Michael Hardt on "Revolution and Identity Politics"

A couple of weeks ago I was able to catch a talk Michael Hardt gave in Chicago, which I found to be really interesting. I haven't spent a lot of time on any of his work (or "toni" Negri's either), save for a glance at Empire, but the talk didn't invoke a ton of previous work. It offered more of a provisional thesis-in-the-works, about the interrelations of different modes of oppression, butressed by a quick glace over recent work in critical race theory, feminism, queer theory and Marxism.

His thesis was this: All revolutionary projects must be involved with identity. Against the view that revolutionary politics died because of 'identity politics', Hardt wanted to argue that revolution is impossible without identity politics. Of course, 'identity politics' is a term inextricably bound up with a multitude of bad connotations. It's something of a buzzword (or at least, was, in the 90s) and I think Hardt invoked it in spite of its usual appropriations. What exactly does he have in mind?

Well, basically something like an intersectionality thesis about different modes of oppression or hierarchy, e.g. gender, class, race, etc. He prefaced this aspiration of this talk with remarks about the problems this attempt has encountered in progressive theory in the past. It's a difficult task, also one succeptible to subsumptions, reductions, appropriations and indifference from theorists with differing priorities. But the fact that this theoretical/political undertaking is difficult is not therefore to prove that it cannot (or should not) be accomplished. It’s still necessary to understand that one is treading on thin ice with here, however. All too often, subsequent movements are subordinated to their points of derivation/origin (e.g. the Women’s movement had origins in the labor movement, but this does not license the view that ‘all sexism would disappear with the overthrow of capitalism’).

For Hardt, the common link that all properly revolutionary politics share is a transformation of identity, or stronger, an abolition of identity. The danger is to misread the trajectory here as one of a certain humanism (i.e. the view that underneath, we’re all ‘human’, we are all the same, and race/gender/sexuality merely obscure our primordial oneness, thus we must abolish all difference). Against this tendency, Hardt’s project is more in line with the Marx of Capital who wanted to explode the presumption that capitalism was “just the free exchange of commodities” in order to expose the violence of class hierarchy. Another example could be the Critical Legal Studies movement which exposed the racist nature of “colorblind” law. But where does this leave Hardt’s thesis about abolishing identity?

The first example he gave was the case of class. Marxism aimed not at a ‘worker’s State’ or improved conditions for the worker as such, but the worker’s self-abolition qua worker. (Hardt suggested here that we look at the work of Italian Marxist Mario Tronti as an example). In revolutionary situations, the working-class aims at its own abolition, which is to say, the abolition of the material conditions which creates and sustains capitalist social relations (classes). Thus the task is not for a more equitable society than that in which we live, not for a better-fed and housed working class, but for the social order to cease to be founded on a mode of production in which wage labor and class exploitation are essential. The idea is to struggle against work, to seek liberation from work, to aim at the abolition of the subordinate identity which is itself inextricably linked to a set of social/economic conditions.

Under capitalism, property is a central feature of social organization. In a republic essentially defined by property, identity becomes lumped into property. This is not only relevant in the example of class. 2^nd Wave feminism was extremely interested in women qua property, and many radical anti-racists have proposed critical examination of ‘whiteness as property’. People come to define and think of themselves in terms of property. In this way, the abolition of private property seems crucial to the task of revolutionary transformation. This is one example of a way in which the Communist impulse (not to be misread as Stalinism) of the 20th century is still a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient to any revolutionary politics today.

In revolutionary feminist theory, the task is the abolition of the subordinate identity, to take in hand the conditions that produce gender and change them, to eliminate the social system that creates gender. Hardt mentioned Wendy Brown on this point. Feminism, on this view, isn’t a matter of recognition. It is not a call for representation or inclusion, but rather, a revolutionary appeal to liberate women from gender (as it is understood under conditions of hierarchy and domination). Likewise in revolutionary queer theory, the task is not one of identity recognition, but to demand a destabilization of the conditions of heteronormativity, to abolish the set of assumptions which designates non-heterosexuals as “Other”, deviant, subordinate, etc.

