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post-modernism, cultural relativity and identity politics - attitudes of progressives

littlebabyjesus said:
This is partly the effect of being a republic, I think. There is a far stronger sense in France that citizens owe duties to the republic. We don't get systematically taught from an early age of the glory of the monarchy. Sure, there's an attempt to socialise us into an acceptance of the monarchy, but it isn't a legitimate power and everyone knows that really, which leaves even royalists with a slightly ambivalent attitude towards state power.

It's very different in the US and most of Latin America, where the idea of the republic is strongly reinforced, and where immigrants are expected to sincerely swear allegiance to that concept. It's one of the paradoxes of the idiotic British constitution, imo, that it allows greater space for widespread dissent.
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But Holland also has a monarchy and it's recently introduced similar bollocks, as has Belgium :confused:
 
frogwoman said:
But Holland also has a monarchy and it's recently introduced similar bollocks, as has Belgium :confused:
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True. I don't know too much about Holland, but I know a bit about Belgium. tbh most Belgians have a very weak sense of their 'Belgianness', ime. It's one of the good things about the place - most Belgians are not fiercely patriotic. That said, there are racial tensions there.

From what I do know about Holland, it strikes me that there is quite a sharp contrast between city and country there. Many Dutch cities are multiracial and seem superficially at least to be pretty comfortable in that. Eindhoven, which I've visited a few times, is a case in point. By contrast, my experience in France is that racial tensions are very much on the surface in many places. These observations are those of an outsider, though.

ETA:

You're talking about laws imposed, though, aren't you? Sorry, my waffle above is probably not very relevant.
 
Jeff Robinson said:
The approach behind the event is multiculturalist in the sense that it recognises a plurality of cultural practices in Leicester (e.g the celebration of Christmas and the celebration of Diwali) and distributes resources to accommodate both cultural practices. That seems to me an example of a multiculturalist practice in that it provides recognition and respect to the practices of certain cultural groups. Yet I don't see a problem with it. In question 2 I was asking: is there anything that you object to about Leicester council providing that funding?
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Ok a recognition of the being existing various cultural practices isn't enough to identity this as multi-culturalism as used on this thread is it? We all start from that position don't we? This just means that everything that recognises this is multi-culturalism, you're back to defining stuff away.
 
articul8 said:
You know full well I'm not defending the cynical (and ultimately self-defeating) electoral calculations of the existing Labour machine. Maybe I'm wrong to think that anything whatsoever can be salvaged from the century+ long history of w/c communities building and voting for the Labour party. But hoping otherwise does not make me some pom-pom waver for what currently exists.
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You slander those working class communities whose struggles eventually led to the establishment of the labour party when you associate them with the beast that is the modern Labour Party. The party they built, imperfect as it was, bares no resemblance to the one you're a member of. In the modern party exists only because their legacy within the party was destroyed by those that led it.

It's no more the party they faught for than the Tories or Lib Dems are.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
This is partly the effect of being a republic, I think. There is a far stronger sense in France that citizens owe duties to the republic. We don't get systematically taught from an early age of the glory of the monarchy. Sure, there's an attempt to socialise us into an acceptance of the monarchy, but it isn't a legitimate power and everyone knows that really, which leaves even royalists with a slightly ambivalent attitude towards state power.

It's very different in the US and most of Latin America, where the idea of the republic is strongly reinforced, and where immigrants are expected to sincerely swear allegiance to that concept. It's one of the paradoxes of the idiotic British constitution, imo, that it allows greater space for widespread dissent.
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Was it you I was talking to about Michael Mann's the dark side of democracy? He talks about this kind of stuff - the fact that in republics everyone is supposedly equal and organically linked to the state, which leads to citizenship being interpreted along racial/cultural/ethnic lines, which in turn leads to politics being interpreted in these terms and class conflicts confused with ethnic ones, whereas in the UK, with its history of de-jure stratification along class lines (monarchy, aristocracy, history of property qualifications for voting rights and so on) has led to politics being understood in class terms, meaning that we've not really had serious ethnic conflicts. Dunno what other people think of his work but it seemed plausible enough to me and he presents plenty of evidence to back it up.

It seems to me that multiculturalism does something similar - racialises politics and leads to class issues being interpreted as racial issues and resources being faught for along ethnic/cultural rather than class lines.
 
SpineyNorman said:
You slander those working class communities whose struggles eventually led to the establishment of the labour party when you associate them with the beast that is the modern Labour Party. The party they built, imperfect as it was, bares no resemblance to the one you're a member of. In the modern party exists only because their legacy within the party was destroyed by those that led it.

