Op zijn Facebook-Site verwijst Constant Vecht, die zichzelf typeert als ‘half-jood,’ naar een opiniërend artikel van de sociologe Jolande Withuis in NRC Handelsblad van vrijdag 6 september 2019. Onder de ouderwets aandoende ideologische typering ‘Alleen al aan zijn woorden herken je de vijand,’ een variant van de communistische kwalificatie ‘als een fascist ademt liegt hij,’ merkt Withuis het volgende op:
Mijn afscheid van het communisme betekende dat ik mensen steeds meer ging zien als individu en steeds minder als exemplaar van een of andere categorie, van een soort. Zonder die fundamentele omslag had ik nooit biograaf kunnen worden. Dat de biografie tegenwoordig ook in Nederland bloeit is te danken aan de individualisering, secularisering, ontzuiling en ont-ideologisering van de afgelopen decennia.
Identiteitspolitiek volgt de omgekeerde weg. Identiteitspolitiek is een nieuwe vorm van ideologische groepsdwang. Zoals communisten op grond van iemands zogenaamde ‘klassenpositie’ meenden te weten wat die persoon voelde, dacht en wilde, zo spijkert identiteitspolitiek mensen vast op hun afkomst in plaats van ze te stimuleren zich daarvan los te maken.
Identiteitspolitiek gaat niet uit van zelfbestemming, maar van een gegeven identiteit. Mensen worden ongevraagd en desnoods tegen hun zin ondergebracht in een collectief. Wie blank is wordt geacht ‘wit’ te denken en te voelen, hetzelfde geldt voor wie zwart is of vrouw of man of homo. Het vermogen tot zelfstandig denken en handelen en de vrijheid je los te maken van een dergelijke indeling, worden ontkend. En wie zich toch vrijmaakt wordt gestraft. Die is een ‘bounty,’ een collaborateur…
Het is alleszins prijzenswaardig dat nu ook de feministe Withuis, wier ‘kritische standpunten over de islam’ een ‘controverse’ opriepen, beseft dat ‘identiteitspolitiek mensen vast[spijkert] op hun afkomst.’ Zij voegt hieraan toe:
Bovenal dank ik aan mijn communistische opvoeding een fijne neus voor al wat riekt naar totalitarisme. Identiteitspolitiek doet het voorkomen alsof het vanzelf spreekt dat iemands huidskleur, geloof, sekse of seksuele smaak zijn totale wezen vormt. Maar identiteiten zijn fluïde en kunnen door de tijd heen veranderen. Mensen zijn ‘van alles’: ze zijn zwart, vrouw, directeur, lesbisch, dik, bejaard, kankerpatiënt en weduwe. Wat van dat al zij ervaren als hun essentie, staat niet vast en zal in de loop van hun leven variëren. Welk van alle mogelijke identiteiten het meeste geluk of ongeluk brengt, verschilt per persoon.
Identiteitspolitiek is ideologie en ideologie maakt blind. Ideologie maakt blind voor de feiten omdat mensen hun ervaringen en observaties interpreteren binnen een vooraf vaststaand denkkader. De teloorgang van christendom en marxisme maakte de weg vrij voor onze individuele vrijheid. Dat is een kostbare verworvenheid.
Juist omdat ik het met mevrouw Withuis eens ben dat ‘ideologie blind [maakt]’ verbaast mij haar bewering dat ‘de teloorgang van christendom en marxisme de weg’ heeft vrijgemaakt ‘voor onze individuele vrijheid.’ De postmoderne massamens zit immers gevangen in het neoliberale totalitarisme met zijn omvangrijke bureaucratie en macht in handen van een kleine elite. Al in de jaren vijftig signaleerde de prominente Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills vijf overkoepelende sociale problemen in de westerse maatschappij:
1) Alienation; 2) Moral insensibility; 3) Threats to democracy; 4) Threats to human freedom; and 5) Conflict between bureaucratic rationality and human reason. Like Marx, Mills views the problem of alienation as a characteristic of modern society and one that is deeply rooted in the character of work. Unlike Marx, however, Mills does not attribute alienation to capitalism alone. While he agrees that much alienation is due to the ownership of the means of production, he believes much of it is also due to the modern division of labor.
