Identity Politics, Class Struggle, and Power

I realised today why I’m uncomfortable with the term ‘identity politics’.

This usually gets counterposed to ‘class struggle’, at least in the intellectual circles I tend to frequent. But elsewhere it can be contrasted with whatever more ‘serious’ or ‘pragmatic’ politics the speaker prefers. For those who’ve not come across it, it sort of lumps together sexual, racial, disability, cultural, etc. issues – politics which problematise the oppression of certain people on the grounds of their ‘identity’.

I dislike the term because I think it serves to disguise the way that all politics is about ‘identity’: all politics is about people deciding to act in certain ways, and the way that people make those decisions, about what they want and what motivates them, has to be understood in terms of how they conceive of themselves.

Does Moral Philosophy Make a Difference?

Missives from Marx has a series of posts up in which he suggests, in essence, that

“There’s something really stupid about the meta-ethical arguments about whether or not legitimations for ethics are absolute or not, and, if not, whether people can still be ethical…most people just don’t give a shit about meta-ethics.”

This is of interest to me, among other things, because I’ve recently been doing a certain amount of work on meta-ethics (i.e. what is ethics? what do words like ‘good’ mean?) and will, with luck, be presenting to a conference in mid-November, arguing that the foundations of ethics (in at least one sense) are absolute (in at least one sense) in what I think is a fairly novel way. If that goes well I will probably post on it. So I don’t think the whole issue is ‘stupid’.

Of course Missives has a point, which is that people are not waiting with bated breath for some philosophers to finally announce whether truth is beauty, or whether, in fact, beauty is truth. Most of the actions that we call ‘moral’ (in at least one sense) are motivated by something other than metaphysics – they’re some psychological impulse or other, whether empathy, disgust, fear, etc.

But I think this point can be over-stated. The question to ask, I think, is not so much ‘does philosophy affect people’s behaviour?’, but rather the two questions ‘does philosophy affect ideology?’ and ‘does ideology affect people’s behaviour?’

Foucault and Carnap on the Politics of Science

For unforeseen reasons, I have found myself reading extracts from the intellectual autobiography of Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the Vienna Circle and of the logical positivists, an early 20th-century philosophical movement that rejected as strictly meaningless all statements that could not be reduced to empirical science or to pure logic.

I came across his brief statement of the ethical and political beliefs that he felt the whole group had shared:

“[A]ll deliberate action presupposes knowledge of the world, that the scientific method is the best method of acquiring knowledge and that therefore science must be regarded as one of the most valuable instruments for the improvement of life.

It was and still is my conviction that the great problems of the organization of economy and the organization of the world at the present time, in the era of industrialization, cannot possibly be solved by “the free interplay of forces”, but require rational planning. For the organization of economy this means socialism in some form; for the organization of the world it means a gradual development toward a world government.

However, neither socialism nor world government are regarded as absolute ends; they are only the organizational means which, according to our present knowledge, seem to give the best promise of leading to…a form of life in which the well-being and the development of the individual is valued most highly, not the power of the state.

…we shall recognize the dangers lying in the constant increase in the power of the state; this increase is necessary because the national states must fuse into larger units and the states must take over many functions of the economy. Therefore it will be of prime importance to take care that the civil liberties and the democratic institutions are not merely preserved but constantly developed and improved.”

There’s a lot to comment on here, but it especially struck me because it reminded me of Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish‘, which I’ve also been reading recently. Foucault describes a process by which, starting around the later 18th century, institutions and habits of ‘discipline’, which were intimately connected to science, have appeared, spread, and become all-pervasive.

Taxation and its Discontents: are taxes theft?

A lot of placarrds at the Tea Party protests expressed a sense of ownership, a feeling that something was being taken away from people, with the key form of this taking being taxation. This is hardly a fringe position – claims that (over-) taxation is theft are relatively common fare. Perhaps relatedly, there is a broader sense of robbery – that the country itself is being stolen?

To what extent might leftist observers agree with or sympathise with this sort of thing?

To start with I think it’s important to distinguish ‘simple claims’ and ‘exclusive claims’. To have a simple ownership claim on something is to have a right to control and enjoyment of it, but a right which must be balanced against the like rights of others. An exclusive claim overrules all others (or permits them only as very secondary qualifications), and so if I have an exclusive claim on something, that excludes anyone else doing so.

Property as it exists in our society is, with some qualifications, an exclusive claim – moreover, an exclusive claim that persists unchanged over time, and encompasses rights of use, exclusion of others, enjoyment of further products, and crucially tradeability to any other person. Its justifications, however, are usually valid if under stood as arguing for simple claims.

For instance, the fact of having expended effort and time to create something certainly gives you a claim to it, in that to be entirely deprived of it would not just be unpleasant but unfair. But that need not imply that other simple claims on it, such as from those who contributed to allowing you to make it, or from those who need it, are necessarily ruled out; nor need it imply that your claim on it fully possesses all the components of a property right, or that it bears any strong relation to the particular property-rights respected by our legal system.

By distinguishing the two, we can grant what is intuitive in various property-justifying arguments, while still denying their conclusion, and supporting communism. This, in essence, is what is wrong with rights-based capitalist arguments.

With that in mind, let us look back at opposition to taxes.

The average person in a capitalist-and-statist society is greatly impoverished relative to what they would have if either a) society’s wealth were divided into equal-sized chunks and each person given exclusive claim to one chunk, or b) society’s wealth were partly thus chunked but, wherever convenient, made collective property in such a way as to maximise people’s ability to use and enjoy it. So overall, most people are alienated from social wealth.

Now we might think that people have roughly equal simple-claims on the accumulated social wealth – although over particular things one person might have stronger claims than another, overall the differences even out. But do they?

The short answer is ‘yes’; the long answer makes reference to the interdependence of different branches of both waged and unwaged labour, the role of socialisation in making labour possible, the amount which was produced by past generations, whose members are now all dead, natural human equality, and of course the falseness of all arguments for the existing distribution. But I won’t go into that. The point is that there is a systematic dispossession of most people.

Tea-Party Protesters: What is Freedom?

So a few days ago there was a huge march in the USA by people who are opposed to something – it may be socialised healthcare, it may be the bailouts, it may be the democrats, it maybe ‘big government’, and it definitely seems to involve Obama.

It’s an intriguing phenomenon, and I thought I might devote a few words to it. After all, at least two things seem to suggest, at first glance, a kinship between me and them: some manner of ‘opposition to government per se’, and some manner of fondness for tea.

On the first point, consider an account of the march here (found via Sociological Images): what is particularly of note is this:

“I would say that the spine of this protest is not any well considered opposition to health care, but to taxes, and to the idea of government itself…one theme that seems to be emerging…is that there is no difference between Obama and George W. Bush…When they protest big government,” they are not Republicans, or even conservatives in the conventional sense of the word. They are defenders of personal liberty against a one party state linked to a secret global system, a state that floods a nation of good white working people with illegal immigrants and freeloading welfare cheats”

Now, of course this can be overstated – a commenter says, correctly, “These people aren’t anarchists” – before going on, bafflingly, to say “and we should be thankful for that. Then they’d be really dangerous.” ‘Really dangerous’ here presumably means something like ‘having a smaller history of violence against civilian persons than almost any other political grouping, and far less than most of the tendencies that were manifested at the march’.

But anyway. Anarchists are already bedevilled by the need to differentiate themselves from anarcho-capitalists, who also use the same term, ‘freedom’, in what amounts to a very different way. To understand how people who I would likely disagree with on pretty much all particular points of politics can raise what seem like formally similar cries requires, I think, unpacking what psychologically terms like ‘freedom’ mean to different people.

Why Does the West Not Cane or Whip People In Public?

This post is very un-thought-through – everything in it is offered mainly to stimulate thought, not to convey my own beliefs (after all, I’m an anarchist, so my thoughts on punishment are hardly going to be mainstream).

One hears sometimes stories of people in other countries by sentenced by a court to be whipped or caned in public. Apparently, this is practiced in one form or another in about 30 different countries – all in either Africa, Asia, or the Caribbean. In ‘the west’, i.e. Europe and North America (also, it seems, Latin America) such a thing is never done – at least to adults.

Not only is it not done, but it often provokes shock and horror. Isn’t that barbaric? As a related fact, we are also entirely opposed to any sort of punitive mutilation, such as the amputation of a hand, or castration, or branding.

