Towards a Critique of Tumblr Theory

(Note: I no longer agree with some of the central claims of this piece and am hoping to write a new piece some time in the near future. Particularly, I think the idiosyncratic way I use the term “class” here is both confusing and ontologically suspect. That said, I think the general critique of idealism here remains useful.)

This piece aims to critique a particular representation of social justice (which sometimes even calls itself anarchism) prevalent in online political discussion spaces, with a particular focus on tumbr social justice blogs. Centrally, I will contrast ‘privilege’ and ‘class’ as objects of political struggle, and discuss the limitations of identity politics and call instead for a revolutionary praxis that is conscious of identity-based oppression but enables us to move beyond identification.

This piece is incomplete and unsatisfactory, and I welcome criticism.

I. Class, oppression, metaphysics

Class is commonly understood as a system of categorization of individuals on a socio-economic basis – e.g. the three class model (lower, middle and upper class) or proletariat and bourgeoisie – but here we understand class as occurring in between individuals and groups. Class is a set of social relations that position the subject relative to power. Class has both an objective and subjective component: objective material forces create the basis for the subjective experience of class. Our definition of class is not a narrow economistic one, but includes patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity, etc. and understands particular oppressions as inter-related and mutually supporting.

It follows immediately that privilege – the experience of being empowered relative to another – is an aspect of class but not the whole picture. Privilege often presents itself as a social fact without any apparent material cause, as if racial privilege, for example, is created by racist ideas, which simply appeared out of the ether. (In truth, race-thinking has historical roots in colonialist strategic thinking, which required the creation of races both as an ideological justification for colonialism and as a way of managing recalcitrant populations in colonised areas.)

II. Check your liberalism privilege

When separated from class as an object of analysis, the focus on privilege lends itself to a form of liberal idealism and moralism. Awareness-raising becomes the central form of political intervention as though, once we make everyone aware of their privilege and get them to act according to a particular set of moral standards, then privilege will disappear. Thus political struggle becomes political correctness.

Once class is reduced to privilege, then privilege is further reduced to a list of privileges – specific ways in which the privileged group are treated differently, such as men being allowed to have pubic hair etc. – which are endlessly cataloged. Thus, particular manifestations of class are made to appear to be constitutive of class itself. Capitalism, a real material phenomenon with concomitant processes of biopolitical control, is replaced by ‘kyriarchy’, the union of all master-slave relations, presented with no apparent underlying cause.

This is not a dismissal of kyriarchy or intersectionality as such, but rather a critique of an idealist conception of intersectionality which mystifies the material basis of oppression. Without intersectionality, the class struggle becomes identified with the concerns of white cisgendered heterosexual men, but conversely, without class struggle, intersectionality becomes critique without transformative potential. Concretely, awareness of privilege is of central importance if we are to prevent the replication of gender/racial hierarchies within the struggle, but awareness of privilege alone offers little in terms of possibilities for transformative direct action, or, put another way, awareness of ones own privilege is substituted for the kinds of actions that could pose a threat to systems of oppression.

III. Identities, identification, legitimacy

The tumblr social justice community adopt a kind of incoherent synthesis of queer theory, post-structuralist feminism, and liberal rights discourse and identity-politics, constructed, Chinese Whispers style from half-understood fragments of theory abstracted from their metaphysical framework. The postmodernist framework of queer theory entails a radical critique of essentialism and a rejection of fixed and stable identities. To try and reconcile it with the thoroughly modernist framework of identity-politics produces absurdities.

Genderqueer, for example, is not a gender identity, but an approach to performing gender: a radical attack on essentialist conceptions of gender which, through the body, exposes the performativity of gender and thereby undermines the ideological and semantic basis of heteropatriarchy. To claim to be genderqueer and to be oppressed on the basis of being genderqueer is to miss entirely the point of what you’re supposed to be doing: that gender is something you do, not something you are. The very act of defining oneself as genderqueer is to replicate the process of definition which reifies binary gender in the first place.

But that is precisely what tumblr genderqueers do. Genderqueer is claimed first as an identity and secondarily as a basis to make demands for recognition and protection, with performativity playing at best a supporting role, turning attack into defence. Worse, this becomes a basis for appropriating the language and laying claim to the legitimacy of trans* struggles by people who are, in the final analysis, thoroughly cisgendered.

