Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 119: Politics and Exhaustion — with Asad Haider
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, Asad Haider
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Paige Smith 0:01
Hello listeners. I'm Paige Smith with Below the Radar. A knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Asad Haider, the author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, to discuss our current state of political exhaustion, as well as questions of identity and class in political movements. I hope you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:31
Hi, there, welcome to Below the Radar. We're very excited to have Asad Haider with us today, he's written a book called Mistaken Identity that will be in the notes with the show and everything. So welcome, Asad.
Asad Haider 0:46
Thanks for having me.
Am Johal 0:48
Yeah, great. I wonder if we can just begin by you just introducing yourself a little bit.
Asad Haider 0:54
Yeah. So, you know, I'm one of the editors of Viewpoint Magazine. We started that back in 2011. It's been a journal of Marxist theory. And it really came into being through the Occupy Movement and as an attempt to think through many of the strategic organizational and conceptual questions that that moment raised. And then more recently, I've written this book Mistaken Identity and since then, I've just continued to engage in this kind of theoretical work of political theoretical work.
Am Johal 1:31
In terms of Viewpoint and its sort of origins in and around the Occupy Movement, reflecting back on it now, I recently, I'm teaching a graduate Liberal Studies class right now and we had Astra Taylor join us. And she's continuing to think and write about it as well, both in terms of democracy, but also some current work that she's doing on solidarity. And looking back on it with some distance, what are some of your reflections around it as a social movement, both its sort of successes and maybe lack of successes in moments how you think about it now that it's been, you know, almost 10 years?
Asad Haider 2:17
Well, you know, what I wrote about it at the time, and continued to kind of be preoccupied with and what Viewpoint was really exploring and then what I recount in the book, we could say two things. One was the question of organization, which was very important to me. And that was, you know, a very central debate that happened to that point, because people were talking about whether horizontalist forms of organization are superior in some way, whether they've surpassed previous forms of organization, if they prefigure different kinds of society, then there were the interpretations, which said, we've had the horizontalism for a long time that isn't able to actually confront the existing structures we need to have. And often that was posed as a binary between organization and disorganization, we need organization. Organization means something maybe that people call a party, not clear whether that means a vanguard party, or it means a political party on the model of a parliamentary party.
Asad Haider 3:26
So, there were many kinds of conflations, questions, or let's say, answers to questions which weren't posed yet. And I thought that, first of all, most of the time, we are already dealing with forms of organization that maybe are not clearly articulated, maybe haven't been deliberately constructed, but there are organizational practices at work. And they have to be thought through deliberately, and they can't just be understood as expressions of a pre-existing model, as determined by a historical moment. And I mean, there are many ways that these kinds of positions are appealing to people.
Asad Haider 4:08
But it seemed to me that it was necessary to think of organization as something which we don't know yet what the answer is to what's the right way to organize and that has never been the case, you know, even when the formation of political parties, of workers parties at the end of the 19th century, that also was an experiment that was determined based on a very specific situation, very specific set of historical changes, even if it was often represented as though it was just determined by the laws of history. So frequently, you find this you know, in the history of Marxism and so on, that these phenomena that are really based on specific circumstances are presented as though they were historical necessity. But we have done understand the specificity. So that was one important theme.
Asad Haider 5:04
And then the one that I talked about in Mistaken Identity is, you know, at a certain level, we were encountering the question, Occupy, of who is involved here? Who's making up this group? Who is this 99%? And it often did seem to be the case that it was largely white. Why is that true in, you know, majority black cities, why is that true in all kinds of circumstances in which, let's say, the class politics that were at least gestured to, in the Occupy movement, were of considerable importance for many people of colour. But it's not a movement that many of these people of colour saw as one that they wanted to get involved in, or it wasn't one that represented a broader spectrum of people. That was a problem. But then at the same time, there was this problem on the other end, which is this kind of language of identity, which always got rerouted into a kind of discourse of guilt, a confessional discourse, which didn't actually change the composition of these movements. But it resulted in a lot of what you know, we might call sad passions, resulted in a lot of negative ways of people relating to each other that were actually disempowering, and actually prevented the possibility of expanding and growing. And so that contradiction is what led to a lot of Mistaken Identity.
Am Johal 6:40
Yeah, this this question of scale, and duration, and organization is so interesting, I've seen David Harvey and many others write about having resistance movement function at the scale of power, that oftentimes we're not functioning at the scale or even when I'm teaching with my own students to describe experiments to Russian example, the Chinese example, the 20th century examples of state, those examples don't go very far, or they don't resonate with the students because of their own problematics.
