Instructive discussion by Daniel Burnfin, a recent PhD in Philosophy and German from University of Chicago, with whom I've had the benefit of discussing many issues in Marxist economics over the last couple of years. An excerpt from the beginning:
Ascriptive identity is a category that names different types of relatively immutable properties of individuals, whom it then groups according to those properties. Ascriptive identity concerns the properties with which individuals identify, ‘as’ which they identify themselves, or as which others identify them. That is, ascriptive identity concerns what individuals consciously think that they ‘are’ or what others think that they ‘are’. It concerns gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and so on. Moreover, ascriptive identity is primarily discursive. And it is the basis for so-called “identity politics”. Many leftists today treat class as though it were one identity among others; as though class politics were a subset of identity politics. For example, the “working class” understood as an identity might designate white, heterosexual male, denim-clad manual laborers, who listen to rock and roll and prefer lite beer. Of course, this is a caricature. But it illustrates the way in which class is distorted beyond recognition when it is understood as though it were an identity.
The Marxian concept of class does not concern the properties of individuals, or what they or others think that they ‘are’. Rather, it classifies individuals according to what they ‘do’ or the functions that they perform in a socio-economic system such as modern capitalism....
And from near the end:
“[T]he left” [today] designates a politically activated portion of the unproductive and professional-managerial segment of the working class. Evidence of this claim can be found by looking at the political developments between 2016 and 2020 as well as the DSA. One need only consider who speaks up as the left, which subclasses they belong to, and consider their priorities—such as “sustainability” or “equity”—to see that “the left” is permeated by the class standpoint of underemployed clerks and managers, or wealthy professionals. “The left” advocates its own, very specific subclass interests: i.e., defund the police and create more jobs for teachers; create more human resources positions for diversity and implicit-bias seminars; create green energy that will provide monopoly rents for progressive rentiers. The peculiar character of the contemporary, actually-existing left has recently been called the “Brahmin left”, a coalition of both underemployed and incredibly wealthy, educated moral progressives and civil rights advocates, in contrast to a “Merchant right”, comprised of petit bourgeois Trump supporters.[14] But I would suggest that it should simply be understood as what it has always been: radical liberalism. And I would also suggest that it cannot be “reformed” or made into whatever one might like it to be. It must simply be recognized as what it is, so that one can relate to it in a politically appropriate way.
Recent Comments