Afterword to Mistaken Identity (2021)

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This Afterword was published in 2021 by Verso for the second edition of Mistaken Identity, with the new subtitle: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology. We have chosen to republish it here because it served as a founding document for Fracture.

It is strange for me now to flip through Mistaken Identity. I wonder if I know the author: why he wrote it, what it meant to him, how he would have felt about the discussions it provoked. By the time the book appeared in the hands of readers, he was in the process of becoming someone else: this non-identity, this irreducible multiplicity he struggled to find the language to express.

There is an autobiography of non-identity which opens and pervades Mistaken Identity — but in becoming part of my biography, the book has rewritten it. We are tempted to write every biography in the future anterior, to see in childhood what the author will become. Perhaps the temptation is never greater than when we write our own biographies, intolerable as it is to imagine we could have become anything other than who we are. But we must grant every author, no less ourselves, the time to grow up. It is nothing other than this which was put forth in the words that open Mistaken Identity: “We all have to be born somewhere.” And, indeed, I was born where I was, out of the accident that is, over time, folded into necessity.

In Mistaken Identity my place of birth indicated the primordial difference and hybridity which became the site of political commitment. I will not repeat what you have already read in the preceding pages, that personal and political history whose relationship to the proposition that the personal is political is obscure. The obscurity arises, however, because of the ordinary correctness of this statement, so profoundly correct that every great political thinker has devoted the utmost attention to it, from Plato’s proposal of the abolition of the family to Hegel’s account of it as the immediate form of ethical life. Introduced within radical feminism by Carol Hanisch in 1970, the statement already indicated a gap and dislocation — the political displaced toward the personal, where it could not be resolved, leading back, therefore, to the political. Impersonal social relations, including those which are hastily stuffed into the knapsack of identity, are part of any society’s institutional order, codified in legal structures just as they are performed in everyday life.

I have come to think, however, that emancipatory politics belongs to a register which is neither that of the personal nor the political, nor their unity in the institutional order within which our selves are formed. Politics disorders this unity in the name of another possible form of human life. It does not happen very often.

Mistaken Identity was published in May 2018; an auspicious anniversary, half a century since that year of global revolution, which included the great strikes of May 1968, which took place not only in Paris but also in Detroit — which led to the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers that had such a fundamental influence on my thinking. It was also the year that the student movement in Italy would “discover” the class struggle and take up the slogan of “workers’ power,” presaging the explosive “Hot Autumn” of mass strikes the following year. For the preceding decade this history had been just as fundamental for me, ever since I read the few, scattered excerpts available in English of Mario Tronti’s Workers and Capital. Over the course of this decade of my life I was amazed to discover the convergence of these threads — dramatized by a 1968 trip made by John Watson of the League to Italy — that actually pervaded their prehistories: the contact between the group surrounding C.L.R. James and James and Grace Lee Boggs, so influential in Detroit, and the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose ideas had influenced not only the student and workers’ movements decisive for May 1968 but also the Italian workerists themselves, who in turn were fascinated with struggles in the US, reading and eventually translating and writing about W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X.

Viewpoint Magazine, which I launched in 2011 with Salar Mohandesi, was initially, in part, the result of this encounter with history. Such historical convergences excited us with the prospect of elaborating a theoretical convergence, between the revolutionary legacy of the country where we were born and the one whose distance only seemed to stimulate the production of concepts.

In the scene of factory revolts in the 1960s, such concepts arrived on cue. But in 2011, they were acted out in the wings. The Occupy movement pointed to the possibility of class struggle in a manner that seemed unprecedented in my lifetime, with the language of the 99 percent. But this was really a word without a concept, an empty space where we hoped class struggle would emerge — statistics are not a concept of class. And there was considerable debate in this period about precisely what class would be adequate for the present: the old proletariat, the new proletariat, the precariat, the multitude, the surplus population. Just as we tried to draw knowledge from the days when class struggle was a universal referent for revolutionary politics, we were faced with their historical limits. Such theories of class struggle were situated in a period in which capital development was driven by industrial production; and indeed Italian workerism in the 1970s had already confronted this problem. A basic workerist impulse was to say that the hegemonic figure of the industrial worker had been superseded by a new hegemonic figure — the socialized worker, or something along those lines. But this seemed to stop short of posing a deeper conceptual question: was it a viable theory to identify a hegemonic figure of the working class in the first place, to view the historical process as a succession of class compositions? A thread of workerism had recognized the problems with this view, which came to the forefront when historical research extended beyond industrial labor to slavery and other forms of forced labor, especially migrant labor.

Despite the occasional appearance of the words “class composition”, however, even this powerful and sophisticated framework does not play a major conceptual role in Mistaken Identity. As the Occupy movement waned, the Bernie Sanders campaign presented the possibilities and limits of social democracy; and as Black Lives Matter surged forth, Marxist theory proliferated in a range of journals, a publishing ecosystem of which Viewpoint was a part. Mistaken Identity registers, for me, an initiative to answer questions which had not yet been formulated — writing the book was precisely the process which made it possible for me to formulate these questions.

A month before the publication of Mistaken Identity, I was invited to write an article on Martin Luther King Jr. for the broad anniversary of 1968. Massimiliano Tomba had just sent me the manuscript of his book Insurgent Universality, whose titular concept had already been presented in articles that formed an important moment in the development of my argument. I drew from Tomba the distinction between the universalism of abstract bearers of rights — which confined politics to protection by the state — and the universality which surges forth in acts of revolt which refer to the agency of ordinary people. This is such a powerful concept that it is frequently what readers identify as the core contribution of the book — a bit of a mixed compliment for me, since it is not my idea, and for Tomba, since it is actually his. Readers now have the great fortune of being able to go straight to the source; in the meantime, I set to work elaborating my own approach, starting with the question of the universal but sensing that it was not precisely the word I was reaching for.

I tested this in my article on King, struck not only by King’s universalism but the way it was tied to political subjectivity, and how both of them were articulated in theological language. I had encountered the same convergence of themes a decade earlier, at exactly the same time as I read Tronti, but in Alain Badiou’s book Saint Paul. I remembered it while reading Martin Luther King Jr. ten years later, struck by a moment which for me captured a fundamental experience of politics: a kind of test of faith in the face of fear and despair, the courage and commitment which is displayed by those who persevere. We can give no social explanation for this basic condition of politics; it is subjective and prescriptive. But I went no further than this, and the article was rejected. In the meantime, I was completely swept up by speaking about the book, doing interviews, and writing follow-up articles, in some sense holding me within this gap, this theoretical indeterminacy that I had found myself in. A text called “Organizing Histories”, written for the launch of the book — a point by which I had already had many clarifications to make — strikes me upon review as a mobile intervention, an initiative at destabilizing the assumptions that many would bring to the book. I realized that there were certain historical gaps in the etymology I traced in Mistaken Identity, and compiled notes for filling them in, but did not find any opportunity to present them. I maintained a general policy of not responding to reviews, with one exception. I wrote “Zombie Manifesto,” because it seemed to me that the review to which I was replying had provoked not only my detractors, but also my defenders, to use words in a very different way from the way I was.

The very day before it was published, however — so my correspondence indicates — I read an article by Sylvain Lazarus called “Workers’ Anthropology and Factory Inquiry,” which I had come across years before during my research on class composition. Since its framework and context were rather distant from the material we were researching, I had only glanced at it. I turned to it then because in all these debates, I frequently encountered formulations which began: “Socialists think that…” Socialists think that the working class is the only force that can change society — to be sure. Socialists think that that race and class are inextricable — perhaps, or to the contrary that it is only a politics of class that can address the problems misrecognized in terms of race.

Many such statements are possible. But filling in the blank that followed these first two words, it seemed to me, was actually an injunction not to think. I recalled that in a section heading, Lazarus had presented an opposition between “workers’ consciousness” and the statement that “workers think”. Consciousness had been just as much an object of critique in workerism — the concept of class composition, as Mohandesi had written in a popular article, was an alternative to class consciousness. The relations generating class are not always conscious; consciousness is an effect of actions, of the concrete forms of the labor process and of political organization. In this sense, Lazarus's opposition appeared to be consistent with previous thinking.

Nevertheless, I had a nagging feeling that there was a different framework there which posed a threat to my theoretical stability. I will not say in a teleological manner that it had the answers I was looking for. Quite the contrary: it gave me entirely new questions. I wondered if the arguments I had deployed in the book were fully consistent with my earlier formation in a particular kind of Marxism; working through the book’s reception, I started to doubt it was sufficient to question identity as the foundation of politics from the vantage point of another foundation. Digging further, I shifted my emphasis from thinking about class as a sociological category to a political investigation of the successes and failures of the twentieth-century revolutions. This set of sequences, I came to think, framed the challenges of maintaining an emancipatory politics today. I am not committed to a single framework, and I still have many puzzles to work through. But I do wonder where the argument of Mistaken Identity might end up, if we begin again at the beginning.

