I am not keen on doing “book reviews.” I like to relate various things I have read to each other. I have not quite finished with “Elite Capture” but it has opened up a topic for me which is worth a blog post.
Its author is Olufemi O. Taiwo, another of the Nigerian diaspora who are managing to succeed rather well over here in North America. He was born in The States to Nigerian parents and has become a professor of philosophy at an American University. The statistics on the success rate of African immigrants suggests that the generally low economic position of black people in North America is about something other than crude racism.
Mister Taiwo has very useful things to say about what is called ‘identity politics’ but is more accurately described as deferential politics. He contrasts it with constructive politics. He asserts that the prevalence of identity politics is a main reason for left politics in general failing to get anywhere for over forty years.
He cites enough examples of popular movements which have succeeded by reaching across class, race, and other divides, and by having clear goals. He notes the near universal lack of success of identity politics. He does not believe this failure is necessarily due to the assumptions of the “‘Combahee River Collective” papers, considered to be the foundation for identity politics.
He believes that focussing on group identity has some uses. He believes it’s failure is due to the capture of identity politics by elites. His insight is that even subordinated groups have elites within them.
He cites sociologists who have studied this phenomenon. The political development of black Americans after the end of slavery has been retarded by the development of a ‘black bourgeois’ which wanted to benefit from the suppression of their own people. Taiwo is aware of something similar happening in black Africa after independence.
As for the way in which these secondary elites achieve dominance over, and disempowerment of, these identity groups, Taiwo cites Jo Freeman’s famous essay on “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”. That is, a refusal to accept any kind of formal structure in a group, allowing a clique to control the majority by talking them down. I have many times seen in action the tactics Freeman describes.
Taiwo also uses the analogy of a big house of many rooms. This seems like a veiled reference to a great prison. Rather than working together to run the house for the benefit of all, residents retreat into their own ever smaller spaces, talking only to each other and demanding that any outsider “defer” to them.
I find a connection between this and a blog article I recently read, by Nora Loreto. Nora seemed to be feeling gloomy that week. She has come to the realization that ‘activist’ wannabe types like her can only engage with community, not build it.
I believe many left types are coming to this conclusion these days. They have for so long been wrapped up in this idea of “building community” to achieve whatever it is they think they are trying to achieve. It is like they think there is a community they can create and build just like they are curating an internet discussion group.
They are starting to realize that they cannot build community, only interact with it. They despair that neoliberalism is steadily destroying community.
Loreto has concluded that there is latent community and activist community. The active community is where she interacts with all her activist friends, doing activist things. Then there is the latent community; the built structure and institutions and neighbourhoods in which we live.
Loreto finds that we cannot do anything to build the latent community. The active community is dependant on the latent community. Thus nothing really happens in the active community either, as she and her circle of friends burn themselves out learning.
Loreto believes that “technofascism is closing the walls in on us”. We are losing all “contact points” with reality. We are going to have to smash technofascism and no other reform will save us.
Yet she also admits she cannot attack what is all pervasive, what she cannot see. Everyone seems to be stuck in their own bubble community. This leads me right back to the ‘rooms’ for identity groups, which Taiwo talks about.
I have had my own experiences with activist and identity groups. I have watched over and over as new groups form around some grievance or issue. They want to be ‘active’ about it but they do not know how. I mean they simply have no ability.
There always seems to be some bastard at the centre of it who forms these people into an ever more isolated bubble group. People like me who see where this is leading are first to be pushed out. The group becomes another ‘activist’ community at best. At worst it becomes another ‘Combahee’ or tyranny of structurelessness.
This is how the social police work, through most of the Atlantic world. There is nothing inevitable about things happening this way over and over. There is a large cadre of agents trained to take direction of these groups and wrap them up in their echo-bubbles.
Yet it does seem to be also something innate in western culture. It does not seem to happen the same way in other cultures. I have talked with people from non western countries about this silencing and identity politics.
These are people with activist experience in their own countries. They are angry to hear what I relate. They tell me it does not happen where they come from; people who try to take over groups in this way get beaten up and thrown out.
In many places on earth, oppressed people are capable of reaching out to other oppressed groups and finding common ground. In that case outright police violence begins to be deployed against them. Taiwo recites instances in which such people were able to organize well enough to at least partially overcome the violence.
Taiwo is very big on “common ground”. Oppressed people need to break out of the small rooms in the big house which is built for them. They need to reach out, not antagonize each other by demanding “deference”.
However, he is more charitable toward identity politics than I am. He believes there is some use for it. Yet in all cases of it which I have seen, it has been a disgusting spectacle.
The key to it is to empower the most self obsessed, narcissistic trolls around. These are then taught to discipline and manage identity bubbles. This is the training ground for the disruptors who are sent out to deal with groups which have not yet been brought under effective control.
To repeat, this is the method of a social policing network. The response to it is first, as my friends from the “third world” advise, kick the identitarians out the door the minute they show up. Second, as Taiwo advises, reach out to other groups and act constructively, not deferentially.
In the modern western context, there is oppression because there is capitalism. Ending oppression means ending capitalism. Ending capitalism means taking control of the institutions of latent community and dismantling capitalism.
This means getting out of the little rooms the oppression system has us in, finding the common ground, and taking over the whole house. This means working together outside separate identities. This means repurposing the house, not tearing it to the ground as some lunatics think is required.
Of course, many people feel comfortable within their identity bubbles and inactively active communities. They can be left with that as long as they do not interfere with the need of building a mass movement. Those who can will move away from identity politics and community building.
The problem is, they will need mass movements to move into. So far we do not have much of this in the west. The forces of oppression have been pretty good at preventing their coalescence.
But it is doable and is what must be done. Taiwo places emphasis on examples of successful movements.
I should conclude with one observation about identitarianism. Contrary to the dogma, severely oppressed people are usually not the best people to articulate their interests. Usually they become alienated from themselves and their situations.
Usually the only cure for this is to get out of the hopeless situation. The best of them will recognize they must get out of the situation. They begin to gain self understanding, and an ability to understand the reality which oppressed them, once they are removed from it.
These will be the first to tell those setting themselves up as the representatives of the disenfranchised identity groups, demanding to be deferred to, exactly where to go.