Class vs. Identity Politics - Ideology as 'Defaultness', Neoliberalism and the Post-Immunological Age

 

The aim of this essay is to explain the difference, in my conception, of class and identity politics and to show how ideologies that maintain a status-quo of power relations (conservative, “right-wing”) invoke a conception of a neutral, ‘default’, normal or natural state of society that we must preserve or return to. Because of this, identity politics is always a right-wing phenomenon, even in the cases where it masquerades as left-wing.

 

I: IDEOLOGY AS DEFAULTNESS

 

            To begin, an ideology is not just a set of intercorrelated beliefs. It is also a way of arriving at conclusions. To define ideology as a set of beliefs (conclusions) would also ignore the reasons as to why an individual or a group would support that conclusion/belief. Thus, it is better to frame, for the purposes of this essay, ideology as the pair question/answer or problem/solution. Because of this, two people can agree with a particular belief (ex: support a policy from a political party) for absolutely different reasons, which puts them at different positions on the ideological spectrum.

            For example, US libertarians such as Rand Paul supported laws that would allow the US to import medicine from Canada. Bernie Sanders, a leftist, also supported that same policy¹, but for absolutely different reasons. The former (libertarians) support them with the justification that the state should intervene less in the economy (thus supporting free trade, opposing interventionism) while the latter (socialists and social democrats) support them for other reasons such as reducing economic inequality. Another example: a Christian religious fundamentalist might oppose Islam simply because it is a different religion while a feminist might oppose Islam because of how they treat women. Again, even though they arrived (in this case) at the same conclusion, they arrived at it for different reasons, and thus remain different ideologies. While the solutions may be the same, the problems they try to solve are different. While the answers may sometimes converge between two different ideologies, the implicit questions can differ.

            Of course, if you’re an actual politician in parliament, the reasons you support a policy matter less in times of the vote, and cross-ideological alliances can form: if we support the same thing for different reasons, we can still vote for it. But in matters of political philosophy, a distinction must be formed between question and answer, between problem and solution, between justification and conclusion. A ruling ideology, for example, can perpetuate itself (through propaganda or other forms of dissemination) not only through advertising its policies, but through changing the voting population’s way of thinking down to the very core².

            Right-wing ideology believes in a normal, neutral, natural or “default” state of society that we must protect or return to. Any difference from this default state of society is viewed like a deviation, perversion or virus that must be eliminated. Because of this, right-wing ideology is immunological in nature. Just like the immune system of a biological organism seeks to eliminate intruders and foreigners of the system in order to return it to its natural equilibrium, so right-wing ideology seeks to act like an immune system eliminating foreigners or intruders in the natural or ‘default’ order of society.

            Economic liberalism is the best example of this. Its most extreme form, libertarianism, as championed by the Austrian school of economics led by Mises and Hayek, functions in this way. Libertarianism believes in the “free market”, a default or neutral state of the economy that must be preserved, and views itself as an immune system fending off any ‘viruses’ that intervene in this natural order (the virus in this case being “the state”). Thus, if you ask a libertarian, they will tell you that a tax increase is a state intervention in the economy, but a tax decrease is not a state intervention, because it is somehow cancelling out the previous intervention and thus returning the economy closer to its ‘default’ state. Thus, the very idea that you can somehow measure or quantify “how much” the state intervenes in the economy is already a right-wing idea (it implies a default or normal economy, the “free market”). The leftist answer here should be that a tax decrease or a decrease in the minimum wage is just as much of a state intervention as an increase is - there are simply multiple configurations of how to run the economy, neither is a “neutral” or default one. This is one example of how the ‘question/answer’ or ‘problem/solution’ paradigm works in ideology – economic right-wing ideologies have a certain question (“how much should the state intervene?”) and an answer (“less”), where an opposing ideology does not only disagree with their answer to the question, but disagrees with the question in the first place (Socialism: “we don’t want the state to intervene less, we do not even find the question to make sense in the first place”). Of course, it goes the other way around too: while a leftist question might be ‘Hierarchy vs. Equality?’ (with the answer being equality), a right-winger might not only disagree with the answer but disagree with the very question itself (ex: “equality of opportunity implies hierarchy so it’s a false dichotomy”).

            In Slavoj Zizek’s system, right-wing ideology perpetuates the hegemony of objective violence, framing it as the default or natural order of things:

 

“At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible "subjective" violence, violence performed by a dearly identifiable agent. (…) Subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the "normal," peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this "normal" state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious "dark matter" of physics, the counterpart to an all-too visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be "irrational" explosions of subjective violence.”³

 

            Right-wing ideologies that do not address economic questions in particular have a similar justification (normality, defaultness, “nature”). Nationalism functions like an immune system against “foreigners” in the country (“Make America Great Again”, return to ‘normality’). Social conservativism imposes a return to ‘natural’ social roles (for example, gender roles: “this is how a normal man should act, this is how a woman should behave”). Fascism is a reaction against scapegoats who are perceived as dirty viruses. Hitler was a germophobe, obsessed with cleanliness, who later transferred the affect from viruses to jews that were perceived in a similar way, which is why he used germs as an analogy for his enemy: “The Jew was only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples”⁴.

