Rebuilding, Rethinking

By Himani Bannerji
New Socialist Magazine January/February 2001

Excerpts from a talk presented at the for Re-building the Left Conference (27 October 2000)

I am glad to have the opportunity of joining my voice with others in this project of re-building the left - though I have to say my emphasis lies on "building" rather than on the prefix "re" - because I think a lot of building, of covering ground, has to be done before we can talk of having a large and consolidated left.

The crucial issue here is one of dialogue, of beginning a conversation, and the good thing is that this conference takes that initiative. The idea is of course to engage many voices, political desires and demands, and yet not be lost in a quagmire of liberal pluralism - to link the notion of alternative to that of opposition. A good dialogue involves both speaking and listening - to hear in particular the voices of those, and issues, which have not been prominent in the traditional Canadian left. Of course, there is an element of risk here - because there is no guarantee that the interlocutors may like or agree with what they hear. But there is no shortcutting this process - if being left is to be more than a state of mind, but rather a practice of widely based and adequately theorized political organization. But it also entails vexing traditional definitions of what being left has meant so far in Canada.

Vexing the notion of the left I will begin to unsettle the common sense of being left by saying that the traditional left politics in Canada, of Toronto in particular - the politics of class consciousness and class struggle - does not sufficiently address the concerns of non-white people, of women like myself for example. Though the notions of "gender, `race' and class" are paid some attention as parts of a theoretical formula, in actuality they have not been really understood through each other or organized upon. Take, for example, "race" and class relations. I don't think that it is possible in a country like Canada - an evolving white settler colony - to talk about how class actually is formed without speaking of historical and present, direct and indirect kinds of gendered racialization of labour on all sites. Sexist-racism is intrinsic to the socio-economic organization of this imperialist patriarchal capital as anywhere else in the West. And it is apparent to all practitioners of life in Canada and the U.S. as lived experience. Three old ladies in an elevator who recognized in me a cleaner were clearly able to do so on the basis of their daily observation, or a receptionist in a doctor's office who asked me if I were a "real" doctor.

The other part of our left task is to recognize that this racialization involves all of us. The stereotypical stroke that darkens some implicitly whitens others. The peculiarities of all these cultural, ideological and social formations, our common senses and hegemonies, that constitute class, capital and the state, create our political unconscious. In my opinion, they need to be thought through more integratively, more extensively, more in-depth. To say this is not a matter of haranguing the left from the outside, because as a certain kind of left person, as an anti-racist feminist Marxist, I speak from within too. But I am not comfortable so far with the political unconscious of the self-identified Marxist tradition in Canada. I have had to leave behind too much of my life and lives of others like me when I have tried to belong to this established left. It is this that brought me to query the common sense of Canadian Marxism. So I have to point out that being "left", in my sense, entails not just naming absences of people, but identifying gaps in thinking about the social and the political as carried on so far in the name of Canadian Marxism. And seeing this is an irreducible condition of being "left", of commitment to class struggle.

In being able to actually see how class in Canada just cannot happen without patriarchal racialization, without a ground of colonialism. This brings me to the topic of anti-racist politics, and to point out that anti-racism is vital to a politics of class struggle. It is important to recognize that the mixed class-consciousness of Canadians is textured with "race" consciousness. So the left has to see and act upon the realization that anti-racism is not about being good to less privileged others or a matter of "white guilt". It is as much a fight against social and cultural organization of "whiteness" as "blackness". An empty left politics that leaves class as an abstraction, non-socialized, has its opposite in the petty bourgeois politics of ethnic and "race" consciousness by some non-white Canadians.

State patronage of community creation through ethnicity and "race", a kind of cultural nationalism which engages in religious fundamentalism - to dire consequences for those who are included within the communal definition - needs to be challenged by the kind of left politics I talk about. In this context, sexual orientation and rights of women to their own bodies and minds become important, because such cultural nationalisms in the name of god and community produce more than the usual patriarchal violence against women, gays and lesbians and the secular forces in these communities. Similarly, the other identity politics of bourgeois or petty bourgeois feminism, which can not see oppression beyond gender or patriarchy, has to be challenged by the left. What Australians call "femocracy", a power block of women professionals tied to the coat tails of "race" and class, is not an answer to the oppression of women. In the false dualism of politics which speaks in terms of either/or - that is, of "race" or class, of culture or economy - or in the limited petty-bourgeois upwardly mobile politics of "race", ethnicity and gender identities, there is no room for us to be left. The sharpest edge of this "race" and gender politics without a recognition of class lies in fights around representation and inclusivity in their narrow senses. But there is a tendency among many, especially academics, to see this language or politics as being "radical" - the socio-economic mobility project of moving from the margin to the centre as being somehow revolutionary.

What is to be done? So what should we do? Among many tasks at hand I want to speak to a few. A very important one, not because I am an academic, but a Marxist, is the need to rethink in order to rebuild. I refer to the notion of praxis - Marx's belief in creating a reliable knowledge for change. This means getting together in smaller or larger groups on an ongoing basis for developing a political understanding, using various media to project these understandings and visions. It means to organize on the ground of actualizing democracy, inquiring into established patterns of political entitlements and participations. To look at the nature of citizenship, whose hierarchical character comes through even from the terminology of "Canadians" and "others" - immigrants, visible minorities and so on. To look at this otherness in the ideology of the nation [we] can begin by studying and supporting the politics of the First Nations - the aboriginal peoples of Canada - and to ask why and how our political world is divided between subjects and citizens. How else, without this distinction, can we understand the state's violence against the poor, aboriginal or black community? While we are doing that we can expand our resistance against what Constance Backhouse has called "colour coded" laws of Canada - regarding land claims, immigration and refugee laws or laws of de-certification of credentials.

I would also like to draw attention to some problems of labour politics in Canada on the ground of "race" and gender issues, and even in class terms. It is not a secret that the labour movement in Canada has a legacy of anti-immigrant sentiments sometimes verging on racism, and that the self-proclaimed feminist or women's movement has sidelined the issue of racism. I might justifiably speak to the paucity of these self-proclaimed "representational" social movements' outreach among so-called people of colour. This is done by not addressing issues of concern to them and having very few organizational devices that work among them, not knowing them socially as people, as well as seeing militancy about racism among the workers as being divisive of class struggle. The problem is further complicated by lack of organization among the lowest levels of menial, "flexible", home and piece workers - which happen to be the job ghettos of non-white labour.

I want to end by drawing attention to the need for anti-poverty organization among those subjects, not citizens, of Canada, who are not necessarily homeless in the sense of being on the streets in large numbers, but are still "homeless" in being far away from where they originated, subject to extreme poverty, daily racism, various degradations inflicted by the Canadian state, and who live in the highrise or other kinds of urban slums in Toronto and its outskirts. We also need to expand the women's movement to involve non-white women, and as such to increase the presence and concerns of such women who are subject to class violence resting on racism and homophobia. We need to ask how our left movement can address the multiple oppression of women who are working class and racialized and punished for their sexual orientation. We need to examine and counter-organize against the media in relation to their creating and mediating the kinds of oppression I have spoken about. Here the implication of culture in politics needs to be specially highlighted, as the role of the media in creating our political unconscious is crucial. Above all we have to link our struggles on different grounds and find their commonalities.

In conclusion I would like to say that we can and need to evolve a political vision beyond segregated single issues. Even when engaged in a specific struggle in a particular site, we have to keep the bigger picture in mind, inform any issue with a broader political understanding. We have to engage in an active dialogue in the way I suggest. This may make a truly "inclusive" politics possible, without condescension or erasure.