radu jude berlinale jury Q&A zinger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS88zZurZks
04/25/2023
04/14/2023
New Book - Identity Trumps Socialism
A few years ago I asked a materialist feminist colleague if she was aware of any significant critiques of identity politics on the radical left. She didn’t reply. I’m happy to have edited the first reader on the subject, a collection of essays that address the politics of emancipatory universality.
Description:
With essays by today’s leading leftist social critics, Identity Trumps Socialism presents a rigorous and persuasive primer on the problems generated by postmodern and neoliberal challenges to the legacy of emancipatory universality. In addition to the ways in which capitalism has used racialized and gendered forms of oppression to divide the working class, today’s activism must also understand how neoliberal capitalism uses identity politics to undermine socialism. Identity Trumps Socialism advances an emancipatory left universality that addresses the limits of diversity and makes the case for the centrality of class in the struggle against global capitalist hegemony.
https://www.routledge.com/Identity-Trumps-Socialism-The-Class-and-Identity-Debate-after-Neoliberalism/Leger/p/book/9781032341804
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Politics of Emancipatory Universality by Marc James Léger
Eight Theses on the Universal by Alain Badiou
Politics, Identification and Subjectivization by Jacques Rancière
The Eternal Return of the Same Class Struggle by Slavoj Žižek
Universality and Its Discontents by Bruno Bosteels
Capitalism, Class and Universalism: Escaping the Cul-de-Sac of Postcolonial Theory by Vivek Chibber
Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique by Barbara Foley
From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond by Nancy Fraser
What Materialist Black Political History Actually Looks Like by Adolph Reed, Jr.
Who’s Afraid of Left Populism? Anti-Policing Struggles and the Frontiers of the American Left by Cedric G. Johnson
Class Not Race by Walter Benn Michaels
Capitalism Is the Problem: Articulating Race and Gender with Class by David Harvey
A Comrade for the Anthropocene: Beyond Survivors and Allies by Jodi Dean
The Use and Abuse of Class Reductionism for the Left by Marc James Léger
Endorsements:
The denunciation of universalism comes all too easily to those who think of themselves as leftists. This keeps the left exactly as elites would have us: divided and enervated by internal conflicts. In a variety of registers, the essays in Identity Trumps Socialism critique the prevailing forms of identitarianism and lay out the key arguments for socialist universalism. – Roger Lancaster, author of Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011)
A left mired in identitarian battles is no match for the inexorable march of destructive neoliberalism. It’s time the left evolved out of the politics of fragmentation and affirmed an emancipatory universalism capable of fighting both exploitation and oppression. This is the politics advanced in this volume by a host of leading scholars. A must read. – Nivedita Majumdar, author of The World in a Grain of Sand: Postcolonial Literature and Radical Universalism (2021)
Review Copy Requests: https://m.email.taylorandfrancis.com/review-copy-request-form
I have also written a forthcoming Guide to the Class and Identity Debate that is under review. This book offers Marxist criticism of the current variants of identity politics, including: identity politics as such, radical democracy, populism, privilege theory, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. The book also looks at how these trends are addressed across the political spectrum, including conservatism and fascism, liberalism and neoliberalism, postmodernism, anarchism, democratic socialism, socialism and communism.
previous:
Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (Red Quill, 2022) https://www.redquillbooks.com/portfolio-posts/too-black-to-fail-the-obama-portraits-and-the-politics-of-post-representation/
Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Brill, 2022) https://brill.com/display/title/61660
A US$17.00 version is now available from Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2030-bernie-bros-gone-woke
04/08/2023
04/07/2023
Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek on Ukraine
A recent panel discussion on the war in Ukraine, and featuring Slavoj Žižek, was posted on March 15 on Simon Gros’s YouTube channel. I wrote a lengthy reply to Žižek’s analysis in the comments section and this was blocked by the channel host, possibly because YouTube flags as spam lengthy comments that are cut and pasted, which is something I just discovered.1 I sometimes write YouTube comments instead of writing blog posts, as this allows me to focus on other things. I am posting my blocked comment here but will preface this with a summary of Alain Badiou’s reflections on the conflict in Ukraine from March 18, 2022.2 Whereas Badiou’s thoughts about Ukraine are consistent with his philosophy and previous work, Žižek’s position is inconsistent with much of his work and with his communist politics.
