Leadership
I saw this meme on the Greenpeace FB site. I let them know what I thought of it in no uncertain terms and unliked and unfollowed the page. I can do without this kind of ‘politics’ and activism. I think memes like this are moral, political, and intellectual dreck, pander to delusions and feed more besides. But that may be too charitable a view. It is always worthwhile pondering the attitudes, intentions, and strategies of the very clever people who are behind such appeals. I don’t know whether to condemn their naivety or their cynicism. They plainly think people so stupid and so gullible as to respond only to the most facile of appeals. Memes like this go straight for the pleasure and prejudice zones of the shallow.
I dashed off a quick response and left:
Memes like this are utterly deluded and a diversion from serious institutional and systemic analysis and transformation. The fact that so many are so happy with this kind of thing tells me that the world is far away from the transformation that is required. This is not serious politics, it is mush. And it is divisive mush at that. I note the consistent lack of a class analysis and the lack of awareness of the class dynamics at the heart of current crises. Instead of class analysis we get the false oppositions of identities: black v white, male vs female, young vs old. This is not radical, it is reactionary to its rotten core. This is patently not leadership. The fact that such a claim could be made tells me to search for the motivations of those who back and finance this kind of high profile activism. It sounds like a new set of leaders preparing the ground to replace the old set of leaders. And those leaders are not the activists who tick all the right identity boxes. I see far too much of this on the green side of politics. It is hopeless and useless, and politically debilitating and dangerous to boot. 4k likes for that nonsense? You guys are in trouble.
I’m no fan of the world’s current leadership, but never make the mistake of blaming the personifications of institutions and economic categories for ills that have their origins in structures and systems. I don’t absolve leaders of responsibility for the effects of their decisions, but am always careful to relate the decisions they take to the institutions and systems they are charged with serving. To replace this institutional and systemic analysis with a focus on identity fails utterly to diagnosis the problems that confront us, with who knows what consequences in terms of politics and policies. It is a mistake of enormous proportions to presume that any one generation or sex causes all the problems and that another generation and sex has all the answers. There is a need to listen to the unique perspectives that all bring to life, and do so by way of reference to a genuine universal, not a mere particular elevated to the status of universal. Pitting one generation against the other and one sex against another is an ugly side of political campaigning. It is done because it is easy, and enables the hard questions and hard boards of politics to be avoided. It reveals a very nasty side to environmental activism. Moral attitudes and willingness to learn have no age limit and no race and sex boundary. There can be no advance with inflexible people riddled with prejudices. Many of the people who have influenced me in green politics, and whom I have had the honour of knowing in advancing environmental issues, have been white men, a number of whom are now elderly. I wonder what they think when they see their efforts of a lifetime dismissed so blithely in favour of this girlwash. This is garbage, encouraging the most reactionary views instead of fostering genuine radical views – radical in the sense of going to root causes and hence genuine solutions.
I’ve been protesting this mentality in green campaigning for a long time now. It is striking that, instead of learning from criticism, the people who engage in this kind of identitarian activism double down. The only thing they seem to have learned is to have added girls of colour to their cast of once overwhelmingly white girls.
This is an appallingly blinkered and destructive route for environmental politics to take, fragmenting its public profile from within. I’m deeply suspicious, too. Behind the girls, I expect to find lots of rich, well-connected, and well-resourced white men. Who else has the power and resources to push these ambitious environmental demands to scale?
Garbage. I’m immune to sugar and spice and all things nice. It’ll be puppy dogs next.
Identity politics is a disastrous and divisive model of politics, most of all for those seeking to advance progressive and egalitarian causes. Without a unifying and cohering principle, the differences of identity, emphasising the things that separate people, cannot but divide and dissolve a unitarian politics. Identity is a universal acid. Instead of seeing what we can do for the public realm in the service of a universal cause, people join with others to nurturing grudges and grievances against the public, past and present, and protest instead of saying what can we do for our country we say we are aggrieved, we are owed, we need our government to compensate us. It is a disastrous model.
