Australia. You’re a shitting disappointment. This is true, of course, on several counts which begin but do not end with settlement. But we hardly have time to scrub all our rotten gut of history has upchucked, do we? Let’s just look hard at a small stain of the last month and try to fix that one before it spreads all over the national rug.
In recent weeks, conditions were good for a decent popular conversation about something quite important: “identity politics”. (If you’re confused about what that means and why it’s important, I’ll explain it to you in a bit. If you already know what it means and would prefer not to have your opinion tested on the matter, I give you the advice I long have to persons offering me Liberal How to Vote cards: jog on, fuck-o.) Well, we didn’t have a decent popular conversation, did we? We chiefly made very loud noises about who was most silent, and then several of us congratulated Caroline Overington for saying nothing much very lightly about hardly anything at all.
In the past few weeks, two prominent persons have made unfavourable review at Australian literary events of “identity politics”—roughly, a way of thinking that supplants the idea of economic class with that of cultural identity, but we’ll get to a fuller and more tedious explanation shortly—and these comments have been much-discussed.
One was popular writer Clementine Ford. At the Feminist Writers Festival, she said, “I think identity politics are important and necessary, but I think that sometimes in our current activist circles we can become a little obsessed with the identity part of things, and not necessarily the progression part of things”. The other was popular novelist Lionel Shriver. In what has now become the subject of international report, this middling speech warned that fiction was diminished by the current mania for identity.
I’ll return to these declarations, their revelation and retorts shortly. But, for the present: it’s quite a popular view that a fixation on identity is ruining everyone’s prosperity, productivity and/or freedom. It spoils everything, apparently! Literature for Shriver. Feminism for Ford. If you believe The Australian, which I rarely fucking do, the very stuff of “civic life” is ruined by our focus on…right, I’ll explain it now. It’s going to take a minute. But, given that so many of you are so fucking absorbed in the matter of decrying or deifying this identity politics thing, maybe you should fucking know what it means. Especially before you tell me that Caroline Overington did not, in fact, take anything more than a thin libertarian dump in the pages of The Australian. God, that was awful.
This will involve a madly abbreviated history of pre identity politics politics. But, if I don’t do it quick and dirty, all you’ll have is Paul Kelly on hand. And I am pretty sure that guy lost his historic marbles in a neoliberal game of Bunny Hole. I mean to say. Kelly says that identity politics arose on the left as the result of the “failure of Soviet communism”. And, look, I won’t get into how that can’t be true at all for reasons of space-time and Trotsky. But permit me to say (1) calling identity politics an exclusively left response to life is rot. (I mean have you seen how “politically correct” Cory Bernardi can be? Don’t call him a racist, if what you mean is Islamophobe. Don’t dare feed him Halal food! Respect his nuanced identity preferences and food intolerances!) and (2) if you want a really great account of the rise of fragmented identity politics, you should read the late Ellen Meiksins Wood, or ask your genuinely leftist friends for a pointer to THE VAST BODY OF WORK from the left about how identity politics came, regrettably, to be. Again, I’m just your quick, dirty guide.
Okay. Here’s my brief, shitty summary of the rise of identity politics; that thing, expressed as trigger warnings, “calling out prejudice online”, conspicuous compassion and corrections to language, seen either as a way to (a) diminish Robust Debate or (b) ennoble the hitherto oppressed.
And if you’re getting impatient with me or are eager to Call Me Out Online early, here’s a spoiler: I don’t think identity politics can achieve either of these things.
You’ve heard the phrase “the bosses and the workers”, right? From the mid-19th century until about 40 years ago, most western people with a political consciousness, whether left or right, saw this as the primary social distinction. One either earned profit or was in the direct or indirect work of amassing profit for others. If you were a person of the right, you thought that this was the natural, or at least the desirable, order of things. If you were a person of the left, you thought that it was neither.
The left, once entirely in the business of ending the distinction between boss and worker, now turned its attention to upturning other power relationships: homophobia racism, sexism etc.
With the emergence of universal suffrage, medical and criminal bureaucracies, colonisation (and its unpleasant descendants, globalisation and financialisation) and heaps of other complexes, “the bosses and the workers” no longer sufficed to reflect what had become very evident identity differences between persons in the west. Capitalism—that system of organisation that demands a boss and worker relationship—was now seen as less than a totalising force.
The left, once entirely in the business of ending the distinction between boss and worker, now turned its attention to upturning other power relationships: homophobia racism, sexism etc. Capitalism was seen not as the defining or sustaining force for such cultural and social inequality, but just another thing to whine about. Just another thing with which, to use the current popular language, oppression would “intersect”. This was due in part to the post-war prosperity large numbers of people in the west enjoyed. For a time, capitalism had been tamed and—if you’re under 30, you won’t BELIEVE it—many people could afford an education, a child and a home.
Of course, the western world had not been perfected in this boom time, and persons of hitherto marginalised categories were entirely justified in demanding their name card at the civic buffet. Why aren’t there more people of colour at university? Why can’t a woman be a parliamentarian? Why must a homosexual person have their pleasure codified and punished?
These are not small things. No siree, Babs. If you go about pretending that it’s just some fucking coincidence that most of those privileged of power owe it all to hard work and talent and nothing to the advantages of their historically esteemed identity category, you’re delusional and/or contracted by Rupert Murdoch to hold such stupid beliefs. And, before you Call Me Out Online, yes, I have checked my privilege. I know that I am only able to write this palaver to a modest audience because of my identity category. Clearly, talent, and, indeed, the skill of journalistic brevity didn’t get me here. Being white had a lot to do with it.
So, while it is in my view and that of anyone with a functional human brain that marginalised persons had not just the right but the ethical obligation to claim their equality within a society that now legally promised it, some shit happened. The so -called laissez-faire western economic policies of the early 1970s declared that capitalism should just be left to its own devices. I am not going to get into how this form of shit thinking is not actually, as it claims, a hands-off approach to capitalism, but one that demands very particular intervention by the state. And I am not even going to talk about how it requires the poverty of so-called “developing” nations. Because you’re already bored as shit. But, for those one of you still reading, this is what happened: while we weren’t looking and busily (as we ought to have been during a nice relaxing interlude) exploring our selfhood and identity categories, capitalism turned nasty again.
So. We held on to the (intoxicating) habit of exploring our identity categories—and these became even more important to many of us as national distinctions fell away—and we forgot about that whole bosses-and-workers thing.
Let’s fast forward (god, please, Helen) to 2008 when the premier beneficiaries of “laissez-faire” economics demanded a big welfare cheque and actual millions of people in the west found themselves homeless—and we should say hello to The Australian’s least favourite economist here, Wayne Swan, who saved us from the aftershock of this growth-quake by applying the opposite of laissez-faire principles. He gave low-income earners some money to spend. You know. Guy got an award from a prestigious centrist banking magazine and everything, but let’s call him a left-wing rat bag for saving Australian capitalism, shall we?
Sexism causes poverty. This is utter identity politics. This is as weird, and almost the same, as saying that a bad attitude causes poverty.
Anyhow. What we saw happening after 2008 is many people in the west—but not in still comfy Australia—return to the language of the workers and the bosses. Record numbers of people attended Bernie Sanders rallies to hear a cranky old avowed socialist put the economy at the top of his agenda. Hundreds of thousands of young people joined UK Labour to vote for a cranky old avowed socialist, Jeremy Corbyn.
Forget that these guys are imperfect; which is, I guess, to say suspend your identity politics. Instead, think about how stark economic agenda now appeal to young people. Think about how Bernie Sanders answers cries of “Bernie” with “It’s not about Bernie!” Think about how there is a return among a diverse group of newly impoverished young westerners to the ides that capitalism is a totalising system, even as some of us remain wed to the old ideas that identity, and not class, is the truly central thing. Now, these young people don’t believe that capitalism’s defeat or mediation will lead to the total end of homophobia, racism etc. But they do believe that capitalism touches us all in a way that these other complexes do not. This is called solidarity. Which is what the fragmentation and pick-n-mix priorities of identity politics—what some people call intersectionality—makes impossible.
