Many of you have probably seen this: another excellent piece by Kenan Malik. Same themes as usual, and many points already covered here and other threads. But worth reading for the way he structures the argument; an eloquent piece:
FROM THE END OF HISTORY TO 2016
"In the quarter of a century since Fukuyama wrote his essay, politics, particularly in the West, has indeed shifted away from ‘ideological struggle’ towards ‘the endless solving of technical problems’. [...] Politics has become less about competing visions of the kinds of society people want than a debate about how best to manage the existing political system, a question more of technocratic management rather than of social transformation."
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"As a result of these changes there has opened up a new political faultline; not, as in the past, between left and right, but one between those who are at home in, or at least willing to accommodate to, this globalized post-ideological, world, and those who feel left out, dispossessed and voiceless."
"The left, no longer rooted in old-style class politics, responded to the new political terrain in one of two ways. The first was to look to bureaucratic or managerial means of creating a more progressive society, in a sense to grasp the Fukuyama argument that ideological struggle and idealism would have to ‘replaced by economic calculation [and] the endless solving of technical problems’."
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"The second response to the challenge posed by the demise of class politics was to embrace ‘identity politics’. The roots of identity politics are long and reactionary".
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"As the left has transformed itself through mangerialism and the politics of identity, many sections of the working class have found themselves politically voiceless at the very time their lives had become more precarious, as jobs have declined, public services been savaged, austerity imposed, and inequality on the rise. Far from helping create new mechanisms through which the working class could challenge economic marginalization and political voicelessness, many liberals, and many on the left, have come to see the working class as part of the problem."
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"Having lost their traditional means through which to vent disaffection, and finding themselves despised by liberals and the left, many working class voters have themselves turned to the language of identity politics. The causes of the marginalization of working class communities are largely economic and political. But many have come to see that marginalization primarily as a
cultural loss. The very decline of the economic and political power of the working class and the weakening of labour organizations and social democratic parties, have helped obscure the economic and political roots of social problems. And as culture has become the medium through which social issues are refracted, so they, too, have turned to the language of identity to express their discontent".
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"What we are witnessing globally is a crisis both of the political class and of progressive opposition to it. It is this dual crisis that is unstitching politics. To return to Francis Fukuyama’s vision, the current tumult is the result of struggles for recognition that remain unshaped by progressive movements, of ideological struggles in a post-ideological world."
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"What we need is to re-establish a politics of solidarity not rooted in the politics of identity, whether of the right or the left, to establish new social mechanisms through which to link liberal ideas about individual rights and freedom, including freedom of movement, with progressive economic arguments and a belief in the community and the collective".