On Identitarianism: A Defense of a Strawman

by Red Maistre on December 18, 2013

For this is how things are: the diminution and leveling of European man
constitutes our greatest danger, for the sight of him makes us weary. — We
can see nothing today that wants to grow greater, we suspect that things
will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured,
more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more
Chinese, more Christian — there is no doubt that man is getting “better” all
the time. (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals)

To remove the strong by means of a strong people brings weakness; to

remove the strong by means of a weak people brings strength. (“The
Elimination of Strength”, The Book of Lord Shang)

The universal has been blunted by difference, language games have

overthrown universal reason, and solidarity has been betrayed by
individualism: a common, severe doxa in our age of austerity. At the root of
this threefold betrayal is the principle of identity which has allegedly
overtaken the rightful primacy of class. The interventions made by Mark
Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, Jodi Dean’s Comrades, and Micheal
Rechtenwald’s What’s Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality
Theory)? (itself a response to the first) are together just one more
manifestation of this line of thought that can claim endorsement from
influential intellectual figures such as Badiou and Žižek, but clearly reflects
a wider anxiety beyond academia.1 What is called “identity politics”, so the
narrative runs, have sabotaged “the Left” by sowing discord through
moralizing and individualizing discourses about victimization that distract
from the real business of confronting the structures of capitalism. The
creation of the radically new has been stunted by the protection of static
communitarian niches, and socialist unity has given way hyper-refined
bickering about discourse.

What confuses the debate from the beginning is the mystifying lack of a
specific target. The paucity of details within all of the pieces (there is much
talk about internet politics, considering the absence of links) preemptively
sabotages any response. More importantly, those who practice “identity
politics”, on or off the internet, rarely if ever describe what they do as
“identity politics”: such people often make some claim to belonging to
universalistic traditions like liberalism, anarchism, or Marxism. It is a term
that seems to be exclusively used in a contemptuous sense by those who
oppose it. Nor was the term used by any of the the alleged founders of this
trend during the radicalism of the ’60s or ’70s. As the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes:

“Identity politics” can draw on intellectual precursors from Mary

Wollstonecraft to Frantz Fanon, writing that actually uses this specific
phrase, with all its contemporary baggage, is limited almost exclusively to
the last twenty years. Thus it was barely as intellectuals started to
systematically outline and defend the philosophical underpinnings of
identity politics that we [intellectuals] simultaneously began to challenge
them.

In other words, the term was the product of the ’80s or ’90s, of the era of
the long Restoration, in which the right was seeking to roll back
revolutionary gains in all fronts. It bears the suspicious mark of a
reactionary misreading of a political phenomena, as opposed to being any
type of fair, let alone neutral, description.

The second factor is that these attacks are always qualified by statements
that dismissing “identity politics” is not the same as siding against the
various identity groups struggling for rights and dignity. This has the same
(lack of) convincingness as the arguments of those who assent to the
capitalist-imperialist cliches about the tyranny, corruption, and barbarism of
the periphery, who proclaim that solidarity with those under attack by the
colonizers is at least just as bad as supporting the colonizers themselves,
while in the end saying they are still personally opposed to imperialism. In
both cases, one can imagine a person sincerely holding such an opinion.
But their arguments rob one of any positive reason for caring for the
struggles of the oppressed in question, who are separated from us on a
lower tier of the epistemic hierarchy. “They” are trapped in their
irredeemably particularistic settings, while “We”, liberated from identity and
place, look on in clinical detachment. At the same time, these nuances,
whether they amount to anything or not, must be acknowledged in any fair
reply.

The most powerful ideas are those which can co-opt even its critics, or at
least can smuggle past its main assumptions unmolested. Many of the
responses to Fisher’s piece have sought to engage with it on the the level
of its Gothic metaphorical language, or have ceded that the author has
valid concerns, but take things too far. The vampires are in another castle,
if only the author should read this or that, etc. The de-valuation of certain
concepts by the anti-identitarian camp is not put in question. In the end, no
one wants to be the monster at the end. This makes it all the more
necessary, following Malcolm Bull, to “read like a loser”, as if we were
members of the loathed vampiric identitarian Trojan Horse allegedly in our
midst. This would mean taking up the tainted concepts — ressentiment,
individuality, identity — and seek to re-appropriate them as positive for their
own sake, and not merely by sufferance.

