Marxism and the Question of Identity
Abhinav Sinha
The question of identity has remained a debatable issue among Marxists-Leninists since at least four decades. The question, in effect, pertains to a Marxist understanding of social oppression based on identity. The Identity Politics theorists claim that Marxism ignores or plays down the role of various forms of social oppression and reduces everything to class. Even some Marxists-Leninists had a moment of epiphany following such claims by Identity Politics theorists, Privilege Theorists, and in general by Postmodernists and Post-Marxists in the 1970s and 1980s and accepted that Marxism in its current form is class reductionist and economistic and lacks the ability to understand the question of social oppression. By the beginning of 1990s, such ‘common sense’ had become axiomatic in academic circles in the developed world and by mid-1990s, it was beginning to infiltrate the major academic centers of excellence in India and other so-called ‘Third World’ countries, especially in the form of the Subaltern Studies. The only difference is that due to a different location in the Imperialist chain, the so-called ‘Third World’ countries never witnessed the flourishing of identity politics in real movements in a big way, though there are notable miniscule exceptions.
This paper attempts to probe this very question: Can Marxism understand social oppression and the question of identity in general? Can communists fight against social oppression? What is Identity? What is social oppression?
What are the roots of various forms of social oppression? What is class? Is it just another identity intersecting with other identities? What is the relation between class-based exploitation and oppression on the one hand and the other forms of special oppression based on race, gender, caste, sexuality, etc? What is the relation between capitalism as a system and different forms of social oppression? These questions need to be answered also in view of the revival of interest in Marxism and the first signs of revival of popular movements against capitalism, especially in the so-called ‘Third World’ countries since the beginning of the current economic crisis in 2007-8. The lull in the working-class movement is breaking, though in the lack of any political and ideological leadership, the movement faces a crisis and has not been able to go beyond spontaneous outbursts. However, this much is certain, that the descent is about to be over, though the ascent is yet to begin. At this specific historical juncture, it is imperative for Marxists to answer the above questions. This is what this paper humbly aims to do. In this process, I will also attempt to present an understanding of the caste question in the context of Indian society and how the question of the caste is articulated with class struggle, with some concrete facts.
Historical Context of the Emergence and Rise of Identity Politics
First of all, let me point out that the question of identity came to prominence only towards the end of the fateful 1960s in the developed world. If we look at the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences of 1968, written most likely in the mid-1960s, we find that there is no entry under the word ‘identity’. The only entry pertaining to identity is about the ‘psychosocial identity’, which talks about the kind of identity crisis which the adolescents have while entering youth. This is only one allusion to the fact that the question of identity became a polarizing question only after the so-called ‘new social movements’ of the 1960s and later with the theorizations of these social movements by different Postmodernist scholars in the 1970s and by Post-Marxists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in the 1980s. By 1990s, the question of identity had become the dominant fetish of academia in the developed world and the same was happening in India, when I entered university in 1999, though on a much smaller scale.
Secondly, it also needs to be reminded that all of this was happening in a particular historical context. By 1953-56, the capitalist restoration took place in the USSR. The Twentieth Congress of the CPSU (B) in 1956 was an open declaration of this restoration. Khrushchev came up with the theory of ‘three peacefuls’ (peaceful co-existence, peaceful competition and peaceful transition) as the modern revisionist theory. It did not take much time for the revisionist USSR to show its true character at the international level. The USSR had turned into an imperialist power from a socialist country and her imperialist ambitions were exposed in her interventions in a number of countries, often in competition with the US imperialism. The incidents in Hungary and later in Czechoslovakia came as a shocker to the progressive
students, workers and intelligentsia in general. The communist parties in a number of European countries took a revisionist position in the Great Debate, which took place between the Soviet revisionist party and Communist Party of China, under the leadership of Mao. Once they took a revisionist position, these parties supported the misdeeds of the Soviet social imperialism and were obliged to take opportunist and chauvinist positions in the politics of their respective countries too. The reaction of the progressive and radical students and intelligentsia was pathological. Barring a few saner minds, most of them mistook the crimes of Soviet social imperialism and social chauvinism for the inherent tendencies of Marxism; the call for something ‘more radical than Marxism’ was raised. The petty-bourgeois class position of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia and students played a role in their pathological reaction. At the same time, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was interpreted by certain “Maoists” in an anti-Leninist “massist” perspective in Europe; such “Maoists” had the seeds to fall into the pit of Post-Marxism eventually from the very beginning and claim that the GPCR was ‘revolution against the party’ marking the beginning of an era when the categories of party, state, class etc. had become irrelevant for the human emancipatory project. Maoism must be saved from such “Maoists”. The capitalist restoration in China with the defeat of “the gang of four” gave impetus to such tendencies. The Tiananmen Square incident in China was taken as a vindication of the pathological reaction against Marxism. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the social imperialist USSR brought this process to a culmination. It must also be noted that the revolutionary communists around the world, except may be a few notable exceptions, could not present a balanced sum-up of these defeats and a critique of modern revisionism after Mao due to their own economistic and class-reductionist errors. Defeat of Socialist experiments in the USSR and then in China and the rise of economism and class reductionism in the revolutionary communist movement forms the first co-ordinate of the historical context that gave rise to identity politics and its various strands, and their philosophical bases were provided by Postmodernist theories churned out from the confused political atmosphere of 1960s, especially in the developed world.
The other co-ordinate of this historical context was the beginning of neoliberal onslaught in 1970s and 1980s. Thatcherism and Reagonomics were the most explicit political expressions of the era of neoliberal globalization. These neoliberal policies began as a response to the Crisis of the 1973 and were characterized by deregulation and financialization, flexibilization of the labour markets, attack on the labour rights. These were the policies which were later characterized collectively as the policies of neoliberal globalization. The era marked beginning of the emergence of the increased flow of capital across national boundaries, revolution in information technology, transportation and communication, the so-called post-Fordist assembly line (a fragmented global assembly line) and contractualization and informalization of labour. The economism and trade-unionism prevalent in the working-class movement disarmed and disabled it from responding to these changes in the modus operandi of world capitalism. One of the expressions of this economism and trade-unionism was the narrow sectarian focus on factory worker and work-place organizing, rather than concentrating on the entire working class and neighbourhood-based organizing, along with work-place organizing. Consequently, the defeat and retreat of the working-class movement, characterized best by the defeat of the iconic coal-miners’ strike in England in 1984-5, led to an atmosphere of demoralization and pessimism among Marxists-Leninists, many of whom turned to the so-called “more radical theories” of identity politics, Postmodernism, Post-Marxism, post-colonial theory, etc. Thus, the collapse of socialist experiments, rise of revisionism and economism, the neoliberal onslaught and the defeat and retreat of revolutionary working-class movement in the developed world form the two co-ordinates of the historical context in which Postmodernist theories of identity politics, privilege theory, intersectionality theory flourished and infiltrated the progressive mass movements that had come into being in the 1960s against racism, sexism, colonialism, casteism, etc.
It is necessary to understand this overall historical context in order to comprehend the contours of the theory of identity politics and that is why it was imperative a present a very brief account of the political developments between the 1960s and 1990s.
Identity and Social Oppression
Let us begin from the beginning. The question that must be asked at the outset is: what is identity? The question can be answered in many ways, but to answer it in the simplest form, identity is a sense of belonging to a particular group based on the difference that is constituted by physical attributes (like gender or race), geographical attributes, or socially-constructed or ossified attributes like caste, religion, ethnicity, etc. or a mix of these. It is essential to understand that the difference based on the physical or geographical attributes do not in themselves and by themselves constitute a social antagonism and therefore a root of social oppression. These differences became the basis of identity-based social oppression at a particular moment of history. For instance, sexual difference became the basis of oppression of women only with the emergence of surplus production, private property, emergence of class divisions, need of determining a definite line of inheritance, and the beginning of monogamous heterosexual family and patriarchy. Therefore, the oppression of women has a history. Of course, the oppression of women assumed different forms under different social formations as it was co-opted, re-adjusted and re-moulded according to the new relations of production and reproduction of life. However, this much is certain and can be historically proven that the oppression of women began at a definite stage of development of human society and the sexual difference does not automatically lead to oppression of women. The same goes for other forms of social oppression based on difference constituted by physical attributes, like race. If we look at the origin of racism, it becomes clear that racism too has a history and racial difference became the basis of social oppression only at a particular juncture of history. It came into being as an ideology to justify the enslavement of blacks by Europeans and early-European settlers in America. Thus, the identities based on difference constituted by physical attributes become the site of social oppression only in the moment of class exploitation and oppression. In other words, it is class antagonism that leads to the emergence of these special forms of social oppression.
Similarly, the difference based on socially-constructed or ossified attributes, like caste, were constituted by the very process of class formation. Varna/caste division came into existence in the North-Western part of the Indian subcontinent in the latter part of the Early Vedic Period (1700 BC – 1000 BC) around 11th c. BC to 10th c. BC. It originated in a society under transition from nomadic pastoralism to agriculturalism. The varna divisions at their point of origin represented the labour division and embryonic class division of the late-Early Vedic society, undergoing the transition to agricultural civilization. In other words, varna divisions were the class divisions of the late-Early Vedic society. They became a socially-constructed identity only with a religious-ritualistic ossification of this labour division by the ideologues of the emerging ruling class, the Brahmins. Every ruling class undertakes the task of constructing an ideological justification for its rule. In the context of the late-Early Vedic society, this legitimation took a peculiar form – religious-ritualistic ossification, or codification of the labour division of a particular period into religious scriptures. This, on the one hand, provided a “divine aura” to the class division and the rule of the ruling class and, on the other, ossified/fossilized the labour division of a particular period. In this process, varna/caste became a socially-constructed identity and, rather than of overlapping, a relationship of correspondence developed between class and caste. Caste relations were relatively less dynamic and relatively autonomous from class relations; however, their dynamic was also constrained by changing class relations. That is why, temporally as well as spatially, one can witness significant variations in the varna/caste system, which is due to the different class structures of different periods or different regions. In this way, caste became an identity. As we can see, this identity was socially-constructed in the framework of the class dynamics of the late-Early Vedic period, when class, state and patriarchy were emerging. We cannot go into the details of this process (interested readers can refer to my paper on history of caste here: https://redpolemique.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/historiography-of-caste-some-critical-observations-and-some-methodological-interventions/), however, this much is certain, the socially-constructed social difference which later became an identity and site of social oppression, was constructed at the site of class struggle.
There is another kind of identity that is based on the life-style choices of individuals. The transwomen or transmen are examples of such chosen identities. It is noteworthy that even the transmen or transwomen face social oppression due to the set standards of family and sexuality, which are essential for capitalism. The heterosexual monogamous family helps capitalist to ‘privatize’ the time, labour and money costs of reproduction of cheap labour-power. Any kind of sexually-deviant behaviour is seen as a threat to this family structure, which is essential for capitalism for reasons pertaining to its class domination. As a result, the capitalist system perpetuates oppression of the transgender people in formal and informal ways through innumerable channels, in a systematic fashion. Evidently, such identities too, become a source of social oppression only in a particular class framework.
In short, we can say that identity becomes a site of social oppression only because of class antagonism, or, all forms of social oppression have a history and they are caused by class antagonism. Not understanding this would tantamount to etherealization and eternalization of identity-based social oppressions and will lead to a deep sense of pessimism.
Second point to understand is that once difference becomes the basis of identity-based oppression, it assumes a relative autonomy and reacts back upon the dynamics of class exploitation and oppression, though in the final instance, they are determined and constrained by class. Social oppression and ideologies of social oppression come into being because of class exploitation and oppression and because of the needs of the ruling class; but they percolate among the masses for a variety of reasons including the illusory sense of supremacy promoted by the ruling classes among certain sections of the working masses, the construction of an ‘imaginary enemy’ to deflect the anger of the masses from the real cause of their hardships, dividing the people in order to conquer them, etc. The ruling classes are able to do all this because they have control over the means of mental production too and therefore their ideas become hegemonic in the society, including the working masses. Thus, a process of ‘othering’ is inherent in the construction of antagonistic identities. These identities are not based principally on what their members have in common. Members of an identity generally do not have much in common except not being ‘the other’.
Third important characteristic feature of identity is that every individual in a class society has many identities based on their race, caste, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. Unless and until we are told that we cannot belong to multiple identities simultaneously, it comes naturally to us that we have multiple identities, none having primacy over the other. Usually people do not have any problem with that, rather, they do not even bother about it until and unless they are asked about it. For instance, before the rise of identity politics, most of the Americans, 54 percent to be precise, were either unable or unwilling to answer questions about their ethnicity. However, between 1960 and 1990, the number of Americans reporting themselves as American Indians/Native Americans quadrupled from half million to two million, an increase which is far more than could be explained by normal demography. It only shows that identity politics does not come naturally to people. It becomes an issue only when it becomes a site of oppression and therefore a site of resistance and consequently a site of politics.
Fourth important basic feature of identity is that it is not fixed. They shift, mutate and can change. For instance, many non-ethnic groups suddenly assumed an ethnic identity like the Southern Christian Baptist Church under Martin Luther King; or the 6 million Mahars who constituted a new religious identity after converting to Buddhism.
Fifth identifying feature of identity is that it depends on the historical context of its construction. For instance, Eric Hobsbawm talks about the case of a Protestant professor who was expert of German Classical literature in Berlin. After the rise of the Nazis to power, he suddenly discovered that he was a Jew! Not only him, many protestants discovered that according to the new standards set by the Nazis, they were Jews and they were either ghettoized or fled Germany.
In sum, it is essential to understand that differences (natural or socially-constructed) that constitute an identity does not give rise to special forms of social oppression by themselves. Identity becomes a site of social oppression only within the framework of class; moreover, the identities are not fixed, but mutate and change and the reason for this mutation too, is changes in the political and social class struggle; identities and their expressions also change with changing political and historical contexts. If we do not take into consideration the historicity of identity, we would not be able to understand their contemporaneity. The result will be reification of identities, their fetishization and their uncritical celebration.
