no objective interest in the abolition of capitalism. Once someone has accepted these assumptions, Marxism is retroactively and falsely presumed to be a deterministic and teleological model of social change. Marxism is a political project whose objective is the transformation of social relations as well as the conditions of production and reproduction in a global capitalist system. Although there is nothing inevitable about its aims and objectives, socialism works to mobilize the working class as its essential constituency. The working class is the only social group that has not only an interest in abolishing capitalism but the capacity to do so. The next question for socialists, according to Wood, is the ways in which its political project relates to the totality of human emancipation. She asks: Is the socialist project more comprehensive than other projects of emancipation, so that they can be subsumed under it, or is it narrowly particularistic so that it must be subsumed under some larger political project which can encompass a whole range of particular emancipatory struggles?53 Radical democracy, intersectionality and populism are different versions of this larger political project option. Wood makes the important point that commitment to all emancipatory struggles is the easy answer.

206  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left The simple approach to “all of the above” issues within a generally progressive perspective works to displace the centrality of class. Rather than make the Marxist case for the centrality of production relations, however, Wood suggests that the burden should be placed on those who claim to offer a more comprehensive alternative to the materialist conception of history. For the most part, advocates of identity politics tend to displace the transecting perspective of class with a vague notion of democracy. They also tend to ignore the problems of capitalism, which, Wood argues, “is uniquely indifferent to the social identity of the people it exploits.”54 Social experiments which demonstrate that in the U.S. a black man without a criminal record is less likely to gain employment than a white man with one evade the Marxist point that the capitalist exploitation of labour is inherently indifferent to social differences and status inequalities. The fact that liberals view white working males as deplorable, and conservatives construe them as the deserving poor, changes nothing to their condition. While differences of identity are valued in different ways in different contexts, identity is not bound up with the capitalist mode of exploitation. That is why capitalism has the option of using racism or anti-​racism, sexism or anti-​sexism, depending on circumstances. According to Wood, capitalism uses differences of identity in two ways: first, to obscure class relations and divide the working class; second, to provide the cheapest available labour force, which means separating production from the organization of the household. Racial and gender oppression are neither specific nor essential to capitalism, she argues, which is why feminist struggle (and I would add, even in its intersectional modality) does not have the same objectives as class struggle. Whereas the abolition of class society is more feasible than the abolition of racism or sexism, all forms of oppression make it more difficult for socialists to abolish capitalist social relations. That is why socialists are not culture warriors and that is why culture warriors bait socialists into conflicts that culture warriors use to highlight their own beliefs, aims and strategies. The notion that liberal capitalism better serves the emancipatory objectives of women and minorities is evidently false for most women and most members of minority groups. Only the leaders of interest-​group politics think that capitalism better serves them, despite all evidence to the contrary. Socialism is the correct politics for feminists and anti-​racists because unlike capitalism, socialism does not and cannot make use of oppression. When it does, it ceases to be socialism. Socialism, Wood surmises, is therefore the most comprehensive and universal project of human emancipation. On the question of power and hierarchy, it may be that in some contexts class relations are less oppressive than race and gender relations, but the structure of that power will be either capitalist or socialist. Unlike slave economies and feudal societies, capitalism relies on compulsion rather than coercion to make labour productive for capitalists. Even the “warfare state” relies on the logistical strength of industrial productivity, a lesson that capitalists have understood since the time of the American

Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism  207 Civil War. However, the capitalist mode of production makes capitalist social relations a compulsion for capitalists as well as for workers –​not to mention socialists. The current geopolitical scramble for the nationalization of microchip manufacturing and imperialist access to the minerals needed for computer hardware is an instance of this dilemma. In the same decades that advocates of identity politics have gone to great lengths to make socialist politics seem outdated, more people around the world have been brought into relations of waged and industrial labour than was the case in Marx’s time. For this reason, it is not surprising that most identity brokers are intellectuals who live or were educated in the West, where relations of competition in post-​Fordist academic and cultural production justify the salaries of the professional-​managerial class. Such efforts typically follow the feminist focus on reproductive labour to then innovate concepts such as “extractive” and “racialized” labour, which, like branding exercises, reprogramme the left to make it more attractive to the consumers of media products.55 Others focus on the financialization of the economy and on forms of rent seeking to falsely separate the question of profiteering from labour politics. The extension of wages to care work in the domestic realm does no more to overcome the capitalist system than did the entry of women into relations of waged labour. Through such efforts, the shift from the formal to the real subsumption of labour only deepens. In the end, a narrowly conceived identity politics is more capitalist than socialist because it looks to change social relations within a capitalist system that it accepts as inevitable and even beneficial. It is therefore class politics that best explains identity politics. 3  Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism The fact that the working class cannot afford to ignore problems of oppression makes the political organizations of the left more susceptible to diversion and manipulation. Endemic disagreements among leftists are due to the fact that the stakes are highest for the disenfranchised. This tends to give the left a greater intellectual sophistication, which also produces a more bewildering and debilitating array of tendencies. The gradual postmodernization of the left since the 1970s has created a nefarious situation from which genuine socialists must recover. Since the 2000s, neoliberal governments and neoliberalized institutions have contributed to the weakening of the socialist left by promoting the cause of diversity as a defining characteristic of contemporary post-​politics. The diversity agenda is served by almost all progressive scholars, only a few of whom produce its theorical concepts. A notable proponent of “diversity work” in educational institutions is the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. In her 2012 book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Ahmed remakes the word diversity into a transitive verb, asking us to consider what the work of diversity and equality practitioners does for universities.56 Aware that critics view diversity initiatives as a threat to equality, Ahmed defines her own experiences as a token “race person” in

208  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left a university department a form of oppression caused by an anonymous institutional whiteness. Since the implementation of the U.K.’s Race Relations Amendment Act of 2000, the Disability Discrimination Act of 2005 and the Equality Act of 2006, public institutions, she says, have been satisfied that they have good policies and a diverse staff without further troubling themselves to advance the intersectional goals established by black feminists. She defines her approach, which connects the body to networks of power, as phenomenological practice. To be in the world, she says, citing the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, is to be involved in things that escape consciousness. Reducing politics to questions of inclusion and exclusion, she defines phenomenological practice as “a way of attending to what gets passed over as routine or an ordinary feature of institutional life.”57 Ahmed’s analysis is not a political theory, but a moral agenda for institutional change. Her book is not concerned to assess why it is that people may accept, reject or criticize diversity initiatives. She is satisfied that she is combating what she perceives to be inertia and resistance to change. Diversity work, she claims, “creates trouble” for institutional whiteness.58 Exposing whiteness as an institutional problem, she argues, provides relief from whiteness for people who “look different,” thereby making whiteness more “caring.” Ignoring the research which demonstrates that diversity and sensitivity training tends to be ineffective and results in resentment on the part of adults who prefer to think that they already understand the basics of ethical social interaction, Ahmed’s diversity agenda manipulates institutional mechanisms to attack normative, routine, ordinary, majoritarian and pluralist environments with the kind of petty-​bourgeois attitudes that have characterized the counterculture since the postwar era.59 The attempt to shift the content of social, educational and cultural capital in the direction of race, gender, sexuality and diasporic capital implies the commodification of personal assets for the sake of advancement. Emphasizing the need to do so as a matter of survival rather than striving does not alter the basic problem. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu remarked about the petty-​ bourgeois habitus, superficial shifts in the social order can be produced in countless ways, through marketing, advertising, therapeutics, encounter groups, ethical proselytism, the fun ethic, the subversion of seriousness, hedonism, selling one’s lifestyle as a model for others, charm and flattery, smart clubs, insiderism, subcultures, gaslighting, reversals of authority, cool culture, popularized versions of complex products, the cults of fitness and youth, exaltation of the body, speed (fast food, fast cars, fast sex), the indulgence of marginality, sartorial outrages, the public display of emotion, ostentatious attachment to tradition, excess and living beyond one’s means, the easing of social restrictions, respectful conformism, and so on.60 Today’s iconoclastic wave of cancel culture, call outs, witch hunts and woke hysteria –​often attributed to the communication technologies that facilitate their spread –​upends some of these strategies and creates increasingly reactionary expressions of counterculture. Social mores, detached from

Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism  209 disciplinary realms of knowledge, culture and politics, are modified in ways that reinforce the worst aspects of the social structure. Because conversion strategies are not outwardly defined as status seeking, but rather as questions of morality and social change, it becomes easier for diversitarians to insist that others “check” their privilege or wait in line as the hitherto underserved get their share of a rapidly diminishing pie. Because diversity mandates replace progressive universalism with means-​ tested policies that privilege the underserved, they are conservative in nature. For example, although the 2023 Supreme Court of the United States decision against affirmative action was not made for the benefit of society, but against the legacy of progressive policy, the impact on American universities will nevertheless only affect a small number of Ivy League schools that serve a small percentage of the student population. Despite widespread panic concerning the decision, it makes more sense for socialists to struggle for free post-​secondary education than for affirmative action, which is a preoccupation of the upper-​middle class. The diversity agenda is about much more than institutional mandates, however. Christian Parenti has demonstrated that the diversity training exercises that are now used by governments, universities, corporations and non-​profits have dubious origins and transform material problems into cultural problems that are addressed through micro-​level fixation on individual choice and personal attitudes, strategies that reinforce neoclassical economic theories and right-​wing social science.61 Diversity agendas create an atmosphere of fear and retaliation in the workplace. This is not simply accidental and diversity management training is now used as a tool for union busting.62 One can think of countless other reasons why the diversity agenda could be rejected as inappropriate for public institutions, including its contribution to corporatization. The panopticism that it promotes is a mainstay of the bureaucracies that make regulation, rather than research, education and public service, their class prerogative. For example, in 2018, the University of Michigan employed as many as 100 diversity workers, many of whom earn more than $100,000 annually, including the diversity worker director, whose annual salary is $315,000. That such staff may be involved in creating trouble for its own sake, or for the sake of high salaries, has led to an atmosphere of intimidation, in which, for example, teachers have been fired for refusing to give lenient grades to black students, for using a Chinese word that sounds like the N-​word, for briefly closing their eyes during a Zoom meeting dealing with institutional racism, for showing documentaries with depictions of lynchings, and for using the word mantra in a non-​Buddhist-​ Hindu context.63 This is in addition to the many people, like University of Bristol professor David Miller, who have been fired for criticizing Israeli apartheid and similarly defensible political and educational content.64 The problem with the postmodern politics of diversity is that it has less to do with exposing the biases of whiteness or patriarchy than with the institutionalization of neoliberal governmentality as a presumably inescapable condition. Ahmed guilefully proffers the Judith Butler theory of

210  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left performativity –​the reiteration, transgression and displacement of norms –​ as a means to evaluate change. Although she is suspicious of institutions that only say the right things, it is easy enough to see that even when the university supports the worst follies of diversity activists, it is still accused of white supremacy and patriarchy. This was the case with Bright Sheng at the University of Michigan (who showed his students a film version of Othello with Laurence Olivier in blackface) and John Comaroff at Harvard University (who alerted a student about the potential difficulties caused by travelling openly as a lesbian couple in Cameroon, where homosexuality is illegal), instances where unfair accusations against outstanding professors nevertheless led to endless campaigning on the part of so-​called culture warriors who believe that the manufacture of victims will advance their confused if not reactionary agendas.65 Even if the prejudice endgame is stereotyped as “feminazism,” she says, it still allows diversity to get “in” by getting “to” certain people. Ahmed’s targets tend, not surprisingly, to be white middle-​class males who through pressure can eventually be brought around to say yes to diversity. A confused atmosphere of positive thinking is created by provocateurs who cause panic, undermine solidarity, waste resources, police suspects and undermine progressive ways to deal with widespread social problems.66 Ahmed is aware of the dubious nature of diversity work, which she admits can mean anything, everything or whatever.67 The diversity worker is no doubt a more professionalized version of the race hustler, who is now authorized by the theory of power/​​knowledge to extort both sides of the self/​​ other, universal/​​particular and discursive/​​non-​discursive dichotomy. As an instance of what Bill Readings referred to as the emptiness of corporatized excellence, the diversity of the student body is now factored along with other measures that reinforce a vision of education that defines its purpose in terms of consumer choice.68 Žižek argues that we sometimes do things as a way to avoid thinking about them.69 Pledging to “do something” about diversity can turn out to be a compulsion in which theorizing and doing alternate as ways to avoid both. Since there can be no knowledge of the future, and because no subject is fully transparent to themselves, diversity work serves as a medieval instrument of prestidigitation. One can only cringe at Ahmed’s seemingly philosophical but primarily voluntarist definition of politics as “that which is necessary to bring something about.”70 Whatever she is unable to legitimize in terms of politics, she compensates for with pathology and narcissism. Although she rejects the notion of an “injured whiteness” that she says is central to fascism –​which should be defined instead as the desire on the part of a group, injured or not, to cause harm as a means to acquire power –​her interest in injury is prevalent among contemporary middle-​class researchers in the humanities who indulge in the study of trauma in largely the same way they do their investment portfolios.71 Just as left neoliberalism requires the notion of a bad-​because-​white-​and-​ male working class, Ahmed’s theory of the academic killjoy needs a figure of the other to justify its pseudo-​politics. Her 2017 book, Living a Feminist

Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism  211 Life, is dedicated to all of the “feminist killjoys out there doing your thing.”72 Reviving the “bad girl” ethos of 1980s yuppie feminism and 1990s post-​ feminism, her “women can be just as aggressive as men” stance is adapted to intersectional times, presenting her readers with a killjoy “survival kit” and killjoy “manifesto” for the academic culture warrior. Turning politics into propaganda and mixing delinquency with self-​help, or resentment with gangsterism, Ahmed panders a depressive psychology of bourgeois rebellion. Championing Valerie Solanas as a freedom fighter, she destructively makes sexism, racism and homophobia into timeless problems. Her postmodern obscurantism calls for strawmen and scapegoats who can stand in for all men and all whites. What, one might ask, does being a killjoy have to do with the Equality Act of 2006? She says to her compatriots: “you are in a certain way calling for the end of white men because you are calling for the end of the institution that makes white men.”73 This haute misanthropy and incitement to ugly trouble is a characteristically conservative politics for power-​ tripping professionals who make their racialism, lesbianism or feminism into cultish agencies of retribution. From a positive “I am woman, hear me roar” to a nihilistic “I am killjoy, the future is anti-​male,” Ahmed replaces serious organizational and institutional work with miserabilism, sensationalism and attention seeking. However multiform, advocacy for diversity is hardly the only way that neoliberal governance demands that people change their lives. As the curator Maria Hlavajova and cultural theorist Sven Lütticken have argued, the multidirectional affronts of such culture war gaming of the system reflect the same dynamics as real wars by placing people in reactive modes created through ideological theatres of polarized difference.74 In an essay on the “theft of enjoyment,” Žižek argues that aggressors who lose something of themselves in their actions have a need to further reaffirm themselves.75 National and group identity involves a shared relationship to the mode of enjoyment of an outsider group. Immigrants, for example, are accused of stealing jobs and the host country’s way of life. Even if an other is essential to the sense of self, rituals of exclusion are required to organize one’s enjoyment. Normativity, for example, can be a perverse or secret stimulant to people who presume that others do not know how to properly enjoy themselves. In the case of killjoys, it could be that what motivates diversity work is the inability to enjoy oneself in what is perceived to be the normal way that others enjoy themselves. The focus on the construct of whiteness can in this sense be the result of self-​loathing. The inability to come to terms with this psychological blockage would cause people to demand that others change their ways. In other words, the theft of enjoyment is not only a problem for supposedly normal people but also for marginal people as well. The assumption, in each case, is that the removal of the extruding element would allow any one of these identities to experience itself in an organic, harmonious way. The lesson here, however, is not the usual post-​ structuralist inversion of the problem, which simply dismisses the notion of organic wholeness. The problem with this rejection is that it can then serve to

