The Invoice, or, Unwrapping Origami Activism

Last week I received via email a mysterious invoice from the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) instructing me to pay (via cheque or direct bank transfer) the sum of $226.00, purportedly for the quantity of 1 (one) ‘Bound Farrago Editions’. Remembering the miscommunication and bureaucratic tomfoolery that resulted in said purchase, I was unexpectedly swamped with warm memories of my time in the Union — of gin-swilling in the Farrago office and mud-slinging on Council.

It’s only now — nearly six months out — that I realise just how much I owe (aside from the aforementioned fliff) to UMSU and its corps of scraggy activists.* My year in the union taught me to defend my beliefs passionately; it also exposed me to that tired brand of leftism that wheezes on in the iron lung of the academy, giving me the opportunity to formulate my own system of liberal politics in its place. The Union provides the sort of departure point for contemporary political debate that Cambodia — a place where left and right are even less meaningful than at home — can never hope to. How I miss the kindergarten combativeness of Union activism, with its self-parody and lonely excesses! It is to real politics what The Bold & The Beautiful is to the whole technicolour glory of life itself.

I also fear that being around rational, intelligent individuals for the last two months has blunted the pugnacious edge to my writing — and what better way to tune up than with another excoriation of the lazy formulas that masquerade as critical thought on the New wing of the Left? Most of the following was written sometime last year as an argument (if I recall correctly) against affirmative action, but it could apply in equal measure to the issue of selective censorship, which I’ve used as an introduction and an extension of my past commentaries on the subject.

After receiving a copy of Ramon Glazov’s piece from edition three of Farrago, I am even more bewildered why it should have been a target of political action. As far as I can make out, Glazov raised hackles around the Union by using the phrase ‘yellow dollar’ to describe the premiums that the university squeezes out of its Asian students. So what? I’ve already argued at length that personal ‘offense’ is a spurious basis for censorship. Most confusing, however, was the reference in the UMSU Council motion to the ‘queer, women [and] international students’ who may have been ‘offended’ by the expression. Let’s assume for a moment that Glazov’s comment was an overtly racist one. Why should women, gays, lesbians and international students as a group have any more reason to be offended than white men who oppose racism? Why are certain categories deemed more ‘sensitive’ to offense and worthy of protection than others?

In a influential 1968 essay entitled ‘Repressive Tolerance’, German philosopher Herbert Marcuse argued that traditional freedoms and liberties had been co-opted as tools of oppression by the ruling class, which used their claim to ‘tolerance’ as a smokescreen for the perpetuation of ‘oppressive’ and exploitative practices. Marcuse denied that these rights were inviolable, arguing quite openly that their selective restriction was necessary if marginalised groups were ever to achieve ‘liberation’ from their circumstances of oppression. Aside from arguing that potentially repressive means were justified by wooly, panglossian ends, Marcuse created a unbridgeable division between those who supported the status quo and the mass of ‘victims’ who were presumed to oppose it. Both groups were seen as undifferentiated and monolithic, providing a carte blanche justification — when ‘the revolution’ finally arrived — for the arbitrary restriction of the rights of whole groups on the basis of subjective judgments. If white men benefited from the economic and social status quo and certain minority groups experienced discrimination, the state should reduce the rights of those deemed privileged and ‘redistribute’ them (so to speak) to the disadvantaged.

But on university campuses, the only place where this pseudo-Marxist cant has taken any root, it has failed as a program for political action: if women, queers and ‘students of colour’ have at certain times and places been subjected to grave injustices (including imagined ones in the pages of the student paper) it is hopelessly misguided to interpret them as a unified political class with a unified set of political interests. Indeed, this is tantamount to saying that the interests of all women and all queers and all international students are essentially interchangeable; that they all, at the bottom of it, want the same thing. This is the intellectual equivalent of the first little piggy’s house: an edifice of straw and hay that can be toppled with barely a huff of common sense.

Anyone who has breathed the air outside of the hermetic confines of gender studies or New Left theory will realise that the categories of class, race, gender, religion and sexuality cross and overlap in complex ways, muddying the neat classifications of identity politics. This has implications for those who argue in favour of ‘protection’ for groups on the grounds of historical disadvantage: who, for instance, can say objectively whether a middle-class woman is more or less disadvantaged than a working-class man, or whether a male African immigrant is more or less ‘structurally oppressed’ than a cosmopolitan lesbian? Some obviously experience disadvantage some of the time, but how — aside from sheer hopeful divination — does one quantify relative levels of discrimination?

As absurd as these conjectures are, they are pertinent for the radical left, since they would presumably determine the relative level of bureaucratic recognition that individuals would receive in a Marcusean state. Giving certain groups the legal (or quasi-legal) right to, say, freedom from ‘offense’ requires that they pass some hypothetical ‘disadvantage test’, proving that they have been victimized enough to qualify for these rights. That Caucasian men are ruled out at the outset is a sine qua non: their membership of a perceived historical in-group of oppressors and tyrants overrides any idea that individual rights should be applied equally. However, life shows us that there are outliers in every group — conservative lesbians, female tyrants, straight white males who melt into a puddle at the most innocuous Glazovism — who will always defy categorisation. Left-wing radicals who generalise about the proclivities of ‘white males’ — and thus justify stripping them of certain rights — are qualitatively no different from right-wing bigots who once advocated the same treatment for ‘blacks’ or ‘gays’.

More important from a political perspective is the question of who would be wise enough to be the final arbiter of this ornate taxonomy of disadvantage. Marcuse would likely offer some political organisation with the power to back its decisions with force; but any state ruled by such a power, where resources and rights are apportioned arbitrarily according to relative levels of disadvantage — according to what one is rather than what one does — fails all but the most elementary tests of ethics. This Marcusean logic totally subsumes the individual within monolithic categories, disregarding the dimension of individual psychology, which arguably affects human behaviour as much as membership of any historical ‘group’.

To branch out one step further: it is even more daft that ‘capitalism’ should be indicted, as it so often is, as the mainspring in this structure of gender/class/race oppression. Pure, corrupt capitalism — vividly caricatured in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle — is brutal and cruel, but liberal capitalism, regulated by government, is by its very definition non-discriminatory. Certainly, it discriminates against the lazy and indigent; but individual rights apply to all, and resources are apportioned on the objective basis of ability rather than on the subjective basis of entitlement. F.A. Hayek openly admitted in The Road to Serfdom that capitalist systems create economic inequalities, but argued that these inequalities were ethically acceptable since in a properly functioning system they are not determined in a discriminatory way. He contrasted this with socialist (or strongly social democratic) systems, in which positive discrimination is used to ‘force’ economic equality, purposely constraining or elevating the priorities of whole swathes of society in the process.

You wouldn’t know it from his Reaganite-Thatcherite admirers, but Hayek looked upon nationalised health, education and welfare systems with some favour: in fact, he supported any measure that could, in a non-discriminatory way, increase equality of opportunity, ensuring people were given equal — or as close to equal as possible — chances in the free market. But Hayek’s most valuable insight was that individual rights are meaningless unless applied equally. He acknowledged the logic behind discriminatory government policies, but cautioned against individual liberties being truncated out of an impatient desire for change:

There is some danger that our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society… [such as] the tendency to rely on administrative coercion and discrimination where a modification of the general rules of law might, perhaps more slowly, achieve the same object.

This is why campaigns against racism and sexism must fight words with words, and actions with actions, all the while maintaining a firm distinction between the two. To arbitrarily restrict the rights of one group to the supposed, but often mistaken, benefit of others is to take a step away from the Enlightenment ideal of equality before the law, which underpinned the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and continues to provide the best compass for progressive change. True racists and sexists will not be deterred by censorship, and their worldview will persist regardless of the saber-rattling of the origami activists on our university campuses. History teaches us that positive change can occur; but it also warns against forcing the pace of progress to the satisfaction of hobby-horse politics and personal vanity.

Let these paper tigers burn.

*Of course, every generalisation I make about the Student Union is just that: a generalisation. There are many within UMSU who do excellent work — this includes the caretakers, administrative staff and a fair portion of the representative wing — and anyone who knows me will know to which factions and individuals I refer when I talk about the minority of bunglers, utopianists, supplicants and bootlicks that burrow through the wood heap of student politics.

~ by Sebastian Strangio on May 23, 2008.