The Root of the Problem: Historical Narrative as Origin, End, and Impasse of Radical Social Change

ABSTRACT

Although often treated as a controversy between radicals and conservatives, the current public imbroglio concerning so-called identity politics is just as much a matter of disagreement within progressivism’s big tent. Such a dispute is especially pronounced between classical Marxists and rival radical leftist groups that position race, rather than class, as the central problem facing egalitarian change. Starting from the idea that historical narrative represents a potent vector of argumentation, this essay contends that, from a rhetorical perspective, the conflict between Marxists and radical elements of identity-based politics can perhaps best be framed in terms of a contest over historical origin stories regarding the “root” cause of modern-day systems of oppression. By situating the controversy over racial identity in terms of origin narratives, this essay seeks to highlight the rhetorical advantages but also the pitfalls of this mode of argumentation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1.  For a recent, representative example of a traditional Marxist critique of “identity politics,” see Haider’s (2017) Jacobin article “Safety Pins and Swastikas.”

2.  Variations of this argument also appear in the work of certain post-foundational continental thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau, and Jacques Rancière, though few if any adhere to a strictly Marxist framework. Alain Badiou, for instance, argues that in order for a category to take on progressive political signification it must pass from what he calls its “identitarian or syndical status” to a political (by which he means universal) status (Badiou 2001, 111).

3.  For a sample of Spencer’s views, see Shivani’s (2017) article for Salon, which includes representative quotations.

4.  Marx in this passage, and elsewhere, is inverting Hegel’s dialectic. Marx’s quest to identify the root – to prioritize the material conditions of social phenomena – is understood by Marx as the mirror image of the Hegelian desire to find the spirit or mind (Geist) in time (Zeit), which itself is consistent with the Hegelian quest for a scientia of historia (contra Descartes, who pitted scientia against historia). As Marx writes in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought” (Marx 1915, 25).

5.  As Zarefsky (1980) argues, discussions of causation make up a central component of written history, even though historians rarely expend much effort exploring theories of causation.

6.  The similarity between Taylor’s argumentation and that of Marxist magazines is not all that surprising given that, as a graduate student, Taylor wrote an article for the Socialist Worker very much in this style (Taylor 2011).

7.  For a useful and succinct account of Antonia Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, see Laclau (1996).

8.  By lumping Ta-Nehisi Coates in with Afro-Pessimists such as Wilderson and Sexton, Stephens (2017) is offering a pairing that both sides, one imagines, must find deeply unsatisfactory.

9.  Although the argument that Marxism is itself a religious creed (or heresy) has been common among conservative critics of Marx for quite some time (see, for example, Molnar 1967, 123ff.), the focus tends to be on the purported atheistic-eschatological dimension of Marx and Engels’s communist goal (as well as its materialist origin). What this view neglects to consider is whether Marx’s use of root-cause historical argumentation, in secularizing the Christian notion of original sin, inadvertently points to a theological antecedent and thereby throws back even further the “root” of the “root cause” form of argument.

10. The term itself debuted in 1985 in Laclau and Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (see also Therborn 2008, 141–166).

11. Indeed, on Marshall’s (2010) view, compossibility is part of the European rhetorical tradition, rooted in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and, arguably, culminating in Vico’s New Science. Ironically, as Marshall points out, Marx himself engaged but ultimately misinterpreted Vico’s work as one asserting radical difference rather than radical interrelatedness (see 120–121).

12. The one possible exception to this compossibility are thinkers of radical decolonization, since for them return of stolen land must supersede “envisioning” questions of what kind of society ought to take shape on what appropriated land (see, for example, Lewis 2017).

13. Kelsey (2019) suggests the impossibility of debate within current conditions of anti-blackness, but it is unclear – if the goal is radical social change – whether that argument would apply to persuading natural comrades in arms or just those invested in liberal establishment. For a contrasting perspective see Watts (2015), who, although focused on the possibilities of engagement between Rhetorical Studies and Afro-pessimism rather than the impossibility of debate, suggests adopting Mailloux’s (2006) “critical cosmopolitanism.” Such a model of cosmopolitanism, Watts argues, would allow for “a reiteration of the sort of practices that presume that one’s epistemologies can translate other’s bodies of knowledge into comprehensible and useful concepts and constructs” (Watts 2015, 276).