In the 1970s the ‘New Right’ emerged as a Western
political force. They argued as a collective that up until that time, Western
immigration policies had been assimilationist in nature and led to a
‘deculturation’ of non-Western peoples. What was required, then, was what Alain
de Benoist called a ‘respect for difference’. This ‘respect’ entailed
immigrants being returned to their country of origin so they could live in
piece among their ‘own kind’. Implied within this was a framework, frozen in
time, whereby the global distribution of the population was understood as
groups belonging to different ‘cultures’. By ‘culture’ they did not mean the
general production of human creativity, symbology and systems of meaning.
Instead they simply meant ethnicity, ethnic groups or ‘races’, merely
translating the supposedly outmoded and discredited language of ‘race’ into
bywords for ‘ethnicity’. These ‘cultures’ the New Right spoke of were all
radically different and so required separate quarters, so assimilation and
cultural marginalisation could not occur.
There is now a ‘left’ grouping that accepts and implies
in all its analyses the major tenets of this ‘New Right’ ideology, although
they appear not to know it as they wrongly believe themselves to be the most
vocal enemies of such an ideology. We can call this grouping the ‘liberal left’,
following scholars who have named or discussed such a grouping, e.g. Karl
Polanyi, Alvin Gouldner, Jonathan Friedman and Frank Parkin. The liberal left
takes its ideological pillars from a confluence of poststructural, postmodern
and ‘indigenous theory’ influences, despite the fact that these are often in
contradiction with one another. From poststructuralism and postmodernism, the
liberal left takes an ‘anti-universality’ stance. All narratives of supposed
‘universality’ are to be rejected. This includes virtually any political
economy stance, Marxism, and humanism, all of which insist on the unicity of
human nature and the universals that underwrite human being. Additionally, from
‘indigenous theories’ – a moniker which signals nothing about their content
other than the standpoint from which they are written – along with other
race-based prisms of looking at the world, the liberal left takes what appears
to be common to each of them: the belief in a static world of groups called
‘cultures’ that are all different and incommensurable, but simultaneously relativized,
subjectivised and with no ‘culture’ able to be understood by its outsiders. The
biggest problem is they cling to this incorrect belief whilst simultaneously lending
lip service to some kind of liberal programme of universal political rights and
freedoms.
Together, these left and right versions of the same
ideology equal ‘culturalism’ – the stitching together of ‘politics’ and
‘culture’ whereby all politics becomes ‘cultural’. Critical theorist Seyla
Benhabib noticed this equation of left and right culturalism (calling them the ‘progressive’
and ‘conservative’ position respectively) almost twenty years ago. She
describes culturalist positions as comprising a “reductionist sociology” and
carrying with them “faulty epistemic assumptions” about the boundedness of ‘cultures’
and their congruence with population groups. But Benhabib is only furthering a
theoretical problematisation of this thinking that existed even earlier. Ernest
Gellner said in the 1980s that the ‘national’ character of modernity would lead
to the proliferation of culturalism in politics. Additionally, in as early as
1989, Loren Goldner referred to a “currently dominant culturalism” that “is so
pervasive that it does not even know its own name”. Russell Jacoby warned that the
left’s adoption of culturalist ideology is part of its gradual relinquishment
of power to liberals, who have themselves lost any idea of what they are
supposed to represent. Jacoby’s writing is
provocative and despairing: “Stripped of a radical idiom, robbed of a utopian
hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate
diversity. With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they embrace all
ideas. Pluralism becomes the catch-all, the alpha and omega of political
thinking.” Jacoby ultimately concludes that the liberal left’s obsession with
multiculturalism above all other concerns represents “the exhaustion of
political thinking” among the left of centre. Chillingly, culturalism “spells
the demise of utopia.”
Culturalism has also swept into a dominant, orthodox
position in academia in recent times. Recent theoretical approaches in the
social sciences and humanities, such as decolonial theory, critical race
theory, and practically any discussion in anthropology departments today, are
re-fashioned instances of what Sally Haslanger has described as ‘debunking’
approaches. These approaches are ‘idealist’ in that they deny the objectivity
of the external world (the world for-itself or the world of objects that we can
all commonly perceive). The ‘debunking’ function is to reveal that what we
thought were common projections of that external world were actually coming
from a particular standpoint or ‘voice’. The effect of the ‘debunking’ position
has been to render the social sciences and humanities critically useless
through new forms of subjectivism relying on unsubstantiated grievance,
supplanting the genuine analysis of social problems for statements of
personally located belief and emotional outburst. This movement to a new round
of subjectivism is not an alternative to postmodernism, as was once claimed by
optimistic academics, but has in fact merely replaced postmodernism as the new
sophistic, relativizing tendency in academia.
