<nettime> Grand narratives vs Identitarianism

Dear Dan

Your posting is so damn brilliant I hardly know where to start praising it. Yes yes yes, this is the summary of the amazing achievements made by a politics of identity. But is also came out of an ideological conviction that there was class as superior category (including all people, globally) under which we then find the sub-categories which this politics rightfully built as proper subcultures that were encouraged to speak and be seen and heard. And this was indeed a massive achievement that worked. Precisely because of its firm roots in Marxism.

However there is always a point where those who are being seen and heard must also be held responsible for what they say and give voice to. Is what you're saying actually factually true? And is it relevant to the priorities that we must make going forward in the class struggle proper? And also, what in all this is "left" or "right"? Maybe what you say is relevant but isn't necessarily a Marxist priority but rather a universal priority where we can find liberal and even conservative allies (say principles like "rule of law", "free speech", "gender, race and sexual orientation equality" or say even "cannabis legalization"), then let's find those allies while we still emphatically address the class issue which liberals and conservatives will always ignore. Where we instead may even have to go to war for justice to be made. Just like Lenin said.

Because that's how a society works. The politics of identity also did succeed in this department. The end of apartheid in South Africa proved it. Any damn pride parade proves it. However the question now is whether those pride parades still address say gender, race and sexual orientation issues, and attract allies, or have just become stations for what we should refer to as a "politics of trauma" rather than as a "politics of identity". Rousseauian cults and sects. An infantilized version of leftist discourse, where a narcissistic call for "look at me, look at me, look at me" has replaced the Marxist class struggle proper for equal opportunity for all in any given society through empowerment and a demand for adulthood from all involved. Where what is said is properly challenged and not just accounted for depending on who speaks. As for Scandinavia, the LGBT people proper are now leaving the pride parades as these have been taken over by heterosexual gender scientists who merely use the parades for their own benefit as professional state bureaucrats. Need I add that the latter all use "identity politics" as their excuse for even being there in the first place?

And this is my possibly only disagreement with you, Dan. You say that the previous generation should have taught the new generation on what it achieved and how it got there. But has the new generation, fostered by social media, the welfare state and consumer society to always seek The Great Tit rather than empowering iitself toward adulthood, even bothered to study history? Do they even know who Marx is? Do they even know who Hegel, Nietzsche and Freud are? I believe the responsibility for this The Great Generational Gap lies with both generations. And it is fundamentally ideologically a huge step away from Marx into the arms of Rousseau. Marxists can handle what triggers them, anything that does not kill them makes them stronger and not weaker.

The college trigger warnings and safe zones today have absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. But they have everything to do with a Rousseauian middle class petit-bourgeois anti-ideology that is obsessed with tonality and etiquette (of others, mind you, not their own venomous tonality, since they always refer to the excuse of "suffering from trauma"), an attitude toward political struggle that is obscenely infantile and ironically way more Versailles than Paris. Watch out for anybody and everybody who constantly "takes offense". You will see nothing but Rousseauian self-pity behind such (a lack of proper) arguments. You simply can not mix Marx with smelling salts with impunity. Instead the Rousseuians must be called out on their game. Is this struggle about you being seen and heard only for the reason that you want to be seen and heard (media-driven narcissism), or is this struggle about the genuine unfairness of class divisions, the genuinely unfair distribution of the resources that society has accumulated, the genuinely unfair distribution of the costs for that accumulation (ecology etc), the equal distribution of both rights and duties among adults in a society of adults?

And do we then have the visionary and strategic tools for such a proper Marxist class struggle? Because it is precisely when vision and strategy is lacking, when the outer circuit is weak and the inner circuit expands at the cost of the outer circuit, that Rousseau makes his ugly return in our midst. We lost Marx, still benefited from the Marxist heritage for another 30-40 years. What we now see is the total disappeareance of Marx replaced with Lacalau and Mouffe's hegemonic nightmare, Rousseauian identitarianism. Leftist discourse as childish demands for attention, what Söderqvist and I call "internarcissism" in our books (I pretend to like you, you pretend to like me, so that discourse becomes totally preoccupied with a race for me me me likes while class struggle is completely hidden and ignored). I honestly could not even tell the difference between the two camps at Charlottesville. All I know is that none of them points the way forward. Just like South Africa risks going the disastrous way of Zimbabwe by replacing a class struggle, which can be properly won, with infinite accusations of racism that can never be solved (whenever you hear of "an infinite demand", check its bitchy and passive-aggressive Rousseauian roots).

Since Rousseauianism is the shared ideology of "The Identity Left" and "The Extreme Right", I see dark times ahead indeed. And the responses must as always be a Marxist Left, on and off allied with a Nietzschean Right, just like Deleuze and Foucault insisted in their merger of the two great thinkers. So good luck with your identity fight, with throwing your constructed trauma after everybody else in public, but as long as this fight is about nothing but your craving for medal attention in particular and not about society's welfare in general, why even pretend that you belong with The Left? We heard you, we saw you, but what weight did your argument actually have? Did it add value to discourse? Or was it all just about you getting The Great Tit back into your mouth to enjoy your traumas without ever having to grow up for the greater good of class struggle?

Best intentions

Alexander

Den fre 2 nov. 2018 kl 21:43 skrev Dan S. Wang <[email protected]>:

Greetings Nettimers,

For me, the question of identity politics–--what it is, where it comes
from, what problems it creates or exacerbates, its political efficacy and
purchase?cannot be addressed in any useful way without putting primary
significance on what both Brian and Keith, in their different ways,
emphasized. Which is to say, the concrete labor of organizing political
formations.

