The Politics of Identity

Class, Culture, Social Movements

Stanley Aronowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135205539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

In The Politics of Identity, Stanley Aronowitz offers provocative analysis of the complex interactions of class, politics, and culture. Beginning with the premise that culture is constitutive of class identities, he demonstrates that while feminist analyses of both racial and gay movements have discussed these components of culture, class contributions to cultural identity have yet to be fully examined. In these essays, he uses class as a category for cultural analysis, ranging over issues of ethnicity, race and gender, portrayals of class and culture in the media, as well as a range of other issues related to postmodernism.

1

The Decline and Rise of Working-Class Identity

“The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology of world historical significance.” So ends Francis Fukuyama’s lament for the end of history, “a very sad time.”¹ In his version of the end of ideology thesis, there are no Hegelian-Marxist contradictions that can be solved only by a relentless struggle for a “communist utopia.” To be sure, according to Fukuyama, the third world will remain “mired in history,” but the triumph of liberalism, at least at the ideological level, means that change is bound to be incremental or, to be exact, simply characterized by perfections of a system already in place, at least consensually.

Whatever the political merits of this thesis, first enunciated, in various ways, more than thirty years ago by, among others, Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, the implications of its key tenets— that our era is marked by conflict but not struggle, problems but not contradictions, unions but not classes, and, most important, that no concrete utopias can animate broad social movements—have barely been explored.² In the heady days of the 1960s, which appeared to be submerged in ideology and animated by the not-too-distant dreams of a “new morning” (later to be appropriated by Ronald Reagan), the American and European New Lefts had no doubt what agents of historical change there were. Although some abandoned the “old” working class for revolutionary youth, women, and, especially, the third world, the framework of theoretical and political dispute remained “class analysis.” For example, Shulamith Firestone’s pathbreaking Dialectic of Sex and Nancy Hartsock’s attempt to assert a “feminist” historical materialism, no less than the Mao-inspired works of Samir Amin privileging the agency of the third world, adopted the class standpoint, only changing the actors.³ In addition, the numerous “new” communist parties in the early seventies were persuaded that their versions of Marxism-Leninism would ultimately prevail over the pack of rival revisionists.

By the early 1980s, Marxism-Leninism appeared to have definitively passed into history, even before its standard-bearers, the State Socialist societies of Eastern Europe, Asia, and Cuba, entered their period of crisis. In retrospect, the last great working-class upheavals might have been those of the French May 1968 and the Italian “Hot Autumn” of the following year.⁴ For the 1970s were, in consequence of these unprecedented events, in part marked by a long economic crisis and consequent world capitalist restructuring, the effect of which has been to shift the scenes of industrial production to the global South and East, leaving in its wake high levels of permanent unemployment, drastically reduced trade union strength and, perhaps most telling, except in Sweden and Southern Europe, the relegation of labor and socialist parties to perennial and embattled minorities.

The question has been boldly, if narrowly, raised by Fukuyama: if the industrial working class of the West no longer carries the social weight of world historical transformation is the concept of agency, itself, dead? For without agency, there can be no history except an automatic kind. Or are agents destined to play within the rules of the liberal-democratic game within a capitalist framework? If this is the case, what is the status of class in contemporary western societies, in the Third World, in Eastern Europe? And, are there new social and political agents—women, people of color, gays and lesbians, the radicalized ecological and consumer-minded middle classes? Finally, what is the relation between social movements and class? Do social movements replace or displace class as a new “motor force” of history. Surely, the proponents of the new social movements reject the old dialectical theoretical framework but, insofar as they still work within historical discourse, that is, remain in the problematic of the “new,” they cannot fully escape historical materialism.

In what follows, my focus will be, in the main, on the United States, but I will address these issues in comparative perspective. While, at least on the surface, the U.S. case may be considered “exceptional” to the European pattern of capitalist development the differences, I think, are not fundamental but are, instead, variations on the same economic, political and cultural themes. For European socialism abandoned revolutionary perspectives during the interwar period and adopted, instead, a long term reform strategy that has entailed collaboration with its own rulers, much as the American labor movement and popular left which, in retrospect, were in the vanguard of this drift. The differences between the U.S. and Europe relate to the differences of their history, respective political systems, and effectiveness. But welfare state progressivism based upon the struggle for economic justice, although not invented in the U.S., was developed most fully in the U.S. of the 1930s, which was the crucial example of “regulated” capitalism.⁵ The 1980s did not merely sound the death knell to the remains of revolutionary doctrine, but it has witnessed the NADIR of the strategy of class-based reform. Austerity has become a permanent slogan of the capitalist state in proportion as capital accumulation has slowed and taken different forms, making enlarging the social wage a zero-sum game. The working class and its main political vehicles have been forced to retreat on a broad front of increasing privatization, of production and social benefits in the U.S. and in Europe. Although the U.S. stands at one extreme of the end of capitalist regulation and Sweden at the other, various labor and socialist movements have arranged themselves along a spectrum of progressively deregulated national economies and weakened welfare state programs. The degree of resistance and solidarity determines the pace but not the direction of the retreat. Today, European labor and socialist movements rest on a higher level of the social wage, but have, with the exception of the German metalworkers’ strike for a shorter work week, made no new dramatic gains.