Am Johal 7:14
So, this question of hegemony keeps coming back as to how we how we do this. In your book, Mistaken Identity. I loved its playfulness and there's an anecdote in the book where you're in elementary school to do an assignment on I think it was Isaac Newton, and you ended up picking up a copy of Huey Newton. So, wondering if you can talk a little bit about where the idea behind that book came from, because questions of identity politics, others are always around. And it's certainly used by the right in so many ways, in a very simplistic way, I think you're writing from a fairly generous point of view from the left as a critique, and that makes it a very interesting intervention. So, first of all, where did the idea of the book come from?
Asad Haider 8:03
So, I became introduced, I became politicized, introduced, and especially introduced to Marxism through the Black movements in the United States. And so, to me, that there was always a fundamental unity between the historical movements against racism, and the opposition to capitalism, and the fact of international solidarity against capitalism, imperialism, which may mean at certain stages, that the old language, national self determination, or what we might call an other more broadly, different forms of autonomous organization, are appropriate and necessary. But that does not alter the fundamental vision of universal emancipation. And that was, you know, you can't read these original texts, like, for example, those of Huey P. Newton, or other major figures, even people who are understood to be entirely, who are depicted as separatists or whatever, like Malcolm X, for example, you find the same language, even when he was in the Nation of Islam and so on, you'll find him using this kind of language, you know, that I'm talking about everybody in the world who is oppressed by the whiteness of, you know, the examples, he uses the examples of the Chinese revolution, these are basic examples for him of what the political project is. And so that was something I learned from this material.
Asad Haider 9:41
And so, the fact that I encountered discussions, polarized discussions about race or about what the relation between race and class and various things of that kind, polarized discussions in which, on the one side would say, you know, that Marxism or any kind of anti-capitalist project is for white people, it's not useful for people of color who you know, have their own unique sets of demands and interests. And so, we have to view that with suspicion. That was one kind of perspective.
Asad Haider 10:15
The other perspective was one which said, you know, well, ultimately, on the basis of maybe some kind of theory of history or theory of human nature, only class is really fundamentally important. And all of these other things, race, other social relations, ultimately are going to come back down to class. And so that's what we have to focus on. And you know, that the fact that there was this polarization after I had been so steeped in and influenced by these important traditions that never saw them as separable, that really framed my kind of political experience of this, and that is, as you say, there are many critiques of identity politics, but it's rare to find explicit critiques, or analyses that refer back to this perspective, this revolutionary perspective. And I think that's the one that I wanted to bring to the book.
Am Johal 11:16
How did you find the reception of the book in progressive circles? Like, where did the conversation get welcomed in? And what kind of critiques did you hear as well?
Asad Haider 11:28
Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, many people responded enthusiastically, said that it resonated with their political experiences, or, or helped them to think through political challenges and problems that they are facing. And that's something that is, that's very important feedback for me. There is also very once, you know, this polarization is very strong. And so, if you write something which isn't simply a denunciation, many people will, who are on one extreme, or the other, will just think you're in the opposite camp. And then anything you say can be, you know, people have extraordinary abilities of interpretation, and, you know, imagination that anything you say, can then be somehow presented as confirming that you're in the other camp. So, a lot of it was that and there's, like, as I said, I mean, anything you say will be creatively interpreted. So, I didn't really know how to engage in those discussions. I responded to a review one time, but otherwise, you know, there's been, there's been an ongoing process of clarification. I did from debates learn a lot about, I first of all, learned a lot.
Asad Haider 12:55
Like I said, there's this basic method that I think is very important for reading a text, or reading a political situation. And saying, very often, we're answering questions that we haven't posed, and we need to figure out what the questions are, and then figure out if those are the right questions. And so, there is a significant extent to which in Mistaken Identity, I was answering questions that I have not clearly posed for myself yet. And so sometimes, that, you know, sort of, people brought other questions to the book, and so you have this kind of indeterminacy of the meaning. And, for example, many people asked, okay, the book, that's all very nice, but what actually is the relationship between race and class? You didn't explain it. And then I realized, as I as I tried to elaborate what I think about that, and what the points that were made in the book, I realized that I didn't present a theory of that, because I don't actually think that a theory of the relationship between race and class, first of all, is possible at a certain level of abstraction that people want to explain it. And then second, I don't think that is the basis for determining a politics, which very frequently and this is something that obviously we're going to get to, very frequently the assumption is that when we figure out the correct social analysis, that will provide us with the correct politics. And one of the things I learned from thinking through Mistaken Identity and looking at the discussions and intervening where it was appropriate. I think I learned that point that that is a false assumption and that's one which we have to think through.