212  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left justify the production of inequity-​reducing inequities that have nothing to do with equity. Because one does not fight inequity with inequity, one does not oppose diversity to normativity if one’s goal is to champion equality. Politics matters more in cases of disagreement than cultural difference. Acquiescence to the demands of diversity workers can conceal the patronizing arrogance that defines the postmodern forms of racism which insist on rather than revile difference. The new forms of racism, according to Žižek, legitimize separatism in the name of anti-​discrimination. Such a politics is inherently anti-​ universal and inegalitarian. For instance, it obliges white liberals to avoid affirming their own ethnicities. As Žižek puts it: “White liberals thus celebrate the political patterns and forms of enjoyment that bond together these other communities, while denouncing their own. Enjoyment is good, on condition that it remains the other’s enjoyment.”76 A white male killjoy, on this score, would be reactionary by default. A straight white male can only confess their identity as the bearer of historical privileges and wrongdoings. The ambivalence of enjoyment is thus expressed through political correctness and the effort to uncover ever more minute forms of discrimination. Because white men are anxiously presumed to be more universal, the diversity worker mistakenly defends the white-​male-​heterosexual position as the universal form of subjectivity. However, it is not the straight white male who is the unmarked universal referent, it is capital that is the mediating invisible norm. This concrete universal is thoroughly abstract and particularized when money converts into identity and back into money (M-​I-​M). Queer diversitarians like Ahmed require a stereotype of the heteronormative white male as the premise of their initiatives. Unless institutions wish to transform progressive policy into a lottery and quota system, conservative thinkers like Ahmed should not be hired to design policy statements. A further consideration, again based on Žižek’s work, is that intersectional killjoys do not present minorities as figures of identification. Minorities, like the killjoys themselves, are expected to remain troubling, disruptive and anomalous figures who embody a traumatic return of the repressed.77 Undermining public trust is a form of impotent acting out that does not result in progressive change. One becomes truly violent only when one renounces ego-​satisfying aggression and poses a genuine threat to the existing social system. Like all reactionaries, killjoys are not killjoys at all, but aggressive counterfeits. They represent a form of dissent that does not cure us of politically correct illusions but that instead offer simplified formulas for bringing about social change. Killjoys are nihilists with confused strivings who require a moral opponent to assert their triumphalist fantasies. Unlike socialists, killjoys do not care whether they win or not, which is why Ahmed’s target audience is a declining and increasingly disoriented middle class. As with the quixotic separatisms of the 1960s, the conservative methods of academic killjoys reveal their own inadequacies. As the corrosion of emancipatory universalism informs academic discourse, people become less sensitive to political demagoguery beyond these elitist circles. In the province of Quebec, for

Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism  213 example, the Culture and Quebec Citizenship initiative created in 2021 by the right-​wing Coalition Avenir Québec administration introduced measures to infuse “Quebec pride” and “a little chauvinist flavour” into grade school curriculum.78 A final word about Ahmed should be said of any radicalism that appeals to phenomenology rather than materialism. Ahmed describes the institution as an immobile obstruction rather than an enabling condition.79 How could it be enabling when it is managed by diversity workers whose cause is that which is not white and male? It possibly never occurred to Ahmed that killjoys are not oppressive because they are Muslim or lesbian but because they serve capitalism. Her worry that critical scholars want to get rid of categories like race or gender opposes universalism and cosmopolitanism to the “political” incontrovertibility of witnessing diversity labour. This illogic presumes that working the system by “getting in the way” represents legitimate praxis rather than “politically correct” revanchism.80 Why should phenomenology make the important difference? Some excavation of phenomenology finds that its development was one way to avoid either positivism or communism through the affirmation of subjectivism.81 Rejecting the notion of a mind-​ independent reality, Husserl elevated subjective consciousness to propose the mutual dependence of thought and object. Phenomenological reduction, also known as “bracketing” or eidetic abstraction, reduces the world to conscious intention. This science of pure phenomena and return to “the things themselves” replaced materialist theory with irrationalism, intuition and immediate sensation. Eagleton argues that phenomenology is ultimately conservative in its contempt for rational analysis and provides mere consolation in a world of alienation and anomie.82 Marxists have always rejected phenomenology as a non-​dialectical method that replaces materialism with relativism. According to Roger Garaudy, phenomenology is a neo-​capitalist and anti-​communist doctrine that justifies political adventurism.83 Phenomenology reduces history to a naturalistic realism and allows the individual historian to give history its meaning, often with prophetic characteristics based on ideal types. When the creation of sociological concepts becomes relative and utilitarian, politics, including fascism, becomes a matter of choice rather than objective analysis. The cynical pragmatism that ratifies power is a doctrine of submission. Lenin, in contrast, showed that capitalist imperialism is not a matter of choice but an outcome of contradictions. One might say the same for identity politics as a product of postwar liberalism. Marxist materialism, in contrast to subjective eclecticism, grasps the ensemble of facts. Today’s diversity agenda, as a feature of neoliberal, petty-​bourgeois culturalism, seeks to escape social problems through relativism. With Husserl, the attack on materialism through the co-​implication of subject and object, materialism and idealism, returns to the classical form of subjective idealism. This is then made into the basis of any random form of praxis, which Ahmed wrongly attributes to Marx’s injunction to change the

214  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left world. Marx and Engels called on workers of the world to unite, not on identity groups of the world to divide. Marx’s German Ideology argued that there is more to matter than the sensible world. Objective historical conditions include social formations, the development of the state, the forces of production and the environment. The necessity of subsistence, which makes sense of human activity, relates production to consciousness. By ideologizing diversity as diversity “work,” Ahmed seems to value labour. However, there is not one word in On Being Included about the working class or the ruling class. That is why she defines this activity as phenomenological practice. For Marx, subjectivity does not posit itself through any random thing but is the dialectical result of objective forces that are manifested in the works that humans create. Phenomenology, in contrast, searches for reality through solipsism. Shorn of dialectics, the reasoning of phenomenology has no meaningful forms, which is why it can be ideologized as killjoy fervour. Hegel’s objective idealism of the concept was already superior to the subjective idealism and arbitrary liberalism of Husserl. While for Hegel, knowledge is defined at a precise and contingent moment in the unfolding of events, Marxist materialism makes knowledge the criterion of praxis. Historicists who reject Hegelian Marxism as religion may as well leave the theorizing to others. Whereas Hegel’s dialectic can be used to justify the existing reality, Marx’s dialectic negates the (capitalist) state of things. Nietzsche, in contrast, locates negativity in subjectivity rather than in objective contradictions, returning the movement of matter to the mechanistic materialism of the eighteenth century and replacing God with fire-​breathing and science-​denying clamour. While the bourgeoisie attributes negativity to individual caprice or enemy nations, it rejects the idea that there is a dialectic at work in history. It therefore reduces knowledge of history to the interests of the ruling class. In opposition to this, Marxism does not simply reduce history to the interests of the working class. The class subjectivism that can be found in the work of Georg Lukács, for example, reductively makes people into things. In contrast, Marx roots materialism in Hegel’s theory of negation (alienation) as an element of universal history. For Marx, the concrete content of the commodity is not the thing itself but the reality of the commodity within social relations. The commodity is a historically specific product of market society. For Marx, alienation has a historical form that is related to specific modes of production: slave societies, feudalism, capitalism, communism. This explains the meaning of class struggle in relation to history and objective reality. For Marxists, then, there is no question of subjective choice when it comes to political praxis. Phenomenology, in contrast, makes theory into a reflection of reality, makes history into second nature, denies that truth can be distinguished from facts, associates Marxism with dogma and pretends that Marxism is trapped in teleology. Phenomenologically defined diversity work does not even satisfy its purported goal of humanizing capitalism. Garaudy’s critique of phenomenology was complemented by Henri Lefebvre.84 The premier French Marxist philosopher concurred with Garaudy

Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism  215 that the goal of postwar phenomenology, as represented by Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty, and as part of the Cold War policy of containment, was to consolidate capitalist restoration under the sign of materialism. Lefebvre argued that phenomenology advocates democracy against the working class and conceals its discourse on the end of communism within the layers of the managerial class. To justify its economic domination, the ruling class emphasizes eclecticism and syncretism, combines the open society with political manoeuvring. Degrading philosophical concepts, phenomenology oscillates between objectivity and subjectivity, materialism and idealism, things and consciousness. Extending a naïve realism and natural attitude, it downgrades social activity for the sake of a transcendent ego, thereby destroying both knowledge and objectivity. The issue for Marxism is the fact that, although the world is not wholly pre-​constituted, there is no absolute freedom of choice. This is what defines praxis and what distinguishes it from immediate perception and description. Like performativity theory, phenomenology rejects social knowledge and situates consciousness between perception and things, which are abstracted from the world. For Marxism, according to Lefebvre, the meaningful universe exists within relations among those who have created the world through their practical activity. Matter is not simply inert but is determined by social reality in its concrete determination vis-​à-​vis the totality of objects. Phenomenology mixes isolated things and isolated thoughts to propose a confused immediacy. Following Descartes, whose cogito includes ideas and social consciousness, Marxism gives a historical sense to universal categories. Reality, the natural world and consciousness are not simply empirical but are the result of human activity and intellectual elaboration –​a totality of often contradictory realities, ideas and knowledges. Dialectical unity and contradiction is the logical form of these material and idealist relations. Since materialism asserts the independence of objective reality, which in no way undermines the insights of psychoanalysis, the truth claims of politics, culture and science have a universal character. In practical life, reality and ideas are relatively rather than absolutely contradictory. In contrast, postmodern themes of indeterminacy and ambiguity are degraded forms of idealism. Phenomenology enhances postmodern nihilism by obscuring concrete reality and extinguishing philosophy. Sadly, the linguistic or cultural turn –​which has all but abandoned the notion of praxis, for which labour remains tied to knowledge –​has institutionalized intellectual regression and political reaction in the name of inclusivity. This new intellectual dark age represents a loss of negativity and a regression to neo-​fascist inanities and cultish witch hunts. Phenomenology blurs the distinction between classes and reduces the human subject to an abstract mechanical entity.85 In this context, the themes of behaviourism and cybernetics define society as a world of conditioned reflexes. Human history and practical activity are abstracted and masked by the pseudo-​concrete fetishization and commodification of bodies, languages and cultures, a process that is defined by Ahmed as “inclusion” and “living a feminist life.”

216  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left The argument here is not that nothing can be done to make society more egalitarian. If that was the case, then the lack of possibility for social change would render meaningless those hard-​won gains that have been achieved over time. What is being argued against here is the impression given by identity-​ oriented thinkers that no progress has been made over time and that relations may even be worse today than before. The real struggle concerns the best strategies to improve social equality. When one begins from the standpoint of particularity, one has little chance to affect the totality of global capitalism. It is the reference to capitalism as the concrete universal that makes any particular the potential placeholder of a universal struggle. One cannot be surprised that someone without leftist credentials has led progressives astray. But what happens when a similar agenda is set by ultra-​ left advocates of communization? In the essay “Onward Barbarians,” the anonymous Endnotes collective, named after their eponymous journal, draws on a 1946 essay by Amadeo Bordiga, titled “Avanti Barbari,” to counter the Rosa Luxemburg ultimatum thrown down around the same time by the revolutionary French group Socialisme ou Barbarie: one either supports socialism or barbarism. The last sentence of their lengthy essay states: “Since communism is the real non-​movement that abolishes these [capitalist] social forms, we say to the masses who confront our tottering order –​avanti barbari! –​onward barbarians.”86 Endnotes writes from a perspective that is similar to authors like John Holloway, The Invisible Committee, Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato and Michael Hardt with Antonio Negri. Although comprised of international members with different leftist orientations, Endnotes’ politics of communization reflects the anarchist tendency of council communism, but in their case without a basis in the workplace. Like the advocates of the politics of the post-​class multitude, they advocate street actions, protests and rioting by the masses of people who are displaced and dispossessed by contemporary global capitalism. Despite their leftist identification, the issue here is the similarity between their approach to diversity and that of post-​political scholars like Ahmed. Published in 2020, “Onward Barbarians” makes two claims with regard to the periodization of new social movement activism: the break that the 2008 banking crisis represents vis-​à-​vis the previous anti-​globalization movement, and the break that the 2020 George Floyd protests represents for the previous movements of the squares and urban encampments –​Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Syntagma Square, V for Vinegar, Puerto del Sol Square, Gezi Park, Taksim Square, etc. Although the promise of these occupations was gradually undone by government forces, Endnotes points to ongoing mobilizations in Chile, Mexico, India, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, the U.S. and Europe, where populations contest not only declining living standards but social norms more generally. If socialists emphasize the fact that identity groups are divided along class lines, Endnotes reverses this insight to say that the proletariat is divided along identitarian lines that can no longer cohere along the classic ideological constructs advanced by modernist trade unions

Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism  217 and political parties. Conflating subjectivity with the mode of production, Endnotes argues that a new anthropological subject reflects a new type of communist party: the participants of contemporary “non-​movements” whose modus operandi is “revolution without revolution.”87 These non-​movements have developed alongside the authoritarian turn within democratic parties in the age of post-​representational politicians like Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Anthony Albanese, Joe Biden and Keir Starmer. This latest round of legitimation crisis, they argue, has produced new forms of dissent that are more dispersed and disorganized than those of the 1960s. Endnotes does not hesitate to acknowledge criticisms of today’s move­ mentism, including its generally liberal characteristics, anti-​intellectualism, leaderlessness, reformism, identitarianism, subcultural infantilism, conspi­ ratorialism, passivity and disorganization. However, the current ultra-​left enthusiasm for destituent practices, which they define through Bordiga’s concept of “anti-​formism,” makes a virtue out of the ungovernability of the movements. As anti-​state politics, destituent processes are said to deactivate government apparatuses. Because destituent practices do not elaborate what would replace those structures, they are said to remain committed to a utopian future. Because the non-​movements are the product of new class compositions and class fragmentation, Endnotes emphasizes the ways in which non-​movements must confront the negotiations of identity. Capitalist stagnation, they argue, has made identity central to class politics. Despite this, Endnotes does not advocate identity politics. Identity is rather conceived as immanent to the imperatives of the neoliberal economy. Without making the U.S. the focus of this shift, the George Floyd protests mark a significant change in global attitudes that is expressed in the anti-​form of anger and outrage against the apparatus of police repression. Further, what the George Floyd protests demonstrate is the desire and the need to overcome the tribalism that normally separates identity groups. Because the movements of the global multitude can no longer cohere around populist nationalism –​the multitude no longer constitutes a people –​and because they can no longer cohere around a unified political strategy and programme, Endnotes argues, identity functions as a negative rather than positive expression of proletarian rage. For them, identity represents social decomposition and the confused anti-​formulation of class struggle around movementism. One could go into more detail regarding the various ways that Endnotes, like Lazzarato, has redefined the politics of the multitude. In terms of criticism, it should be said that class is not a category of identity and belonging. Class politics, therefore, is a matter of solidarity and not identity, lest we begin to think that people like to be poor and exploited.88 There is nothing about the reduction of class analysis to the level of identity-​as-​negation that would prevent Endnotes from further reducing class to the level of subjectivity. In Stuart Hall’s misconstrued formulation, this would construe class as the way that subjectivity is lived. The immanence of identity to class is not the premise of most of the struggles that are listed by these authors. In

218  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left contrast to Endnotes’ forebears in Italian autonomist Marxism, the fact that many people today would gladly accept a factory job with inflation-​adjusted union wages and benefits betrays the now outdated countercultural tendencies that define petty-​bourgeois leftism. Middle-​class anti-​racism and anti-​patriarchy makes Endnotes’ fetishism of the crowd without a party the good conscience of the tech sector whose social media-​driven networks produce the “here comes everybody” alternative to “bowling alone.”89 Just as the “Californian ideology” teaches you that slavery is freedom, Endnotes encourages you to think that hippie survivalism is class radicalism.90 The limits of movementism are demonstrated by the massive resurgence of working-​class actions in 2022. In the context of pandemic negligence, crumbling infrastructure, climate disaster, expensive and devastating wars, the rising cost of living, workplace actions are more consciously strategic than anxiously indignant. Against this, governments desperately seek to blame their authoritarian plutocratic policy on inflation, which is a problem of economic mismanagement and not identity. In 2022, the U.K. saw the most strike activity since the 1980s, with actions among nurses, bus drivers, railway workers, dockworkers, artisanal workers, confectionery workers, oil refinery workers, gas distribution workers, aircraft manufacturers, lorry drivers, recycling and refuse collectors, pallet makers, university academic staff, council workers and postal workers. The Labour Party, fellow traveller to the Tories, fended off most of these efforts and celebrated the monarchy instead. In Ireland, government workers went on strike. Water workers and fishing protection staff went on strike in Scotland. In the U.S., the Biden administration and the corporate sector came up against more than 320 strikes by nurses, mental health workers, Amazon workers, coal miners, metalworkers, dockworkers, warehouse workers, immigrant centre workers, museum staff, teachers, truck parts manufacturers, railway workers, state workers, grocery store and food industry workers. More than 240 Starbucks locations unionized. Railway workers, miners and teachers went on strike in Canada. Australia saw the most strikes in decades as well, with significant actions by public sector workers, nurses, teachers, railway, maritime and transportation workers. Health care workers and nurses, teachers, hotel and transit workers went on strike in New Zealand. Industrial workers went on strike in Norway. In Belgium, car manufacturers and childcare workers went on strike. Teachers, railroad workers, transportation workers, oil refinery and energy workers went on strike in France. Railway workers also went on strike in Belgium. Metal workers, nurses and aviation workers went on strike in Germany. Teachers went on strike in Germany, Hungary, Norway and Kosovo. Dockworkers went on strike in Italy. There were mass strikes in Spain. Municipal workers went on strike in Cyprus. Foreign ministry workers went on strike in Israel. Doctors in Palestine and teachers in Lebanon went on strike. Labour strikes involving petrochemical, steel, cement and transportation workers, as well as massive anti-​ government protests took place in Iran. Doctors, electronics workers, construction, steel

Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism  219 and iron workers, shoe workers and paper workers went on strike in Turkey. Teachers went on strike in Syria. University workers went on strike in Nigeria. Metalworkers, taxi drivers, electricity, telecommunications, census field workers and municipal workers went on strike in South Africa. Health workers in Kenya, civil servants in Nigeria and bus drivers in Lagos went on strike. Construction workers went on strike in Lesotho. Air traffic controllers went on strike in more than 18 African countries. Mass strikes took place in Haiti. Rail workers went on strike in Brazil. Miners went on strike in Chile and tyre workers in Argentina. In 2022, 75 percent more strikes took place in Brazil than the previous year. Millions of people participated in a general strike in India against the far-​right and Hindu-​supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party –​workers in coal and copper mines, steel, automotive, transportation and public transit, telecommunications, the civil service, public sector enterprises, life insurance, health care and education. After the number of Indian billionaires increased by approximately 150 or more in 2021 alone, fewer than one hundred billionaires possess more wealth than 500 million East Indians. The Narendra Modi government has therefore targeted the right to strike as part of its plan to privatize more sectors of the economy and de-​universalize social services. In Sri Lanka, industrial, agricultural, tea plantation and health care workers went on strike and the rest of the country forced president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign. In China, Foxconn workers rebelled against militarily imposed work regimes. Just as creative and immaterial labour in post-​Fordist societies is sometimes more pertinent to the postmodern left than the growing mass of proletarianized workers in traditional sectors, the “normalcy” of blue, pink and white-​collar labour makes it irrelevant to the no-​collar imaginings of intellectuals who presume to orchestrate new class compositions with their laptops. Less an anti-​politics than a post-​politics, this revolution without revolution advocates not only collaboration among identity groups but among social classes. The petty-​bourgeois character of the Endnotes revolt is evident in staking the goal of working less at full pay on “interclass intermingling,” and this since the revolution will need the help of managers and technicians.91 If only the classical left had thought of that. As for managers and technicians, in the Fall of 2022, the new billionaire Prime Minister of the U.K., Rishi Sunak, who was congratulated by Labour leader Keir Starmer for being the first British Asian PM, set to work imposing minimum service levels on striking transportation workers, which would effectively neuter industrial strike action. Previously, the Conservative Party had already legislated the right of agencies to supply temporary scab labour and to raise the maximum on the damages that can be awarded to employers whose profits are affected by “unlawful” strike action. A Public Order Bill also attacked the right to protest and tamped down on strike activity, with dictatorial police measures added. The Canadian Liberal Party’s 2023 Bill C-​58, presented as anti-​scab legislation and enthusiastically supported by the social democratic New Democratic Party, similarly exposes public servants to government strike bans

220  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left and non-​union contractors. In the U.S., this same year, the Supreme Court gave businesses the right to sue unions for the economic impact of strikes and employee protests, thereby reversing the jurisdiction that the National Labor Relations Board has had over these issues since 1959. In addition, neo-​ McCarthyites in the U.S. Senate passed a resolution titled “Denouncing the Horrors of Socialism,” which equates socialism with totalitarian dictatorship and violence. The Endnotes collective understands the limits of what it proposes. It chooses anti-​state barbarism over proletarian socialism while at the same time arguing, through the immanentist reduction of subjectivity to the existing reality, that neoliberalism is making our choices for us. Only an intentionally obfuscating discourse would ask people to think of the yellow colour of the Gilets Jaunes jackets as a reference to skin colour rather than the safety equipment worn by people in working-​class occupations. If the George Floyd protests became a channel for resistance to authoritarian austerity, so did the party leadership campaigns of Bernie Sanders.92 The ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America swelled at the same time. Since the period 2012 to 2022, all three of these insurgencies have waffled, in large part because none of them are based on the independent mobilization of the working class. After the Biden victory, the DSA came up with the bipolar election strategy of using working-​class populism in rural areas and woke messaging in urban centres.93 Race consciousness and identitarian negation cannot be a long-​ term holding pattern for left strategy. The Groucho Marx reply to “Onward Barbarians” is that this non-​movement of rhetorically post-​class masses may seem disorganized and confused, but don’t let that fool you, it is disorganized and confused. Class, Class, Class Some of the practical problems addressed in the above came to light in the Fall of 2023 after the African American philosopher Cornel West announced his decision to run for President of the United States, with the possibility of doing so through a Green Party nomination. The journalist Glenn Greenwald, a free speech crusader with oscillating political commitments, made an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show on August 31, offering his wisdom to the right-​wing host concerning the disagreement between West and Sanders on West’s decision to run for president on a third-​party platform. The interview came after West had appeared on Charlamagne tha God’s Breakfast Club radio show, on which he correctly accused Sanders of lying to the public about the possibility that a second Joe Biden administration would implement any meaningful social reforms. Shortly after this appearance, Sanders counter-​appeared on CNN to say that he supports Joe Biden because he believes that the Republican assault on democracy is the most serious existential threat facing the nation. Sanders called on Biden to bring the entire progressive community together to defeat Donald Trump or

Class, Class, Class  221 whoever will be the Republican nominee in 2024. This was a hard sell for a president who worked behind the scenes to curtail labour struggles, allow corporation to price gouge citizens, threaten humanity with nuclear annihilation and green light Israeli war crimes. Shortly after this, on the programme Rising, West said that Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-​ Cortez and the Squad of left-​ leaning party members understand that the Democratic Party has no intention of speaking to the needs of poor working people. Concerning all of this, Greenwald stated: Cornel West has always been a critic of the Democratic Party. He’s never liked the Democratic Party, but he’s maintained one foot inside of it. … One major problem for the Democrats is that he is a very respected black intellectual … very popular among black voters on whom Democrats rely in every election to win, but he’s also I think somebody people are going to start to see who has this ability to speak to working-​class people in a way that makes them feel like they’re not hearing stale left-​wing dogma. He’s exciting, he’s charismatic, he’s funny, he’s very human, he produces music, he sings, he’ll break into song in the middle of interviews … And I think he poses a huge threat to the Democratic Party because even if he takes only two or three percent from Joe Biden, obviously it could make a difference in the way our elections are run.94 It is true that West does not subscribe to left-​wing dogma. He is better known to straddle left tendencies in the name of Christian love rather than Marxist-​ Leninist orthodoxy. For West, this explains his commitment to the black prophetic tradition that bears witness to human suffering and stands among those who struggle for a better world. With West there is a high degree of moral criticism that one does not necessarily find in the work of Marxist theorists or socialist leaders. Recent left-​wing leaders in the U.S., such as Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders, have had to demonstrate their American belonging by combining grassroots populism with pragmatism. Given the pressures of corporate media and the inordinate influence of political advertising –​not to mention the conservatism of the electorate –​they must reassure the public that they are not kooky communists. This is no doubt why Trump referred to Sanders as Crazy Bernie. Beyond that, West is an unusually compassionate individual, especially for someone with academic bona fides worthy of the country’s thought leaders, a public intellectual with a touring agenda that is as impressive as Bob Dylan’s, and a self-​professed jazzman who has an ear for compositions that are worth playing. Although communist leaders and intellectuals have possessed the best qualities one could expect from a politician, a commentator like Greenwald has no interest in knowing about them. This is a political choice, and it is one that has characterized American politics since the Cold War. More significant than W.E.B. Du Bois’s colour line, it is a division that intersects nearly

222  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left everything. Since at least the 1960s, however, the role that the colour line has played in the U.S. has followed a Cold War script. One of the more confusing elements in all of this, and after the eradication of socialism in the McCarthy era, is the appearance of revolutionary black militancy, which retained some aspects of the prophetic tradition but combined this with revolutionary Marxism and anti-​colonialism. This glitch in the image of imperial American capitalism is something that West understands first-​hand, but he also understands it as a Christian commitment to everyday people rather than a Marxist commitment to the overcoming of capitalist relations. And so, we hear at least three chords in West’s playing: the black prophetic tradition, American anti-​communism and a race-​oriented revolutionary ideology. No doubt there are more elements than these. In relation to the identity and class issue, West gave a revealing interview around this time on The Jimmy Dore Show. Dore began the segment with condescending reassurances that his criticisms of West’s campaign were made with the hope that they might help him. Dore challenged West to educate people about what is happening. West responded rhetorically that it is important to lift every voice, a policy that from the perspective of socialist politics has no strategic significance. It is nevertheless close to the elementary political principles of revolutionary bourgeois ideology: freedom, equality, solidarity. Dore agreed with West that Sanders has sold out his supporters by asking them to endorse Biden but disagreed with him about giving any conciliatory words towards Sanders, which Dore suggested encourages voting for the Republicans. This point was one of several stratagems used by Dore to make West seem foolish and make himself seem like a shrewder, more radical player. Dore could do this easily enough because he could count on the fact that West likes to lift every voice –​even the voice of someone like Dore who combines both sides of left and right populism. Citing the Russiagate fiasco and the threat of nuclear exchange with Russia or China, Dore excoriated Biden and some of the other failings of the Democratic Party, like mass incarceration. West argued that Dore was attacking Biden from the right, making Trump seem like the lesser of two evils. One of Dore’s strongest points in this interview is the notion that the Democratic Party has limited progressive reform to diversity and identity politics. This is perhaps true for the average Democratic Party supporter, but it can hardly be said to be true for the party itself, which gives lip service to anti-​ discrimination to advance a neoliberal agenda. This incongruence was then made into a line of attack through which Dore assailed the “woke” agenda in a manner that is indistinguishable from right-​wing attacks on wokeism. In a style that is worthy of Father Coughlin, Dore accused Biden of being an enemy of the worker and a stooge of Wall Street and the military-​industrial complex. What West should be doing, he argued, is bringing together disaffected Republican voters, independents and others who feel alienated by the political system. Dore was here using class as ballast to promote a populist alliance of the alienated, which has nothing to do with socialism. His

Class, Class, Class  223 political disorientation became more obvious as he then baited West about the inordinate amount of attention he gives to race and sexuality issues, with trans rights a sticking point. For Dore, the Democrats long ago abandoned the working class in favour of cultural issues “and now,” he said, “that’s all the Democrats have to run on.”95 On this point Dore made one of many equivocations: the Democrats run on trans rights and on calling Trump a fascist. This short-​circuit was rejected by West as rhetoric that avoids deep reflection and analysis. The strategy nevertheless has some effectivity as an alt-​right provocation, which seeks to bypass reasoned argumentation. Dore then added: The role of a third party is to focus not on the identity politics that divide us, but on the core economic issues that unite along class lines, like [Amazon labour union leader] Christian Smalls did at Staten Island. Do you think that he led with LGBTQ trans rights and white supremacy? Or do you think he organized around class lines?96 Any leftish podcast pundit understands that Dore’s provocation is in fact a softball pitch. In the interest of what Noam Chomsky refers to as mass media concision, all that one must do is reject class reductionism and the game is won. The podcaster Sabby Sabs did one better by suggesting that “race is class and class is race.”97 West thanked Dore for his candour –​in other words, for saying the quiet parts out loud. This means two things: 1) from the left, touching on the core of the problem, which is class struggle; 2) from the right, evading this problem through discriminatory diversion. West argued that when he speaks of white supremacy, he is not making a utilitarian calculation, but rather he is coming from a tradition and a people who have been traumatized by white elites. This is perhaps acceptable as a response to the second point, but it is inadequate as a response to the first point. West is an intellectual who fights and loves from a black perspective first and foremost. One problem with this is that the critique of white supremacy, like the critique of patriarchy and heterosexism, is in fact a utilitarian calculation on the part of people who today advance concerns that have been shaped by petty-​bourgeois politics. West prefers to solve class contradictions through Christian moralism, which is a winner every time, even when you are burning at the stake. He assured Dore that class issues are crucial and fundamental, but that class does not imply the tolerance of white supremacy. No leftist would disagree with that statement. However, West went one further, saying: “one of the problems is that you get too many folk who want to talk about class, class, class, and can’t say a mumbling word about white supremacy, police brutality … or when they do say it, you call it identity politics, as if it’s not connected to class politics.”98 West told Dore that he is addressing all of these in his platform but that he will never be silent regarding the mistreatment of black people, Indigenous people, gay brothers, lesbian sisters and trans folk. “It’s not an either-​or,” he said, “and that’s

224  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left where you and I have a deep, profound disappointment.”99 Who and what does Dore imply when he speaks of the common interest, West asked. Is Dore only referring to the majority? Dore responded that in his reply, West sounds like every other Democrat. West’s suspicion of universality as cover for particular interests is fine as an elementary form of ideology critique but it is not worthy of someone who considers himself a Christian universalist. In these terms, humans are little more than the playthings of an unloving God. This is why the socialist version of this problem is not that socialists want benefits for workers, but that socialists want all of humanity to progress beyond the capitalist system. In this regard, it is essential to understand that Marxism is not a form of moralism that indulges in the problems of victimization, especially not in today’s context in which histories of oppression are leveraged by middle-​class intellectuals and politicians –​in academia, NGOs, activism, union bureaucracies and the fringes of the Democratic Party –​to reinforce the identity categories that have little to do with politics. West was correct to point out that he is not like every other Democrat because his platform is far to the left of the Democratic Party, but Dore was correct that West’s handling of the race and class issue, the both-​and option that is counterposed to the either-​or option, is inadequate and ideologically useful to Democrats, who certainly have no intention of making good on the class aspect of the equation. And because they fail on this issue, they fail on the other. However, what neither of them discussed, because that is not in the nature of these kinds of interviews, is the fallout of decades of postmodern theory and at least eight years of the race and class debate in the U.S. since the election of Trump in 2016. West’s handling of this issue was rather inept, as if all he needs do is emphasize pain and suffering at the hands of white supremacy. Anti-​racism can be used to support different kinds of politics. There is no doubt that West’s agenda is social democratic, but there is also a racialist dimension in his approach that has a floating quality, especially when it comes to class, that Dore was seeking to extirpate. Dore fails to appreciate that for socialists, class is not absolute. But West failed to explain that identity must not be equated with politics. In the several years since Occupy Wall Street, the progressive agenda has been monopolized by trends like privilege theory, whiteness studies, intersectionality, decoloniality, and the like. This has been accompanied by a return to postmodernism by activists on the new social movement left, which competes with more conventional approaches to emancipatory socialist universalism. As a Christian universalist, West should have more in common with the emancipatory universality of the left than with postmodernism. However, West himself contributed to this postmodern orientation, with for example his 1991 essay on the “new cultural politics of difference,” which states: Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity

Class, Class, Class  225 and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing.100 West’s leftism coincides with many other strands of New Left theory that locate the source of radicalism in agencies other than the working class. It is therefore not altogether surprising that West did not himself say a word about how difference politics has weakened the radical left and served as intellectual handmaiden to neoliberalism. Anti-​oppression difference politics is now used to reject universality, Enlightenment and socialism –​all of them denounced as Eurocentric. In this interview, West was not obliged to state his stance towards universality because Dore was flirting with fascism, attacking Biden from the right, being equivocal about Trump’s crimes and Stop Cop City protests, baiting West with trans issues and patronizing the working class in the manner of a right-​wing demagogue. Those of Dore’s points that are correct were therefore muddled through his demagoguery. One could nevertheless agree with Dore that if West is to run as president, he needs to be more focused on a universalist approach to policy. Dore confronted West with the fact that the GPUS black caucus in the Green Party rejected COVID-​19 mask mandates and obligatory vaccination. West replied that if he had another chance, he would lean more with the GPUS and would call for a truth commission to find out what truly happened with COVID-​19 and see what voices were marginalized. Here is one of countless instances where lifting all voices makes no sense. In the first two years of COVID-​19, close to one million Americans died from the disease and today nearly 20 million Americans confront the problems that result from Long COVID. In China, where mask mandates and contact tracing measures were followed on the basis of medical science, only 5000 or more people died from the disease in the first two years and before the vaccine rollout was completed. The 2023 commission on COVID-​19 that was launched in the U.S. included McCarthyite interrogations of scientists who were pushed around by neoliberal and right-​wing politicians, many of whom continue to pander the scientifically discredited hypothesis that the disease originated in a lab in Wuhan. Government propaganda does not dissipate when candidates like West act in conciliatory ways towards populist demagogues like Dore. And this is where Christian universalism reaches political limits. A high percentage of black businesses failed during the COVID-​19 lockdowns, as Dore mentioned, for two reasons: 1) because Americans do not invest in public policy –​not because the U.S. is racist and does not want to help poor blacks, but because the U.S. is the most fervently capitalist nation in the world, enforcing the same policies on people of all races; 2) because small businesses in poor neighbourhoods fail as a matter of course, especially in times of economic crisis. The problem here is not infighting on the left, it is

226  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left a matter of knowing what genuine socialism is and what it is not. On the left there are anarchists, social democrats, socialists and communists. In the U.S., being “not Republican” is sometimes enough to quality as left, but in most cases, what you have is one version or another of liberalism, which may as well include most of today’s postmodernists, radical democrats, populists and pragmatists. The struggle against oppression is an essential part of the left agenda. However, racialism and the kind of postmodern thinking that West has advocated is not part of the socialist understanding of universality. The problem with media interviews, and debate more generally, is that someone can only present as many ideas as the structure of speech and dialogue allows. Whereas knowledge is comprehensive, dialogue takes place in a gradual, deliberative fashion, which does not allow someone like West to say everything he knows all at once. But it does allow someone like Dore to pose as radical and remake dialogue into a cheap form of altercation. And the same goes for the rebellions of despair, which, as Paul Mattick once wrote, are “easily handled by the authorities.”101 If we are not to be satisfied that God knows the truth of the matter, we must rely on social mediation. That is the meaning of the word politics. But what about culture? Everyone, racists especially, understands that the U.S. has a vicious legacy of white supremacy that informs contemporary life. The real question is what to do about it. How do you lead? What policies or practices will be most effective and comprehensive? West’s platform, which combines redistribution and recognition with anti-​imperialism, is probably his best answer to Dore’s provocations, but they were not given enough attention. Whereas West impresses with his unique combination of moral exhortation and intellectual references, Sanders would have droned on with his policy positions and dull talking points. And these, as it happens, would have been enough to get him elected had the Democratic Party establishment not orchestrated an internal party coup against the 2020 Sanders campaign. The dull and dogmatic octogenarian from Vermont led the most exciting presidential campaign in recent memory. In 2023, West was maligned by hangers-​on for leading the charge outside the two-​part duopoly. From a socialist perspective, his is the correct strategy. However, the obsession with identity politics within the new social movement and extra-​parliamentary left must not be solved through cultural strategies that resemble those of the Democratic Party. As Malik points out, we live in an era that is saturated with the kind of racial thinking that fails to distinguish between identity and identity politics. While politics should take us beyond identity, he argues, today’s culturalized politics shackles us to identity. Not only is this an ideological version of Stockholm Syndrome, he says, where the more identity is questioned, the more we cling to it, but more importantly, the politics of identity is a politics of the right, not the left.102 Racialism and anti-​oppression discourses are effective because they deploy Manichean paradigms that are easy to fall into and have nothing to do with socialism.

Class, Class, Class  227 The brokerage of identity through nationalism and social movement activism does not solve the problems that are generated by capitalism. To take another example, in his Cornel West 2024 presidential campaign email announcements of October 2024, West addressed his list with the phrase “My Dear Brothers, Sisters, and Siblings.” In the spirit of Christian community, West is known to refer to everyone as brother and sister, even right-wingers. The terms brother and sister that are commonly used in the labour movement also have currency as black American terms that signal in-​group solidarity. The gender-​neutral term sibling is added in this case to include non-​binary and non-​conforming identities. While the intention is progressive, and conforms to DEI policies, the effect is to particularize language that was intended to be universalist. It raises the same problem as adding the word multicultural to working class. If one wanted to retain the universalist emphasis, one could simply say “My Dear Siblings.” However, doing so could be misconstrued as an unstated endorsement of cisgender exclusion. A better solution is to refer to everyone as comrade. Unfortunately, the term comrade, like the collectivizing use of the term ‘we’, is proscribed by postmodernists. Liberals tend to refer to audiences in seemingly non-​political terms as cosmopolitan citizens, and conservatives use more rallying terms, as members of a nation, moral majority or valiant minority. The problem with siblings is that it shifts the address from questions of political solidarity to questions of diversity and difference, from political commitments to matters of ontology and inclusion. While it may be that some people are siblings, most people take identity and difference for granted. The attention given today to inclusive language shifts public discourse to a social constructionist register that is consonant with post-​structuralism, neoliberalism and even aspects of the conservative anti-​Enlightenment tradition. Even when ideologies of ascriptive identity are acknowledged, the problem of what kind of politics to pursue remains. Material interests, conceived in broad social terms, are not the only consideration in matters of politics, but they are the most determining. If issues around race, gender and sexuality are to be adequately addressed, they need to be understood in universalist leftist terms. This means reckoning with postmodernism and with contemporary academia. This also means understanding the importance of revolutionary leftism and the labour movement to civil and human rights struggles. Lefebvre argued that culture is a moment in the flow of life, as is philosophy and even religion. As for those who talk only about “class, class, class,” one would like to know who they are. What is certain is that the petty bourgeoisie and the professional-​managerial class have for decades reinforced the offensive on the legacy of the socialist left, which in neoliberal times can rarely be mentioned except as a historical referent. We have a surfeit of identity politics and culture wars today because we do not have class politics and socialism. The solution to this cannot be an exclusive focus on class and labour. This paradox that bedevils the left highlights the importance of theory to socialist praxis.

228  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left Notes 1 Eric Hobsbawm, “Identity Politics and the Left,” New Left Review 217 (May/​ June 1996), 38–​47. 2 See Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, eds, Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity, [2014] 2016). 3 Michaels cited in Richard Kreitner, “What Is the Left Without Identity Politics? Four writers consider the question dividing the Democratic Party,” The Nation (December 16, 2016), www.thenat​ion.com/​arti​cle/​arch​ive/​what-​is-​the-​left-​with​ out-​ident​ity-​polit​ics/​. 4 Vivek Chibber, “Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn,” Catalyst (Spring 2007), 27. 5 Two sides of the problem of class and identity in Marxist materialism, one structuralist and the other post-​structuralist, are argued in, for example, Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022) and William Clare Roberts, “Class in Theory, Class in Practice,” Crisis & Critique 10:1 (2023), 248–​62. 6 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019). 7 Kenan Malik, Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics (London: Hurst & Company, 2023), 142. See also Susan Buck-​ Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 8 David Tomas, “From Gesture to Activity: Dislodging the Anthropological Scriptorium,” Cultural Studies 6:1 (January 1992), 1–​26. 9 Susan Neiman, Left Is Not Woke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023), eBook, 44. 10 Neiman, Left Is Not Woke, 35. 11 Although Neiman identifies as liberal, social democratic and socialist, her thinking in Left Is Not Woke is almost exclusively liberal. The thrust of her book is to criticize the argument that all normative or universal claims and principles, like justice and democracy, are means to ignore reality and disguise specific if not nefarious interests. One cannot dispute that this rhetoric is fundamental to reactionary politics, postmodern discourse theory, as well as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Although she is correct that progressive theory does not rely on absolutes, her non-​dialectical use of formal logic to distinguish altruism from selfishness –​or the inability of social constructionism to distinguish what is determined and what is not –​is somewhat irrelevant to Marxist theory, which provides a scientific and political argument concerning capitalist exploitation that is not dependent on moral denunciation. Capitalism is not based on greed but on the need for capital to reproduce itself, a compulsion that affects capitalists as much as workers. The capitalist, as Marx argues, and unlike the miser, is capital personified. His only impulse is the creation of surplus value through exchange relations, which propels capitalist competition and the ceaseless development of labour-​saving machinery. Moreover, within the terms of political liberalism, the capitalist, who may very well be a model citizen, confronts the needs of the worker as one right against another. Under capitalism, the “right” of the workers to sell their labour is determined by necessity and the balance of class forces. Despite its many valuable insights, our response to Neiman’s book is that leftism is not liberalism.

Notes  229 12 Nivedita Majumdar, “Is Socialism Eurocentric?” Jacobin (April 18, 2017), https://​ jaco​bin.com/​2017/​04/​social​ism-​marx​ism-​rac​ist-​euro​cent​ric-​west-​int​erse​ctio​nal. 13 Azoulay, Potential History, 30. The concept of habitus is defined by Pierre Bourdieu as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1980] 1990), 53. 14 See Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, [1988] 1991). 15 Azoulay, Potential History, 70. Along these lines, see Gene Ray’s association of critical theory with what he now views as modernity’s ecocidal and genocidal tendencies in Ray, “Writing the Ecocide-​Genocide Knot: Indigenous Knowledge and Critical Theory in the Endgame,” South as a State of Mind 8 [documenta 14] (Fall/​Winter 2016), www.docu​ment​a14.de/​en/​south/​895_​writing_​the_​ecocide_​ genocide_​knot_​indigenous_​knowledge_​and_​cri​tica​l_​th​eory​_​in_​the_​endg​ame. 16 Azoulay, Potential History, 77. 17 See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge, [1913] 2001). 18 Azoulay, Potential History, 113. 19 David Walsh, “Should art be judged on the basis of race and gender?” World Socialist Web Site (April 27, 2017), www.wsws.org/​en/​artic​les/​2017/​04/​27/​sdsu-​ a27.html. See also Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-​Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 20 See for example, Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/​​ Power/​​ Truth/​​Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation –​An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3:3 (2003), 257–​337. 21 See Michael Hudson’s discussion of this in Real Progressives, “RP Live with Michael Hudson: The Destiny of Civilization,” YouTube (November 10, 2022), www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​cD_​U​cRtl​jDU. 22 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Oxford University Press, [1918–​1922] 1991), 178, 46. 23 Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism, From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 24 Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, xii. 25 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-​Right (Winchester: Zero Books, 2017). 26 Terry Eagleton, Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 27 See Slavoj Žižek, “Postmodernism or Class Struggle? Yes, Please!” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 108. 28 Eagleton, Culture, 45. 29 See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001).

230  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left 30 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Another version of left identitarianism that is not discussed here is Keeanga-​Yamahtta Taylor’s notion of the black left, which she says seeks to win white workers not only into unity with poor blacks and Latinos, but to understand the centrality of racism in shaping the lived experiences of black and Latino workers. See Keeanga-​Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 31 Arthur Manuel, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-​up Call (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015), eBook. 32 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 14. 33 On this issue, see the critical review of Coulthard’s book in John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review (February 1, 2020), https://​monthl​yrev​iew.org/​2020/​02/​01/​marx-​and-​the-​ind​ igen​ous/​. 34 See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (New York: Grove Press, [1952] 1967); Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, [1961] 1963). 35 Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection (London: Zed Books, 2016). 36 Lewis, The Politics of Everybody, 87. 37 Lewis, The Politics of Everybody, 214. 38 Jennifer Kabbany, “Civil rights complaint filed against NYU for whites-​only anti-​ racism workshops,” The College Fix (July 17, 2023), www.thecol​lege​fix.com/​civil-​ rig​hts-​compla​int-​filed-​agai​nst-​nyu-​for-​whi​tes-​only-​anti-​rac​ism-​worksh​ops/​. 39 Lewis, The Politics of Everybody, 190. 40 Lewis, The Politics of Everybody, 193. 41 Lewis, The Politics of Everybody, 195. 42 See Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012). For a critique of feminist social reproduction theory as a form of “gendercraft,” see Elena Louisa Lange, “Gendercraft: Marxism-​ Feminism, Reproduction, and the Blind Spot of Money,” Science & Society 85:1 (January 2021), 38–​65. 43 See Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991). Although his approach tends to moralize psychoanalysis, Todd McGowan associates enjoyment on the left with the cause of universality, which he distinguishes from enjoyment on the right, which is an enjoyment, or jouissance, that cannot be universalized. Contrary to McGowan’s argument, the left is universalist, but it does enact political exclusions that are not concerned with the right’s clinging to particularity and rejection of universality. In fact, the political right has its own version of universality: power. The left excludes its political antagonists on the basis of organized emancipation from relations of exploitation that are not matters of identity or belonging. McGowan’s approach is more useful as a refutation of identity politics. He is correct that the universal, as an unconscious factor that is defined as external to the symbolic order, distinguishes the singularity of an individual from their social-​symbolic identity. However, socialist politics is defined by alienation and the overcoming of contradictions rather than by post-​utopian immanence and the occupation of contradiction, which are defined by McGowan in post-​structuralist terms as universal nonbelonging.

Notes  231 It is worth recalling that the MAGA enjoyment and great replacement theory that McGowan describes are displacements of class contradictions. Contrary to McGowan’s references to Freud on this issue, it is fascism and not socialism that is defined by the friend/​​enemy distinction. Capitalists may well be the enemies of socialists, but socialist politics is universal in principle and in scope. See Todd McGowan, Enjoyment Right and Left (Portland: Sublation Media, 2022). 44 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Representation,” New Left Review 3:3 (May/​June 2000), 107–​20. See also Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age,” New Left Review 212 (July/​August 1995), 68–​93. Decades later, Fraser still holds to this overall approach but with the difference of having added intersectional and decolonial concepts to her analysis. See Fraser’s June 2022 Benjamin Lectures, “Gender, Race and Class Through the Lens of Labor: A Post-​Intersectional Analysis of Capitalist Society,” for the Centre for Social Critique, Humboldt University, Berlin. 45 The pragmatic solution to republicanism proposed by James Bohman is to strengthen the potential for justice by rethinking Jürgen Habermas’ critique of the metaphysical trappings of eighteenth-​century notions of collective will and sovereignty through a “republican cosmopolitanism” that considers interdependence across national boundaries. This liberal approach, however, never broaches the question of communist internationalism. See James Bohman, “Republican Cosmopolitanism,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 12:3 (2004), 336–​52. 46 David Ingram, “Critical Theory and the Struggle for Recognition,” Berlin Journal of Critical Theory 1:1 (September 2017), 30. 47 See Nancy Fraser, “Identity, Exclusion, and Critique: A Response to Four Critics,” European Journal of Political Theory 6:3 (July 2007), 309. 48 Fraser, “Identity, Exclusion, and Critique,” 333. 49 Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, Feminism of the 99 Percent: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2019). 50 Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, Feminism of the 99 Percent, 83. 51 Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, Feminism of the 99 Percent, 84. 52 Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Why Class Struggle Is Central,” Against the Current (September/​October 1987), 7–​9. 53 Wood, “Why Class Struggle Is Central,” 8. 54 Wood, “Why Class Struggle Is Central,” 8. 55 For example, the interview with Jessie Kindig, a New York city-​based editor with the left publisher Verso, announces more books about power and sexuality, gender violence, transwomen, #MeToo, structural racism, racial slavery and xenophobic white nationalist movements. What she does not want to see, she says, is books by people who are not feminists. One can presume that this attitude extends to the limitless array of intersectional issues. See Kirkus editors, “Q&A: Jessie Kindig, an Editor at Verso Books,” Kirkus (2017), www.kirkus​revi​ews.com/​news-​and-​featu​ res/​artic​les/​jes​sie-​kin​dig-​verso-​books/​. 56 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 57 Ahmed, On Being Included, 22. 58 Ahmed, On Being Included, 27. 59 Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, “Why Diversity Programs Fail,” Harvard Business Review (July–​August 2016), https://​hbr.org/​2016/​07/​why-​divers​ity-​progr​ ams-​fail.