In Black radicalism, likewise we see this tendency. The struggle is to abolish racialized thought, to abolish race as a subordinate identity. In the words of some radical black theorists, to ‘liberate the man of color from himself’. Huey Newton and Malcolm X, to take two examples, both began early on as Black Nationalists calling for recognition, affirmation of blackness under conditions of systemic racism, etc. But by the end of the 60s, in later interviews, we see a move away from identity and nationalism to a kind of internationalism. This is likewise seen, somewhat, in the political shifts and progression of the Black Panthers.

But, as Hardt points out, this task of abolishment of identity would not be easily undertaken nor would it be painless. On the contrary, there is a sense in which it would be both painful, monstrous and violent. You would have to “lose yourself in order to discover who you could become”. This losing of oneself would be a violent process, insofar as withdrawing from dominant institutions requires violence (this is constitutive of being dominant institutions). Revolution would require a kind of painful exodus. A concrete example of this that Hardt gave was to think of someone coming out to their parents. This is in a sense, an extremely painful task which requires a recognition of abolishment of who you thought you were and who your parents understood you to be. It’s not an easy task.

While I find much of this very interesting, it is extremely inchoate. It begs for a clearer account of identity, the relationship of structure to subject, and faces a host of potent objections. For instance, take Žižek’s position set out in the Parallax View: Class is revolutionary, but neither race nor gender fit this bill. Class aims at annihilating the Other (expropriation of the expropriator), of overcoming the role of worker, but race and class do not: they are only (for Žižek) calls for recognition. He’s not discounting them as necessary and progressive struggles for justice or saying they don’t matter; but rather, he’s saying that they aren’t revolutionary struggles. Is this right?

Hardt responded, first of all, by pointing out that his theory sees class as a species of identity politics. In this initial sense, at least, class is understood similarly to gender, sexuality, etc. Moreover, there are plenty of non-revolutionary versions of class identity politics, in fact, the vast majority of working-class politics fit this bill. So the actual lack of revolutionary movements in the case of gender, for example, cannot speak to an inherent lack of revolutionary potential within feminism as such. Furthermore, Hardt pointed out, we have a lot reasons to think otherwise that he pointed out in his talk. Nonetheless, something about Žižek’s criticism is still well taken: feminist (to take the example of gender) struggles don’t necessarily address race or class, and we find many examples that don’t. I don’t think Hardt aims here to defend reformist versions of feminism, perhaps with respect to those incarnations he and Žižek could agree. In contrast, Hardt wants to instead argue that there can be no revolutionary politics that is not already feminist. The crucial reply to Žižek is that class isn't (in actuality right now) necessarily revolutionary, in fact the opposite is almost always true. Non-revolutionary feminisms are no less indicative of a problem with feminism as such than are the myriad examples of non-revolutionary working-class movements a reflection on the revolutionary potential of class.

But is there something to the objection that his project reeks of humanist ‘colorblind’ baggage which seeks to abolish all difference? Hardt responded that there can be an abolition of gender with a proliferation of differences… when he talks about abolishing gender he is talking about abolishing hierarchy, not the social formation of identities that aren’t all the same. It’s not entirely clear how this would work. Parsing out the hierarchical and oppressive aspects from the ‘keepers’ is not so easy. Moreover, are we to define freedom and liberation in wholly negative terms, that is, in terms of negating what is?

Another question I had was the relation of identity to social structures (material conditions). This is lurking behind everything the talk seeks to accomplish. Hardt rejects dialectical understandings of the structure/subject relation, and argues for the implementation of concepts like “multitude” and “singularity”, but I don’t understand these attempts well enough to know how they gesture at solutions to this problem. Moreover, as someone inclined towards dialectical thought, I’m not convinced that the dialectic (especially as conceived in Adorno, for example) is untenable here.

Food for thought.