- 26 Dec 2016 20:35
#14755019
Most of the critique of identarism is subjective nonsense or outright a-historical. But some of Adolph Reed's analysis in Common Dreams is thought-provoking. Reed argues that racial (and other) identities, when asserted as political norms, are essentialist in nature.
His ascription of this syndrome to the "left-wing of neoliberalism" needs to be placed in context - it is not 'left' as a Marxist would understand it, but the appropriated 'left' of neoliberalism. The critical concept is what I have bolded above. Your identity is inherited and essential to your being, not a product of your actions. Action is irrelevant, and only identification with your recognized peers is recognized.
Therefore, quietism and acceptance are made an integral part of the political order.
The interesting question is why did the white working class end up on the outside? Reed doesn't explicitly deal with this, but I believe it is essentially an economic question. Tim Duy's bitter response to Krugman lay this out:
So, the identities of some are essential, while the identities of others are disposable. It is not an actual holocaust, no one is physically killed. It is the new holocaust: your identity, culture, and way of life are simply made economically infeasible. The historic nastiness of white racism is the justification for this process, but oddly this only applies to poor whites.
Of course, the real reason is that rural and working-class cannot be supported under the precepts of neoliberalism. Notably, black poor suffer the same fate but no one is particularly interested in them.
race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.
His ascription of this syndrome to the "left-wing of neoliberalism" needs to be placed in context - it is not 'left' as a Marxist would understand it, but the appropriated 'left' of neoliberalism. The critical concept is what I have bolded above. Your identity is inherited and essential to your being, not a product of your actions. Action is irrelevant, and only identification with your recognized peers is recognized.
Therefore, quietism and acceptance are made an integral part of the political order.
The interesting question is why did the white working class end up on the outside? Reed doesn't explicitly deal with this, but I believe it is essentially an economic question. Tim Duy's bitter response to Krugman lay this out:
That Krugman can wonder at the source of the disdain felt toward the liberal elite while lecturing Trump’s voters on their own self-interest is really quite remarkable.
I don’t know that the white working class voted against their economic interest. I don’t pretend that I can define their preferences with such accuracy. Maybe they did. But the working class may reasonably believe that neither party offers them an economic solution. The Republicans are the party of the rich; the Democrats are the party of the rich and poor. Those in between have no place.
That sense of hopelessness would be justifiably acute in rural areas. Economic development is hard work in the best of circumstances; across the sparsely populated vastness of rural America, it is virtually impossible. The victories are – and will continue to be – few and far between.
The tough reality of economic development is that it will always be easier to move people to jobs than the jobs to people. Which is akin to telling many, many voters the only way possible way they can live an even modest lifestyle is to abandon their roots for the uniformity of urban life. They must sacrifice their identities to survive. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Follow the Brooklyn hipsters to the Promised Land.
This is a bitter pill for many to swallow. To just sit back and accept the collapse of your communities. And I suspect the white working class resents being told to swallow that pill when the Democrats eagerly celebrate the identities of everyone else.
So, the identities of some are essential, while the identities of others are disposable. It is not an actual holocaust, no one is physically killed. It is the new holocaust: your identity, culture, and way of life are simply made economically infeasible. The historic nastiness of white racism is the justification for this process, but oddly this only applies to poor whites.
Of course, the real reason is that rural and working-class cannot be supported under the precepts of neoliberalism. Notably, black poor suffer the same fate but no one is particularly interested in them.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. -Antonio Gramsci