232  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left 60 Some of these possibilities are added to those already mentioned in Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Goodwill,” in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1979] 1984), 318–​71. 61 See Christian Parenti, “The First Privilege Walk,” nonsite (November 18, 2021), https://​nons​ite.org/​the-​first-​privil​ege-​walk/​. 62 Lee Fang, “The Evolution of Union Busting: Breaking Unions With the Language of Diversity and Social Justice,” The Intercept (June 7, 2022), https://​thein​terc​ept. com/​2022/​06/​07/​union-​bust​ing-​tact​ics-​divers​ity/​. 63 See Dan Kovalik, “Witch Hunt in the Academy,” in Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture (New York: Hot Books, 2021), eBook, 359–​94. 64 Rachel Hall, “Bristol University sacks professor accused of antisemitic comments,” The Guardian (October 1, 2021), www.theg​uard​ian.com/​educat​ion/​2021/​oct/​01/​ bris​tol-​uni​vers​ity-​sacks-​profes​sor-​accu​sed-​of-​anti​semi​tic-​comme​nts. 65 Matthew Brennan and Barry Grey, “University of Michigan faculty open letter supports witch-​hunt, rejects letter signed by hundreds defending victimized professor Bright Sheng,” World Socialist Web Site (November 9, 2021), www.wsws. org/​en/​artic​les/​2021/​11/​10/​shen-​n10.html; Nell Gluckman, “At Harvard, Details About the Handling of a Harassment Case May Spill Into Public View,” Chronicle of Higher Education (April 10, 2023), www.chroni​cle.com/​arti​cle/​at-​harv​ard-​deta​ ils-​about-​the-​handl​ing-​of-​a-​har​assm​ent-​case-​may-​spill-​into-​pub​lic-​view. 66 See Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-​Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (New York: Picador, 2010). On the structural absence of class considerations from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, and its contribution to intensified competition and administrative austerity, see Lillian Cicerchia, “Diversity and inclusion within what and for whom? And other questions about the political economy of academia,” Verso Blog (March 22, 2021), www.ver​sobo​ oks.com/​blogs/​4871-​divers​ity-​and-​inclus​ion-​wit​hin-​what-​and-​for-​whom-​and-​ other-​questi​ons-​about-​the-​politi​cal-​econ​omy-​of-​acade​mia. 67 Ahmed, On Being Included, 79. 68 See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 27. 69 Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 11. 70 Ahmed, On Being Included, 128. 71 Ahmed, On Being Included, 169. 72 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), v. 73 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 253. 74 See Maria Hlavajova and Sven Lütticken, eds. Deserting from the Culture Wars (Utrecht: BAK, 2020). 75 Slavoj Žižek, “The White Issue: The ‘Theft of Enjoyment’,” The Village Voice (May 18, 1993/​ July 23, 2019), www.villa​gevo​ice.com/​2019/​07/​23/​the-​white-​ issue-​the-​theft-​of-​enjoym​ent/​. 76 Žižek, “The White Issue: The ‘Theft of Enjoyment’.” 77 Slavoj Žižek, “More on Joker: From Apolitical Nihilism to a New Left, or Why Trump Is No Joker,” The Philosophical Salon (November 11, 2019), https://​thephi​ loso​phic​alsa​lon.com/​more-​on-​joker-​from-​apo​liti​cal-​nihil​ism-​to-​a-​new-​left-​or-​ why-​trump-​is-​no-​joker/​. 78 Antoni Nerestant, “Teachers worry Legault government playing politics with upcoming changes to school curriculum,” CBC News (October 23, 2021),

Notes  233 www.cbc.ca/​news/​can​ada/​montr​eal/​eth​ics-​relig​ion-​cou​rse-​lega​ult-​citi​zens​hip-​ 1.6220​000. 79 Ahmed, On Being Included, 180. 80 Ahmed, On Being Included, 186. 81 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1983] 2008), 47. 82 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 49. 83 Roger Garaudy, “Aventure de la dialectique ou dialectique d’une aventure?” in Roger Garaudy et al., Mésaventures de l’anti-​ marxisme: Les malheurs de M. Merleau-​Ponty (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1956). At one time an orthodox communist, Garaudy was later excluded from the French Communist Party for objectionable views that betrayed his former commitments. 84 Henri Lefebvre, “M. Merleau-​Ponty et la philosophie de l’ambiguité [part 1],” La Pensée 68 (1956), 44–​58. 85 Henri Lefebvre, “M. Merleau-​Ponty et la philosophie de l’ambiguité [part 2],” La Pensée 73 (1957), 37–​52. 86 Endnotes Collective, “Onward Barbarians,” Endnotes (May 2020), https://​endno​ tes.org.uk/​posts/​endno​tes-​onw​ard-​bar​bari​ans. 87 Endnotes Collective, “Onward Barbarians.” 88 Much ink has been spilled over the relevance of classic, orthodox Marxism to contemporary political economy. While the labour relation is essential to Marxism, David Harvey argues that Marx’s theory of historical materialism was concerned with seven distinct and co-​evolving aspects of society: general social relations, the relationship to nature, the process of production, technology, social reproduction, mental conceptions of the world, and the development of the state. See David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and The Crisis of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 89 For comparative purposes, see Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (London: Verso, 2016). 90 See Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” in The Internet Revolution: From Dot-​ com Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2015), 12–​27. See also Marc James Léger, Don’t Network: The Avant Garde after Networks (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2018). 91 Endnotes Collective, “Onward Barbarians.” 92 On the split between these two aspects of American progressive politics, see Joshua Clover, “The Two Politics: 2020 So Far,” Verso Blog (July 16, 2020), www.ver​ sobo​oks.com/​blogs/​4796-​the-​two-​polit​ics-​2020-​so-​far. See also Marc James Léger, Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Leiden: Brill, 2022). 93 Editors, “Commonsense Solidarity: How a Working-​Class Coalition Can Be Built, and Maintained,” Jacobin (November 9, 2021), www.jac​obin​mag.com/​2021/​11/​ com​mon-​sense-​sol​idar​ity-​work​ing-​class-​vot​ing-​rep​ort. 94 Greenwald in Megyn Kelly, “Can Cornel West Play Spoiler in 2024 … While Bernie Sanders is Attacking Him? With Glenn Greenwald,” YouTube (August 31, 2023), www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​7pFF​kBAU​oTA. 95 Dore in The Jimmy Dore Show, “Cornel West Does 45 Minute Commercial FOR JOE BIDEN!” YouTube (September 7, 2023), www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​YeTe​ 9Z7Z​kjk. 96 Dore in The Jimmy Dore Show, “Cornel West Does 45 Minute Commercial FOR JOE BIDEN!”

234  Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left 97 Sabs in Sabby Sabs, “Jimmy Dore & Cornel West DISAPPOINTING Interview (clip),” YouTube (September 8, 2023), www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​sXfb​ 8S8-​LkY. 98 West in The Jimmy Dore Show, “Cornel West Does 45 Minute Commercial FOR JOE BIDEN!” 99 West in The Jimmy Dore Show, “Cornel West Does 45 Minute Commercial FOR JOE BIDEN!” 100 Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” (1991) in West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 119. 101 Paul Mattick, Critique of Marcuse: One-​ Dimensional Man in Class Society (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), www.marxi​sts.org/​arch​ive/​matt​ick-​paul/​ 1972/​marc​use.htm. 102 Malik, Not So Black and White, 1–​10.

Conclusion Theses on Class Struggle and Identity Politics

1 Racism, sexism and other forms of oppression and discrimination predate capitalism. These forms of oppression have been incorporated, in various ways, into capitalist social relations and ideology. Racism and sexism, however, are not constitutive of capitalism. Despite the real subsumption of labour and the alienation of social life in post-​Fordist capitalism, there is no racial capitalism and no patriarchal capitalism. Likewise, there is no black Marxism or socialist feminism. There is capitalism and there is socialist opposition to capitalism. 2 Contemporary neoliberal capitalism makes use of anti-​ racism, anti-​ patriarchy and other forms of anti-​oppression. Gender, sexual and racial conflicts are used by the ruling capitalist elite to divide and control the working class. In contrast to theories of anti-​racism and anti-​patriarchy, class analysis does not view class “differences” as the root of capitalist exploitation. Class society is the product of capitalist social relations and the capitalist mode of production. Class is therefore central to left politics but not exclusive. People who are serious about ending oppression are serious about ending class exploitation. 3 Labour and capital are inherently antagonistic in ways that gender difference, racial difference and sexual difference are not. While it is possible to replace capitalism with a better social system, it is not possible to replace men with women, or women with men, etc. The opposition of whites to blacks, or blacks to whites, is a means to avoid politics, remaking social conflict into an endgame of eternal opposites, archetypes, myths, and other clichés of the political right. The presumption of an innate difference between social groups is part of the history of reactionary, anti-​ Enlightenment, anti-​ materialist and anti-​ universalist thought. So is the assumption that working-​ class, DOI: 10.4324/9781003483922-5

236  Conclusion middle-​class and upper-​class members of the same identity group have more in common than the members of the same class group. Fascist ideology replaces questions of politics and political economy with questions of power and organic community. An academia that fetishizes particularism and attacks universalism allows micropolitics and eclectic materialism to reintroduce reactionary ideas into social life. 4 Contrary to the pseudo-​Gramscian notion that power is a site of hegemonic contestation among different social groups, the Hegelian understanding of the concrete universal determines that capitalism is, at present, the dominant form of social relation and organization. Despite the possible continuity of traditional and pre-​capitalist social meanings, all articulations of identity politics take place against the background of global capitalism. The socialist left opposes all forms of oppression but does not play the game of identity politics, with its various offshoots, including radical democracy, populism, intersectionality, privilege theory and decoloniality. For Hegelians, capitalism is the “self” and all identity groups, including individuals, are instances of the “other.” There is no privileged other, or abstract universal, in relation to the totality. The relativism according to which everyone is different is as meaningless or as meaningful as the notion that all humans are the same. Discrimination is the act of denying people their universality. It emphasizes those characteristics that people have the least control over. Universality is not reducible to masculinity, whiteness or European heritage. The truths of politics, art and science are generic and universal. Fascism is premised on the notion of absolute difference. Capitalism is premised on the formal equivalence of all labours that are subject to the value form. 5 Baiting someone to identify with an identity group or a nationality does not solve the problems that are specific to capitalism. This form of blackmail connects identity politics to the ideology of the global petty bourgeoisie. Through the methods of privilege theory, critical race theory and decoloniality, anti-​oppression discourse has become an extortionist’s game that disavows the contradictions between classes and emphasizes instead the contradictions between identity groups. Identity and diversity activists pressure “normal” and “ordinary” people to be for or against them, or for or against themselves. While there is no stable self, there are better and worse forms of interaction. Because much postmodern theory is premised on an immanent and non-​dialectical understanding of the self/​other paradigm, identity activists typically presume an ignorant or malevolent other. The distinction between class and humanity does not suggest that the bourgeois class is falsely universal. It suggests that capitalism is the concrete universal and that

Conclusion  237 the bourgeoisie is the dominant class. The history of world cultures belongs to all of humanity and cannot be segregated in such a way as to become the exclusive property of particular identity groups or of one social class. 6 The problems that are specific to psychoanalysis make identity and diversity into matters of identification, fantasy, enjoyment, narcissism, aggression, neurosis, etc. Identity politics is a symptom of contemporary post-​politics, with its hypotheses of the end of history, end of ideology and end of meta-​ narratives. The jealous obsession with the enjoyment of the other is a form of pathology. In postmodern post-​politics, minority subjects are allowed to enjoy in ways that are denied so-​called normal people. Because some people are presumed to be more typical than others, they are made into the norm that post-​politics seeks to manage and control. Race and sexuality have no scientific or normative basis. These classifications are therefore less fundamental to Marxist analysis than gender analysis. There is no politics that is specific to gender, race, sexuality or nationality. The uses of discourse theory to define politics as a challenge to constructs of normativity is part of a neoliberal politics of social control. Discourse theory extends post-​politics to identity, making minority discourse into a weapon of labour control and global imperialism. 7 Social, cultural, national, religious and sexual differences are not pretexts or justifications for nihilism, cynicism and violence. The demand that the working class should atone and pay for the original and eternal “sin” of racism or for histories of oppression is the kind of means-​tested social policy that is suited to neoliberal post-​politics. Rather than fetishize pluralism and the objective reality of diversity, Marxism explains social relations. Socialism organizes social equality and mitigates the meaninglessness of multiplicity. To deny this meaninglessness, the cold racism of postmodern culture emphasizes difference and so-​called equity. 8 Social democracy is class reductionist. It seeks to redistribute wealth and reduce economic inequality. Socialism is anti-​capitalist and non-​reductionist. It seeks to abolish the wage relation and the dispossession of the majority by the global capitalist system. Most progressive identitarians are part of a tradition of Cold War anti-​communism and liberal pragmatism. They view themselves outside the history of the Internationalist left. Social democrats redefine Marxism as democratic pragmatism and reinforce the bourgeois character of political leadership. The practical disappearance of the communist left and

238  Conclusion of organized labour makes the cultural agenda of liberal progressives ridiculous to the working class. Postmodern identity politics is an academic and cultural market. The rights gained for women and minorities are otherwise achievements of the democratic revolution and of socialism. 9 Neoliberal governance has generalized the predispositions of the postwar petty bourgeoisie. This disposition is now mobilized by the professional-​ managerial class. The neoliberal attack on the professions has transformed the PMC into a mediocratic class of virtue and vice signallers. Today’s PMC are the inheritors of the bourgeois cultural tradition, beginning with Romanticism and bohemianism, and extending to the counterculture and conservative variants such as yuppies. The purpose of PMC culture is to support, in an inverted manner, the system that it challenges. Class-​conscious socialists do not make the same political demands as the PMC. Despite its progressive enclaves, the class function of the PMC is to keep the international working class trapped in exploitative social relations. 10 By systematically inverting common sense, postmodern theory makes society less worldly and more volatile. Postmodern and post-​structuralist theory are now intellectual adjuncts of neoliberal capitalism. As the petty-​bourgeois disposition becomes anti-​humanist, class is bracketed from dialectics through empirical, phenomenological and anthropological reduction. This is a problem of contemporary intellectuals and not of Marxism. 11 The Hegelian Marxist break with metaphysics means that Marxism is not oriented towards synthesis. The motifs of community, participation, collaboration and collectivism, and of practice over and against theory, are contradictions within postmodern theory. To privilege collectivism over subjectivity, practice over theory, or the concrete over the abstract, is a form of moralism that has little to do with radical socialist politics. One can just as easily find this bias on the fascist right and in the liberal centre as on the left. What matters is the politics you believe and the cause you support.

