Striking a pose

By: Aphra

31 July 2021

“You can be sincere and still be stupid.” 

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

Back in the day, Thatcher’s bully boys in the right-wing British media coined the phrases loony left and PC madness. They used them to label and to demonise left-wing local authorities, feminist and anti-racist organisations, and the trade union movement which was fighting to protect jobs and services. 

The motivation was to weaken opposition in advance of the ravaging effects of the disinvestment and privatisation that neo-liberalism was ushering in.

The first thing the Thatcher government did was to remove the controls on the export of capital. That signalled the start of a massive flow of investment to places in the world where corporations could extract more profit by paying less for labour, and have the bonus of being able to pollute and spoil to their heart’s content. 

They did not invest to improve the lives of workers in those regions. Like the first wave of transnational corporate investment and its associated governmental aid, neo-liberal corporate investment was purely in the pursuit of profit. The first wave of investment had been aimed at developing infrastructure to facilitate the extraction of natural resources; the second was aimed at the exploitation of “human resources”.*  

Neo-liberalism has been in the driving seat for almost forty years. During that time there has been an explosion in digital technology and a dramatic rise in the living standards, choices, and expectations of the buffer class. 

The price for that is a massive increase in energy consumption, the development and use of thousands of toxic chemical products, the dumping of billions of tonnes of toxic waste, along with galloping species’ extinctions and accelerating climate change. 

Arguably neo-liberalism’s greatest harm is also its greatest ideological success – the virtual destruction of the belief in the possibility of foundational economic change.  

In this on-going process, its media game has become more subtle. 

The second-wave feminist-inspired idea that structural change needs to be accompanied by attitudinal change, has been transmogrified into the idea that attitudinal change alone is sufficient to bring about such structural change as is necessary.  

For neo-liberalism’s well-padded buffer class, whose members are the most heavily invested in identity politics, what constitutes necessary structural change is radically different from that demanded by the traditional left operating in the interests of the working class.

Underlying much of identity politics (rhetorical flourishes on Twitter bios notwithstanding) is the acceptance that a radical change of the economic base is either not necessary, or is unachievable.  All that needs to be, or all that can be achieved are accommodations for those who are disadvantaged because they belong to one or more of the categories on the current list of approved oppressed-minorities. 

This locates the adherents of identity politics as the progressive wing of neo-liberalism, or the neo-liberal left. It does not make them left-wing in the original meaning of the term. 

What worsens the situation is that for some of the neo-liberal left, all that is needed to bring about attitudinal change is attitudinising. As a result, posturing on social media often becomes the measuring stick of what is progressive. 

That attitudinising has been deemed by the right to be left wing and the older, discredited right-wing slurs of PC madness and the loony left have been replaced by woke, the radical left, or hard left.

The neo-liberal left falls into the trap set for them by not questioning why it is that demands which question arguably the most universal and foundational of human understandings – that there are two sexes  – are not just accepted, but are actively promoted by neo-liberal governments and the giant corporations whose interests those governments serve. 

Their narrow focus effectively privileges demands for extensions of, or even entirely new, formal rights within a politico-economic system that is either perpetuating or deepening gross inequalities and injustices in other spheres. 

Those on both sides of the Identity Question who fail to look beyond the labelling and the rhetoric, are helping to fuel the most recent iteration of capitalism’s campaign to keep divided the constituent parts of a global movement which could bring about foundational change.   

*Human resources is a term that speaks to the dehumanisation of the process –  living human beings reduced to a factor in an economic equation aimed at increasing the obscene wealth of a ruling elite.

HOME