Recently, a particularly uninspired and uninspiring article on counterpunch caught my eye. The article is written in the really trite open letter style that swamps articles on social media, which despite the best attempts of a few brave souls still hasn't earned the mass derision that it richly deserves. Every so-often the politically correct Left decides to launch an attack on Zizek and the reason why is patently obvious--his books sell well and theirs don't. This attempt will probably not do any more to dint his popularity than previous attempts and its notable that this is the first article for counterpunch written by the "concerned" letter writer. Typically open letters often start with false praise and this letter is no different when the author isn't praising Zizek's brain, books or contrarianism, she is informing him that he is wrong about everything. It is often said that nothing identifies a hipster more than the rabid denial that someone is one and the charge of post-modernism is no different: "...but my criticism is not in the post-modern vein of refusing the notion of the universal." Who else sees where this is going?
My intention here is not to defend Zizek whose eclecticism and shock jock antics are well-known, but to point out that he is here merely a rorschach test for those portions of the Left that the author would like to attack directly but for some reason has chosen not to. The author excerpts a section from one of Zizek's well-known hobby-horses of emphasizing the need to defend Western values on the Left and his analysis of "capitalism with Asian values" which emphasizes that capitalism no longer needs the Western-centric radically emancipatory universal values that the (postmodern) Left commonly critiques. The author decides it opportune to engage in a rather shallow discussion of the nature of the Enlightenment without touching his essential point. Zizek in first presenting his argument confined it mainly to the authoritarian polities of Singapore (where the term "capitalism with Asian values" originated) and China and proceeded with some well-worn academic tripe about Buddhism and capitalism in the Weberian vein. But since then recent developments have far from disproved his contention with the rise of Hindu fascist Nahrendra Modi to power who Zizek calls "a most brutal neoliberal" and even the acceptance of many elements of capitalism by the so-called Islamic State. We analyzed Westra's bare-bones conception of capitalism as a mode of production for profit that is oriented towards the abstract accumulation of mercantile wealth from the perspective of the seller. From that perspective its pretty clear that the Enlightenment thought and values that served as capitalism's justification is no longer really necessary, especially after escaping its European shell.
To be clear, the values of the Enlightenment are no longer really necessary in the rest of the West, in fact they've been or are being steadily abandoned. Some feints towards those values will always probably be necessary but that is a distraction from the real substantive content. Michael Hudson in his book Killing The Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy makes a solid case that the economic legacy of the Enlightenment and classical political economy is in their program to liberate the barely post-feudal economies of Europe and its offshoots from rentier interests for the purposes of reducing economic costs and increasing efficiency. Under the umbrella of what may broadly be called rentier interests were the landlord classes, chartered monopoly merchants and financial/usurer's capital. In his superb book Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Crisis: Parasitic Finance Capital Ismael-Hussein Zadeh explains some of reasons that the European bourgeoisie began to retreat from this radical legacy of attacking the unearned economic privilege of the rentier classes: 1. the necessity of forming a united front among the propertied classes against the proletariat 2. changes in the structure of capitalist ownership bringing the world outlook of the productive bourgeoisie closer to that of the rentiers they had previously decried. I will go more in-depth in the post on economic thought and the Enlightenment but for now it is sufficient to say that these changes began to occur in the late 19th century and that economic thought has increasingly reflected it.
Returning to the author's conception of the Enlightenment the author starts from a loaded position about how the Enlightenment could be defended and then seems to work in a discussion of Hegel's merits and demerits--as if he was the entire Enlightenment or a substitute for the phenomenon as a whole. Hegel has not been fashionable since the 1840s and hence rarely deeply studied but here the author is repeating a narrative about him that anyone vaguely familiar with post-colonial studies must already know. But this shallow dismissal of Hegel reminds me of a habit of intellectual derision and feigned knowledge popular in academia today that John Dolan sums up: "The notion that Stevens might be a racist AND a great poet, just as Dworkin might be a fat loon AND a crucial figure in feminist intellectual history is simply beyond our Beige compatriots." he goes on to cite a scene from the day after tomorrow where a male character argues that Nietzsche was the most profound thinker of the 19th century only to be trumped by the female love interest who says that he was a chauvinist in love with his sister. So suffice it to say that the notion that Hegel might have been a racist as well as one of the greatest philosophers in intellectual history with something still salvageable in his thought is beyond our author here. Just like the notion that the Enlightenment could have been a major progressive step for mankind as well as also having devastating consequences.