Am Johal 14:49
Yeah, and I think there's other there's historical passages in periods that are interesting, you know, I was involved in student politics in the 90s. And so, they were very forms of what today might be called identity politics, but as people opened up spaces, like women's centres to Colour Connected Against Racism and others, the questions of solidarity were still quite central. And I think to some degree, those are being adjudicated in a different way. And maybe there's maybe challenges between and amongst movements, a little bit more intensely. I think also, in when it comes to the specificity of some conversations and where they're at, in the Canadian example, colonialism and the Indigenous experience there is a specificity to that context that requires a different type of politics and a centering of it. But then also, then questions of solidarity continued to be played out, and also the disproportionate impact on black people in policing in the Canadian context and others. And so, I think that questions that poses to movements broadly on that question of movement building, solidarity, organization, to the labour movement, as well and academic institutions and others.
Am Johal 16:15
I wanted to ask you about, I was able to attend the other day, a workshop with the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis in the world of Zoom and all of that it was great to see you present there. And you were discussing partially the work of Sylvain Lazarus, who has been a long-time collaborator of Alain Badiou, and wondering if you can talk about what you're finding interesting in his work, and that he's quite an obscure figure in many ways, particularly in the English-speaking world. Badiou's work is circulated maybe a little bit more than his has. But what is it in his work that you're finding particularly interesting to think through today?
Asad Haider 16:58
So, you know, as I mentioned, I only ever responded to one review of Mistaken Identity, and I was looking back over my, you know, over my records to see, you know, where I started to develop particular points. And I realized it was, it was the day before I published that I read this article by Lazarus called Workers' Anthropology and Factory Inquiry. And I had come across, you know, one interesting point to make here is that Viewpoint, from the beginning, was very grounded in the tradition of Italian workerism, and the idea of class composition. And so, class was a fundamental concern. But the idea was that class isn't something that is an already existing sociological object, you have to understand how classes are actually composed. And they're composed through particular kinds of productive processes, particular labour processes, because it's not just that you add up individuals, and suddenly you have a class, it's that, you know, workers enter into the factory, and they become a cooperative, productive force. And then you have something which isn't just a collection of individuals, but it's an actual, it's been, people have been composed into something that we can call a class.
Asad Haider 18:15
And then that, so then you have processes of organization when people engage in political action and that also composes classes. So, this is a complex process. Of course, this also rested on the assumption that every political question would be referred back to the question of class composition. And so, for example, if you want it to go beyond the narrow framework of, you know, the European and male industrial worker, you would point out, you would show how the working class is also composed of women working in the home, was also composed of slaves and migrants, and so on, throughout the history of capitalism. And with that, you would show you know how all of these other social relations were fundamentally important. They weren't they weren't somehow secondary. But you did that through showing how they were also part of class. So that was this very sophisticated theory of class composition did that.
Asad Haider 19:14
And so, I had that in my mind, but it actually, that doesn't appear in Mistaken Identity. I don't actually make that argument. Though I had that, of course, in my mind. And then, as I said, one of the realizations, one of the questions that I hadn't posed, that I was trying to answer in the book was, actually what is the politics of universal emancipation? And the answer I provided, without posing the question, was that class presents the basis for a politics of universal emancipation. So, I looked at, you know, where class dropped out of anti-racism. I, you know, looked at how class dynamics affected these movements, but I didn't explain why it is that we should equate class and emancipatory politics. That question was suspended.
Asad Haider 20:06
And one thing that I realized through studying Lazarus was that when you pose the question that way, you cannot understand the character of emancipatory politics because emancipatory politics has to be formulated first. Because if you start with any sociological category, any category of the existing reality, you will not be able to conceive of the way that there is a politics which can go beyond the situation that is that exceeds the situation. Badiou talks about this too, in his own way. So, that was a that was an important realization that came from reading this article, which, which we had come across in studying workers inquiry, which was a fundamental practice of Italian workerism that led to the method of class composition. I'd come across this article, but never really read it because it was outside of the traditions that we were talking about. For some reason, I read it at this point. And I saw that he was dealing with the same problem of going to a workplace and trying to figure out what's happening there, but a totally different approach, which was not to say that, okay, let's say that, we are going to look at the way the productive processes set up and then we're going to figure out on that basis, what kinds of political organizations and practices people are going to form. It was actually to ask people, how they understood what was politically at stake in the factory, what were the opposed positions that they took in the factory? And how did particular words like immigrant or worker, how did these words demonstrate these oppose, what Lazarus, he calls these problematic words, which represent a post prescription.