Now, there are still plenty of people who think that complexes like sexism and racism are just as forceful as capitalism in creating inequality. One of them is, or appears to be, Hillary Clinton. Both she and her husband play a good game of post-crash identity politics and they say things like “sexism causes poverty”. And they, and others like them, say that women’s increased participation in the labour force will be good for the economy. As though there are any fucking decent jobs remaining.
Sexism causes poverty. This is utter identity politics. For mine, and for a re-emerging group of people, this is as weird, and almost the same, as saying that a bad attitude causes poverty, which is what folks in The Australian are wont to. There is one thing that causes poverty, and that’s capitalism. I mean to say. Even the merest look at the machinery of capitalism will reveal its dependence on dearth. You don’t have the growth which The Australian keeps telling me is “natural” without the diminution of large groups of people—whatever identity category they happen to have at any point in history. There is no profit without poverty, unemployment and unpaid domestic labour. That’s just the way the thing works. And we could get into a way to civilise it, but shit, no one is reading. Go and get yourself some Keynes. I can’t be expected to cover everything, especially as I am (a) not that bright and (b) haven’t even got to Tuesday of last week yet.
So what we have now on both “left” and right is a group of people who think, basically, that capitalism is fine, capable of delivering prosperity, education, health etc. to all. Even people who say that wealth inequality is a problem don’t really think that capitalism is responsible for this. Poverty is just another unfortunate identity category that may intersect with others.
On the matter of “free speech”, Caroline Overington writes “I can’t be silent”. But fuck, I wish she would.
This is the thinking that brief period of post-war prosperity gave us. On the right, a la Overington and Shriver, the thinking goes that everyone has legal opportunity now so if you want, for example, to write great literature you shouldn’t let anything as “ridiculous as self-pity stand in your mighty way”. Why aren’t indigenous Australians writing books? Not because of their staggeringly high illiteracy rates which are, in any case, the result, according to The Australian, of morally corrupt fathers who just can’t get their shit together. But because they haven’t learned the art of genteel restraint and daily self affirmation in a tasteful mirror, such as Overington has. Who only got her job through hard work and natural talent.
(And also by being the journalist who exposed Norma Khouri, an author who fabricated details of an Islamic honour killing in order to sell books. It’s great that Overington performed that investigation. It’s also pretty funny that she is currently arguing with a Muslim woman about how little her authentic Muslim woman’s voice matters, when the inauthenticity of Khouri’s Muslim woman voice clearly mattered a lot.)
So, that’s what we have on the right: a bunch of people who think Those Less Fortunate should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, all the while ignoring the very 101 fact that the economic principles for which they so ardently advocate demand the amputation of bootstraps in some identity groups at birth, if not before.
But what we have on the now maturing “left”, a la Ford and Yassmin Abdel-Magied who wrote the most notable response to Shriver, is a commitment to identity politics. It’s pretty interesting that Ford, a writer who has consistently employed her gender identity category and experience of online harassment as the foundation for her thought, has newly disavowed identity politics—an inconsistency noted by the impressive Nayuka Gorrie in the one outstanding piece I have read on the entire identity politics “debate”.
Twerkers of the world. I’m not telling you to wear a sombrero. Frankly, it’s racist and you’d look like a dill.
Of course, Ford is entitled to change her views. If she has recently elected to detach herself from a personally based politics and describe the mechanics of a system with scant reference to her own experiences, I eagerly await this evolution. I would be very happy to read a popular feminist or leftist writer informed less by emotional storytelling and references to that reviled identity category “white men” and more to social structures. Bring it on. But, I understand that this politics, which has just begun to recede, remains very popular and I do understand that writing about one’s own encounters with terrible things is tempting.
And this is the temptation to which Abdel-Magied acceded. While I utterly understand the anger that she felt while listening to the intellectually unremarkable Shriver complain that she was being “silenced”—silenced for a fee and to a packed auditorium—I find Abdel-Magied’s sentiment impossible to describe as “left”.