The reason for this is not entirely obvious at first sight. ‘We’ (that is, the general Western public) are quite happy to have people locked in cages – some of us are even happy for it to be indefinite, or solitary for long periods. Why is there such a big difference between controlling someone’s movements and just beating them?

One obvious argument for why we’re against mutilation is that it’s so permanent, and we want to affirm the possibility of rehabilitation – that punishment shouldn’t determine the whole of your life. But this seems to imply that we should be very keen on corporal punishment – because a beating, even a severe one, is less ‘lasting’ than most forms of imprisonment.

Reinforcing this, is the possibility that a beating might be considered substantially preferable to imprisonment by some (or most?) of the actual recipients of the punishment. It’s over quickly, it doesn’t impact so much on your ability to carry on your other projects. It’s less likely to destroy your relationships through prolonged absence, it has less effect on your children.

What is Politics? Crafts, Conflicts, and Oppression

Most of this blog is about ‘politics’ in one form or another. But it’s not entirely easy to say what identifies things as ‘political’. Sometimes the term is given a very wide definition (e.g. the making of decisions by groups) but that doesn’t seem much use – other times it’s defined quite narrowly (e.g. anything relating to the affairs of government), which also seems to miss what’s interesting.

A related question is why do politics? What is the point of it? I don’t think this would be the same for everyone. I do notice certain patterns though.

One view of ‘politics’ is sort of a generalisation from war – different groups are in conflict, and the important thing is simply to ensure that my side wins. Because we’re the best side, obviously.

Another view might be that ‘politics’ is a sort of craft – how can the ‘ship of state’ be most effectively ‘steered’? This can agree with the above that there’s a sort of constant ‘war’ going on, but it’s one in which ‘we’, the political-minded, are not engaged. Rather, we want to moderate, resolve, and generally control these conflicts so as to make things as peaceful as possible.

A particular flavour of this would be to treat ‘politics’ not as a practical but as an intellectual craft – the skill of best formulating hypothetical constitutions, say, or just of best understanding the ‘laws’ by which society progresses.

And finally, a last view of politics might be to see it principally in terms of ‘oppression’ – that is, as the first view said, there is a conflict going on, but it’s a conflict in which one side is systematically the aggressor against, and overall is ‘beating’ the other. The goal of politics is not to pick a side and back it, nor to keep this conflict under wraps, but to support the ‘oppressed’ in each case, with the goal not of having them triumph, but of reaching a point without oppression.

Obviously this isn’t all-or-nothing: most people will exhibit all of these at some point. For instance, the formation of rival parties, movements, ‘isms’, etc. means everybody will be drawing on the psychology of number 1 – my team is right, we have to fight the other team, they are bad. And there’s nothing wrong with that, within limits.

But I think it’s clear that there will also be fairly big variations, and that they will tend to relate to people’s actual political views. The primacy of the last one – politics as defined by the fact of systematic oppression, and as having the goal of ending that – is probably the best definition I can think of for ‘left-wing’.

What’s interesting is how people thinking in terms of one might view people thinking in terms of another. For example, it’s common to hear people from somewhere around the political centre complain that those on the far left ‘are entirely negative – they only know what they’re against, not what they’re for’. In part (in part), this may be due to the fact that those centrists are envisaging politics as a realm where ‘we’ (the politically active) are all basically on the same side, with the same goals (we all want to ‘make society better’, don’t we?) and are engaged in sharing advice about how to do that, even if sometimes we diagree.

But those unhelpful leftists are perhaps approaching politics more as a realm of struggle – and forces at war with each other don’t give each other advice. The focus might be less on identifying the right ‘plan’ and more on identifying the right ‘side’, and how to support it.

I think this can go too far, of course. Everything is best in moderation. But I also think it’s worth stating out loud: for me personally, I don’t approach politics primarily in terms of contributing to a shared ‘craft’, a body of knowledge either academic or practical – although that is, for example, the way that I generally approach philosophy, and the way that scientists, we might hope, generally approach science.

Rather, on this blog I primarily treat politics as something defined reactively, by the responses that are possible/necessary to the unfortunate fact of oppression.