Asad Haider 21:50
So, the bosses will have a particular kind of position on who is a worker, who counts as a worker. The workers will have their own prescription, then he, so he investigates that, and that, you know, sort of reflects this difference in method, which is that workers are able to formulate a thought about what politics is, which cannot just be derived from their labour praxis, and that you need to start with that. And then, from that you can determine what politics is taking place. And, you know, this is the step that is not clearly, it's not clear what the relationship then is between determining these political prescriptions, and then doing the social analysis, which still is, is unavoidable. I don't know how to explain that relationship, yet. But I think that with the approach that Lazarus is presenting, we balance the constant assumption that we have, that we always need to start with social analysis.
Am Johal 22:58
Yeah, or this is you say, in your own paper that this notion of emancipation exists, is oftentimes posed with, in terms of a specific situation of domination, and I guess, in Badiou's work, From Logic to Anthropology, he also talks about a kind of affirmative dialectic as opposed to the negative and he's likely building on his conversations with, with Lazarus. You also spoke the other day about this notion of exhaustion, and how to think it through philosophically, where to place it. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that, because I think it came up towards the end of your talk the other day, but I wanted to hear more.
Asad Haider 23:46
Yeah. And I just, there's an article now on the similar South Asian Avant-Garde anthology with this title, Emancipation Exhaustion. I go into one of the only figures who has elaborated on Lazarus' work, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba. And then you have also Michael Neacosmos who has followed that. So, these are some of the only people who, besides the small circle in France, who have elaborated on this.
Asad Haider 24:12
So, the category of exhaustion is very closely related to what Lazarus calls the method of saturation. And so, you know, it's not totally clear how they're distinguished in his usage or Badiou's usage. But I mean, I've kind of used them in distinct ways. But the method of saturation is extremely important. And it's about, what relationship do we have to past moments of politics, which we somehow understand as having failed? And that is something that anybody who's committed to emancipatory politics, you cannot avoid this question. And there are so many ways that we can try to make this question easier for ourselves in a way that's ultimately, we're ultimately deceiving ourselves, because it's not an easy question. So, we can say, you know, well, if this guy had been in charge instead of this guy, it would have worked out better, you know. We can say, if the revolution happened in this country instead of that country, it would have worked out. So, you know, that there are all kinds of wish fulfillments that we engage in, in that sense. But the difficult thing to do is to say, actually, there was a political event there, there was new possibilities were created in revolutions, and these other moments, and they also came to an end they, and the inventions that they had generated, they lapsed, to use Lazarus' term.
Asad Haider 25:45
And so, the method of saturation is about understanding, instead of taking, you know, some kind of, instead of thinking in terms of counterfactuals, instead of thinking in terms of some kind of teleology in which these errors will be overcome, when we really go through the process of historical development that's required, you understand politics is happening and sequences that begin and end. And in these sequences, there are inventions of new categories, new sites of politics, and when those categories no longer respond to their situation, when these sites of politics, like councils, Soviets, other things like that, when they lapse, the sequence has ended. And so, the method of saturation says we understand what invention took place, while also understanding how the sequence ended. And that is a very different kind of relationship to this history. And it's one that's very much embedded in the moment that Lazarus and Badiou are writing in, which Badiou talks about in an interesting way, as a crisis of Marxism in the 80s. It's a situation in which everybody's having to grapple with the fact that the, you know, people who participated in these organizations, these communist, Marxist organizations, had to grapple with the fact that their language didn't seem to be able to explain the situation that we are now in. And so, that's the fundamental insight of the method of saturation.
Asad Haider 27:14
But the way that I'm talking about exhaustion, is that, first of all, you know, when a political sequence comes to, to an end, you can say that its categories have been exhausted. You can't just take the categories of a past political sequence and just circulate them to the present and say, like, well, that's just always how politics works. No, it was exhausted there. And so, you have to think about what's going to be specific to a new political sequence.
