"Capitalist liberals masquerading as revolutionaries"?Archived Message
Posted by margo on December 26, 2018, 6:39 am, in reply to "Disband the Left?"
interesting thread, thanks DJ.
Interesting, too, to read again various understandings of intersectionality and i.d politics.
There are those who feel that intersectionality theory (and identity politics discourse) are bourgeois ideology. Intersectionality theory seems to overcome the limitations of atomising identity politics... but in fact it falls short, according to writers like Fisher, Rectenwald et al.
Statements like "I am a black man" and "i am a white, disabled, trans-gendered person" leave out the other part of the equation which could be said to go something along the lines of: "I am human and I'm an atomised and alienated worker who lacks power and means to effectively fight for human rights".
Writers who critique both intersectionality theory and identity politics theory include Mark Fisher, who wrote the book Exiting the Vampire's Castle, as well as writers Eve Mitchell and Michael Rectenwald. The fact that the 'big tent' Soros Open Society attacks Mark Fisher and his book means perhaps he touched a nerve? Mitchell and Rectenwald make the case for the need to come together primarily around labour and its various forms of exploitation under capitalism, rather than diving down the different rabbit holes of individual identities.
Here are some of these writers' positions :
" Obsession with racism and sexism is a distraction from class struggle and mounts a direct obstacle to it. Class privilege is the key issue". - Mark Fisher
"re-centralise class in authentic leftist politics" - Mark Fisher.
-- "Intersectionality theory has been taken over by liberal university graduates whose only real political commitment is to their own advancement ... a hegemony of capitalist liberals masquerading as revolutionaries". - Mark Fisher
"does intersectionality promise only linguistic emancipation for reified social categories?" - Michael Rectenwald.
"Identity politics is the bane of the left. It is the reification of alienated labour and the attempt to marshall politics out of this reification" - Rectenwald.
""Solidarity becomes an endlessly deferred moment [dependent on enough toilets for trans people]... when there's not much time."
-- "Intersectionality and identity politics emphasise difference and division. Theories of an interlocking matrix of oppressions creates a list of identities abstracted from their material context. Increased individualism leads to a politics of difference, where women, queers, people of colour, have nothing in common with each other. These theories are not wrong but they are incomplete." - Goldner.
-- "The advances of black power, women's and gay liberation have been absorbed into capital."
-- "As capitalism develops it depends on and reproduces racism, sexism ie. generates new forms of oppression or benefits from old ones. Imperial capitalism of the 19th century was justified by racism; the rise of industrial capitalism was dependent on sexism, where women needed to take care of children for free, unwaged. Yet we're supposed to argue the surface "isms" in liberal left media, using identity politics jargon and refraining from properly addressing the root influences and the limitations of such an approach.
------- excerpt from Vampire's Castle:
Previous Message
It is first of all necessary to identify the features of the discourses and the desires which have led us to this grim and demoralizing impasse, where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent. Not because we are terrorized by the right, but because we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate our movement. I think there are two libidinal-discursive configurations which have brought this situation about. They call themselves left wing, but they are many ways a sign that the left — defined as an agent in a class struggle — has all but disappeared.
Inside the Vampires’ Castle
. The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specializes in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if — and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought — that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have “identities” recognized by a bourgeois big Other.
The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.
I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. In all of the absurd and traumatic twitter storms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race — but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories....