Distract And Divert: The rise of what we have come to call “Identity Politics” represents the ideological manifestation of the ruling class’s objective need to destroy class politics, and of the middle-class’s subjective need to justify their participation in the process.
THE RELIEF of the ruling class can only be imagined. Thirty
years after the collapse of actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe, they
have more or less faded into invisibility. The ruling class (also known as the bourgeoisie)
along with the proletariat, are now little-used politico-historical terms: as
distant from today’s activists as the “patricians” and “plebeians” of Ancient
Rome.
If you’re lucky, the villains of the twenty-first century
Left are the “One Percent”. Otherwise, the people’s enemies are identified by
characteristics over which they have no control: ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation and age. The fact that, 80 years ago, belonging to the wrong
ethnicity and/or sexual orientation was enough to get you exterminated by the
Nazis is but one of the many ironies associated with contemporary leftists.
Even the “One Percent” designation, introduced into popular
discourse by the short-lived “Occupy Movement”, is a curiously disembodied
term. To be a member of the One Percent is an entirely passive condition. You
are a statistic. A percentage of the population made relevant solely by another
percentage – i.e. the quantum of societal wealth your statistical sliver
possesses.
Once again, a person’s villainy has nothing to do with what
they do and everything to do with what they are. The other
disturbing aspect of Occupy’s vilification of the One Percent is the way in
which the remaining 99 percent of the population are let off the
hook entirely. As if 1 percent of any group has ever been able to control the other 99
percent without a lot of help!
The contrast with Karl Marx’s world of class agency could
hardly be more stark. To read his (and Friedrich Engels’) The Communist
Manifesto is to enter a world in which classes act. To be a member
of the bourgeoisie is to be in constant motion. This is because, once secured,
economic, political and social power must be constantly reinforced and
protected. Proletarians, likewise, are constantly struggling to weaken the grip
of their capitalist masters. In Marx’s defining sentence: “The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
In other words: the human order is made and reproduced by
human action. Which means the human order can be changed by human
action. Our destiny is not predetermined by our ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation or age, but by how effectively we participate in class struggle.
Sadly, the effectiveness with which working-class New
Zealanders – New Zealand proletarians – have struggled against the more-or-less
continuous onslaught of the New Zealand ruling class and its bourgeois helpers since 1984 has been sub-optimal. They allowed themselves to be betrayed by the country’s
trade union bureaucracy in 1991, and remained pathetically loyal to a Labour
Party which had, between 1984 and 1990, dismantled the social-democratic
economy their parents and grandparents had struggled so hard to establish in
the 1930s and 40s. The most highly-skilled and enterprising members of the New
Zealand working class decamped in their thousands for Australia. Those who
remained were forced into competition with the swelling numbers of immigrant
workers who were admitted to make good the shortfall.
Unsurprisingly, this process produced innumerable
socio-economic victims and with them enormous socio-economic resentment and
rage. To an extent not before seen in New Zealand, it became necessary to
obscure the suffering of these working-class citizens and, at all costs,
prevent it from assuming a political dimension.
This has always been a major aspect of the bourgeoisie’s
function in capitalist society, but in the aftermath of the neoliberal
revolution of the 1980s and 90s it came to absorb an ever-greater amount of
middle-class energy. A great deal of that energy was devoted to making sure
that the class oppression in which more and more of them were now engaged
remained hidden – not only from the victims, but also from themselves. In
essence, this involved masking conscious human agency behind the immutable
markers of human identity. The rise of what we have come to call “Identity
Politics” represents the ideological manifestation of the ruling class’s
objective need to destroy class politics, and of the middle-class’s subjective
need to justify their participation in the process.
Redirecting the rage and resentment of those on the
receiving end of neoliberal economic policy away from those actually
responsible – the capitalist ruling class and its middle-class enablers – was
always going to involve a pretty substantive re-interpretation of social
reality. It meant recasting the malignant behaviours associated with poverty
and powerlessness as the inherent failings of particular human sub-groups:
whites, males, straights and, most recently and ridiculously, Baby Boomers.
Is it really the contention of the 55-year-olds-and-under
who now blame the Boomers for all their woes, that every human-being
born on the planet in the years 1946-1965 has benefited unfairly from the
economic, social and political trends of the subsequent decades? Even the billions
of people born in the Third World? The millions more born in the Soviet Bloc?
Are they really insisting that there was not a huge discrepancy between the
experiences of working-class Baby Boomers living in the capitalist west and
their middle-class compatriots growing up alongside them? If so, then the
degree of Gen-X and Millennial self-deception; their inability to recognise
what has actually been happening around them since 1984 – or the role they and
their own middle-class families have played in it – is astonishing.
What a victory for the ruling class! To create at least two
generations incapable of understanding that the wealth and comfort of their
middle-class parents was the necessary price of their complicity in destroying
the self-defence mechanisms of the New Zealand working-class. Or that their own
difficulties in replicating their parents’ lifestyle is purely and simply
because their parents’ success was so comprehensive that the going rate for
oppressing the lower orders of society has fallen sharply. How pleasing it must
be for those at the top to see how much more willing the young are to turn on
their parents and grandparents than on the true villains – the ruling class.
If the members of Generation X and the Millennial Generation
really want to improve their lifestyles, then they should force up the price of
complicity in class oppression by threatening to embrace or, even better, adopt
for a generation or two, the precepts of Marx’s class struggle.
