The twentieth century will probably be remembered as the century of the first wave of socialist revolution and of the liberation of the peoples subject to colonialism. Not a bad century, all in all. The winning of political independence by the peripheral nations once under the yoke of the European empires is a particular historical watershed, whose full meaning will still take some time to unfold completely.
The fight against colonialism was a fierce one. It was won - or rather, is still being won - with many sacrifices and with the mobilisation of the energies, the memory and the creativity of many Asian, African and American peoples. It is therefore very dispiriting for a socialist to see this endeavour being overtaken and corrupted by an epistemological dead pup like multiculturalism. But such is life under capitalism. When the bourgeoisie is forced to take a step back, it always strives to assimilate and embroil the emancipatory argument it is confronted with, rearranging it to serve its own purposes.
The struggle against colonialism has brought to life and reaffirmed the dignity of non-western cultural traditions, restoring their historicity and offering their precious patrimony to the common fold of humanity. Yet, now multiculturalism comes in, contending there is no such common fold.
Old wine in new bottles
As the French essayist Alain Finkielkraut has noted, not many today would draw their pistol when they hear the word culture but, among prophets of ‘difference’, there are more and more who seem ready to draw their ‘culture’ when confronted with the word thought. The recent vogue and currency of multiculturalism (or cultural relativism) is in fact part and parcel of a wider philosophical offensive, that of post-modernism.
It may appear wrapped up in progressive tones - as one of the central themes of the bizarre ‘political correctness’ polemic - but its central tenet comes straight from the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution by such thinkers as Gottfried Herder and Joseph de Maistre. It contends that national idiomatic patterns and cultural traditions are closed systems, incommensurable and basically incommunicable with each other.
The African or the Asian would have nothing to gain or learn from western science, philosophy or literature (and vice versa), which will always be strange corpses forcefully introduced on their own conceptions and world view. Universal history and culture don’t exist and therefore Darwin’s evolutionist theory is neither inferior nor superior to any creationist mythology, be it judeo-christian or from the ‘sad tropics’. They are only incompatible and mutually exclusive. That is the contention of Paul Feyeraband’s anarchist theory of knowledge. A ‘farewell to reason’ indeed.
According to the present-day defenders of PC multiculturalism, each culture holds in itself its own road to development and the particular emancipation project for the national, ethnic or even gender group to which it belongs. There is no more sense in devising a universal utopia, only particular and particularistic heterotopias.
It’s not hard to understand the purpose of this patronising multiculturalism (always bearing in mind that philosophical trends are seldom the result of conspiracies, but nevertheless do obey a certain objective historical intentionality). It drives the peoples of the Third World and the immigrant communities in the core imperialist countries to their voluntary exclusion from the benefits of the most advanced knowledge and technology. To their generalised bantustisation, in isolated pockets of poverty, ignorance and despair. It’s a rationalisation of capital’s need - in line with the law of unequal and combined development - to devise a system of hierarchical segmentation of markets, most decisively of the labour force market.
Sowing the seeds of competition among workers is a must for the international ruling class, in order to depreciate the price of labour and thus counter the overwhelming tendency of rates of profit to decline. And this competition is optimised in a ladder-like disposition of ethnicised segments with little (but still some) effective mobility between them. Therein lie the sources of modern racism, baited, induced, indeed imposed on the working classes. The bourgeoisie, creator and manipulator of the beast, is left off the hook to preach its mild multiculturalist morals. But the seeds of competition will one day turn into the tree of worldwide class solidarity and come home to haunt the perpetrators.
It’s curious to realise that, when the European bourgeoisie was expanding, there was no such talk about the glories of diversity. All the emphasis was put on the civilizing mission of the white man and on rationalist universality. Now that imperialism (demographically weakened in the core metropoles) is also plagued with problems of profitability and self-confidence, the discourse of radical difference has arisen. Multiculturalism is not here to offer any redress for past crimes, and make the world free today, but serves instead quite different designs. In its retreat, the imperialist bourgeoisie is trying to burn the bridges it has so unwillingly built between the peoples of the world it has mastered and reject capitalism’s own past confident ideology of making the world one.
While the economic integration of the planet proceeds and accelerates, the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation on a world scale have driven the greater part of humanity into isolation and the vicious spiral of dependency. The centre of the system is ever more ‘global’, but the periphery lives isolated and completely subject to the mediation of the imperialist metropoles for any exchanges. There is an exploitative North-South axis, but there is no South-South axis. It’s the centre, the great powers of the First World, that dominates globally all the relevant fluxes of value: capturing markets, controlling and appropriating natural resources, exploiting cheap labour, collecting interests and now even benefiting from new situations of rent (industrial licenses, insurances, freights, concessions, franchising, etc).
The imperialist metropoles control the whole circuit of capital and have exclusive access to cutting edge scientific knowledge and all the relevant fora of political decision-making. In store for the peripheral nations is ignorance, confinement and irrelevance, them being denied any voice and conscious participation on the life of the planet. Why so? Because, multiculturalism tells us, they have their own inviolable culture, different and incommensurable with the western...
Multiculturalism and eurocentrism
We are told that multiculturalism is the alternative to eurocentrism. Hardly. For as long as there is capitalism, long-held western misconceptions and prejudices about the ‘other’ will have widespread currency. In fact, what multiculturalism achieves is to justify this deep estrangement (despite of the growing mercantilisation of ‘exotic’ products: world music, world religions, world sports), by decreeing that understanding between different cultures is impossible. It’s precisely because we can’t understand that we should ‘tolerate’.
Another curious result (or is it a premise?) of multiculturalism is the confusion it promotes between modernity and westernisation. All the features of modern life are supposed to be the marks of western influence. So, in order not to lose their ‘soul’ (those doomed westerners already having lost theirs), non-western peoples should stand guard against any modern technologies and concepts. This is, no doubt, an excellent mechanism to deflect the just struggle against imperialist exploitation and oppression into a muddled reaction to external influences, including, for sure, such ‘foreign’ ideas as development and emancipation, let alone marxism and proletarian internationalism.
Of course, after the european expansion (colonialism), the ideal line of projection of a completely autonomous historical development for most non-western societies was definitively broken. ‘Purety’ was lost forever. But that shouldn’t, for a moment, obscure the fact that those societies were and - though now obstructed by the chains of imperialism - are indeed still developing independently towards the same ideals of liberty, equality and citizenship the bourgeois revolution has promised (and forfeited) in the West. It’s precisely on the atrophy that imperialism has caused on the historical development of non-western societies that multiculturalism feeds itself for its supercilious argument.
What we are coming across where reactionary traditionalist movements are on the rise - notably in India and throughout the countries of Muslim faith - is in fact a fabrication whereby the rich and sophisticated cultural traditions of these peoples are ‘excised’ of any lay and universalistic elements. Only that which is parochial, superstitious and the most crude manifestations of regressive bigotry are celebrated as genuine. And this is precisely what we are told we should ‘tolerate’. Rational endeavour, progress, innovation and emancipation are supposed to be western idiosyncrasies (the West’s ‘superstition’) that shouldn’t be ‘imposed’ on others.
Multiculturalism is the kinder, gentler name for racism, now stripped of its unfashionable biological determinism which is replaced by an even more rigid ‘cultural’ determinism. Against it, we must argue that humanity is one and whole. The overcoming of the present world economic system, based on the exploitation of the labour force, will be the work and common project of all its peoples, on the base of the most advanced human knowledge. Trans-ethnic solidarity will go way beyond the deaf and dumb ‘tolerance’ of multiculturalism, into the realm of a true cosmopolitan class conscience. Or it will never be.