I.

In the face of the apparent passing of the era of workers’ power, albeit in the reformist mode, the past decade is marked by the appearance of a new politics of “identity,” the terms of which are defined by the ruins of the old universal values of modernity. These values— industrialism within a market capitalist system, a liberal state that guarantees parliamentary democracy and individual rights—and identities that are defined, at least for political purposes, by economic position and interest, live an uncomfortable existence in late capitalist societies of Western Europe and North America. As a political program, modernity enjoyed an initial ascendancy against the authoritarian state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe in the 1980s and became hegemonic, briefly, with the fall of Eastern European communism. However, when the Berlin Wall toppled, and it became evident that the revolution was reasonably secure from a possible counterattack by the old leaderships, nearly every brand of long-suppressed identities surfaced: nationalism, Catholicism, monarchism, agrarianism, all of which owed their animus to premodern culture. And, especially in the West, there has developed a new politics based on race and gender identities.

The politics of identity takes no universal form. In Eastern Europe and what is, mistakenly, termed the “Middle East,” nationalism is conditioned by historical subordination of former client states to the Soviet Union or, in the case of the Arab and Muslim world, to Great Britain, France, and the United States. Lifting the Soviet yoke revealed the plain truth that under the rock of suppression seethed yearnings that cloaked strong authoritarian currents, despite the liberal-democratic program by which the anti-communist movement rode to power.

Of course, Arab nationalism requires no democratic veneer. The modernist tendencies, identified as specifically Western values, were soundly defeated by the Iranian revolution and subsequently submerged, if not eradicated, in normally secular Iraq and Egypt. As the Shah was ousted so were equal rights for women, closely linked in the Iranian context to anti-clericalism and, as it turned out, so were the possibilities for trade unionism and other forms of open class politics. Anti-imperialism, directed especially against the United States and Britain, has combined with a resurgent Islamic fundamentalism to produce a powerful pan-Arab movement that has subsumed class movements. Recently weakened by the Vietnam trauma, recession, and waves of new, apparently unmeltable immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean whose faith in the “American Dream” is tempered by virulent nativism, American nationalism is on the rise again in the wake of the Gulf War. This nationalism was preceded by a resurgent ethnicity in the 1970s, when large sections of the white working class—especially those with Eastern and Southern European roots—began to reevaluate the merits of assimilation and discovered one aspect of their oppression. In the Reagan era, the United States recovered its rampant militarism, which has been a crucial component of that peculiarly American idea of progress. For U.S. reliance on force to achieve state objectives is a feature both of a foreign policy that has bathed its expansionist aims in the blood of others and of the various internal wars that have been the moral equivalent of the welfare state: the “wars” on crime, sex, drugs, terrorism, dissent, the labor movement, radicals.

Certainly, American nationality has lost its utopic dimension. Militarism is no longer mediated by vital democratic and libertarian traditions, no longer masked by America’s image as the “golden door” to economic opportunity and social and political freedom, no longer opposed by progressivism that tried to link U.S. imperial aims with the provision of domestic social justice. Like the British at the turn of the 20th century, but also in the late 1940s, and the French just after the War, when their efforts to preserve empire in Southeast Asia and Algeria ended in bitter defeat and national humiliation, American nationalism rises in inverse proportion to declining U.S. global hegemony. While it is premature to announce the invasions of Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf as a “last gasp” of the U.S. imperium which, for most of the past half century, was the leading economic and military power in the world, the government’s almost ritual reversion to the use of force to reestablish its dominance is surely a sign of weakness.

At the same time, as the coalition that pursued the Gulf War shows, the global metastate is alive and well. In this context, descriptions of U.S. imperialism are simply inadequate. Rather, U.S.-based transnational corporations, together with an international political directorate closely linked to them, pursue their own version of imperial intervention with, of course, the nation-state performing an important, if subordinate function.