Implicitly understanding that her position is the politically correct orthodoxy of the academic "Left" the author attempts to lure us in with false contrarianism. Zizek may seem like an unorthodox radical contrarian, the author seems to say, but are YOU ready for the redpill about Europe that even Zizek won't touch? The author sets it up for us: Enlightenment Europeans didn't just fail to live up to their values but Enlightenment ideals were far from innocent. This position, in one form or another, was expressed to great academic acclaim by Adorno, Focault, Furet, Blaut, Said and others decades ago. What is the clincher for her? That slavery and the Atlantic slave trade took place during the Enlightenment. Neglecting that it also took place before the Enlightenment and was also plied in the Indian Ocean over a longer period of time, the author fails to point out that Enlightenment-inspired movements were the first to successfully abolish slavery and challenge a barbaric social relation that was practiced nearly everywhere. But that history is small beans compared to the author's main contention: the Enlightenment's conception of freedom is racist. And why is that? "What freedom meant, and what being a human being meant, was premised on having an opposite--the non-being of the slave." You can see where this is going. A similar argument is presented Greg Grandin's overall decent book The Empire of Necessity if anyone needs a reference, which argues that for people at the time to conceive of themselves as free beings they needed an opposite for reference. Now, for people in pre-modern times living in traditional class societies, "freedom" in the modern sense usually never meant much more then the absence of slavery. The Roman Patricians taught their children that the worst fate that could befall a person was to become a slave--while keeping slaves themselves. Nor was there anything unique in European slavery in considering the slave "a non-being"; Orlando Patterson in studying slavery in sixty-six societies argues that the position of the slave as being a "socially dead" being is common practice. The other position that what made European slavery in the Atlantic world unique was that it was a racialized and heritable position is also questionable in my view. Michael Parenti in his book The Assassination Of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Rome (whatever its flaws) draws on some sources and scholars that convincingly argue that German slaves in Rome were "racialized" by the slaveholding class and that the remittance of the children of slaves from slavery was far less common than usually thought. I would not be surprised to find out that other romantic views about the benign character of slavery in non-western societies also turned out to be false.
But returning to the author, from all this the privileging of whiteness flows, so that therefore it is impossible to have Enlightenment-inspired freedom without privileging "whiteness" and therefore oppressing the Other. I'm going to take a small moment here to ask: who invented the concept of white privilege? Was it the Weathermen? Was it Fanon? Was it Du Bois or even Frederick Douglas? It was actually none of these. During the French Revolution, the French radicals were on the outs with the American revolutionaries that had partially inspired the French Revolution in the first place. At this point they began to critique what they increasingly saw as the American Revolution's conservative nature: they had thrown off Britain, a state dominated by old regime aristocrats, and had moved towards instituting many popular liberties amongst themselves but what they retained was what the French radicals called "the aristocracy of the epidermis." according to Domenico Losurdo. Its notable that the reactionaries that opposed the radical revolutionaries tried to re-institute the slave trade and slavery. Similarly, during this same time, critiques of Empire, however limited, began to emerge; Empire and colonialism were hardly dirty words before modern times, they seem to have existed in most class societies. The direct correlation between the Enlightenment and King Leopold's Congo or the Holocaust hardly seems sustainable as Anthony Pagdin correctly argues in the preface to his book on the Enlightenment.