 

II: CLASS POLITICS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS

 

            Identity politics is a similar immunological reaction. The aim of identity is to preserve itself, fighting off intruders and foreigners that may threaten to destroy it. Identity is resistant to change and thus invokes a hegemonic “natural balance” of things, otherwise it would no longer be identity and would turn into difference (change). By identity politics I do not refer to any social movement that gathers around a common group identity to fight for its rights and demand equal treatment (“strategic essentialism”), instead I refer to a particular branch of such approaches that aim to preserve the identity after it will win over its rights. When gathering around a group identity is no longer a means to an end, but an end-in-of-itself, strategic essentialism turns into identity politics.

            Hitler was the king of identity politics. “Conservative” identity politics include traditional forms of nationalism, sexism and racism against minorities. A hierarchy is established and passed off as natural order (‘scientific racism’, the patriarchal order of male domination, etc.).

            Conservative critiques of allegedly “left-wing” identity politics label them as ‘cultural marxism’ according to a misconception of Marx that was started by Jordan Peterson around 2017 and later spread around. According to Peterson, tribal identity politics that have invaded western progressive politics view society as a “Hobbesian war being various group identities”⁵ where the main narrative is “oppressor-oppressed”, the oppressed seeking to take revenge upon their oppressors. This allows Peterson to mistakenly call this form of tribalism a reinvented form of Marxism where the “poor vs. rich” narrative was replaced by various non-economic narratives such as intersectionality.

However, class politics (Marxism) is NOT identity politics, since class politics does not aim to preserve a group identity, but to abolish it. A working-class movement gathers around the group identity of "working class", "proletarian" or "poor" because they want to stop being working class. A movement for poor people's rights is a movement to abolish the identity of poor, not to preserve it and protect it from intruders. A social movement that fights for poor people does so in order to make them stop being poor. This distinguishes it from identity politics (racism, sexism, nationalism, etc.) which aims to preserve a homeostasis of identities, a normal or 'neutral' state. Class politics organizes around a common group identity only in order to abolish that very identity, killing it off from within, from “inside out”, which is also a consequence of Marxism being inherently dialectical. Thus, the identity (or label) is only a means to an end (we fight for poor people’s rights because we do not like poverty), not an end-in-of-itself. Nowhere is there called for a natural order where poor people can continue being poor and live in better harmony with rich people, or a return to authentic “poor culture”.

 

III: NEOLIBERALISM AND WOKE CAPITALISM

 

            In the past decades, corporate capitalism has found new ways of perpetuating itself through ideologies that persuade people in thinking in the natural or neutral state of society. Where a certain segment of the population is not convinced by economic libertarianism, a separate segment of the population is overtaken by neoliberalism masquerading itself as left-wing. This ideology can be even more insidious at times since it infects the very left-wing spaces supposed to resist capitalist exploitation. Active change is replaced by virtue-signaling and revolution is merely simulated in a mass media spectacle. According to Adolph Reed,

 

“Identity politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature.”⁶

 

            Strategic essentialism turns to identity politics the moment that group identities do not gather around a movement in order to hopefully abolish their identity (race, gender) by the end, but in order to maintain it. Feminism turns into identity politics when its end goal is not to gather around the identity of “woman” in order to be better treated as a human but in order to be better treated as a woman, through a reactionary return to an essential gender role of how women should be, or through a fixation over representation. Mark Fisher, writing on what he calls “The Vampire Castle” notes how “rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.”⁷

            Through neoliberal identity politics, corporate “woke” capitalism can maintain its hegemonic force by not changing power structures through merely replacing the identity of those who are in power. Instead of abolishing private ownership of the means of production, neoliberalism asserts that it is perfectly fine as long as half of those who own it are women. Instead of getting rid of wealth inequality, neoliberalism supports diversifying our oppressors. Instead of getting rid of CIA military interventions⁸, neoliberalism supports half of the war criminals being sexual minorities. Today’s US democrats would have been fine with slavery 200 years ago as long as half of the slave owners would have been transgender. This is why Slavoj Zizek correctly states that the problem with neoliberal identity politics is not that it’s “too radical”, but that it’s not radical enough, it seeks to maintain the status-quo of capitalist exploitation without actively changing anything about the system: “the problem with [movements like] #MeToo is not, as some people think, that they are too radical… No! This excessive nature, you say one wrong and you are immediately excluded and so on, is a mask of the fact that the way it predominates today does not touch the real social problems – poverty, daily exploitation and so on. And that’s for me generally the problem with political correctness, it deals with polite forms of talking and doesn’t approach the true economic roots of this crisis”⁹.