It's no more the party they faught for than the Tories or Lib Dems are.
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And when did this sea change happen? Was it about the time Militant were kicked out?;)
 
Spanky Longhorn said:
And when did this sea change happen? Was it about the time Militant were kicked out?;)
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No, well before that IMO. I think militant should have left years before they did and I'm not sure they should have ever been in there tbh.

Sorry if that spoils any attempts to label me as some kind of party hack :p
 
SpineyNorman said:
Was it you I was talking to about Michael Mann's the dark side of democracy? .
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Wasn't me, no. But there's definitely something to it, imo. Punk was a very British phenomenon partly because of this, I think.

It's not just Britain, though, of course. Spain has a similar feeling, for instance. Stronger if anything. The insumismo movement that opposed conscription is a good case in point. It was far more than simple conscientious objection. It was a rejection of the idea of submission to state power.
 
SpineyNorman said:
Was it you I was talking to about Michael Mann's the dark side of democracy? He talks about this kind of stuff - the fact that in republics everyone is supposedly equal and organically linked to the state, which leads to citizenship being interpreted along racial/cultural/ethnic lines, which in turn leads to politics being interpreted in these terms and class conflicts confused with ethnic ones, whereas in the UK, with its history of de-jure stratification along class lines (monarchy, aristocracy, history of property qualifications for voting rights and so on) has led to politics being understood in class terms, meaning that we've not really had serious ethnic conflicts. Dunno what other people think of his work but it seemed plausible enough to me and he presents plenty of evidence to back it up.

It seems to me that multiculturalism does something similar - racialises politics and leads to class issues being interpreted as racial issues and resources being faught for along ethnic/cultural rather than class lines.
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Michael Mann is the best bourgeois sociologist you're going to get right now. His books on ethnic cleansing, fascism and 'social power' need to be readed by anyone serious - but, and this is a big but, you need to be able to cut through his functionalism, the idea that society just threw up things for functional reasons. That last line is exactly where multi-culturalism/racial thought in europe meets its limits though - the conditions previously limited to the NW of europe that managed to hold in check integral nationalism or ethnic based nationalisms (with the failed/thwarted imperialist ambitions etc) are now- bog-standard. Elsewhere...

Plus, he did some fucking great films.
 
frogwoman said:
Yeah I was just about to ask that actually. What is all that racist shit the French gov't have done an example of? That surely isn't multiculturalism, although perhaps the whole idea of multiculturalism gave those ideas ground to take root in, although in France what they've done is sort of enforced a sort of weird insistence that everyone in the country is the same and has the same conditions (for example not taking stats on who gets jobs so allowing them to deny that there is racism among employers, the cops etc)
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No, it isn't. The French government has had a pretty strong strand of a type of assimilationism that entails institutionalising a racist impulse to highlight difference by enforcing certain levels of homogeneity.

Not that the French state, too, hasn't flirted at times with Multiculturalist policies, but its default setting seems to be top down assimilationist.
 
danny la rouge said:
No, it isn't. The French government has had a pretty strong strand of a type of assimilationism that entails institutionalising a racist impulse to highlight difference by enforcing certain levels of homogeneity.

Not that the French state, too, hasn't flirted at times with Multiculturalist policies, but its default setting seems to be top down assimilationist.
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And all wrapped up in pseudo-radical secular imagery/iconography.
 
posted up some quotes from the Meikel book on an fb thread, here's a partially edited selection of some of the responses:

For Laclau-Mouffe, the problem for revolutionaries is still capitalism (although more widely defined to include socio-political aspects more than simply economic ones). Therefore they still see material conditions as the problem. They are still Post-Marxists. What they argue is that we need to go beyond the working class essentialism which has been a problem that the left has struggled with, and which seems especially problematic since the advent of neo-liberalism which has seen a break up in the traditional working class power bases. Instead they see the progressive force arising out of particular interests (identity politics, working class struggles etc) to discursively construct a new universality. Mouffe-Laclau are still committed to (an thus far more 'orthodox' than many other Post-Marxists) a notion of Hegemony. It is simply that this will be constructed through 'an empty universal', which will be filled with varied and intersecting particulars rather than created by a working class that seeks to come to represent other particulars. This comes from their reading of Gramsci, in which they see that through the construction of hegemony, all interests are transformed beyond their particularity. In short, there is no universal that we simply have to roll out when the time comes and get everyone behind it, but the universal itself must be constructed. It is not, therefore that there are not material issues that confront society, but that there are no a priori universals that can be simply set in motion at the right time. Thanks for the link though, does sound useful. If anyone is interested in this kind of stuff, Laclau, Butler and Zizek wrote an awesome book debating each others conceptions of this kind of thing called 'Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contmeporary Dialogues on the Left'. Worth a read.
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Isn't Marx’s view that the proletariat is the universal class by way of it being the only agent that produces surplus value – and therefore the only agent that can stop the reproduction and expansion of value. That is why they are privileged in his theory.