When the author tells us that all the hopes and horrors of modernity are intertangled and therefore it should be dispensed with, she may think she is saying something profound but only tells us that there are contradictions in history and the world. Utilizing Jaffe's reading of Western democracy as a global form of apartheid she chides Zizek that "our" democracies cannot be disentangled from whiteness. There is a theoretical problem with equating settler-colonial societies like South Africa and others with European ones--imperialist nations they maybe. It is not as if Zizek doesn't talk about "new apartheids" as a feature of our age, anyway. But it raises the question, is bourgeois democracy white? One feature of our time, has been the spread of bourgeois democracy through the Third World beginning in the late 80s and continuing into our time through the so-called third and fourth waves of democratization. These developments thrilled identity circles even when they led to ruin like during the Arab Spring. Even in the mid-19th century most of the world's political democracies were actually in Latin America. We will leave aside the true nature of these democracies.
With the disappointments of national liberation struggles in the 1960s the discourse has increasingly shifted to "race" as the mode of analysis. Now the struggle and accepted parameters of debate revolves around abolishing "whiteness" whatever that may actually mean; the more sophisticated notions of this discourse hold that anyone who has darker skin is inherently more oppressed than someone who has lighter skin. The latter increasingly encompasses people who are not European or who do not have skin traditionally considered "white". Some people realize the problems of this shifting scale and try to form a united front against Europeans and European settlers on an anything-but-class basis. In reality, hatred of whites usually isn't enough to hold the various oppressed nations together in the United States or anywhere, much less lead them to victory. What is necessary is to identity specific conditions of national oppression and to organize on the basis of a particular nation, as a cultural and social entity, not just a skin color. A "white" left-wing Venezuelan patriot can do more to advance revolution than someone on twitter or tumblr denouncing whiteness. But the post-modern project does not respect nation-states, even those of the oppressed, and what they profess is a kind of cosmopolitanism of différance to use Derrida's term.
Styve proceeds with the usual postmodern performative contradiction: "Don't get me wrong, I was incredibly hopeful and in awe when the Greeks went to the polls last year and voted OXI." This should be read: "look, its not like I don't see what your saying but...you (we) need to check your (our) privilege." she continues by mournfully admitting: "...we have come to the extreme position where even arguing for a full welfare state seems incredibly radical." And here it is, the friction between "white" imperialist social democracy and neoliberal identity politics. As a liberal, Styve wants to believe but also what about people of color™? If we can't guarantee that everything will be perfect for them then it would be better just to not do anything. Don't build solidarity; break down barriers.
While this all might seem like a serious competition between Zizek's evil modernist white male communism and Styve's "radical" post-modern racial abolitionism it is nothing of the sort. It is a struggle between two competing post-modernisms, the one we are analyzing currently, and Zizek's weird project of trying to push communism through the EU. She refers to the dependency theorists of the 1970s who sought analyze how the core working class was benefiting from imperialism and says: "Now, despite the relative and increasing poverty of the European precariat to what extent are they (we!) willing to give up the privileges that being a citizen of the Core gives?" I have already analyzed the issue of the labor aristocracy here but it pains me to say that while as much I found Third Worldist (again for lack of a better term) theory exhilarating in its willingness to question popular Left orthodoxy the politics of it are sometimes not much different than neoliberalism. It maybe forgotten that some of Milton Friedman's most acclaimed work was when he appropriated Marx and Engels concept of a labor aristocracy for capitalist purposes and argued that unions hurt members of the working class outside of its membership and in developing countries. What feeling human being or revolutionary could argue with such logic? It didn't help that the leadership of the developed nation unions were often reactionary.
For Adolph Reed, identity politics isn't just co-opted by neoliberalism, it is neoliberalism. Aside from the superficial similarity between identity politics and neoliberalism in the promulgation of a strange brew of ultra-individualism, anti-communism, and red baiting, we see a proliferation of talking points designed to handle privilege from the Right. This is indeed where the original neoliberals got their start; Union-busting for the less fortunate. It is pretty blatant in some of Friedman's documentaries, when he wasn't tipping his fedora and going on about how inheriting millions is the same as inheriting musical ability and eye color, he was walking around the streets of Singapore or Hong Kong showing vibrant displays of lights and commodities, small street venders cart-pushing their way out of poverty. The message: stepping in the way of capitalism's exploitation of the less fortunate was not only the privilege of the fortunate but a racist Euro-centric approach. Don't protest sweatshops. For that matter, you shouldn't protest political repression in a place like South Korea either because capitalism is bringing home the goods there.