Worse still are the entirely artificial identities and spurious associated oppressions – e.g. transethnics (white people who decide that they really belong to another race, usually one strongly associated with anime production), otherkin (non-humans trapped in human bodies), multiples (bodies supposedly containing multiple identities who ought to be recognised as real and autonomous individuals, an idea which would mean that people with real and serious mental illnesses would be denied treatment) – conjured ex nihlo by those wishing to feel special on the internet.

While these made-up oppressions are dismissed by the more sensible elements of the community„ the basis on which they do so is often theoretically inconsistent. A politics which is built entirely around the right of individuals to define themselves subjectively, with no material or historical basis in the real world, has no real basis for defending against parodies of itself. To dismiss otherkin on the basis that they appropriate trans* stuggles, for example, while obviously correct, within this context amounts to an a priori assumption that trans* struggles are legitimate and otherkin aren’t. It is only by returning to materialism (and to class) that we find a basis for doing so. Trans* struggles have a material and historical reality (real processes by which gender is imposed upon their bodies), which flows ultimately from the particular historical development of capitalism as a gendered power structure, which cannot be said of kids who think they’re dragons.

IV. Against identity

Identity is a cage. That is to say: identity, being, is the antithesis of spontaneity, doing. Identities are alien categories imposed upon us by biopolitical processes of identification, with which are constantly in conflict. Capital needs us to be certain things at certain times and in certain places in order to effectively police and manage us. The revolutionary subject, then, is one without identity. They act authentically in their situation, inhabiting their history without being constrained by it, acting against identity-based oppression in order to open up new possibilities and new experiences, rather than to reify the same categories of cold capitalist managerial logic. Ultimately, freedom means a world beyond identity, beyond capitalism, built on the basis of human solidarity, with a diversity of experiences and ways of living. This means that, while we struggle based on who we are, or who we are made to be (and thus autonomous identity-based organising is sometimes the most effective form of resistance) there is only one revolutionary class and one world to take.

Review: The Crises of Multiculturalism – Racism in a Neoliberal Age

This is the text of a review I wrote for Irish Anarchist Review No. 5, which is available from the WSM (PDF should be up soon). I’ll hopefully write about some of this stuff in less wordy faux-academic language soon.

Title: The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age
Authors: Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley
ISBN: 978-1-84813-581-9
Publisher: Zed Books
Available online from: zedbooks.co.uk
Cost: £15.99

In November 2011, the Fine Gael mayor of Naas, Darren Scully sparked controversy when he announced on national radio that he would no longer represent “Black Africans”, due to their “aggressiveness and bad manners” and their tendency to “play the race card”. Ultimately, the controversy caused by Scully’s blatant and unambiguous racism forced his resignation as mayor.

1. It Ain’t Easy Being Blue.

However, as Crises… co-author Gavan Titley pointed out, the mistake, from Scully’s point of view, was not in being racist per se, but rather that he “played the wrong race card”. [1] While overt racism is still experienced by people of colour both on the streets and within institutions, in public discourse the language and tactics of racism have become more subtle (to some extent, in response to significant victories by anti-racist, anti-apartheid and post-colonial movements worldwide, and the demise of scientific racism as an ideology). Racist speech is no longer concerned (explicitly at least) with racial superiority and inferiority, or even with race per se, but rather with the supposed impossibility of the harmonious co-existence of different cultures within a single society. Scully’s blunder was his lack of political sophistication, not his racist intent.

Multiculturalism in crisis

In Crises…, Lentin and Titley discuss similar themes, exploring the dynamics of racism in contemporary public discourse in the era of neoliberalism. Specifically, they discuss various narratives around ‘the failed experiment of multiculturalism’, which function as a means of ‘laundering’ racist ideas and policies. These narratives have a fairly familiar form: For the past number of years we have been living in the era of multiculturalism, whose noble aspirations were pursued by state institutions across the Western world. However, despite the good intentions of it’s left and liberal proponents, multiculturalism has proved to be an utter failure and must be abandoned.

These narratives, while often presented by their narrators as someone finally speaking up on behalf of the silent majority in the face of repressive political correctness, in fact crop up regularly in public discourse, with everyone from newspaper columnists to mainstream political figures such as David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, to far-right figures such as Nick Griffin or Geert Wilders clamouring to sound the death knell for multiculturalism.

