The Problem With “Inclusion”
Written By: Giacomo Bianchino
"Oh goodness without results! Unnoticed attitude! I have altered nothing."- B. Brecht, St Joan of the Stockyards
Around reconciliation week, there is always a revival of a certain kind of political debate, a debate on “voices in parliament.” Last year, the LNP’s Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Ken Wyatt, proposed a popular referendum on whether or not “indigenous recognition” should be enshrined in the constitution. As a part of this, he suggested the convention of a parliamentary body of indigenous consultation.
This demand was originally made by the “Uluru Statement from the Heart”, a document issued by a body of indigenous activists gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention. Alongside the voice to parliament, the Uluru Statement called for “constitutional reform” and the establishment of a commission for Makarrata, the Yolngu word for “coming together after a struggle.”(1) So far, there has been little progress on the commission. But the government is pursuing the other prescriptions through the only option available for updating the constitution: a referendum.
“Representation is a paper tiger – it has no meaning under liberal democracy”
Without losing any time, conservative commentators were up in arms at the thought of changing the constitution or introducing a new parliamentary body. Peter Dutton, for instance, has bemoaned the creation of a “third chamber” with its own set of parliamentary prerogatives. Wyatt fell over himself to accommodate those who felt marginalised by the proposal such as self-proclaimed “indigenous” woman Pauline Hanson. He also wound back any talk of enacting the Uluru statement or a federal treaty, going so far as to say that he wouldn’t even offer the referendum if it looked likely to fail.
At this point, it’s common practice to hurl criticism at the circus of liberal reform. There is significant distance between the scale of the drama and the meagerness of the consequences that will follow it. When the question is one of political “inclusion”, the socialist critiques are usually as follows:
What people advocating the “Uluru Statement” are seeking would result in inclusion into is a system that will actively co-opt and de-radicalise their claims.
“Representation” is a paper tiger – it has no meaning under liberal democracy. The people who will “represent” the interests of the indigenous community are themselves class traitors.
Playing the “identity” game will only distract people from the real issues (economic exploitation) and the real solutions (revolution).
What these positions rely on is the sense that there is a gap between what people think, and what the reality is. This, in many ways, is the basis of Historical Materialism, which seeks to understand the usually unseen reality underlying political events. The whole edifice of the Marxist approach is based on the notion that “in the final instance,” the material processes of production is the main determining factor in history. (2) To appreciate the shape of political and cultural events, we have to look at the “relations of production” that inform people’s social interests.
However, the overemphasis of the distance between thought and reality can lead people to mix up problems of “propaganda” and “ideology.” On the one hand, it can seem as if some of the ideas that garner social popularity are directly calculated to facilitate the flows of capitalism. What this approach misses, however, is how this ideology is organically generated by the relations of production that really and genuinely exist under capitalism.
Ideology and Identity Theory
Identity politics and the claims made by “advocates” like Wyatt are not necessarily a concerted attempt to undermine the working class. Nor, however, is it politically innocent. It is an ideology, which organises people’s lived experience of the relations that actually underwrite society.
“From a historical point of view, there’s nothing ‘new’ about the evaporation of the public and private”
An “ideology” is not a piece of propaganda in the common sense of the term – the methods used to promote a view of events and possible solutions in a way to conceal or mislead. It is the “imaginary relationship of individuals to the real conditions of experience.”(3) Essentially, there are two ideologies – that of the upper class defending capitalism and that of the working class striving to establish Socialism and Communism. Under capitalism, ideology serves to facilitate the “reproduction” of the social relations that form our social reality.
In fact, the ‘mystification’ or abstraction of bourgeois ideological offshoots like ‘identity politics’ is not something arbitrary. It is the reflection of a reality that is already abstract and antagonistic. Life under the capitalist mode of production is comprised, according to the Soviet economist I.I. Rubin, by "material relations between persons and social relations between things." While the true substance of economic “laws” is relations between people, the true relations between people are dictated by their place in the production process.
The ideological variants that one can describe under the broad term “classical liberalism” were based around this division between production and society. Liberalism preserves a myth of the “independent” rational actor whose private life is entirely separate from their role at work. In fact, the denial of worker exploitation under liberalism relies on the notion that the worker has freely chosen to participate in the economy. To preserve the ideology that allows for the continuation of antagonistic class-relations, it is necessary that the “private” sphere is defended as a space of independent moral agency.
