How to hate the working classes

Walter Benn Michaels reviews Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson in the London Review of Books, and he feels the authors have started in the wrong place. For the last 40 years there has been a movement from class-based politics (Marxism) to identity politics (feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, etc). He considers how the division between rich and poor is being ignored by many people, and when it is given attention it is considered as another form of identity politics. Nice liberals condemn the mocking of the poor (chavs, Jade Goody, etc), but this application of identity politics is focussing on the wrong thing: opposing how the working classes are regarded and ignoring their poverty. American universities are more elitist than ever, more home to the wealthy. As blacks, women, and gays become more equal with heterosexual white males, we're facing a world where injustices are "produced not by discrimination but by exploitation".

Michaels claims identity politics is antithetical to class-based politics - the former will be satisfied when "[i]f about 1.5 per cent of your population is of Pakistani descent, then ... 1.5 per cent of every income quintile is Pakistani", the latter wants the entire working class, black and white, to be better off. Identity politics doesn't merely deflect attention from attacking economic inequality, it create phoney solidarity e.g. between rich blacks and poor blacks, or rich women and poor women, making class conflict less likely. For a long time Marxists have accused the west of using nationality in a similar manner, so that national interest is placed ahead of class interest, which means the needs of the poor are not addressed.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we've made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we've made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven't isn't. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won't be cured by – they aren't even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing.