Let Them Eat Diversity!

See this magnificent interview of Walter Benn Michaels in the socialist magazine Jacobin:

Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. “Let Them Eat Diversity. On the Politics of Identity,” Jacobin Issue 1
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/

Granted there is a bit of exaggeration here and there, and some vulgar Marxism, but this article is brilliant stuff.

The fundamental arguments of Walter Benn Michaels in this interview, written in 2011, are as follows:

(1) there is, in reality, a right-wing and left-wing neoliberalism.

(2) the left-wing neoliberals actually fail to understand that their beliefs reinforce and support neoliberalism, and that they are unwitting tools of neoliberalism:

“For me the distinction is that ‘left neoliberals’ are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things. ....

... today’s orthodoxy is the idea that social justice consists above all in defense of property and the attack of discrimination. This is at the heart of neoliberalism and right-wing neoliberals understand this and left-wing neoliberals don’t.”
Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. “Let Them Eat Diversity. On the Politics of Identity,” Jacobin Issue 1
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/

(3) Michaels points out that early American neoliberal Gary S. Becker in his book The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago & London, 1973) argued that discrimination in capitalism on the basis of race, class or gender is inefficient and reduces incomes.

The tendency of capitalist production, in other words, is to break down such barriers in the name of economic rationality.

This is exactly the argument that Noam Chomsky has made:

“See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist—it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist—just because it’s anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic—there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced—that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.”
from Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power (2002)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Understanding_Power

(4) right-wing neoliberalism has actually therefore enthusiastically and logically adopted “social justice” as a strategy in the “defense of property” and capitalist enterprise.

(5) though Michaels mentions the Marxist falling rate of profit doctrine in his explanation of the development of capitalism, I have no doubt we can ditch this as Marxist dogma (see here and here).

More important is Michaels’ analysis of the connection between mass immigration and globalised neoliberalism:

“An easy way to look at this would be to say that the conditions of mobility of labor and mobility of capital have since World War II required an extraordinary upsurge in immigration. The foreign born population in the US today is something like 38 million people, which is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Poland. This is a function of matching the mobility of capital with the mobility of labor, and when you begin to produce these massive multi-racial or multi-national or as we would call them today multi-cultural workforces, you obviously need technologies to manage these work forces.

In the US this all began in a kind of powerful way with the Immigration Act of 1965, which in effect repudiated the explicit racism of the Immigration Act of the 1924 and replaced it with largely neoliberal criteria. ….

While at the same time we’ve had this increased immigration from Mexico, people from the lower-end of the economy, filling jobs that otherwise cannot be filled — or at least not filled at the price capital would prefer to pay. So there is a certain sense in which the internationalism intrinsic to the neoliberal process requires a form of anti-racism and indeed neoliberalism has made very good use of the particular form we’ve evolved, multiculturalism, in two ways.

First, there isn’t a single US corporation that doesn’t have an HR office committed to respecting the differences between cultures, to making sure that your culture is respected whether or not your standard of living is. And, second, multiculturalism and diversity more generally are even more effective as a legitimizing tool, because they suggest that the ultimate goal of social justice in a neoliberal economy is not that there should be less difference between the rich and the poor — indeed the rule in neoliberal economies is that the difference between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks — but that no culture should be treated invidiously and that it’s basically OK if economic differences widen as long as the increasingly successful elites come to look like the increasingly unsuccessful non-elites.”
Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. “Let Them Eat Diversity. On the Politics of Identity,” Jacobin Issue 1
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/

So the practical effect of neoliberalism is not just to use cheap labour for unskilled jobs, hold down real wages, or break down the effectiveness of trade unions through a diverse workforce, but to be concerned with getting minorities into the new neoliberal elite, so that elite is diverse, even when economic inequality soars.

(6) Michaels has a cutting analysis of Postmodernism, and floats the idea that “postmodernism” is “the official ideology of neoliberalism.”

Even more, academic education in the humanities, steeped in Postmodernism and SJW cults, has this remarkable trait:

“… elite universities more generally do a very good job of providing the upper middle class with its impressively good anti-racist, pro-gay-marriage conscience. But the more striking thing here is that when it comes to respecting difference, the academic world is hardly very different from the corporate world. The kind of distinctions and divisions that academics have learned to make in various identity categories are absolutely matched in sophistication by the ones that are made by any major US corporation. ….

