(co-authored with Joshua Depaolis-Pickett)
With the rise of myriad forms of identity politics, corresponding to a new “Trinity Formula” of leftist analysis of capitalism (class, race, and gender), major currents in the contemporary radical left in the past decades have shifted their aim from the abolition of capitalist relations of production towards an overwhelming (and more often than not, unreflective) submission to the status quo. Not only do influential contemporary leftist theorists and activists conform to the neoliberal narrative of ‘intersectionality’, ‘diversity’ and ‘gender theory’, they reduce the analytical categories of class and the dynamic of capitalist accumulation to a ‘subthread’ of personal forms of domination. This shift, we believe, has a historical and theoretical predecessor in the New Left and the international student movement of the 1960s. Its idiosyncratic reading of Marx’s economy-critical work, prompted by an increasing incapacity to adequately address the problem of value and impersonal domination in the global spread of capital, allowed for a misidentification of the law of value as transhistorical, and neglected the significance of its monetary dimension. Much of the left has therefore been unable to overcome the naturalisms of bourgeois political economy and adequately grasp the basic dynamic of capitalist domination, the reproduction of the wage relation, and hence the worldwide spread of impersonal capitalist domination in the law of value. Radicals increasingly focused on more ‘concrete’ and ‘personal’ forms of power —napalm bombings and warfare, colonialism, the patriarchy, racial segregation – thereby obscuring the constitutive dynamic of modern society and regressing to a pre-Marxist critique of ‘injustice’. Seeing the latter as the main engine of capitalist relations allowed for a convenient suppression of the question of impersonal power — a more unsettling matter. The result was a striking inability to organise an adequate response to the challenge of capital as a social relation, the failings of which are felt until today in the increasingly authoritarian, rightwing, and neoliberal backlash.
The positivistic approach to capitalist relations of production assumed by today’s left has capitulated to an understanding of capital not as totality, but as ‘individual’ sets of oppression that can be addressed as ‘parts of a whole feeding into each other’, and in which every social relation counts as equally significant. This is reflected in the regressive trend towards identity, i.e. cultural, ethnic or ‘gendered’ communalism, the fetishisation of which has not only stifled Marx’s critique of capital as a critique of class society, but brought us a fantastic new repertoire of ever new forms of inter-social (or ‘intersectional’, for that matter) oppression, as is manifest in terms like ‘microaggression’. Its often moralistic and epistemologically flawed logic is based on oppression’s alleged ubiquity, thereby precisely obscuring the insights of Marx’s critique: the problem of unequal exchange in the form of equal exchange, i.e. the problem of wage labour. Wage labour comprises the socially and historically specific essence of capitalist exploitation (and not just “oppression”) that is the sine qua non of the general and universal social mediation under the rule of value. By relocating its “area of intervention” into more individually and morally motivated forms of critique, discarding Marx’s poignant analysis, the contemporary left internalises a methodology which neoliberalism itself has propagated for decades to erode worker resistance worldwide. The contrast between the Marxian emancipatory project and what the ‘progressive’ left has made of it has never been more glaring than now, a time in which capital no longer seems to confront a political barrier.
The Introduction will carry out a historical review of the political and ideological process through which the global left has abandoned the framework of universal emancipation of the working class and substituted it with moralistic concerns of ‘disadvantaged groups’ that no longer tackles the neoliberal status quo. The diagnosis we find pertinent to our analysis is that, with the growing tendency after the 1960s to view social hierarchies no longer as the effect of the impersonal domination mediated by capital, but of personal domination (e.g. “interest groups”) and a question of “good/bad politics”, the left has shifted its concern from the abolition of capitalist productive relations to managing those relations in a ‘better’ way. As Marxists committed to the Critique of Political Economy, we see a ‘new Trinity Formula’ emerging as discursive template on the left - akin to Adam Smith’s understanding of the ‘sources of wealth’ in land, labour, and capital -, namely the notions of ‘race, class, and gender’, in which the specificity of class is rendered meaningless by its integration into categories which adhere to an understanding of ‘oppression’ whose abolition will not abolish capitalist society, but only manage it more ‘equitably’.
The Introduction shall set the tone for the volume by presenting an analysis and critique of the ways in which recent discourse in the left has accommodated itself to a ‘conformist rebellion’. The most representative examples of this phenomenon can be seen in the shift from class to identity politics (race, gender) and the substitution of class for ‘community’ (Part I), in the reframing of questions of culture and identity in the socially influential areas of academia and art (Part II), and in theoretical streams that predominantly inform a ‘leftist’ view of society, i.e. the demand for UBI, postcolonial theory, and eco-socialism (Part III).
Featuring contributions by Todd Cronan, Nick Nesbitt, Elena Louisa Lange, Jane Clare Jones, Selina Todd, Joshua Pickett-Depaolis, Robert Pfaller, Eric-John Russell, George Hoare, Samir Gandesha, Maren Thom, Haseeb Ahmed, John-Baptiste Oduor, Nivedita Majumdar, Leigh Phillips, and Raji C. Steineck.
Publication in January 2022/Rowman and Littlefield Int.
speaking of the "New Left's idiosyncratic reading of Marx" I would be interested to see a genealogy, with names, of how we got to the "unholy trinity" you speak of. Zizek rejects Jordan Peterson's claim that "cultural marxists" laid the groundwork for woke capitalism, but I find Peterson's term (admittedly a generalization) not that far off, which is not to say I agree with much else in Peterson. It seems Foucault leads to Butler for instance, who is maybe important for CRT and Intersectionality..? Any way, I'd love to hear your account.
Ah this’ll be good. Looking forward.