Continuing the Slave Revolt

It is argued that we need to combat the general spirit of pathology and

depression that is allegedly working against the advancement of revolution,
free of all merely particularistic burdens, towards the wonder of the future.
Strength, health, “sexiness”, and laughter are to be affirmed, while what
disturbs this happy equilibrium is to exorcised as the work of parasites and
outsiders working in bad faith, as the doubly evil vestiges of a Christian
past (or perhaps just of Stalin and the Chinese Cultural Revolution). At
bottom is the self-defeating poison of ressentiment, the envious tearing
down and demonization of the allegedly more privileged and professionally
successful.

Behind this position (explicitly in Fisher, implicitly and not disputed in the
other two authors) is a Nietzschean narrative of the millennia long struggle
between slave morality and master morality outlined in On the Genealogy
of Morals. But there are at least two misreadings of Nietzsche at work here.
For one thing, Christianity is made out to be the lone ancient bugbear who
invented “all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological
torture instruments” (Fisher) when in the original text it was the obstinate
Jews who, “with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic
value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of
God).” The founding of Christianity itself was in fact, for Nietzsche, merely a
part of the “truly great politics of vengeance, a far-sighted, underground,
slowly expropriating, and premeditated revenge” of the Jewish race,
consumed by its envy against fitter, more “noble” peoples. By moving the
malignant origin of ressentiment to a safer target, the reader is distracted
from the stench of 19th-century style anti-Semitism that hangs over the
text, and the very unambiguous understanding of history as conspiracy and
race war that this form of bigotry is enmeshed with. Second, no one seems
to bother, when invoking the tropes about the need to restore strength and
renounce “priestly” habits, to consider how these ideas are integrally
related for Nietzsche to his openly partisan stance on the class war. The
reason why Nietzsche despises what Fisher calls “the priesthood of bad
conscience”, old and new, is because it is complicit in “the slave revolt in
morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and
which we no longer see because it — has been victorious.” In other words,
the “Judaic” slave morality is connected, in On the Genealogy of Morality,
with the coming of democracy and socialism, and that is why, in Nietzsche’s
view, it needs to be stopped. Some socialists, then, seem be in the odd
position of insisting on reading Nietzsche backwards, and counseling the
abandonment of the great revaluation of values in favor of the weak that
has guided past milestones in emancipation for the masses in order to add
more “force” and “confidence” to the revolutions to come. Self-defeatingly, it
seems we are advised to imitate the cheerful aristocratic natures that in
every age have had to face down the unnatural strength of the sad faced
and the sickly (a.k.a. the oppressed).

If the writers had not overidentified with the authorial voice of Nietzsche,
they would have noticed, first that it’s not the weakness of “slave morality”
that is actually repugnant to him, but its power. The real scandal that
disturbs all of Nietzsche’s writings was that by the 19th century European,
indeed global, civilization had been apparently conquered by the ideals of
the lower classes, whether through the Gospel of the churches, the political
maxims of the French Revolution, or the “philistinism” of Anglo-Saxon
liberalism. He was certainly not concerned by the practical ineffectiveness
of this or that radical scene; on the contrary. Second, they would have
noticed that Nietzsche, who grasped his enemies better than many of his
admirers, recognized that, far from being merely stagnant, ressentiment
had a great (if deleterious ) creative power, and this was its strength. Slave
morality was victorious everywhere because it transformed poverty,
infirmity, and mental “pathology” into something that gave value to the lives
of the “unexceptional” majority, and made them into lethal enemies of the
various noble castes that Nietzsche eulogizes. It is the “reactive”
vengefulness of the oppressed that transformed their lack of temporal
advantages into a claim for dignity in the eyes of God, right in the sight of
the law, and, ultimately, into an exculpatory justification for revolutionary
action. Third, any reading of Nietzsche will notice that while slave morality
may have its roots in vindictiveness, and this is how it expresses itself
towards enemies, real and perceived, that is not its final result. Both in On
the Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere, the ultimate result of this all this
endless tearing down by the chandalas is the general spread of a
“mediocre” and “plebeian” spirit, infected with such vices as
undiscriminating good naturedness, longing for peace, love of equality, and
hatred of tyranny. In other words, what one would think would be desirable
human characteristics in any future post-capitalist society. This is the
fundamental reason for Nietzsche’s distaste for ressentiment, not the
unconvincing contempt for revenge by a man who was nothing if not a
great hater himself. In a levelling society which no longer respected
domination for its own sake, but valued mutual aid and tranquility, any
potentially aristocratic soul would be softly suffocated to death before it
even had time to know itself. For someone profoundly committed to elitism,
to the point of believing it to be necessary for “life” itself to thrive, this would
indeed be the abomination of abominations, the worst of all possible
futures. But it is puzzling that anyone claiming to work for the advancement
of a more democratic and socialist future would share Nietzsche’s anxieties
at this prospect. If anything, it is wanting to follow what he approves of at all
that should fill us with concern, not the possibility that we may be
approximating his histrionic racist caricatures of popular power.

Of course, not taking most of what Nietzsche say seriously is to be

expected in this particular context. Since those seeking to appropriate the
Nietzschean critique identify as leftists, and are seeking to sway leftists,
they can’t take his disdain for the demos to its logical conclusion and divide
humanity into two separate species. They are concerned about upholding
the dignity of the universal, after all. Instead, they have chosen to summon
up such an untrustworthy (if culturally respected) devil for more trivial
causes. These authors want to use against their (vaguely defined) enemies
the moral psychology of Nietzsche, as if that can be neatly separated from
his wider historical vision and political beliefs. Their opponents can be
explained away as weak minded, envious, and fetishists of their own
victimhood, while they themselves are justified by their hardheadedness
and evident lack of suffering. By doing so, they are primarily seeking to
insulate some, most notably certain makers of opinions (academic and
media personalities) from snarky one-liners and criticism from the rest, in
the name of an alleged unity of purpose:

But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of

comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance.
(Fisher)

Instead of morality, with its interplay of habit, personal judgment, and the
acknowledgment of shared rules, we are asked to accept the cliqueness of
etiquette. Instead of taking on the risk of criticism that making statements in
a public sphere implies, we are asked to retreat into the coziness of merely
personal relations. Political discourse is to be made less demotic and more
like the insular community of gentlemen that Nietzsche preferred, who
could afford equality amongst themselves, as long as the distinction
between the truly free insiders and naturally servile outsiders was
maintained. Thus, the critique which demanded a new collectivity seems in
the end itself to stumble on the problem of compartmentalization that it
sought to transcend; and instead of going “beyond good and evil” towards a
new communist mentality, it resurrects, for narrow purposes, very dubious
and threadbare aristocratic prejudices.

The “Excessive” Proliferation of Agents

Against contemporary individuality, a three-fold case is made: first that it is

bourgeoisie in character, a by-product of post-Fordist, postmodern
capitalism; second, that is a epistemologically handicapped category, since
it can’t think in terms of the functioning of the system as a whole; and third,
that it undermines the proper solidarity that should exist between comrades
in the common struggle against capitalism.

Against the first objection it must be emphasised that the bourgeoisie have
never, except in the region of rhetoric, been about about promoting
individuality as such, but only the individuality of people like themselves, or
rather, how they think themselves to be. It has always been guarded as a
privilege for the few to have, and the many to lack by default. The masses
are the masses because, from the perspective of the ruling class, they can
be treated as an impersonal aggregate of bodies to be managed, not as
being made up of finite beings with “personalities” like themselves. The
pretensions to uniqueness of the bourgeoisie is grounded on most people
being represented as tending towards the condition of the invisible, the
monster, or the instrumentum vocale. That some whose exploitation and
oppression was previously accepted as natural now must be acknowledged
as having individualities too, in theory equal with their social betters, is an
embarrassing reversal of ruling class power. The pathos of distance
between masters and the rest is harder to maintain when one needs to
accommodate, if only for the sake of appearance, groups who could have
been easily shrugged a few decades ago. And if more “constituencies”
have to be pleased, the bourgeois model of “decisive” and “effective”
leadership becomes more and more frustratingly elusive, as a particularly
celebrated/infamous ideologue recently lamented:

The decision system has become too porous — too democratic — for its
own good, giving too many actors the means to stifle adjustments in public
policy. We need stronger mechanisms to force collective decisions but,
because of the judicialization of government and the outsized role of
interest groups, we are unlikely to acquire such mechanisms short of a
systemic crisis.