Identity Politics, or, The Politics of Depoliticization
Identity politics today is an ensemble of different theories. However, the basic tenets of identity politics shared by all these theories can be summarized fairly well. Identity politics claims that only those who experience a particular type of social oppression, can understand and fight against it and all others are part of the problem or benefit from it, even if at the unconscious level. The second basic argument of identity politics is that various forms of social oppression based on identities are autonomous and independent social antagonisms. Consequently, all these autonomous and independent spheres of oppression demand autonomous and independent struggles, comprised of those who face those particular forms of oppression, because vis-à-vis each particular form of oppression, all others are beneficiaries, privileged, etc. Therefore, identity politics emphasizes that there should be an independent and autonomous movement of each oppressed section of society, it should be led by the people from that oppressed section itself and it should be independent and autonomous from other particular struggles against oppression and also class struggle against class-based exploitation and oppression.
Another characteristic of identity politics is that, with it, social oppression becomes a subjective entity rather than an objective material reality. The very notion of oppression inherent in identity politics is based on the self-experience of the oppressed. This notion is self-referential, self-defined and subjective. The result is an idealist understanding of oppression rather than a materialist and historical understanding. The most important questions are not asked or are even prohibited: how and why did various special identity-based oppressions came into existence? How did they evolve through history? In identity politics, identity-based oppression becomes a mere discourse and comes to depend upon the self-experience of the oppressed. This makes oppression a subjective and relative thing, rather than an objective and structural relationship of subordination and domination. That why the panacea suggested is change in one’s self, as Patricia Hill Collins said. For instance, the “anti-oppression training”, “self-awareness”, “creating safe spaces”, “to learn to speak in non-oppressive language”, etc. This reminds me of Marx’s remark on such subjectivist understanding where he says that for the broad masses of working people to rise from their knees, “it is not enough to do so in thought and to leave hanging over one’s real sensuously perceptible head the real sensuously perceptible yoke that cannot be subtlized away with ideas.” (The Holy Family)
One important sub-category of identity politics is Privilege Theory. This theory focuses on personal relationships as the basis of understanding of oppression. The emphasis here is more on the beneficiaries of oppression, rather than the oppressed themselves. ‘Privilege’ here refers to the ‘unearned benefits’ that a group of people enjoys because of its particular identity. For instance, a privilege that a white person enjoys due to being white, or a savarna enjoyed due to being savarna, and so on. The beneficiary might be unaware of these privileges and they might function at the level of the unconscious. That is why, the privilege theorists focus so much on making the beneficiaries ‘aware of their privilege’, ‘making the privilege visible’, etc. Peggy McIntosh, a privilege theorist has identified 46 areas of social life where she enjoys the privilege of being white and compares this privilege with a ‘knapsack without weight’. If we get to the bottom of her description we find that these are expressions of racism in the social life. Identifying the ways in which racism functions in social life is only the recording and collection of facts. It is observable to naked eye that men get higher wages than women, white people or savarna people are less likely to be harassed by the Police as compared to the blacks or Dalits. A mere recording of this reality does not tell us anything about how and why these forms of oppression came into being. Was it there from eternity? Or does it have a history? Does it belong to the reign of subjective experiences or is it rooted in the material objective reality of social relationships? As Marx had noted long ago, “All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincide.” Privilege theory, like all other strands of identity politics, does not go beyond seeing and recording the apparent reality and in this sense are subjectivist positivism. Privilege theory argues that since men are beneficiaries of oppression of women, they cannot and would not fight against the oppression. As we can see, the basic premise of this theory is deeply pessimistic and disarming. It reifies each oppressed section and fetishizes it. Individuals enjoying privileges cannot rise above their benefits and prejudices owing to their social position. Thus, they are denied any political autonomy because identity replaces politics. Thus, the only option left to them is to become “sensitized”, “self-aware”, etc. Besides, this view of oppression and ‘privilege’ makes the very notion of oppression very ambiguous. Since the notion of oppression itself is based on subjective experiences, anything can be defined as oppression or ‘privilege’. Thus, the Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois has listed a number of forms of privilege that should be checked, including ‘body size privilege’, ‘life on the outside privilege’, ‘passing as white privilege’, etc. The amusing thing is that most of the privilege theorists are themselves highly privileged and belong to the university academia. Their privilege flows from their class position in the society, however, this fact is never recognized by them, whereas the fact is that it is the bourgeoisie and the higher echelons of petty-bourgeoisie which are the most privileged sections of society, even when they belong to an oppressed identity. This privilege stems from their access to and monopoly of material resources and also their access to the privileged conclave of the university, where most of these theories are churned out.
Another strand of identity politics is Intersectionality theory. In our part of the world, a joke was going around when Hillary Clinton was running her presidential campaign and was expected to win the elections. A guy from the US says to a guy from West Asia, “Thanks to the beauty of democracy, first we had our first black president, and now we are going to have our first woman president; now, what do you call it?” The guy from West Asia responds, “intersectional imperialism!” This joke succinctly sums up the core of intersectionality theory. From time immemorial human beings have known that they have multiple identities and based on this there is an “intersection” between the forms of social oppression that they face. Claiming novelty on the basis of making this argument, is like inventing the wheel all over again and then exclaiming, “Eureka, Eureka!” The theories of intersectionality emerged with the black feminist thought. Later, these theories were systematized by Kimberle Crenshaw and more importantly Patricia Hill Collins. Hill argued that the intersection of different forms of oppression does not create an “additive” impact but lead to a new form of experience of oppression. This theory does not have any analytical power, but only descriptive power. This too, does not go beyond describing the apparent reality. Of course, a good description makes our knowledge more nuanced, but by itself, even the best description can only be a placebo for a real materialist and historical analysis. Despite intersectionality of different forms of social oppression, the struggle against each form of social oppression would be autonomous and independent from each other, because even when different social oppressions intersect each other, they do not have a causal relationship and are autonomous from each other. Therefore, there can be at best temporary aggregative unity of struggles against different forms of oppression. The fetishization of the fact of intersectionality among different forms of social oppression and between social oppressions and class-based exploitation and oppression, prevents us from undertaking a rigorous analysis of how exploitation and special oppressions articulate, how class antagonism leads different identities to become sites of social oppression. There is no historical and scientific analysis of the overlapping and intersection of different forms of social oppression and class exploitation. The reality is that different forms of social oppression exist and intersect in the moment of class, which is not a separate identity (we will come to this point later).
Identity politics is also characterized by its fetish for political correctness and logic of tolerance. There is immense emphasis on using the ‘politically correct language’ in order not to be oppressive. This fetish exacts a heavy price by replacing the real material fight against oppression with a kind of linguistic fundamentalism that is out-and-out elitist and exclusivist. Most of common people with no access to university education do not know about this linguistic political correctness and use the ‘politically incorrect’ language. Consequently, they become the enemy. In fact, the ability to know and use the ‘politically correct’ language itself is a privilege! Moreover, since the very notion of oppression is subjectivized, ‘culturalized’ and considered as a discourse rather than an objective reality, another logic put forward by identity politics is the logic of tolerance. The problems of racism, casteism, sexism become the problem of tolerance and intolerance. The logic of linguistic correctness and tolerance becomes an ersatz for struggle for real material change in the material situation. Such a logic creates a buffer-zone of political correctness between the oppressed people, between individuals, and between movements and precludes any possibility of real and organic solidarity. In this sense, the logic of political correctness and tolerance is actually anti-solidarity.
