Max Sawicky gets polemical about Susan Neiman's "Left is Not Woke"
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Fairness dictates that when someone critiques a piece of writing or a concept, the first order of business should be to present it correctly, take the time to understand its terms and avoid ad hominem arguments. Max Sawicky does not manage the tasks.
He either misunderstands Neiman's contentions, gets certain concepts wrong, or questions her Left bona fides.
My motivation for responding to "Woke Like Me" is to present Neiman's argument correctly and urge people to reflect on the state of the Left, which sadly is flat on its back.
Neiman has written a book informed by philosophy for a general audience. As far as it is polemical, she does not simply assert without applying reason or misrepresent her opponents. Sawicky, however, is not so fair. Neiman's work as a philosopher, public intellectual and stated political commitments represent a historically left alignment akin to social democracy. While she displays no commitment to overcoming capitalism, she refers to herself as a socialist, as many of the Western Left do. Sawicky seems to suggest that she is not on the Left, that she misrepresents herself to criticize the genuine Left, which for some reason is said to be specific people, Bernie Sanders, the Squad, BLM, and anti-Gaza War protesters, not a set of political commitments or practices. In doing so, he incorrectly invokes standpoint epistemology. Neiman's position is based on Enlightenment reason, whereas standpoint epistemology contends that knowledge can be derived from a position as a member of a social (religious, ethnic, racial, etc.) group. In other words, to be a socialist is not an epistemological standpoint, as Sawicky states. It is a political choice. Here, Sawicky employs an ad hominem argument: Neiman is not who she says she is; even if she were, it would not give her any particular authority to speak on the Left. She does not assert such authority, however, but argues, using reason, for what she takes as traditional precepts of the Left she is a part of and sees vanishing.
At issue is the notion of wokeness and the rather tedious debate about how it is constituted. Most of the actually-existing Left blanches at the terms because the Right has taken it up as a pejorative. As Neiman states, it is incoherent, for which Sawicky takes a confession that it does not exist or is merely a rhetorical club for the Right to wield. But no, its incoherence is immanent.
But first, the term wokeness is slang for a viewpoint and a set of practices with underlying precepts. Chiefly, it foregrounds identitarianism and how individuals who have suffered oppression based on their group identity form the foundation for claims-making for redress. Membership in an identity category instills individuals with knowledge of unique political importance. In practice, wokeness typically builds a hierarchy of authority that deems those who view reason as the bedrock of politics as privileged, Eurocentric, and, ironically, unenlightened.
When Neiman states that wokeness is incoherent, it is not an admission that it is a false construction of the Right. She argues that it is inherently contradictory. Universalism has been associated with the Left, particularly since the French Revolution, based on the principles of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" irrespective of culture, race, religion, ethnicity, sex, or gender. What, at base, animates identitarians' claim of injustice are these universal values, not particularism or the status of being a victim, hence the incoherence. Her quote from Ghanian philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu gives further credence to this point:
"... race' obstructs our perceptual horizon, distracts us from attending to other, foundational questions of human being and social existence, so we should move on to those other questions, questions we would still have to address were the domination of racist culture as a world system ever to come to its long-overdue end."
Likewise, the anti-colonialist writer Frantz Fanon wrote: "All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied against the same object: the human being."
Sekyi-Otu and Fanon appeal to universalism on behalf of liberation, whereas so much of the actually-existing Left view the concept as a Eurocentric imposition while at the same time speaking in the language of justice.
I expect that Sawicky would suggest that what Neiman has described does not exist within what he construes as the Left. No one should take this seriously. The actually-existing Western Left is replete with activists who preach allyship, not solidarity, because the former is anti-universal. Their approach does not rely on reason but on identity, and when it is called into question, the practice is to attack a leftist's bona fides who object. There is little room for debate.
Adolph Reed Jr. was blasted by the DSA AFROSOCialist and Socialists of Color Caucus for his "reactionary and class reductionist form of politics" when a couple of local chapters asked him to speak on the COVID-19 crisis. Instead of allowing him to discuss the topic, they demanded a debate on his heretical views. Reed's name comes up a lot among Left identitarians because he is willing to stick his neck out. Yet, his story is hardly the only manifestation of the self-defeating politics of much of the Left.
When Bernie Sanders was running for election in 2015, BLM activist crashed his speech in Seattle on the anniversary of the passage of the Social Security Act, where he was calling for creating more universal benefits (a higher minimum wage, parental leave, etc.). They vowed to shut down the event if the white supremacist progressive audience did not listen to them on how racist the city is and police brutality. After a BLM statement was released that stated that "the problem with Sanders, and with white Seattle progressives in general, is that they are utterly and totally useless (when not outright harmful) in terms of the fight for Black lives." Is a higher minimum wage or parental leave harmful to black lives?
Such an event is remarkable not only because it demonstrates how tribalism works—either you are with us on our terms or against us—but also because it degrades politics. The injunction is, don't think or debate openly; submit.