Crises… challenges those narratives, by questioning whether a coherent multicultural era ever existed. They argue that multiculturalism was never seriously embraced by the establishment beyond the rhetorical, nor by left anti-racists, who saw it as a liberal retreat into culture (but who have been forced somewhat reluctantly into the position of defending multiculturalism against attacks from the right). Instead, the spectre of multiculturalism is erected as a target for the racial anxieties of everyone from liberals to the far-right.

This thesis is elucidated by combining theoretical analysis with discussion of various recent controversies: moves to ban or regulate the wearing of Islamic headscarves or burkas by Muslim women, the Swiss ban on minarets, the ‘free speech’ controversy around the Jyllands Posten cartoons, the 2004 Citizenship Referendum in Ireland, and others.

Free speech and white privilege

2. This is discussed explicitly by Titley in relation to the recent invites of Nick Griffin to speak at UCC and Trinity College here.

Of particular practical significance for the Irish left, specifically those involved in anti-fascist organising, is the discussion of the Jyllands Posten cartoon controversy, which has a number of parallels with the free speech debates that regularly result when fascist leaders are invited to speak on university campuses. [2]

In such controversies, the substantive issue at stake (in this case the racist content of cartoons of Muhammed in a newspaper with a right-wing anti-Islamic agenda and historical links to fascism) is subsumed into a meta-debate about the principle of free-speech and its limits. This reflexive reframing of the issue serves a particular political function: to apparently invert the power structures of a white-privileged society so that the white racist becomes the victim of oppressive multiculturalism – an ontological inversion that functions to delegitimate the complaints of the oppressed and cast the oppressor as a symbol of Western liberal values.

“Organised around this abstraction is a ‘threefold cast of characters’ beginning with the protagonist who breaks a taboo in pursuit of freedom, who is subsequently supported by principled defenders of the open society, and both of whom triangulate with the subject who has taken offence… Muslims are cast as this intolerant apex, and thus positioned, ‘end up being treated as deficient in comparison with the evident open-mindedness of those who tolerate transgression’”. (pp. 138)

A similar dynamic exists in the case of fascist speakers on university campuses, with anti-fascists being drawn into a liberal-idealist discussion about what rights exist, how far they extend, and which rights take precedence when they conflict – a discussion which ultimately benefits fascists and racists. The more materialist analysis found here of how such events and the controversy surrounding them actually impacts the subjects of racism is perhaps a more useful way to frame discussions around applying a No Platform For Fascists policy.

Liberal racism, feminism vs. Islam, homonationalism

Also of interest is the authors’ exposition of the various forms of racism embedded in liberal approaches to understanding race and to governance, which are significantly more subtle than those of the right and far-right. Multiculturalism itself is exposed as an effort to depoliticise racism, rendering invisible structures of racialised power through constructing an imagined post-racial landscape, and in doing so functioning both as an adjunct to the post-politicism of neoliberalism generally and as a liberal mirror to the far-right’s shift in focus from race to culture. This post-racialism deprives racialised groups of the right to challenge discrimination as they experience it. Multicultural diversity is exposed as a coded language for certain acceptable ways of performing minority cultures – good diversity – which is counterposed with kinds of cultural performance less palatable to the white majority – bad diversity.

The co-optation of feminist and queer struggles by racist agendas is also discussed in-depth. Contemporary racism often employs the language and concerns of feminist and queer struggles in order to position Muslims and other racialised groups as a threat to the gains made by these movements, even though many of these gains are recent and heavily contested within even the most progressive of Western societies. This was a particularly significant dynamic in debates about Islamic headscarves and veils across Europe, where veiled Muslim women were presented as a threat to the position of all women with European societies. The actual views and experiences of veiled women were in practice excluded from these debates, which were more concerned with white people’s particular racialised vision of what a free woman looks like.

The authors draw from Jasbir Puar’s work on ‘homonationalism’ in discussing the use of queer issues towards racist agendas. Queers, particularly those who fall into the category of ‘homonormative’ (those that closely mirror heteronormative sexuality and heterosexual identity: upholding monogamy, binary gender etc.), are able to “enact [previously barred] forms of national, racial or other belongings by contributing to a collective vilification of Muslims”. (Puar, Jasbir (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press  pp 21) This dynamic is particularly significant in relation to the struggle for Palestinian national liberation, as Israel uses its relatively progressive position on LGBT rights to project itself as the ally of Western queer people in a region dominated by homophobic Muslim states and thus help to justify (pinkwash) it’s continued oppression of Palestine.

