Section started in August 2019. It is specifically dedicated to critical approaches the authoritarian identitarianism that is related to Group Identity Theory (now also called Critical Social Justice), not on the older emancipatory movements such as the women's movement, the gay rights movements, civil rights for minority populations, etc ..., which operated under a egalitarian ethos within the bounds of universalism. This section is exclusively concerned with movements that reject universalist egalitarianism and pose particular dangers to peer to peer and commons approaches.

Context

In order to learn a critical and self-reflexive approach in this subject, you may look to critique and contextualization from various sources:

• on the radical left, current critics have been the people working around Jacobin magazine; with people like webcaster Michael Brooks (identified as 'integral left'), and from the black African-American left, with researchers on class and race such as Adolphe and Toure Reed. Also radical philosophers and journalistic commentators such as Slavoj Zizek and Matt Taibi belong to this broad camp, which was initiated with the Vampire Castle essay of Marc Fisher, listed below. (see also Dyab Abou Jahah). There is also strong critique emanating from the radical feminist camp.

• on the center left (in the U.S. often called the 'liberal left'), there are several groups active: 1) the group of Grievance scholars, i.e. Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian which focuses on the genealogy of the current identitiarian ideology (New Discourses; Aero magazine); 2) the group around Brett Weinstein, Heather Heying, and Eric Weinstein (Dark Horse Podcast, the Portal); 3) the group around Rebel Wisdom documentary network and journalist David Fuller.

• some pluralistic alliances cover broader political ground. This would be the case for the Intellectual Dark Web nebulae, for magazines like Quillete, and for a loose alliance of African-American scholars such as Coleman Hughes, James McWhorter, etc .. There is a group of critics that originated from the left but moved to the conservative camp as a result of their free speech commitments, for example Michael Rectenwald.

Quotes

Short Quotations

"If you can't control your own emotions, you have to control the behavior of others"

- Robert Skinner cited by John Cleese

Long Quotations

Quote on the darker sides of group identity theory and practice

Selected from Diane Musho Hamilton:

"As we move towards greater inclusivity we’re also seeing some unintended consequences, such as:

• Oppressive rules around speech and “political correctness”. There can seem to be a hypersensitivity to language and behavior that can create a culture of fear.

• Endless processes of blame and accusation that don’t seem to ever resolve.

• A victim-oppressor framework that doesn’t allow any other narratives to come forth.

• The inversion of power hierarchies instead of their transformation (with a new group of oppressors at the top instead of no oppressors there).

• A monoculture that only values a narrow range of attitudes, politics, personality types, and communication styles.

• The demonization of those with differing views."

(https://tendirections.com/inclusion-2-0/?)

Denying the Individual, denying the universal

"Oppressed group identities ... are constantly in conflict the way classes were always in conflict. And in this worldview, individuals only exist at all as a place where these group identities intersect. You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide. You can hear this echoed in the famous words of Ayanna Pressley: “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” An assertion of individuality is, in fact, an attack upon the group and an enabling of oppression.

Just as this theory denies the individual, it also denies the universal. There are no universal truths, no objective reality, just narratives that are expressed in discourses and language that reflect one group’s power over another. There is no distinction between objective truth and subjective experience, because the former is an illusion created by the latter. So instead of an argument, you merely have an identity showdown, in which the more oppressed always wins, because that subverts the hierarchy. These discourses of power, moreover, never end; there is no progress as such, no incremental inclusion of more and more identities into a pluralist, liberal unified project; there is the permanent reality of the oppressors and the oppressed. And all that we can do is constantly expose and eternally resist these power-structures on behalf of the oppressed."

- Andrew Sullivan [1]

See also: Andrew Sullivan on Truth and Power in Group Identity Theory

Mark Fisher: There are no identities, our struggle is with capital

"“So what can we do now? First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests and identifications...The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts. But that, after all, is not the point. The aim is not to popularise a leftist position, or to win people over to it, but to remain in a position of elite superiority, but now with class superiority redoubled by moral superiority too. ‘How dare you talk – it’s we who speak for those who suffer!’ ...

The rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the re-assertion of class. A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group. Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital. ...

"We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.""

- Mark Fisher [2]

Helen Pluckrose on Ideological Possession

"Throughout history, groups of humans have become filled with a self-righteous, burning fervor to uphold a moral order and rid society of corrupting influences. In so becoming, they have often also become possessed of a kind of collective ideologically-inspired madness and thereby inflicted great cruelty on their fellow men and women. This is a part of humanity that must be acknowledged and mitigated. Modern, secular, liberal democracy, which is rooted in reason, evidence, freedom of speech and tolerance, has done rather well at channelling these impulses into more productive courses."

- Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Mike Nayna [3]

Dyab Abou Jahah on choosing for solidarity

“It is time to "shut up and listen" you would hear them say. At other times they will ask you to "use your privilege" and "speak up".

If you say something they don't approve of, they will tell you to "educate yourself", or even propose to educate you. "Stop being toxic", "stop being fragile", stop these crocodile tears of "innocence". Sounds familiar?

If you are white and you have another approach to the fight against racism than what a "person of colour" is saying, you will very likely hear this. If you are a man and you try to make a point on gender equality you are very likely to hear it too. If you are heterosexual and you have a point to make in the fight against homophobia that does not please a gay activist, some version of this narrative may come your way. The problem we are facing today is that the debate on equality is transformed into a debate on identity. An identity that is not seen anymore as an expression of cultural realities, linguistic diversity or religious doctrine.

Identity from a minority perspective is nowadays focalised around two central characteristics: colour and gender.

Do not get me wrong, I am aware of the importance of colour and gender in the debate on equality. And I am not going to reproduce the classical leftist analysis claiming that inequality results from class differences and nothing else. That analysis is reductionist. It is also often used to keep oppression forms based upon racism and sexism in place.

Nevertheless, we are facing a big problem with the rising minority identity politics paradigm, and the intellectual intimidation tactics its adherents are using in the debate. This is risking to jeopardise the struggle for equality altogether.’

- Dyab Abou Jajah [4]

Wokeism as the corporate religion of late stage capitalism ?

"The reason Wokeism is so easy to adopt into a corporation is that it is also a product of late-stage capitalism; a last gasp of a system running out of steam. Its doctrine can now be found in most major companies. As Matt Taibbi has pointed out, the emphasis Robin DiAngelo and others place on ‘lifelong vigilance’ of power and privilege creates a situation where Wokeism can perpetually insert itself into the workplace– there can never be enough sensitivity trainers to cleanse the sin away. Just as our economies are based on the erroneous idea of infinite growth, Wokeism preaches infinite sin; the unholy union between the two is terrifying."

- Alexander Beiner [5]

"The principles of secularism hold that, no matter how strongly you believe your belief system to be true or how essential you think it is that all of society holds it to be true and lives according to its moral dictates, you do not have the right to impose it on anyone else. We currently live in societies that do a pretty good job of applying this rule to religion, but which have not yet recognised Critical Social Justice as the same kind of thing. Instead, Critical Social Justice is largely misunderstood as a continuation of the liberal civil rights movements, which worked to reform laws and to open up all opportunities to everyone, regardless of their identities, and whose principles can still, quite reasonably, be expected to be upheld by employers. This is a misunderstanding of Critical Social Justice. As shown above, Critical Social Justice is a very specific belief system, which revolves around several core truth claims, which have not been shown to be true."

- Helen Pluckrose [6]

The Class and Political Psychology Dynamics behind Political Correctness

Wesley Yang:

"Political correctness .. has become: a mode of exercising power within an intramural contest between rival elites. In this contest, the fetishistic invocation of the “marginalized” is a tool the powerful use to increase the power of a given group, often to the detriment of the very people they purport to represent. The study shows that virtually no one who does not directly benefit from the exercise of this power (in the form of sinecures, professional advancement, or the destruction of rivals within liberal institutions) supports it.

Political correctness can thus be defined as the ideology of a distinct class of petty officeholders and office seekers within the therapeutic state. Their dogmas inexorably point in the direction of, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it back in 1991, “a regime so heavily policed” as to be “inconsistent with democracy.”

PC also refers to the specific means that this faction has adopted of attempting to police dissent out of existence in pursuit of what it calls justice. Their ideology draws on the sometimes brilliant and penetrating, and often exasperating and pretentious, work of critics of Western concepts of truth, reason, and law who can broadly be classified as “postmodernists.” Their ideology metastasizes a complex and rebarbative set of critiques of power into an active parapolitical program seeking to transform the world along, as Gates put it, “sweepingly utopian” lines. Gates was writing before the microaggression reporting systems, the compulsory implicit bias training, and the social media agon had even been dreamed up. But he foresaw all of it.

What matters most about this faction is not that they are annoying. It is that institutional power increasingly defers to them. That deference makes them potent, despite their small numbers and unpopular opinions, and the lack of grounding for those opinions in American custom and law.