This view of social life, however, has become increasingly untenable as the distinction between private and public has evaporated. The politicisation of the middle-class’ “free time” started after the crisis in reproduction and the collapse of commodity markets in 1929. In FDR’s America and post-Scullin/Lang Australia, the state was forced through the struggle of the working class to take an interest in ensuring that “all” levels of society were able to afford their own sustenance. The social reproduction of the middle class became a political priority, with the birth of the welfare state and the provision of relative job security in industry, commerce and the services.
Since then, more and more of the middle-class’ time has become bound up in reproduction. The old liberal myth of the private individual has started to erode along with the difference between their identity inside and outside of work. The changing nature of work and reproduction assumed its current form (the austerity policies of disinvestment from public services and the workforce) with the monetarist or “supply side” turn of the world economy in the mid-1970s.
From a historical point of view, there’s nothing ‘new’ about the evaporation of the public and private. Marx showed 150 years ago how this has long been the state of the proletariat. What has happened in the last 50 years is the extension of this process from the working to the middle-classes. As job security breaks down and more people are “proletarianized,” they are forced to continually change employment. In this process, the important factor becomes one of self-improvement and investment in “upskilling.” A worker is no longer exclusively motivated by the profit they can earn directly from raises in salary but hopefully by appreciating the value that they themselves constitute. More than ever, they become owners of a piece of “human capital”: their own set of talents. The most private part of their life has been successfully mobilised by the market.
“The job of an “Indigenous voice” from its own viewpoint is basically to raise the perceived “value” of investment in Aboriginal human capital”
For a middle class constructed on the mythical principles of autonomy and rational choice, the disappearance of the “free” area of self-actualisation has left a confusion about where their social interests lie. Contemporary ideology relies on the deployment of identity as a means of improving the value of one’s human capital. With the “logic” of global, monopoly-dominated markets now beyond debate and where even the middle class are kept out of the “free space” of liberalism, the old lines of class antagonism are politically blurred. Instead of mobilising in class struggle, modern politics organises itself around demonstrating that a person’s identity makes them worthy of inclusion.
This is the “pantomime” of capitalist politics in 2019. On the one hand, our social lives and politics are still governed by the relations of production. On the other, liberal activism (or whatever you want to call it) uses the various “masks” of identity not to challenge the system, but to facilitate its reproduction. Instead of questioning the organisation of society, politics today (both progressive and conservative) actively seeks to conserve the structure while diversifying the cast of people that profit from it.
What does this mean for politics today?
A Marxist orientation towards the problems of indigenous “recognition” today has to factor in the roles envisaged for the various sections of Aboriginal communities by the prevailing capitalist ideology. An “indigenous voice in parliament” is more or less a consultative body about how the government will address the issues of indigenous inequality. This is generally reduced to a matter of public investment, contingent on whether a particular group can make itself seem “worthy”. As we have seen since the closure of remote communities and the closure of Aboriginal services under Abbott, investment in the indigenous community is clearly not a fiscal priority today. The job of an “Indigenous voice” from its own viewpoint (and not that of the capitalist class, which employs tokenism) is basically to raise the perceived “value” of investment in Aboriginal human capital.
“We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”
Identity politics uses existing frameworks of evaluation to improve the value of a group’s human capital. This affects the kinds of demands that we make at a political level. Things like self-determination, property rights and “social inclusion” may have the ring of progress. But ultimately, they help to entrench the material interests that do the real governing under capitalism. Progress comes to mean nothing more than the diversification of the division of the means of production and their fruits. By focusing on the “moral” aspect of a political struggle, one condemns oneself, like Brecht’s Saint Joan, to practicing “goodness without results.”
Instead of retreating into identities and trying to preserve the “free” space of personal self-determination, the Communist strategy is to build a new subject whose identity is based on an act of solidarity across the lines of culture and individuality; to use “identity” as a bridge. This means determining politics not in terms of the individual, but at a collective level. Today, economic developments have “communised” social problems beyond the old class lines. In the last ten years or so many movements have grown around the widespread disaffection with the structural dysfunction of the current system of production relations. Communists must take this and construct a proper revolutionary body. In Marx’s own words, “we do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”
A real “makaratta”, if it isn’t just going to be the pantomime “inclusion” of token individuals, has to factor in the real social differences underlying the colonial situation. Improving the situation for First Nations people means dismantling a system which demands poverty; not finding ways to work within it. We have to know what we’re up against, and not let the reality of our situation become mediated by our enemy’s ideology. We don’t seek the “goodness without reward” of an “unnoticed attitude,” but the power to “alter” the world we live in.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Makaratta was the term proposed for the treaty process as early as 1979 by the National Aboriginal Commission.
2 Jameson, “Introduction” in L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. B. Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. xi
3 L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. B. Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 109