Though Cowards Flinch

I really like the new edition of the Staggers, which contains a bunch of interesting articles – particularly this one from Žižek and this one from Terry Eagleton. There’s also a blessedly short leader traipsing out the old remark about ‘Methodism, not Marxism‘ which can justify virtually any degree of backsliding.

It’s Žižek I want to speak of, however, because for all the merits and insights that I enjoy in his work, his position on theology just baffles me. Which is to say it’s probably tied up with the Lacanian master-signifier in some way, as a particularly persuasive example of “It is so because I say it is so.” Mostly, as a materialist, I just ignore it.

Yet Žižek offers in his article an opportunity to see the disadvantages of his flirtations:

Why is theology emerging again as a point of reference for radical politics? It is emerging not in order to supply a divine “big other”, guaranteeing the final success of our endeavours, but, on the contrary, as a token of our radical freedom, with no big other to rely on.

Is theology emerging again as a point of reference for radical politics? I haven’t noticed it; most of the Left continues on much as it has before. What constitutes the political act for the ‘radical’ (however Slavoj defines that) hasn’t changed much in twenty years: local meetings, protests, petitions, book stalls, strikes etc. ‘Theology’ doesn’t play a role here.

On the contrary, where theology seems to be continuing its position as a replacement for the very radical politics that once held a much larger swathe of the population. Accounts from the rustbelt of the US, where fundamentalist churches grow and religious organs proliferate, are so numerous as to barely require citation.

In the UK, liberal theology (so defined because it takes a fair bit for Anglican bishops to quote scripture at people like it’s a cudgel) is still the preserve of the well-off political Right. Fundamentalist theologies have always been present – such as in the eisegesis that is current in many magazines, popular with Presbyterians and others, like ‘the Word for Today’.

They are, however, a minority. Irreligion in the UK is growing phenomenon. This suggests that ‘theology’ is continuing its slide. British political discourse provides many issues around which the political and cultural Right coalesce, and though ‘Christian values’ are occasionally treated as synonymous with ‘British culture’, this seems vestigial.

To the best of my knowledge, there has been no new emergence of a credible theology on the Left, certainly not the radical Left. Perhaps it’s different when seen from the Academy windows looking out.

Appeals to the Big Other have abounded, on the other hand, as with George Osborne’s use of ‘the economy’, or the Daily Mail’s use of ‘wealth creating business leaders’ as the reification of concepts which will sting us for our folly should we not decide the next election in the manner they demand.

I would not say these are especially theological, though Osborne certainly appeals to ideas like ‘investment in the economy’ like they are immutable.

This is where we end up all too frequently with Žižek; wondering on what empirical evidence his assertions are based. If we demolish his initial assertions, about the growth of ‘theology’ as a means of radical praxis, then the article itself becomes an exercise at whistling Dixie, rather than an attempt to explain an actual fact.

Carl at Raincoat Optimism has a fascinating article up discussing the position of James Earl Ray as the ‘vanishing mediator’ between Martin Luther King the civil rights campaigner and MLK the social reformer. Ray’s actions in assassinating Marting Luther King ‘preserved’ him for the civil rights cause, so suggests Carl, utilizing examples of Slavoj Žižek.

“Martin Luther King, weeks before he was shot, engaged in workers rallies and championed the proletarian cause with both white and black workers. If this had been any more established King would’ve been written in history as a activist of workers rights, and not part of the civil rights movement – a position that is fully congruent with American ideology – proven today by the presidency of Barack Obama.”

In order for this to make sense, there must be an opposition between being civil rights and workers’ rights. Also there must be an assumption that whatever Martin Luther King did after his decades of civil rights campaigning would be what defined him. Only in this way could assassination preserve MLK for the civil rights side of things, beyond which the murderer himself ceases to have much importance.

Whilst I think the concept of the vanishing mediator has some value, in this instance I don’t buy it. First, the opposition between civil rights and workers’ rights is not clear cut. One might expect the standard Marxist trope to be that advocating workers’ rights directly challenges the class-structure of society, whereas civil rights could be safely incorporated into the edifice of American capitalism.

Within the civil rights movement, however, there were people unwilling be incorporated, who looked to their own actions to advance their demands rather than coat-tailing the liberal establishment and concentrating on elections. As Howard Zinn notes in his study on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee;

“Following the tumultuous freedom rides, the Kennedy administration made attempts to funnel activists of the civil rights organisations into voter registration activities rather than disruptive movements. Indeed the Kennedy administration was adamant in opposing widescale civil disobedience. President Kennedy thought that low key voting activities would result in peaceful change and provide additional votes for the Democratic Party.”

