This essay excoriates (from the left) what passes for "socialism" in certain circles these days, as reflected in the recent 2022 "Socialism Conference" in Chicago, which even included some philosophers (I missed it, happily). Some excerpts, with some interspersed observations:
The vast majority of panels were on topics related to police/prison abolition, antiracism, reproductive rights, opening borders, and other progressive movements and causes with precious little to do with socialism proper. And while there were panels billed under the categories of “labor movement” or “socialist theory and strategy” (for example, “Class Struggle Unionism,” featuring union negotiator and labor lawyer Joe Burns, and “The ABCs of Marxism”), these topics received no more time, and often far less attention, than abolitionism or various kinds of identity politics. In other words, the Socialist Conference treated the labor movement—and even socialism itself—as just one of many progressive causes, and class as just another identity around which to organize....
[M]uch of the conference was devoted to making the case that any progressive cause or movement actually is socialism. Keynote speaker Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor and a center director at the City University of New York, claimed that abolition is communism, race the modality through which class is lived, and mass criminalization class war, pretty much all in the same breath.
Speaker Robin D.G. Kelley, professor of history at UCLA, argued that we have all been bequeathed an impoverished view of socialism, which, apparently, can be about oh-so-much-more than just class struggle. In a 50-minute talk, he blamed the failure of previous international socialist movements on white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, the failure to center antiracism, and an internationalism that was insufficiently internationalist. The socialist project, in Kelley’s view, must be about abolition, reparations, antiracism, and climate justice. Socialism can even, he insisted, require skepticism of “science as a product of Enlightenment rationality”—it is not just a fight against capitalism but also patriarchy, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, settler colonialism, and more.
“The socialist project isn’t just about changing material conditions,” Kelley announced. “It is a spiritual and ethical project. It has to be. It is a psychological, cultural, and dare I say, civilizational project, in the sense that we need to create a new kind of civil society."
So much for Marx's (correct) idea that people have the form of consciousness their economic circumstances require, and that exhortations to have a different "spiritual and ethical project" have always been, and will continue to be, impotent without a change in material circumstances.
For the purposes of understanding the Socialist Conference and its political tendency, we need only consider which traditions are being displaced, discredited, de-emphasized, redefined, and watered down through endless recombination with others: those of universalism and class struggle.
Identity politics redirects radical energy away from class struggle and obfuscates the class position of the professionals, managers, and academic and media elites who promote it, a point so thoroughly explored elsewhere that it hardly requires recapitulation here. However, the 2022 Socialism Conference—with its pageant of writers, professors, and nonprofit/university managers redefining socialism—illustrates that point with rare clarity.....
The unwillingness of supposedly "left" academics to consider how their class position affects their ideology really is astonishing. Does anyone think that the "diversity" industry would survive if it were not in the interest of a certain class of academics?
This...kind of class obfuscation could be found throughout the conference. In perhaps the most eyebrow-raising panel of the whole conference, “Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics,” speaker Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò specifically referenced the “class reductionist” or “class first” Left when making the case for identity politics and what he called the “class plus Left” (again, getting out ahead of the criticism). He acknowledged that identity politics are weaponized in pursuit of personal or anti-solidaristic group interests but blamed the problem not on identity politics itself but its co-option by political, social, and economic elites. By his account, the real identity politics is that put forward by the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 statement, often credited with laying the groundwork for identity politics as a theoretical and organizing concept, and an identitarian theory of interlocking oppressions that critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw would later term intersectionality. Conversely, again, by this account, liberal identity politics is the universalist colorblind politics of the center-Left and center-Right promoted by elites.
The problems with this narrative should be immediately apparent. First, mainstream liberals have supported non-colorblind policies like affirmative action as far back as the Kennedy and LBJ administrations in the 1960s, and now openly embrace the extreme racialist identity politics of the Combahee River Collective. Intersectionality and social justice discourse around “equality vs equity” became mainstream among liberals and progressive Democrats years, arguably decades ago. Táíwò ignores both history and the present when he lumps the “center-Right” and “center-Left” together in a sleight of hand that collapses the differences between Richard Nixon and Bill Gates (representative examples of his own choosing) to create a class of political and economic elites that excludes himself, a professor of philosophy at prestigious Georgetown University.
Identity politics was not “captured” by political, economic, and social elites—it was created by them. Despite the folksy-sounding name, the Combahee River Collective was a collective of mostly scholars and academics. Their ranks included Audre Lorde, sisters Beverly and Barbara Smith, Gloria Akasha Hull, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Cheryl Clarke, and Chirlane McCray, among others. Feel free to google the names you don’t know. Many were educated at some of the nation’s top universities and some went on to become professors at them. They entered academia, politics, and nonprofits and headed various centers and university hospitals and the like. McCray, despite her participation in the black lesbian socialist collective, later went on to marry Bill de Blasio.
Political elites and capitalists cannot be said to have “co-opted” intersectional identity politics when they deploy it in much the same manner as elite workers in the professional-managerial class, especially its activist subset. Intersectional identity politics are perfectly compatible with capitalism because, as Adolph Reed has pointed out, it tacitly accepts inequality so long as it is spread evenly across certain identity groups. Capitalists now embrace identity politics in part to distract from growing economic inequality. They could not so easily embrace actual socialism or class struggle, except perhaps aesthetically, whereas corporations and capitalist elites can be antiracist without compromising their interests or calling attention to their own class position....
(Thanks to Paul Russell for the pointer.)
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