Asad Haider 27:43
And then there's another sense, which relates to this moment from which this theory is being presented this moment of the crisis of Marxism, this moment of the failure and collapse of state socialism, which is that it's now become almost impossible for us to imagine political sequences on the kind that took place in the 20th century. We have, of course, many important social movements, that, you know, there's never a moment in which people simply meekly submit to domination. There's always resistance. But do we have these sequences, which become universal reference for politics in which entirely new ways of conceiving of politics are happening, which actually transform the existing social structures. You know, the sequences in which nothing is the same again, and the possibility of an entirely different kind of world is presented. It's hard to imagine that now, and even people who are engaged in politics, who may be engaged in left politics, may frequently think, well, that's, you know, we don't need to think in those terms, because we're going to figure out how to rearrange the society we have to be more fair, so that, you know, everybody's got what they need, but not to imagine a kind of form of human life in which people govern themselves, in which everything is common. And we've gone beyond the relations of private property in the state that have defined the whole of human history up to this point. And so, that's the moment of exhaustion. And that is, I think that if we want to understand the problems that are associated with identity politics, and so on, I don't think we start by looking at people's bad ideas, or we start by looking at how they've made mistakes in their judgments. We look at the fact that we are in this moment of exhaustion, and it's become difficult to mobilize political sequences.
Am Johal 29:53
I'm wondering, you know, in so much of your work, there's a kind of thread or through line, or maybe I'm reading into it, this, the question of solidarity comes in organization, durability strategy of movements and left politics. I'm wondering in this sort of moment of authoritarian populisms that abound, the kind of large questions of community that come to the surface, how you think through what strategy might look like today in, not a post Trump era, because Trumpism is still here, in the context of you being in the in the United States, what are some things that are on the table for you as questions of the present moment?
Asad Haider 30:40
That's a great question. I mean, I think that this moment is very much framed by exhaustion, and we could look at that in a kind of more immediate sense. I described on the one side, the way that political sequence comes to an end, and its categories have been exhausted, then I described this moment of a kind of general historical crisis in which it seems like the possibility of political sequence has been exhausted.
Asad Haider 31:13
Then there's also, let's just, you know, to be very simplistic about it, a little bit of crude thinking, as Brecht said. You know, when you participate in politics, you really eventually get exhausted. Anybody who is participating in the uprisings over the summer, you know, this is something Badiou, if people read his book on riots, Rebirth of History, he captures a lot of this very well and he frames a lot of these problems very well. I mean, there are moments in politics, when suddenly it becomes possible for you to sleep for three hours, to speak with, you know, 15 people you never knew before, and suddenly organize a massive demonstration that night. Anybody who's participated in politics knows that experience. And you also know that that doesn't go on forever. You know, there are so many ways that that comes to an end. It may come to an end, just because you cannot, your body cannot keep going, it may come to an end because people are unable to agree on anything and they begin to attack each other. And that's one of the dilemmas of these kinds of outbursts of politics that have to be understood and what you said, you know, the question of durability is a very complicated question.
Asad Haider 32:38
And sometimes before I often thought, earlier, you raised the question of scale, and so on. I often thought that the important thing is to figure out how a movement can grow, how, and in Mistaken Identity I've talked about coalitions. There are various ways of understanding this. And you know, these are all important and legitimate questions. But there's also what Badiou talks about, which is, I think, in Rebirth of Histories as contraction, early on, in Theory of the Subject, he called it concentration, there's a sense in which for there to be a durability, there has to be some shrinking too. That you have to get the people who are really focused on this and who have come to a kind of, who have shared reference points, who are capable of lasting beyond the moment of eruption. And keeping it going, keeping politics, or the possibility of politics going. And there has to be that as well.
Asad Haider 33:41
And so, I think a lot of these questions about solidarity, and so on, they're questions that we can think through in terms of how people relate to each other, how people understand issues of identity, how they understand their own experiences, and what that has to do with their political participation. These are all important, but I think that actually, everything changes, if you have a situation which there is continuity of politics. If you can establish those organizational forms, and you can have that kind of concentration which let's understand it in a broad sense. We're not talking about like, some kind of tightly knit party, we're understanding this conceptually. If you have that, then I think different things become possible. So, if solidarity suddenly becomes, you can approach it from an entirely different way if you have that continuity of politics.
Am Johal 34:42
Badiou calls it the possibility of the possibility of something new.
Asad Haider 34:46
Yes.
Am Johal 34:46
And this is also this notion of fidelity in Badiou which the task of the philosopher is to be happy, but the victory comes at the end. This kind of thing. Asad, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar. I feel like I could speak to you for hours but we're going to have you back again on Below the Radar. Thank you so much for joining us.
Asad Haider 35:10
Thank you. A pleasure to talk about this material.
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Paige Smith 35:14
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. This has been our conversation with Asad Haider. You can find links to his book Mistaken Identity and other writings in the show notes. Thanks again for tuning in. And we'll see you next time on Below the Radar.
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