But what is wrong with the ‘left’ form of culturalism if
its aims are to support social justice concerns? There are three answers to
this question that explain why. The first is evident from what I have just
discussed – ‘left’ culturalism has become what I feared it would: completely
unable to fight right-wing culturalism as it is basically its mirror image. The
second is that ‘left’ culturalism is the apotheosis of – at risk of confusing
myself with the language I am using – the gradual move to the right among self-described leftists.
This move to the right is symbolised by the deemphasising of class politics and
the turn to identity politics, which has no utopian vision and can be serviced
for any political ends whatever. No analysis of class can proceed now without
some attempt to include concerns about identity even when none are relevant or
necessary, or when it is analytically preferable to subsume concerns about
identity to concerns about class (which is the majority of instances). As
Adolph Reed describes in a new article, ‘anti-racism’ has now become ‘a
neoliberal alternative to a left’, having now outlived its usefulness as an
organising strategy. Identity politics has in fact supported an entire industry
of ‘diversity managers’ who are busy furthering along a process of class recomposition
that I have identified in previous articles. The ruling and middle classes are
becoming more diverse, which is considered the apex of political understanding
to much of the left today, as the working class are written off as unimportant,
ignorant, or untrustworthy to make ‘correct’ political decisions, and so on.
The third answer is to turn the question on its head. I
argue that left culturalism has done more than any other ideological tendency
on the left to damage social cohesion and social justice in the last decade: by
throwing the gains of socially liberal movements over the past forty years into
serious doubt, as its practitioners further alienate themselves from the
working class politically and socially, lend support to the discredited social-democrat
parties and their feeble attempts to latch onto and contain the anger of
left-populist movements, fill the increasingly compromised trade unions with
functionaries of said parties, and by doing so empower the extreme-right as a
viable alternative to a do-nothing ‘left’. We are entering into yet another
cycle of social-democratic ‘revival’ worldwide and already experiencing the
inevitable disappointments and political stagnation that results from being
again duped. In Aotearoa this is characterised by capitulation after
capitulation from yet another Greens-backed Labour government. The recent
election in Finland also is worrying as the social democrats achieved an
election win but on the back of a very minimal programme that barely can call
itself ‘social reform’, with the right-wing nationalists snapping at their
heels.
The second reason I have identified requires more
elaboration. The function of anti-racist discourse is, in today’s society,
ideological. Its simplicity persists despite a wealth of evidence contradicting
it, as African-American scholar Adolph Reed explains.
Antiracist activism and scholarship proceed from the view that
statistical disparities in the distribution by race of goods and bads in the
society in which blacks appear worse off categorically (e.g. less wealth,
higher rates of unemployment, greater incidence of hypertensive and
cardiovascular disease) amount to evidence that “race” remains fundamentally
determinative of black Americans’ lives. As Merlin Chowkmanyun and I argue,
however, disparity is an outcome, not an
explanation, and deducing cause simplistically from outcome (e.g. treating
racially disparate outcomes as ipso facto evidence of racially invidious
causation) seems sufficient only if one
has already stacked the interpretive deck in favour of a particular causal
account.
How ironic that the subjectivist group of academics who
support these kinds of explanations are now the biggest advocates of positivist
approaches to social science research, as this is effectively what such research
amounts to – nominalist observation with no attempt to make any deep
theoretical understanding of the situation. This is a considerable about-turn
to make, especially since the very same academics who rely on such explanations
are very likely to have supported postmodernism and extreme variants of
interpretivism merely ten years ago.
But in a further twist, what is coupled with the
positivistic underpinnings of this research is a reliance on primordialised
abstractions like ‘white supremacy’ and ‘colonialism’ that are, of course, true
in their contexts, but in the new forms of anti-racist ideology are made to
assume an ahistorical, totalising form. For example, the statement that we
should not care about the Notre Dame cathedral fire in Paris because the church
is emblematic of ‘colonialism’ and ‘slavery’ is completely erroneous as the
church was built long before European slave economies that exploited African
labour, which such an explanation relies on, began to operate. These primordial
forces are also ‘impervious to changing historical circumstances’, as Reed
describes. For example, despite the fact many formerly colonised countries have
become independent, they are still ‘mentally colonised’ and thus white
supremacy can still be said to exist. The new, over-hyped ‘decolonial’ theory approach
uses this practice of translation to advance an idealist theory that
colonisation is in fact the imposition of systems of thinking and cultural
ideas, rather than a materialist theory that those ideas were false and used as
a proxy to steal resources. What is required by decolonial theory is a retreat
from so-called ‘Western epistemologies’ and a return to proper ‘cultural ideas’
– usually defined by particular architects of the decolonial theory itself and
justified through esoteric readings of scholars essential to national
liberation movements, such as Frantz Fanon.