Conclusion

As an academic text, rather than an anti-racist handbook for activists, Crises… is somewhat lacking in direct practical insights for anti-racist activists, and often requires significant effort to parse the analyses presented into a useful form (a problem that is compounded by the dense writing style of the authors). However, a sophisticated understanding of how racism works under neoliberal governance is key if we are to win the ‘battle of ideas’ against those who would use racism to divide and control us in the interests of the ruling class. As such, the depth and incisiveness of analysis in Crises… make it an important text both for those seeking a better theoretical understanding of race, and those who work to combat racism in society.

Politics averted: thoughts on the ‘Occupy X’ movement

This post was written for the Workers Solidarity Movement site in October 2011 when the Occupy movement was just kicking off. It attracted quite a lot of attention at the time, because I think it echoed a lot of the frustrations leftists were feeling towards the movement. It was even picked up and republished by the IWW in the Industrial Worker newspaper.

I’m mainly reposting this because I want to copy some of the better stuff I’ve written for activist publications over to this blog, but it is interesting to read over this in retrospect and see how some of these dynamics played out in different contexts around the world.

What are we to make of the global ‘Occupy X’ movement which has exploded onto the streets of cities across the world, turning public spaces into campsites of opposition? Certain things are obvious: Firstly, the fact that there are thousands of people across the world taking over public spaces to express their anger at the financial system is undeniably a good thing. Having camped out outside the Central Bank on Dame Street on Saturday night, I can also say that these protests exude a positivity and hopefulness that is so often lacking from the ritualistic parades of anger that make up most protest marches. But there are also, in my view, serious political problems that prevent the movement from moving beyond a ‘radical sleepover’ and becoming a genuine anti-austerity grassroots resistance movement.

The analysis below is based in my own particular experience of the Dame St. protest on the ground and of the US protests as a media event. Obviously any attempt to discuss a diverse and fluid movement like this as a whole can only ever be approximate and reductive. This account is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather to sketch what I see as the major trends and tendencies emerging within the movement, and should be read with that in mind.

Non-politics, incoherence, (neo)liberalism

The ‘Occupy X’ movement has since its inception shown an extreme aversion to being seen as political. Some aspects of this, such as banning political party banners, are an understandable pragmatic reaction to the tendency of various Leninist parties to hijack these kinds of events by swamping them with flags, banners and paper-sellers. But the anti-politics of the movement, at least on the part of the organising core and the Adbusters collective who issued the call for the original Wall St. protest, is also ideological: an odd synthesis of post-leftist anti-organisationalism (which sees formal political organisations, trade unions, etc. as being necessarily oppressive) and neoliberal post-politicism (which sees a Left vs. Right contest of ideas as being largely irrelevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall). After decades of neoliberal governance and media spin attempting to drive ideology and politics out of public discourse in order to enshrine the liberal-capitalist consensus as being ‘above politics’ and to reduce political questions to technical ones best dealt with by ‘experts’, it is perhaps unsurprising, but nonetheless disheartening, to see this depoliticisation reflected in contemporary forms of resistance.

Most obviously, this has been expressed in the movement’s unwillingness to attempt to agree on a coherent set of positions beyond some very basic points of unity with no underlying analysis of society. Instead, the occupied space is used by individuals to express a range of incoherent and often mutually contradictory ideas which are related only by being in some sense opposed to the status quo and the political and financial elites. On Saturday, I spoke to individuals who believe in everything from Rawlsian social democracy, to anarchism, to paranoid crypto-anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (the New World Order, etc.), to Stalinism. Of course, the advantage of this is that it’s extremely inclusive – the only requirement to participate is a sense that things are not as they should be and that the financial sector and the state are in some way to blame – but this also means that reactionary ideas are treated the same as progressive ones rather than being robustly challenged. In practice, this means that the ideas that come to the fore tend to be those that are already dominant in society: the ideas of the ruling class. In the US context, the dominant messages from Occupy Wall Street have been liberal, reformist and nationalistic: those that posed the least threat to the establishment. For example, a call to “make Wall Street work for America” amounts to little more than a call for increased exploitation of the Third World as an alternative to imposing austerity. A call to reform banking practice to constrain “corporate greed” is merely a call to stabilise capitalism so that the course of exploitation runs more smoothly. The problem is capitalism, not regulatory failure, or corporate greed or a lack of economic patriotism, and the inadequacies of these analyses need to be exposed rather than uncritically welcomed. The Irish protest seems to be following a similar pattern, with a particular anti-IMF/EU flavour.

