'our critique of the inequality within equality aims at equality too..." (Adorno, Negative Dialectics).
I have commented briefly before on recent attempts to identify the Left unproblematically with the values of, and the extant facts of, 'constitutional democracy', and Enlightenment principles of equality and enfranchisement. I suggested that this is tendentious revisionism: historically, the left have always been critical of these things, but- crucially - in their own name. For the left, these things failed to 'live up to their concept', and this failure was due to the political and economic situation in which we live. In short it was to do with capitalism. The left has always sought to analyse how these concepts work, or are put to work within a particular historical system.
I want to try and offer for consideration a historical situation which demonstrates some of the above. A situation where an 'enlightenment' text of equality and rights and democratic inclusion functioned actually to negate all of these things, and not because of corrupt implemention or accidents of misunderstanding
In 1801 Ireland was incorporated, by the Act of Union, into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Union was, if you like, an Enlightenment document: it spoke of equality, free trade; it included Ireland within a 'democratic' constitution. Surrounding the Union there is a whole language invoking a mirroring of rights and liberties between the two countries ( Joseph Chamberlain would speak of 'equal laws, equal justice, equal opportunities, and equal prosperity.') The Union was a contract entered into freely by equal 'subjects', its logic being 'parity of treatment for the inhabitants of the two islands.’ Thus, upon diverse political geographies, a new abstract space was imposed: everywhere, equally, within it – from Cork to Carlisle - was a point of distribution or exchange, supply or consumption, legislation or bureaucratic initiative. Everywhere was now subject (at least in theory) to place-blind legislation. The Union therefore addressed that level at which Ireland and Great Britain were the 'same', the very substratum of equality beneath false hierarchies. This, of course, is the point. They were not the same and would not prematurely become so by legal fiat, by a mere 'fiction of constitutions'*.
But it isn't just that this legal fiction denied the heterogeneous reality, that it spoke of a fictional legal entity that had no concrete existence. The more important point is the actual economic and political effects produced by the new ‘constitutional democracy’ of ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland".
What happens is this:
Post 1801, Irish representation now consists of a small minority grafted onto the English parliamentary system. Legislation is typically worked through in terms of the English nation: its internal situation, its external entanglements, and the pressure of domestic opinion. These are the priorities through which Ireland is 'refracted'. Politically, the Union turns out to be nothing less than a paradoxical attempt to preserve subordination through the fiction of inclusion. Something of this double logic emerges in the words of Pitt's undersecretary, Edward Cooke:
'By giving the Irish one hundred members in an assembly of six hundred and fifty they will be rendered impotent to operate in that assembly, but it will be invested with Irish assent to its authority.'
The 'gift' of democracy is for the British simply a way of addressing 'their Irish problem’: Ireland is, in relation to the metropolis 'subversive' and must be rendered 'impotent;' there is a deficit of hegemony which must be rectified. Any potential growth in Catholic emancipation will, likewise, now take place in a context where Catholic are inevitably a marginal group. In all these instances, inclusion within the 'centre' is by that same stroke, an act of marginalisation; the granting of formal equality is the very means of increased subordination.
Economically, the effect is analogous: 'The Union threatened to expose the economy of the less developed partner to the competition of the highly developed nation on earth [...] which could not fail to benefit the more advanced country'. (Making Ireland 'extremely dependent on outside - in effect British - markets'.) Ireland is more and more integrated into a much larger system of production and exchange. The rhythms of its economy are increasingly determined by forces eccentric to Ireland itself ("The changing pattern of British demand", for example). To some extent, Ireland becomes a 'subsidiary' country, a market for 'the more cheaply produced English goods,' as well as a source of supply to that same absent centre. Marx describes post-Union Ireland as 'merely an agricultural district of England that happens to be divided by a wide stretch of water from the country for which it provides corn, wool, cattle..'. The structural determinants of the Irish situation (whether 'British demand' or the economic and political logics of Empire) are now part of a system not directly present to the Irish subject, yet bearing on that subject's experience in a comprehensive fashion, from cultural consumption to the way land is farmed, from paths of career mobility to the content of political debate.
To recap, then: yes, the Union can be seen from one point of view in terms of enlightenment values, constitutional democracy and so on, but when this document is put to work in a particular context it systematically produces inequalities and oppression. The key point is that this is not some 'charade', it is not that a trompe l'oeil has been erected, behind which the dirty work is done; the Union is not simply there to hide something else. The Union is not the dissembling screen but the very underlying mechanism. It is the 'equalisation' or homogenisation of space, under one law for all, one franchise - this is the instrument of impoverisation and disempowerment.
If the legal fiction which the Union sets up, the fictive equality between ‘partners’, is precisely the vehicle of subordination, then to work inside the 'legal' or 'rational' structures of constitutional politics is to be silent about the power relations that these systematically reproduce. Needless to say, however, anyone working outside those structures can easily be condemned as an enemy of democracy, or even, to use the words of Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his writings about Ireland, a 'terrorist'.
[This post will hopefully be updated later. If anyone would like the footnotes, send me an email.]
*The reference is of course to Marx, who analysed that 'fiction of constitutions' whereby people are posited and interpellated as equal subjects, a fiction which only reinforces actual inequalities.
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