For some reason, Sawicky generally has a problem with philosophy and, specifically with Neiman's discussion of Michel Foucault. Contrary to Sawicky, she does not suggest that the "woke left" is reading him as a theoretical guru or consciously identifying with his project, although some certainly have. On good authority, he is the most cited writer in the humanities. In any event, she is pointing to his substantial influence on the Left. By the 1970s, with the New Left in decline and neoliberalism on the rise, his brand of post-structuralism submitted that "power" in the form of discourse -- not explicitly enforced by capitalism or the state -- is the source of domination in society; this was a signpost of socialist political retreat. Because so much of the North American Left is entrenched in academia, Foucault's work profoundly influenced the next generation of leftists coming of age. The new social movements' emphasis on issue-based efforts did not hold or share a new vision to transform society. They sought to oppose power with limited, local and partial demands. Political organizing that focused on a grand scale was suspect, would result in domination and relied on European political thought that ignored the inherent knowledge of the subaltern.
Not all such problems can be laid at the altar of Foucault. His works are finely-grained interrogations of how specific institutions exert power and provide fascinating insights. Yet, he was entirely resistant to universalism as a political practice, instead opting for a position on the fringe, resisting power, and not taking it for the majority. Neiman grants his insights but centres her criticism on how he ushered anti-universalism into the Left.
Relatedly, in many quarters of the actually-existing Left, they reject the liberal principle of freedom of expression as a cruel hoax. Words themselves are often equated with violence, mainly when spoken by someone classified as more powerful based on their identity. From here, it is permissible to use whatever power the Left has to suppress speech because universal principles that allow all to express themselves will inevitably benefit the Right utilizing its greater power. Institutions of the state and capitalism have massive platforms. This is the fundamental condition of being in opposition for the Left. Appealing to the power of authority, such as university administrators, to de-platform adversaries is a contradiction. If you are the weaker party, you have more to lose by counting on the power of state capitalist and bureaucratic authority. A socialist's task is to appeal to the majority's interests with reason. Any ability to utilize the power of established authority to silence opponents will be short-lived and ultimately self-defeating. All one has to do is witness the repression experienced by anti-Gaza war protesters by college and government authorities.
As political theorist Enzo Rossi states, the Left can never win meaningfully if the truth is only power itself. What would be the basis for victory?
As I stated earlier, Neiman's book is good but is not great. Her approach to the problem of Left censoriousness and tribalism focuses on a battle of ideas, not the material conditions that nurture them. Material conditions generate ideology; it does not spring from the ether. Foucault and a slew of lesser post-structuralists gained traction and influenced the Left with the implementation of neoliberal state policy and the eventual demise of the Soviet Union. When Margaret Thatcher said "there is no alternative," she was not only saying that Soviet-style communism was a failure but any socialist project was doomed. Reaganism and Thatcherism took the offensive against organized labour, smashing one of the most threatening institutions to the ruling class. Wokeness is but one dead-end response to the offensive of neoliberalism as the Left within the working class was decimated, leaving the academic left and the growing professional-managerial stratum to take up the mantle.
Sawicky, very oddly, on social media, refers to Neiman's "Zionist screeds" and, in his article, her reputedly inaccurate claim that many people on the Left celebrated the terrorist attacks by Hamas. There are no such screeds in the book, nor did I find any reference to his claim about her vis-a-vis the Hamas attack. Painting Neiman as a right-wing adjacent Zionist is quite rich. She is based in Germany and has been publicly very critical of the German state and society's crackdown on criticism of Israel's invasion and mass bloodletting in Gaza.
Without getting into all the geopolitics of Israel's war, "wokeness" is an obstacle to opposition to US foreign policy in Israel-Palestine. Besides, some academics at elite institutions, such as Columbia University (Joseph Massad), Cornell (Russell Rickford) or Yale (Zareena Grewal), who did praise the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas, there is a broader problem amongst the left: Palestinians are politically diverse but are often defined by their victimhood. Therefore, any group -- in this case, Hamas --which is Palestinian, is a stand-in for their interests, no matter how reactionary.
So when Wake Forest Professor Laura Mullen writes: "So it's kind of a Duh but if you turn me out of my house plow my olive grove and confine what's left of my family to the small, impoverished state you run as an open air prison I could be tempted to shoot up your dance party yeah, even knowing you will scorch the earth.": no leftist political (or even moral) distinctions are being made. Israel is a state that oppresses Gazans; it is not partygoers. Hamas is an ethnoreligious nationalist organization that makes the same sort of claims on the territory as Zionists do. The "you" and the "I" in her remark demonstrate faux politics reduced to tribalism and victimhood.
Indeed, not most anti-war protesters are ardently pro-Hamas, but if those students on college campuses represent the Left, where is the leftist critique of Hamas? Where is the movement for a peaceful, secular, new socialist state in the region? After a ceasefire, what then? There are no answers to these questions. Palestinians are victims. "We stand with victims" is not a political program. When I have raised this criticism, I have been called a Zionist. You are either with us or an enemy. Neiman invoked Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy concept for good reason.
Finally, by the same token, socialists should not engage in the culture war itself. It is an intermural sport, mainly for Democrats and Republicans. The leftists who engage in it vote Democratic when elections come around, which reflects how little it has to offer to create independent socialist politics. Criticize the dangers and wokeness and move on. If the Left can get up off the mat, wokeness will have fallen by the wayside.