Neoliberalism: Diversity and Inequality

by Walter Benn Michaels

Released: 25 Mar 2009

No one observing France today could fail to agree with the French leftwing daily Libération when it wrote: “In 2001 the question of diversity was not an issue, but today the debate has taken off.” The context for this observation was the growing (although not, according to Libération, growing fast enough) number of diversity candidates in the March 2008 municipal elections. But the French left hardly has a monopoly on the diversity issue. After all, it was Nicolas Sarkozy who had suggested adding diversity to the French constitution a few months earlier, and who is now declaring that he intends to accelerate rapidly the ethnic diversity of the elite.

An American observing these developments might have two reactions. First, surprise -- what took the French so long? Diversity has been increasingly central to American political, social and above all, economic life for almost 30 years, so how did the French fall so far behind? And second, disappointment -- why, having fallen behind, have the French decided to catch up? My book The Trouble with Diversity does not answer the first question (which no doubt will be a subject for French historians) but it does address the second. And the long list of diversity enthusiasts -- ranging from the Indigènes de la République to the French president -- provides us with the beginning of an answer.

The outline of that answer may be found in a question by a spokesperson for the Indigènes not about diversity, but about equality: “What does this paradoxical affirmation of equality really mean, this equality between rich and poor, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, bosses and workers, masters and servants, whites and non-whites, men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals?” The interesting thing about this list is the structural shift that occurs when “masters and servants” turn into “whites and non-whites.” The inequalities between whites and non-whites, men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals are produced by discrimination and prejudice. They are the products of racism and sexism, and the way to eliminate them is to end racism and sexism.

But the inequalities between masters and servants (and rich and poor, bosses and workers) are not produced by racism and sexism: They are the products of capitalism and liberalism. With respect to economic inequality, racism and sexism function as sorting systems, technologies not for producing that inequality but for distributing its rewards. Hence, even the most successful battle against racism and sexism will not close the gap between the rich and the poor; it will just rearrange their sexes, sexualities and skin colours. A France where more black people were rich would not be a more economically equal France; it would just be a France with a wider gap between rich black people and poor black people.

The French situation has its own characteristics, of course. From the end of the second world war to the late 1970s, dominant leftwing trends were exclusively concerned with equality and the defence of the working class. Issues relating to feminism, racism and homosexuality were considered to be “secondary contradictions” or simply ignored. But, in the last 25 years, the order of priorities has been reversed. Since the liberal turn taken by the left-wing government of François Mitterand in 1983, the fight against discrimination (exemplified by organisations such as SOS Racisme) has replaced the critique of capitalism at the top of the political agenda.

And, as it turns out, the effort to eliminate racism and sexism is completely compatible with liberalism, while the effort even to minimise (much less eliminate) the gap between the rich and the poor is not. Hence, if the question is why has France begun to develop a commitment to diversity -- a commitment not only to eliminating prejudice but to celebrating difference -- the answer is that France has also begun to perfect its commitment to liberalism, in particular to neoliberalism. And, if this commitment is obvious on the right (what else is the meaning of Nicolas Sarkozy?), it is also, I suggest, almost equally obvious on the left. (What else is the meaning of what Libération calls the “renewal of the left”? What, if not the commitment to markets, counts as the “renewal”?) In fact, as the issue of national identity gains hold on French life -- whether celebrated by the president, or denounced by the Indigènes -- it both facilitates and conceals the rise in economic inequality that has begun in France and that has been the hallmark of American society for the past 30 years.

My point is not that affirmative action (or the commitment to diversity more generally) has caused the rise in inequality. It is, instead, that the concept of social justice embodied in diversity (the analysis of our fundamental social problems as the result of discrimination and intolerance, rather than exploitation) is itself a neoliberal concept. It is a parody of social justice that ratifies the growing economic gap between rich and poor as long as the rich are (proportionately) black and brown and yellow as well as white, as long as they are female as well as male, and gay as well as straight. Untroubled by the inequalities produced by capitalism, it seeks instead to ensure that the system functions more efficiently, that the inequalities it produces are not distorted by racism and sexism.

Catching up fast
Despite being relative latecomers to diversity and neoliberalism, the French ruling classes are learning fast. As Louis Schweitzer, chairman of Halde (the French equal opportunities and anti-discrimination commission), puts it in the commission’s 2006 annual report: “If we believe in equality, the absence of diversity is the visible sign of discrimination, or of a poorly-managed equal opportunities policy.” In short, if the people earning more money than anyone else are all white males, there is a problem. If they are also black, brown and female, there is not. If you were deprived of opportunities because of your race or gender, there is a problem. If you were deprived because of your poverty, there is not.

