A Blindness Among the Left
The Achilles heel in progressive left politics, especially since the 1980s, has been both a general blindness to the connections and interrelations of the economic, the political, and the cultural and a failure to grasp the shifting dimensions of the alliance politics underlying neoliberal success. As neoliberals have formed and reformed their constituencies and produced issues and languages that connect their economic goals with politics and culture in politically effective ways, progressives and leftists have tended more and more to fall into opposing camps that caricature each other while failing to clearly perceive the chameleon that eludes them.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the proliferation and expansion of progressive left critiques and social movements constituted a fertile ground for connections as well as for conflict and confusion. Identifying the most significant sites of inequality and injustice and discovering the best means for attacking them was always a contentious project. But the range of social movements – antiracist and anti-imperialist, feminist, lesbian and gay, radical labor, and environmentalist – did not generally or easily fall into camps with economics emphasized on one side and culture on the other. Gay liberation newspapers included anti-imperialist manifestos and analyses of the racist legal and prison system. Black feminists set out to track the interrelations of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. There were bitter fights among contingents of activists who prioritized one or another “vector of oppression” and dismissed others. The economics/culture split, however, did not appear as a major and sustained divide in U.S. progressive left politics until the 1980s.
The progressive left social movements of the 1960s and 1970s might be conceptualized as overlapping, interrelated (if conflicted) cultures of downward redistribution. The differing sectors were joined by languages and concepts, by practices and policies, as well as by movement institutions that combined cultural and material resources. Such cultures were mixed, neither pure nor consistently critical of all forms of inequality and injustice or unfreedom. But in their hybrid, mongrel mixtures the overall emphasis that connected the progressive left social movements was the pressure to level hierarchies and redistribute down – redistribute money, political power, cultural capital, pleasure, and freedom. They were met, from the early 1970s forward, with a pro-business counter movement intent on building a culture of upward (re)distribution. Business and financial interests were no more unified or consistent than the social movements, but their activities forged languages and concepts, practices and policies, and founded new institutions to promote mechanisms that either shored up or established inequalities of power, rank, wealth, or cultural status.
During the 1980s, as standards of living dropped in the United States and global inequalities expanded, social movements responded to multiple constraints and pressures, in part by fragmenting and in part by accommodating the narrowing horizons of fundraising imperatives, legal constraints, and the vice grip of electoral politics. Identity politics, in the contemporary sense of the rights-claiming focus of balkanized groups organized to pressure the legal and electoral systems for inclusion and redress, appeared out of the field of disintegrating social movements.1 Single-group or single-issue organizations dedicated to lobbying, litigation, legislation, or public and media education had existed earlier as only one part of larger, shaping social movements. As the practical wings of broad-based mobilizations, ranging from reformist to radical on a motley collection of connected issues, such organizations usually remained intimately connected to movement cultures. But during the 1980s, such organizations – known collectively as the “civil rights lobby” – began to appear as the parts that replaced the wholes. The reproductive freedom movement receded, but the National Abortion Rights Action League remained; the civil rights and black power movements disintegrated, but the NAACP persisted. Focused narrowly on U.S. domestic politics and even more narrowly on courtroom litigation, legislative battles, or electoral campaigns, large portions of the organized efforts of social movements succumbed to liberalism’s paltry promise: engage the language and institutional games of established liberal contests and achieve equality.
Many if not most of those engaged in the civil rights lobbies or with the protest and pressure politics aimed at the media and marketplace understood the limits and false promises of the “equality” on offer through liberal reform: equality disarticulated from material life and class politics, to be won by definable “minority” groups, one at a time. They engaged a politics of the possible, often with the hope of using liberalism’s own languages and rules to force change beyond the boundaries of liberal equality. Like the motley, radical union movements of earlier decades that collapsed largely into the co-opting embrace of New Deal corporatism in the post-World War II era, the social movements disintegrated, leaving their liberal reformist wings as their most visible traces. Meanwhile, the more radical and transformative segments of social movements nonetheless survived in a range of new as well as continuing organizations and campaigns and in a growing library of progressive left intellectual and scholarly projects and publications. Occasionally, it all came together as it had in earlier times: the movement born to fight AIDS and HIV infection linked identity and civil rights politics with an encompassing vision of material and cultural equality and drew on the resources of activists, theorists, artists, and scientists to construct an imaginative range of political interventions during the 1980s.2 Overall, the remnants of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ social movements, together with the identity-based organizations and civil rights establishment of the 1980s, remained cultures of downward distribution – even if in a less generally radical sense during the 1980s.
But during the 1990s, something new happened. Neoliberals in the ranks of U.S. conservative party politics began slowly and unevenly to shed the “culture wars” alliances with religious moralists, white supremacists, ultranationalists, and other antiliberal forces that had helped guarantee their political successes during the 1980s (phase 4, above). Neoliberal New Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, included civil rights/equality politics within a framework that minimized any downwardly redistributing impulses and effects (phase 5). And some organizations within the “civil rights lobby” narrowed their focus and moved dramatically to the right, accommodating rather than opposing the global inequalities generated by neoliberalism.
Meanwhile, activists and intellectuals on the progressive left, operating outside the terms of two-party neoliberalism, fell more deeply into unproductive battles over economic versus cultural politics, identity-based versus left universalist rhetoric, theoretical critiques versus practical organizing campaigns. Most recently, a newly insurgent antiglobalization movement, emerging into active visibility and effectiveness at the beginning of the twenty-first century, offers a space where such divisions might be remade into productive connections, though this remains a possibility and not an achievement.
In general, too few on the left have noticed that as neoliberal policies continued to shrink the spaces for public life, democratic debate, and cultural expression during the 1990s, they were doing this through their own versions of identity politics and cultural policies, inextricably connected to economic goals for upward redistribution of resources.
As long as the progressive left represents and reproduces itself as divided into economic versus cultural, universal versus identity-based, distribution versus recognition-oriented, local or national versus global branches, it will defeat itself. On one side, the identity politics camps are increasingly divorced from any critique of global capitalism. Some organizations and groups creep into the neoliberal fold, shedding downwardly redistributing goals for a stripped-down equality, paradoxically imagined as compatible with persistent overall inequality. They thus sacrifice the broad goals that might connect a new social movement strong and ambitious enough to take on inequalities that single-issue politics only ever ameliorate, but never reverse. On the other side, critiques of global capitalism and neoliberalism, and left populist or universalist politics within the United States, attack and dismiss cultural and identity politics at their peril. Such attacks strip them of prime sources of political creativity and new analyses and leave them uncomprehending before the cultural and identity politics of the opposition. In addition, they drive constituencies seeking equality away, toward the false promises of superficial neoliberal “multiculturalism.” In other words, they help to create what they fearfully or critically imagine.
- Identity politics in the broadest sense arises from the exclusions of the U.S. nation-state beginning in the early nineteenth century. But identity politics in the narrowest sense defined here first appeared in the 1980s. [↩]
- See any of a long list of publications by Cindy Patton, including Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990); Last Served? Gendering the HIV Pandemic (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1994); and Globalizing AIDS (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). [↩]
