Douglas Murray, author, journalist and associate editor of The Spectator, a ‘gay’761 conservative, traces the origins of identity politics in his informative book The Madness of Crowds. Murray cites the ‘post-Marxists’ Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as providing one of the earliest foundations for identity politics.762 Murray refers to their 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy where they wrote of the challenges to socialism by ‘the emergence of new contradictions’. Orthodox Marxism being ‘centred on the class struggle’ and ‘the contradictions of capitalism’ had to be reappraised. Issues emerged that were not based on class struggle: ‘women, national, racial and sexual minorities’.763 Laclau and Mouffe had written in a preliminary article in 1981 that the enemy could no longer be defined by classical Marxist concepts on class; this had been superseded by power relationships that involve sexism, patriarchy and racism.764
Mouffe and the late Laclau are notable ‘post-Marxists’. Their article for Marxism Today contained the primary elements of identity politics:
Socialist political struggle takes place today on a terrain which has been profoundly transformed by the emergence of new contradictions, with which the traditional discourse of Marxism, centered on the class struggle and the analysis of the economic contradictions of capitalism, has had great difficulties in coming to terms. To what extent has it become necessary to modify the notion of class struggle, in order to be able to deal with the new political subjects — women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements etc — of a clearly anti-capitalist character, but whose identity is not constructed around specific ‘class interests’?765
The analysis is neo-Gramscian, after the Italian Communist Party theorist Antonio Gramsci, who has had a major influence on post-Marxist thinking, and underlines the purpose of identity politics as being that of cultural hegemony: ‘The emergence of new contradictions in advanced capitalism requires that socialist forces develop the concept of hegemony even further than its formulation in Gramsci, in order to bring out all its theoretical and political effects.’766 With a convoluted rhetorical flurry, such as only Marxist theorists can truly master, one of the more cogent paragraphs explains the Gramscian dialectic:
It is Gramsci who elaborates this new conception of hegemony, drawing out all the potentialities present in Leninism. With Gramsci, in fact, hegemony is no longer conceived of as mere political leadership exercised over preconstituted subjects, but as ‘political, intellectual and moral leadership’ through which new political subjects are to be created. These subjects will express a national popular collective will resulting from the articulation by the working class of a series of democratic popular demands corresponding to contradictions which are not strictly class ones.767
Where the value of Gramscianism lays is in its multidirectional, metapolitical approach to undermining the System:
This brings us to the notion of the war of position, a key concept in socialist strategy according to Gramsci and one which implies what one might term a multidimensional conception of political radicalisation. A conception of this kind goes against the traditional Marxist outlook — including Leninism — which was unidimensional insofar as it considered the political process and the revolutionary struggle as revolving around a single point: the seizure of power. Power was conceived of as a substance, having a source and a specific location within social relations — in the extreme case, as a building: the Winter Palace.768 The Gramscian concept of war of position implies a rupture with such a conception, a rupture which finds its theoretical source in the notion of integral state. For if the articulations of the social whole are political articulations, there is no level of society where power and forms of resistance are not exercised. Since these articulations do not come from a single and necessary source, there can be no absolute and essential location of power, but rather a multiplicity of dimensions and struggles, whose unity — or separation — are constantly being re-defined.769
Here we see the strategic purpose of identity politics — a multidirectional undermining of the ‘integral state’; the social community.770 It is the means by which society is fractured by subverting and attacking it at various levels, not just economically, as hitherto, but socially, culturally, intellectually, and morally. For this purpose, not only are the normal constituent parts of a society, such as class, age, gender and race, fractured, but even these fractures are divided as a social cancer on the body politic. Mouffe and Laclau refer to the constant re-definition and multiplication of ‘struggles’ and their role in ‘separation’ and ‘unity’ within the ‘social whole’. This continual social fracturing is no less revolutionary than the Leninist conception of revolt against the central authority of the state. The aim is to destroy the social organism at all levels, as cancer destroys at a cellular level.
