Thinkings 8: Collected Interventions, Evocations, and Readings 2018-19 Jeff Noonan
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Thinkings 8: Collected Interventions, Evocations, and Readings 2018-19 Jeff Noonan 1 Contents Far-Right Identity Politics and the Task for the Left .............................................................................. 5 The Intelligence of Weeds .......................................................................................................................... 9 One Million More Reasons to Mobilise Against Ford ........................................................................... 12 The Limits of Politics, (But Why They Still Matter).............................................................................. 15 Closed for Business ................................................................................................................................... 18 Second Time Farce .................................................................................................................................... 20 Politics. Fools. April. ................................................................................................................................. 23 Hard Question, No Answers ..................................................................................................................... 27 Straw Dogs, or Last Straw? ..................................................................................................................... 31 Enough Bullshit About the Rule of Law ....................................................................................................... 34 Give the People What They Want: An Alternative! .................................................................................... 37 Imperialism, Not Trump, is the Problem ..................................................................................................... 41 The Politics of Impunity .............................................................................................................................. 43 Salvation? Not Yet ....................................................................................................................................... 46 Naked Power ............................................................................................................................................... 48 Red Dawn II ................................................................................................................................................. 50 The Road From Wigan Pier to Here ............................................................................................................ 55 The Personal is Political, but the Political is Not Personal .......................................................................... 58 #MeToo Meet Tipper Gore ......................................................................................................................... 60 Subject, Structure, and History in the Struggle Against Oppression .......................................................... 63 Cry for You, Venezuela ................................................................................................................................ 65 Peregrination .............................................................................................................................................. 70 Ephemera .................................................................................................................................................... 79 Reading Victor Serge in Russia, (or, The Return of the Gulag Archipelago) ............................................... 86 Republic of Blood ........................................................................................................................................ 91 Vespers/Evensong ....................................................................................................................................... 92 The Fragility of Beauty ................................................................................................................................ 96 A Moral History of Objects .......................................................................................................................... 98 Mayworks Windsor 2019 .......................................................................................................................... 100 Hand Writing Painting ............................................................................................................................... 102 Readings: Ricky Gervais: AfterLife ............................................................................................................. 107 2 Lessons From History VIII: John Cowley, “The Strange Death of the Liberal University” (Socialist Register, 1969) ......................................................................................................................................................... 110 Windsor Spaces IV: Caron Avenue Pumping Station ................................................................................ 113 Lessons From History VII: Karl Marx: “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality” (Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, 1845-1848) .................................................................................................................. 116 Readings: Liz Fekete: Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right .......................................... 119 Readings: Hannah Gadsby: Nanette ......................................................................................................... 122 3 c. 2019 Jeff Noonan Free to use and disseminate. Please cite the website: https://www.jeffnoonan.org All photos by the author. Cover: Ana Lupas, Installation at Tate Modern Gallery, London, Sept.2019. 4 Interventions 5 Far-Right Identity Politics and the Task for the Left Originally posted 30 April, 2019 Identity politics is a key problem of our age, but the problem is typically misunderstood. Usually the left is vilified by the the right for encouraging divisive politics rooted in the grievances of different minority groups. These groups are denounced for pursuing selfish agendas that harm the unity of the nation. The right then portrays itself as the guardian of the nations’ unity. In so doing, it identifies its agenda with the universal values and interests of all people. Those who disagree with the agenda are portrayed as enemies of the people, even in the case that all the opponents added together make up a majority of “the people” in whose interests the right-wing populists claim to speak. Hence, the deepest problem with identity politics is not that people fight against their experiences of oppression on the basis of those aspects of their identity that their oppressors demonize, but that right wing populists falsely identify their particular program with universal values and human interests. Too often, critics on the left who want to defend targeted groups from demonising rhetoric and oppressive political power make the mistake of rejecting universal human values and interests, rather than the false identification constructed by the right-wing populist movement. Let us look at how these constructions work in a little more detail. Take the example of the recent Israeli election. In the midst of the campaign, Netanyahu openly asserted what had always been true in practice: that although they enjoy formally equal rights, Arab Israelis cannot be true members of Israeli society, because Israel is a Jewish state. Netanhayu was confident that this overtly racist downgrading of Arab-Israeli citizenship would survive the gasps of indignation which always accompany awful truths being spoken in polite liberal company because he has been emboldened by a wave of right-wing populism that operates on the same logic. Here is how it works. First, you construct an identity between your party and the nation as a whole. Then, you solidify this logical construction with racial or ethnic cement. Next, you build feelings of power amongst the powerless elements of your supporters by telling them that after years of neglect by “the elite,” their interests are going to be recognized. Finally, you turn these new-found feelings of power amongst the powerless to win office. Once installed, the party continues to serve the political and economic power of the existing ruling class. Both overtly violent and coded, para- violent tactics against opponents supplement parliamentary power. Understandably, critics focus on the content of the identity (white Americans, Jewish Israelis, and so on) in order to emphasize the racist essence of the right-wing populist wave. There is no doubt that it is racist, but we also have to pay attention to the political logic at work in the building of the movement. Ernesto Laclau’s work on populism is an exception to the tendency to focus only on the content of populist movements and ignore their form. But the form is important, because it reveals the political power of universal appeals. While it is true that there is a hard racist core to contemporary right-wing populist movements, they have won because they 6 appeal beyond the ruling-class interests that they serve to marginalized and dis-empowered elements of the working class. De-coding the “dog-whistle” appeals to racism are important, but so too is understanding the way in which genuinely universal values are perverted in the political identification between the populist movement and the good of the whole nation. There is a dialectic of inclusion-exclusion