In Alain Badiou’s series for the Commune CDN Aubervillliers titled “How to Live and Think in a Time of Absolute Disorientation?,” the March 18, 2022, lecture focused on the relation of the conflict in Ukraine to Badiou’s philosophy more generally. He begins by asking what we should do so as to not become victims of both sides. How can one stay calm in the context of propaganda? Dialectical reason generally avoids ideas that depend on two camps. One finds this as well in Žižek’s Lacanian formula of 1+1+a, namely: the conflict between labour and capital does not take place directly but is mediated by a third element, for example, xenophobia, or, in “progressive” neoliberalism, anti-patriarchy and anti-racism. According to Badiou, a third term renders differences and similarities intelligible. This is why the postulate that all people are the same or that all people are different is by itself meaningless. Without a third term, the opposition between the two terms is reducible to sterile, empirical facts. What one wants to know is the meaning of the conflict, its future and its scope. The opposition of “evil” Russia and “legitimate” Ukraine is, from the perspective of universality, a contradiction of differentiated negative terms.
Badiou reminds us that the Maidan revolt of 2014 was manipulated by the United States and by nationalist forces. We should add that this took place as communism was being outlawed and far-right forces were entering parliament. At the present moment, organized workers have no collective bargaining rights and Ukrainian workers are the most exploited in all of Europe. This will only increase as the war continues and after it ends. For such reasons, Badiou argues, the war in Ukraine has no affirmative positivity at the level of politics. The meaning of communism is opposition to nationalist stagnation. The current conflict is therefore a crisis of universality and of genuine values. Politics, in the current situation, is exclusively a matter of domination. The old idea of camps that is in play annuls third terms. It partakes in the “cancer” of identity and thereby cancels the universality of judgements.
Badiou proposes six theses with which to understand the concept of universality as a third term.
1) All universal judgements or elements have their origins in an event. (Event is here understood in the specific ways that Badiou deploys that term.) The third term is not implicit in a conflict but emerges from out of that conflict.
2) All universal judgements or elements first emerge as a matter of decision and where previously universal judgements were undecidable. The universal is not reducible to existing knowledge. Although the universal is attached to knowledge, it goes beyond knowledge.
3) The universal has an implicative structure in the sense that it can tell us what can engender something else. The universal is implicated by the movement of thought in the conjunctures of time.
4) Like antagonisms, the universal is a univocal judgement. One cannot know the pertinence, limits or purposes of univocal judgements.
5) All universal singularities are open and limitless propositions that engage us to determine their consequences. Universal singularities cannot be limited to observed phenomena.
6) Universality is the faithful construction of a generic and infinite multiple.
Badiou follows this presentation of six theses on universality with further reflections. The event is intransitive to the particularities of the situation. The universal and the event therefore have a fundamental relation. Fidelity to the event is not a matter of doctrine. Fidelity is oriented towards an event and eventuality (l’évènementiel). The negation of universality requires more than propaganda. One should add that the negation of universality also requires more than the empirical facts of domination. Unlike discourse theory, Badiou’s philosophy of communism is not an alibi for the use and abuse of power. Counter-revolution, he argues, is a form of evental revisionism which requires a systematic critique of the elements to which universality is faithful.
We are witness today to the systematic deconstruction of emancipatory political events. This takes the form of a critique and denial of the existence of political truths. For example, François Furet viewed the French Revolution as useless and pointless. One can see the same logic at work in the New York Times’ 1619 Project. The nouveaux philosophes of French postwar theory likewise viewed communist revolution as a matter of totalitarianism. The May 68 uprising is reduced to the theme of sexual liberation, etc.
The problem with the deconstruction of third terms is that this brings us back to one of the two terms, or the stabilization of terms. Such an operation is essentially designed to attack anything that is new. A new universality creates a militant subjectivity – not a belligerent reaction. Identity dominates today in all fields. In politics, identitarianism takes the form of nationalism. Its objective is hegemonic power. Universality is opposed to conflictual configurations of identity. Universality, in contrast to identity, experiments with differences subtractively. Although identitarians argue that knowledge is not neutral, knowledge is today conceived as identitarian and neutral at the same time. The contemporary focus on difference coincides with undecidability. The universal, in contrast, imposes itself as new knowledge, a decision on the undecidable. The encyclopaedia is the general system of knowledges. Such knowledge is uncertain and anonymous. It does not provide solutions to problems of politics, or culture, for example. It rather exists as equanimity: maybe God exists; maybe immigrants belong here. Decisions are not reflections of the state of things. Universality is the consequence or subjectivization of an evental decision.
The current goal of Western neocolonialism is to weaken Russia. Once the war is over, the countries will return to their real problems – problems that are masked by the war and that existed before the war began. The world must avoid a scenario like World War II from being re-enacted once again. We can do this by looking for the evental and its universal pertinence. Universality will be internationalist and anti-nationalist.
