Das Uberdog
remembers the alamo
Staggered beyond belief after reading Richard Seymour's latest article, Cultural materialism and identity politics. Here's some choice tid-bits...
'Much of the left is reproached with abandoning the ‘bread and butter’ of politics (jobs, welfare, housing) in favour of ‘identitarian’ concerns with Islamophobia, Gaza and so on. This criticism may well accept the importance of anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics, but argue that the priority given to these ‘identity’ issues that is the problem, representing both a shift in emphasis and in the locus of operation: from the workplace to the campus, from bread and butter to bruschetta and olive oil. Naturally, this trope is far from novel. Its pedigree has origins in the perplexed reaction to the ‘new social movements’ – those struggles oriented toward environmentalism, LGBT and women’s liberation, anti-racism and so on – by a variety of people on the social democratic and revolutionary left.'
' It [identity] is not distinguished only by its affirmation of the culturally, or politically proximate, but also by the process of identification which involves the perception of, for example, shared interests. And interests are interesting things: they can be expansive, or narrow; inclusive, or aloof. Identity politics is a ‘politics of location’, certainly. But where one is situated in the social formation has consequences for how far one can see. I seem to recall from somewhere that it was Angela Davis who urged readers to imagine the capitalist system as a pyramid, with heterosexual white male capitalists at the top, and black, gay women prisoners at the bottom. Each struggle by those at the bottom would also lift those further up, such that the more subaltern one’s situation, the more potentially universal one’s interests are. The marxist understanding of the working class as the ‘universal class’ hinges partially on this strategic insight.'
'‘Identity politics’ is usually treated as an unwelcome narrowing of horizons, a reduction of the political field to competing particularist fiefdoms – in a word, the identitarianisation of politics. But it is also possible to arrive at the same subject from the opposite direction – the politicisation of identity. The tendency of capitalism is to multiply the number of lines of antagonism. And if certain identities are goaded into being, or take on a politicised edge, because the system is attacking people then it is clear that ‘identity politics’ is not a distraction, or an optional bonus. The fact is that ‘identities’ have a material basis in the processes of capitalism. And just because they are constructed (from that material basis) doesn’t mean that they are simply voluntary responses to the life situation they arise in, which can be modified or dropped at will. Thus, it is not realistic to tell people – “you have the wrong identity; you should think of yourself as a worker instead”'
'As Judith Butler argued in her essay, ‘Merely Cultural’, the Left can respond to this in two ways. Either it can try to construct a unity which is based on the exclusions of what I might call, for convenience, a pre-1968 Left: a unity which suppresses or demotes gender, race, etc as being of secondary, derivative importance. But this will not work: the genie will not go back in the bottle, and all such efforts would result in would be a divided and more defeasible Left. Or it can try to construct a unity in difference, negotiating between identities, acknowledging them as starting points which give rise to certain forms of politicisation and which can potentially be the basis for accession to a universalist political project.'
'[...] what is at issue, and what is being illegitimately conflated with the above, is the claim that the injustices of oppression are not ‘bread and butter’ as it were; ie somehow less ‘material’, or less ‘fundamental’ than class injustices. Because they are seen as not partaking of the same processes of material life, as not contributing to the reproduction of productive relations, then their resolution can be seen as extraneous to class struggle, as desirable but ultimately not part of the material base in which real politics is conducted.
'This is a tendency, to put it no more strongly than that, which we can see creep back into certain left (mainly social democratic) discourses. It is one whose logic, which many of its advocates will resist due to their better nature, tends toward a racially and sexually ‘cleansed’ class struggle, in effect a narrow struggle of straight white men in the imperialist core over their living conditions – ie, not a class struggle in any recognisable sense'
It's hard to know where to begin... for starters, what about the fact that the left's cultural impact over liberation and ethnic minority movements of the past was so great that in all but a handful of cases they adopted inclusive, non-parochial and secular positions? The Indian Workers Association, the PLO, the FLN, the IRA, even the fucking Black Panthers? How come the shower of shit we're dealing with today are so indulgently obsessed with their shallow communitarian issues in comparison to the serious organisations of the past?