One of the fundamental problems of mass society is that many people have lost their faith in leaders and are therefore very apathetic. Such people pay little attention to politics. Mills characterizes such apathy as a ‘spiritual condition’ which is at the root of many of our contemporary problems. Apathy leads to ‘moral insensibility.’ Such people mutely accept atrocities committed by their leaders. They lack indignation when confronted with moral horror; they lack the capacity to morally react to the character, decisions, and actions of their leaders. Mass communications contributes to this condition, Mills argues, through the sheer volume of images aimed at the individual in which she ‘becomes the spectator of everything but the human witness of nothing.’
Mills relates this moral insensibility directly to the rationalization process. Our acts of cruelty and barbarism are split from the consciousness of men — both perpetrators and observers. We perform these acts as part of our role in formal organizations. We are guided not by individual consciousness, but by the orders of others. Thus many of our actions are inhuman, not because of the scale of their cruelty, but because they are impersonal, efficient, and performed without any real emotion.
Mills believed that widespread alienation, political indifference, and economic and political concentration of power are all a serious threat to democracy. Finally, Mills is continually concerned in his writings with the threat to two fundamental human values: ‘freedom and reason.’ Mills characterizes the trends that imperil these values as being ‘co-extensive with the major trends of contemporary society.’ These trends are, Mills states throughout his writings, the centralization and enlargement of vast bureaucratic organizations, and the placing of this extraordinary power and authority into the hands of a small elite.
Mills karakteriseerde in zijn boek The Sociological Imagination (1959) het westerse systeem als ‘rationality without reason,’ een technocratisch systeem dat zich weliswaar rationeel ontwikkelde, maar waaraan ‘de rede’ ontbrak. De atoombom en de NAVO-doctrine van de Wederzijds Verzekerde Vernietiging zijn hiervan misschien wel de meest aansprekende voorbeelden. Collectieve zelfmoord kan vanzelfsprekend nooit gebaseerd zijn op ‘de rede,’ laat staan op ‘onze individuele vrijheid.’ Het kapitalisme, ook in zijn neoliberale vorm streeft niet naar vrijheid, zoals Jolanda Withuis kennelijk meent, maar naar zo hoog mogelijke winsten, dus niet naar ‘de rede,’ maar juist naar de redeloosheid, de onverzadigbaarheid, de mateloosheid, de begeerte, het driftleven. Het westers systeem vernietigt juist ‘de rede,’ waardoor wij allen onderworpen zijn aan de totalitaire ‘rationaliteit zonder rede.’ Vandaar dat ‘The Power Elite’ in het Westen alle macht naar zich toe heeft weten te trekken, ten koste van de vrijheid van de burger annex consument. Charles Wright Mills schrijft in zijn gelijknamige boek daarover het volgende:
The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. ‘Great changes’ are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook nonetheless. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power. But not all men are in this sense ordinary. As the means of information and of power are centralized, some men come to occupy positions in American society from which they can look down upon, so to speak, and by their decisions mightily affect (aantasten. svh), the everyday worlds of ordinary men and women. They are not made by their jobs; they set up and break down jobs for thousands of others; they are not confined by simple family responsibilities; they can escape. They may live in many hotels and houses, but they are bound by no one community. They need not merely ‘meet the demands of the day and hour’; in some part, they create these demands, and cause others to meet them. Whether or not they profess their power, their technical and political experience of it far transcends that of the underlying population. (What Jacob Burckhardt said of ‘great men,’ most Americans might well say of their elite: ‘They are all that we are not’).