Below is my comment on Žižek’s statement during the recent ASLEF-sponsored discussion. Note that I have also written to the organizers at DiEM25, suggesting that they should host a panel discussion among Western and East European leftists since the Western left’s critiques of NATO and U.S./E.U. imperialism do not coincide with the views of many East European leftists who focus solely on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These comments of course do not summarize Žižek’s arguments in his talk, which is supported by his many online articles on the subject.
For followers of Badiou, see his YouTube talk at La Commune Aubervilliers March 18 2022 for a counterpoint to Žižek’s position on the conflict. You do not have to be a supporter of Putin and you can condemn the Russian invasion while at the same time acknowledging the following: how the West manipulated the Maidan uprising along with nationalists, many of them far-right and anti-communist; how the assault on ethnic Russians in the East of Ukraine is a real problem (divisions within the country that were not dealt with in a democratic way, to say the least); how the people in the Crimea voted unanimously (90%) to unite with Russia; how NATO and the U.S. want to weaken and divide Russia so that it can then challenge the economic power of China; how foreign investors and the West are economically colonizing Ukraine (which will not be able repay its war debt for countless generations); how the U.S. is economically forcing Europe to do its bidding, going so far as to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline (and powers like Germany and Japan will use this to regain their military power, if nothing else); how this protracted conflict with Russia and China will do nothing to address global problems of militarism, ecology, economic inequality, etc.
Rather than criticize the left’s “symptomal” readings of the conflict, why does Žižek not address the double blackmail of Ukraine vs Russia and why does he avoid the standard internationalist leftist class critique of wars manufactured in the interest of the ruling elites and oligarchies on all sides. This does not mean you are pacifist; it means that communists do not call on workers to kill workers from other nations for the sake of the class of investors who profit from war, oil, gas, tech, etc. All Marxists understand this. It would be good for Žižek to distinguish between the radical, socialist, communist left, and the liberal left (progressive liberals, social democrats, NSM left, New Left, postmodernists) and those around establishment sources like The Guardian and New York Times, or the Green Party in Germany. Why conflate the left with Western liberal democrats – especially since, in the case of the Ukraine conflict, almost exclusively, Žižek comes across as more cosmopolitan than internationalist? In Žižek’s terms, the left is either perplexed (liberal left) or non-perplexed (academic left). When is the left ever correct, or is there always an infinitely demanding number of paradoxes that only philosophy can address? I ask this as a follower of Žižek, and not as a Noam Chomsky, Gabriel Rockwell or Norman Finkelstein pseudo-critic of his work. If the citizen philosopher wants the bureaucracy to take care of things so that people can go about their daily activities, why would he not also allow the broad internationalist left have the correct position on this issue?
Regarding peace: when the left calls for peace, it does not avoid political differences. As Badiou puts it, the left calls for peace because the war is a way of avoiding the necessary and difficult decisions that will have to be taken once the war is over, and that existed before the war started. In other words, war is a way of avoiding political deadlocks around ecology, economic inequality, social equality and political corruption. Calls for peace are not pathetic. Why should making things worse (choosing the option of war) be the only way of clarifying the choices and decisions that need to be made? Jeffrey Sachs is a mixed bag, and not a good example of leftism. Same with Judith Butler. The left does not call for NATO out of Ukraine, the left calls for the dismantling of NATO as a relic of the Cold War and now part of the arsenal of the U.S. military. Because of this proxy war, we will likely see a Russia-China alliance that will make a formidable bloc against NATO. At least two thirds of the countries of the world reject NATO plans for war against Russia and China. This proxy war in Ukraine is a problem of imperialism. The shift to financialization is part of this problem. The idea that Finland and Sweden should be afraid of Russia – same for Ukraine – is in fact ridiculous, especially since around 1989 Russia sought to join NATO and the U.S./E.U. has preferred to make it more useful as a permanent enemy, which is good for the deep state that does not want leftist movements to develop. We have also learned that the Minsk I and II agreements were undertaken in bad faith by Western powers. The argument advanced is that Russia should have no security concerns, as more and more countries are absorbed into NATO, and as official U.S. policy is great power conflict with Russia and China, and this, not for security reasons, but for economic reasons that are redefined as security concerns.
The conflict in Ukraine is in fact a proxy war, no less than in Syria. Ukraine no longer makes its own military decisions without U.S. command and the U.S./E.U. is bankrolling the Ukrainian government, which no longer functions independently. How does sending more soldiers on both sides to their deaths help anyone, that is to say, at the level of universality and emancipation? Moreover, it’s not that Ukraine should not win, but that it cannot win, objectively speaking and in military terms. Why bait leftists with the idea that Ukrainians are stupid, as Žižek does here? Ukraine has Stepan Bandera statues and place names appearing everywhere. Does that mean that the left believes in Putin’s de-Nazification argument? No. The internationalist left is not as stupid as Žižek seems to think.