This process of expanding individual right that is, from one perspective, one
of co-option and embourgeoisement is from another a victory for the
previously marginalized and a limitation on the future power of maneuver
for the capitalist class as a whole. Therefore, the spread of the concept of
individuality, as a contradictory phenomena, can’t be one-sidedly
denounced, but must be understood and appreciated dialectically.

Against the second accusation, it can certainly be ceded that while no

worthwhile critique of capitalism can end in in the immediacy of
individuality, none can begin without it, if only because the perspective that
apprehends totality is not from nowhere, but from a place that is already
thrown in media res within the motion of the whole. And because of the
complexity of the capitalist system, those starting points will be many and
diverse. Further, a perception of the social whole in which the subject works
outward from his or her own particular experiences will generally be more
adequate that one that simply invokes an a priori notion of totality. By
thinking upon the concrete ways one is out of joint with the system, and
refusing resignation from this state of disjunction, the true contours of the
system are made clearer than if one just mechanically invokes “the class
struggle” as an explanatory key. As Adorno (no friend of bourgeois
individualism) expressed it in Negative Dialectics:

Experience and consistency enable the individual to see in the universal

a truth that the universal as blindly prevailing power conceals from itself
and others. The reigning consensus puts the universal in the right because
of the mere form of universality. Universality, itself a concept, comes thus to
be conceptless and inimical to reflection; for the mind to perceive and to
name that side of it is the first condition of resistance and a modest
beginning of practice.

Finally, it said that bringing up individuals and their differences between

one another is inherently inimical and divisive. We need to focus more on
“impersonal structures” of economic power instead of seeking to criticize
the actions of others. There is at the very least a performative contradiction
at work here, if not outright hypocrisy. All three articles under discussion
appeal to the readers to change their minds in a specific way (“get over
yourselves, stop condemning”) but at the time they say that individual
behavior is not “really” important, not something one should get excited
about and write 2500+ words on. Further, while speculating on the perhaps
less than exalted motivations of those “who emerges out of the left as
someone exciting, someone to hear and read” or noting that academic and
millionaire actors may not themselves be workers is to risk witch hunts,
questioning the background and intellectual genealogy of others (such as
accusations against opponents as being “petite bourgeois” in class
background, or linking talk of privilege to a “Stalinist” model of politics) is
apparently acceptable. In order to stop people from obsessing about the
behavior of others, we must vigorously seek to persuade them to alter their
own behavior. In seeking to end discord and shame, both must apparently
be multiplied, but against different sorts of people. Thus the authors’ own
struggles against the vampire castle of “identity politics” admits the
rationality at work in those they accuse of being so naive as to get angry at
other people who perpetuate injustice, as opposed to the “the real enemy”
of capitalism, who seems to float, mysteriously, above the actions of actual
human beings.

This incoherence in action, in turn, is based on a theoretical reification, a

process its proponents often decry. For when the appeal is made to
impersonal structure, they speak as if structures were not made up and
reproduced daily by individual agents. Without the continued co-operation
by actions, words, and thought of human beings, the systemic oppression
and exploitation would not exist. No misogyny without misogynists, no
racism without racists, no capitalism without capitalists. If any privileged
agents that act as bearers of the sustaining practices of the system lack the
confidence to act because of fear of popular power, that is one more
multiplying factor for the contradictions of the system as a whole. Hence
the perennial interest of the ruling class in propaganda and coercion. The
strength of those presently at the top and the weakness of those presently
at the bottom must constantly be reaffirmed, while the wavering middle
strata must be taught to identify with the former, not the latter.
Revolutionary theory and praxis, by contrast, seeks to do the opposite, by
analogous methods of persuasion and force. To act, then, as if changing
structures does not require engaging with individuals is deeply
disingenuous. Intellectually, this leads to the reproduction of a stultifying
dichotomy between structure and agency. On the level of praxis, it simply
blocks debate and self-criticism with the chimera of an unearned sense of
togetherness.

From Nullity to Identity

Finally, at the heart of this critique is the attack on the concept of identity
itself:

Similarly, identity, like an occupation, is a trap, because it curtails human

potential and bars workers from participation in the social totality as fully
developing individuals. Identities are reified social categories from which
we should emerge, not within which we should be compelled to remain… It
aims to liberate identity groups (or members thereof) qua identity groups
(or individuals), rather than aiming to liberate them from identity itself.
(Rectenwald)

But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom

from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people
back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by
dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of
solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we
belong to the same identity group. (Fisher)

Which begs the question, as eloquently articulated by Linda Martin Alcoff:

Why assume that giving any prerogative to the parent/community/society

or the discourse/episteme/socius is in every case and necessarily,
psychically pernicious and enabling only at the cost of a more profound
subordination? Why assume that if I am culturally, ethnically, sexually
identifiable that this is a process akin to Kafka’s nightmarish torture
machines in the penal colony?

The dismissive understanding of identity as trap parrots the position of its

alleged opponents and simply gives it a negative meaning: one can’t be [X]
and be anything more than that at the same time; one can’t be [X] and
understand anyone who is not [X] or anything else beyond being [X],
because others’ human experiences are so opaque, and yours to them.
Instead of actually thinking of identity as fluid, or that our feelings are
translatable to others, as they claim to, these authors assume the opposite
is the case in order to demand the renunciation of identities altogether as
the precondition for emancipatory struggle.

If identities are indeed fluid, they can hypothetically be cultivated and

educated beyond any narcissistic cul-de-sac they may have arrived at, and
there would be no reason for an antagonistic contradiction between them
and socialist politics. But instead, they are to be liquidated, because they
“bar participation in the social totality.” It is unclear how this is the case, or
what this means in practice. If it refers to the exclusion suffered on account
of being a certain identity, then it would be the fault of systemic oppression,
not the identities themselves. The former should be the proper focus of
attack. If this argument is not referring to discriminatory treatment, then it
seems to have the unfortunate implication that (for some unexplained
reason) being-black, being-Palestinian, being-a-woman, etc., is
incompatible with full participation in society. The fascists, apparently were
right in their intuitions, just wrong in execution. While reactionaries wish to
“return” society to a unity purified of difference centered around some
national volk, the socialists of this type wants to push society forward to a
unity without difference, centered around either a return to a retro-
proletarian identity preserved by T.V. stars or … je ne sais quoi. Both
visions offer the consoling (to some) thought that, someday, all opaqueness
will be abolished, and we will be free from the task of having to deal with
any strangers in our midst. The language and the means may differ, but the
aim is the same, the annihilation of all particular identities within an
unsegmented collective.

