How do you define an ideal individual? Are you an ideal individual?
With the interminable self-optimisation talks, often getting elevated to onanistic celebrations on social media, one can't look past the basic question of politics today - the individual. The facet of how individuals govern and sustain their lives in the current conditions of existence, falls under micro-politics and it deserves to be evaluated. This essay aims to do this because, often it's not limited to the politics and the individual being inextricably linked, but this conjoining itself being deified by and through the social media engagements. And there is no better way to explain this than by going back to the old maxim: The personal is the political. Considered to be the foundation in refashioning the feminist struggles of the last century, this 'battle cry' has had a tremendous impact on the existing libertarian politics.
In this essay, I try to unpack the ideology of the individual who embodies a moral stance that emphasises compassion, fairness and a commitment to not taking advantage of others for personal gains. And what I have in mind here is the directives like "wash your dishes at home", "wash your clothes" and so on and so forth. And yes, the current feminist discourses have a significant role to play here. Well, the problem is not leading a caring and compassionate life but connecting politics to it and parading it as radical and revolutionary. There is a moral high-handedness at work here. In other words, considering these practices as an end in itself, outside the structural elements of political organisation is fallacious. When we look closely at these practices, we can see that this is similar to the appeal made by the right-wing, self-help guru, Jordan Peterson - "Clean up your room." Again, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't do these things. The point here is that these practices are often represented as tools in political enlightenment and emancipation. The intention of this article is to show how these 'innocent' gestures of 'politically correcting' the individuals fall into the trap of the anti-political self-fashioning of late capitalism.
Here politics as differentiated through micro and macro spaces also needs clarification. Politics is mostly defined and understood as how society has organised itself with the founding of certain institutions and frameworks. This macro view was clearly disrupted by the last century feminist rebellion. But today this identifying of politics in personal spaces has taken the focus away from macro politics. This is, in other words, the 'internalising' of politics where the individual works in his capacity toward creating spaces of equality for the society. Here the assumption is that other individuals would soon follow suit and this in a way would change society altogether. But what the practitioners of this micropolitics miss is the fact that the institutions that govern and sustain society are still unfettered. The assumption that exploitation will cease to exist by the individual capacity of doing good, is thereby flawed.
This is where I'll take a detour to bring in a related argument from How Capitalism Ends: History, Ideology and Progress by Steve Paxton. In this book, Paxton writes on the 'duality of the Left'. He says that the Left Wing today in politics is mostly reflected in "the palpable tension between the socialist left (mainly focusing on economics) and the liberal left (mainly concerned with identity politics)". Now returning to the idea of individual spaces of equality, this idea falls under the liberal leftist notion explained by Paxton. According to Paxton, "the dividing line between the liberal left, who think capitalism can be reformed, and the socialist left, who recognise that capitalism has to go" is more evident than ever before. Therefore, the appeals ("clean your plates rather than asking your mother to do it") made to combat the inequalities and oppression in personal spaces won't solve the structural issues of our governing principles. Let's take the example of the market. The market has a free hand in our politically organised systems to exploit the poorest of the poor so that a heirarchy of exploitation is sustained between the classes. My problem with these individual acts of creating equal spaces is that they ignore the macro status of how deeply they are involved in a hierarchised market-system of exploitation. Consider this: most of the commodities that we use are made from cheap labour. This applies to every range of products, be it cheap or expensive. It is not surprising to see that exploitation has been baked into the system and that it has become so normalised. In this context, practices such as cleaning your plates or washing your clothes become desperate attempts at exculpating individuals of their involvement in systemic exploitation.
Again, these criticisms do not wish to undermine the feminist reinterpretations of personal spaces and the questioning of power, and it wouldn't do even if it wanted to. By all means they are hard fought freedoms and there is still a long way to go for us. There is no disagreement here. But the point of this essay is to show the paradox of claiming to be morally and ethically superior in a market-motivated system. This is why Paxton's 'duality of the Left' needs to be underscored. By merely embracing the contradictions of micro spaces without addressing the larger systems that be, the liberal left of today has managed itself to continue in the contours of real politics - the cultural wars.
To conclude, I recently saw an IG short video (reels?) where a girl was seen answering a simple yet profound question - What is the one thing you'd eradicate if you had the power? The girl answered, poverty. Even though the video was celebrating the mature worldview in her answer, the girl's answer is wrong. Here, in my opinion, there are not many answers to this question but one - exploitation. It is the one thing that needs to be eradicated not in any 'skewed' sense but in a way that disrupts the whole economic and social structure of the society. But the fact remains that the leftist politics of today seems to be more focused on the liberal strain that blunts the socialist side of arguments. Here, the only way forward is to join the splintered dualities of the left. Otherwise, we might win many battles but end up losing the war.
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