Squaring the circle, universalizing the particular

R. L. Stephens’s call for a politics that refuses to distinguish between identitarian and universal interests might be the worst possible position on identity politics

Over the past week, an article by Philadelphia DSA co-chair Melissa Naschek condemning identity politics and calling for a class-based, universalist socialist movement has provoked a flurry of responses, counter-responses and hot takes. The latest, an editorial by DSA NPC member R. L. Stephens, which is itself a response to an article by Jeremy Gong and Eric Blanc, may be the worst of them all.

Gong and Blanc, against Naschek’s claim that “We can’t ‘do both’ [identity and class politics]”, argue that we can, in fact, do both. Stephens takes this a step further, arguing that the distinction between “identity politics” and “class politics” is an artificial, reductionist fallacy. By drawing this false dichotomy, he claims, we fail to recognize the unity of the political and economic aspects of the struggle for socialism, as identified by Vladimir Lenin. Rather, Stephens wishes to uncover a hidden universalism underlying both the political demands of movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the economic demands of socialists calling for social-democratic programs like Medicare for All (M4A). To wit:

Yet, the economic components of class struggle are no more “universal” than the political elements. The political right for every person living in our society to not to be gunned down by the police is no less universal than the economic right to government-funded health insurance.

Stephens is of course, at first glance, correct. There is no inherent reason to privilege a demand for healthcare over a demand for an end to police violence. But what makes this statement problematic, even shocking, is how completely out of sync it is with the respective political movements advancing these causes. There is a movement for universal access to healthcare, (Medicare for All), but there is no movement for universal protection from police violence. There is a movement for black lives. The former is explicitly universal, while the latter is explicitly particular. It’s right there in the name!

“Hold up a minute”, you say. “How can you say that Black Lives Matter’s demands would only benefit black Americans when 75% of people killed by the police are not black?”. My response is: you’re absolutely right. Nevertheless, we still have no universal movement for the end of police violence and the abolition of mass incarceration, we have a movement for black lives. Black identity is central to this struggle, full stop. Those engaged in the Black Lives Matter movement would certainly acknowledge that universal benefits would flow from their victory, but they would also furiously resist any attempt to de-center black particularity in the struggle against state violence. Indeed, the seemingly universal response to BLM, “All Lives Matter”, is in fact a right-wing slogan deployed to defend and justify the violence that BLM rightly seeks to oppose. While we might imagine a universal, solidarity-based movement, what we see in real-world left politics is a movement in which racial identity is paramount, in which so-called allies are suspect and universality is white lie.

It is critical to emphasize that this particularizing tendency is as inherent in economic matters as it is in the political. The consequence of the identity-political framing is that nominally universal struggles are emptied of their universality. In its failure to formulate itself as an expression of a particularity, “Medicare for All” becomes a “white male issue”, along with all other economic demands (and quite a few political demands) that fail to articulate themselves in the voice of a marginalized identity. When we get to the bottom, what we find is not a hidden universality, but an absolute particularity in which solidarity is all but impossible, in which economic demands are viewed with inherent suspicion and de facto ceded to the right. What Stephens fails to recognize is that identity politics is a critique of the left, of its failures to adequately express particularities that capitalism has so cunningly mobilized following the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. In defending these movements he sells them short. Stephens’s almost pre-critical position is actually far worse than that of BLM or any other particularist movement, attempting to paper over all the contradictions and fissures on the left in the name of a phony universality that exists entirely in his own head.

I am certainly sympathetic with the idea that class is an insufficient vehicle for universality, and that we should pursue political as well as economic demands. It is perhaps the greatest failure of the post-1968 left that it has, so far, failed to articulate a new universal to replace the “class reductionism” that characterized the Old Left, and we should be skeptical that such a new universal can be found simply through a “return to class” in the form of social democracy. But we also have to be honest about parochial struggles that are, at base, about expressing one’s personal identity in its difference from dominant identities, not about universality or even solidarity. Are we going to beat post-modern capitalism at its own game, mobilizing multitudes in their rhizomic particularity, or are we going to present an alternative, universal, totalizing vision of a world beyond capitalism? In the face of this dilemma, R. L. Stephens buries his head in the sand.