Around 1987, when Stuart Hall was at his peak as one of the gurus of Cultural Studies, he contributed the essay “Minimal Selves” to an ICA catalogue titled Identity: The Real Me.1 The essay emphasizes the personal experiences of diasporic blacks whose existence could be defined as fragmented, disenfranchised and dispersed. “Welcome to migranthood” was his take on the postmodern age. Soon, everyone would understand their postmodern existence in the same terms as diasporic intellectuals like himself. Someone I know who was a left-wing refugee of the coup regime in Chile similarly believed that his experience of persecution and exile gave him an advantage when it comes to understanding postmodern culture. Hall’s work and the “New Times” current that developed around the journal Marxism Today was focused on bourgeois politics and elections. It signalled a shift from revolutionary communism to the kind of Eurocommunism that dispensed with class war. In practice this meant giving up on the goal of nationalizing major industries and accepting lower wages through de-industrialization. At the same time, from the 70s through to the 90s, it meant accepting that language, culture and politics were free-floating constructs that could be adjusted to “challenge” social norms with new, ever-changing and weird constructions. This extended to shifting alliances between identity groups, whose body politics and politics of the personal had no fixed political foundation.
In “Brave New World,” written one year after “Minimal Selves,” Hall celebrated the emancipation of society from labour and the shift from welfarism to the kind of entrepreneurial and lifestyle flexibilization that was made possible by new communication technologies, marketing and globalization.2 The world of post-Fordist work was modelled by this advocate of cultural representation on the play of signification and the eclectic materialism of discourse. Capital was also said to have been emancipated from labour through information technology. Consequently, all serious political work was now to be done at the level of culture, politics and ideology. This shift away from Marxist political economy changed the understanding of oppression. If a woman was being abused by someone, this was not to be condemned as both an attack on her person and an affront to universal principles of justice. Rather, she was thought to be oppressed very specifically as a woman. Likewise, if a black person was oppressed, it was specifically as a black person. One can imagine a situation in which a white male makes a coloured smoke bomb go off during a protest. A woman who happens to be passing by is offended and considers this a male attack. A black man who happens to be passing by is also offended but considers this to be a white attack. What is advanced today by anti-oppression ideologues is a conservative and regressive policy orientation that asks “privileged” subjects to take a back seat to minority groups. Notice that most of these intellectuals, celebrities and artists are defenders of the neoliberal status quo, which belies the idea that they reject universalism. The universalism they adhere to is the concrete universality of capitalism.
Indifference to the dimension of universality is precisely the way that the Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, recently framed his government’s economic recovery plan. Presented on International Women’s Day, Trudeau said that the “she-cession” that was created by the pandemic has been particularly difficult for low-earning women, who, overall, were now at 5.3 percent below where they were in February 2020, compared to 3.7 percent for men. “To build a fairer and more equal Canada,” he said, “we must ensure a feminist, intersectional recovery from this crisis.”3 According to Trudeau, it is the pandemic that has rolled back the “hard-fought social and economic progress of all women” and not the austerity policies pursued by four decades of neoliberal government, which, combined with globalization, outsourced good-paying jobs to poor countries where women are paid much less and are forced to work under threat by armed security guards, without workplace safety protections and without benefits. This “she-covery” is promised as the Trudeau government has failed to prevent the spread of the pandemic, when compared to what is possible by a modern government.
Heading into an election in which the Conservative party is very weak, Trudeau is appealing to middle-class voters with intersectional language that minimizes the suffering of poor workers and families, dividing the working class with identity politics. It is not enough to suggest, as David Doel correctly recognizes, that this sort of pandering is cringeworthy.4 What is at stake is the left position on the neoliberal transformation of social theory. A recent publication by Seth Masket, who defines equality in identarian terms only and considers the Democratic Party to be “post-reform,” discovered that the party activists who chose Elizabeth Warren as their favoured candidate were more likely to believe that Russian interference was the reason for Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016.5 They were also more likely to blame the supposed racism and sexism of voters. Since those who favoured Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders did not believe in Russiagate or the idea that racism and sexism were reasons for Clinton’s loss, but rather her bad policy choices and unlikeability as a candidate, it is possible to suggest a correlation between what can be defined as two kinds of conspiratorial thinking. Today’s woke anti-racism and anti-sexism, as expressed by Trudeau, is not only counter-solidaristic, but, as Barbara and Karen Fields argue, has the character and political function of superstition.6 We could otherwise say that today’s neoliberal anti-racism and anti-sexism has a similar ideological function and form.
The kind of anti-oppression superstition that has been cultivated by neoliberal progressives has been integrated into the Vote Compass interactive online voting advice application that is used worldwide.7 As of this date, and since the September election was announced last weekend, the test has been taken by close to 200,000 Canadians. The test requires that you answer approximately 40 questions. One can agree or disagree to different degrees with questions like: “No new oil pipelines should be built in Canada.”; “The federal government should guarantee a minimum income for all Canadian adults regardless of whether or not they have a job.”; “The federal government should give priority to visible minorities when hiring.”; “How accessible should abortion services be across Canada?” The results allow you to see how your political values align with those of the six different parties running in the federal election. Among several indicators, the graph result they provide shows your standing on economic and social issues.
Answering the compass test with socialist economic standards and universalist standards when it comes to social issues, which would acknowledge group rights but not advance group privileges that pit women against men or blacks against whites, the results for the test show someone to be more progressive than all of the parties on economic issues, but less progressive than the New Democratic Party, the Green Party and the Liberal Party when it comes to social issues. However, if one was to consider and accept that the kind of woke identitarianism that has been advanced by Cultural Studies since the decline of communist parties is related to the hegemony of neoliberal globalization, which is also accountable for endless wars, neo-colonialism, economic re-feudalization, plutocracy, negligence on climate change solutions, etc, then the conflict between class issues and identity issues is only apparent. A more radical compass test would allow for emancipatory universalism to be ranked higher than the NDP. That would reflect the real you, or better still, the genuine thrust of emancipatory universalism, this side of the return of History and the rejection of the post-political tenets of postmodernism, including the political relativism and intellectual obscurantism that is now upheld through woke identity politics. One should add that since many of the gains that could be achieved for minority rights in the postwar era were achieved as part of the progress of political liberalism and socialism, the post-socialist and post-representational (post-reform) universe we live in at the moment is reversing the effectiveness of some of those gains, reducing the universal benefits of those movements and leading towards identity conflicts rather than greater equality and more freedoms for all through class solidarity against the corporate state. All must stand together against the neoliberal cooptation of social meaning and social solidarity.
Notes
1. Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Lisa Appignanesi, ed. Identity: The Real Me (London: The Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987) 44-6.
2. Stuart Hall, “Brave New World,” Marxism Today (October 1988) 24-9.
3. “Trudeau vows to tackle ‘she-cession’ after new report says pandemic has been worse for working women,” CBC(March 8, 2021), https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/report-trudeau-international-women-s-day-1.5941674.
4. The Rational National, “Trudeau Calls For A ‘She-covery’ To Address The ‘She-cession’,” YouTube (August 18, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl5QKlh9bIk.
5. See Seth Masket, Learning from Loss: The Democrats, 2016-2020 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
6. See Karen F. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012).
7. See https://votecompass.cbc.ca/canada.