The theory underlying this anti-politics, so far as I can gather, is this: no two people experience oppression in the same way, and thus any attempt to unite people under a political programme inevitably ends up erasing some people’s perspectives. This is superficially quite a pleasing analysis, since it creates a framework under which all ideas can be understood as equally valid, since they all derive from lived-experience, but it’s extremely problematic. Implicitly, it denies the possibility of coming to an inter-subjective understanding (i.e. one based in mutual recognition of shared experiences and understanding of differing ones) of oppression through collective discussion and compromise, and instead collapses into a naive relativism that produces a vague and weak politics, which plays into the hands of those who wish to dismiss the protesters as ‘hippies’ who don’t understand the complexities of capitalism. In any case, it’s easy to overstate the case for subjective perspectives and ignore the objective factors that shape experiences: the processes and structures of capitalist domination.

Bring back the working-class!

One of the major victories of neoliberalism is the eradication of the working-class from the popular consciousness. One of the results of this is the prevalence of the idea among certain sections of the left that the working-class is no longer relevant to understanding power in the modern world – an outdated idea clung to by old-left dinosaurs. This is reflected in the idea of ‘the 99%’ which has become the slogan of the ‘Occupy X’ movement, which expresses a very crude understanding of class, where the ruling class are an arbitrarily defined proportion of the wealthiest people in society. This makes for some great chanting – “we are the 99%!” – but is a poor criterion for membership of an anti-capitalist or anti-austerity movement. Put bluntly: there are an awful lot of capitalists, bosses, managers, bankers, CEOs, politicians, police, prison wardens, pimps, heroin dealers, etc. in the 99%.

Properly understood, class is not a classification system of individuals based on how much money they have, it’s a social relation between people that derives from the organisation of labour under capitalism. In other words, it’s the way people are forced to relate to one another in order to participate in capitalist society. Class oppression is not a small cabal of the ultra-rich in Wall Street or Washington or Leinster House, it’s in every workplace, every police station, every dole queue, every courtroom, every prison and every territory occupied by Western militaries, and can only be sensibly understood as such.

Conclusion

The radically democratic nature of the occupations creates the potential for the movement to evolve in any number of possible directions. Whether or not they become genuine resistance movements depends largely on how much the radical left are willing to engage with them, and re-assert the importance of class politics in understanding and countering oppression, by participating in the actions, discussions, and assemblies. A key hurdle has already been overcome: people are on the streets, expressing their dissent, reclaiming public spaces; it remains to be seen what comes of it.

Things I’ve learned from the Household Tax campaign (so far)

When I say learned, a lot of this is stuff I knew already, but which has become a lot more starkly clear through the Campaign.

• Talking to people is key to building any kind of resistance. There’s no real substitute for knocking on people’s doors or stopping them in the street and communicating your ideas. Things like handing out flyers and papers, while much easier, just don’t have the same effect as a face-to-face conversation. You also get to learn a lot about the level of politicisation, and the language it’s expressed in, outside of the activist bubble.
• How to talk to people. This is essential reading for anyone doing any kind of organising. The biggest revelation for me was that listening is much more important than talking.
• There’s too many of us for the State to handle. This sounds a bit like Communism 101, and I’ve known this intellectually for years now, but it’s only recently, through walking around working-class neighbourhoods (even in a small city) and seeing just how many people there are out there that I’ve started to feel that revolutionary change is actually a pretty realistic prospect (if we do our work properly). If we become ungovernable, even in a relatively small way like boycotting an unfair tax, the State actually doesn’t have the resources to govern us anymore.
• Democracy is strategically important and not just in the sense that our organisations should reflect the kind of society we want to create, but that only through participatory democracy can we build an effective campaign, because only grassroots democratic decision-making gives the campaign the benefit of the creativity and intelligence and experiences of a broad mass of people.
• Some people have really annoying letterboxes. I don’t get why people have letterboxes that have that weird carpetty stuff in them (and sometimes two flaps). Surely all of their post gets scrunched up and ruined like my flyers did. Also, some people hide their letter boxes in random places around their garden. Also, I’m more scared of dogs than I realised.

Check out: the Campaign Against The Household & Water Taxes website.