Such views run into the grave problem that they contradict how radical
politics has in fact unfolded, both in the core and the periphery. Either a
great deal of what is conventionally considered revolutionary history has to
be rejected, or it must be gravely misinterpreted. The former option is
openly taken by Rectenwald. The latter one is taken by Fisher, who at one
point cites the example of Malcolm X and Che Guevara as authentically
communist examples of “a psychedelic dismantling of existing reality.” But
the lives of both of these figures reveals a quite different dialectic than the
liquidationist paradigm Fisher holds up. Malcolm X thinking moved towards
revolutionary universalism by fidelity to two particular experiences — that of
being black in America, and being a follower of Islam — neither of which
were static identities, but developed over time along with his overall political
vision. Nor would the trajectory of Che Guevara make any sense without
his loyalties to an interconnected family of patrias — Argentina, Cuba, Latin
America as a whole — and his sympathies for the plight of those
throughout the world who were dispossessed of a homeland of their own by
imperialism. In neither case was the particular simply shed to reveal the
“real” core of truth beneath all of the contingencies.What they wanted and
who they were inseparable intertwined. For both men, the abstract forms of
political emancipation were given content by a concern to live out specific
identities to the end, identities which in turn which were given a heightened
meaning and intensity by being forced to acknowledge and search for what
fell outside of themselves. And, pace Rectenwald, they were allowed to
develop as very distinct individuals precisely because they took up as an
ethical task the burden of bearing not one, but several, predications.
And surely this has also been the case with the radicalization of people
who never achieved the celebrity of those two men. The mere abstract
hope in a completely alien future that we cannot even yet imagine is rarely
sufficient to make the leap towards resistance. Nor is it always a concern
for wages and workplace conditions that forces one to think in terms of
revolution as opposed to resignation or incremental reform. Often, it is the
seizure of a name, of some fragments of experience, memory, and desire,
and the refusal to surrender them up, that forces otherwise mute and dumb
atomized individuals to confront the totality that encircles them. What was
formerly passively accepted destiny become then a mean for self-creation
and the construction of new polities. This process can take on many
idiosyncratic forms. What are usually called “identities” simply give public
and political form to some of the more common manifestations of this
phenomena, reflecting where the major objective contradictions of the
system are located (race, gender, nationality, etc.). While the sources for
this subjectivation are different, all function by the integration of
revolutionary principles into our lives as social animals who feel, love,
remember, and hope, as well as think. With the entrance of identities, the
rejection of capitalism becomes no longer just about the prospect of
economic improvement, but the recovery and transformation of ourselves.

Nor does this emotional investment isolate us, or at least necessarily

isolate us. Once we have come to the conclusion we have been wronged
by capitalism, it becomes easier to conceive that others may have suffered
as well. The world may have presented itself as one more or less happy
whole of essentially identical people now begins to tell multiple tales of
tragedy, struggle, and occasional victory. And these stories, like the
oppressions they wrestle with, are connected through history by the chains
of necessity. The belonging that spectacle, humanitarianism, and legal
equality failed to provide is now supplemented by counter-narratives and
networks of resistance that speak of a clefted universalism that is yet to
come. Ultimately, what was wanted only for one’s own sake, in seeking to
realize itself, becomes the basis for a general sympathy with others.

Taking a Step Back

It is instructive to compare the critiques of “idenitartainsim” being discussed

here with Postmodernism Today: A Brief Introduction, published around the
mid-2000s by pro-Naxalite publishing outfit by an author going under the
name of Siraj. It has similar concerns about the divisiveness of the many
recent theories arising out of post-structuralism. But despite arising from a
political movement currently struggling in far more desperate
circumstances than any of us involved in this exchange will likely ever face,
the piece is careful to avoid certain excesses when attacking the
discourses it considers “postmodern”. For one thing, the article sets itself
clearly against Nietzsche, who is dubbed both “the guru of post-modernists/
post-structuralists” and “Hitler’s philosophical guru.” Further, the text
refuses to cede to their opponents’ bourgeoisie understanding of difference
in terms of a hopeless zero sum game of subordination:

While preaching discourses in a society based on power, Post-

Modernists conveniently avoid delving deeper into the facts that difference
does not invariably mean bossing or domination and that a society can
move forward having many differences, some are open to change with
fundamental changes in a society.

From this Naxalite perspective, the critics of “identity politics”would seem to

have succumbed to the errors of the ideologies they believe themselves to
be fighting against. They have assented to the idea that difference
necessitates the empowerment of one group over another, and thus make
a fatal confrontation between difference and collectivity inevitable:

This however, does not preclude the conscious efforts on the part of
revolutionaries from the beginning to address various types of domination
and exploitation while spearheading the attack against the principal forms
of exploitation and domination. This was one of the crucial theoretical
mistakes of the C.P.I. and C.P.I.(M) leadership to shelve struggles against
caste system and such other questions with the fond hope that a socialist
society shall automatically erase them from the Indian society. Such a
fatalistic approach based on Discourse is clearly anti-Marxist, and hence
harmful to the revolutionary struggle. It only poses a question whose post-
modernist solution is embedded in anarchy, passivity and also running
away from the actual struggle against any type of domination.