There were two questions I knew were coming at every talk on Mistaken Identity. The first: what is to be done? I always replied that the question was settled in 1902. The second: but what really is the relation between race and class, or between racism and capitalism? This question I declined to answer. What I wanted to resist was the assumption that if we can demonstrate through social analysis that race and class are fundamentally related, then we will guarantee the correctness of a politics that relates to both of them. I wanted to insist that our starting point should be emancipatory politics, rejecting any foundation and guarantee in social analysis. Social analysis would only subsequently emerge from the forms of thought and action of a political sequence.

How does this social analysis proceed? There are many approaches to defining capitalism's specificity. One is to make a model of what capitalism is, because history is simply too messy. There is too much variation across time and space, too many contingent factors, so we try to clear it all away to get down to the essence, the pure model of what a capitalist society is, and from there we can deduce its necessary aspects. Based on that model we might make the claim that class struggle is intrinsic to capitalism and race is not, because on the basis of the model it is possible to conceive of a capitalist society in which race did not play a determining role. You might, on the other hand — motivated probably by rhetorical strategy rather than analytical precision — produce an even more ornate model in which race is among the gears and levers.

The reality of both capitalism and class, however, is that they are not models: there are specific capitalist social formations, there are specific class compositions, and there are specific processes by which classes are generated. Statistics, as I mentioned earlier, are not class concepts; neither do they constitute a concept of race. Despite all the math you will find in the three volumes of Capital, ultimately the theory of the capitalist mode of production is not mathematical. By illustration: we cannot say that the morning of the working day is devoted to reproducing labor power and that surplus value is produced after lunch. When it comes to race and class, the attempt to assign greater causality to one factor could consist in a statistical analysis: that 65 percent of the tobacco in colonial Virginia was produced by capitalism and 35 percent by white supremacy. Some pose the question differently and ask whether capitalism needs racism, like a venture capitalist might need a fresh glass of kombucha every morning. But even asking whether capitalism needs something or not is based on the premise that there might be a history of capitalism other than the one that actually happened.

There are even greater risks when this method is mobilized for a general theory of race. This is because there is no such thing as race, only specific regimes of racialization. That is, in the first instance, race has no biological or civilizational reality; it is a false way of understanding variation in human beings, and it falsely equates nature and culture as functions of this variation. If we believe that race is real, then we are in the realm of racial ideology, which obscures the real social relations that produce it. Instead, we need concrete analyses of the production of race. Stuart Hall wrote in his indispensable article “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance” that to theorize “racially structured social formations” we have to begin with "the premise of historical specificity.” Rather than dealing with racism as “a general feature of human societies” we investigate “historically specific racisms.” There may certainly be commonalities to these different social formations, and we may find different notions of race throughout history. But we need to understand how they fit into these specific social formations, and how they get reconfigured when other relations in the social formation are transformed.

Thus, race is not transhistorical and it must also not be understood as real — except insofar as any ideology refers to real social relations, is produced by real practices and institutions, and has real effects. In fact, racial ideology is imaginary: it is a representation of the way that we live our relation to real conditions, through the symbols and images that circulate between us. What it represents is the division of populations into groups based on arbitrary physical characteristics, corresponding to the subjection of certain people to increased violence and exploitation. In other words, racism is real as a social relation, and it produces an ideology of race, of biological and civilizational difference, which is false — yet has real effects — and reproduces the social relations of racism.

It is for this reason that I am critical of the association of identity with race. If identity becomes a general category that encompasses not only race but also gender and sexuality, if it becomes transhistorical and all-encompassing, we have totally lost the specificity we need for a materialist analysis. Moreover, identity has a particular function within racial ideology: it associates race with the experiential phenomena of self-definition, group belonging, and social recognition. These experiential phenomena do not explain the complex processes that have assigned people to so-called races. The language of identity obscures these complex processes.

Here, however, things become difficult, because we can also have an imaginary conception of class. I am not making the claim that class is also an identity, or that all politics are identity politics; recall that I do not believe that race should be understood as an identity. There is, rather, a prevailing identity politics on the left that revolves around gaining the working class greater recognition, redressing its injuries, and winning a more equitable redistribution of resources — it is an affirmation of the identity of the working class.

However, the most basic premise of Marxist thought and politics is that the program of the proletariat is the abolition of classes, including the proletariat itself. So, the tendency of affirming a particular kind of group definition that is implied by class identity politics is contrary to the program of proletarian revolution, which involves its self-abolition. Many socialists do subscribe to this kind of class identity politics, and they belong to the tradition that Marx upbraided in his Critique of the Gotha Program. Marx did not conceive of the proletariat as some kind of interest group; in fact, he began with the idea that the proletariat was the negation of the existing society.

