Identity Crisis: The Politics of False Concreteness

The global emergence of authoritarianism has, unsurprisingly, provoked analogies with the Weimar period. Yet caution must be exercised when reasoning by historical analogy. While we ought not so easily be swayed by analogical reasoning, the European interwar period might yet hold some unexpected lessons for us today. Neoliberalism exacerbates the rationalization tendencies of capitalist modernization through heightened processes of institutional and ideological abstraction. This means the unceasing subordination of qualitative human needs and aspirations to the quantitative monetary values of the market and the dynamics of capital accumulation. Such processes come under pressure in moments of crisis, giving rise to a fragmentation of the universalism that had historically underwritten the struggle for socialism, leading to aspirations to what could be called a false concreteness centred on a particularistic form of identity on both the contemporary right as well as the left. Each of these forms of ‘false concreteness’ eschews universalism, and has thus contributed to the crippling polarizations of our times. On the right, this has taken the form of authoritarian ethno-nationalism. On the left, identity politics, far from challenging the neoliberal consensus, only reinforces its iron grip.4 In these ways, neoliberalism’s deepening of the increasingly abstract nature of social life under capitalism redoubles tendencies towards re-enchantment as a way of providing false solutions to real problems. After looking at the radical conservative response to Weber’s diagnosis of modernity, I turn to neoliberalism’s heightening of abstraction, before showing the way in which identity politics represents an ostensible response to this logic by seeking to grasp the concrete or the particular in its immediacy. In conclusion, I suggest a way in which class analysis can provide a genuine alternative to such a politics, one that articulates what Ato Sekyi-Otu calls ‘left universalism’