Of course the source here, as many have pointed out, is a problematic one. For one thing, the committee running Halde is short on ethnic minorities itself. And Schweitzer has had his own problems with discrimination; when he was at Renault, the company was accused of discriminating against unions. But both these objections miss the point. The problem with Halde is not that its governing board is insufficiently diverse. Even if it had a board that looked like the World Cup champions of 1998, it wouldn’t make French society any more economically equal than Zinedine Zidane did. And the problem is not that Schweitzer used to discriminate against members of radical unions. There’s no hypocrisy in opposing radical unions while supporting diversity because there’s no contradiction between perpetuating the elite and also trying to diversify it. The point of diversifying the elite is to legitimate it, not eliminate it. Against racism, against sexism and against socialism -- Schweitzer is the perfect person to run Halde.

A successful businessman, Schweitzer understands that the commitment to diversity is as much a management strategy as a political stance and that the enthusiasm for diversity is as high in business schools as it is among the Indigènes de la République. Two business school professors, Carlos and Javier Rabasso, have written a book to provide future company managers with “a global perspective of interculturalism in the world of business.” Virtually every sentence in the relevant chapters on managing diversity could have been written by the supposedly left-wing Indigènes.

In fact, the criticism by one of the Indigènes activists, Sadri Khiari, that the left cares about cultural diversity on a global scale, but not in France, is identical to the criticism of European governments made by the Rabasso brothers. And, like the Indigènes, who are calling for a new evaluation of “the universal egalitarianism proclaimed during the French revolution”, the business school professors are calling for a “new French revolution” based on the controversial issues of “diversity, discrimination and affirmative action.”

What does it mean when business-school faculties and the self-described “descendants of enslaved, and colonised grandparents” see the world the same way? It means that diversity has come to be seen as what the French business newspaper Les Echos called “an economic imperative” and that the left is just as eager to do business as the right is.

Now that the neoliberal commitment to respecting identity difference rather than minimising economic difference has begun to have the same success in France that it has had in the United States, in France, as in the US, the neoliberal right is beginning to find itself a neoliberal left, one that demands what the right is only too happy to give. In fact, when it comes to making labour and stock markets more efficient by making corporations more diverse (that is the “economic imperative”), the new left is eager to lead the way, not only collaborating with the right but functioning as its avant-garde.

Neoliberals unite
Perhaps to speak of collaboration between the neoliberal right and the neoliberal left may seem a little counter-intuitive, or at least premature. After all, didn’t Sarkozy win an election (in 2007) by calling for national identity, not diversity? And didn’t he charm the most conservative French intellectuals (such as Alain Finkielkraut) during his campaign and, once elected, immediately establish a ministry of integration and national identity?

It was immediately clear, however, how little the neoliberal right is attached to older racist concepts of national identity, for no sooner had Sarkozy inaugurated his national identity initiative than he also announced a diversity initiative (in January 2007), proclaiming that “diversity is good for everyone” and that the fight for diversity would be central to his administration. Those are not exactly the words of a right-wing racist, and for good reason -- all that is wrong with neoliberalism has nothing to do with racism. In other words, neoliberalism, national identity and diversity are complementary rather than contradictory; they are both technologies first for obscuring and then for legitimating economic inequality.

Nevertheless, the neoliberal left frequently attacks Sarkozy as if he really were racist. And for good reason since, unless they can paint the neoliberal right as the old racist right in disguise, the difference between them and the neoliberal right collapses. That is why people like Laurent Joffrin, director of Libération, love it when Sarkozy makes vaguely threatening noises about immigration and national identity. As long as they can pretend that the new neoliberal right is really the old anti-liberal right in disguise (or that Sarkozy is really an incarnation of the National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen), they can also pretend that the new neoliberal left really is some kind of left, and they are part of it.

But it isn’t, and they aren’t. The truth is that someone like Joffrin is a lot closer to being Sarkozy than Sarkozy is to being Le Pen -- they are both neoliberals. Of course Sarkozy has a slight advantage: at least he knows what he is, while the Socialist Party is still, as Joffrin himself wistfully observes, trying to find a definition of the word socialism that is both contemporary (how about “a view of the world that emphasises free markets, free trade and economic growth”?) and yet “quite distinct from any UMP [Sarkozy’s party] policy.”

Forgetting about money
The goal is to be on the left without actually taking any leftwing political position, and that is made all the more difficult by the fact that, until the current crisis, any radical criticism of markets was not very “contemporary” (and even now the commitment is to saving neoliberalism, not getting rid of it). But we Americans have found a solution to this problem. If we quarrel endlessly about identity, pretending that being against affirmative action is a rightwing stance (discrimination against whites) and being for affirmative action is a leftwing one (compensation for years of discrimination against blacks), we can keep on calling each other racists and acting as though we actually have a left wing, whereas in fact we only have several shades of right.

If we compare the obligations related to diversity (everyone must be nice to everyone) with those required by equality (some people must give up their wealth), it is easy to understand how commitment to diversity has transformed the policies of the American left into a programme that aims to make rich people with different skin colours or sexual orientations feel “comfortable” without touching the one thing that makes them feel most “comfortable” -- money.

That has not always been the case. Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther movement in 1966, warned his comrades: “Those who want to obscure the struggle with ethnic differences are the ones who are aiding and maintaining the exploitation of the masses of the people: poor whites, poor blacks, browns, red Indians, poor Chinese and Japanese... We do not fight exploitative capitalism with black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism.” Now, with the rise of Obama, we still don’t fight capitalism with black capitalism, we try to save capitalism with black capitalism.

Not content with pretending that our real problem is cultural difference rather than economic difference, we have even begun to treat economic difference as though it were a form of cultural difference. What is expected of the upper middle class today is that we show ourselves to be more respectful of the poor, and that we stop acting as if things like our superior educations really make us superior.

And once we succeed in convincing ourselves that the poor are people who need our respect more than they need our money, our own attitude towards them becomes the problem to be solved, and not their poverty. We can now devote our reforms not to removing class but to eliminating what we Americans call “classism.” The trick is to analyse inequality as a consequence of our prejudices rather than of our social system, and thus replace the pain of giving up some of our money with the comparative pleasure of giving up (along with our classism) our racism, sexism, and homophobia.

And this strategy is open to the French as well. Indeed, the long debate over the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools was a very promising rehearsal for it. In a certain sense, as Pierre Tévanian has pointed out, it was a completely false debate. The few young women who were wearing headscarves posed no threat to France or the French educational system, and they were not seeking to transform the debate into one about secularism. Why then did it become such a major issue? According to Tévanian, the answer is racism, “a latent racism that can be found in all social strata and all political families.” But at best this is only partially -- one might even say, only symptomatically -- accurate. For the headscarf debate revealed not so much the threat of racism, as (once again) the attractiveness of anti-racism, and indeed anti-sexism, too.

One side could happily accuse the other of racism while the other side could just as happily accuse the former of sexism. “You are only against the headscarf because you don’t care about the rights of Muslims.” “You are only for the headscarf because you don’t care about the rights of Muslim girls.” In short, what made the debate so successful was that, like the debate over affirmative action in the United States, it was a perfect neo-liberal storm -- all identity, all the time.

There will be many more opportunities for equally empty debates. Indeed, the recent controversies over memory and French history offer an almost infinitely repeatable model. The neoliberal left can complain, as do the Indigènes, that France cares nothing about “rehabilitation and promoting our histories in the public space” (the italics are mine) and the neoliberal right can insist, through the voices of Alain Finkielkraut et al, that national history is what matters and that the Indigènes ought to start thinking of French history as their own or be reminded that “they have the right to leave.”

Identity not equality
Again, those questions about who is French, and what it means to be French, are really about identity and not about equality and, whatever the answers are, they will certainly not stand in the way of free markets. Indeed, although Finkielkraut is particularly grumpy about demands for French “repentance” for past wrongdoings, I predict that many of his friends in the corporate world (who haven’t the slightest desire for all that cheap labour to exercise its “right to leave”) will soon learn the lessons long since mastered by their American counterparts: Repenting is good for business. Saying you are sorry for slavery, colonialism and the Holocaust, demonstrating your respect for other people’s cultures and histories, their sexuality, their preferences in clothing or whatever is far less expensive than paying them a living wage.

The good news for the rich but the bad news for the French is that France is now in about the same position as the United States was in when neoliberalism took off, which has led the economist, Camille Landais (focusing especially on the increase in revenues that have gone to the richest one per cent of the French population) to observe: “After a period of great stability of high revenues from 1980 to the end of the 1990s, France is now catching up with current trends in the Anglo-Saxon countries.” So, assuming Sarkozy, Obama and their bankers contrive to rescue neoliberalism, France can look forward to simultaneous and complementary increases in inequality and diversity.

That’s what the authors of the book on inter-cultural management are hoping for when they say: “Despite its prejudices against the United States, France could learn from American society.” And that’s why their new “French revolution” mainly consists of diversity and affirmative action. But if you are committed to opposing rather than to implementing neoliberalism, the French need to think twice about following the American example. Diversity is not a way of achieving equality; it is a way of managing inequality.

Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of The Trouble with Diversity: How we Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2006.

Copyright © 2009 Le Monde diplomatique – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 March 2009
Word Count: 3,005
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