            The ideology of diversity becomes a right-wing ideology insofar as it shares a similar immunological reaction to libertarianism and nationalism: it posits a “natural equilibrium” where various group identities (race, gender) can live in harmony, and thus, it does not seek to abolish those identities (like class politics does) but to merely re-structure their relationship. Its right-wing (neoliberal) core comes from calling for a “return to normality” where all races and genders can live back in harmony in their “natural equilibrium”. The immunological reaction stems from excluding (in the name of inclusion) anyone with a different opinion through a super-ego moralizing injunction. “The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other”⁷. Just like libertarianism arbitrarily chooses one of the states of the economy as the “default” one and posits that when the state reduces taxes, they are not intervening in the economy but somehow “canceling out” the previous intervention; in a similar fashion populist identarian demands function: fighting racism with more racism and sexism with more sexism is not viewed as discrimination, but as cancelling out the previous discrimination, thus bringing things closer to their neutral, ‘default’ state. This makes so-called “left” identity politics much closer, ideologically, to the right-wing.

            “Diversity, inclusion and equity” are neoliberal imperatives, which is why there is a strong correlation between that and a “corporate” vibe or environment. Major corporations love diversity because they can continue to maintain their daily exploitation of workers and the environment while giving the appearance of change. Political correctness is the slang of neoliberalism. It seeks to distinguish insiders from outsiders depending on those who are able to pick up the slang. Its inherently right-wing nature stems from the fact that its source is managerialism. A form of talking that is strictly corporate is spreading out throughout the rest of the citizens, thus, the working class in their everyday life is imitating the communication style of their oppressors (ex: the HR politely trying to fire you). Eva Illouz explains in “Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism” how 20^th century ‘soft managerialism’ appropriated a style of communication from psychotherapy¹⁰ in order to increase productivity. Now, many corporations tell you that “we are a family here” and the boundary between business and personal relationships is broken down. Political correctness is merely a re-appropriation of the soft manager/HR-speak by neoliberal politics and the American university industrial-complex.

            So-called “cancel culture” works through projective identification. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described the defense mechanisms of projective identification as a way of the subject first projecting internal qualities upon another person and then identifying back with those projected aspects in order to regain control of them (like a boomerang which comes back). For example, consider a person who is angry at the fact that you’re angry in a disagreement, or a person who is panicking at the fact that you’re not relaxing enough at a party. Similarly enough, in the name of tolerance and inclusion, neoliberalism is intolerant and exclusive of anything that disturbs its hegemonic order, just like Christianity fought wars of terror and hate in the name of love and peace during the inquisitions. The Big Brother now wears a friendly face, and diversity and tolerance is brought up whenever there is a large profit-incentive: US universities, Hollywood and large corporations. By initially projecting its own fear of the neighbor through a fake, fetishizing multiculturalism, it identifies back with this projected fear and seeks to control it.

 

IV: A POST-IMMUNOLOGICAL AGE

 

            After the end of the cold war, ideology manifested itself as non-ideological, neutral, default, "standard practice" or apolitical. Mark Fisher noted a general apathy regarding how the ideology of capitalism took over the spectrum of politics in a cynicism that it is not a good system, but that all the other ones are even worse¹¹. It was declared the end of history by Francis Fukuyama – we have reached the least bad system, and the only thing we can do is reform capitalism, otherwise we risk running into totalitarianism. Alain Badiou notes: “To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.”¹².

In the hegemonic neoliberal ideology, while various viewpoints can be articulated towards a domain of expertise (ex: politics), the very ground made up of the implicit presuppositions upon which any accepted argument must be built is the ideological superstructure of capitalism. Hence why most politicians today do not even mention capitalism since for them it would be the equivalent of saying "everything" or "how things work" - you are only allowed to have moderate critiques within capitalism, but not to change the very ground upon which critiques are built. It is the water that the fish swim in. You are allowed to have critiques within water, but not to criticize the water itself.

            As such, philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes on the tendency of the 21^st century to remove all immunological barriers. Global capitalism has overtaken everything to the point that it’s synonymous with “the world” or “how things work”, so using the word in a political context being equivalent with saying “the universe” – in the liberal establishment it is inconceivable to see anything truly Other to it. The rise of immunological discourses such as woke identity politics or reactionary religious fundamentalist (which are two sides of the same coin) should not be confused for a change in the actual economic base of society towards immunological lines: “the currency of immunological discourse should not be interpreted as a sign that society is now, more than ever, organized along immunological lines. When a paradigm has come to provide an object of reflection, it often means that its demise is at hand.”¹³.