Meanwhile Kennedy was appointing racist justices to the federal courts and appeasing the Dixiecrats. Robert Kennedy, at one meeting, was famously supposed to have demanded of CORE activists, “Why don’t you guys cut all that shit, freedom riding and sitting-in shit, and concentrate on voter registration. If you do that, I’ll get you tax-free status.”

Freedom riding, sit-ins and their associated rallies became mass actions that threatened to defy the moderate leadership of the civil rights movement. Amongst this mass base, the interpenetration of ‘civil’ demands with explicitly social and economic demands is undeniable. If there was a division, it was in the minds of the moderate civil rights leaders who opposed King’s move towards the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968.

A lot of King’s speeches betray explicitly social and economic content however – like the Beyond Vietnam speech of April 1967, seven months before the Poor People’s Campaign was even in the planning stage. Retrospectively portraying the civil rights movement as something that would not challenge capitalism is buying into the views of that moderate section who opposed the more serious demands that finally found a voice in 1968.

It’s at this point which James Earl Ray intervenes, in Žižek’s example. By killing Martin Luther King, Ray supposedly prevented King’s further association with this series of demands. I think this is an overemphasis on the individual. The demands themselves are not well remembered. Most attention is given to equality between white and black, attempting to impose a de-politicized civic view of the past.

This is not because of King’s death, it’s because of the failure of the campaign, which is also not the result of King’s death. The metaphor of the vanishing mediator is thus misapplied in this instance, in contrast to its use in For they Know Not What They Do, one of Žižek’s older works.

“The passage from feudalism to Protestantism is not the same nature as the passage from Protestantism to bourgeois everyday life with its privatized religion. The first passage concerns “content” (under the guise of preserving the religious form or even its strengthening, the crucial shift – the assertion of the ascetic acquisitive stance in economic activity as the domain of manifestation of Grace – takes place), whereas the second passage is a purely formal act, a change of form (as soon as Protestantism is realized as the ascetic acquisitive stance, it can fall off as form).”

The meaning of Protestantism was fought over by real people rather than pre-determined as part of the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism. The ‘assertion of the ascetic acquistive stance’ (assuming for a moment that this is an acceptable simplification of Protestantism as ideology) was what emerged from social struggle between competing material interests; it was not predetermined in a formulaic manner.

Protestantism was the metaphor through which these struggles were fought in social struggles from Switzerland to Scotland.

The assumption which establishes Protestant theology as the vanishing mediator is that, whichever side emerged victorious in the class struggle, the bounds of Protestantism would have been transcended and its explicit use necessarily discarded. I think this is empirically verifiable; it’s evident at the Putney debates in the voices of the Levellers present.

That this is equally true of the ruling class shouldn’t even be in dispute – since the ruling class won through, and Theological assumptions and debates quickly receded as an indispensible touchstone of political discourse. The vanishing mediator is thus a useful shorthand in understanding the relationship between the ‘form’ of demands and their proper material content, and how form can change according to material context.

I’ve only just had a chance to watch the video above, of Žižek’s performance at Marxism 2009. Probably the most powerful thought to come out of Žižek’s speech is the notion of victims with their own voices.

Žižek talks about how, at a Hitchcock conference in California, he was denounced by a man there for talking about such trifling things while the war in Yugoslavia raged. The implication was that those not involved could talk about whatever they wanted, but as a Yugoslavian, Žižek had a duty to dwell on his victimhood, on the trauma of his home country. Something in this struck home with me.

Sympathy with those whose countries have suffered civil war and the brutality which Žižek describes is the wrong emotion. Solidarity is the right one. The difference, I think, is that, through our sympathy we develop a tendency to impute noble qualities to the victims of trauma, when they are just people. For the Left, this is repeated in the myth of the ‘noble’ proletariat, the good but stupid pawn of the ruling class.

The answer, which Žižek doesn’t make explicit, is to focus on the material context in which the ideological must exist.

To give an example, Silvio Berlusconi, of late a favourite of Žižek, appears in the speech, this time as the masque worn by capitalism-with-asian-values, the authoritarian capitalism that Žižek contends is being developed. Italian political discourse faces being sidelined in favour of a grotesque pantomime that neuters political opposition by displacing real grievances.