Recall that American troops have been deployed for the past century as instruments of U.S. foreign policy in five major wars and an equal number of “delightful” skirmishes on foreign soil. Between 1898 and the Gulf War, U.S. military has been involved in the following interventions to protect American interests:

1898—Spanish-American War: U.S. occupies Puerto Rico, Philippines, Cuba

1911—Nicaragua

1917–18—First World War

1920—U.S. joins 21 foreign armies, invades Soviet Union

1934—Nicaragua against the guerrilla forces of Sandino

1941–45—Second World War

1950–54—Korea

1962—Cuba

1961–74—Southeast Asia

1964—Dominican Republic

1984—Grenada

1989—Panama

1990—Gulf War

Needless to say, the list here of small wars is incomplete but it is sufficient to belie the well-publicized isolationist impulse of the American people. Nor was the century devoid of discontinuous but powerful patriotic fervor linked, in the main, to the reality of U.S. and transnational interests. I would venture the hypothesis that these interests were and are an extension of that intrinsic internal will to expansionism that has marked the entire compass of U.S. history, the signals of which are the French and Indian War of 1763, the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804), the wholesale theft of African tribes to enlarge the slave labor force, the Civil War, and the Indian wars of the latter half of the 19th century. The recent and very naive idea, that one may join the armed forces for purely educational and training reasons or for the vague aim of “defense,” may be ascribed to the post-Vietnam syndrome, the illusion of the end of the Cold War, or anything else you like. What is abundantly clear is this: if young Americans believed that they would be spared the toils, but not the spoils, of war they were deeply mistaken. After the Gulf War, the symbol of American identity remains the centaur, electronically mediated, of course. The American as policeman is supplemented by what has become a national scandal: the emergence of a permanent covert intelligence force that not only plays a vital role in foreign policy— keeping tabs on other governments, toppling or undermining them when they show signs of independence, and so forth—but also in domestic. The CIA is only the most visible of a complex network whose internal surveillance of U.S. citizens, labor unions, and social movements has never relaxed since the 1920s. The other side to identity politics is no less disruptive of the older assumptions that social divisions were defined by national boundaries and class affiliations. Although national identity retains its mesmerizing power among large sections of the underlying population, the last two decades have been marked, in nearly all major countries of the late capitalist West, by a discernable decline in politics in which class, rather than race, gender, or ethnicity, was a crucial element. Of course, this is especially true of the United States, where class-defined movements have been weak throughout its history, but also Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, where socialist and labor movements constituted the heart of the social and political opposition for most of the 20th century. With the exception of the United States, socialist and labor parties still occupy the space of the alternative to capitalist hegemonies, but no longer represent what might be termed the determinate negation of the prevailing order. Rather, they have settled for the position of “loyal opposition.” Socialist parties and the former Italian Communist Party (now the Democratic Party of the Left) are national parties of order. Similarly, the class struggle is relentlessly waged, but, with few exceptions, the initiative has passed, perhaps decisively to capital and its political retainers. With few exceptions, the labor movements, still the mass organizations of workers, have become almost reflexively shy of militant strike action; their most fervent wish is that the status quo will remain in force.

II.

Inevitably, the concept of class entails abstraction and a severe reduction. The multiplicities of concrete relations and, in contemporary parlance, of identities of individuals and collectivities are understood in one reading of historical materialism that, until recently, was dominant within Marxism, as mediations of what is conveniently described as a fundamental structuring relation of capital to exploited labor. Or, in the structuralist mode of analysis, the polarity of Marx’s two-class model is, within this, ascribed the highest level of abstraction, termed “mode of production.” Below this, the “social formation,” the so-called intermediate classes, may play a larger or smaller political role depending on the specificity of a country’s history.⁶ However, in all versions of Marxism, class retains its dominance as a structuring relation. Within the paradigm, identities that may motivate political mobilization, such as gender, race and ethnicity, and even nationality, are named displacements of class relations and are ascribed to the unevenness of capitalist development or the specific conjuncture of the social formation which, typically, produces caste and stratification within those classes that structure the system.

Marx defined capital as a social relation the hidden term of which was that it is constituted by labor.⁷ Capital appears in the forms not only of money, but also machinery, buildings, and raw materials, which are merely materializations of quantities of living labor. In Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the slave is the object of domination by the master but, in turn, is the vehicle through which humans dominate nature.⁸ Living labor, as the embodiment of the multiplicity of nature’s endowments is, for Marx, the condition for the reproduction of the entire social order, most particularly the relations of production and the social relations, the multiplicity of which is what we mean by the term “society.” For Marx, the mode of appropriation of the surplus—in capitalist production relations the extraction of surplus value—is, at the end of the day, the fundamental structuring relation that determines all other social forms, including the state and politics.

Although Marx never denies the importance of considering that multiplicity of relations and, especially in his historical writings, insists on their pertinence for explaining concrete events at the political and social levels, he is chiefly concerned to reveal the underlying logic that governs the long wave of historical transformation. The subject term in the celebrated phrase “All history is the history of class struggles”⁹ is “history” which, for Marx, connotes, in the first instance, the act in which “the production of the means to satisfy … needs, the production of material life itself.”¹⁰ Since this production depends on the mean...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Decline and Rise of Working-Class Identity
• 2. Marx, Braverman, and the Logic of Capital
• 3. On Intellectuals
• 4. Theory and Socialist Strategy
• 5. Working-Class Culture in the Electronic Age
• 6. The White Working-Class and the Transformation of American Politics
• 7. Why Work?
• 8. Postmodernism and Politics
• Index