It is a common misconception that the human world is currently undergoing a period of ‘globalisation’ where the world is increasingly becoming ‘connected’. This period is supposedly differentiated from the past because, all of a sudden, people and commodities are moving across the world at increasingly rapid paces. This also supposedly means that ‘culture’ has now been forced to mix, proliferate and spread across the globe in a similar fashion. Such an admission wrongly implies that before this period, the human world consisted of self-sufficient, closed, unconnected socio-political units (often hypostatically referred to as ‘cultures’) that seemingly materialised from the ether and did not engage with each other. Regardless of its astonishing inaccuracy, this idea powers a large majority of the modes of political thought that dominate today.
Not only does this culturalist notion of ‘globalisation’ require considerable historical occlusion and distortion, it also conceals the extent to which the ‘mixing’ it attests to is emphatically not occurring. It cannot explain why in the West, the quickening movement of commodities and money has not caused economies to flourish and multiculturalism to thrive. In fact the opposite has occurred. Western economies are now thoroughly de-hegemonising, even undergoing self-inflicted shocks such as with ‘Brexit’ in the United Kingdom. The modern nation state, which subordinated any perceptible ‘ethnic’ character of a nation-state to a primary function of developing a commonly-understood citizenry, is now increasingly under threat from ascendant ethnic nationalists and xenophobic populists. These politicians gain much of their support from the downwardly mobile middle classes and severely disenfranchised members of the working classes that nonetheless display passionate attachments to modern, often nostalgic, ideas of their nation. The ‘politics of difference’ that was proliferated by academics in the 1980s and 90s and so key to globalisation discourse has reached a brick wall. Across the globe, the extreme-right now presents itself as ‘anti-globalisation’, threatening to reverse a process that has long been thought inexorable.
The nationalist revolt against globalisation is occurring just as the old ‘centres’ of the world-system are experiencing drastically increased material inequalities, while many of the ‘peripheries’ and formerly colonised countries are lifting many people out of abject poverty and creating new elite strata. It may come as no surprise that it is the new globalising elites that are the primary promoters of the false globalisation discourse. Terms such as ‘hybridity’, ‘diaspora’, and ‘border crossings’ have emerged from academic social theories once regarded as renegade, counter-hegemonic, or even ‘leftist’ (in an albeit rather nebulous way), but are now empty slogans that are the foremost amplifications of these new elites. They are somewhat reflective of a quite specific experience of the world’s diversity, from ‘above’ in the professional-managerial, financial and bureaucratic strata. Emerging in opposition to this discourse, on both the Left and the Right, and predominantly from the middle classes, are notions of a kind of reinvented ‘lived experience’ rooted in revisionist ideas of ethnicity, religion, ‘culture’ or gender.
Interestingly, although this idea of a ‘lived experience’ appears on the face of it a progressive answer to the wrongheadedness of the globalisation discourse, it actually accepts one of its most inaccurate claims – that before ‘globalisation’ there were distinct and self-sufficient ‘cultures’, where all one must do to resist the encroaching force is to retreat to these ‘cultures’. This is misled nostalgia at best and complete sophistry at worst. It is also by no means a progressive idea despite being obsessively touted as such by the liberal establishment and academe. In fact it is more than likely an empowering contribution to reactionary and regressive political ideologies. Key to the operation of this politics on both the Left and Right is the elevation of self-appointed cultural representatives who claim to speak for groups or ‘communities’ that in fact do not exist in the homogeneities which must be presupposed for such a communicative act to be effective.
This failure to ‘represent’ everyone – amidst increasing public space through which to attempt to do it – is a key reason why this politics is galvanising people to strongly follow one side or the other, resulting in an ever more polarised society. Because it relies on a simplistic and pernicious narrative that is reductive and distorted, yet superficially meaningful to an array of different people, a coterie is created of deeply invested followers on either side (despite being, for the most part, philosophically identical) while a large section of the population remains unfazed and eventually tired out by the entire exchange. Hence the unending, futile snowball collision between ‘social justice warriors’ and the ‘alt-right’.
On the Right, nativists claim that Europeans have a common ‘white identity’, a ‘white culture’ and ‘white experience’. This is outlandish and absurd, and is often premised on dangerous and unsubtle allusions to fascist rhetoric common in the twentieth century. Religious variants of nationalism are also unfortunately common today, despite having once been largely vanquished. The theocratic governments currently in power in India, Iran and Saudi Arabia are supposedly structured by rules passed by lawmakers that reflect divine order or instruction –an excuse used to humiliate and murder religious or ethnic minorities in those countries. These forms of ethnic and religious nationalism are reactionary throwbacks that thrive on either the ignorance or angry nihilism of the populace, cheap sloganeering that taps into the construction of a feared and hated enemy, and the dehumanisation of said enemy.
The Left or so-called ‘liberal’ version of this rhetoric can be found in ‘culturalist’ variants of Left politics, such as in variants of feminism, postcolonial theory and ‘critical race’ politics (ironically not very ‘critical’ about its key assumptions), and indigenous politics. The main problem with the ‘Left’ variants of these politics, apart from their basis in flawed social ontology, is that they are functionally nullified by their participation in the fragmentation, division and antagonising of potentially agreeable social constituencies, which is completely inimical to solving any of the problems they purport to identify.
Therefore proponents not only gain traction from the popular nihilism of the politically disenfranchised and impressionable, but also become fatalistic themselves about their prospects of political success. They commonly turn inward in a self-annihilating solipsism, which is often easy enough to sustain as many who elevate themselves as cultural representatives in this vein are from economically and materially comfortable backgrounds. Characteristically, they suffer from a serious analytical blindspot to the reality of worsening class inequalities, especially inequalities internal to the groups which they misleadingly represent in their rhetorical projections. When they do try to ‘connect the dots’, so to speak, between the patchwork quilt of differences, through buzzwords like ‘intersectionality’, the messaging and activity that results is so confused, unrelatable and contrived that little meaningful emerges as a consequence.
To reiterate, it is notable that this retreat to the non-existent coherency of some rooted form of ‘lived experience’ is only currently significant in countries facing the threat of economic stagnancy or decline. It is arguable that the opposite is occurring in countries experiencing rapid capitalist accession, such as China. As the inequality gap closes in these countries, there is a widespread suppression of ethnification and social fragmentation. Social anthropologist Jonathan Friedman argues that this pattern, of hegemonisation-modernisation and dehegemonisation-demodernisation, has occurred in cyclical patterns throughout history.
The future of the world-system appears so apocalyptic because these nihilistic forces of retreat and division are the horizon of politics today, constituting a decline that reverberates with increasing inequality. We are used to hearing, for example, stories of political leaders covering up more and more extraordinary stories of corruption, abuse of power and sanctioned murder – or how the bell is tolling on the Doomsday Clock. The key panacea to this ill-feeling and destruction is to identify and heal the wound it exuded from. The eradication of global class inequality is the key axiom that will determine whether these destructive movements will survive or be imperilled by their own contradictions.