Instead of talking about and understanding the actual material things which cause them hardship in their lives, instead of knowing who their real opponents are, citizens of the Italian democracy become invested in the spectacle at work on stage. Likewise the media, already aligned to act as a conduit from Westminster or the Palazzo Montecitorio, recycling consensus as if was news and adding to the distortion, remains glued to the spectacle.

There is a similar a phenomenon regularly talked about by Marxists. Racism, we often contend, is a displaced class struggle. Without effective means of expressing solidarity with one another, or challenging the ruling class, the ‘real’ mechanisms of power become concealed from the working class. They appear as the ‘normal’ background to life; “it’s how the world works”.

Without appreciating that this normal background is not permanent but changeable, blame for the ill-effects of the system are transferred to elements which appear as if from ‘outside’. Immigrants are the standard example, being literally as well as metaphorically from outside, and therefore the most common victim of this transference.

Real grievances in the Italian case can be blamed on the excesses of Berlusconi’s stupidity, much in the way people in America blamed their problems, come the recession, on the stupidity of George W. Bush. Many Americans couldn’t believe that the country had elected such an obvious bumbling moron as President. It was only when he was ousted, and Obama took his place without a real change in direction that the depth of the problem was revealed.

The result, absent a political alternative, has been apathy on the part of those who swung things for Obama. Arguably, at second glance, the process may still be at work, with the continuing deadlock being ascribed to Republican wingnuts, who, as poll after poll tells us, are wildly out of touch with reality. This forestalls deeper analysis.

Generalised stupidity or ignorance of the ‘real’ issues are thus not the cause of relative quiescence of our class, despite some furious outbreaks of resistance. Quite the opposite. The collapse and continuing weakness of once-powerful social solidarities are the failure of the politically conscious elements of the working class to articulate an effective strategy whereby resistance doesn’t merely explode on to the streets and then fade away.

That’s an extraordinarily broad group – including seven million trades unionists of all trades and disciplines, community workers, politicians and many other groups, not just the band of easily dismissed supposedly ‘middle class’ revolutionaries, professional or otherwise.

Instead of culminating in a march that is defeated when the government pursue their agenda regardless, resistance must be the method for forming links of more general purpose than solving the specific grievances raised. To give an example, the Public and Commercial Services Union has announced that it will ballot its members in response to the government’s decision to slash pension and redundancy entitlements, making laying off workers cheaper.

Many workers in jobcentres will be affected, the very place where some of them might end up as claimants. There is the opportunity here for workers and the unemployed to link up and show their solidarity with one another. The workers will appreciate, more keenly than ever, the threat of unemployment – and it’s suddenly in their broader interest to demand greater security nets for the unemployed.

Regrettably Žižek doesn’t deal in concrete activism, and so his discussion of what it means to be a revolutionary doesn’t provide much solid advice when it comes to day-to-day work, and his claim that the Left should ruthlessly use state power against the ruling class is rather undermined by the gap left as regards how we conquer state power.

Slavoj Žižek appeared on the BBC’s Culture Show a few days ago. I’d been meaning to write it up and am only now getting around to it. His performance is dazzling, as per usual, and we socialists do like our in-jokes, but I thought that this time, rather than just show the video, I might pick up on a point or two of what he says, and how it relates to his wider oeuvre and his practice of what he preaches.

In the interview, Žižek maintains that the purest form of ideology is in cinema, that it is ‘more real than our everyday reality’. It is with this in mind that most of Žižek’s written works must be read – and to this is then applied the unique blend of Žižek’s systems of analysis: Marxist, Lacanian psychoanalysis and so on. I can see how certain ideologies can be evinced through certain movies. Žižek uses blockbuster ’2012′ as one of several examples he gives.

One message from the film suggests that ‘in order for one stupid American family to come together,’ most of the world’s population must be wiped out – that solidarity under current conditions is impossible, that even imagining is pointless, for the individual as much as for Hollywood.

There is a logic here; it is a motif repeated in almost every Hollywood disaster movie – the disaster wreaks a personal effect, which is almost universally good, presented as the exposure of the people underneath the day to day existence. Except that who we are day to day is who we are; the normal processes of the system are what the system is.

What Žižek is suggesting, and where I agree with him, is that in this repeated motif, we can see a function of ideology. It is the argument that we should disregard banality, disregard our day to day drudgery, because who we are, and who other people are, underneath sets us apart from all that. The moral of the story is a sedative.