The achievement of socialism, therefore, does not arise from an absolute moment represented by a radical break consisting of the seizure of power. It must instead be the result of a series of partial ruptures through which the ensemble of relations of forces existing in a society will be transformed. What is traditionally known as the seizure of power, that is, control over the state apparatuses, is in fact only one — albeit one of the most important — of the many ruptures in this process of transformation. It is, therefore, an error to present the war of position strategy as implying a reformist or social democratic position, opposed to another which would be revolutionary. The defence of a democratic socialism, then, has nothing to do with a necessary ‘peaceful road’ or a slow accumulation of reforms. What it refers to is a novel conception of the radicalisation and the politicisation of social struggles, one which enlarges the field of confrontation and struggle to the whole of civil society.
Laclau and Mouffe trace the change of direction of the Left towards Gramcianism at the rise of the New Left. It is here that the student movement, through the formation of the Students for a Democratic Society, aligned with the Black civil rights movement. Here we see the first two elements of identity politics emerge: age and race, to which feminism was added.771 Laclau and Mouffe refer to 1968, the year of the worldwide New Left student riots as the start of ‘new contradictions’.
In fact, the antagonisms that became prominent in the late 1960s, and were to expand and acquire a dynamic of their own in the following decade, exhibit new and specific characteristics. These new political subjects: women, students, young people, racial, sexual and regional minorities, as well as the various anti-institutional and ecological struggles, not only cannot be located at the level of relations of production (though this is not in itself absolutely new, Gramsci and Togliatti772 having already understood the importance of contradictions other than ‘class’ ones); on top of this, they define their objectives in a radically different way. Their enemy is defined not by its function of exploitation, but by wielding a certain power. And this power, too, does not derive from a place in the relations of production, but is the outcome of the form of social organisation characteristic of the present society. This society is indeed capitalist, but this is not its only characteristic; it is sexist and patriarchal as well, not to mention racist.773
The question arises as to why it is the oligarchy that has been encouraging and funding these constituent parts that today form the components of identity politics. What the post-Marxists call ‘capitalism’ is the remnant of middle class commerce that remains connected to the nation. To global capitalism, the phase of capitalism that Marx predicted as becoming international,774 this smaller scale, nationally-based commerce is passé. What Marx saw as the bourgeoisie being ‘its own gravedigger’ through the revolutionary character of industrial expansion, has not seen ‘the inevitable victory of the proletariat’775 but a post-bourgeois class of capitalist, which has rendered the old proletariat as redundant as the old middle class. Marx came near to the reality when he stated that
the lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary but conservative. Nay, more they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer to the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat’.776
Marx wrote that the remnants of the lower middle class were an impediment to the next phase of capitalism, that their resistance is ‘reactionary’. This lower middle class would be destroyed or proletarianised. The destruction of this lower middle class remnant is sought by both the post-Marxist Left and the globalist elite. It is notable that the Critical Theorists regard the lower middle class as the fossilised remnant of the patriarchy and the authoritarian family. While the working class did not have sufficient inner resolve to resist, according to Fromm, ‘the lower middle class has been an important factor in the rise of Nazism’.777 For Wilhelm Reich, ‘the National Socialist movement relied upon the broad layers of the so-called middle, i.e., the millions of private and public officials, middle-class merchants and owners and middle-class farmers. From the point of view of its social basis, National Socialism was a lower middle-class movement, and this was the case wherever it appeared, whether in Italy, Hungary, Argentina or Norway’.778
The identity politics discussed by Laclau and Mouffe in Marxism Today in 1981, and explicated as a book in 1985, emerged two decades previously from the Critical Theorists. Even prior to Marcuse, from the start of the Frankfurt Institute in Weimar Germany, the premises of the New Left and identity politics had been formulated.
Professor Howard J. Wiarda traces the term identity politics to the 1960s. He states that black, women’s, gay and lesbian groups all claim ‘original authorship’. During the 1960s and 1970s, there emerged in the USA and Europe large-scale movements, including black power, students, feminists, Greens, gays, sundry indigenous movements, and in the Third World women, indigenes, and peasants. ‘Each group identified with its own individual cause’. In the 1990s, the word was used to ‘apply to a broader array of interest groups’, ‘entered mainstream political discourse’, and became the primary focus of the Left.779
Wiarda’s placing the 1960s as the seminal year seems correct. We can be specific in tracing the origins to Marcuse, who referred to the coming of a ‘New Left’ when describing the identities referred to by Wiarda. It seems odd that Laclau and Mouffe make no reference to Marcuse in their 1981 article.
In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse sought to extend the dialectical conflict to include ‘the persecuted colored races, the inmates of prisons and mental institutions’.780 In a 1967 lecture, the year prior to the world-wide New Left riots, Marcuse stated:
But in the global framework the underprivileged who must bear the entire weight of the system really are the mass basis of the national liberation struggle against neo-colonialism in the third world and against colonialism in the United States. Here, too, there is no effective association between national and racial minorities in the metropoles of capitalist society and the masses in the neo-colonial world who are already engaged in struggle against this society. These masses can perhaps now be considered the new proletariat and as such they are today a real danger for the world system of capitalism. To what extent the working class in Europe can still or again be counted among these groups of underprivileged is a problem that we must discuss separately; I cannot do so in the framework of what I have to say here today, but I should like to point out a fundamental distinction. What we can say of the American working class is that in their great majority the workers are integrated into the system and do not want a radical transformation, we probably cannot or not yet say that of the European working class.781
What Marcuse, as with Hayden in The Port Huron Statement, was advocating was the mobilisation of anti-colonial forces among the Third World and ethnic minorities in the West. With the destruction of the old empires after the exhaustion of Europe following two world wars, it was the USA that was in a position to fill the void with its own neo-colonialism. Organisations such as the Peace Corps and USAID went in with their ‘soft-sell’ neo-colonialism of development aid, as part of a global industrialisation process. As we have seen, an important role was played by anthropologists and other social scientists in providing academic data on those societies that were to receive the blessings of U.S. state and corporate largesse and loans from the international banking system, in return for compliance and integration into the world economy. The African-American Institute was established to train a leadership cadre for post-colonial Africa, meaning ‘neo-colonial’ Africa behind the façade of decolonisation and ‘liberation’. Founded in 1953 and mainly funded by the CIA,782 the Rockefeller Foundation started funding the AAI in 1972.783 The Rockefeller Brothers Fund had been supporting the AAI programme for sponsoring Africans to U.S. universities since 1961,784 where a pro-American generation could be trained to assume control after the scuttling of the European colonies.
‘The national liberation struggle against neo-colonialism in the Third World’ was generally the vanguard of Wall Street. The Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations, which had taken control of the education systems of Africa and Asia even prior to the scuttling of the European empires, had been preparing for decolonisation for decades. The USA was ideally placed to posture as the big brother of ‘national liberation’, having been born from revolt against the British Empire. The reasoning behind the ‘considerable funding’ by Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller ‘for the expansion of educational institutions in Africa, Asia, and [Latin] America’ was that educational and cultural funding was an important aspect of foreign policy. This was examined by Philip Coombs (who had come from the Ford Foundation-created Fund for the Advancement of Education in 1961 to become Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs) in his 1964 book The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy.785
Marcuse pre-empted Laclau and Moueffe by twenty years in stating that the working class was not going to become the agent for revolutionary change, and that disaffected elements that could not be integrated fully into Western society had to assume the role. These elements were the perpetual outsiders, as well as those who could be fractured from society: Blacks, Latinos, and even, as Marcuse and others of the Left advocated, lunatics and criminals, and contrived identities based on gender (feminism, homosexuals) and age (students, Yippies, hippies, drop-outs, and addicts in Oedipal revolt).