Another characteristic feature of identity politics, which flows from above-mentioned characteristic features is depoliticization. Since oppression becomes a subjective, self-defined, self-referential thing rather than an objective material reality, since the location of oppression is in inter-personal relationships and since all identity-based oppressions are autonomous and independent, the political struggle against the entire system and the state is replaced by personal struggle, life-style changes, the struggle for recognition, representation and accommodation. Thus, the state is out of the dock! Even, the bourgeois liberal state can be an ally in a number of struggles, since the issue at stake now is not overthrowing the entire capitalist system and the capitalist state, but recognition, representation and accommodation. Of course, the capitalist class and state welcome this logic! The politics of Catherine Mackinnon is a representative example of the disastrous results of such a politics.
In sum, identity politics believes that (i) only those who experience a particular form of identity-based social oppression can understand and fight against it; (ii) different forms of social oppression are autonomous and independent from each other; (iii) therefore, to fight against different forms of autonomous and independent social oppressions, different autonomous and independent struggles are needed; (iv) those who benefit from any form of oppression, even if unconsciously, cannot become a part of struggle against it and the maximum they can do is become “self-aware” and “sensitized” from anti-oppression training, etc; (v) different forms of oppression intersect each other and give rise to new types of experience of oppression but still they are autonomous from each other and require different struggles; (vi) even when the different anti-oppression struggles form fronts, they are aggregative fronts and they still remain autonomous from each other; (vii) the source of oppression is identity itself and therefore it is constituted by the subjective experience of the oppressed, in other words, oppression is self-defined, self-referential and subjective, rather than an objective social relationship rooted in the overall exploitative and oppressive system of capitalism; (viii) such a notion automatically absolves the capitalist class and state from any culpability and consequently the struggle for revolutionary political and social transformation is replaced by separate struggles of different identities for recognition, representation and accommodation or even not raising any demand to the state and retreat to the sphere of the personal in the form of life-style changes, anti-oppression training, “safe spaces”, etc; (ix) class itself is an identity and the oppression based on the identity of class is manifested in “classism”, “snobbery”, etc.; (x) no identity, including class, has any primacy over the others.
As we can see, such a politics of depoliticization can only lead to endless and continuous fragmentation of movements. The reason is identity politics is based on methodological individualism, subjectivism and solipsism. The empirical evidence proves this. All the movements against different forms of social oppression that came into existence in the 1960s in the developed world, like the feminist movement, the gay movement, the black liberation movement (though to a lesser extent), the Dalit movement in India ended up into innumerable fragments. The organizational anarchism (in the name of non-hierarchical structure) of these movements contributed to this process of fragmentation. The reason is that the basic logic of identity politics is reification and uncritical celebration of fragments. Such a logic can only lead to this result.
Now let us move to the philosophical and theoretical roots of identity politics in order to understand the theoretical foundation of the notions of identity politics.
Theoretical Foundations of Identity Politics
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
– Shakespeare (Macbeth)
The theoretical foundations of identity politics come mainly from two interrelated sources: the Foucauldian Postmodernism and the Post-Marxist thought of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Let us first discuss the first source, that is, Michel Foucault’s Postmodernist theories.
Foucault is one of the high priests of Postmodernism and is especially known for his works on madness, crime, punishment and his critique of Enlightenment modernity. One of the most important philosophical sources of Foucault is Nietzsche, known for his critique of Enlightenment modernity and his anti-humanism. We cannot deal with entire Foucauldian theory here. Here Foucault’s concept of Power is most relevant which informs most of identity politics. Foucault argues that Power is decentred and everywhere. It is not held by a ruling class or its state. It is distributed throughout the society. Rather than being unitary, Power is a multiplicity of specific and localized relationships that infiltrate and percolate the entire social body. Moreover, Power is impersonal and is not held by a particular individual or collective, but it is constituted by a combination of localized discourses, institutions, tactics, practices, etc. in accordance with the dominant apparatus of Power-knowledge. Every power-relationship creates its own forms of knowledge, which in turn presupposes a particular kind of power-relationship. Secondly, power is not simply repressive, but it is productive. It does not function by repressing people but by constituting them as subjects. Wherever there is power, there is resistance. However, since power itself is dispersed and localized, the resistance also has multiple autonomous points.
The second important tenet of Foucauldian theory is his rejection of any theory of subject. In fact, and Foucault accepted it, he takes the challenge to the theory of subject beyond Althusser or Levi-Strauss. Foucault argues that it is Power that constitutes the subject, which then becomes its carrier. Now, if the subject is constituted by Power and is its carrier, then it can resist Power only when allowed by Power! At the same time, Foucault says that wherever there is Power, there is resistance. Then what is the source of this resistance? The particular examples of resistance that Foucault discusses reveal his instrumentalist and functionalist understanding of resistance as something which allows Power-knowledge apparatus to change and restructure itself. Obviously, this tenet is in contradiction with the first characteristic that we discussed. But such contradictions abound in Foucault.
Thirdly, Foucault critiques the very notion of objective knowledge and science. For him, knowledge is subjective and constantly changes according to the changing apparatus of power-knowledge. The very notion of scientific knowledge, universality, generalization is rejected as part of the domination project of the Enlightenment modernity and Marxism is implicated as a part of it. Foucault’s notion of knowledge somehow relates to the relativism of Nietzsche’s notion of knowledge, according to which every knowledge is judged according to the particular will to power which it embodies. However, this creates a contradiction again. Because if every knowledge is based on some will to power, what can be the vantage point of Foucault’s theory? Which will to power does it represent against which it can be scrutinized? Anyhow, according to Foucault, Marxism also is based on the notion of ‘totality’, characteristic of the power-knowledge apparatus that came into existence as the result of the Enlightenment modernity and scientific reason. With its totalizing stress on class struggle, Marxism fails to address the need of multiple points of resistance to oppose multiplicity of oppressions. That is why, Foucault saw May 1968 as a thoroughly anti-Marxist event. Such a critique of the notion of universality and totality, taken to its logical culmination, was bound to reject any idea of collective resistance, because every collective is formed on some sort of generalization based on a notion of totality. Therefore, every collective resistance is bound to lead to an oppressive structure. Therefore, the only site of resistance that we are left with is individual and personal relationships.
These are some of the basic foundations of Foucauldian theory which became the guiding light of identity politics.
The other and immediately more important theoretical source for identity politics was the Post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which was deeply influenced from Postmodernism. The publication of their work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy can be considered as the inauguration of Post-Marxist thought. We have already described the global political climate of the period from the late-1960s to the 1980s. It was in this context of historical defeat, retreat of the working-class movement, the rise of revisionism in the USSR and then in China, the revisionist betrayal of a number of European communist parties, the pathological response of the radical progressive intelligentsia of Europe to this reversal and betrayal, rise of movementism and the search for “something more radical than Marxism”; that this book was published. It soon assumed, along with the writings of Foucault and other Postmodernists, the status of a classic among the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia of the Western world.