Let us turn, then, to class. We may retain the Marxist insistence that class is not merely a category of distribution of wealth — which is the classical liberal ideology but is rather defined in terms of the forms of property. What is of decisive importance is that in Marxism class appears in two forms. First, class is a category of social analysis, a definition in terms of forms of property. But second, fundamentally, class indicates a political subject, the agent of emancipation. The social analysis of forms of property is supposed to be the foundation for the political subject of emancipation. Here, Marxism has encountered many difficulties. The unity of these two forms of class was supposed to be guaranteed by a historical process which is practically automatic: a consciousness of class was supposed to be spontaneously generated by the labor process; a particular definition of class internal to the existing order, of a hegemonic sector of the exploited — classically the industrial proletariat — was understood as the basis for the break with this order.

This complex understanding of class is actually a unique development in the history of modern socialism, which in the form of utopian socialism in the early nineteenth century was centered on businessmen who saw themselves as engaged in philanthropy. They were interested in popularizing their message among workers, but no more than this; there was no intrinsic connection between socialism and class struggle. Socialism did not necessarily signify a program, but a particular view of human nature, which emphasized the fundamental importance of “sociability” or the “social instincts” within it. It implied an organization of society that emphasized cooperation in social action, and intervention in the existing market — but did not necessarily mean collective ownership of wealth. As time went on it became clear that this outlook would align with those who believed in equality — in the manner of the extreme left of the French Revolution — and that this agenda would come into conflict with property rights. On the other side of this was the labor movement, and representative of the labor movement was Chartism, based on the People’s Charter, which used the tactics of strikes, petitions, and mass meetings (the right to assemble was not guaranteed). But the reforms of the charter were specifically based around increasing democracy and winning democratic rights: suffrage, secret ballots, and so on.

For most of its existence as a movement, there was nothing about socialism here. It was a matter of deepening democracy to represent the excluded part. It is in this context that Marxism emerged and fundamentally transformed what socialism meant, in the course of a concrete process of social reorganization through the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. There are two uneven yet intertwined strands to this process. First, replacement of the absolutist state with the organizational form of modern parliamentary democracy. This shift results both from contradictions within the ruling classes and the pressure of uprisings from below. It means the introduction of the universal ideals of liberty and equality, which have their material basis in institutional transformations: the transfer of political power from the monarch to elected parliamentary representatives, and the extension of rights to citizens, including the right to vote, the right to hold property, and the right to freedom of speech and belief. This is not an expression of the idea of democracy, as liberals imagined and still imagine, but a reorganization of existing oligarchic structures to incorporate representative institutions. However, the effect of these new institutions was to allow the demands of various social groups to be expressed in the public sphere, and potentially implemented through the contestation of political power.

The second strand to this process has an uneasy relationship to these democratic developments: the emergence of capitalism. Precapitalist, feudal societies had organic political hierarchies that regulated both the power to govern and the way people met their subsistence needs. Under capitalism, these organic political hierarchies were reorganized into the separate spheres of the political and the economic. This was the result of major processes of dispossession that separated people from the means of subsistence and rendered them dependent on the market, in the form of both industrial wage workers and as forced labor. Now the meeting of subsistence needs was subordinated to the accumulation of abstract wealth — wealth in the form of money — which replaced the conquest of territory characteristic of feudal accumulation. Over the course of these centuries the global population would be increasingly incorporated into the world market.

In his earliest writings, the young Marx was trying to understand the social change taking place as he participated in movements to overcome the residues of the absolutist state. He observed that the new liberal conception of people as the bearers of universal rights was grounded in the social relations of the market, in which people acted as abstract, atomized individuals exchanging their property. But the contradiction of modern liberal society and the revolutions that were bringing it into being was that these market relations foreclosed the emancipation that the revolutions had promised. What had actually happened was that an economic class — the bourgeoisie — had come to represent its particular interests as the universal social interest, and had achieved political domination to represent the whole of society.

So, Marx argued that real human emancipation could only be achieved by the new class that had emerged in opposition to the bourgeoisie, and this was the proletariat. At this early stage Marx advances this thesis because he argues that due to its absolute dispossession, the proletariat can only make the demand for the abolition of the whole society; instead of hegemonically representing its particular interests as the universal social interest, the proletariat would genuinely represent the universal human interest of overcoming domination, which had found in market society its most complex and developed form. Rather than confining this to an economic theory, or a theory of class struggle, we should understand it as a theory about fundamental political questions, including the classical question of who is fit to govern a society. The whole history of political thought poses this question, and proposes different ways of determining who is fit to govern, based on birth and lineage — as in the case of monarchy — or based on education, a common position of classical liberalism.