Modern identity politics--?for convenient periodization, let's say
post-1968?--did not come out of abstract debates. Rather, it was the
growing realization, happening in many parts of the mass movements then
mobilized with the wind at their backs, that the movement work was itself
undemocratic in so many ways. One of the originary myths of second wave
feminism, for example, is the coming to consciousness among the women of
early SDS (long before '68), who noticed that the female cadres always
ended up serving the coffee while the male members went straightaway to
the debates about strategy. Casey Hayden’s story of coming to feminist
consciousness basically begins with this very story. She was already a vet
of SNCC organizing, already had thought through the systemic issues vis
racial segregation and Jim Crow. But the language for the rather more
informal politics of interpersonal behaviors?--which basically governed the
so-called private domain of the household, especially--?was yet to be
invented.

So, in that moment, with the fresh (but familiar) irritation of a tableful
of dishes left by a bunch of white male so-called radicals hashing out
movement plans, is it a debate about Marx vs Rousseau? Or is it a group of
women looking at each other and thinking, what the hell is wrong with
these dudes?? And then...hey, maybe WE should have our OWN meeting?!
Identity politics? Why, Yes, I do mind dying!

Asad Haider takes as his inspirational templates the Combahee River
Collective and the late communism of Amiri Baraka. Keith writes of the
pre-'68 masses in political motion in young African nations. Brian writes
of the resistance in Chicago today. For my part, I’ve been taking memory
trips to that poorly understood political interregnum we call the United
States of the 1980s, the campus cauldrons from which identity politics
grew teeth. This was the coming of political age for my cohort, Gen X.
Identity politics was our achievement, but also, in the way that those
politics were transmitted to the current youth without a context, our
generational failure.

And what was that context? It was a period in which the youth-driven
Sixties and Seventies mass movements conclusively disintegrated, for a
host of reasons both internal and external. Also, the decade advanced a
parallel retrenchment of capital, at all scales. Examples– Macro: Volcker
putting the stranglehold on inflation, with punishing interest rates,
forcing austerity and massive industrial restructuring. Micro: elite
institutions reclaiming authority eroded in the 60s, each in their own way,
such as Stanford University deliberately reducing the admissions of
humanities-oriented applicants and increasing their engineering
enrollments as way to manage campus activism. Molecular: the individual
who moves into responsible “straight" life, disawowing their youthful
ideals?--a narrative much reinforced in the mass media products of the time
(The Big Chill, thirtysomething, the Ballads of Rubin/Horowitz/Cleaver,
etc).

In the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher era, with wars fought by proxy, an obviously
sclerotic Soviet bloc, and a total rollback agenda targeting every
progressive achievement of the previous two decades?and no mass movements
producing pressure for new initiatives?--battles over new terms and
concepts like "sexual harassment" (the term itself hardly existed up until
then) and LGB recognition (no wide use of T or even Q yet) came to the
fore as
productive grounds for organizing--?a process that of course further
exposed the inherited dysfunctions of the activists themselves. In that
time, as I recall, activist work meant a good deal of introspection and
application
of care to one's ways of speaking. So, for example, in addition to getting
up to speed on the pros and cons of the Sullivan principles and the
various tactics of disruption and escalation in the campus divestment
movement, we took care to think through what, exactly, were our stakes
(being privileged college students of the day) in the anti-apartheid
struggle of black South Africa, and how to engage without patronizing
those with whom we felt called to stand in allegiance. The latter being an
identity politics problem, one that made the movement stronger.

The one thing is, those struggles created space for real power, for making
real changes. Until the campus activism of the 80s, colleges and
universities, not to mention corporations and government, were almost
wholly without sexual harassment policies. Ethnic Studies was born in the
late 60s but Ethnic Studies *requirements* did not take hold until students
demanded them a generation later. Apart from the two fresh but narrowly
defined social movements of the day, ACT UP and the deep ecology/ancient
forest preservation movement (in both of which identity fissures
manifested as internal secondary struggles), the campaigns that
foregrounded identity concerns were basically the only spaces in which new
radicalism exercised consequential power. In short, I now regard the rise
of identity politics in the 1980s as a rearguard politics, a zone of power
left by the retreat of the mass movements of the 70s. What power there is
in the #metoo phenomenon owes a debt to this history.

This history has not been transmitted to the post-Millennials. Hence the
ahistorical, moralistic version of today's identity politics--?a
pseudo-politics, if you ask me. One that invests itself in a supreme claim
to trauma (too easily appropriated by the hard right) rather than to an
unfolding and contingent history. I'll say it again: this failure to pass
along the history is the fault of my generation.

As to the question of class, well, yes, of course class is the political
answer. On that much, I agree with Alexander's return to Marx. But what is
a class? As Brian says, it is not an unchanging thing. Clearly. More so
than any other identity, class is a construction?--created in tandem and in
tension by both capital and labor...and when I say labor in a grand way, I
mean it in the way Alice may mean it: a universe of the marginalized,
racialized and gendered, who are doing the shit work of capital--?even if
that work is "only" passing time in a prison cell).

This post is already long, so I will leave my thoughts on class as
questions. If an agenda pushing for socialism and climate justice (maybe
the same thing, ultimately?) can only be class-driven (and I believe that
to be true), then what is the constitution of that class to be? And, given
our tools and what we can control, how is that class to made? The full
answers are long--?EP Thompson gave us eight hundred pages on just the
English working class, covering really just its first thirty years. But
the short answer is what Brian already said, which I put into Thompson's
turn of phrase: it's not the class that matters, but the making of it. So
let's get out there and make it. After all, Marx was no armchair Marxist.

>From sunny, catastrophic LA,

Dan W.

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