Preaching racial solidarity and separatism at 125th & Lenox/Malcolm X Blvd, 9’24/2022, one long block from One West Camp
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“Woke” capitalism gets bad press from both Right and Left, although Republican trolls like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have greater, measurable effects on the world than social-democratic intellectuals like Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels. The Right isn’t anti-capitalist, of course, but both sides are, in fact, anti-corporate. De Santis and Ramaswamy, et al., are because they see that Apple, Disney, Nike, Quaker Oats, and yes, even BlackRock, the gargantuan private equity firm, have taken up the cause of “diversity,” endorsed Black Lives Matter, defended LBGQT rights, and/or sponsored socially responsible investing. Reed and Michaels, et al., are because they see these same corporate moves as public relations maneuvers that covertly validate the neoliberal agenda by bracketing the Left’s historic mission, redistribution via working class political organization rather than recognition via identity politics.
Now, I’ve been arguing for 20 + years that identity politics are crucial to the Left’s continuous and growing presence in normal political discourse. It seems obvious to me that the movements for civil rights/black power, women’s rights, and gay/trans rights—which have defined our epoch, and serve now as the whipping boys of Trump’s MAGA crowd—are forms of identity politics in the sense that they began as attempts to articulate subject positions that had no self-evident political antecedent or consequence. They weren’t predicated on or animated by some version of the “man of reason,” in other words, who had served for centuries as the blueprint of the self-mastering individual, the inevitably European, Caucasian, heterosexual male uniquely equipped with the moral compass called his conscience or his virtue.
So the articulation of these new subject positions lengthened our intellectual horizons, made us think harder about who might be considered moral agents in their own right, and, as such, individuals capable of political representation (citizenship) and cultural expression on their own terms. It also made us rethink the value of individualism by forcing us to contemplate the new solidarities (and “human rights”) that black power, feminism, and gay/sexual liberation brought to bear on political discourse.
My principal concern has, then, been with the comrades on the Left who discount and deride identity politics as a diversion from the “real thing,” which would be organizing not on the basis of difference (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) but on the basis of commonality determined by class position. Their assumption here, as far as I can tell, is that the priority of class—the shared foreground of work for wages, economic exploitation—in the experience of black, white, male, female, straight, gay, and trans people constitutes the grounds for a universal appeal that transcends any random particularity still separating any of these subject positions from all others.
It’s a problematic assumption, in my view, because (1) it accepts the definition of human nature on offer from the Lutheran/Hegelian/Marxist intellectual tradition—as the capacity to master the world and our selves through work; (2) it thus homogenizes the experience of working people by abstracting from their own interpretations of salient people, events, and institutions in their lives—by leaving the knowers out of the known; and (3) as a result, it ignores the historical changes that have made the choice of identity a possibility—even a necessity—for the plurality if not the majority of human beings.
I have made the argument against this regulative assumption of the comrades in several places, beginning with “Narrative Politics,” Chapter 4 of Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy (2001); continuing with “How The Left Has Won” Jacobin 7-8 (Summer 2012), No More Work (2016), better know in French translation as Fuck Work (2018), and “Race, Class, Cops, and Capitalism,” Politics/Letters June 24, 2020 [link is below]; now here at Substack, in “What Now, After Work,” March 9. 10, 15, “Wonking Out With Marx,“ June 6, and “Labor Day Sermon,” September 5, all in 2022.
It seems I may not have to keep making the argument. I detect a seismic shift—or is it tectonic?—in the parallel tracks of Keeango-Yamahtta Taylor and Olufemi Taiwo. My evidence is slight, Taylor’s review in The New Yorker (September 21, 2022) of Taiwo’s book, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (2022), but to my mind it’s compelling; for although the title of the review is “The Defeat of Identity Politics,” it describes an impending intellectual rapprochement between the factions of the Left that have hitherto been divided over the priority of class as against race—or any other identity—in their thinking and organizing.
I’m waiting for the book to arrive on Monday, so I’ll merely sample the review here, to give you a sense of what may be in the making.
Taylor begins in a truly unpromising way, by aligning the concept of “elite capture” with the inane idea, born of self-righteous left-wing abstention from the corruptions and compromises of electoral politics, that we can’t use the resources we inherit from the past—among them, the language and institutions of the ruling class—in redeeming the future: “This was Audre Lorde’s pointed insight when she remarked that the ‘master’s tools’ cannot dismantle the master’s house; the oppressed cannot use the same methods as the oppressor and till hope for a just outcome.”
Taylor then cites LaToya Cantrell, who objected to trade union protests against her economic policies by invoking her standing as the first black woman mayor of New Orleans: “These appeals to identity politics are much more impactful than the promises of corporate executives to spend money to make Black lives matter. Nevertheless, as Taiwo writes, ‘treating such elites’ interests as necessarily or even presumptively aligned with the broader group’s interests involves a political naivete we cannot afford.’ This confusion then ‘functions as a form of racial Reaganomics: a strategy reliant on fantasies about the exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy.’ Taiwo adds that we need to ‘fix the social structure itself—the rooms we interact in, and the house [the master’s?] they make up. Deference, as a strategy, bears at best a tenuous relationship to this goal.’”
Sounds almost platitudinous to this point, I know. But Taylor now makes a crucial turn. Taiwo, she says, is against “passing the mic” to the most oppressed person in the room, on the assumption that his/her/their blackness, or any other stigmata, must indicate authentic political presence and produce liberating political utterance: this is deference turned upside down, and serves no purpose except consolation for those who regret their privilege: “Taiwo is interested in constructive. as opposed to deference, politics. ‘A constructive political culture would focus on outcome over process,’ he writes—’the pursuit of specific goals or end results, rather than avoiding complicity in injustice or promoting purely moral or aesthetic principles. . . . To opt for deference, rather than interdependence, may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does so at a steep cost: it may undermine the goals that motivated the project—and it entrenches a politics that does not serve the those fighting for freedom over privilege, for collective liberation over parochial advantage.’”
Taylor’s conclusion is the bottom line:
“What Taiwo and the Combahee River Collective [which invented the phrase “identity politics” in 1976], of which Lorde was also a member, were arguing is not to paper over our differences for the sake of building inclusive movements. Rather, they demonstrate that identity politics is an important entry point into a world deeply defined by racism and gender inequality and hatred, but it alone is not enough. We must find the ties that bind us together, to see how our oppressions are linked, to build bridges to each other’s struggles and find ways to unite. This is the opposite of elite capture; it is a remaking of the world. As Taiwo, echoing Marx, reminds us, after all, the point is to change it.”
I’ll report on the book late Monday. Meanwhile, we can hope for the best.
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“Race, Class, Cops, Capitalism”: http://politicsslashletters.org/uncategorized/race-class-cops-and-capitalism/