For a Neo-Marxism with Guarantees: A Critique of Critical Criticism

In the beginning of the age of Obama, there was the grand objection of Walter Benn Michaels. In a 2008 article for the New Left Review, the distinguished professor of English literature argued that the frenzy of public attention, especially from the foundering American Left, paid to the prospects of the first (white) woman or the first black (man) to occupy the White House is fundamentally misplaced, as these "campaigns are victories for neoliberalism, not over it—serving only to camouflage inequality."¹ The terse intervention presented in Michaels's "Against Diversity" updated arguments first elaborated just two years prior in The Trouble with Diversity, a book-length version of a fundamental misunderstanding that is as easily clarified as it is enduringly useful to the speaker's benefit. Demonstrating its recyclable value, the New Left Review contribution was updated in turn several years later by an interview with Jacobin magazine. The so-called politics of identity, in this account, entail nothing much political at all, year after year.

Racism and sexism, for Michaels, represent not historically specific structures of material and symbolic domination but rather expungeable forms of discrimination within a governing structure of class inequality wrought fundamentally by the history of capitalist exploitation, most recently in its neoliberal stage. By this truncated logic, the social problems inscribed by race and gender hierarchies are extrinsic to capital and could be—indeed are being—resolved within its terms, moving U.S. society closer to a perversely representative, if growing, inequality between the haves and the have-nots: to wit, an equitable suffering without prejudice. So, we reject discrimination, but we are asked to admit that it is a minor problem at best and a terrible distraction at worst. "Diversity," as the promotion of such nondiscriminatory inequality, is not only compatible with advanced capitalism but also ideologically aids and abets its reproduction. A relation of inverse proportionality obtains between our supposed love for identity—the empty category to which race, gender, etc., are consigned—and our erstwhile opposition to inequality. If it has been argued, from within certain precincts of socialist thought, that racism serves mainly to divide and rule the workers of the world and to forestall the possibility of solidarity in the struggle against capital, we see now, in the neoliberal dispensation, that it is possible for the same egalitarian attitude to conclude that antiracism too serves "to ultimately deter materialist class consciousness" (31). There is within this framing no such thing as radical antiracism (or feminism or . . .) pursuant to a substantive equality of condition. There is, by definition, only liberal multiculturalism pursuant to a formal equality of opportunity. Michaels, as other critics have demonstrated, does not bother himself to engage in arguments with the political and intellectual positions of, say, the black radical tradition, in or beyond academe, regarding the practical-theoretical relations between race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality, among other axes of division. He is content to make sweeping assertions that conflate radical, progressive, liberal, and moderate elements of the U.S. body politic into an amalgam of antiracist sentiment devoid of—or rather detached from—what Lisa Duggin refers to as ongoing historical movements "advocating downward redistribution of economic, political, and cultural resources" (40).

Gerald Sim, associate professor of film studies at Florida Atlantic University, openly borrows in The Subject of Film and Race more than a few pages from Michaels's playbook, but the latter treatment at least has the virtue of sustained commentary on or around actually existing scholarship. Across five chapters and a substantive introduction, Sim surveys what he terms "critical race film studies" in the U.S. academy over the second half of the twentieth century. He coins the term by noting what he sees as a convergence of thought between "critical race theory" among legal scholars and analyses of race and racism in film studies over the last two generations. The first generation of critical...