Is left-liberal race discourse the left's real worst enemy?

The greatest enemy of the left is left-liberal or progressive identity politics. The problem is one of rhetorical cooptation. Corporate liberalism mainly benefits the upper class. But now it most often masquerades under a rhetoric of radical leftism. But the giveaway that it is nothing of the kind is precisely that they only talk about identities (race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, religion). They attack not capitalism, not the police state, but the 'privileges' of the people they want people of color to think of themselves as competing against.

Most often the particular people targeted tend markedly towards the left wing. Thus, we can suspect that part of the purpose is to delegitimate the left. This is easily done on an identity-political basis, for the simple reason that most people on the radical left come from fairly privileged class backgrounds, are often Jewish, and otherwise usually white, and more often male than female. Every marker of social class privilege is favored on the left, and that is mainly not because we on the left are prejudiced. Most left-wing groups that are not organized partly on a racial/ethnic/national, gender/sexuality, or other identity-worthy basis engage very energetically in trying to involve more people of color, etc. But most leftists do come from rather privileged, often very much so, backgrounds.

There are two reasons for this, that go together: one is that the way they are raised, they are much more likely to expect of themselves an involvement with artistic or social purposes that are highly creative or focused on improving their society (as elites of all kind are more likely to), and they are of course much less likely to be overburdened or prevented from this kind of life orientation by having to slave away at some job whose sole purpose is to make money. Secondly, they often have a good sense of what it is to life a good life in economic and related terms, and a deep feeling that all that is not enough. The differences among people in the more privileged classes tend to come down to whether one wants to just be prosperous and powerful in some way, often in one's very career and occupation, or try to accomplish something that is not exactly definable in such terms. Social movements, particularly on the left, need such people, and all they ought to do that is constraining on them is ask them to make use of their opportunities, talents and interests in socially useful ways.

This would not be the case in a truly classless society, but obviously we don't live in such a world, even though many of us want to and certainly we should.

What it really comes down to in terms of ethical choice for political radicals is whether you want to change the world for the better or attack people individually for bad morals. The latter is conservative. So why do left-liberals buy into it? It's because they have not thought through their own political position clearly and rigorously enough, and because there is so much noise in the air constantly, especially in times of social ferment on the left, suggesting that privilege-bashing, race-baiting, and the like, are the answer. There is also an intense and constant media campaign selling the liberal ideas of Affirmative Action to 'people of color' and trying to persuade them to only want positions for themselves in the existing social system, and to believe that oppression and injustice are really a matter not of what is done but who does it and who it is done to. The resulting identity politics is not the same as a politics of redistribution. Nor is it the same as the even radical political project of changing not the distribution of roles and opportunities among people so much as the very forms of our institutions and social discourses and practices. Changing our forms of life. This would have both an ethical/aesthetic component that has to do with the 'feel' of everyday life and a political/economic one that has to do with how activities are organized and wealth produced, used, and its production and use managed. If you talk only about 'who' is doing what and not 'what' they are doing, then you are not working to change the world, but only to secure and celebrate your own place in it.

The division among American Blacks politically is obviously between (a) those who think the replacement of racial slavery by a system of formal equality and liberty based on free contractual labor and the commodification of desires is all we need, along with the rear guard activity of punishing everyone who seems still to cling to some aristocratic sense of individual privilege or who still has prejudices that they need us to disabuse them of -- and (b) the very small actual left, which is against capitalism and authoritarianism and actually considers that more important than those rear guard moralisms. Furthermore, when it comes to race these two purposes never really are kept separate, and the result is that the first one always wins out, since the whole economic, social, and political system is based on this at least as an idea.

Would that the appearance of films like the recent one about Black Panther Fred Hampton would really change this. I don't think I have ever met a black American who is truly on the left in a way that is not ambiguous in this way. The confusion may be symbolized by a correspondence that actually took place in the years leading up to the abolition of slavery in this country: this exchange of letters was between Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx.

They agree on some points, disagree on others, and we need to be clear about this.

I'm worried by the prospect of Eric Adams as mayor of New York, because he is a black moderate. I expect to hear and see lots of confused messages that ignore or overwrite the important distinction I am trying here to make.

We need a new slogan. Of course Black Lives Matter. It's because that cause was as victorious as it has been that our President's actions and statements have been so slanted to the liberal-left, and that the new mayor will likely be a black man or woman. Now we need to make clear that what matters about race (and gender and sexuality) is also about more than it. Otherwise, you will hear lots of talk about race, and it's often a lie and a swindle. I can't begin to describe how many times I've got a bullshit fuck you thrown in my face by someone idiotically going on about race or gender and falsely and unthinkingly putting me in the 'wrong' category (as a mostly straight European-American, Irish, and Jewish university-educated 'white' man). Provocateurs, full of BS. You can't argue with them, of course. If the person has any power they can exercise, they will use it against me, with real violence likely being involved, and they will cynically reassure themselves that it's about race when we both know it's really about capitalism and the state and authoritarianism.

If someone can please show me the way to understand black American culture apart from its apparent destiny that affirms capitalism and its police state through a hard core moralizing authoritarianism and a lot of cynical rhetoric pretending to political correctness, my reading agenda has room for additions.