Either way, the underlying premise is that the majority is not fit to govern; for Marx, the political achievement of the proletariat would be to overcome this question entirely. Real emancipation is the abolition of any distinction between rulers and ruled; it is the universal power to self-govern. It is for this reason that class struggle becomes the central political antagonism of modern societies, and not because of any natural foundation. And so it would take Marx decades to define what classes are in the capitalist mode of production, since this is not simply transparently contained in the discovery of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. In the transitional period of his writing, Marx developed an analysis of class that is inextricably tied up with the question of political organization, a problem that his earlier analysis had not concretely addressed. Because there was a clear contradiction in his logic: if market society has reduced the proletariat to atomized, egoistic individuals, how will they achieve the unity necessary to carry out a revolution? So, in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels had argued that the forces of history indicated a movement toward the unity of the proletariat, because it was brought together into towns and factories by industrial development. As a result, workers began to form unions to struggle for better wages and conditions, and therefore not only improve their lives but also, and more importantly, increase their unity for the final struggle for seizing power. But this was a very distant goal, because the role that was concretely projected for the proletariat at the time was to intervene in the continuing political revolutions against the vestiges of feudalism, which is what happened in I848. But while the Manifesto suggested that the forces of historical necessity would cause this to continue into a revolution against capitalism, it became clear that there was no such automatic process. Actually, class alliances between the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat began to fracture, democratic demands did not lead to a movement against private property, and the programs of different class fractions came into open conflict. So, the defeat of 1848 — when the liberal forces of the middle classes turned against the interests of the working class — introduced a crisis in the automatic conception of revolution.

The original theory of organization in the Manifesto relied on history’s linear progression toward the transcendence of class society, driven by the development of the productive forces and its constant contradiction with the relations of production, and this theory had fragmented. Over the course of the 1850s and ‘60s Marx grew increasingly suspicious of the view that the forces of historical necessity would result automatically in a revolution, and therefore in revolutionary organization. But, nevertheless, there was no clear alternative to this theory. In Capital Marx presented an entirely new analysis of the capitalist mode of production, and in his reflections on the Paris Commune he presented a new understanding of the character of the society which would follow a revolution. However, he did not present a new theory of organization that corresponded to these new insights.

The fact that for Marxism class is both a sociological and empirical object and a revolutionary subject is a political, and not only theoretical, problem. The theory of class as an object internal to the existing order is not the same as the theory of class as a subject that will be capable of overturning the existing order. Definitions of what already exists cannot serve as the basis for realizing the exception to what exists, which is a form of human life that is beyond the market and the state. Categories of social analysis, whether they are class, race, gender, or anything else, describe effects of the social structure; when social analysis is the starting point, and consciousness is understood as the effect of social being, we remain at the level of what exists, and not the capacity of people to think of what is distinct and exceptional, what is in excess of that which exists. As a result, the attempts to give emancipation a foundation in a category of social analysis will always lead us back to what already exists.

Yet the difficult problem is that, at the same time, the project of emancipation only exists in concrete and specified historical modes, and deals with categories of social analysis. No general theory of politics can determine in advance what can be invented by people’s thought. Politics exists, therefore, in particular sequences that have a beginning and an end; they end when the existing procedures and aims of politics have been exhausted.

As I have suggested, Marx proposed a theory of emancipation that meant overcoming the classical conception of the political as the form of good governance, as the determination of who is fit to govern and how best to govern. This means that necessarily emancipation is based on the premise that everyone has an equal capacity for thought, and that they are already, within the existing society, capable of thinking not only of what exists, but of what is possible.

Opening new pathways for thought, and for emancipatory politics — what I am increasingly inclined to simply call “politics” — is a struggle without end. Breaks are uneven. A new language does not instantly and automatically become available to those who are striving for new concepts. I cannot easily assimilate the continuing debates over my book itself to the new reflections its reception provoked. My views are on the record; over time I have grown less polemical on matters merging the personal and the political, since it hardly seems worthwhile to allow one’s person to become a matter of political debate.

Rare, it seems, are the happy times when what we think matters as much as who we are. I do not think I will write about “identity politics” again. But tomorrow I will be someone else; far be it from me to tell me who I am.