... if you get to the core of it, anti-discrimination — which is after all something we are all, including the general American public, committed to — has become the almost exclusive criterion of political morality. American society today, both legally and politically, has a strong commitment to the idea that discrimination is the worst thing you can do, that paying somebody a pathetic salary isn’t too bad but paying somebody a pathetic salary because of his or her race or sex is unacceptable. That is, in some sense, built into the logic of liberal capitalism, but it has reached new heights in the last thirty or forty years. And from that standpoint the American academy is really only following along with what is been central to American society more generally.”
Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. “Let Them Eat Diversity. On the Politics of Identity,” Jacobin Issue 1
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/

(7) Michaels even argues that the core of the Tea Party Movement was an element of profound middle class – even upper middle class – hostility to neoliberalism on the issue of mass immigration:

“The truth is, it’s hard to find any political movement that’s really against neoliberalism today, the closest I can come is the Tea Party. The Tea Party represents in my view, not actually a serious, because it’s so inchoate and it’s so in a certain sense diluted, but nonetheless a real reaction against neoliberalism that is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist Right. It’s a striking fact that what the American Left mainly wants to do is reduce the Tea Party to racists as quickly as humanly possible. They’re thrilled when some Nazis come out and say “Yeah, we support the Tea Party” or some member of the Tea Party says something racist, which is frequently enough. But you can’t understand the real politics of the Tea Party unless you understand how important their opposition to illegal immigration is. Because who’s for illegal immigration? As far as I know only one set of people is for illegal immigration, I mean you may be [as a Marxist], but as far as I know the only people who are openly for illegal immigration are neoliberal economists.

First of all, neoliberal economists are completely for open borders, in so far as that’s possible. Friedman said years ago that, ‘You can’t have a welfare state and open borders,’ but of course the point of that was ‘open the borders, because that’ll kill the welfare state.’ ….

“… one of the primary sort of marks of the triumph of neoliberalism in the US is a very high tolerance of illegal immigration, and that illegal immigration is the kind of ne plus ultra of the labor mobility that neoliberalism requires. I mean that’s why for years — even though it’s a kind of contradiction in terms — as a policy it’s worked well. The Bush administration did everything it could to talk against illegal immigration but leave it alone and I’m sure the Obama administration would do the same thing except its hand’s being forced by the Tea Party. So you get these people who are saying illegal immigration sucks, and even Glenn Beck will say ‘immigration good, illegal immigration bad’ and, what he’s reacting against is not, as he thinks, socialism but currently existing capitalism, but he has no clue.”
Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. “Let Them Eat Diversity. On the Politics of Identity,” Jacobin Issue 1
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/

Events have moved on since Michaels said this, and the Trump movement – in important ways – is, I would argue, a right-wing populist movement against neoliberalism.

(8) American liberals have become infested with the idea that the major problem of modern society is racism, and anti-racism a panacea for all ills, when of course the major problem is the destructive effects of neoliberal capitalism.

(9) Michaels points out that most of the poor people in America – given the fact that most people are white – are of course white working class people, but American liberals are often not just indifferent to the poor white working class, but actively hostile to them with a vicious SJW mentality that sees such people as the worst type of racist, sexist, homophobic evil oppressors.

In fact, “anti-racism” is now the official religion of both the mainstream left and right:

“… there is an important sense in which anti-racism is absolutely the official ideology because no one can imagine themselves to be committed to racism. It’s become a kind of moral imperative rather than a political position, deployed by the Right as well as the Left.”
Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. “Let Them Eat Diversity. On the Politics of Identity,” Jacobin Issue 1
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/

But of course identity politics based on this obsession with witch hunts against racism and discrimination cannot provide the real economic solutions to the disaster of neoliberalism.

That is a lot to digest here, but it seems to me there are excellent insights that are absolutely correct.

Moreover, Michaels has an interesting book on this subject here:

Michaels, Walter Benn. 2006. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Metropolitan Books, New York.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Becker, Gary S. 1973. The Economics of Discrimination. University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.

Michaels, Walter Benn. 2006. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Metropolitan Books, New York.

Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. “Let Them Eat Diversity. On the Politics of Identity,” Jacobin Issue 1
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/

I’m on Twitter:
Lord Keynes @Lord_Keynes2
https://twitter.com/Lord_Keynes2

Some Forgotten Truths about Politics

Things to ponder on:

(1) Classical liberalism of the 19th century was a left-wing movement, when placed on the political spectrum of that era. It follows that a major strand of the left was strongly in favour of laissez faire capitalism in the 19th century.

