Populism versus Biopolitics

Political Absurdities (Part One)

By Arpad Szakolczai

Our high-brow, established, respectable newspapers, and other similar means of communication, are for years now speechless with outrage concerning recent political developments; and more so every day. Apart from Trump winning again, which for them simply defies belief, showing the evident and utmost stupidity of mere “people” – yet, in the same breath, they claim to be the defending “democracy”! – preoccupying developments are piling up everywhere, from Romanian presidential elections to German parliamentary election results. Mainstream establishment journalists, intellectuals and academics univocally come up with the same assessment: this represents the despicable progress of the extreme right, and is due to the increasing force of populism.

Let’s try to step back and assess the meaning of the term, “populism”, in this particular context.

Luckily, in a blog, one does not have to start by reviewing the existing literature, which in this case is a particularly great relief, as this mainstream literature, with due respect to any eventual exceptions, is mostly worthless. This, in itself, offers further reasons to persist with our concern. So, and again: not “what is populism”; but: what is the reason that the mainstream left-liberal establishment, feeling threatened, cannot find a better way to analyse the situation than to evoke the purportedly threatening spectre of “populism”?

While the word, as it is now used by “respectable” circles, is a pretext, a sham, even outright a lie, it is revealing, as it has to do with “people”; and what is specific about the current left-liberal agenda is that it has no interest whatsoever in “people”, meaning concrete human beings who have their own lives, histories, families, and concerns. For them, the “people” was always an abstraction, meaning – in the strict sense of the word – something detached, drawn away, diverted from concrete, real life, but which allowed them to use this abstraction to speak instead of ‘the people’, in their name, over their head, and so justify the egoistic pursuit of their own self-interest with the cloak of acting in the name of “others”.

Let’s now shortly overview some of the main current concerns of the mainstream establishment liberal left – I will call them by the short-hand “left- liberals”; and then explore what kind of causes, and whose causes, these might serve.

A most prominent current concern is with gender and sexual politics. The two, while now evidently going together, refer to somewhat different things: “gender” basically to “women”, while “sex” refers to the pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh, now also reified as “identities”. However, and in a way helping to understand their current joining as a political agenda, originally the words “gender” and “sex” meant the same thing; or, “sex” simply meant “gender”, as we now call it, still visible in expressions like the “fair sex” or the “weaker sex”. For Dickens, “sex” simply meant “gender” – he never used the latter word, just as he never used words that would directly refer to what we now call the “sexual act”. This was by no means prudishness, just a combination of simple decency and common sense.

Returning to the present, gender politics is evidently waged in the name of women – and mostly, though by no means exclusively, by women; and in the name of “equality”. Let’s stop here, for a moment, with this word, as this word is an abstraction, and a very lifeless abstraction. So what does this really mean? What does it mean that men and women are, or should be, equal? Since, if by equal we mean identical – as in two lines of equal length – they are not equal, being obviously quite different.

Of course we would be told – or rather I would be told, “you idiot, this is evident, how come you are a sociology professor and don’t know this?” – it means equality of rights, so a legal equality. However, and I’m sorry to persist, but everybody having equal rights means that nobody has any right. This is not a piece of sophistry, but goes right into the heart of the Communist “experience”, as the supposed complete equality of citizens under Communism effectively meant nobody having any rights, because such generalised and abstract equality meant that therefore there was need for a special organisation, the Communist Party, who could effectively handle and solve everything. Actually, there is a functional equivalent of the communist party today in the DEI bureaucracy, and activist NGOs funded by governments and oligarchs like George Soros, which likewise claim power to micro-manage human relationships and behaviour on the basis of advancing an equality of outcome which cannot be produced without such social engineering (or even with it). So equality of rights, while it sounds nice, even impossible to oppose, actually begs the question about its implications for a meaningful and flourishing real social life.

One might evoke the similarly nice-sounding slogans of “equal opportunities” or “equal pay”, but they quickly lead to the same paradoxes.

So, instead of continuing this line, I rather turn to the question of who are actually pursuing the line of ”equality”: all women, women “as such”, or rather some women – and, even worse, some men – who pretend to stand up and represent the whole, and who with a vigorous and quite terroristic conduct silence anybody who would voice a different position. The answer, of course, is the second; and books could be, and should be, written about women who were actually, concretely, personally, excluded or ostracised, in academic life especially, because they failed to toe the party line.

Let me offer here a personal anecdote about the extremely peripheral interest in “gender politics” of the left, in the past; a story repeatedly told me by my mother. When she had to pass an admission examination into the university, in 1949, this included a political test. This was much more difficult for her than a mathematics or chemistry test, partly because she was classified as a “class enemy” (her father was a high-ranking administrative judge in the “old regime”), and partly because she had no knowledge whatsoever about the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism. She was asked to give an example of “irresolvable antagonism”. The right answer was, bourgeoisie and proletariat. However, she replied, for whatever reason, “men and women”. The communist admission officer was so astonished that he could not contradict the answer, not being able to oppose it by arguments, so she was admitted.

But my mother was actually a mathematician, quite open to “abstract” arguments. “People”, in general, were never much interested in “gender politics”. This was not part of their lives.

But let’s now move to the second point, about “sexual politics”, in the current sense of the word. Here the argument is even simpler, as in the past, which means anywhere and anytime in human history, as far as one can see, this was not an issue for real people. This obviously does not mean that they were not engaged in sexual acts, including such acts as are currently publicised in the name of “sexual politics”; but they did not talk endlessly about such things, still less make them the basis of a personal identity, still less a political movement.

Thus, this agenda, even more than the previous, is not something effectively promoted by, and which concerns, real, concrete people, with their real, concrete lives, rather some people; and, as in the case of women, not just some people who fit the category, but rather those ready and willing to take this up as a political battle flag. It thus implies a peculiar complicity between certain political activists, certain intellectuals, and especially certain media.

Here we should take a glance back to the classical, historical left, and especially its potentates. We must state it upfront: these likewise had no serious interest in real people. They had a different agenda, and we are still in the dark about what this was. As often, an anecdote is illuminating here. This one was told in his Autobiography by the poet György Faludy, who became an American citizen in the 1930s, then in WWII fought in the U.S. Army, but around 1948 returned to Hungary, to help the “people”. He was of course duly arrested and brought in front of the head of the secret police, the much-feared Gábor Péter, who had him sit down, and then, without saying a word, gave him a huge slap in the face. “Do you know, why you got it?”. “No.” “Because you are an idiot. You had the chance to stay outside, and instead came back to this shit.” So, evidently, the head of the communist secret police, in 1948, had no illusions about communism; could not care about “the cause of the people”. But then why was he there? What was his real purpose? And who was running the show? So many questions without an answer – recalling our own present, and the question concerning the forces that transmogrified the glorious struggle of the working classes into sexual politics, something in which the real working people don’t have even minimal interest.

Thus, our investigation quickly reached a result: all around the world, but especially in the most “advanced” countries, so-called “populist” leaders are elected because the political and intellectual establishment became convinced to pursue an agenda in which normal, ordinary people simply were not interested.

This point could be elaborated much further; but let’s now turn to the connected theme of the meaning of the pursuit of such matters by left-liberals. Why pursue such an evidently, literally self-defeating strategy? What is its meaning? And what connects these undertakings, like sexuality and gender?

Such questions can only be answered if we try to capture the underlying unity connecting such dissimilar concerns. And the answer is not difficult: this concerns life; not simply in the metaphorical sense of everyday or social life, but in the literal sense of engendering life, and the social practices connected to sustaining life. Gender and sex, partly even etymologically (see gender and generation), are connected to the way life can be perpetuated, which requires – it is a most simple truth, but for some people evidently intolerable – a man and a women, a male and a female, everywhere in nature.

A politics of gender and sexuality, thus, and again most evidently, is biopolitics. This term was created, or at least singled out for attention, by Michel Foucault, as one of the most threatening aspects of modern power, back at least to the 18^th century. This is what is truly behind the current smoke and mirrors about “populism”, as behind this there is an evident impulse of refusing to be treated as just members of a “population” (this was exactly the central point of Foucault’s 1978 lecture of biopolitics, entitled ”Security, Territory, Population”). A politics of gender and sexuality, thus, is by no means a radical critical effort – whatever the real meaning of this! – to overcome capitalism, the state, exploitation and the established powers, rather is a way to make this officialised establishment, the worst aspect of modernity, a double winner: being already in power, against the traditional, classical European powers, social, political or ecclesiastical; but now even gaining support from those political forces who supposedly wage a “revolutionary” struggle against the establishment!

This point gains further support, and confirmation, from the recent Covid measures. On the one hand, such unacceptable, even lethal, socially and even physically destructive policies were supported not only by the political establishment, but also by the left-liberal intellectual and university forces, practically univocally. On the other hand, a particularly strong resistance against such policies came from Giorgio Agamben, a long-term elaborator of Michel Foucault’s ideas about biopolitics, who immediately identified these measures as a new instance of biopolitics.

It is this biopolitics which is sold to “people”, meaning everybody, all of us, in various guises, since long decades and even centuries, but which now, more than ever, touches upon the most fundamental issues of life and living, at the point of intersection between the biological processes of reproduction and the eternal social and cultural practices that were developed around them. “People” feel threatened by them, and are reluctant to support them. Betrayed not only by politicians, but the media and even the intellectuals – another trahison des clercs! – they support those politicians who, whatever they are, do not support such policies. And, far from being idiots, they are dead right.

However, and most unfortunately for us, even this is not enough; as beyond this biopolitics, or perhaps as its part, there is also a new politics of death. This theme, however, belongs to the next blog.

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