While, it is certainly good to make a noise while some very well-paid person is claiming persecuted innocence, it is not, as Overington and many others see it, “left”. It has certainly been a tactic of the left. It is not, however, the founding principle of leftism.
It’s a good intention, obviously. And I think for Overington to charge Abdel-Magied, a twenty-something brown chick who I reckon might weigh about 45 kgs in a wet hijab, with “censorship” and responsible for a nation-wide “chill” that will detonate all that is noble about art etc. is bullshit. I am gobsmacked by the positive reception that greeted this twaddle.
On the matter of “free speech”, Caroline Overington writes “I can’t be silent,”. But fuck, I wish she would.
This is not, of course, to advocate for the mandatory silence of the right’s intellectually inert. I am not a brick from the monolithic “left” Overington describes come to shatter her fine concentration. I am a different kind of brick from a different kind of left. The kind a growing number of people in the west have begun once more to consult—perhaps a movement that has inspired Ford to make her first public attempts at critiquing identity politics; a movement, or movements, that focuses on fragmentation at the expense of solidarity. Let me assure Caroline and her marginalised class that they will not be deprived of—what was it?—the “cornerstone of liberty” by me.
Even if I felt morally entitled to demand Overington’s silence, which I do not, her freedom to provide two-bit exegeses of the worst eighteenth century thinkers in a vanity newspaper is assured. This newspaper, that, despite its slim and still-dieting readership, not only does not discourage but demands declaration like “I will not be silent on the matter of free speech” from its writers. Nearly all of them expert in adopting the very same posture of persecuted innocence—“Stop silencing me!”—of which they accuse “the left”.
I mean. To say. If you want to write your mighty work of right wing ideology, stop whining that small brown women are trying to silence you and do it.
No. However much I crave Caroline Overington’s silence, I’m not demanding nor do I have the power to demand it. But that’s the point, innit? Just as I, a broke-ass writer who has extinguished all hope of modest wealth or influence after 20 years of publicly telling the right’s intellectually inert to get fucked, I am fairly powerless. I am as powerless to jam the right wing media apparatus as I am to convince Abdel-Magied that the reason she was not asked to deliver that keynote address was not loathing for her identity category alone.
Of course, that racism plays a part. But, the totalising unity of the capitalism the “left” has forgotten to be angry about is there, too. And not just as an intersection, but as a foundation whose form and expression adapts over time. Today it’s a return, by institutions like The Australian, to Enlightenment principles—and I have been guilty of upholding such bollocks myself—which treat the world as a high school debate club where all one needs to do is speak reasonably, to let others speak in turn. But, capitalism also finds its expression in identity politics itself.
Now, whatever I say about the very fragmented and destructive nature of identity politics and however you feel that it is your moral duty to “call out” people wearing sombreros, the fact is, the strategy is in trouble. It’s in so much trouble, people who have built careers out of its elaboration are doubting it. And it’s in trouble because frankly, right wing writers like Overington—and, please, don’t tell me she’s from the centre when she is plainly a classical liberal to her core—or Shriver unintentionally make a bit of a point when they say that the “left” has paralysed itself with its zeal for correct language, appropriate costume party attire etc. Because it has.
And this is not to say for a moment that I think you should desist in attempting to understand the experience of all identity categories in the world—even though such a task is actually impossible. But, it is to say that you can’t wish a diverse, flexible and respectful world into existence without considering that there is a totalising, inflexible and passionless basis first to overcome.
To eschew the fragmentation of identity politics and to build a true “left”—not the thing that Overington or even many of her critics describe—doesn’t mean becoming a monolith, and thereby acceding to the “neutral” identity that people like Overington believe exists. It just means acknowledging that there is a monolith, which is not going to be smashed or even civilised unless you all acknowledge its existence together.
Twerkers of the world. I’m not telling you to wear a sombrero. Frankly, it’s racist and you’d look like a dill. But, I am suggesting that you temporarily lose interest in Shriver’s “right” to a hat. Let her have her unremarkable “silence” at a well-attended cultural event. Let us have that world we were promised but are yet to win.