In this work, they argue that the collapse of socialism in the USSR and then in Eastern Europe, Campuchia, etc. was due to essential lacunae of Marxism. They argued that the whole analysis of Marxism is based on the idea of ‘totality’ and ‘universal’. These ideas, according to Laclau and Mouffe are insufficient to understand the society. They reject the emphasis of Marxism on class analysis and class struggle, which for them is a narrative based on totality. For them, the society is constituted by many ‘partial discourses’ of social relationships. The authors here follow the Postmodernist idea that there is no such thing as ‘universal’ or a ‘totality’. The impact of Althusser is unmistakable here, who in his project of refutation of economism, went so far as to claim that society is constituted by many autonomous structures, social, political, ideological and economic with their own autonomous movement and these structures do not have a direct causal relationship, but a conjunctural relationship. The economic structure plays a determining role only in the ‘last instance’ which never comes. The second Althusserian idea which has a partial influence on the Post-Marxist theories is the idea of history as a process ‘without a subject’.
Laclau and Mouffe under the multiplicity of influences conclude that society is not constituted as a totality of economic, social and political relationships, as a socio-economic and political whole, but is a ‘field of criss-cross of different antagonisms’ in which class struggle is just another antagonism and does not have any primacy over other antagonisms or any determining role. The concept of state that follows from such an understanding is very obvious: the state too, is an autonomous and independent body from class. It is not simply an instrument of domination because power itself is dispersed and decentred. Therefore, there is not one struggle against the state but a multiplicity of struggles against a multiplicity of social oppressions. These multiple antagonisms do not constitute a ‘diversification’ but a ‘diversity’ from which we cannot be led back to a point of totality. Consequently, either there is no need to put demands in front of the state, or at most the demands for recognition, representation and accommodation in front of the state that does not represent any class: a liberal state above classes. At worst, such “struggles” take place only in the personal sphere and are limited to life-style changes, self-awareness, creating “safe spaces”, anti-oppression training, etc. The state is effectively absolved and can even become an ally in case of particular anti-oppression struggles.
Laclau and Mouffe argue that the working class does not have any historical consciousness stemming from the lack of access to ownership of the means of production and commodification of their labour-power, on the basis of which it can be considered the ‘productive’ revolutionary agent. Instead, there are multiple ‘subject positions’ based on the multiplicity of oppression. Since there are no historical objective class interests, there are no ‘privileged’ subject positions and therefore the working class cannot be considered a revolutionary agent.
Once causality in social relationships is abandoned, history becomes a series of contingencies and accidents, a free-floating set of criss-cross of totally autonomous antagonisms with no root in any primary source of exploitation and oppression. Each particular form of oppression is reified, dehistoricized and fetishized and becomes the result of ‘an ensemble of social practices, of institutions, and discourses’ which produce the subject (women, blacks, Dalits, etc). Thus, a kind of phenomenalist and impressionistic understanding of oppression is presented, where the very notion of oppression becomes self-referential, subjective and self-defined, having no basis in the real social relations of production and reproduction of life.
Laclau and Mouffe go even further and claim that any relation of subordination does not by itself constitute a relationship of oppression. It does so only when it is consciously articulated through a ‘discourse’ by the oppressed themselves as a relation of oppression. Thus, ‘slavery’ or ‘serfdom’ are just relations of subordination and they become relations of oppression only when they are constituted as such by a ‘discursive discourse’ like the inalienable ‘Rights of Man’, etc. Thus, exploitation and oppression are not objective and structura social relationships but subjective things based on ‘discursive discourse’.
Moreover, the notion of oppression is generalized in an anarchist fashion to include the relationship between the leader and the led even within an organization of the oppressed. Thus, a general ‘anti-authoritarianism’ is preached in an anarchist fashion. No distinction is made between the authority of the state institutions based on class exploitation and oppression and coercion on the one hand and the authority of an elected leadership of a revolutionary or anti-oppression organization, on the other. Who and why wields the authority is immaterial in this notion. Needless to say, such a theory will lead to an organizational line that would either lead to continuous fragmentation or will make the organization a debating club or society. A part of this line of argumentation is also the rejection of the very notion of a vanguard party. Since there are no objective historical class interests, there can be no revolutionary party representing these non-existent interests, and if there is, it is bound to become authoritarian. Some of the followers of Laclau and Mouffe are even uncomfortable with the idea of a movement based on a ‘grand narrative’, a ‘grand political program’ because there can be none!
We can easily guess the political prescriptions of such a theory. Since there are multiple autonomous and independent spheres of oppression, therefore, we need multiple autonomous and independent spheres of struggles. In other words, the call is for autonomization of struggles. These autonomous struggles, in the opinion of Laclau and Mouffe, will lead to a ‘new kind of radical politics’ that in turn would lead to a ‘democratic revolution’. This, by them is considered ‘a step forward from Marxism’. The overthrow of capitalist state with use of force by the proletariat under the leadership of its vanguard is a thing of past for them because the state itself is not an instrument of class domination but an autonomous and independent sphere itself. This liberal, pluralistic, democratic state can even become ally in certain particular struggles against a particular form of oppression. The whole struggle is now not for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and capitalist state, but a struggle for representation and recognition, at most. The struggle is now against ‘bureaucratization’, ‘homogenization’ implicit in modern social life. In ‘the great imagery of liberty and equality’, according to our authors, the emphasis now is on liberty and that is why many struggles are not taking the form of collective struggles against state, but a kind of ‘armed individualism’.These are the basic tenets of the Post-Marxist theory of Laclau and Mouffe. As we can see, it is not actually “Post”-Marxist but anti-Marxist. It attacks the revolutionary core of Marxism-Leninism, that is, the notion of class, class-struggle, class dictatorship, the state, the party. Along with Foucauldian Postmodernism, the anti-Marxist theories of Laclau and Mouffe form the theoretical foundation of identity politics.
In India, these theories along with the linguistic turn introduced by Edward Said’s Orientalism found manifestation in the post-1986 Subaltern Studies. Before that the Subaltern Studies was broadly within the framework of the British historiographical tradition of ‘history from below’. However, after 1986, when Spivak and Sai wrote preface to a volume of Subaltern Studies, this project of history-writing collapsed into Pstmodernism and post-colonial theory. The basic argument of the Subaltern Studies was simple: Enlightenment modernity is a project of western domination; this includes all theories based on the notion of scientific reason, totality, the concept of universal; thus it includes Marxism too; the Indian Nationalism was a derivative discourse of the western modernity and that is why it was a still-born project; there is only one alternative, namely, resorting to the spheres and identities which are uncontaminated by Western modernity and Enlightenment reason; like the domestic sphere of Hindu family, or the spontaneity of the tribal people, the spontaneous activity of the Subaltern Hindu communities, etc. This is a very short introduction of the basic logic of Subaltern Studies. Such a logic led the theories of these Subalternists to objectively lend support Hindutva Fascism and karseva which led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, which was taken as an outburst of subaltern energy! It is not surprising because we cannot expect anything else from the reification and uncritical celebration of fragments. The Subaltern Studies was a project which applied Postmodernism in Indian history-writing. It is largely discredited now, though some of these trenchant critics of western modernity are still churning out their obscurantist theories in the centres of western modernity and western domination.