            Post-cold-war 21^st century neoliberalism abolishes all boundaries and sharp edges the world through a rampant economic globalization and globalization of information through new technologies like the internet and smartphones. The ideological superstructure of society marks a sharp increase in right-wing discourses partially as a reaction to this unbridled globalization: “Otherness represents the fundamental category of immunology. Every immunoreaction is a reaction to Otherness. Now, however, Otherness is being replaced with difference, which does not entail immunoreaction. Post-immunological difference does not make anyone sick. In terms of immunology, it represents the Same. Such difference lacks the sting of foreignness, as it were, which would provoke a strong immunoreaction.”¹⁴.

            Neoliberalism promotes neither collectivist conformity, nor individualism, but superficial diversity. In our current neoliberal order, everyone is different in the same way: everyone stands out, but no one stands out from others in how they stand out. We have so many choices, but they all amount to the same in the end. We can choose between Coca Cola and Pepsi, between a corrupt political party and an even more corrupt political party, between 20 brands of shampoo that are only slightly different from each other. Post cold war capitalism gives the illusion of freedom of choice by taking the one and turning it into a multiple of superficial differences. Hence, we have one single brand of shampoo, but we are given the illusion that we have 20. We have one single political party, but we are given the illusion that are have more.

            Socrates as a professor and as a lover was named “atopic”. In Greek, atopia refers to something so radically different, so radically Other, that it is incomparable. An event that is atopic has no place in the previous order, and therefore, it is a violent encounter, it shakes up the system of how to compare things in general. The atopic is whatever is placeless, mysterious, one cannot talk about it without having to change the entire way we talk about things in general. It is not something that’s simply new, it’s something that’s meta-new, it is so new that the way in which it is new is also new. It’s different from all the ways in which everything else is different. Neoliberalism loves superficial diversity, but hates atopia. The globalization of capital turns everything into a commodity, making everything comparable through price. The atopic stands outside the order of capitalist production.

            In this so-called ‘post-immunological’ age, the virus in the neoliberal machine, the “intruder” or foreigner is becoming more and more invisible. As rampant globalization encompasses everything, anything is turned into a commodity and thus comparable through price or other forms of evaluation. Social media creates systems of meta-comparison where each one of your friends, followers or subscribers is different in the same way – by promoting superficial difference, all people are put in the same category, being allowed to stand out only under the rules of the specific meta-system they are placed in. The inferno of the same is perpetuated through dating apps and websites as well: a mysterious and unconscious fatal attachment like falling in love is no longer fashionable nowadays, instead we are satisfied with a business-like transaction where we compare potential partners like items in a supermarket. The emotionalization of business relationships in the “we are a family” paradigm is mirrored by the rationalization of personal relationships through dating websites and the new culture of relationship advice⁹.

 

“As a neoliberal production strategy, authenticity creates commodifiable differences. It thus increases the diversity of the commodities in which authenticity is materialized. Individuals express their authenticity primarily through consumption. The imperative of authenticity does not lead to the formation of an autonomous, self-possessed individual; rather, it is entirely co-opted by commerce.”¹⁵

 

            In this new economic base, it is no wonder that the new ideologies are a reaction against the inferno of the same. Thus, reactionary ideologies on both the right and the fake left employ an immunological discourse. Where the violence of positivity is shattering our society, through a “too much” that is making us sick, discourses of negativity are infecting politics and culture.

EDIT: Fixed some grammatical errors.

 

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NOTES AND REFERENCES:

1: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/drug-imports-canada-senate-sanders-paul-unusual-alliance/

2: Of course, I am not implying that ideology only spreads itself through a centralized propaganda, like a conspiracy theory where a few elites gather around a table and discuss ways of “brainwashing the population”, this conclusion is inherently paranoid and describes only the exception rather than the rule. In fact, ideology works even if no one believes in it, thus it does not even matter how many specific individual human beings believe in it or not (see: Slavoj Zizek’s Santa Claus joke https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1410964402277419 )

3: Slavoj Zizek, “Violence”, p. 2

4: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 304

5: Jordan Peterson, “Cultural Marxism and the lie of white privilege” (Youtube Lecture)

6: Adolph Reed, “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much” - https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal-one-trans-good-other-not-so-much

7: Mark Fisher, Exiting the Vampire Castle - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/

8: See: woke CIA recruitment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpJDnyZqfLw

9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSrMeNKcAKE

10: ‘Therapy-speak’ is a similar manifestation, see: “Cold Feeling: How late-capitalism creates emotional prudishness” - https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/07/cold-feeling-how-late-capitalism.html

11: See: Mark Fisher – “Capitalist Realism: Is there really no alternative?”

12: Alain Badiou, “On Evil” - https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/cox_whalen_badiou.php

13: Byung-Chul Han, “The Burnout Society”, p. 2

14: ibid.

15: Byung-Chul Han, “The expulsion of the Other”, p. 24