Thus the constellations of message produced by Hollywood takes on the role of one more arm of the hegemonic ideology. Here is an opportune space to query Žižek’s epistemological assumptions. Žižek does not believe in an objective reality; what decides between competing interpretations is the “master-signifier”, a resistance to the infinite regression of over-intellectualized reason, “It is so because I say it is so!”

The concept of hegemony is based on the idea that one can know the real processes at work through the system of socio-economic organization we call capitalism. Having gained further knowledge of cinema and this particular movie, we can then suggest how its message might relate to this broader process that we’ve observed, i.e. the attempt to normalize as common sense everything that upholds values conducive to the smooth running of that system.

We can argue over the meaning of ’2012′, much like people argued over the meaning of Avatar. Yet we do so within the universe of the things actually contained within the film. Moreover we do so in the context of pre-existing ideology, the common sense factor, and mechanisms of dissemination controlled by the gate-keepers of the common sense factor (the press), all of which will have an effect on interpretation.

So the reality of the processes of capitalism have an effect in determining the interpretation. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it’s not limitless. It is not merely raw material to be warred over by competing factions wishing to hegemonize it and utilize its popular appeal for their own ends, much in the way that some Left groups tend to approach nationalism or ethnic identities.

It will contain the same contradictions as the ideology (or some part thereof) of the system which created it. We resolve those contradictions using the fundamental analytical categories provided by Marxism. It’s only when looked at in this way can we avoid what seem like wanton extrapolations from a film, however tightly packed it might be with ideology, however closely it may be linked to how capitalism thinks about itself, to the whole world or a whole ideology, or a whole socio-economic system of organizing.

In the interview, Žižek continues, “If you want to approach how beliefs function today, I claim, the best example I can imagine is that stupid cartoon which I’ve seen five, six times, because of my small son, Kung-Fu Panda.” Žižek goes on to link in the Marx brothers and how these explain the appeal of Silvio Berlusconi:

“This guy looks as an idiot, acts as an idiot, but this shouldn’t deceive you, this guy is an idiot”. Berlusconi is wealthy, his corruption is the subject of much debate, much like his links to the fascists and his many affairs with beautiful women and his changing of the law to suit his private interests. People, it seems, simply don’t believe that one can act like such a moron and yet be a moron.

This type of analogy seems different the previous one, more straightforward, assuming that what we can see in day to day life is real, and that we may look for reflections and distortions of the ‘real’ in cinema.

Whereas in the previous example, Žižek was taking a specific film and generalizing to the form in which capitalist hegemony attempts to oppress people, in this one it is mere metaphor for what we can see with our own eyes. An opportune film demonstrates a phenomenon we’ve all wondered about over George W. Bush and Berlusconi.

Simply put, how can people continually elect a moron? Žižek calls this the ‘double-cynical wager’, that if someone acts like what they are, then people will expect them not to be that. The explanation of this surface-phenomenon might be complex, but we’re still working within the confines of empirical data.

When attempting to explain such phenomenon, using cinema as a means to extrapolate meaning, whether by analogy or some other process, is as valid as reaching for any of the other items in our shared cultural universe. Cinema is as common a language as any, and there’s the added value that it’s entertaining – though even here, I think, we locate a flaw in our esteemed theorist.

He suggests that the current situation demands that we wake people up to the ideology that they live and breathe as part of their daily routine. Yet there are very few people who are going to read the tracts of any of the current shower of academics – Marxist, liberal, libertarian, whatever. Presumably it is through this entertainment, which include several visual endeavours and lecturing at a rubbish tip, that we might wake people up.

I think this loses sight of the need to approach people where they are, in languages with which they are familiar.

Žižek also suggests that if he were taken seriously, it would mean that he is ‘integrated’ into the cosseted, cultural buffer against revolutionism that universities so often form. While this is probably true, and Zizek’s antics make him stick out like a sore thumb, being taken seriously and being integrated need not mean the same thing. It really depends on who Žižek wants to take him seriously.

If it’s fellow academics, then being taken seriously and being integrated often are the same thing. One need only compare the lives of academic socialists such as Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. However, if Žižek wishes to be taken seriously by the people he wishes to carry out the revolution (however he wishes to define them, assuming they’re not an intellectual elite), then he needs to get his hands dirty at public meetings and on the doorsteps as well as writing such stylish prose.

That will prevent his integration to the Academy.