The Marxist Understanding
The Marxists without being apologetic claim that their project is universalist. Some Marxists, in the name of learning from Postmodernism and identity politics, become apologetic about it and begin their blabbering that their project too, is “pluralistic” acknowledging the multiplicity of oppressions, etc. Such Marxists end up practising aggregative equationalism. For instance, in India, there are so-called Marxists who have been trying to strike an equation of Dalits + Muslims + Tribals + Women as the magic formula to defeat Fascism and neoliberalism! Winning majority is not equal to adding up minorities. The very idea of non-organic aggregative unity between identities is flawed and it is bound to end up in frustration, as many ‘eager to learn Marxists’ are slowly learning. Only class can be the basis of an organic unity between all exploited and oppressed. Let us elaborate why.
First of all, let me refute some ‘common sense’ notions about Marxists, prevalent among the progressive intelligentsia influenced by identity politics.
Marxists are not opposed to struggles against oppression. They know and understand that multiple forms of social oppression based on gender, caste, race, sexuality, etc. do exist and Marxists know the need to fight against these special oppressions. In fact, Marxists globally have been at the forefront of the struggles against these oppressions. Class-reductionism was never the argument of Marxism, notwithstanding the economistic deviations that prevailed in the Second International, against which Lenin fought, and during the period of Stalin in the Bolshevik Party, with which Stalin himself continued to grapple. In fact, even in the late-19th century, the Social-Democratic movement of Europe was in the leadership of all the movements of oppressed sections of society. Social-Democrats were involved in all struggles against all forms of oppression and exploitation in all countries. In countries where industrial development was not considerable, and proletariat constituted a small minority in the population in the late-19th century, the Social-Democrats won 30 to 47 percent votes. The reason was that they were leading not only the working-class movement for its economic demands, but were leading the political movement of all oppressed and exploited people against capitalism. That is why Lenin called the Socialist movement as the ‘tribune of the people’ and said, “Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse, no matter what class is affected – unless they are trained, moreover to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other.” Similarly, Marx criticized the British working-class movement for its inability to take a revolutionary position on the oppression of the Irish people in these words, “This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working-class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.” Therefore, the basic Marxist logic was never ignoring or downplaying the forms of social oppression but to understand their material history and their causal link with class antagonism.
Marxists do not say that class is the only form of social division and know that there are other forms of social division based on identities. Class is not an identity, but a social relation based on production, which is independent of the subjective experiences of the exploited and oppressed. It is an objective social relation. When Marxism claims that the role of the working-class was central to the cause of revolutionary transformation and human emancipation, it was not based on the sectional interests of the workers, as a section or identity. The trade unions pursued the particular economic interests of the working-class and that is why the relationship between the party and trade unions was always in a constant dialectical tension. The logic of communist parties was not like that of the trade unions, while emphasizing the centrality of the working class as the revolutionary productive agent. The Marxist logic depends on two things: (i) working-class has a central role as a revolutionary agent in revolution against capitalism, because capitalism as a mode of production and a socio-economic and political system, depends on the exploitation of the labour of the working class. The surplus extraction from the working class through the commodification of the labour-power of the worker and monopoly of the capitalists over the ownership of the means of production is at the root of the rule of capitalist class and reproduction of capitalism as a system; without this surplus, the ruling classes would be deprived of their means of rule as well as their means of subsistence; working-class, therefore, is in a unique position due to its contradiction with the bourgeoisie, to play the role of productive agent; (ii) the second reason is that all forms of identity-based social oppression came into existence, evolved through history and intersect with each other in the moment of class. It is class antagonism that makes identity the site of social oppression and is articulated with this social oppression. In this articulation, it is the changing class dynamics which play the determining role ultimately. The political line of the revolutionary organization must take notice of this articulation of class-based exploitation and oppression and different forms of social oppression; but it is political line which must take precedence over identity. Due to these two reasons, it is essential to understand that class is not just another identity based on the subjective notions of the oppressed; it is a social relation of production that is constituted through the process of production and reproduction of life. It is an objective relation independent of what one perceives or not perceives.
When economism hegemonized the communist movement during the period of the Second International and then during the period of Stalin, who was grappling with this error till the end but could not reach the solution, the sectional pecuniary interests of the working class became dominant in the working-class movement. In fact, everywhere in the communist movement, communists have to wage constant struggle against economism which is bourgeois ideology that infiltrates the ranks of communists. Wherever the communists fail in this struggle, economism becomes dominant and leads to trade unionism, anarcho-syndicalism, non-party revolutionism, autonomism, workerism, some of which are a form of identitarianism themselves. These forms of workers’ identitarianisms ossify the social class into an identity. Such alien tendencies, wherever they became dominant, disabled the working class from becoming the leader of the working masses in the revolutionary movement against capitalism. It denied the working class the chance to become the leader of all exploited and oppressed masses. In India, we have been witnesses to the disastrous results of this economism since the late-1920s itself and especially during the rise of Fascism in India. Leaving apart the revisionists, even the revolutionary communists who were active among working-class could not go beyond militant economism and workerism. Similarly, in Britain, the militant economism prevalent in the working-class movement antagonized the other sections of the society to such an extent in the period of crisis that they drifted towards Thatcherite Toryism.
Some Marxists have claimed that it was only due to the economistic mistake of communists that identity politics became dominant. This is only the part of reality and reducing the whole failure to the subjective mistake of communists would be subjectivism. It is true that the economism prevalent in the communist movement contributed to the rise of Postmodernism and Post-Marxism, however, there was a fertile historical context for this. Otherwise, these ideologies could have emerged in the late-19th century itself. In that period too, economism was active in the communist movement. Therefore, we need to understand the dialectics of subjective and objective dimensions of the whole historical context in which identity politics emerged and became dominant.
Moreover, some Marxists in the process of refuting class-essentialism and class-reductionism tend to prove too much and go to the other extreme of de-economizing class. It is true that workerists (operaists) reified social class and ossified it as an identity and led to what can be termed as workerist identitarianism. We need to make a distinction between spontaneous workers’ consciousness and proletarian consciousness which is constituted through constant political struggles. The former is only potentially progressive and prone to hegemonization by an ensemble of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies. However, it is the social class of workers that is historically at a vantage point to internalize proletarian consciousness through political struggles. Otherwise, one would be obliged to argue that any class can internalize the proletarian consciousness and lead the revolution. It would be divorcing the political class from the social class. The social class becomes political class through real struggles which first lead to the constitution of the vanguard, which itself is a result of a particular moment in this process of becoming, and then develop further under the leadership of the vanguard.
The real Marxist-Leninist project is universal because it does not aim to fight against one or two particular forms of oppression, though it supports all struggles against oppression. Since it sees all forms of social oppressions originating and evolving in the moment of class antagonism, which itself is constantly in motion, it sees the causal links between class exploitation and oppression on the one hand and all identity-based oppressions on the other. Consequently, it fights against the entire capitalist system which breeds, sustains, co-opts, re-adjusts, re-structures, moulds and remoulds different forms of identity-based social oppressions.
Identity politics (Postmodernism and Post-Marxism in practice) reifies, de-historicizes and fetishizes the fragments, the identities, and uncritically celebrates them. In this way, these identities are also eternalized and etherealized. They are completely separated from their material history. Consequently, their notion of social oppression reduced to the multiple autonomous sites of identities, totally divorced from their material basis, prevents us from comprehending the essence and the inner dynamics of oppression. Identity politics depoliticizes social oppression by making them a subjective thing and divorcing it from the capitalist system and state. In this way, the state is absolved and all anti-oppression struggles are reduced to the
sphere of inter-personal relations, like anti-oppression training, creating safe-spaces, becoming self-aware, etc. The state would not only welcome it but might even help in this! In fact, almost all the NGOs involved in such activism are getting funds from governments of imperialist countries and imperialist funding agencies.
