El identitarismo ha pasado a primer plano como el campo de batalla dominante de la política de izquierda contemporánea. [...] En este artículo, primero examinaré brevemente la lógica y las implicaciones del advenimiento del neoliberalismo. Argumentaré que las presiones de individualización producidas por el neoliberalismo han creado un clima político en el que la demanda de emancipación suena como una demanda para desestigmatizar y visibilizar las identidades oprimidas.
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Neoliberalism’s break with liberalism is in the move from the logic of market-exchange to that of market-competition. The classical conception of market, as based on the natural impulse to exchange, becomes the conception of economic competition, for which the market must be constructed to allow.
Neoliberalism seeks to close the gap ‘between moral and political principles on the one hand and the economic order on the other’.[13] It seeks to place a moral value upon economic relations; competition is not just an economic necessity but a moral imperative. Social bonds and collective securities are seen as impediments to competition, and social protection is destructive of the values which capitalism now needs in order to function. As such, neoliberalism calls into question ‘any and all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to the logic of the pure market’.
The remaking of the subject as one of enterprise, the universal entrepreneur, seeks to collapse the distinction between capitalist and worker; between businessman and citizen.
Comprehending neoliberalism as a rationality that structures subject-formation is imperative to understanding the current way that identity is mobilised, and the depoliticising effects of the inadvertent correlation between the logic of contemporary identity-politics and neoliberal techniques of governmentality. Neoliberalism constitutes an assault on collective solidarity, transforming the economic, political and cultural bases on which people unite. In doing so, it personalises the causes of suffering into individual trauma, which can in turn be self-managed.
I argue that neoliberalism, in its attempts to destroy the basis for collectivity, provides the basis on which movements privilege individuality. Reflected in the theory and practice of contemporary identity-politics is a depoliticisation of struggle which frames oppression as subjective and individual.
Neoliberalism has worked to destroy the material basis for collective existence and has relentlessly individualised suffering. By defining identity through psychic suffering, this lack can be marketised through discourses of self-help, resilience and recovery which increasingly commodify the self. It is my contention that politicising identity by associating trauma with identity is an attempt to found a new basis for collectivity. This can be seen in the example of ‘classism’ and the concept of privilege, which indicate a framework in which systemic analysis is reduced to personal affects. These discourses often function through demanding inward reflection upon one’s own positionality within systems of oppression, focusing on individual lived experience. Because the effects of domination are personalised in affective terms, the reification of trauma and victimhood means that resistance to fighting symptoms is prioritised over systemic analysis.
This is exemplified by the calls to end ‘classism’ as discrimination against working-class people, a misguided attempt at understanding how relations of domination function through class.
In this analysis, poor and working-class people suffer because of the attitudes of middle and ruling-class people towards them, rather than because they are exploited by capitalist modes of production.
I do not dispute that the suffering which marks the lives of oppressed subjects must play a role in resistance to oppression. However, the impulse towards culturalism evidenced in contemporary identity-politics leads to resistance being conceived of as an inward turn towards the symptoms of oppression and away from the systemic causes.
This reduces solidarity with the oppressed to a politics of guilt, where political agency is replaced with moralism and self-denunciation.
Its contemporary popularity is in line with the neoliberal individualism which renders it compatible with systemic injustice; as a programme for action, privilege theory foregrounds change upon the self, rather than upon the world, as resistance is reduced to self-reflection.
When resistance is held to be located primarily in individual actions and beliefs, the political becomes wholly a question of ethics, leading to a depoliticised politics which seeks justice through interpersonal relations. Racist and patriarchal systems become reduced to racist prejudice and sexist attitudes.
Intersectionality and privilege discourse tends towards an epistemology of provenance, an ‘overly subjectivist theory of knowledge’ which assumes that knowledge is group-specific and derived from experience.
The ‘we’ that engages in collective action is not a pre-existing object but is created in the course of acting. To challenge the foreclosure of collective identity is to reopen the relationship between the particular and the universal, the individual and the collective, in a way that neoliberalism has purportedly excluded. The invisible universal of an unembodied agent and the visible particular that demands recognition are the multiplicity of the potential human.
To move from a politics of ‘I am’ to a politics of ‘we want’ requires considering anew what it means to be a ‘we’, through the particularities of the multiple possible articulations of the ‘I’s: ‘It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.’