(2) 19th century Conservatism had a strong protectionist and anti-laissez faire capitalist strand: think of the British Tory Paternalists, Tory Radicals and High Tories, some of whom led the Parliamentary reforms that regulated working conditions and child labour. (Admittedly, they had no coherent economic program to put in place of laissez faire capitalism, and often had naively Romantic views of the medieval and rural world of orders, hierarchy, monarchy and aristocracy.) Some of the more substantive, early attempts to implement welfare state measures were taken by Conservatives (even if supported by progressive liberals): think of Otto von Bismarck and Benjamin Disraeli. As the 19th century progressed, conservatives were gradually taken over by economic liberalism, until by the early 20th century the process was complete as many pro-free trade Classical liberals defected to conservativism, as the Left was increasing taken over by socialist, social democratic and labour-based political movements. There was a reversal from about 1945 to the early 1970s, as even most mainstream Conservatives accepted the Keynesian, mixed economy consensus. (For a fine discussion of British Victorian political movements, see Jones 2000.)

(3) The Old Left of the early and mid-20th century was, more or less, socially conservative (with a Bohemian fringe) and strongly opposed to mass immigration. In fact, outside of Europe, in Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand, the trade unions and labour-based parties were easily the most vocal and hostile to mass immigration precisely because it undermined labour rights, working conditions, and wages in the colonies.

In our time, things have reversed:

(1) old-style, laissez-faire capitalism is associated with the Right and what used to be called Classical liberalism is essentially a form of libertarianism, which is generally grouped with the political Right.

(2) Conservatism has been largely taken over by the neoliberal or Thatcherite vision of capitalism since the 1970s, and the left-wing political parties have been converted to neoliberal-lite economic policies since the 1970s.

(3) The Left is now extremely liberal or even quasi-libertarian on cultural and social issues and, at least amongst the elite and middle class representatives of it, strongly in favour of mass immigration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jones, H. S. 2000. Victorian Political Thought. Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Trump’s Wall versus Spain’s Wall: The Left Wing Hysteria about Trump’s Proposed Border Wall

There is a country called Spain. Many people probably do not know that Spain still has a few small strips of territory in North Africa called the “plazas de soberanía” (“places of sovereignty”), such as Ceuta and Melilla. I am not sure how attached the people of Spain are to these outposts in North Africa, but that is not the issue here.

In some of these places, the Spanish government has built walls or fences to protect its territories.

Here is a photo of the Melilla border fence between Morocco and Spain’s Melilla territory.

The law is the law. It is illegal for people to just immigrate into a different nation. Spain is neither fascist nor authoritarian nor racist for having its wall. It’s a plain common sense way to solve the problem of illegal immigration.

America’s problem with illegal immigration is far, far worse than Spain’s. It seems to be plain common sense that if America cannot police its border with Mexico, then some kind of wall is probably the only solution to the problem.

Yet people on the left are screaming hysterical abuse at the very idea. Apparently it’s racist; it’s fascist; it’s Nazism reborn.

But it’s none of these things. In reality, even Bernie Sanders knows that open borders and mass illegal immigration are terrible threats to America’s working class and real wages.

He’s well aware of the problem, as we see in the video below.



Unfortunately, it is unlikely that Bernie could ever really do anything effective to stop mass illegal immigration. Why? Because Bernie is too kind and too compassionate a man. And I mean that as a genuine compliment to Bernie Sanders, because I like him a lot.

Unfortunately, to really do something effective to stop open borders, Bernie – even as a democratic socialist – would have to build a wall or fence on America’s border with Mexico too, rather like Spain’s fences to protect its North African territories. This is a hard reality of life.

Left-wing people will do nothing but discredit themselves by ignoring reality.

Chomsky versus the Regressive Left

I tire of people trying to paint Chomsky as the father of the regressive left.

Yes, some elements of this thinking have influenced it and flowed into it (e.g., an often unbalanced and one-sided critique of US foreign policy). And, yes, you can make serious and sometimes very serious criticisms of Chomsky too.

But I also tire of regressive leftists trying to invoke Chomsky as if he is one of their own. This is blatantly untrue.

If you look seriously at Chomsky’s thought and beliefs, there is a vast amount there that is vehemently opposed to the regressive, Postmodernist left.

