Omnishambles

Causes and Effects

Lots of people have been writing about “the omnicause”. This term refers to the tendency on the left to lump together distinctly different issues into one progressive lump. If you are worried about climate change then you must also be anti-capitalist and for Palestinian and trans rights, etc. The term is more often used by the right to dismiss these issues although I am pretty sure that similar phenomena happen on that side of politics as well. This is in part driven by ideological polarization and the growing sense that a political position needs to be a core part of our identities. If you want to be part of our tribe then you need to sign up to these things.

I personally find this stultifying. I have opinions on Israel/Palestine and trans issues that I think are fairly centrist but I strongly suspect would get me kicked out of certain progressive groups. I am also ambivalent about capitalism. On many issues, I have no opinion at all. If that excludes me from certain groups and communities then they can have sex and travel.

Personally I don’t mind people showing up to unrelated events (say about cycle paths) with Palestinian flags, so long as no one cracks the sh*ts if someone else turns up with an Israeli flag and no one tries to turn the cycle path rally into a pro/anti-Palestine rally.

Although remember, as Alysia Ames says, that the more ideological commitments you require to join your movement, the smaller your movement will be. So you can require people share your stances on capitalism, race, gender, sexuality, etc but don’t complain if no one shows up.

At an intellectual level, you find this position in the claim “to end X, we must also end Y” - where X and Y are capitalism, patriarchy, racism colonialism, homophobia, whatever other bad thing the speaker does not like. Lets call these things The Bad Stuff.

The first problem with these claims is that I am unsure we can “end” any of these things. In the biological realm, we have eliminated smallpox infections but we have not eliminated influenza. This is not because of laziness on the part of medicine but due to the nature of the viruses themselves. Smallpox only infects humans whereas the flu can move between species. The question is whether The Bad Stuff is more like smallpox or the flu. I think it’s more like the flu. Prejudice and power can move and shift and change. That doesn’t mean that we are powerless. Deaths due to influenza have declined due to hard work on the part of human beings. There is no reason why injustice and bigotry should not continue to decline as well. But I think that eradication is unrealistic.

The second problem is that I don’t buy the claims of linkage between these issues. This not to say there isn’t any interaction between capitalism and racism. The Atlantic slave trade was a profit-generating enterprise that was both supported by and generative of racist ideas. But that’s not what is being claimed here. To continue with this example, it seems pretty clear that non-capitalist societies can exhibit systemic racism. The Soviet Union deported multiple ethnic groups as “enemies of the people”. Antisemitism was widespread in the feudal period. Likewise, capitalist societies can demonstrate relatively low levels of racism. The countries that top surveys like the racial equality index tend to be capitalist liberal democracies. You can argue that these surveys are inherently racist, colonial, etc. But it should at least give activists pause for thought.

On some level, these claims are less rigorous intellectual statements than they are pragmatic attempts at building solidarity between different groups (e.g. socialists, feminists, antiracists, etc). The problem is that I don’t think they stand up to scrutiny and they are ultimately unnecessary. If different groups are facing the same opponent then that should be enough for them to make common cause. And the more issues we lump together, the harder it seems to change anything. We end up another version of the metacrisis.

Which would provide lots of great material for my Substack but may not make the world a better place.