Which is not to say, of course, that there is no such shared, non-conflictual ‘craft’ of how to organise people in society, at whatever scale. There is – but it’s quite different from most of ‘politics’ as usually understood, and in some ways it’s only been developed as a systematic discipline over the last century (or less). How to de-escalate situations, how to increase group creativity, how to avoid groupthink, how to stop people from feeling excluded, how to transmit information across networks rapidly, etc. In its intellectual aspect it might be called ‘social psychology’ – in its practical aspect, I’m not sure what to call it.

I don’t talk much about that, whatever it’s called. Primarily that’s because I’m quite useless at it, and can only suggest the absolute most basic and general principles of it (e.g. you’re more likely to get a decision to reflects everyone’s interests if everyone has a say in that decision). But it’s also because I don’t think it should be too hard – once we’ve turned our insane oppressive society into a sane one, and in doing so dissolved everything we would normally think of as ‘politics’.

Looking Back

Yes, I’m unoriginal for making a post about the anniversary of the world trade centre attacks. It’s not even a very good one. Just some thoughts thrown out.

I didn’t have a reaction to the attacks when they happened – I don’t even really remember what I was doing at the time. I was largely apolitical back then, so my response was mainly confusion and intrigued observation of the various responses being offered all around me.

It was in the reaction to the attacks and the following events (‘the war on terror’) that I underwent a lot of my politicisation – though whether this was because of those events, or just personal development, I’m not sure.

That politicisation took a long time to really get anywhere though. It was about 5 years before I moved decisively to the hard left, and in the intervening period I tried on most of the available outfits: at times I was anti-war, at times I was pro-war, at times I was a liberal, a classical liberal, or a ‘decent’ lefty. Most of the time I think I was just devil’s advocate against whoever I was talking to. Ha, oh yes, and at one point I stood in a mock election as a Liberal Democrat candidate.

More broadly, I feel as though the world trade centre attacks somewhat frame a certain political period, with the worldwide recession framing it from the other end.

I don’t know whether that period is really very meaningful from an objective point of view, but I think it was very meaningful to me, because it gave me the co-ordinates within which politics always worked. Because I hadn’t taken much of an interest in politics before around 2001, my political awareness of the world has always involved: Bush is US president; 9/11 has happened; we are at war in Afghanistan and Iraq; everyone is talking about ‘terrorism’, and conversely about ‘attacks on civil liberties’; the UK government is labour, but they’re all right-wing bastards; ‘Islam’ is a politically contested symbol; etc.

Now that’s changed, at least symbolically – there’s a different US president, the economy is talked about more than foreign policy, and pretty soon there will be a Conservative government in Britain. A lot of other people, older than me, or with a more politicised childhood, will have experience of such things from the past, from the ‘pre-9/11′ period. I don’t, so it will be interesting.

Reflecting on how my circumstances affected the formation of my beliefs, I’m actually relatively confident though. If I had jumped straight onto a particular bandwagon in 2003 or so, and then stuck to it and defended it for years, I might worry that my beliefs were the contingent outcome a particular situation – that if things had been slightly different, I’d have believed something completely opposed. And to an extent obviously that’s true – I didn’t build myself from scratch, after all.

But I do flatter myself that a small difference in circumstances wouldn’t have made a big difference in my eventual beliefs – precisely because I held off from committing to anything for something like 6 years (5 years to become a communist, then another year to add ‘anarcho’ on the front – I’m focusing here on ‘conventionally political’ topics, I think my relationship to feminism had a different sort of pathway). While I never went very far to the right, I do recall at one point toying with ‘right-wing Marxism’, which supports free market globalisation as the best way to ‘develop’ capitalism towards its fullness and then eventual self-overcoming.

Anyway, that’s some thoughts. The test, I suppose, will be over how the politics – both explicit stated positions and the equally important set of ‘instincts’ and responses that guide judgement of particular cases – that I developed in the 2001-2008 period work in the coming years.

What Does Political Disagreement Reflect?

The same post I mentioned yesterday ends with a question: “If you’re going to argue that the case for property rights rests only upon consequentialist arguments…then the difference between  classical liberals and revolutionary Marxists such as myself comes down largely to merely empirical questions. Is this really the case?”

It’s an interesting question – both specifically about liberalism and Marxism/communism, and also more generally.

