If it is this ideal that signifies educational and vocational opportunity, upward mobility, relative protection against arbitrary violence, and reward in proportion to effort, and if it is this ideal against which many of the exclusions and privations of people of colour, gays and lesbians, and women are articulated, then the political purchase of contemporary American identity politics would seem to be achieved in part through a certain renaturalisation of capitalism that can be said to have marked progressive discourse since the 1970s. What this also suggests is that identity politics may be partly configured by a peculiarly shaped and peculiarly disguised form of class resentment, a resentment that is displaced onto discourses of injustice other than class, but a resentment, like all resentments, that retains the real or imagined holdings of its reviled subject as objects of desire. In other words, the enunciation of political identities through race, gender, and sexuality may require - rather than incidentally produce - a limited identification through class, specifically abjuring a critique of class power and class norms precisely insofar as these identities are established vis-a-vis a bourgeois norm of social acceptance, legal protection, and relative material comfort. Yet, when not only economic stratification but other injuries to the human body and psyche enacted by capitalism - alienation, commodification, exploitation, displacement, disintegration of sustaining albeit contradictory social forms such as families and neighbourhoods - when these are discursively normalised and thus depoliticised, other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight; indeed, they may bear all the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that attributable to the explicitly politicised marking.
1 comment:
«when these are discursively normalised and thus depoliticised, other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight»
The way I understand this is:
* Assuming the point of view of an upper-middle class professional or managerial person, comfortable in their rapidly appreciating properties, with relative job security and a good salary, whose social circle is made entirely of similar people.
* They may be prone to assume that "we are all in the same boat", "we are all middle class now", so everybody else will be in the same circumstances. Typical moan "It's hard to get to the end of the month on a mere middle class income of £100,000/£200,000 per year, with school fees/house renovations/,,, being so expensive".
* Those who aren't yet and are not "deplorable" sore losers then can only be so because they are discriminated by the majority of "deplorable" sore losers.
Anyhow my understanding of the consequences (that I think are intentional) of the huge pushing of identity politics by the ruling economic and political elites is:
* Identity politics splits the proletarians into rival grievance groups, most against the "deplorable" sore losers, and all in competition with each other. All this without costing a penny to the ruling elites, because the gains of "victim" proletarians are necessarily the loss of "deplorable" proletarians.
* It just so happens that typical wage in the 85% of the world that is 85% non-white is $1/hour, which is the market wage, and the typical wage in the 15% of the world that is 85% white is $10/hour, which is then not a market wage. Therefore the difference in wage looks the result of "white supremacist" sore losers exploiting their employers. Consequently protecting the labour markets of that 15% of the world with restrictions to immigration and offshoring is racist, because of disparate impact. Ideally businesses in that 15% would have workforces composed of 85% non-white and 15% white workers, all on $1/hour. I guess many people don't know that many large companies based in that 15% of the world have made a lot of progress towards that goal.
* Since all major parties are thatcherites economically, as they are all for lower labour costs and higher asset incomes, the electoral differentiator between "whig" thatcherites and "tory" thatcherites can only be social attitudes, for example being for or against gay marriage. Now that gay marriage is a settled matter, further social differences must be found to differentiate "whig" electoral campaigns from "tory" electoral campaigns, and as various "progressive" social issues are settled, ever narrower and more extreme issues must be made prominent to maintain that electoral differentiation.
Clear point made by ERG member Michael Fabricant, the other "blonde menace":
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/02/20/liberal-tory-member-erg-dare-splitters-call-extremist/
«When I entered the House of Commons, I voted for equality so that men could have sex with men at the same age as men could legally have sex with women: 16. I lost that vote back in the early 90s, but the age was dropped to 18 from 21. Eventually, equality was reached. I have consistently voted liberally on gay issues including gay marriage, on the age of abortion and alongside the Labour MP, Paul Flynn who recently passed away, on drug use. I describe myself on social media as “socially liberal”.»
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