If we fail to see the fact that all forms of identity-based social oppression originate, evolve, and intersect in the moment of class, we cannot devise a revolutionary program for the elimination of all forms of social oppression. It is only by a historical materialist understanding of the origin and evolution of different social oppressions that we can see that it is the capitalist system that causes, sustains, co-opts, re-adjusts all forms of social oppressions and only with this realization can we devise a program for the revolutionary unity of all exploited and oppressed people for the revolutionary overthrow of the system that breeds and sustains class exploitation as well as social oppressions. It is class struggle that is the key link in overthrowing capitalism as an exploitative and oppressive system, not the separate struggles of multiple identities. A class-based movement against all forms of social oppression is needed. The demand for autonomy embodies a deep sense of pessimism that the working-class movement cannot fight against various forms of oppression and even the acceptance that even all oppressed cannot unite. The very logic of identity politics is ‘othering’, autonomy, isolation. This precludes any possibility of building a broad-based movement that can lead to the end of oppression. Only class provides a basis that can unify all oppressed and exploited and build a movement that has the potential to overthrow capitalism and thus all forms of oppression and exploitation. Even the working-class cannot succeed if it does not unite with all oppressed people in their fight for liberation. However, this is not an aggregative and coalitionist unity, but an organic unity along class lines. A socialist revolution will lead to the liberation of all women, but all women do not fight for the socialist revolution against capitalist system. As Alexandra Kollontai said in The Social Basis of Woman Question, “The women’s world is divided, just the world of men, into two camps: the interest and aspirations of the one group bring it close to the bourgeois class, while the other group has close connections to the proletariat, and its claim for liberation encompass a full solution to the woman question. Thus, although both camps follow the general slogan of the ‘liberation of women’, their aims and interests are different.”
Summing up the revolutionary Marxist position, it can be said that Marxism believes that production and reproduction of human life forms the foundation of society. The class struggle is the driving force of history and various forms of social oppression come into existence, evolve, overlap and intersect in the framework of class antagonisms and are articulated with class struggle. In this articulation, class dynamics plays the dominant role in the last instance. Marxism shows that various special forms of oppression came into existence at different moments of the evolution of the class society. For instance, women oppression came into existence with the evolution of private property, monogamous family, class and state; similarly, caste came into existence with the religious-ritualistic ossification and codification of the embryonic class division of late-Early Vedic Period. Racism on the other hand came into existence with the emergence of capitalism and modern slavery. Capitalism has co-opted women oppression and caste-based oppression by re-adjusting and restructuring them according to its own class framework. Today, it is capitalism which causes, sustains and co-opts all forms of social oppression and therefore is the root cause of class-based exploitation and oppression as well as all forms of identity-based oppressions. Working-class is the revolutionary productive agent because capitalism as a system depends on the exploitation of labour of the working-class, without which it cannot reproduce itself. Since the existence and reproduction of capitalism depends on the working-class, it is in a unique position in relation to capitalism and as far as revolutionary transformation is concerned. Class unity across identities to fight against exploitation and all forms of social oppression is the only revolutionary way to end all forms of oppression. Working-class as revolutionary agent is not a given or foregone conclusion for Marxists, but a real potential. Capitalism compels workers to organize and fight against capitalism, but it also divides and disorganizes them by obliging them to compete with one another in the labour market. This competition among workers creates the ground for growth of ‘false consciousness’ amongst them, that is, the influence of bourgeois ideologies of racism, casteism, etc amongst them. It is an empirically proven fact that racism, xenophobia, casteism, misogyny often soar in the periods of economic crisis. In India’s post-independence history, it can be shown with fair amount of preciseness, be it the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement of the 1980s, the Mandal Movement of 1990s, or the Maratha, Jat and Patel agitations for reservation in the 2000s and 2010s. All of these periods witnessed serious economic crises. At the same time, it can be shown that such ideologies become, at least, less effective in the periods of intensification of class struggle, especially under a correct political line and leadership. The transformation of the objective potential (class-in-itself) into subjective agency (class-for-itself) is a historical process which requires intervention of revolutionary organization in political struggles, which itself emerges at a definite moment in the process of becoming of the spontaneous working-class consciousness into proletarian political consciousness.
Who is the Enemy?
To answer this question, we need to answer who benefits from social oppression. The privilege theorists would argue that vis-à-vis every particular form of social oppression and its victims, all the others are beneficiaries and are complicit in this oppression and therefore they are the enemy. However, it can be shown with fairly conclusive evidence that men are not the objective beneficiary of oppression of women, non-Dalits are not the objective beneficiary of Dalit oppression and Whites are not the objective beneficiary of racism. That they are affected with the ruling class ideologies of sexism, Brahmanism, and racism is a different question altogether. The fact that even workers fall prey to ideologies of sexism, racism, casteism, etc. only shows that the spontaneous consciousness of workers is not automatically and always-already proletarian and is prone to fall prey to bourgeois ideologies. However, such behaviours are subjective and vary from individual to individual, unlike the objective interests of the working class as a whole, which remain the same for all workers.
In India, it can be shown that the oppression of Dalits also makes the working masses among other castes much more vulnerable to caste-based oppression as well as class exploitation. It can be demonstrated that wherever the women are oppressed, get less wages, are confined within the ambit of the household, the male workers also get less wages, are faced with the task of economic sustenance of the family alone, and the working-class family as a whole is much more vulnerable economically. Similarly, it can be proven, as the study by Michael Reich shows, that wherever the wages of the Black workers are depressed, the white workers too get less wages.
The second way in which these ruling class ideologies work against the working masses and in the benefit of the capitalist ruling class is that it allows the capitalists to over-exploit the oppressed sections of the society. In India, the average wages of the Dalit workers (89 percent of Dalit population is either rural or urban worker) is lower than the overall average wage in India. This also creates a downward pressure on the wages of non-Dalit workers. The result is higher rate of exploitation for the capitalist class as a whole. Regarding the articulation of class and caste in Indian society, I would like to present three theses here: (i) Every worker is exploited, but the Dalit worker is over-exploited due to the excess of vulnerability caused by the particular form of caste-based social oppression that they face; (ii) Every Dalit is oppressed, but it is working class Dalits who face the most barbaric forms of anti-Dalit atrocities and caste-based humiliation on account of the excess of vulnerability caused by their class position; and, (iii) the ruling class Dalits as a class, even when they face anti-Dalit verbal humiliation, do not and would not militantly fight against casteism as it brings the question of the culpability of the entire capitalist system to the centre eventually, of which they are beneficiaries as well as functionaries.
Thirdly, such ideologies of the ruling class allow the capitalist class to ‘divide all to conquer each’ in the words of F. Douglous. The clearest example was the recent movement of Marathas for reservation in Maharashtra. Recent years have seen unprecedented rate of unemployment in India; at the same time, capitalist development in agriculture has led to the ruination of a huge number of marginal and small peasants in Maharashtra and other parts of India. This has created a situation of extreme social and economic uncertainty and insecurity for working masses, giving rise to demands for reservation of seats in government jobs and education by a number of peasant castes. The Marathas are one of them. The reality is that 200 elite Maratha capitalist families control most of sugar mills, huge farms, factories and government posts in Maharashtra. The huge bulk of working masses among Marathas are deprived of all opportunities due to this Maratha ruling class. To blunt this increasing class contradiction, the Maratha ruling class fanned the flares of casteism among the Maratha working masses by arguing that it is the Dalits who are taking away the job opportunities of Marathas due to reservation. The immediate incident of rape of a Maratha girl, in which the accused were from Dalit background, sparked off huge Maratha Marches all across Maharashtra demanding either the end of reservation for Dalits or reservation for the Marathas in government jobs and education. This is how the ruling classes use the casteist ideology in dividing the masses, whenever there is an economic crisis, threatening to become a political crisis. The class contradictions are misarticulated as caste contradictions by the political leaders and ideologues of the ruling class. To be more accurate, whenever class contradictions do not find correct political articulation they are misarticulated as caste, race, or gender-based contradiction by the ideologues and politicians of the ruling class. The same thing happened with the Jim Crow segregation laws: the result was that the blacks as well as white workers lost, whereas the ruling class benefitted. Similarly, the oppression of women and confining women within the ambits of household, allows the capitalist class to ‘privatize’ the costs of reproduction of cheap labour-power, in time and money, that it desperately needs. Even when a section of women become part of work-force, their wages are depressed due to their primary function of reproduction and child-rearing. And finally, the onus of being breadwinner falls completely on the male, which creates the fear of being unable to provide for the family. All of this objectively benefits the capitalist class. Working-class as a whole does not have any objective interest in any form of identity-based oppression.
Contrary to the claims of identity politics which believes the enemy to be ‘white male power structure’, or ‘white male heterosexual power structure’ or ‘Brahmanical Manusmriti’, it is the capitalist class which is the common enemy for all oppressed and all exploited. A sizeable (almost 9-10 percent) Dalit population has become the part of capitalist power structure in India; they do not have anything common with the immense majority of Dalit working masses, who face the worst forms of casteist atrocities. Their only complaint is that despite rising the economic and political ladder, they are not treated as socially equals by their savarna counterparts in the bureaucracy or high government jobs. They never agitate on the question of anti-Dalit atrocities, but raise a lot of hulabaloo for purely symbolic issues like changing the name of some university to the name of Ambedkar or some other anti-caste symbol. Obviously, it is their right to demand it. However, if their entire political activism is limited to this hollow symbolism, while they maintain a conspiracy of silence on the most heinous anti-Dalit crimes, then serious questions about their loyalty emerge. The truth is that this small Dalit section of the ruling class is much more strongly linked with the system and therefore except paying lip-service to the cause of equality, does not do anything for the cause of liberation of all Dalits. The same goes for a small Black ruling class. The class-based anti-caste movement will also fight against the issues of caste-based humiliation of, for example someone like Mayawati, as a part of struggle against the casteist ideology. However, the focus of class-based anti-caste movement will be struggle against the anti-Dalit atrocities and humiliations faced by 90 percent of Dalit working masses. In nutshell, the small ruling class that has come into existence in all oppressed identities does not share anything with the immense majority of the oppressed and exploited working masses belonging to these identities. From the example of Mayawati and Ramdas Athawale to Obama and Hillary, it is clearly visible, if we leave apart the ridiculous logic that the Dalits “feel empowered” when Mayawati became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh; the truth is that this feeling of “empowerment” is illusory and elusive for 90 percent of working class Dalits.
Conclusion
Whenever the ruling class ideologies like racism, casteism, sexism, become dominant it is the working class in particular and working masses in general that lose and the capitalist class which benefits. The vice-versa is equally true. We saw how casteism, racism, sexism etc. serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. However, these ideologies are not crafted in a planned fashion by the bourgeoisie. They have a relative autonomy from the economic base but are also constrained by it. They are formed in generations according to the class interests of the ruling class, by the ideologues of the ruling class, but in a very complex dialectics of the objective and the subjective. These ideologies continue to exist even after the economic base that they originally served is gone, and are co-opted and remoulded by new economic base, if not eliminated in a gradual process.
The only way to fight against the influence of these ruling class ideologies among the working class is through real political struggles. It is only in unified struggles against the system that breeds exploitation and all forms of social oppression, that the working masses can fight against racism, sexism, casteism etc. As Marx said, “The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” Ruling class ideologies and backward ideas can only be challenged and fought against in the process of unified, broad-based mass struggles against the entire system based on exploitation and oppression. When people come to fight against any social oppression or exploitation, they come with an ensemble of ideas, some of which are progressive, others reactionary and still others confused. It is only in the process of struggle that people understand how capitalism utilizes the forms of social oppression, identity politics, their own prejudices, and how capitalism as a system functions. It is only through this understanding that they can fight against these ruling class ideologies, not by moral preaching, of “self-awareness”, “sensitization”, “anti-oppression training”, “creating safe spaces”, etc. Here it is essential to understand the difference between the antagonistic contradictions against the enemy and the friendly contradictions among the masses in order to handle them correctly.
Finally, it can be said that (i) all forms of identity-based social oppression originate, evolve, overlap and intersect in the framework of class antagonism; (ii) identity-based social oppressions articulate with class antagonism in a dialectical fashion; (iii) class struggle plays the ultimately determining role in this articulation; (iv) the causal link between class-based exploitation and oppression on the one hand and identity-based social oppressions shows that the root of all forms of oppression and exploitation is class antagonism; (v) today, it is the capitalist system which causes, sustains, co-opts, re-adjusts, re-structures and remoulds all forms of social oppression and therefore is the common enemy; (vi) class is not an identity but an objective material social relation based on production; (vii) in the struggle against capitalism, the role of the working class is central not because of primacy of its sectional interests, but because of the unique position it has vis-à-vis capitalism and the bourgeois ruling class; (viii) the working-class is the revolutionary ‘productive’ agent because the reproduction of capitalism as a system is based on the exploitation of labour of the working-class; (ix) the working-class cannot become political in the genuine sense if it does not unite will all oppressed masses; (x) the different socially-oppressed sections of society cannot liberate themselves without a broad-based revolutionary movement against capitalism which causes and sustains all forms of social oppression; (xi) the separatist, autonomous and independent anti-oppression movements cannot liberate the oppressed masses and are doomed to go through endless fragmentation and splits and retreat to the sphere of the personal life-style changes; (xii) to end all forms of social oppression as well as class-based exploitation and oppression, a revolutionary Socialist movement under the leadership of the working-class is necessary; (xiii) even under Socialism, the various forms of social oppression cannot be eliminated immediately and it will take many cultural revolutions before the inter-personal disparities can be eliminated and the hegemony of ruling class ideologies can be decisively broken, through ‘perpetual revolution’ in the sphere of superstructure, constant development of productive forces and the revolutionization of production relations; (xiv) the present immediate task for communist revolutionaries is building class-based militant revolutionary movements against social oppressions, which exposes the capitalist system and brings it to a point of impossibility and resist the attacks of chauvinists, in every sense of the term.
(Presented in the Left Forum, 2018, New York, USA on June 3, 2018)