Discursively constructed ideas are largely irrelevant in his theory because it is material conditions that sustain capitalism. That is, the debilitating material conditions of unemployment workers must face if they don't 'freely' accept exploitation. In other words, many other agents (unemployed, peasants, prisoners, students…) can be materially better or worse off than the proletariat. And there existence as a class might be the product of a capitalist society. But as they play no role in the production of value (profit), they are not in a position to directly halt exploitative capitalist-worker social relations.

I'm not sure if there's anything new in Marxists trying to build hegemony (think Lenin and question of the peasants). But they would recognise that it is the decision (class consciousness) of the proletarian that is crucial to the outcome of a revolution.
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Also [xxxx] I really like the authors you mention. But to be critical, I think if they claim their political project is to build a hegemonic left around a new universal then I think its lame none of them can define what this new universal would be or why Marx's old universal (outlined above) is discredited. That's just not good enough if we want to build alliances, after all the purpose of theorising universals is to inform political action/strategies. You know better than me about this stuff but my guess is those philosophers are too heavily influenced by Badiou - who's new universal counts as anything that comes to us as a bit of a surprise (his terminology is 'the event', something that breaks the symbolic order).
When Zizek has a go at defining this new universal he comes out with liberal platitudes: ‘minimum degree of distance from neighbour’ ‘community decide their own direction’ – not helpful, and all sounds very ‘big society’.
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Yes, that is pretty much what Marx said. The problem is, and it is the one that post-Marxists especially attempt to deal with, is that the emphasis on the industrial working class seems arbitrary. It is both a theoretical and practical problem. In theoretical terms, simply because a group of people are deeply affected by something it does not mean they will oppose it. It is a logical leap to argue this. The old retort to this was that this was purely scholastic and practical political action would show this problem as irrelevant. However the real world experience has shown this to be incorrect. The working class has not risen up and overthrown capitalism, but on the contrary, its powers and organisation have declined.
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...cont.
 
The second issue of working class universality is that by giving preference to the working class, you undervalue and totalise other (possibly fairly linked or positive) interests. In this sense, they would say that Marxism paints the working class as a 'false universal': a universal that homogenises and totalises other interests under its banner. This has been seen in many socialistic revolutions such as in Latin America, where women played a huge part in the revolution, then were pretty much sidelined afterwards. This links into your mention of Lenin, whose conception of hegemony is a little different to Gramsci and Mouffe-Laclau. Lenin posited the working class as a false universal in a country where they were only a minority. Whilst the fact that they were only a minority isnt that problematic, Lenin's emphasis was on creating peasant labour in the image of proletarian labour, ie imposing the proletarian identity. Gramsci was far more subtle than this (mainly because he never had to lead a revolution) and argued that hegemony was a process that, whilst incorporating other interests, never overcoded them with the interests of the working class. By such interests intersecting, they produced something new. It is not so much working class hegemony, but a hegemony of the subaltern.
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Some quick thoughts. It is true that there has been a decline of the working class in industry in the UK - but the reverse has happened globally. Actually according to Marx the working class employed in industry must diminish over time as capitalist are compelled to introduce labour saving technologies. This makes proletarian agency more relevant as fewer people produce (and hence can control) a greater amount of value. Also it's not the case that there has been a decline industrial working class, which is a term Marx used for workers in general commodity production - but that's just me being irritatingly pedantic :p

The emphasise on the working class is not arbitrary for Marx but because it contributes towards the production of value. This is opposed to merchant classes, land owners and fancier classes which Marx discusses and theorises at length.

I would argue that there are many reasons why the working class did not cause revolution. The twin influences of Stalinism (obviously not Marxist, but masquerading as such) and Western imperialism in every post 1921 revolution should not be understated.