Thus, exclusive focus on class is not only bad theory and bad practice, but
dialectically a twin to the deviations towards postmodern bourgeois
idealism that is it notionally opposite. It creates the conditions for such
errors to find an audience by ignoring intractable problems, and brings
about the actual anarchy that they seek to avoid it by a myopic focus on
economic exploitation. By holding fast to a Maoist understanding of there
being (potentially) non-antagonistic contradictions among “the people” as
well as the antagonistic contradictions between the exploited and exploiter,
Siraj is able to articulate what is wrong with bourgeois ideologies without
denying difference its place or ceding ground to the reactionary,
psychologizing thought of Nietzsche. “Totalitarian” Marxist-Leninist
dogmatism thus proves more sound in its political instincts regarding this
issue than those who would pride themselves on their anti-Stalinism and
magnanimous lack of authoritarian tendencies.

Conclusion: Which Transvaluation of Values will Win?

We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever

the enemy supports. (Mao Tse-Tung)

We crumbled apart
and crumbled into one again.
(From “Irish” by Paul Celan)

Every intellectual trend and every political epoch undergoes a backlash,

and this backlash in turn divide into competing claimants. Within first world
radical politics, struggling to define itself in the aftermath of neoliberalism
and the unsuccessful oppositional politics that accompanied it, there can be
discerned two distinct camps seeking to project their diagnosis of the
current malaise, and the solution required.

For one side, whose position Fisher and the rest have helped articulate,
what is lacking and needed, is greater homogeneity and discipline. The
Left, since the ’60s has been corrupted and bogged down by allowing in so
much diversity; what is needed is contraction into a body capable of
decisive and effective management of itself. Nietzchean affect is to be
combined, incongruously, with a certain type of grey universalism, the slick
ambience of aristocratic irrationalism married to the cult of the rationalized
undifferentiated social totality to come. Just as the metropolitan
revolutionaries of the late 18th-century and 19th-century took over the
muscular colonial archetype of Hercules as a mythic model, these proudly
Spartan futurists and post-Leninist Lacanians seems to intend to take over
the harsher models of ruling class power in order to make an opposition
that is more adult, grand, and martial:

We have to be connected, solidary, and strong. (Dean)

But against this there is the (perhaps less articulate) consensus that holds
that what is called “identitarianism” or ”multiculturalism”, far from being
overwhelmingly dominant, is the route that has never been more than half-
heartedly pursued; and that what is sometimes called “slave morality” —
the urge to level, “herd instinct”, and contempt for strength — have always
characterized the advancement of freedom. It is the further integration of
the peoples in their rage that promises the disintegration of capital; it is this
that bourgeoisie have always feared and sought to frustrate, not flattering
celebrations of their own preferred self-image or demonization of the
rudeness of the mob. The ruling class are fine with hiding behind abstract
totality, as long as it is kept from being excessively saturated by the
multitude, who want many things, not all of which can be satisfied at once
under the present global regime. What they fear is not the reign of the
universal itself, but the universal being forced to expand, in multiple
directions, by the demands for inclusion by previously subordinate
particulars, who have always known the collective better than the collective
has known itself. Thus, instead of looking to imitate the sleek homogeneity
of the powers that be, true solidarity should grow of the differences and
negativity that already exist, will exist, and will triumph, regardless of
ineffectual cries of “peace!” where there is no peace. Instead of seeking to
paint the hegemonic prejudices of capitalism red, the great inversion of
values must again be repeated. What has been considered the most
contemptible, weak, and diseased has thus far proved the most dangerous
to the ruling class. What is most contemptible, weak, and diseased must
therefore be multiplied.

This article does not consider Eve Mitchell’s piece on intersectionality

because, while objections may be raised to it, the overall thrust of argument
— “liberation must include both the particular and the universal”, “struggling
as women but also as humans” — seems substantially different from the
other three, and closer my own understanding of the matter, despite the
differences in ultimate conclusions. Similarly, JMP’s piece comes from a
MLM angle that is distinct from the tendency being dealt with here.