Fortunately, for neoliberalism and the resentful right, there is no end to privilege politics, and it never will, as capitalism will never be able to provide prosperity, much less employment for all of humanity. What the ruling class fears is not paying more or having to bestow more privileges to certain segments of the population but independent working class organization. Contrary to Styve who says we have no credibility to lead the revolution in the West, the real privilege is that of doing nothing. Many non-Westerners have said it, the idea that Westerners should await liberation from capitalism while non-Westerners die fighting to overthrow it is a privileged one. The historical case shows that revolution was easier when there was a highly-organized radical movement in the global North.
Fortunately, some on the Left are questioning identity dogma and its practice. Contrary to identity politics attacking "whiteness" or encouraging mass migration of "non-white" people into Europe will not destroy the European or white identity. If we follow Stalin's theory of nationalism, nations aren't completely a creation of capitalism and they won't disappear until the advanced stage of communism. Stalin maybe getting his revenge as the EU is increasingly torn apart by nationalist divisions proving not only the hard reality of inter-imperialist struggle within the EU banner but also the division between core and periphery in Europe. A common subcontinental civilization may not be enough to unite Europe especially under capitalism. Likewise, there's more to being German or French then being white and many oppressed groups and nations in Europe and Russia are "white". Stalin in his time criticized Zionism as being an unscientific idea as it posited that Jews as members of a "race" were the same everywhere and thus ignored real national differences between Jews across countries. Unfortunately for people who live in imperialist nations there are cultural and ideological reasons for chauvinism and if the intention in joining the struggle is to purify oneself of it there then we will never be pure. People are trained to think that the way to undo "racism" from their minds is to not think or express any chauvinist thought rather than trying to change social relations or build solidarity. Imperialism uses this to its advantage by thinking the less offensive it makes itself and the more people from oppressed nations it invites to join the oppressor nations, the longer it can prolong this existence. In some ways, immigration bolsters oppressor nation privileges by inviting workers from the outside to fill the lowest and hardest work in society, in order to dent class consciousness or contradiction within or to move more native citizens into the middle class. This is not always the case though but the irony is that immigration can advance "white privilege" or at the least help keep imperialism going contrary to stated intentions.
History offered us one glimpse into a terrifying vision of capitalism without "whiteness" when fascist Japan was rampaging across Asia killing millions of people in the nations it "liberated"; it was proclaiming the end of white colonialism in Asia in its propaganda and maybe even the world. Its propagandists proclaimed that communism was a European ideology and that it was a screen for greater "white" domination. It is eeiry how much post-modernists echo Japanese fascist propagandists sometimes. It wasn't for nothing that the German philosopher Habermas called Focault: "a young conservative" because of the way he and other post-modernists integrated irrational conservative ideas reminiscent of the interwar period into a left-guise. It is likely that as capitalism dies it will increasingly conceal itself beneath a "non-white" mask. What we need is real proletarian politics and that is admittedly difficult to develop and push in the West but class is the key to ending other oppressions. Identity politics offers an ameliorative and libertarian edge for the system, implicitly feeding the illusion that imperialism would end of its own accord if the more repressive and chauvinistic elements of it disappeared. To appropriate Zizek *sniff* the Truth is exactly the opposite as what Styve maintains: "whiteness" could collapse and capitalism could keep going. This is especially the case that now that so much of its key architecture is located in Asia and elsewhere. Styve says that only the end of the world would end whiteness; but as Jameson and Zizek point out in the developed nations it is easier to imagine than the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Hopefully this will be the last time I write about the identity wars on this blog for sometime because of discomfort with it, boredom with it, and the pens of superior critics out there. But I could not avoid commenting on this little piece because as bad as Zizek can be at least he doesn't lie to the people and say he's not part of the European elite, he admits that it would be a lie, as European to say that he does not have a Eurocentric point of view. Can we say the same about those feigning anti-racist purity?
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