As everyone whose even slightly familiar with them knows First World Leftist spaces--not excluding openly Marxist spaces are absolutely infected with identity politics. Perhaps one sign of that is that I used the word "spaces", a common fixture of identity politics vernacular, instead of some other word to describe the Leftist scene. It's an issue I tend to dislike writing about what with the troll brigades of idpol know-nothings and my own proximity to the subject both in the sense of being "privileged" and my education in English literature. This post won't be an exploration of all the theoretical mistakes, practical mistakes, and downright subterfuge of Identity Politics and its unique brands of activism. Rather this is just a short rumination on Beyoncé's latest antics and its relation to idpol, not an essay-length breakdown of either. Full disclosure, I've never particularly liked Beyoncé's music, nor have I ever understood Beyoncé's cult. I'm sure if this article ever achieves any mild internet popularity the response will be that the reason I dislike Beyoncé is because I am white and male and so on and so forth.
Despite the best intentions of those either consciously or subconsciously following idpol ideology and strictures I couldn't bring myself to invest a lot of emotional skin in the game regarding Beyoncé's performance. I was rather struck by the bizarreness of it all, the parallel universe that passes for reality in the United States of America. How are we supposed to feel about a billionaire appropriating the black panthers legacy, with the dancers, of course dressed up scantily? It has rvrn been something of a hit in some harder Left anti-imperialist circles but I remember one person (correctly) in my view calling it a pornographication of history. But let's not stop there, as people pour over the performance looking for something subversive in the performance, we should issue a note of skepticism--can anyone actually believe that the American bourgeoisie would allow message that legitimately opposed their interests to broadcast in front of over a hundred million Americans and the world itself. There is the old argument that the bourgeoisie will sell anything, even something against their interests, therefore we should pay attention to the capitalist media. Almost as if we should go trenching through the desert hoping to find a hidden spring or use some sort of cypher to to divine the hidden truth from capitalist cultural media. Very often the Left forgets Brecht's famous warning that rather that as a radical artist, you don't get control of the mechanisms of cultural production under capitalism--those mechanisms get a hold of you. This was from a time when the media was far less concentrated than it is today, and Brecht was talking about the theatre in particular, so we should be triply-conscious of this when comes from the vast monopolistic media enterprises and artists like Beyoncé who are not self-consciously radical. Culturally, the United States and perhaps the West in general is in a deep state of cultural and economic decay, which in my view is trending towards a new kind of social-fascism. As numerous leaks on spying and numerous analyses of the monopoly media (including even the internet) we do not live in a free market of information; an aside while it would be superior than what we have even that would be problematic.
Which brings me to another point--if identity politics was so radical it wouldn't be plastered all over cable news. Anyone who watches American cable news knows that race is practically a 24/7 issue, which strikes one as counter-intuitive, if the ruling class wanted to get away with their racism wouldn't they try to keep quiet about race in general and act as if they were non-racists? In the US constant agitation serves as a replacement for what would seem to be the "rational" approach of a silent establishment as they hope to whip up resentment among whites against non-whites and frame the whole thing as a struggle for liberal civil rights against uneducated rednecks. Constant agitation over race and gender, of course keeps people distracted as even a "brosocialist" or "meninist" could discern. But the discourse is always very politically correct, always fitting into neat boxes of everything bad being white and male (the "capitalist" part is almost always dropped) and everything good belonging to women and "people of color". I've heard it said that "white male" is the identity politics version of the far right-wing canard of "the Jews!" a convenient scapegoat for all that is wrong in the world with members of the group in question being preternaturally evil until proven otherwise. It's not the same but there are certain superficial similarities that are readily apparent, for instance reading many accounts of things, European colonialism and patriarchy are the only reason capitalism is bad and not the inherent function of that system itself. Also one might bring up Imperialisms that are not Western? A full account of that beyond the scope of this post, but it only goes to add to the list of reasons why the practice and ideology of identity politics doesn't hold up well. We could go further, the discourse of "race" has replaced the older Left discourse on oppressed nationalities, so that we talk about black people as an oppressed race who obviously just want to get a fair seat on the bus of (white) America--the most hated nation in the world. Of course flipping a switch and replacing "race" with "oppressed nations" will not eliminate the scourge of identity politics as the discourses of several Marxist spaces show (many of the ones on reddit come to mind).
It's often said that the Left has been unprepared for the revolutionary impact of the capitalist system, economically speaking, I think in most ways, that is broadly untrue. More plausibly, the Left has been far more unprepared for capitalism's capacity to launch its own Cultural Revolutions and has not planned accordingly or been appropriately skeptical. One thing Beyoncé was praised for doing was bringing Black Lives Matter and sticking it straight in the faces of White America on their most hallowed occasion. However, Black Lives Matter is in league with and controlled by the democratic party as I've noted before, but something that was noted before by some black political observers at Black Agenda Report. Is anyone else getting skeptical and damn tired of the capitalist "revolutionaries" and their controlled revolution? It seems that OTPOR style tactics and ideology have bled into the opposition movements of the West. I will be doing a post in the future for those who don't believe that America creates "opposition" movements and even its own controlled opposition.
One last observation about the Beyoncé affair concerns the Black Panther legacy and the lyrics of the song "Formation": "I got hot sauce in my bag, swag." If this isn't an exemplary example of the "Pork Chop Nationalism" that the Panthers so roundly criticized, then I don't know what is.