We can express the more general question rather like this: take some person whose beliefs you profoundly disagree with. Now take the most outrageous but still factual claims that they make. ‘If organised religion decays, society will descend into chaos’; ‘if the races are mixed too much, intellectual acheivement will come to a near-complete halt’; ‘if the rightful king is replaced by a government of mere commoners, their incompetence will lead to famine after famine’.

Now, suppose that this were factually true. If it seems (as I think it would) that you would then, in good conscience, have to accept at least the essentials of their position, then doesn’t that mean that your disagreement is based merely on the empirical fact that these things happen not to be true?

What this illustrates of course is that a distinction between ‘factual’ and ‘evaluative’ beliefs is at most a way of talking hypothetically about abstract extremes. That is, ‘factual beliefs’ are those things that hypothetically, people can all come to believe regardless of their values, and values are those things which, hypothetically, would divide people even if they both knew every single fact. But in practice we’re never anywhere close to either situation, so the two are all manged up together.

The ‘Political Compass’ and Class Politics: A Better Way to Classify Ideologies?

Most people interested in politics will have come across ‘The Political Compass’, which markets itself as an improvement on ‘The Left-Right Spectrum’ (which those interested in politics will also probably have come across). It’s basic idea is that the Left-Right axis should be kept as a gague of economic views, but supplemented with a vertical ‘authoritarian-libertarian’ axis.

This gives four corners, as indicated right:

(Note that this approach gives no obvious way to reflect issues such as feminism vs. antifeminism, environmentalism, racism, etc.)

Is this any good? I think it’s major problem is that although it’s presented as replacing the left-right spectrum, it’s actually a different sort of thing. It is, so to speak, a classification ‘from first principles’ that sets up abstract criteria and then compares people’s views to them. It’s spirit is almost like that of a scientific experiment that tries to isolate certain variables and then model them. What it ends up doing is asking two (very broad) questions – about capitalism and about personal freedom – and then tell you how you answered them.

The left-right spectrum doesn’t do this. It looks at the complex and messy reality – of divergent all-encompassing worldviews, and how they imply views on particular issues, and how this plays out in practice, and who will ally with who, and tries to group this into hazily-defined but (at least somewhat) practically-relevant lumps.

The first method might be more appropriate if people’s political opinions were formed in a purely intellectual process of debate and inquiry, but if this weren’t the case – if, in fact, systematic interests lay behind most if not all production of ideology – then we would expect that the most relevant ideological contours would actually be based on fault-lines that weren’t always immediately obvious at the ideological level, and which could best be understood in terms of a certain sense of ‘partisanship’.

That would suggest that ‘the left’, whatever particular ideals they espouse, are partisans of a particular side; the ‘right’, partisans of another. This approach also has the virtue that it can deal better with different views of what the basic questions of value are – whereas the political compass’ approach has to assume that, say, ‘personal freedom’ is an important issue for all views, and that they define it in the same way.

However – isn’t there some usefulness in trying to spread the left-right spectrum out over at least two dimensions? It does seem strange that Hitler and Stalin must be placed at opposite ends despite their similarities, for example. So what if we tried to combine the merits of both – to look for a schematic representation that could incorporate more information than a mere line, while retaining the ‘class-partisanship’ approach of the traditional left-right spectrum?

That’s what I want to try to do today! I may not do it very well, but that’s ok.

See second image, right (and bear in mind the colours may not always be most appropriate, I was trying to balance historical associations with making it look pretty overall).

So what’s the idea? The idea is that four major trends all appear as paths leading away from the grey muddy centre: liberalism, socialism, nationalism, and conservatism.

All ultimately are best understood in class terms, although only two are specific to a certain class. Socialism, as is conventionally assumed, seeks the interests of the proletariat, i.e. it seeks a society without private capital, on behalf of the class whose members have no private capital.

Liberalism, again not saying anything too strange or novel, seeks the interests of the bourgeoisie, of those who do own private capital and seek a return on it. But the ambivalence of liberalism comes from the differentiated of this class into the petit-bourgeoisie, who have little capital, and whose interests (and hence ideology) can potentially move close to those of the proletariat, and the haute-bourgeoisie, who have loads of capital and are thus a proper ruling class.

This merges them into conservatism, which is not the ideology of any particular class but rather a body of ideas and sentiments that any established ruling class can use to defend its position and hold back change.