Not sure if there is an objective interests of workers other than the end of their own material exploitation. That's what makes them a class. Even if proletarian interests are a 'false universal' why should it be that they are opposed to that any other identity group? For example men, white people, and heterosexuals (who are all workers) benefit from a society without sexism, racism and homophobia. You present a prominent interpretation of Gramshi, but there are others and that's probably a debate we should have another time. I do know it’s not true that Lenin's emphasis was on creating peasant labour in the image of proletarian labour – he opposed forced collectivisation of labour which was introduced after his death. But let's not argue Lenin
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It means the working class has changed and we can't simply re apply classical Marxism. Marx isn't a God who predicted the future. He was just a clever guy who helped create a theory of revolution about his present time. He was adamant that theory must be continually renewed in order to fit new circumstances. Simply re-applying classical Marxism (whatever that is) misses important ways in which production functions, the working class are comprised and the possibilities that arise from this. It doesn't mean it is no longer Marxist (although if it isn't but has the potential to transform society then I am all for it).
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Here's a few more of my sporadic thoughts. It's true that Marx was adamant that theory must be continually renewed in order to fit new circumstances.


Where are these new circumstances?

I think we might agree that the number and prominence of working class in the production of value hasn't declined. People usually say that work has become more precarious, but all the data suggests otherwise (I can link to some great articles, but this vid is good. Jobs security in America has improved over the last twenty years.


How must his theory be changed?

You put forward the argument that other groups gain greater importance as an agent of revolutionary change because the working class is weaker (after trade unions have been smashed etc). First, That's a non sequitur - could just as easily be an argument for building up the strength of unions again. Second, this position is true only if you reject Marx’s value theory. Laclau does this when he argues the proletariat is not universal because universals are instead produced. I’ve just finished reading Difference and Repetition by Deleuze (ok, now I'm just being a big head). He makes a similar argument that universals are in a state of pre-reflective becoming. There's no politics it that book, but anarchists rightly take it to mean ‘all that is new is true’. Hence, no planning just spontaneous political activity (which I don't find helpful for political organisation). Finally, you seem to attribute the decline of class power (smashed union etc) to a political failure of the working class as a central agent in the fight for socialism. But why assume it is a political failure? In the book we read in this group, Dick Bryan lists the many ECONOMIC explanations for the weakening of the working class power (Kliman also).
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As for your first question, it took Hardt and Negri over a thousand pages to try and argue this! But I think we all recognise that things are very different from a hundred years or more ago. We produce different things, in different ways and for different reasons. Since Marx we have had world wars, revolutions, leftist reforms and right wing attacks on the working class in both its Fascist and neo-liberal forms. As for your second question, may i just clarify that I did not mean to say that identity politics and other political interests had arisen because of the decline in the power of the working class. What i would like to say is that the decline in the power of the working class has shown them to have always been there. We are better able to recognise them in a world where things are no longer framed in binary terms. Now our options are, as you rightly pointed out, either to rebuild the strength of the traditional working class movement, or to go beyond it. I would argue that we cannot, and must not, attempt to re build the strength of the unions, traditional socialist parties etc. This has become impossible; both practically and theoretically. in theoretical terms, we can never go back and recreate what has been lost, as what we create could never be the same as what we wanted to recreate. Anti-modernity (or post-modernity) can never create anything new. Why would we want to anyway? Unions were never a means to overthrow capitalism, but were engaged directly with it.
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know it's very long and abit long-winded but thought it expressed quite a good expression of the questions posed by the book.
 
SpineyNorman said:
It seems to me that multiculturalism does something similar - racialises politics and leads to class issues being interpreted as racial issues and resources being faught for along ethnic/cultural rather than class lines.
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That's really communitarianism which tends to view society as composed of distinct 'collective cultural identities' (i.e seals people into 'ethnic boxes'). It's this version of multiculturalism that's more dominant in policy making. Whereas multiculture is an organic reality.
 
Ibn Khaldoun said:
That's really communitarianism which tends to view society as composed of distinct 'collective cultural identities' (i.e seals people into 'ethnic boxes'). It's this version of multiculturalism that's more dominant in policy making. Whereas multiculture is an organic reality.
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Official-multi-multiculturalism is an aggressive version of communalism. What do you mean by 'communitarianism'?

And you say this above is a version of multiculutralism, right? This thing that separates people into distinct 'collective cultural identities'. As opposed to multi-cultralism right?

Do me a favour - read the thread.
 
Yes what? Every person here is more than aware of the history of the concept and the political uses of it (though you seem not to be if this is your start point). I'm asking you to explain what you posted. More waffle expected.
 
L_C betting on the wrong horse and he doesn't understand why. Care to dip your toes in the waters of actual content? Need i ask? No.
 
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