Kenan Malik distinguishes between ‘the lived experience
of diversity’ – which, in my humanistic tradition I belong to, we are all a
part of and I celebrate unwaveringly – and ‘multiculturalism as political
process or policy’, which despite its intention has been incredibly damaging to
that diversity. It has diluted the critical aims of feminism and anti-racism to
irrelevancy and distorted the secularist, atheistic and humanistic critique of
the incorporation of religion explicitly into the public sphere by attacking it
incoherently as racist (and by doing so has unintendedly found friends in the
fundamentalist Christian right, who have been trying to produce a similar
silencing outcome for decades). It has also led to self-appointed ‘cultural’
representatives who import themselves into the public space and both public and
corporate governance structures, advancing exclusionary ideas about what
constitutes being an ‘authentic’ practitioner of one’s ‘identity’. These
self-established leaders become functionaries of state policies on diversity and
its management and proceed to draw illusionary boundaries and divisions between
groups. Through this embedding of cultural divisions, the organisation
principle of politics transitions from class to culture and loses its
ideological content.
The liberal left has participated in this process at
every step and is currently (with Labour in government) the leading political
force that continues to advance a politics without ideological content. It is
why, for example, despite the ‘left’ in the name, the liberal left in Aotearoa
supports and magnifies the political actions of the Iwi Chairs Forum because it
is seen to be representative of Māoridom and ‘Māori leadership’. The support
is therefore on cultural grounds that aims (and fails) to cut across the
inevitable class contradiction that results. The Iwi Chairs Forum is in fact comprised
of members who when considered as a bloc privately own and control billions of
dollars of assets through trusts and corporate bodies, and has been set up as a
means of further privatising resources for the purposes of capital accumulation
and valorisation. It is a capitalist bloc that is directly opposed to the
interests of the Māori working class, but one that astoundingly continues to
enjoy left-wing support.
Many leftists who want to maintain sympathy to such
tendencies tend to make the superficial and contentless remark that it’s not
about ‘class versus identity’ but ‘class and identity’; identity is meant to
‘mediate’ the lived experience of class. However, it is rarely clear from such
comments how this actually works, and almost exclusive reference is made to the
very same self-fulfilling identity politics discourses (i.e. the claim is made
with reference to other, also unsubstantiated claims from similar discursive bodies
– a hermetic circle without evidence), rather than a clear synthesis of social
and economic research. For example, it is much easier to explain the relative
economic deprivation of non-white people (considering that such social settings
can, have and will continue to change and may be more helpfully defined in
terms of ‘national economy’ than ‘ethnic group’ in the future, for instance) by
referring to the theory of imperialism, ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, and
uneven development proffered by Marxists over decades, i.e. economic
explanations. Explanations focused on discrimination do indeed mediate and
inform class, but, when understood in the generalised sense popularised by
liberal-left academia of ‘privilege’ and ‘oppression’ (i.e. all non-white
people are inherently ‘oppressed’), leads to serious distortion of the social
reality. We can turn to Adolph Reed again to explain why it is not so much that
identity mediates class, but identity politics in fact takes the form that it does because of class:
Antiracist politics is a class politics: it is rooted in the social
position and worldview, and material interests of the stratum of race relations
engineers and administrators who operate in [social-democrat/centrist] party
politics and as government functionaries, the punditry and commentariat,
education administration and the professoriate, corporate, social service and
non-profit sectors, and the multibillion-dollar diversity industry. That
stratum comes together around a common-sense commitment to the centrality of
race – and other categories of ascriptive identity – as the appropriate
discursive framework through which to articulate norms of justice and injustice
and through which to formulate remedial responses. It has grown and become
deeply embedded institutionally as an entailment of the victories of the 1960s.
He then says, “As the society moves farther away from the
regime of subordination and exclusion on explicitly racial terms to which
race-reductionist explanations were an immediately plausible response, race has become less potent as the dominant
metaphor, or blanket shorthand, through which class hierarchy is lived.”
This completely contradicts the discourses of critical race theories,
postcolonial and decolonial theory and so on, which steadfastly continue to
deny this claim despite the last two or three decades of historical change that
have led to class becoming, beyond reasonable doubt, the most important
sociological variable of explanation.
The inevitable failure of ‘left culturalism’ is thus
shown up for these three reasons: it is a mirror-image of the culturalism of
the New Right that has now unfortunately re-emerged as political orthodoxy, it is
supported by a ‘liberal left’ that is now embedded in the state as purveyors of
a new ideology that entrenches group identity as the primary political means of
organisation – which means they actively booster their analytical target of
‘neoliberalism’ and will help along the destruction of public and civic
discourse, and by doing so has contributed more than any contemporary left
tendency to sow social divisiveness amongst the general population. ‘Left’
culturalism is openly antagonistic to a socialist-humanist view of society that
envisages the emancipation of the working class and the freedom from, not the
binding to, restrictive identity labels. It must be rejected or the left will
be doomed.