So many many things wrong and I'm just too tired to write about them all now..
'Much of the left is reproached with abandoning the ‘bread and butter’ of politics (jobs, welfare, housing) in favour of ‘identitarian’ concerns with Islamophobia, Gaza and so on. This criticism may well accept the importance of anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics, but argue that the priority given to these ‘identity’ issues that is the problem, representing both a shift in emphasis and in the locus of operation: from the workplace to the campus, from bread and butter to bruschetta and olive oil. Naturally, this trope is far from novel. Its pedigree has origins in the perplexed reaction to the ‘new social movements’ – those struggles oriented toward environmentalism, LGBT and women’s liberation, anti-racism and so on – by a variety of people on the social democratic and revolutionary left.'
' It [identity] is not distinguished only by its affirmation of the culturally, or politically proximate, but also by the process of identification which involves the perception of, for example, shared interests. And interests are interesting things: they can be expansive, or narrow; inclusive, or aloof. Identity politics is a ‘politics of location’, certainly. But where one is situated in the social formation has consequences for how far one can see. I seem to recall from somewhere that it was Angela Davis who urged readers to imagine the capitalist system as a pyramid, with heterosexual white male capitalists at the top, and black, gay women prisoners at the bottom. Each struggle by those at the bottom would also lift those further up, such that the more subaltern one’s situation, the more potentially universal one’s interests are. The marxist understanding of the working class as the ‘universal class’ hinges partially on this strategic insight.'
'‘Identity politics’ is usually treated as an unwelcome narrowing of horizons, a reduction of the political field to competing particularist fiefdoms – in a word, the identitarianisation of politics. But it is also possible to arrive at the same subject from the opposite direction – the politicisation of identity. The tendency of capitalism is to multiply the number of lines of antagonism. And if certain identities are goaded into being, or take on a politicised edge, because the system is attacking people then it is clear that ‘identity politics’ is not a distraction, or an optional bonus. The fact is that ‘identities’ have a material basis in the processes of capitalism. And just because they are constructed (from that material basis) doesn’t mean that they are simply voluntary responses to the life situation they arise in, which can be modified or dropped at will. Thus, it is not realistic to tell people – “you have the wrong identity; you should think of yourself as a worker instead”'
'As Judith Butler argued in her essay, ‘Merely Cultural’, the Left can respond to this in two ways. Either it can try to construct a unity which is based on the exclusions of what I might call, for convenience, a pre-1968 Left: a unity which suppresses or demotes gender, race, etc as being of secondary, derivative importance. But this will not work: the genie will not go back in the bottle, and all such efforts would result in would be a divided and more defeasible Left. Or it can try to construct a unity in difference, negotiating between identities, acknowledging them as starting points which give rise to certain forms of politicisation and which can potentially be the basis for accession to a universalist political project.'
'[...] what is at issue, and what is being illegitimately conflated with the above, is the claim that the injustices of oppression are not ‘bread and butter’ as it were; ie somehow less ‘material’, or less ‘fundamental’ than class injustices. Because they are seen as not partaking of the same processes of material life, as not contributing to the reproduction of productive relations, then their resolution can be seen as extraneous to class struggle, as desirable but ultimately not part of the material base in which real politics is conducted.
'This is a tendency, to put it no more strongly than that, which we can see creep back into certain left (mainly social democratic) discourses. It is one whose logic, which many of its advocates will resist due to their better nature, tends toward a racially and sexually ‘cleansed’ class struggle, in effect a narrow struggle of straight white men in the imperialist core over their living conditions – ie, not a class struggle in any recognisable sense'
It's hard to know where to begin... for starters, what about the fact that the left's cultural impact over liberation and ethnic minority movements of the past was so great that in all but a handful of cases they adopted inclusive, non-parochial and secular positions? The Indian Workers Association, the PLO, the FLN, the IRA, even the fucking Black Panthers? How come the shower of shit we're dealing with today are so indulgently obsessed with their shallow communitarian issues in comparison to the serious organisations of the past?
So many many things wrong and I'm just too tired to write about them all now..