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Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 229n13 refers to note 13 on page 229. 9/​11 66, 158 1619 Project 56, 156 ability 4, 60, 62, 110, 113, 144, 163, 188, 200, 204 academia 3, 4, 14, 22, 27, 29, 30, 36, 49, 54, 59, 60, 63, 88, 91, 92, 97, 110, 111, 117, 118, 122, 144, 145, 148, 153, 157, 160, 192, 194, 196, 199, 207–​12, 224, 227, 236 accumulation 71–​2, 197 activism 2, 7, 9, 13, 22, 37, 44, 58, 69, 90, 93, 98, 108, 110, 111, 115, 116, 129, 132, 135, 141, 149, 153, 169, 192, 198, 199, 203, 210, 216, 217, 224, 227, 236 Adekoya, Remi 154 Adorno, Theodor 5, 24 aesthetics 64, 102, 114, 117, 128, 195 affirmative action 8, 49, 89, 149, 172, 209 AFL-​CIO 151, 154 African Americans 48, 49, 95–​8, 108, 135, 148 Afrocentrism 27, 56, 161 Agamben, Giorgio 118 age 60, 62, 188 Ahmed, Sara 205, 207–​16 Albanese, Anthony 217 alienation 10, 13, 68, 75, 134, 167, 173, 202, 213, 214, 222, 235 Allen, Theodore 45 allyship 13, 47, 63, 98, 133, 139, 190 Althusser, Louis (Althusserianism) 11, 31, 33, 75, 126, 162, 205 alt-​right 16, 87, 88, 96, 168, 194, 195, 223 American Civil War 56, 156, 206–​7

American Federation of Teachers 54, 151 American Revolution 56, 156, 191, 192 Amin, Samir 162 anarchism 1, 7, 11, 26, 32, 37, 120–​1, 130–​40, 153–​6, 160, 216–​20, 226 Anderson, Bendict 65 Anderson, Perry 114–​15 anthropology see ethnography anti-​capitalism see socialism anti-​communism see communism anti-​colonialism see colonialism anti-​Enlightenment see Enlightenment anti-​essentialism see essentialism anti-​foundationalism 2, 32, 33 anti-​globalization 38, 56, 63, 101, 132, 133, 216 anti-​humanism see postmodernism anti-​immigration see immigration anti-​oppression see oppression anti-​racism 9, 23, 41, 50, 54, 59, 65, 85, 95–​101, 146, 147, 149, 150, 153–​5, 168, 189, 190, 192, 199, 206, 218, 235 anti-​Semitism 8, 168 anti-​universalism see universalism anti-​war see militarism Anya, Uju 195 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 4–​6 applied postmodernism 53, 110–​12 Arab Spring 3, 105, 136 Arendt, Hannah 93 Aronowitz, Stanley 91–​2, 160–​2 Arruzza, Cinzia 134, 204–​5 Assange, Julian 186–​7, 191 authoritarianism 4, 7, 39, 45, 72, 101, 102, 106, 109, 113, 123, 188, 198, 203, 217

258 Index autonomist Marxism see workerism autonomy 4, 10, 13, 32, 40, 105, 114, 119, 125, 131, 137, 140, 148, 162, 163, 187, 202, 205 Azoulay, Ariella 189–​92, 196 Backer, David I. 145–​6 Badiou, Alain 7, 42, 126–​8, 157, 158, 165, 173 Balibar, Étienne 126–​7 Baudrillard, Jean 75, 107, 160 Beal, Frances 20 Bell, Derrick A. 48–​51, 53 Bello, Walden 101 Berardi, Franco 135, 141, 216 Bezos, Jeff 195 Bhabha, Homi 65 Bhambra, Gurminder 142 Bhattacharya, Tithi 204–​5 Biden, Joe 4, 29, 34, 35, 39, 100, 108, 135, 217, 218, 220–​2 Bilge, Sirma 57–​9 black feminism see feminism and race Black Lives Matter 7, 37, 63, 89, 98, 104, 132, 136, 143–​6, 154, 172, 186–​7 Blair, Tony 5, 140 Boghossian, Peter 91–​2 Bohman, James 231n45 Bohrer, Ashley 8, 61 Bond, Anne 64 Bookchin, Murray 140 Boorman, Georgi 88–​9 Bordiga, Amadeo 216–​17 Bottum, Joseph 96 bourgeoisie 1, 8, 13, 30–​3, 36, 39, 42, 44, 47, 51, 54–​8, 60, 70–​2, 86–​9, 95, 101–​3, 107, 109, 114, 119, 122, 128, 129, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 154, 157, 161, 168, 170, 188, 189–​93, 195, 203, 204, 210–​12, 214, 222, 236–​8 Bourdieu, Pierre 157–​8, 208, 229n13 Bovy, Phoebe Maltz 44–​5 Brexit 39, 90, 104, 140–​2 Brown, Wendy 117, 122, 124 Burden-​Stelly, Charisse 21–​2 bureaucracy 5, 24, 26, 52, 102, 116, 152, 161, 170, 209, 224 Burke, Edmund 191–​2 Bush, George W. 95 Butler, Judith 117, 121–​2, 137, 139, 144, 156, 209–​10 Cairns, Kate 145–​6 Campbell, Grace P. 21

cancel culture 12, 85, 116, 119, 120, 215 Capital 62, 71, 73, 131, 165 capitalism 1, 5, 6, 9, 11, 23, 24, 32–​4, 36, 38, 41, 42, 45, 49, 51, 54, 57, 61–​3, 66–​6, 70–​5, 94, 96, 101, 109–​10, 114, 115, 119–​23, 129, 130, 133, 135, 137–​40, 143, 145, 150, 153–​5, 157–​74, 197, 198, 201, 205, 206, 213–​17, 222, 224, 235, 236, 238 Carter, Tom 54–​6 Cassell, Jessica 63 censorship 93, 96, 120 Chibber, Vivek 85, 144, 188 Chomsky, Noam 1, 118, 223 Choonara, Esme 46–​7, 62 Chowkwanyun, Merlin 149, 152 Churchill, Ward 70 Cicerchia, Lillian 232n66 cisgender 97, 111–​12, 122, 192, 199, 200, 205, 227 citizenship 34, 37, 38, 42, 105, 108, 124, 126, 169, 191, 213 civil rights see rights civil society 1, 12, 34, 118, 128 Clark, Brett 72 clash of civilizations 66, 162 class: analysis 31, 33, 39, 40, 48, 53, 55, 61, 62, 66, 68, 75, 116, 121, 147, 149, 162, 163, 188, 199, 235, 237; centrality 47, 55, 61, 133, 136–​7, 151, 161, 163, 167, 200, 201, 205–​7; classlessness 45, 157; consciousness 33, 123, 146, 173, 214, 238; politics 6, 8, 32, 58, 123, 125, 141, 143, 186; solidarity 8, 58, 101, 134, 217; struggle 2, 4, 6, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 36, 40, 46, 47, 57, 67, 73, 75, 100–​1, 116, 121, 123, 125, 132, 137, 144, 146, 157, 162, 163, 166, 198, 205, 217, 223; see also labour classism 55, 100, 200 Clinton, Bill 25, 10 Clinton, Hillary 3–​4, 8, 39, 85, 103, 142 Coates, Ta-​Nehisi 8, 56, 95, 126 cold racism 127, 129, 130 Cold War 2, 8, 51, 59, 90, 98, 102, 106, 135, 138, 145, 215, 221–​2, 237 collectivism 7, 12, 24, 35, 63, 105, 106, 120, 122, 124, 128, 132, 135, 227, 238 Collins, Patricia Hill 56–​9, 66

Index  259 colonialism 2, 4, 8, 34, 52, 63–​75, 130, 133, 136, 137, 156, 161, 166, 188–​90, 192, 195–​7, 198, 200, 222 colourblindness 48, 51–​3 Comaroff, John 210 Combahee River Collective 19–​22, 43, 58, 62, 109, 121, 124, 137, 139, 145–​6, 204 commodity 12, 24, 67, 73, 121, 131, 169, 196, 214 communism 2, 7, 8, 23, 25, 26, 30, 33, 36, 38, 41, 48, 51, 54, 59, 66, 68, 73, 92, 105, 106, 116, 127, 128, 132, 136, 143, 157–​74, 204, 213–​15, 217, 221, 226, 237–​8 Communist Manifesto 121, 168 Communist Party (CPUSA) 45, 62, 147 community 37, 91, 131, 140, 163, 227, 236, 238 communization 132, 216–​20 conservatism 3, 39, 43, 44, 50, 57, 62, 74, 85–​102, 110, 114, 121, 131, 134, 149, 150, 154, 162, 187, 191, 194, 206, 209, 211, 212, 227, 237 Conservative Party (UK) 8, 29, 140, 154, 218, 219 constitutionalism 35, 49, 51, 52, 86, 108 constructionism see social constructionism consumerism 3, 7, 24, 51, 106, 115, 117, 125, 135, 166, 199, 200, 205, 207 Corbyn, Jeremy 8, 39, 105, 140–​1 Coulthard, Sean Glen 72, 197–​8 counterculture 2, 3, 7, 13, 25, 31, 51, 96, 106, 159, 191, 194, 208, 218, 238 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 48, 53, 55, 56, 59–​60, 62, 63, 92 critical race theory 48–​58, 85, 88, 97, 110, 111, 161, 236 critical theory 33, 49, 110, 191, 192, 202, 203, 229n15 cultural Marxism 75, 88, 121 cultural politics 7, 125, 148, 224–​6 Cultural Studies 25, 29, 53, 65, 111, 123, 125, 148, 161, 165, 188 cultural turn 3, 148, 198–​9, 215 culture 5, 7, 11, 13, 24, 28, 29, 68, 73–​5, 88, 114, 115, 123, 125, 157, 188, 190, 195–​6, 227

culture industry 5, 24, 75, 96, 109, 114 culture war 6, 13, 14, 22, 33, 40, 45, 75, 85, 104, 106, 116, 123, 130, 141, 145, 155, 206, 210–​11, 227 cybernetics 10, 32, 122, 138, 215 cynicism 13, 110–​11, 113, 115, 124, 192, 193, 195, 207–​20, 237 Dalmia, Shikha 94 Danuta, Suzanna 113 Davis, Angela 28, 29, 57, 60, 117 Dean, Jodi 21–​2 Debs, Eugene 203 decoloniality 7, 28, 40, 57, 63–​75, 100, 133, 154, 161, 171, 189, 193, 194, 197–​8, 201, 224 deconstruction 3, 13, 33, 55, 60, 75, 88, 89, 97, 110, 111, 148, 156, 168, 187, 236 Deleuze, Gilles 17n16, 68, 92, 111, 114, 132, 133, 137, 138 Delgado, Richard 50–​2, 65 Deloria, Vine 70 Delphy, Christine 133 demagoguery 4, 35, 44, 118, 162, 187, 212, 225 de Maistre, Joseph 193 democracy 1, 2, 5, 36, 41, 101, 103, 194, 203, 206, 215, 238 Democratic Party (USA) 7, 8, 35, 39, 42, 48, 51, 56, 95, 99, 100, 108, 135, 141–​3, 151, 164, 221–​6 democratic socialism see social democracy Democratic Socialists of America 34, 65, 143, 151, 220 demographics 100, 108, 126, 141 Denvir, Daniel 143 Derrida, Jacques 65, 75, 92, 160, 168 DeSantis, Ron 195 Descartes, René 67, 155, 215 determinism 33, 47, 51, 87, 150, 162, 205 developmentalism 65, 68, 73, 74, 197 dialectics 3, 5, 10–​12, 67, 92, 159, 165, 167–​9, 173, 199, 213–​15, 236, 238 DiAngelo, Robin 54–​6, 95, 115–​16, 126 difference 3, 5, 7, 13, 14, 24, 30, 32, 42, 44, 50, 51, 61, 75, 87, 100, 126, 128, 135, 148, 155–​7, 161–​2, 167–​8, 171, 193, 196, 206, 212, 224–​5, 227, 235–​7

260 Index DiMaggio, Dan 152 discourse theory 3, 14, 27, 31–​4, 37–​8, 53, 55, 61, 67, 75, 110, 119–​26, 129, 146, 156, 160, 185, 193, 197, 199, 202, 204, 205, 210, 237 disparities 8, 9, 48, 49, 63, 99, 149, 150, 154, 155 diversity 3, 30, 42, 44, 52, 54, 59, 61, 66, 69, 85, 89, 94, 97, 106, 108, 125, 130, 139, 140, 150, 154, 161, 164, 168, 172, 196, 199, 200, 204, 207–​14, 222, 224–​5, 227, 232n66, 236 Dixon, Bruce 138 Dore, Jimmy 222–​6 Dubilet, Alex 167 Du Bois, W. E. B. 46, 51, 162, 221–​2 Eagleton, Terry 31, 195–​6, 213 ecology 4, 23, 27, 31, 34, 35, 55, 70, 74, 95, 99, 100, 103, 107, 129, 137, 139, 165, 171, 193, 197, 204 education 9, 27, 44, 47, 48, 49, 53, 55, 56, 95, 97, 99, 132, 149, 166, 171, 188, 191, 209, 210, 213 Eisenstein, Hester 61 elections 4, 8, 24, 34–​5, 39, 42, 63, 99, 103–​4, 108, 124, 135, 140–​3, 220–​7 elites 35–​6, 39, 70, 75, 88, 94, 101, 102, 126, 138, 141, 162, 187, 192, 198, 212, 223 emancipation 1, 5, 7, 21, 38, 47, 54, 67, 72, 75, 110, 121, 127, 146, 156, 162, 163, 169, 172, 174, 187, 188, 189, 195, 198, 205 empiricism 33, 122, 215, 238 employment 23, 34, 53, 55, 56, 99, 141, 144, 149, 171, 203 empowerment 2, 5, 50, 58, 96, 98 Endnotes 205, 216–​20 Engels, Friedrich 1, 11, 12, 25–​6, 72–​4, 117, 124, 154, 165, 168, 197, 199, 214 enjoyment 13, 163, 173, 202, 211–​12, 230n43, 237 Enlightenment 1, 2, 4, 22, 28, 48, 51, 66, 75, 86, 97, 101–​3, 105, 108, 110, 112, 118–​19, 121–​2, 124, 146, 156, 158–​9, 164, 187–​90, 193–​4, 227 entrepreneurialism 106, 108, 117, 150 epistemology 2, 54, 64, 66–​7, 98, 111, 137, 146–​8, 155, 165, 190, 193–​4, 197–​8, 216 equality 2, 5, 8, 9, 13, 24, 27, 42–​50, 52, 86, 87, 89, 90, 100, 102, 104, 105, 119, 127, 128, 143, 150, 153–​5,

188, 193, 203, 206–​7, 211–​12, 216, 222 equity 13, 43, 52, 54, 89, 100, 129, 134, 212, 237 essentialism 32, 38, 60, 65, 98, 100, 115, 122, 127, 156, 161, 198–​202 Estes, Steve 70 ethnicity see race ethnography 10, 73, 96, 101, 139, 189–​91, 194, 195, 217, 238 Ethnological Notebooks 73 Eurocentrism 2, 44, 64, 65, 68, 70–​2, 163, 171, 190, 236 Eurocommunism 31 European Union 135, 140, 152, 171 exclusion 6, 13, 126, 143, 152, 156, 170, 208, 211 exploitation see labour Extinction Rebellion 37, 154 Fanon, Frantz 51, 67, 137, 145, 198 fascism 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 23, 26, 30, 32, 34, 35, 41, 51, 75, 86–​8, 100–​2, 105–​8, 112–​13, 117, 119, 121, 141, 146–​7, 155, 159–​60, 164, 168, 170, 187, 190–​1, 194, 210, 213, 215, 223, 225, 235–​6, 238 fat studies 110, 113 Federici, Silvia 144 feminism 3, 4, 19–​23, 27–​8, 41, 55–​6, 58–​62, 66, 85, 87, 91, 100, 103, 111, 118, 133–​4, 137–​8, 144, 146–​7, 150, 153, 163, 165, 187, 192, 198–​9, 200, 204–​7, 210–​11, 215, 218, 231n55, 235 feudalism 70–​2, 86, 137, 168, 189, 206, 214 Feuerbach, Theses on 10–​12 Fields, Barbara and Karen 138, 142–​3, 201–​2 Finkelstein, Norman 20–​1, 60 First Nations see Indigenous peoples Floyd, George 186, 191, 216–​17, 220 Folbre, Nancy 61 Foley, Barbara 134 Foster, John Bellamy 72 Foucault, Michel 25, 28, 31, 32, 53, 65, 75, 92, 114, 121, 124, 136–​8, 160, 197, 201 Frankfurt School 7, 24, 31, 49, 54, 88, 115 Frank, Thomas 36, 38 Fraser, Nancy 103, 202–​5 freedom 5, 7, 13, 14, 41, 75, 87, 92–​4, 97, 103, 107–​8, 110, 118–​20, 122,

Index  261 131, 165, 170, 194, 198, 200, 215, 218, 222 free speech 13, 110, 118–​20, 186 French Revolution 6, 101, 105, 189, 191–​2 Freud, Sigmund 7, 40, 98, 102, 160, 191 Fukuyama, Francis 66, 103–​9, 113, 118, 172 Garaudy, Roger 213–​15 Garvey, Marcus (Garveyism) 19, 147 gender 3, 4, 6, 7, 33, 43, 45, 53, 55–​7, 59–​60, 62, 66–​7, 69, 72, 87, 97, 99, 130, 134, 138, 148, 152, 154, 156, 163, 166–​7, 169, 187–​8, 192, 200–​2, 208, 213, 227, 235, 237 genocide 64, 89, 156, 157, 171 Gerbaudo, Paolo 37–​8 German Ideology 214 Gilets Jaunes 136, 220 Gimenez, Martha 62 Gindin, Sam 140 globalization 25, 37, 103, 106–​7, 115, 171–​2 Gobineau, A. de 147, 193–​4 Goebbels, Joseph 101 Graeber, David 11 Gramsci, Antonio 10, 31, 40, 57, 92, 146, 148, 200, 236 Great Society 7, 99, 108 Greene, Marjorie Taylor 194–​5 Green Party (USA) 220–​1, 225 Greenwald, Glenn 220–​1 Grundrisse 131, 165 Guattari, Félix 132, 137, 160 Guevara, Che 11, 23, 67, 145 Habermas, Jürgen 24, 31, 114, 203, 231n45 habitus 158, 191, 229n13, 238 Haider, Asad 45–​6, 119–​24, 143 Haider, Shuja 147 Haitian Revolution 124, 189, 192 Hall, Stuart 123, 125, 132, 144, 160, 217 Hannah-​Jones, Nikole 56, 95, 156, 193 Hardt, Michael 68, 127, 132–​5, 137, 158, 216 Harman, Mike 153–​4 Harris, Cheryl 53 Harvey, David 116, 139–​40, 164–​9, 233n88 health care 8, 9, 27, 42, 61, 95, 99, 132, 144, 149, 166, 171, 188

Hegel, G. W. F. (Hegelianism) 1, 33, 67, 88, 92, 126, 129, 137, 163, 168, 171–​3, 201, 203, 214, 236, 238 hegemony 2, 31–​3, 37–​8, 40–​1, 48, 98, 101, 114–​15, 122, 125–​6, 135, 146, 163, 168 Herder, J. G. 130 heteronormativity 29, 97, 188, 205, 212 heterosexuality 21, 29, 44, 91, 136–​7, 145, 201 Hiraldo, Payne 52 Hitler, Adolph (Hitlerism) 147, 191 Hlavajova, Maria 211 Hobsbawm, Eric 185–​7 Hochschild, A.R. 142 Holleman, Hannah 72 Hollywood 54, 97, 103 homelessness 46, 158, 171, 203 homophobia see LGBTQ hooks, bell 60, 134, 144 horizontalism 2, 37, 121, 131–​3, 217 housing 9, 43, 53, 55, 56, 95, 99, 149, 166, 188 humanism 33, 53, 75, 86, 166, 187, 190–​1, 193, 204, 236–​8 human rights see rights Huntington, Samuel 66 Husserl, Edmund 208, 213–​14 idealism 10, 12, 53, 63, 88, 144, 150, 167, 171, 188, 202, 213–​15 identity politics 4–​6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 20–​30, 34, 35, 41, 51, 56, 57, 60–​2, 75, 85, 88, 92, 102, 113, 118, 119, 122–​4, 126, 129, 131–​2, 134, 142–​6, 148, 150–​1, 153–​4, 157–​9, 161, 163, 165, 172, 186, 188, 192, 194–​207, 213, 217, 222–​3, 226–​7, 236–​8 ideology 2, 5, 15, 24, 32–​5, 37–​41, 47, 74–​5, 88, 90, 98, 100, 103, 106, 108, 109, 111, 119, 131, 141, 147, 148, 150, 155–​8, 161, 163, 168, 171, 188, 199, 214, 223, 235–​6 Ignatiev, Noel 45–​6 illiberalism 50, 87, 96, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113, 118, 124 immanentism 32, 75, 120, 135, 139, 161, 196, 217, 220, 236 immigration 3, 39, 47, 87, 89, 92, 101–​3, 124, 129, 144, 162, 171, 186, 195, 211 imperialism 9, 23, 24, 27, 33, 51, 54, 56, 66, 70–​4, 88, 98, 121, 143, 162, 168, 187, 189, 191, 192, 195, 213, 222, 226, 237

262 Index inclusion 6, 47, 118, 156, 170, 207–​8, 215 incommensurability 2, 69, 87, 162, 200 indeterminacy 32, 50, 114, 120, 215 Indigenous peoples 2, 4, 47, 51, 64, 69–​70, 72–​5, 78–​9n55, 108, 124, 144, 166, 197–​8, 223 individualism 7, 12, 24, 26, 27, 33, 53, 58, 86, 87, 99, 102, 120, 122, 168, 195 inequality see equality Ingram, David 203 intellectuals 2–​4, 11, 22, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 40, 56, 74, 86, 88, 89, 108, 113, 117, 121, 144, 145, 148, 160, 163, 169, 172, 190, 192, 194, 200, 207, 215, 219, 221, 224 interest convergence 49, 51–​3 interest groups 42, 149, 187, 206 internationalism 2, 9, 33, 56, 65, 68, 121, 131, 143, 145, 153, 160, 164, 187, 198, 202, 238 intersectionality 7, 8, 19, 21, 23, 28, 29, 53, 55–​65, 72, 90, 92, 93, 106, 110, 121, 132–​5, 138, 145, 153, 192, 196, 197, 200, 204, 205, 208, 211, 212, 224 Inwood, Joshua 64 Islamophobia 34, 89 Israel 65, 58, 79n55, 89, 151, 171, 177n72, 182n191, 209, 221 Jain, Uday 144 Jameson, Fredric 114–​16, 139, 165 January-​6 100, 135, 141, 145, 194 Jardina, Ashley 141–​2 Johnson, Boris 140, 154 Jones, Claudia 21, 60 jouissance see enjoyment Kant, Immanuel (Kantianism) 118, 172 Kasselakis, Stefanos 152 Kelsh, Deborah 153 Kendall, Frances 46 Kendi, Ibram X. 53, 55, 56, 95, 99, 126, 172 Kilpatrick, Connor 45 King, Martin Luther 23, 95, 109, 170 Klu Klux Klan 109 Kouvelakis, Stathis 38 Kraus, Karl 120 Kristeva, Julia 191 Kroker, Arthur 117

Krugman, Paul 150 Kurds 101 Labor Party (USA) 148 labour: division of labour 6, 7, 75, 123, 131, 162, 205; domestic 21, 23, 27, 61, 207; exploitation 6, 8, 12, 19, 21, 24, 26, 32, 42, 46, 61, 72, 101, 120, 122, 136, 143, 145, 150, 165, 170, 172, 200, 205, 206, 235, 238; flexibilization 115; immaterial 132, 136, 219; industrial 62, 147, 161, 207; labour capital contradiction 35, 38, 39, 85, 87, 100, 136, 138, 159, 160, 166, 201, 235; living 131; militancy 13, 102, 124, 152; organizations 3, 32, 37, 44, 57, 75, 125, 133, 141, 149, 153, 154, 186, 188, 198, 207, 217, 238; politics 8, 32, 34, 36, 39, 62, 164, 207, 218–20, 227; precarity 62, 106, 133, 200; service workers 32, 62, 115; strikes 12, 97, 151– 2, 218– 20; struggle 23, 30, 32, 47, 51, 57, 99, 116, 127, 155, 162, 206, 214, 221; subsumption 131, 134, 207, 235; theory of value 61, 71, 89, 131, 132, 214, 236; unions 8, 26, 32, 54, 57, 63, 86, 125, 143, 148, 151–​4, 161, 209, 216–​17, 219–​20; workers 4, 27, 44, 45, 47, 54–​7, 61, 63, 68, 73, 87–​9, 94, 100–​1, 109, 114, 116, 123–​4, 133, 136, 139, 141–​2, 147–​8, 154, 156, 169–​70, 172, 187, 192–​3, 203, 205, 207, 214–​21, 223–​25, 235–​6, 238 Labour Party (UK) 4, 8, 29, 140–​1, 218, 219 Lacan, Jacques 163, 170–​1 Laclau, Ernesto 30–​4, 39–​41, 92, 126, 133, 146, 160–​1, 205 land rights 64, 69, 73, 197–​8 Lange, Elena Louisa 230n42 Langton, Marcia 79n55 Larsen, Neil 67–​8 Latinos 51, 108 Latour, Bruno 117, 137 law 24, 48–​64, 102, 137 Lazzarato, Maurizio 135–​40, 216, 217 Lefebvre, Henri 116, 214–​15, 227 Lefort, Claude 31 left anti-​essentialism 198–​202 left identitarianism 197–​8 left recognition 202–​5

Index  263 Lehman, William 151 Lenin, Vladimir (Leninism) 11, 23, 48, 56, 73–​4, 117, 124, 132, 153, 159–​60, 213 Leslie, Esther 125 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 75 Lewis, Holly 198–​202 LGBTQ 19, 22–​3, 27, 28, 34, 51, 56, 60, 87, 90–​1, 94, 98, 103, 108, 110, 112, 121, 137, 144, 198–​203, 210–​11, 213, 223, 227 liberalism 1, 6, 8, 24, 26, 28, 30, 34–​5, 37–​8, 41–​2, 44–​6, 50–​1, 53, 60, 68–​9, 87, 90, 93, 96, 98, 102–​16, 118, 119–​20, 122, 124, 126–​7, 133, 141, 143, 145, 148–​9, 155, 157–​8, 162, 171, 186–​7, 191, 195–​8, 203, 206, 212–​14, 226–​7, 237–​8 Liberal Party (Canada) 40, 219 liberation struggles 2, 19, 21, 49, 53, 59, 64, 67, 69, 74, 100 libertarianism 16, 53, 86, 87, 101, 110, 131, 140, 187 Lichtenstein, Nelson 152 lifestyle 24, 46, 126, 172, 208 Lilla, Mark 108–​10, 113, 118 Lindsay, James 91–​2, 110–​13 linguistics 32, 55, 110, 148, 189 Liu, Catherine 115 Lonzi, Carla 137 Lukács, Georg 214 Lütticken, Sven 211 Luxemberg, Rosa 11, 216 Lyotard, Jean-​François 114, 160 Macnair, Mike 60, 152 Macron, Emmanuel 217 MAGA 40, 94, 140, 141 Majumdar, Nivedita 145, 190 Malik, Kenan 189–​90, 226 Manhattan Institute 94–​5 Manning, F. T. C. 167, 169 Manuel, Arthur 197 Marcuse, Herbert 24, 107 Marx, Karl 1, 10–​12, 32, 36, 42, 48, 61, 71, 73–​4, 117, 124, 128, 131, 153, 154, 165, 168, 169, 172, 197, 199, 203, 207, 213–​14 Marxism 1, 3, 10, 22–​5, 27–​28, 30, 32, 37, 40, 46–​7, 49, 53–​9, 61–​3, 65–​7, 72, 74–​5, 85–​6, 88–​9, 91–​2, 98–​9, 102, 104, 107, 109–​10, 115, 118, 121, 123–​4, 128–​9, 131–​3, 136–​7,

139–​40, 144–​7, 151, 153, 156, 158–​74, 188, 192, 196–​203, 205–​7, 213–​15, 235, 237–​8 masculinism 59, 122 masculinity 21, 29, 43–​4, 60, 90, 192, 211–​12, 236 materialism: bourgeois 1, 10, 30, 33, 46, 53, 68, 86, 119, 133, 137–​8, 155–​6, 188–​9, 199, 201–​2, 213, 215; dialectical 10–​12, 121, 124, 148, 153, 163, 165, 198, 202; eclectic 15, 30, 35, 51, 68, 122, 185, 201, 207–​20, 236; historical 10–​12, 14, 26, 30, 68, 73, 87, 106, 117, 153, 198, 233n88; Marxist 6, 10–​12, 24, 30–​1, 52, 54, 67, 122, 167, 188, 192, 196, 214, 228n5; zoological 147, 152, 156, 199, 205, 215 Mattick, Paul 226 Mbembe, Achille 133 McCarthyism 8, 21, 51, 116, 220, 222, 225 McGowan, Todd 230n43 McIntosh, Peggy 42–​6, 55, 56, 92 McNeal, Donald 112 McQueen, Humphrey 10 McWhorter, John 94–​101, 116, 118 Means, Russell 70 media 34, 54, 70, 85, 90, 93, 117, 119, 141, 142, 145, 195, 218, 221, 223, 226 Meloni, Giorgia 4, 121, 194 meritocracy 43, 53, 86, 88, 149, 188, 200 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 215 Merrifield, Andy 11 meta-​narrative 4, 54, 88, 98, 114, 194, 237 metaphysics 12, 33, 90, 92–​3, 97, 121, 139, 160, 168, 172, 173, 199, 238 MeToo 37, 89, 104, 132, 231n55 Meyerson, Gregory 160–​4 Michaels, Walter Benn 9, 60, 144, 150–​2, 154–​8, 188–​9 micropolitics 2, 26, 45, 58, 68, 96, 137, 139, 185, 199, 209, 236 middle class see bourgeoisie Mignolo, Walter 65–​9, 72 militarism 4, 23–​4, 34, 55, 62, 86, 101, 103, 106–​8, 115, 151–​2, 192, 193, 206, 222 Miller, David 209 Milley, Mark 48

264 Index Mills, C. Wright 114 minority groups 13, 37, 49, 51–​2, 55, 60, 87, 92, 100–​1, 104, 111, 113, 115, 118, 123–​4, 136 138, 142–​3, 148, 150, 168, 170, 186, 192, 206, 212, 237, 238 Mitchell, Eve 61 modernity 2, 7, 53, 65–​7, 111, 113, 121, 157, 172, 190, 195 Mohandesi, Salar 147–​8, 153 monarchy 4, 6, 71, 124, 193, 195, 218 moralism 47, 56–​7, 63, 96, 105, 118, 124, 145, 149–​50, 153, 172, 195, 199, 201, 208, 221, 223, 238 Moran, Marie 24 Mouffe, Chantal 30–​4, 37–​8, 41, 92, 117, 126, 133, 146, 160–​1 multiculturalism 46, 60, 63–​4, 69, 103, 126, 130, 134–​5, 141, 171, 190, 197, 227 multitude 68, 132–​7, 216–​17 Murray, Douglas 89–​94, 96, 98, 113 Nagle, Angela 96, 109, 194 narrative 41, 48, 51–​3, 67, 156 Nascheck, Melissa 143 Nash, Jennifer 60 nationalism 1, 2, 19, 27, 28, 32–​5, 37, 39, 41, 54, 58, 64–​5, 86–​7, 94, 99, 102, 104, 107, 121, 130–​1, 133, 135, 141, 146, 157, 163, 166, 168, 185, 187, 191, 198, 200–​2, 217, 227, 237 national socialism see fascism nation-​state see state NATO 4, 34, 39, 40, 192 negation 12, 125, 173, 214, 215, 220 Negri, Antonio 68, 117, 127, 132–​5, 137, 158, 216 Neiman, Susan 190, 228n11 neoconservatism 25, 48, 89, 94–​5, 123 neoliberalism 3, 5, 9–​10, 14, 25, 30, 34, 37, 39, 41–​2, 44, 47–​8, 52, 56, 58–​9, 61–​2, 68, 70, 85, 91, 94, 98, 100–​17, 121–​2, 124, 128–​35, 140–​1, 143, 145, 147–​51, 153–​6, 158–​60, 164–​5, 172, 187, 194–​5, 207, 209–​11, 213, 217, 222, 225, 227, 235, 238 neo-​racism 126–​7, 129 New Deal 7, 36, 108, 143 New Democratic Party (Canada) 40, 219–​20 New Left 2, 88, 92, 109, 121, 132, 140, 144, 160, 187, 200, 225 new materialisms 3, 12, 120

New Right 3, 14, 25, 117 new social movements 2, 3, 22, 24, 27, 32, 35, 37, 56, 70, 103, 106, 116, 123, 125, 127, 135, 160, 187, 198, 203, 216, 224, 226–​7 NGOs 3, 115, 149, 160, 224 Nietzsche, Friedrich 102, 117, 160, 162, 194, 195, 214 nihilism 3, 5, 7, 10, 36, 108, 111, 113, 121, 161, 194–​5, 202, 212, 215, 237 Non-​Aligned Movement 66 Nwanevu, Osita 119 Obama, Barack 19, 25, 39, 108, 135, 143 objectivity 54, 67, 88, 110, 111, 162–​3, 172, 193, 214–​15 Ocasio-​Cortez, Alexandra 56, 100, 143, 195, 221 Occupy Wall Street 3, 28, 37, 40, 63, 69, 132, 136, 165, 204–​5, 224 Oduor, John-​Baptist 151 Okazawa-​Rey, Margo 22 ontology 62, 66, 74, 137–​9, 153, 155–​6, 158, 173, 190, 193–​4, 202–​3 oppression 6, 8, 13, 20–​2, 27, 30, 34–​6, 43, 46–​8, 55, 57–​8, 60–​4, 88–​9, 92, 101, 122, 131, 136–​8, 143–​4, 146, 150, 153, 155, 163, 166, 169, 190, 199–​201, 206–​7, 224, 226, 235–​6 Orbán, Viktor 36, 89, 104, 194 overdetermination 33, 100–​1, 161, 167 Palestine 79n55, 89, 101, 171, 177n72, 182n191, 218 Palmieri, Jennifer 103 pandemic 40, 42, 57, 154, 218, 225 Parenti, Christian 209 particularism 2, 5, 24, 28, 40, 43, 50, 58, 74, 87, 124, 126–​7, 137, 139, 147, 169, 171, 173, 188–​9, 195, 200–​1, 204–​5, 223, 225, 227, 236 patriarchy 8, 27, 41, 55, 59, 61, 97, 134, 136, 138, 161, 167–​8, 197–​8, 200, 209, 223, 235 peasantry 35, 73, 189 performativity 65, 91, 96–​7, 100, 124, 137, 157, 210, 215 pessimism 3, 7, 26, 28, 58, 75, 91, 102, 111, 148, 187, 194 Peters, Ralph 94 petty bourgeoisie 3, 7, 24, 30, 32, 36, 39, 42, 45, 52, 106, 115, 117, 145,