The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions: their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater consequence than the decisions they do make. For they are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy. The power elite are not solitary rulers. Advisers and consultants, spokesmen and opinion-makers are often the captains of their higher thought and decision. Immediately below the elite are the professional politicians of the middle levels of power, in the Congress and in the pressure groups, as well as among the new and old upper classes of town and city and region. Mingling with them, in curious ways which we shall explore, are those professional celebrities who live by being continually displayed but are never, so long as they remain celebrities, displayed enough. If such celebrities are not at the head of any dominating hierarchy, they do often have the power to distract the attention of the public or afford sensations to the masses, or, more directly, to gain the ear of those who do occupy positions of direct power. More or less unattached, as critics of morality and technicians of power, as spokesmen of God and creators of mass sensibility, such celebrities and consultants are part of the immediate scene in which the drama of the elite is enacted. But that drama itself is centered in the command posts of the major institutional hierarchies…
[T]hose who feel, even if vaguely, that a compact and powerful elite of great importance does now prevail in America often base that feeling upon the historical trend of our time. They have felt, for example, the domination of the military event, and from this they infer that generals and admirals, as well as other men of decision influenced by them, must be enormously powerful. They hear that the Congress has again abdicated to a handful of men decisions clearly related to the issue of war or peace. They know that the bomb was dropped over Japan in the name of the United States of America, although they were at no time consulted about the matter. They feel that they live in a time of big decisions; they know that they are not making any. Accordingly, as they consider the present as history, they infer that at its center, making decisions or failing to make them, there must be an elite of power… Behind such men and behind the events of history, linking the two, are the two major institutions of modern society. These hierarchies of state and corporation and army constitute the means of power; as such they are now of a consequence not before equaled in human history — and at their summits, there are now those command posts of modern society which offer us the sociological key to an understanding of the role of the higher circles in America.
Within American society, major national power now resides in the economic, the political, and the military domains. Other institutions seem off to the side of modern history, and, on occasion, duly subordinated to these. No family is as directly powerful in national affairs as any major corporation; no church is as directly powerful in the external biographies of young men in America today as the military establishment; no college is as powerful in the shaping of momentous events as the National Security Council. Religious, educational, and family institutions are not autonomous centers of national power; on the contrary, these decentralized areas are increasingly shaped by the big three, in which developments of decisive and immediate consequence now occur. Families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and armies and corporations shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends. Religious institutions provide chaplains to the armed forces where they are used as a means of increasing the effectiveness of its morale to kill. Schools select and train men for their jobs in corporations and their specialized tasks in the armed forces. The extended family has, of course, long been broken up by the industrial revolution, and now the son and the father are removed from the family, by compulsion if need be, whenever the army of the state sends out the call. And the symbols of all these lesser institutions are used to legitimate the power and the decisions of the big three.
The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years; not only upon the school where he is educated as a child and adolescent, but also upon the state which touches him throughout his life; not only upon the church in which on occasion he hears the word of God, but also upon the army in which he is disciplined. If the centralized state could not rely upon the inculcation of nationalist loyalties in public and private schools, its leaders would promptly seek to modify the decentralized educational system. If the bankruptcy rate among the top five hundred corporations were as high as the general divorce rate among the thirty-seven million married couples, there would be economic catastrophe on an international scale. If members of armies gave to them no more of their lives than do believers to the churches to which they belong, there would be a military crisis. Within each of the big three, the typical institutional unit has become enlarged, has become administrative, and, in the power of its decisions, has become centralized. Behind these developments there is a fabulous technology, for as institutions, they have incorporated this technology and guide it, even as it shapes and paces their developments. The economy — once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance — has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions.
The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized, executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered, and now enters into each and every crany (uithoek. svh) of the social structure. The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government, and, although well versed in smiling public relations, now has all the grim and clumsy efficiency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain. In each of these institutional areas, the means of power at the disposal of decision makers have increased enormously; their central executive powers have been enhanced; within each of them modern administrative routines have been elaborated and tightened up. As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. The decisions of a handful of corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously affect political life as well as the very level of economic activity. The decisions made within the political domain determine economic activities and military programs. There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to moneymaking. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions. On each side of the world-split running through central Europe and around the Asiatic rimlands, there is an ever-increasing interlocking of economic, military, and political structures. If there is government intervention in the corporate economy, so is there corporate intervention in the governmental process. In the structural sense, this triangle of power is the source of the interlocking directorate that is most important for the historical structure of the present.
Kortom, de veronderstelling van Jolanda Withuis dat ‘de teloorgang van christendom en marxisme de weg’ heeft vrijgemaakt ‘voor onze individuele vrijheid’ is even naïef als de gedachte dat met de val van de Sovjet-Unie het kapitalisme de eindoverwinning had binnengesleept, en wij vanaf dat moment ‘het einde van de geschiedenis’ meemaakten, of zoals de neoconservatieve Amerikaanse ideoloog Francis Fukuyama het formuleerde: ‘the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’
In werkelijkheid ontwikkelde de ‘liberale democratie’ zich in toenemende mate in een totalitaire technocratie, waarin een zeer kleine elite wereldwijd de dienst uitmaakt. Als telg uit een communistisch milieu heeft mevrouw Withuis de ideologie van het marxisme ingewisseld voor de ideologische valkuil van het neoliberalisme, wanneer zij met grote stelligheid verkondigt dat door de ‘teloorgang’ van ‘christendom en marxisme de weg’ werd vrijgemaakt ‘voor onze individuele vrijheid.’ Het blijft ook in haar geval onmogelijk zich werkelijk te bevrijden van één of andere ideologie. Kennelijk is het besef dat ‘Identiteitspolitiek een nieuwe vorm [is] van ideologische groepsdwang,’ onvoldoende voor een academisch geschoolde om hieraan daadwerkelijk intellectuele consequenties te verbinden. Als er namelijk één systeem succesvol is geweest in het creëren van ‘ideologische groepsdwang’ dan is het wel de kapitalistische consumptie-ideologie. En toch beseft deze sociologe dit niet. Het is alsof een ideologische overtuiging een ongeneeslijke genetische afdruk achterlaat, waardoor de gelovige hunkert naar een vervangende ideologie om de leegte van het identiteitsverlies op te vullen. Hetzelfde proces zagen we bij de antiekhandelaar Constant Vecht die moeiteloos het universele marxisme inwisselde voor het tribale zionisme.
Ik vrees dat hier sprake is van één van de grootste gevaren van onze postmoderne tijd. Terwijl de mensheid geconfronteerd wordt met nooit eerder voorgekomen wereldwijde bedreigingen blijkt de mens zich niet te kunnen bevrijden van zijn ideologische ketens. En toch is hij gedwongen dit te doen, wil de soort kunnen overleven. Wanneer Jolanda Withuis beweert dat zij ‘[b]ovenal aan’ haar ‘communistische opvoeding een fijne neus’ heeft ontwikkeld ‘voor al wat riekt naar totalitarisme,’ en zij bewust het totalitaire neoliberale kapitalisme buiten beschouwing laat, dan kan de conclusie niet anders zijn dat zij in het neoliberalisme een nieuwe ideologie heeft gevonden, om daaraan een identiteit te ontlenen. Jammer genoeg heeft zij geen oog voor hetgeen de wereldberoemde socioloog C. Wright Mills al in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw besefte, namelijk dat de westerse samenleving scherp verdeeld is tussen ‘de machtigen en de machtelozen’ en dat door de vervreemding de elite via de massa media erin is geslaagd de massa te manipuleren. Dat is geen marxistische bewering, maar een eenvoudig te constateren concreet feit. Het is tevens de reden waarom de voormalige communiste Jolanda Withuis in NRC Handelsblad met grote stelligheid beweert dat met de ondergang van christendom en marxisme de weg is geopend voor de bevrijding van de ganse mensheid.
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