The politically correct exploit two aspects of group psychology to dominate what is in fact a far more numerous group. They exploit the power that intolerant minorities, whose energies are focused on a single issue, have over majorities whose preferences and attachments are more diffuse. They benefit from what social psychologists have termed “the false enforcement of unpopular norms,” a phrase that describes the tendency, as observed in both experimental settings and in the wider world, of widespread conformance to unpopular norms out of social pressure, and the accompanying desire to signal the genuineness of one’s conviction by out-competing all others in zealous enforcement of norms in which they do not themselves believe.

Since political correctness is above all about an intra-elite battle among elites—a form of nonelectoral political struggle for hegemony within ruling institutions—it is there that the battle will be contested." (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/political-correctness-minority)

Is Wokeism a sign of "green hegemony", or not ?

This is using the ideas of Clare Graves, and the colour coding of Spiral Dynamics:

"Cowan & Todorovic advise caution in relation to people claiming to be certain levels, for example Turquoise (H-U), or D-Q (blue) or E-R (orange) which may be masquerading as F-S (green):

…we see the relationship that has confounded so many bright people – green-sounding ideas slid back into an absolute, authoritarian, dichotomous way of thinking about them, maybe even into an aggressive and rigidly dogmatic form. That’s not FS in operation, but it can certainly look Green at the surface. Sometimes, people may have developed a broader way of conceptualising (such as R/orange), but be in a situation where they are coping with life of prior levels (such as C/red)."

- [7]

Key Resources

• New Discourses: project for political dialogue by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian

• Social Justice Reformation: very informative resource

Key Articles

• How race and class are related. By Stan Goff. (recommended)

• A very good introduction of the issues raised, by Micha Narberhaus: Critiquing the Dogmatic Versions of Group Identity Theory

• A must-read and one of the first progressive call to arms: Mark Fisher's Vampires’ Castle

• Social Justice Ideology Does Not Foster Egalitarianism. By Michael Rectenwald [8]

• Reflections on Intersectionality

• An Open Letter of the Non-Identitarian Left to the Misunderstanding Right

• The Myth of Class Reductionism. By Adolph Reed: "Centrist Democrats and left-identitarians are bound in shared embrace of a particularist, elite-driven politics .. This .. political vision, - at the expense of long-term, movement-driven, majoritarian strategies at all levels of government — threatens to preempt hopes of restoring the public-good model of governance that was at the heart of postwar prosperity and foundational to the civil rights movement." ; see also: The Argument against Race Reductionism ; By Adolph Reed; New Labor Forum 29(2):36-43 ; May 2020

Key Books

• Springtime for Snowflakes: "Social Justice" and Its Postmodern Parentage. By Michael Rectenwald.,New English Review Press, 2018 [9]; see our entry: The Social Justice Movement and Its Postmodern Parentage

• Toward Freedom. The Case Against Race Reductionism. by Touré F. Reed. Verso, : " the road to a more just society for African Americans and everyone else, the fate of poor and working-class African Americans is inextricably linked to that of other poor and working-class Americans."

Key People

Key progressive critics of identity politics:

1. Paul Gilroy
2. A.Sivanandan
3. Anthony Appiah
4. Edward Said
5. Kenan Malik

Key Research

• "A review of nearly 1,000 studies of anti-bias tools found little evidence that they have any impact. In fact, recent studies suggest anti-bias training's primary effect may be to encourage discrimination: Firms with diversity training end up with fewer minorities in management, and field research finds that training both reinforces stereotypes and increases animosity against minority groups." [10]

Key Videos

• Ayishat Akanbi on Replacing the Moral Superiority of Political Correctness with Compassion and Understanding

• Benjamin A. Boyce on What Happened at Evergreen State College

• Mike Nayna on the Grievance Studies Story

• Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay's Critical Introduction to Group Identity Theory

• Touré Reed on the Pitfalls of Liberal Antiracism and Woke Neoliberalism

See also:

• Brett Weinstein's talk, How the Magic Trick is Done , https://youtu.be/bz0oxIZ3xIg

Documentaries

• Mike Nayna’s 3 Part Evergreen Documentary: https://youtu.be/FH2WeWgcSMk

• Benjamin A Boyce‘s 24 part complete Evergreen (he has made 11 parts so far, out of 24), https://youtu.be/p5Wny9TstEM [http://bit.ly/31mddXS playlist