So why is it done? One can be conspiratorial and say that, for a ruling class at bay, identity politics offers a perfect means for breaking up a growing opposition, getting those in revolt to turn upon one another rather than unite against a common enemy. Such things have been known. The truth may be more mundane, though. In an age that is already fractured and has long since lost the sense of commonality, identity politics is the way to incite people and get them moving – it works. Identity politics isn’t the driver of this diremptive social system but its product. In the short-run, it is the only politics that anyone can engage in to any effect. It is cheap and easy, then, and very nasty. In fine, it is the product of a fractured society. It pays to be nasty, divisive, and disagreeable, and ineffectual to think and act in ways that are civil and reasonable. Every institution that undergirds civilisation has been traduced and rendered unworthy of assent. Unless we can again reestablish regard and respect for a common framework, institutionally and ethically, and embody and articulate this in unifying and solidaristic practices – ensuring that these institutions, ethics, and pracitces are worthy of respect – then the road ahead is going to be treacherous, with universal hatred a likelier prospect than universal love.
I now turn to this article ‘Class, the word that elites and would be elites want you to forget and ignore.’ I would direct critical attention away from merely the ruling class to analyse too the dominant voices in a supposedly oppositional politics, noting the absence of class and class analysis, indeed the explicit devaluation and denial of the legitimacy of class.
Chris Hedges writes that ‘the culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage.’ He begins: ‘Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us.’ He continues:
‘The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about sexual identity and gender. They are happy to talk about patriotism. They are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about immigration. They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun control. They are happy to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural freedom. They are not happy to talk about class.’
Indeed. I continually repeat this poem, in the hope that people get the point. They rarely do. Right to the end which recognizes one’s own personal responsibility alongside the structural cause:
Know thy enemy:
he does not care what colour you are
provided you work for him
and yet you do!
he does not care how much you earn
provided you earn more for hi
and yet you do!
he does not care who lives in the room at the top
provided he owns the building
and yet you strive!
he will let you write against him
provided you do not act against him
and yet you write!
he sings the praises of humanity
but knows machines cost more than men.
Bargain with him, he laughs, and beats you at it;
challenge him, and he kills.
Sooner than lose the things he owns
he will destroy the world.
SMASH CAPITAL NOW!
But as you hasten to be free
And build your commonwealth
Do not forget the enemy
Who lies within yourself.
- Christopher Logue, Know Thy Enemy
Celebrate whatever sex, colour, and age you like, it is utterly reactionary if it is done to draw attention away from the structural purposes and systemic imperatives which drive society. Such celebrations could even serve as an ideological cover for the system, revealing ideological effect and maybe even intent. Frankly, if you were a member of a ruling class at bay, identity politics is a godsend, serving to fragment a growing opposition, dividing it from within and turning people against one another in conflicts that are without end. Identity politics runs to infinity in its endless nominalist recreation of reality.
Hedges writes:
‘Race, gender, religion, abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used to divide the public, to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage.’
Beyond the divisions of left and right in the conventional political sphere, I am interested in the extent to which activists and campaigners are politicking 24/7 on seemingly every issue but class. It really is as if we have a licensed and sponsored radicalism that renders the irresolvable contradictions of the system safe for the ruling class. Class is off limits, precisely because it is only the one or other ‘identity’ that is invested with transformative significance. Bizarrely, whereas Marx made class the key to the resolution of all other issues, contemporary activists tend to see other and even any identity as key – anything but class. Marx has been inverted, and it shows in the political and social impotence of an endless activism on the part of people who lament continuously that no-one is listening and nothing is being done. Might I suggest to such people that they listen, learn, and change – because they are doing it all wrong. It tells me that environmentalism has a long way to go before it becomes politically and sociologically relevant. At present, it is not engaging in real politics but manipulating reactions from the outside. The whole approach betrays a certain misanthropy on the part of environmentalists, patronising people and addressing them with clichés and slogans and nice images.
And for the record, this is not what leadership looks like. It’s a view that flatters the self-image of the activists. But leadership is a title that belongs properly to those who tread the hard boards, address the hard questions, walk the hard yards, and take the hard decisions. Activists seeking power without responsibility on the outside of politics are precisely that – activists seeking the power to demand actions free from responsibility for their enacting, from their financing, and from their consequences. That’s not leadership. That’s spoiled children helping themselves to the deep pockets of rich parents.
This is infantilism, at best. At worst, there is something nasty and manipulative going on, with people considered not as citizens but as dupes.
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