Yesterday I discussed the attempt to replace class analysis with ‘identities’, and the roots of this development in both the unprecedented post-war economic boom and the defeat of working class resistance when the boom came to an end, provoking capitalist crisis and retrenchment.*

Fast forward to the present day. Plenty of post-marxist intellectuals are still playing the same game. I want to look briefly at Goran Therborn and more in-depth at Slavoj Zizek as they provide useful models by which to gauge the ideological routes of thought of identity-favouring theories.

They display the tendency to seek for ‘other’ (i.e. non-class related) forms of resistance to capitalism. In this article, we’ll look at their preference for casting slum-dwellers in this mould. Neither examine this group using the materialist analysis of Marx, however; instead they prefer other categories of analysis (though Therborn and Zizek differ from one another too).

As I’ve outlined before, Therborn proposes that the ‘dialectic of modernity’ – that is, the opposition between labour and capital is decreasing to the point where it can no longer be considered a useful analytical tool. In his book From Marxism to Post-Marxism, he establishes other criteria and axes by which to measure society.

He views the growth of the slum-dwelling population as an ‘urban proletariat in the pre-Marxist sense of informal labourers’, ascribing to them an identity that stands outside the Marxist concept of class as determined by one’s position in the relations of production.

Zizek’s view of modern class struggle is that in four ways is the new popular alliance against capitalism being created by capitalism itself. Through the ecological destruction of the planet**; the ‘inadequacy of private property’ as a basis for dealing with knowledge (resulting in paradoxes like the modern copyrighting of ancient cures – perhaps we might characterize this as the final enclosure of the commons, consonant with total globalization); the harvesting of human biogenetics with the emerging potential to change ‘human nature’, and ‘new forms of apartheid’.

The last is of particular relevance here. Several of my recent articles have dealt with the problems of rectifying relative inequality, e.g. that black people bear proportionally more poverty than whites, without a clear class narrative, of universally empowering working class people regardless of identity. I contend that the concept of apartheid used by Zizek is a form of this problematic style of identity politics, and does so at what Badiou is probably correct in defining as an ‘evental horizon’ of modern class struggle. Zizek explains:

“While the [classical Marxist working class] is defined in the precise terms of economic ‘exploitation’ (the appropriation of surplus values generated by the situation of having to sell one’s own labor-power as a commodity on the market), the defining feature of the slum-dwellers is socio-political, it concerns their (non-) integration into the legal space of citizenship, with (most of) its incumbent rights” (In Defense of Lost Causes, 2008, p425)

This socio-political feature is a way to focus on the slum-dwellers as the excluded, something synonymous with their status as ethnic minorities, as lesser citizens and the victims of prejudice in their home countries. The bait-and-switch technique by which we move to focus on this is by dismissing the working class of the favelas, ghettos, slums and barrios as ‘informal labourers’.

Implicit to the quotation below, is Zizek’s recognition of the Marxist distinction between the working class as a class-in-itself, an objective reality, and a class-for-itself, the subjective understanding of that objective reality and its use as a guide to action.

Yet instead of casting the slum-dwellers as merely a disorganised part of the global proletariat, for Zizek, because of their status as informal labourers, the slum-dwellers are Rancière’s ‘part of no part’, which Zizek elsewhere contrasts with the classical Marxist conception of the proletariat. He proffers instead the identity of the lumpenproletariat. The slum-dwelling lumpens are:

“The free floating element which can be used by any stratum or class…the radicalizing ‘carnivalesque’ element of the workers’ struggle, pushing them from compromising moderate strategies to an open confrontation.” (ibid, p286)

But surely makes more sense to point out that the objective reality of the slum-dwellers position as working class remains, what needs to be built is a subjective consensus to push the slum-dwellers into open class struggle?

Actually from these areas particularly, we have plenty of evidence of that consensus being constructed through the basic drive to solidarity born of capitalist exploitation and attempts to monopolize democratic government. Zizek himself cites a key one; the move of the Venezeulan slum-dwellers to support Hugo Chavez during the coup against him. Yet support did not spring out of the earth spontaneously, which one would not necessarily appreciate from Zizek’s writings.

In Venezuela as in the mountains above La Paz, Bolivia, the primary means of political organisation is first and foremost economic. If we take Bolivia, where the ethnic make-up of the poorest areas can be uniformly Aymara, Quechua or Guarani and so on, it’s the Federation of Working Class Street Sellers and other unions, the demand for the ayllu economy and the soviet-like Fajave which makes up the backbone of Evo Morales’ support network. These were fashioned long-term, out of struggle for the basic needs of the individual and the collective.