One question I have, and I think we need more discussion on this, is why are the Western left and the East European left so at odds on this issue? I tend to think that East Europeans have a Soviet hangover and cannot see how the working majority in all the countries of Eurasia, and elsewhere, have common interests. Many East European comrades are in a human rights, dissident and anti-Putin mode that makes them advocates of democracy and NSM radical democracy, which Žižek does not advocate elsewhere. It would be better to argue with and against actual left arguments, based on facts and on principles, than against some of these strawman representations of the left that Žižek brings up and that create more confusion than clarity.
Will Europe die for Ukraine? Not likely. Europe has not died for Greece either. This conflict is not like the time of the international brigades who went to fight in Spain against the fascists during the civil war. (If Žižek goes to Ukraine, he will not be carrying a rifle.) It’s closer to the opposite, with fascists, mercenaries and conscripted soldiers involved in a futile conflict that has no universal truth. Helping Ukraine, to the extent that that will occur, will only happen after a peace is negotiated. And it will not happen through predatory foreign capitals.
How can one be fully Ukrainian by being pushed into being so by Putin, as Žižek suggests here? How is this consistent with his philosophy? Did Russia and the U.S. make Afghanistan more fully itself? Did the Nazis make Jews more fully themselves? This is grotesque logic that even Žižek does not adhere to in his work. To think that the left can only support Ukraine by taking the pro-NATO neoliberal line is confusing to me. Not to get into deeper waters, but Lenin not only defended nations (to the death, as he wrote); he also took the position that Muslim satellite nations that do not have a socialist base should not be given too much independence. (On this, see the book by M. Renault, L’empire de la révolution.) How is canceling all Russian culture a proper measure? Because this happened in WWII, as Žižek suggests? Žižek likes Wagner, without any pseudo-Marxist reductionism. Why should we not reject the ratcheting up of anti-Russian sentiment? Also, why limit Russia to Putin and his ideologues, or for that matter, the U.S. to Trump and Bannon & co? Žižek is correct: the conflict is not just about a piece of land. It is, in fact, about Russia's legitimate security concerns, and this is something that the U.S., with its provocations, understands better than Žižek. Notice that the U.S. has now legislated government positions against socialism, and we see this also in U.K. education, and so I see no reason to become complacent about Western designs regarding Russia. John McDonnell is selling out and it’s sad to see Žižek agreeing with Paul Mason as he becomes ever less a friend of the left. Notice that almost the entire U.S. left is critical of Bernie Sanders and the squad for going along with weapons and billions to Ukraine at the same time that U.S. infrastructure is crumbling and ecological shifts are wreaking havoc. It’s the same struggle all around. There is such a thing as “bourgeois luxury,” as Yuliya Yurchenko says in this discussion, but in this case, in the West, it’s not among the leftists who want peace, it’s among the hipster liberal “leftists” like Bono and Sean Penn who want unthinking, beautiful soul, support for Ukraine.
About awakening (which by the way is not only something fascists say, as Žižek suggests in one of his recent lectures, and Žižek himself says we need to wake up often enough, like in his recent book, Surplus-Enjoyment, on page 3 and 122, and elsewhere) ... notice how New York City advertisements about what to do in case of a nuclear attack are not only accidentally absurdly ineffective but designed to make people accept this new proxy war, and the planned war against China, as part of our normal routines (war as usual, like in 1984’s Oceania), more or less the way governments wanted us to accept herd immunity and living with COVID-19, which means dying from COVID. It’s bourgeois luxury to produce Ukrainian cannon fodder to make life good for Americans and weapons manufacturers. Authentic leftists DO condemn the Russian invasion and DO support universal rights and values. The struggle is universal. Indeed. The genuine left does NOT see the Ukraine conflict as a clash of civilizations.
I never tire of reminding left comrades about how important Žižek’s work has been for exiting postmodernism and critiquing post-politics as well as identity politics. On the issue of Ukraine, though, I think he is contradicting much of his previous work so that Ukrainians do not feel abandoned and with only reactionaries and neoliberals on their side, which would cause them to reject leftism, and so that during and after the war, they keep thinking progressively about how to struggle for democracy in desperate circumstances. It’s paternalistic to some extent and sells short the idea of communism. What would Lenin do?
Sources
1. Simon Gros, “Ukraine, Invasion, Resistance and the Struggle for Freedom (with Slavoj Žižek),” YouTube (March 15, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8HdCWOuJNU.
2. La Commune CDN Aubervilliers, “14/03/22 – Comment vivre et penser un temps d’absolue disorientation ?” YouTube(Mars 18, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhk264iTfFc.