Guest post: Trans identitarianism benefits principally upper-class white men
Originally a comment by Papito on His colleagues complained.
Nullius, I agree with your statement:
Action within the constraints of egalitarianism (treating none as lesser or greater than oneself) is incapable of exerting the power over others necessary to bring about egalitarian conditions. Egalitarianism cannot bring itself about. Thus, a Leftist politics must necessarily incorporate some other non-egalitarian mechanism for changing the state of affairs obtaining in the world.
This can be substantiated by looking at leftist theory, e.g. Marcuse, who states openly that a bias should be instituted in favor of leftist ideas, to contradict a naturally existing bias towards conservative ideas. So it’s true that leftism has a propensity towards identitarianism, at least as an intermediate stage in the progress towards equality.
On the other hand, there has also been a hijacking of leftist purpose at the means stage, on the part of capitalism. Identity politics has been coopted as a tax paid by the well-educated and well-established in order to continue pursuing the concentration of wealth unhindered. In this, a means stage of leftism has itself become one of the main antagonists of leftist ends.
Trans identitarianism – gender theology – benefits principally upper-class white men. They love to use the shield of poor brown people in, say, Brazil, as a justification for their extortion, but there is nothing whatsoever about that project that enhances equality between rich white trans men in America and mixed-race tranny prostitutes on the street in Rio.
Many other forms of identitarianism have been similarly perverted – affirmative action in American colleges principally benefits immigrants from Africa and middle-class black kids, while leaving the native-born impoverished behind. The left finds itself in frank conflict between those who seek to create a more egalitarian social system and those who seek to use their identity status for personal gain within the system as is. The latter are winning, not incidentally because it’s been so easy for capitalism to adapt to them. It’s just another form of rent-seeking.
But back to the question: are university bosses who force out lesbians and feminists for telling the truth “far-left?” All they’re doing is privileging one identity over another; they’re not doing any work whatsoever to bring about greater social equality. We call them “leftist” if we find the identity/means part of leftist praxis to be its most salient feature, and we don’t if we believe that working for social equality is leftism’s most salient feature. They are simultaneously examples of leftism and examples of its antithesis; they are emblematic of the failure of leftism.
For some people new to a philosophy, creed, religion or whatever the feature they find most attractive and liberating is its ability to somehow explain everything; well at least everything they find important to themselves. Often it comes with the added benefit of making themselves feel important and authoritative. Thus the noisy transgenderists, following the example of the postmodernists, which latter set themselves up beautifully to be gulled sooner or later by a Sokal hoax.
But looking back over the history of the Left and its politics, I think that its most important and far-reaching failure was in its attitude to liberalism, which far too many on the Left dismissed as a ‘bourgeois’ concern, and thus easily dismissable in those terms. Out went the baby with the bath water, and a yellow brick road (well, some colour of bricks anyway) was opened up to a glorious Stalinist 20th Century epoch, or bog, or quicksand that trapped many on the Left and saw many of them move severely to the Right in disgust.
I think that this started with Lenin, who was preoccupied with the creation of a movement sufficiently disciplined to overthrow the Russian tsarism that he saw as responsible for the judicial murder of his own adored elder brother. Except that the same thing happened in China and elsewhere.
People who wish to overthrow a tyranny and put a democracy into its place cannot do so without first creating an army of some kind. (Mao’s Red Army in China has been a classic example; the type specimen if you will.) But no army is a democracy. All are top-down hierarchies based on different levels of experience, and cannot function otherwise. And that IMHO is where the trouble starts.
An event like the Russian (1917) Chinese (1949) Yugoslav (1945-) or Cuban revolution (1959) creates a lot of enemies bent on revenge and against whom the successful revolutionaries feel a need to defend themselves, heading them in an anti-liberal direction. (The English Revolution, which was an anti-monarchist movement that began with Cromwell in the 1640s is still a work in progress, and will be as long as Britain has an unelected House of Lords with real political power.)
In short, liberalism has to be paramount in any social change worth having. But Catch-22: it implies freedom of thought and expression, and the freedom to propagate and spread ideas via printed and other media. Thus a corollary is freedom to set up a media business – publishing papers, books and whatever, which in turn implies freedom to set up any business; even a brothel. (Police corruption is the price of making them illegal.) And thus we arrive back at capitalism and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History.
There must be some way out of here. But I’m damned if I know what or where it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Thank you for expanding the point, Papito.
Indeed, Marcuse refers to his correction mechanism as pre-censorship, censorship that prevents not the expression of ideas but the thinking of them. Reading Marcuse is rather enlightening and refreshing, because he doesn’t really hide his cards, so to speak. He’s upfront about his authoritarian means. Rather than argue that they aren’t authoritarian, he instead makes the case that such means are good when employed in the service of the proper goal by the proper agents. He, of course, is one such agent.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is kind of the ur-example, I think. Yes, the proletariat revolution is an explicit, obvious application of power, but the fact that everyone forgets the intermediate autocracy rather demonstrates the problem. Rent-seeking behavior is certainly a large obstacle, but it’s ultimately a subset of the larger problem that imposing your will, whether you are one or many, is an exercise of power. All political action is, after all, the exercise of some form of power. A current example might be the critique of “colorblindness”. While colorblindness is the desired state of affairs, adopting radical colorblindness prematurely renders one insatiable of recognizing racism. An intermediate state is required in which we “see color”.
It’s worth noting that Right politics faces the same (well, converse) problem. In seeking the annihilation of hierarchies, the Left employs and creates them. In seeking the creation and strengthening of hierarchies, the Right breaks them. Instituting a more rigid hierarchy (whether by amendment or wholesale replacement) necessitates breaking the existing order. The Right impulse contains its opposite just as does the Left.
This goes to your final point: what ultimately distinguishes Left from Right?
In philosophy, we have a term “intentionality”. As a metaphor, consider an archer firing an arrow. Where the arrow is aimed is the shot’s intentionality. Both sides employ the same or similar means, so only the intentionality of a political action can determine whether it’s Left or Right. Does this censorship aim at equality or hierarchy? If equality, then Left; if hierarchy, then Right.
Funny how this phase of “blindness” was reached so quickly with regards to women’s rights and equality. We never really “fixed” sexism. There was a little bit of a start, but it was interrupted by a combination of “choosie-choice feminism” and gender identitarianism. We skipped right over equal pay, equal political participation, freedom from male violence, etc. to “Sex Work is Work” and “Trans Women Are Women.” In exchange, we have the “cotton ceiling” and feminism=fascism. Women are painted as oppressors through the “Karen” meme and the “cis” slur. As for “blindness?” We’re now not supposed to see sex; not because we’ve acheived equality between women and men (as if), but because sex no longer exists. Women can no longer be named. If women had even half the power attributed to them by trans activists, they’d be better off than they are. They would have been able to resist the unprecedentedly rapid advances of trans-activism’s institutional capture, because they would have had a seat at the table. Women had no such seat at the table; they weren’t even in the goddamn room.
Here’s some convenient “blindness.” How many oppressed minorities have instant, backroom access outside of (and despite) the law, to shape policy in accord with its own peculiar, self-interested redefinitions, and against existing statutes? Gender is the oppressed king, calling the shots from its position of entrenched “marginalization.” If trans identifying men were really as powerless as they claim, they would be fucking nowhere.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Trans identitarianism benefits principally upper-class white […]
Well, that was supposed to be “incapable of recognizing racism”, but whatever. Maybe we’re hungry racism-sucking vampires or something. Les sigh.