The point is simple: the methods of resistance undertaken in the more politically advanced slums differ little from forms of organisation that have been known in Europe since the industrial revolution.

They unite on the basis of common exploitation and class. Revolutionaries will naturally emerge from the struggles undertaken by these organisations – the role of Western socialists is to lend a hand in widening and deepening the appeal of such organisations, and connecting them with the international labour movement. It is to facilitate, to expedite, the development of a class-in-itself towards a class-for-itself.

The contention that what exists is ‘only’ a pre-Marxist proletariat (presumably Therborn is referencing the Roman proletarii and capitecensi, who, on a simplistic level, were essentially insecure wage labourers also) is nonsense. Informal labour may be the order of the day, as Zizek and Therborn contend, but this is a basic trick of any employer, because the uncertainty undermines opportunities for labour organization and speeds capital accumulation. Hence the increasing casualization of labour in the developed economies.

Similarly, apatheid may be widely practiced against indigenous peoples, who are pushed to the edges of society in all senses – to face deprivation of economic participation and rights, social prejudice and loss of citizenship and concomitant political rights (Paul Mason, Live Working or Die Fighting, 2008, pp210-214). Yet opposition to this is coterminous with opposition to wider forms of economic exploitation, which can affect relatively well-off tech workers in Argentina, compelled to take over their factory, just as it can the ethnic minorities of Bolivia.

The withdrawal of the State, or its half-hearted presence, in many of these ghetto areas does not represent a change in the objective position of the residents, as Zizek contends, if such a thing is even true – it may not be, as many states have history of intervening with indiscriminate violence in such arenas. Thus was sparked the 2003 Bolivian uprising, in protest at the police shooting of eight people from the slums above La Paz.

I see no reason why, even if accusations of state withdrawal are true, it should promote the socio-political to primary category of analysis, other than that it neatly fits with the schematic Zizek draws about the slum-dwellers being the part of no-part, the lumpenproletariat that by its very exclusion can radicalize the proletariat, whose position inside the capitalist system is contradictory – as they must at once resist and prop it up.

Except the proletarian position is exactly the role of these slum dwellers also. They sell their labour power in exchange for a wage, and everything else about their lives, the organization of the economy and so on is decided elsewhere. This is precisely the condition of the working class elsewhere, the relative levels of poverty and pay notwithstanding.

Only the universal and global aspect to the working class offers any hope of widening a particular struggle from a local issue, that might win gains eventually clawed back by disenchantment or violence, into one that crosses borders and awakens acknowledgment around the world.

Undermining that universality is the hope of the reactionary Right. Whether it involves sophisticated dog-whistle politics about how the “rights” of minorities serve only to work to the disadvantage of the majority, or whether it’s a clear appeal to naked ethnic and racial prejudice, the reactionary Right must either acquire support from the working class by dividing it against itself, or it must fail in its agenda. We serve that agenda if we advocate a one-sided approach to what Zizek calls the ‘socio-political’ exclusions visited on minorities.

It’s easy to recognize that these exclusions are wrong, it’s easy to call for their correction, and it’s very easy to attack anyone who shows a hint of reserve as racist. It is not easy to actually correct the exclusions, and less easy still to carry with you precisely the working class that is the backbone of the Left. It’s impossible to carry the working class without appealing directly to the paramount struggle which undermines all identities – that of the working class against the capitalist class – and linking the fight for inclusion to the other struggles.

In Bolivia, the Movement Towards Change may yet fail, as may the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela. Neither have struck at the power-base of their opponents, private property and its economy, and neither have fully realised the promise, offered to their supporters by the factory occupations and the temporary action committees, of a democratic, planned economy. If they focus on identity, they surely will fail. In Bolivia particularly, those tactics could open a space  where the ‘white’ governors might appeal to their ‘white’ provinces for military support to resist Morales, exploiting nervousness and prejudice which might otherwise be allayed.

My solution is not that we return to the ‘monolithic’ politics of the Parti Communiste Français circa 1960, as this would invite the disaster that the main organ for socialist politics once again becomes detached and isolated from whole new layers of the working class, but nor (to return us to our immediate focus) can we concentrate on identity without looking at class, as Harriet Harman and New Labour attempt to do. I am suggesting that while advocacy for minority groups is important, it must march in lock-step with a wider, nuanced class narrative.