Let us run through a list:

(1) Chomsky is strongly in favour of free speech and he once went so far as to defend the right of a French holocaust denier to free speech.

Furthermore, Chomsky praises America’s free speech and its constitutional protection of free speech, and even goes so far as to say that America’s protection of free speech is the “best in the world” (and that is his words as quoted in Mitchell and Schoeffel 2002: 268). Do regressive leftists agree with Chomsky here and defend people’s right to free speech, even racists and holocaust deniers?

(2) Chomsky rejects French Poststructuralism and Postmodernism, and all its related ideas, and he has called leading Postmodernist thinkers “charlatans.” Chomsky has also been scathing in his assessment of Michel Foucault and cult of Foucault.

(3) Chomsky thinks that Freudianism and Marxism are irrational cults like organised religion, and has been brutal in his criticism of them (Mitchell and Schoeffel 2002: 227).

(4) Chomsky wrote a scathing attack on leftists who talk about “white male science,” saying that the concept sounds as stupid as the Nazi idea of “Jewish physics.”

(5) Chomsky is a defender of the best values of the Enlightenment from hostile anti-rationalist leftists. Chomsky is also committed to the defence of the real existence of objective truth, as part of his defence of the Enlightenment.

(6) Chomsky also rejects the extreme social constructivism and “blank slate” view of human beings that characterise some parts of the modern left, and he thinks that human beings have a real human nature caused by biology and evolution.

In particular, point (6) by implication constitutes a brutal rejection of the extreme social constructivism of Postmodernism and Third Wave Feminism: e.g., it seems likely that, if Chomsky were honest, he presumably thinks that sex differences and even some gender differences (note the word “some”) are real and rooted in biology and Darwinian evolution. This doesn’t deny important environmental influences, of course, but it requires that genes and biology are important, and entails the rejection of extreme social constructivism.

I wonder how long it will be before Chomsky is slandered as a racist, sexist, homophobic, white male oppressor and member of the patriarchy?

Time to add his name to the long list below!



BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mitchell, Peter R. and John Schoeffel (eds.). 2002. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. Scribe Publications, New York.

Pure Evil

If what is described here is true, it is pure evil.

Where are all the cultural relativists now? All those people who think all cultural beliefs or cultures are totally equal in every way?

And, even worse, certain people on the left in the Western world still obsess over “safe spaces” and “culturally insensitive” Halloween costumes. These whining, narcissistic, intellectually crippled, infantile idiots make me sick, given how much real evil there is in the world.

The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism

It is high time that the Left dispensed with and put an end to the fashionable nonsense that is Postmodernism (or “Poststructuralism” as the French intellectual movement which gave rise to it was originally called).

I can, incidentally, speak on this subject from personal experience. When I was an undergraduate I learnt a lot of this Postmodernist nonsense myself, and encountered it frequently at university, but I had the great benefit of learning a considerable amount of analytic philosophy (an acid under which Postmodernism dissolves) and listening to, and reading, no-nonsense Leftists who always understood it for the idiocy that it was and still is.

This subject is relevant to economics, because there are some actual Post Keynesians who seem to think that they can adopt a serious “Postmodernist” methodology and epistemology as a foundation of Post Keynesian economics. This, in my view, is a terrible delusion.

Some of the pernicious ideas that Postmodernism has given rise to are the following:

(1) the view that there is no such thing as objective truth;

(2) cultural relativism;

(3) following from (2) the view that there is no such thing as objective morality;

(4) the view that modern science is not true or just one “narrative” that is just as “valid” as any other, and

(5) the view that no text can have a fixed meaning intended by its author.

These ideas have led to intellectual catastrophe on the Left. They would be just as devastating to Post Keynesian economics, if seriously pursued as epistemological ideas. John King (2002: 195–196), for example, is absolutely right to point out that Postmodernist ideas are incompatible with core Post Keynesian principles, such as objective reality and objective truth, and even something as basic as Nicholas Kaldor’s “stylised facts” about modern capitalist economies.

But here I just want to take a quick look over the intellectual origins of modern Postmodernism.

The origins of Postmodernism are complicated. In the mid-20th century, structuralism was the fashionable theory which had replaced existentialism and which had spread from linguistics to anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory.

But by the 1970s many French intellectuals, many of whom were former Marxists and communists, reacted against structuralism and Marxism and invented a new poststructuralist philosophy.

It is true that some of the big name philosophers who were associated with poststructuralism did not explicitly identify themselves as “postmodernists,” but we should not be fooled by this: the French Poststructuralist movement is a major source of modern Postmodernism.

Within French poststructuralism, there were at least two important strands, as follows:

(1) the strand derived from the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), and

(2) the one associated with the work of Michel Foucault (1926–1984).

But numerous other influences flowed into the Postmodernism cacophony that you find in modern cultural studies, literature and philosophy departments in modern universities.

One stream that has entered into modern postmodernism is semiotics, which was in origin a discipline within structuralism but came to influence certain Poststructuralists like Lacan and Foucault.

A third, but underrated, influence on modern Postmodernism was Anglo-American New Criticism, which had been the dominant form of literary criticism in the English-speaking world until the late 1950s and early 1960s, but which, even though it has collapsed, also influenced the theory of textual “deconstruction” that has become an almost cult-like staple of modern postmodernism and cultural studies departments.

A fourth source of modern Postmodernist pretension is the pseudo-science of Freudian psychology and its bastard offspring Lacanian psychoanalysis and Lacanianism.

A fifth influence, though perhaps weaker than the ones above, was Theodor Adorno and the German Frankfurt School, whose social and cultural Marxism was a harbinger of many themes in modern Postmodernism.

Many people on the Left who think of themselves as intellectuals or who are (bizarrely) regarded widely as Leftist intellectuals have been brought up on a steady diet of Postmodernism nonsense: you can always spot them by their arcane and verbose jargon, and their frequent inability to explain what they mean in ordinary, straightforward language. The appalling cult of Postmodernist jargon was famously pilloried by the Postmodernism Generator, a computer program that can write a grammatically correct essay in the Postmodernist style, but is literally nonsense.

Postmodernism as a general philosophy, as the famous linguist Noam Chomsky has said, should go to the flames. It is as simple as that.

Maybe some few ideas can be salvaged from it, but I would be very surprised indeed if these were anything but trivial truths or things that other philosophers have already known for a long time.

Finally, here are some videos below on postmodernism. The first two are excellent videos in which Chomsky explains the history and absurdities of Postmodernism, and its terrible effects on attitudes to modern science and even intellectual life in the developing world.





The final one is from John Searle, from his own conversations with Foucault and Bourdieu, explaining why French poststructuralism is filled with such incomprehensible rubbish.



BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aylesworth, Gary. 2005 (rev. 2015). “Postmodernism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

King, J. E. 2002. A History of Post Keynesian Economics since 1936. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA.

Chomsky on Postmodernism and Poststructuralism

The left – particularly the academic left – really went down a wrong path when Postmodernism and Poststructuralism started poisoning its intellectual life.

If you have worked and studied in English speaking universities over the past 30 years in the humanities, I suspect you will have encountered the mind-numbing drivel that characterizes much of Postmodernist writing. One of its worst excesses was an attack on the natural sciences, exposed in all its ignorance by Alan Sokal and the now famous Sokal affair, and in more detail by Sokal and Bricmont in Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (London, 1998).

I will never forget the time I once wasted trying to understand Derrida, and my conclusion that Derrida’s writings are some of the worst rubbish I have ever read.

Frankly, I don’t think it is difficult to find support for this view. Noam Chomsky, probably the most well known libertarian socialist today, gives his view of Postmodernism:

“Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I’ve met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible—he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I've discussed it in print); Kristeva (who I met only briefly during the period when she was a fervent Maoist); and others. Many of them I haven’t met, because I am very remote from these circles, by choice, preferring quite different and far broader ones—the kinds where I give talks, have interviews, take part in activities, write dozens of long letters every week, etc. I’ve dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish”
Noam Chomsky on Post-Modernism.

As on so many other things, Chomsky is dead right on this subject (and his description of Lacan as “an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan” is priceless!). Nor is he alone, as there is an equally stinging attack on Postmodernism from the philosopher John Searle, which is worth reading.

The major historical issue for the left was, and still should be, economics. I certainly don’t deny the importance of social, cultural and other moral issues, but economics is the burning issue of our time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dawkins, R. “Postmodernism Disrobed,” RichardDawkins.net, 1 April 2007
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobed

Gross, P. R. and N. Levitt, 1994. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Postrel, S. R. and E. Feser, “Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle,” Reason.com (9 February 2000)
http://www.reason.com/news/show/27599.html

Sokal, A. and J. Bricmont. 1998. Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science, Profile, London.