But the struggle for the solution has outgrown the traditional forms. The totalitarian tendencies of the one-dimensional society render the traditional ways and means of protest ineffective—perhaps even dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty. This illusion contains some truth: ‘the people,’ previously the ferment of social change, have ‘moved up’ to become the ferment of social cohesion. Here rather than in the redistribution of wealth and equalization of classes is the new stratification characteristic of advanced industrial society. However, underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions.786
Marcuse saw in conventionally non-political social outcasts the potential for disruption. Their mere existence is disruption: hence they are ‘revolutionary even if their consciousness is not’; they are an ‘elementary force’. This is the element that Marx called the lumpenproletariat. Unlike Marx, Marcuse saw their use, as it manifests in periods of social breakdown as random violence, vandalism, and looting. A particularly extreme example of this was the widespread rioting in Britain in 2011 after police shot the drug dealer Mark Duggan, who was then glorified by the Left,787 reminiscent of the 1960s ‘Days of Rage’ in Chicago, and the rioting and looting that periodically spills over from U.S. ghetto districts. The Left seeks to politicise such sociopathy. Marcuse wrote:
Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system; it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the game and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game. When they get together and go out into the streets, without arms, without protection, in order to ask for the most primitive civil rights, they know that they face dogs, stones, and bombs, jail, concentration camps, even death. Their force is behind every political demonstration for the victims of law and order. The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period. Nothing indicates that it will be a good end. The economic and technical capabilities of the established societies are sufficiently vast to allow for adjustments and concessions to the underdog, and their armed forces sufficiently trained and equipped to take care of emergency situations. However, the spectre is there again, inside and outside the frontiers of the advanced societies.788
Marcuse imagined a nihilistic revolution that could not be ‘deflected’. He alluded to a contradiction, however, in stating that ‘the economic and technical capabilities of the established societies are sufficiently vast to allow for adjustments and concessions…’ So far from the upheavals resulting in the displacement of the actual power structure in late capitalist societies, comparatively radical changes could be justified to ward off the threat of total social breakdown. These changes are enacted in the name of ‘human rights’ and ‘equality’.
Marcuse approaches the reality of the dialectic: ‘… But the chance is that, in this period, the historical extremes may meet again: the most advanced consciousness of humanity, and its most exploited force. …’789 Those who constitute this ‘most advanced consciousness of humanity’ are identified by Marcuse in the preface to the 1966 edition of Eros and Civilization. Reiterating that the working class had become passé as a revolutionary force, in obliterating the vestiges of the lower middle class he stated that the revolutionary role would be assumed by the technocratic bourgeoisie, along with youth:
To the degree to which organized labor operates in defense of the status quo, and to the degree to which the share of labor in the material process of production declines, intellectual skills and capabilities become social and political factors. Today, the organized refusal to cooperate of the scientists, mathematicians, technicians, industrial psychologists and public opinion pollsters may well accomplish what a strike, even a large-scale strike, can no longer accomplish but once accomplished, namely, the beginning of the reversal, the preparation of the ground for political action. That the idea appears utterly unrealistic does not reduce the political responsibility involved in the position and function of the intellectual in contemporary industrial society. The intellectual refusal may find support in another catalyst, the instinctual refusal among the youth in protest. It is their lives which are at stake, and if not their lives, their mental health and their capacity to function as unmutilated humans. …790
The functionaries of the brave new world will be drawn from industrial psychologists and public opinion pollsters among others, riotous youth in alliance with social outcasts having provided the tension from below to justify the imposition of a revolution from above. One might wonder what type of utopia Marcuse envisaged that drew its functionaries from ‘scientists, mathematicians, technicians, industrial psychologists and public opinion pollsters’, having also stated that in such a society dissident opinions would be suppressed in the name of ‘repressive tolerance’. It is a technocratic, elitist society of the type social scientists have been advocating since the days of the Rockefeller sponsorship of Charles Merriam.