This is to the benefit of minorities; every socialist revolution has been accompanied by massive changes to the social order. Whether it was the defence of the black Haitian Revolution by the masses of a racist Parisian society, or the introduction of women’s rights across Europe just as the continent was convulsing in the throes of revolution, an assault on the class system is an assault on all oppression. Even at a lower ebb, class struggle challenges preconceived notions of identity; thus the miners’ strike and women for example.

Importantly, however, fighting to challenge prejudice and exclusion must be adapted as a tactical weapon governed strategically by a class agenda, rather than the other way around, since it is not our goal to fight for the right of certain individuals from any given minority to be elevated to the same status as the elites of our society in proportion to their numbers in our society. It is our goal to overthrow elites full stop. Read more…

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.

Courtesy of Chris Dillow’s oft-excellent ‘Top Blogging’ selections of material from around the Interwebz, always posted on the right of his own blog, I noticed that Norman Geras has an article up entitled “Liberalism and the radical Left” in which Professor Geras roundly berates Slavoj Žižek for a bunch of different offenses. I often like what Žižek writes: if nothing else the man delivers a new perspective on time-worn dilemmas in an engaging way. I tend to simply ignore the Lacanian baggage that he carries with him – and often he is quite intelligible without it.

On this occasion, however, I think Professor Geras is massively mistaken in some of his attacks – and quite ungentlemanly, it must be said. As I have noticed in the past, this seems to be a regular feature of Žižek’s reviewers: they don’t much like to engage with him on his own terms, preferring instead to read out of context and ridicule without substantive engagement.  Norm focusses on the following paragraph from a Žižek essay (note, the numbering is down to Norm – but it’s handy as his subsequent criticisms are directed by the numbers):

[1] “The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (liberal center, populist Right, radical Left), they locate them in a radically different topology: for the liberal center, radical Left and Right are the two forms of appearance of the same “totalitarian” excess, while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, with the populist “radical” Right as nothing but the symptom of… liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat. [2] When we hear today a politician or an ideologist offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking a (purely rhetorical) question “Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocking of religion to be punished by death?”, what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer – who would have wanted that? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence. [3] This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. [4] One should accomplish here a Hegelian step back and put in question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. Liberals have long ago lost their right to judge. [5] What Horkheimer had said should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk (critically) about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.”

I want to respond to Norman Geras’ attacks: as Norm has numbered the paragraph in order to better specify which bit he is attacking, I’ll follow the same formula. Anyone wishing to play the game should read Norm’s article first, then read mine.

[1] What Žižek is saying here is neither new nor remarkable. For liberals, radical Left and Right are two forms of the same totalitarian excess. I have to use Žižek’s words because they are so well chosen. How many times do socialists come up against the argument that Fascist tyranny and Soviet tyranny were the same thing? One doesn’t even have to engage with the Trotskyist idea of deformed and degenerated workers’ states to see that, whether or not their methods were similar (and in his In Defence of Lost Causes, Žižek makes a good case that at the semiotic level, the methods weren’t the same) , the two represented different configurations of social forces.

One was born of stalled workers’ struggle, the other was given birth to crush that struggle – and this is true whatever one thinks of the subsequent behaviour of the new Soviet Russian elite. Similarly, for the Left, the major opponent is liberalism. I give liberalism the lower-case ‘l’ as a means to note that this is not the list of policies held by one political party or another, but the ideology which underpins the whole system of capitalism and the basic prejudices of all three major parties of the British parliamentary system: Right, Centre and Left. I don’t see anything startling here – nor any reason for Professor Geras to dismiss it as idiocy.

When Žižek subsequently says that “the populist “radical” Right [is] nothing but the symptom of…liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat”, again, he is saying nothing new. The conception of fascism as the reaction to the global eruption of militant class struggle around the world following WWI is not new. On a smaller level, I was saying something similar myself in my previous article: the populist Right latch on to solutions to symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself (e.g. immigration rather than a free labour market).

Capitalism creates two interests, liberalism only has room for one. Under capitalism, the first interest is that of the worker, who would prefer if cheaper labour could not be used to supplant his own or drive down his wages. The second interest is that of the employer, who has the opposing interest. Liberalism, the defence of the equal rights of the individual, stands with the employer: individuals should be able to move around unrestricted, which is an implicit justification of capitalist practice. To assert otherwise is to constrict the liberty of some.

