Though Cowards Flinch

Concepts like post-marxism and identity politics, their proponents and their relationship to political struggles from the 1980s to the present day are mainstays of any explicitly socialist blog seeking to gain a greater understanding where we’re at and what is to be done.

At one extreme there are the membership-based socialist parties which largely propose the continuation of things we revolutionaries and socialists have been doing since time began. At the other extreme there are the high-falutin’ philosophers like Negri or Critchley.

Everyone who reads that sort of stuff will be familiar with the anecdote about Negri, walking past workers on strike and complaining that they were behind the times, that their sort of activity was outdated and actually held back the socialist agenda.

I say this by way of explaining that the philosophers often try very hard to convey that their work is new, is surpassing outdated formulae and practices – though mostly it passes unread by the vast majority of activists, and littles comes of it before the next totem-destroying book arrives fresh from the academy. In the case of Laclau and Mouffe, as has been discussed on this blog, ‘identity’ was the Big Idea.

With the working class looking rather unreliable as the means to overthrow capitalism, something else was needed. Interestingly, while most of us tend to look to the 1980s as the big decade for the ascendancy of this style of politics, it wasn’t the first time it had been tried. In fact it goes all the way back to the 1960s, as I was surprised to discover. The following was written in 1966 by Tom Haydn of the American SDS:

“[T]raditional Left expectation of irreconcilable and clashing class interests has been defied…It appears that the American elite has discovered a long term way to cushion the contradictions of our society. [We must] oppose American barbarism with new structures and opposing identities. These are created by people whose need to understand their society and govern their own existence has somehow not been cancelled by the psychological damage they have received.”

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the Mai 1968 student movement, has said something similar in his book, Obsolete Communism:

“The student, at least, in the modern system of higher education, still preserves a considerable degree of personal freedom, if he chooses to exercise it. He does not have to earn his own living, his studies do not occupy all his time and he has no foreman at his back. He rarely has a wife and children to feed. He can, if he so chooses, take extreme political positions without any personal danger…the ensuing struggle is especially threatening to the authorities as the student population keeps going up by leaps and bounds.”

With the failure of the student movement of the 1960s, other identities were floated, so that by the 1980s a veritable coalition of excluded groups could gather plenty of people. Whether single mothers, or women generally, ethnic minorities or homosexuals, the idea was that since these groups were most persecuted, they had most to gain by a change and thus the greatest revolutionary potential, though the term revolution was also changed, moving away from grabbing state power and executing the counter-revolutionaries to something more sociable.

Actually, reading over the pronouncements of such leaders with the benefit of hindsight, the corruption of the student struggle – once the palpable threat of general strike and a genuine political threat to capitalism had been suppressed, as it was in France – should have been easy to foretell. Cohn-Bendit again:

“Factory work, trade union ‘militancy’, verbose party programmes, and the sad, colourless life of their elders are subjects only for [the young workers'] sarcasm and contempt. The same sort of disdain is the reason why so many students have taken a radical stand…”

“In our case we exploited student insecurity and disgust with life in an alienated world where human relationships are so much merchandise to be used, bought and sold in the marketplace.”

At the last, when the movement was defeated, what remained was simply a protest against the specific values then dominant through the liberal democratic form which western capitalism takes. The defeat of the movement is not simultaneous with the defeat of the Nanterre students, nor the failure of the French General Strike. As the situation across Western Europe suggests, the 1970s saw escalating battles between the ruling and ruled. It was a long defeat.

By the end of it, however, modern liberal democracy had been largely anaesthetized to the effects of the social revolution – elements of which, particularly individualism and an alienation-countering way to ‘fulfillment’, were incorporated enthusiastically into a resurgent capitalism. This is illustrated by Slavoj Zizek to great effect in his book Violence (pp18-19) when discussing the two faces of the highest modern businessmen:

“Liberal communists do not want to be just machines for generating profits. They want their lives to have a deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion, but for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation…Their preferred motto is social responsibility and gratitude…After all, what is the point of their success, if not to help people? It is only this caring that makes business worthwhile.”

That capitalism could assimilate this rebellion was a consequence of a wrong political strategy, but it also an acknowledgment that identity politics cannot be revolutionary on its own. Not to say that the entire movement of the 1960s is easily dismissed. It is not. E.P. Thompson in his Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski derided the “posters of Che Guevara, juxtaposed against mini-skirts, ‘Mao tunics’, and military leather jackets” that “decorated the most modish swinging boutiques in the King’s Road or Royal Leamington Spa” but he also defended the movement:

“And yet there are other, and more hopeful, ways of seeing that experience: the challenge to Gaullism, the great strikes in the French motor industry, the first large cracks in the massive, ritualized traditionalism both of French academic institutions and of the routinized politics and routinized ideology of the PCF. [...] What was remarkable in the German youth movement was not its impulsive form and its lack of bearings, but that these children of Hitler’s legionairies had taken to the streets, and in this affirmative way, at all.”

Rather what I am giving is just a warning against, for example, dealing with inequality in the identity-focussed, individualist manner that Harriet Harman recent did, without its class-based content.

In the1960s, the creation of a popular counter-culture only vaguely associated with the serious and revolutionary demands of a large section of the population, and even of the student movement, was simply the waves that denoted the earthquake. Yet the earthquake passed, eventually, and the waves were all that remained. On one of those waves came the seeds of identity particularism fruited by the trees of Haydn, Cohn-Bendit, Rudi Dutschke and the others – and they took root all over the place in the context of a working class in retreat.

So the identities of the excluded, rather than becoming better integrated into the wider socialist programme – the leadership of which had failed to take proper account of them – instead became a political regression, a means to replace class and explain the defeat. Which brought things full circle to Tom Haydn, who, as outlined above, imagined the particularism of students precisely in response to the long-term quiescence of the working class (and, I would add, his failure to see how that quiescence could be integrated with Marxist theory).

From there it is only a short-hop to some types of post-marxism, which I shall engage with in Part 2 as regards Goran Therborn and the conclusions of Slavoj Zizek’s books, In Defense of Lost Causes and First as Tragedy.