Index  265 147–​8, 152, 157, 158–​9, 172, 202, 208–​9, 213, 218–​19, 223, 227, 236, 238 phenomenology 3, 32, 168, 199, 208, 213–​15, 238 philosophy 11, 33, 65, 124, 169, 172, 194, 215, 227 Pluckrose, Helen 52–​3, 110–​13 pluralism 29, 30, 34, 94, 124, 130, 148, 189, 190, 195–​7, 202–​205, 237 policing 28, 35, 49, 55–​6, 95, 99, 107, 123, 142, 149, 154–​5, 172, 186, 201, 222–​3 political correctness 13, 36, 60, 94, 109–​10, 168, 212–​13 political economy 9, 26, 47, 57, 61, 67, 74, 102, 115, 127, 135, 138, 149, 159, 161–​2, 165–​7, 169, 193, 198, 200, 205, 207, 236 Popular Front 106 populism 7, 8, 32, 34–​42, 45, 57, 87, 100, 102–​3, 105–​6, 108, 115, 120, 123, 132, 141, 153, 174, 204–​5, 217, 220–​2, 226 postcolonialism 63–​5, 68, 75, 111, 161 post-​Fordism 7, 38, 117, 120, 125, 127, 131–​4, 153, 203, 204–​5, 207, 219, 235 post-​history 152, 155–​8, 189 post-​Marxism 30, 129, 160–​2, 199, 204 postmodernism 2, 3–​5, 7, 8, 10, 12–​15, 22–​6, 28–​34, 37, 47–​54, 59–​61, 65–​7, 72, 75, 88–​9, 92, 96, 98, 100, 106, 110–​13, 116–​40, 144–​8, 150, 153, 155–​6, 158–​61, 164–​6, 170, 172–​3, 185–​227, 237–​8 post-​politics 5, 28, 37–​8, 41, 52, 85, 92, 106, 116–​17, 128–​9, 156–​9, 163, 171–​3, 207, 216, 219, 237 post-​structuralism 3, 38, 45, 61, 67, 93, 119, 121, 146, 148, 161, 163, 190, 196, 199, 200, 211, 227, 238 Poulantzas, Nicos 39 poverty 44, 46, 49, 62–​3, 70, 95, 105, 123, 142–​3, 154, 158, 162, 165, 193, 195, 225 power 32, 43, 46–​7, 51, 58–​9, 61, 65, 75, 111, 138, 162, 199, 201, 205–​6, 208, 210 pragmatism 12, 31, 127, 152–​3, 160, 221, 226, 236–​7 Prasad, Yuri 46–​7, 62 praxis 11, 34, 99, 203, 214–​15, 227, 238

privilege (theory) 13, 42–​50, 54–​7, 60, 63–​4, 88–​9, 97–​8, 112, 124, 135, 141–​2, 188, 192, 200, 212, 224, 236 production: mode 33, 38, 47, 61, 73, 161, 168, 207, 217, 235; forces 32, 33, 93, 214; relations 2, 32, 33, 39, 47, 57, 61, 71, 73, 128, 207, 235 professional-​managerial class 2, 30, 32, 37–​8, 60, 95, 116, 141, 148, 155, 159, 161, 207, 227, 238 progress 1, 4, 14, 54, 86, 93, 101, 106, 109, 117, 139, 151, 154, 194, 201, 216 progressive neoliberalism 35, 85, 100, 103, 106, 134, 141, 153, 204 proletariat see labour property 7, 24, 46, 50, 70–​3, 86, 104, 131, 145 protest see activism Proudhon, Pierre-​Joseph 11, 153 psychoanalysis 2, 14, 23, 24, 40–​1, 45–​6, 65, 91–​2, 98, 139, 158, 160, 163, 165, 170, 173, 191, 194, 202, 211–​12, 237 race 1, 3, 4, 6–​8, 19, 20–​3, 30, 33, 40–​1, 43–​5, 48–​63, 65–​7, 69, 72, 85, 87–​8, 91, 95–​101, 121, 123, 125–​28, 130, 133–​36, 138, 142–​3, 145–​6, 148, 152, 154–​57, 161–​3, 166–​7, 169, 172, 187, 189–​90, 192–​4, 197–​8, 200–​2, 206–​8, 211–​13, 223–​7, 235, 237 racial capitalism 8, 9, 28–​9, 58, 65, 134, 143–​4, 146–​7, 149, 152, 167, 205 racialism 27, 29, 45–​6, 48, 55–​6, 101, 161, 187, 189, 194–​5, 200, 211, 224, 226 racism see race radical democracy 30–​4, 37–​40, 46, 92, 121, 125, 132–​4, 146, 153, 165, 196–​7, 204–​5, 226, 236 Rajapaksa, Gotabaya 219 Ramaswamy, Vivek 97 Rancière, Jacques 127–​9, 169–​71, 173 Randolph, A. Philip 23, 153 Ray, Gene 229n15 Ray, William 44 Readings, Bill 210 Reagan, Ronald (Reaganism) 3, 6, 9, 25, 103, 108, 114 recognition 101, 104–​5, 122, 197, 202–​5, 226 reconciliation 191

266 Index redistribution 8, 61, 87, 122, 131, 141, 155, 202, 203, 226 reductionism: class reductionism 8, 27, 59, 61, 100, 115, 121, 123, 138, 143, 144, 147–​9, 167, 192, 203–​4, 217, 237; economism 11, 26, 27, 30–​2, 46, 51, 53, 125, 148, 153, 161, 170, 197, 199, 201, 204; identity reductionism 2, 9, 55, 61, 87, 90, 143–​4, 149, 152, 158, 160 Reed, Adolph 8, 10, 19, 29, 134, 138, 143–​4, 148–​55 Reed, Touré 8 reformism 36–​7, 47–​8, 56, 99, 102, 152, 167 relationality 57 relativism 2, 5, 7, 58, 69, 72, 74, 108, 111, 117, 119, 164–​5, 191, 193–​4, 196, 213 religion 2, 4, 7, 10–​12, 43, 51, 57, 64–​6, 68–​9, 72–​4, 86–​7, 90, 93–​8, 100–​1, 104–​6, 110, 117, 130, 158, 163, 191, 193, 201, 213–​14, 221–​7, 237 rem/​patriation 64, 69, 191 reparations 48, 64, 128, 129, 144, 191 representation 13, 74, 149, 153–​4, 203–​4, 217 reproduction 61–​2, 187, 199, 206–​7, 230n42 Republican Party (USA) 34, 39, 51, 96, 97, 100, 103, 108, 135, 220–​2, 226 revolutionary politics 2–​4, 6, 10–​12, 41–​2, 73, 125, 136, 138, 139, 152, 158, 162, 166, 171, 192–​3, 196, 203, 217, 222, 227 rights 1, 2, 5, 7, 13, 14, 22–​3, 27, 30, 35, 48–​51, 55, 59, 62–​3, 66, 70, 87, 96, 98, 100–​1, 103, 105–​6, 108–​11, 118, 122, 124, 128, 137, 143, 147–​9, 153, 164–​6, 168, 170, 186–​7, 189, 191–​2, 194, 201, 203–​4, 223, 227, 238 Robbins, Bruce 117, 126–​7 Robinson, Cedric 9, 28–​9, 134 Roediger, David 46, 142 Romani 101 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 104, 195 Russiagate 222 Russian Revolution 25, 27 Sabs, Sabby 223 Said, Edward 65 Salazar, Miguel 143

Sanders, Bernie 8, 28, 34–​5, 39, 63, 99, 103, 105, 135, 140, 143, 220, 221–​2, 226 Sanyal, Sagar 74–​5 Sawant, Kshama 152 Schmitt, Carl 67, 139, 190 Schor, David 96 sectarianism 146, 148, 153 secularism 102, 105, 190, 193, 201 segregation 48, 49, 51, 55, 149–​50, 170, 199 semiology 3, 32, 55, 65, 110 sensitivity 44, 72, 150, 208 Sensoy, Özlem 55 separatism 23, 25, 27, 55, 147, 202, 203, 212 settler colonialism see colonialism sexism see sexuality sexuality 3, 4, 6, 7, 19, 23, 30, 33–​4, 43, 53, 55–​7, 60–​3, 66–​7, 69, 87–​8, 91, 97–​100, 103, 124, 130, 134, 136, 142, 148, 154, 156–​7, 163, 172, 192, 200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 211, 223, 227, 235, 237 Seymour, Richard 29, 30 Sheng, Bright 210 Singh, Jagmeet 40 singular universal 169–​71 situated knowledge see epistemology slavery 29, 52, 56, 64, 73, 93, 138, 150, 156–​7, 170–​2, 189–​91, 201, 206, 214 Smalls, Christian 223 Smith, David Michael 74 Smith, Preston 150 Smith, Sharon 26–​8 social constructionism 12, 14, 37–​8, 47, 50–​2, 54–​5, 59, 72, 74–​5, 89, 125, 128, 137, 139, 157, 161, 163, 196, 198–​9, 201, 203–​4, 227 social Darwinism 2, 94 social democracy 8, 33, 35, 140–​58, 190, 224, 226, 237 socialism 1–​3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 19, 21, 24, 27, 29, 31–​7, 40–​2, 44, 46–​55, 57, 61–​5, 67, 69, 70, 74, 86, 89, 92–​3, 98, 100, 104, 114, 116–​19, 121, 123–​5, 129, 131–​2, 135, 141–​2, 145, 147–​8, 151–​2, 154, 156, 158–​74, 185–​227, 236–​8 Socialist Equality Party 54 social justice 7, 9, 32, 43, 44, 48, 49, 53–​5, 58, 63, 69, 89–​91, 93, 96–​7,

Index  267 107, 109–​13, 118, 147, 150, 156, 164–​5, 172, 186, 202 sociology 3, 109, 125, 158, 163, 213 Sokal, Alan 91–​2 solidarity 5, 13, 28, 35, 45, 52, 55, 62, 69, 106, 128, 130, 162, 164, 187, 191, 197–​8, 201–​2, 222, 227 sovereignty 70, 105, 132, 192, 198 Soviet Union 3, 25, 54, 65, 74, 107, 132 Spanish Civil War 154 spectrum (political) 1, 6, 19, 63, 85, 116, 185 Spengler, Oswald 66–​7, 194 Spinoza, Baruch (Spinozism) 119–​20, 135 Spivak, Gayatri 65 standpoint epistemology see epistemology state 2, 7, 36–​7, 42, 67, 69, 102, 122, 124, 128, 130–​1, 136, 139–​40, 162, 166, 197, 198, 214, 217, 220 Stalin, Joseph (Stalinism) 2, 5, 11, 37, 51, 75, 86, 106, 160, 196 Starmer, Keir 39, 217, 219 Stefancic, Jean 50–​2, 65 Steinem, Gloria 23 stereotypes 51, 125, 126, 141, 150, 204, 210, 212 Sternhell, Zeev 86 Stewart, Maria 61 Stop Cop City 225 strikes see labour structuralism 3, 32, 75, 110, 167–​8, 191, 198, 205 students 12, 31, 35, 55, 92, 209–​10 Students for a Democratic Society 27, 45 subjectivity 10, 14, 102, 158, 213–​15, 217, 220 Sunak, Rishi 219 Sunkara, Bhashkar 100, 144 superstructures 12, 33, 75, 127, 161, 167, 199 Surin, Kenneth 166

teleology 33, 73, 140, 199, 205, 214 Thatcher, Margaret (Thatcherism) 3, 25, 37, 123, 125, 140, 186 Tietze, Tad 47 Tomas, David 190 totalitarianism 6, 107, 160–​1, 164, 220 totality 1, 5, 22, 24, 26, 30, 33, 47, 52, 67, 107, 115, 125, 128, 137, 154, 161, 172–​4, 195, 196, 198, 201, 205, 215–​16 traditionalism 2, 7, 36, 58, 62, 87, 104–​5, 110, 126, 130, 193, 208, 223, 236 Traverso, Enzo 102 tribalism 13, 44, 93, 143, 190, 217 Trotsky, Leon 11, 56, 146, 151, 152, 160 Trudeau, Justin 4, 85, 217 Trump, Donald 9, 34, 39–​40, 48, 85, 90, 93–​4, 103–​4, 108, 113, 118, 120, 124, 135, 140–​3, 145, 192, 194, 220–​1, 224–​5 Truth, Sojourner 21 Tuck, Eve 69

Taft-​Hartley Act 8 Taibbi, Matt 115–​16 Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. 6 Taylor, Keeanga-​Yahmatta 230n30 Teamsters 151 technocracy 33, 36, 39, 52, 113, 128, 131, 172 technology 11, 25, 103, 132, 166, 208, 218

Vaneigem, Raoul 116 vanguardism 42, 109, 115, 169 victim politics 99, 109, 112–​13, 130, 172, 196, 204, 224 virtue signalling 95, 100, 116, 149, 193, 200, 238 Vogel, Lise 62, 199 voluntarism 31, 86, 121–​2, 131, 132, 210

Ukraine 39, 40, 102, 105, 107 ultra-​left see anarchism unions see labour United Auto Workers 151–​2 universalism 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 19, 21–​2, 24, 28, 31, 38, 40–​1, 43–​4, 47–​53, 57–​9, 63–​4, 66–​70, 72, 74–​5, 85–​6, 89, 95, 105–​7, 109–​10, 112–​13, 115, 118–​21, 124, 126–​8, 134–​5, 137, 139, 142–​4, 146–​7, 155–​8, 164–​5, 169–​74, 185–​96, 198, 200, 202–​4, 206, 209, 212–​13, 216, 223–​7, 236 universality: abstract universality 57, 107, 189, 198, 236; concrete universality 57, 67, 158, 171, 216, 236–​7 universities see academia

268 Index wages 22–​3, 55, 63, 95, 99, 151, 199, 203, 207, 218, 237 Walby, Sylvia 137 Wallerstein, Immanuel 126–​7 Walsh, David 192–​4 Washington, Booker T. 51, 195 welfarism 2, 8, 29, 35, 36, 44, 47, 64, 106–​7, 137, 142, 152, 172, 187, 202–​3 West, Cornel 19, 35, 118, 143, 160–​1, 220–​7 West, Kanye 168 whiteness (studies) 21, 29, 42–​7, 49, 50, 53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 69, 135, 141–​2, 144, 149, 150, 156, 188, 192, 201, 208–​12, 224, 236 white supremacy 41, 45–​6, 48, 52–​3, 55, 58, 64–​5, 74, 126, 138, 141, 147, 167, 172, 223, 224, 226 Williams, Patricia C. 142 Wise, Tim 46 wokeism 4, 85, 91, 95–​8, 101, 116, 120, 129, 153, 155, 208, 222

Wolin, Richard 194 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 31–​4, 40, 70–​2, 134, 152–​3, 168–​9, 205–​7 workerism 131–​40, 153, 156, 216–​20 workers see labour Writer, Jeanette Haynes 54 xenophobia 23, 40, 87, 88, 101, 131, 187 X, Malcolm 173 Yancy, George 45 Yang, Andrew 40 Yang, K. Wayne 69 Young, Iris Marion 134, 203 yuppies 3, 25, 115, 211 Zalloua, Zahi 171 Zedong, Mao (Maoism) 11, 23, 48, 160 Zionism 147, 171 Žižek, Slavoj 21, 31, 38–​41, 50, 97, 100–​1, 113, 121, 126–​7, 129, 153, 158, 163, 165, 168–​73, 194, 210–​12