Thus politicians, caught between pressure from below, which is angry at one of the natural practices of capitalism, and the natural and logical extension of their own liberalism, adopt Right-populist slogans and concepts: the restriction of immigration, British Jobs for British Workers etc. Here it is the rhetoric which is important: the practical effect of such measures  is to produce scapegoats rather than to actually halt immigration; all the draconian immigration laws in the world don’t stop the free flow of labour – as witnessed if we compare the actual practices which caused the Lindsey Oil Refinery Strike versus the number of laws New Labour have passed to tighten up immigration.

Professor Geras contends that by asserting all this, that Žižek elides a bunch of differences between Right-populism and liberalism: I don’t think this is so. I think Žižek simply recognizes the deficiencies of liberalism and the circumstances under which liberalism will be transformed into Right-populism by its inability to reconcile popular disaffection with the results of capitalism and the first principles of liberalism itself. I’m sure all of this is open to challenge – but it’s hardly fitting for Norman Geras to go about calling it ‘political idiocy’.

[2] The next attack launched is that Žižek is trying to eliminate the distinction offered by the notional politician he creates. Said politician asks, “Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocking of religion to be punished by death?” Obviously the expected answer is “No”, and the implication is that only liberalism can deliver on that “No”, whilst a whole host of fundamentalisms will happily deliver the organised suppression of women and the censure and execution of free-thinkers.

Agree or disagree with him, Žižek’s point (a more extended version of which can be found in his book Violence) is that actually the distinction is a false one. Liberalism delivers for Western Europe (relatively) empowered women and the right to say what we want – but as a result of our liberal system, our armed forces are off doing the work of totalitarians and fundamentalists in foreign countries. Indeed the same rhetorical cover has been used for such military interventionism since the days of slavery and beyond.

We can want different freedoms etc, but so long as these remain on a liberal basis, they come at the expense of coercing other nations to be just like us. Which sounds fine: a few broken eggs to create a global liberal democratic omelette. But the reality, when the rhetoric is stripped away, is that ‘just like us’ simply means that countries are open to foreign investment, that their State has the same attitude towards opening up public services to private profiteering and so on and so forth. This is what happened in Iraq: it will no doubt happen in Afghanistan.

Bottom line: I don’t think Žižek is minimizing the real differences in quality of living between British people and people living under fundamentalist regimes – and this is what I take from Žižek’s remarks, though I have the advantage of having read quite a portion of other work. What Žižek is attempting to do is show that these freedoms and differences in quality of life aren’t abstract and politicians who counterpose the differences as a means to defend liberalism (muscular or otherwise) ignore the global effects of this ideology, denuded of its innocence.

[3] Again the liberalism-fundamentalism distinction. I agree with Professor Geras that those things he lists – e.g. throwing acid at girls for attending school – are barbaric. But the opposite of ‘barbarism’ is certainly not liberalism. See the above comments on our ‘liberal’ involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq – and they are not the first. The only thing added to the discussion is that Žižek contends that liberalism generates fundamentalism; if Žižek had said ‘capitalism’ in place of liberalism I think he’d have been more accurate – but even still, all is not lost.

Liberalism is the dominant discourse of capitalism; the doctrine of  rights, which are inalienable to the individual. Export of liberalism is part and parcel of capitalism, breaking down moral economies and traditional ties in favour of market exchange. People can react to this by attacking the symptoms, such as the surface discourse of liberalism rather than the practicalities of capitalism, in defence of ‘traditional’ forms of exploitation. The form that capitalism takes, i.e. liberalism, thus begets if not the fact then the form of its enemy: illiberal fundamentalism.

For this reason, Osama bin Laden and his crew attack homosexuality, fornication, intoxication and gambling (all defended by liberalism based on the right of the individual to do as they will, so long as they harm no other) in the same breath as usury – i.e. modern banking, the necessary prerequisite of a free market. Even the attitude of such people to advanced technology, that other symptom of modernity, is one of suspicion – though no doubt hypocritical, since OBL himself is reportedly surviving due to a dialysis machine.

I shall leave [4] and [5]; the former seeming to me a bit of gobbledegook (what the hell is a Hegelian step back and is that any different from the regular English idiom ‘to step back’, i.e. to gain perspective?) and the latter seeming like an excuse for a pissing contest over how far people like Norman Geras do or do not critically analyse liberal democracy (that is, cast the mote) before they attack religious fundamentalism. They hardly require much explanation – and I think my point is already made in any case.

Namely, when Žižek drops the Lacanian silliness, his points are pretty traditional – and agree with them or disagree with them, they are not as immediately nonsensical as Norman Geras would make out.