The most cancelled man on earth

An interview with Norman Finkelstein — world-renowned cancelled political scientist, left-wing dissident and author of many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict — on his latest book, “I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It,” a scorching critique of cancel culture, wokeism and left-wing hypocrisy.

We meet over Zoom, because Norman Finkelstein lives in Brooklyn, New York, and we live in Amsterdam. We see Norman, a man of 69 years old, sitting in a neat study with books in the background. He is dressed casually in a blue shirt.

Norman, your book is a critique of cancel culture, wokeism and identity politics. What, precisely, do these terms mean?

Norman Finkelstein: I’ve never found definitions very useful, because either they’re very abstract or they come to embrace a thousand different phenomena because they’re too flexible.
In the book, I just go through the historical evolution of the concepts. Woke politics is, basically, what we used to call political correctness. And cancel culture is a version of the state-sponsored anti-communist scare of the 1940s and 1950s.

Woke politics is, basically, what we used to call political correctness

One of the most insightful parts of the book is where you describe how woke ideology is used by the richest 1% to divide the 99%. Can you say something about that?

Norman Finkelstein: We could just begin with basics. The richest 1% control about 30% of the wealth, and the richest 10% control about 60% of the wealth. They have the political power. They have the organization. They have countless institutions, organizations, research facilities, which have a long history of working together to figure out how to make this system stable and hold together — a fantastic, ramified network.

The other side has only one thing: numbers — the masses. But in order to bring to bear the power of those masses, they have to be organized.

It seems, objectively — I’m not going to hatch a conspiracy theory — that the major function of identity politics [a political approach with the aim of developing an agenda based on race, gender, sexual preference, etc. — red.] is to keep fragmenting the 99% such that each oppressed group is engaged in a struggle with other oppressed groups as to who is more oppressed, each demanding its own autonomous voice in a coalition. So then you have to create a platform that embraces 100,000 different identity groups. That’s just not possible.

In the traditional left tradition, why has the working class played such a big role? There are several reasons for it. The assumption was that as the capitalist system unfolds, all wealth and power would be polarized at one end, and all poverty would be polarized at the other end — frankly, just like the United States today. The working class represented pretty much everybody. The working class occupied the strategic locations in capitalist society, such that if they went on a general strike it would bring all of society to a halt.

These may be trivial observations, but they’re totally missed in identity politics. Let’s say — I’m not trying to be funny here — every transsexual decides to go on a work strike. How would that affect the economy? It wouldn’t. None of the oppressed groups has any real social power alone. 

Look at what happened at the moment of truth: the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign. The main organ of identity politics in the United States has been the New York Times. They were also the main attacker of the Sanders movement. The same is true for the main news program of identity politics, MSNBC. All the people I go through in the book: Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, they all attacked Bernie Sanders. And they used identity politics to attack him: Bernie is weak on reparations for black people, so he’s a racist. Bernie’s movement is all men — the “Bernie bros” — so he’s a sexist. Identity politics was used as the main instrument for discrediting and destroying the Bernie Sanders movement. That to me — no theories, no abstraction — are its true colors: a reaction of the capitalist system to maintain itself.

Norman, you write in your book: “I tell you my pronouns if you tell me your net worth.” Why do you see this attention to gender pronouns [e.g., he/she/they] as a negative development?

Norman Finkelstein: Well, first of all, it’s about nothing. That’s one of the problems. There are two sexes. There’s male and there’s female. End of story. There is a very small group called intersex, where at birth, you can’t identify the sex, but that’s an infinitesimal category.

Everything else — what’s nowadays called “gender” — has to do with the social expectations of different biological sexes versus how each person experiences his or her biological sex.

All right. Now, let’s take a university setting. For various reasons, knowing a person’s sex is relevant. Why? There are bathrooms. There are sports teams. There are dressing rooms. And there are also laws about discrimination: for example, you want to make sure women are not being discriminated against when it comes to math and science. Everything else, as a professor — if I may still use that term to describe myself — I’m really not interested in. I’m teaching a class. If you identify with certain social roles that are normally ascribed to women and you’re a man, that’s your business. Do what you want in your life. But it has no place in my classroom. Or take publishers: look on publishing sites, everybody gives their pronouns. Instead of putting in she/they, I would be more interested in knowing if they did or didn’t  read Shakespeare.

Why do you think left-wing activist groups are propagating woke culture? Aren’t they just trying to be tolerant in a less-than-tolerant world?

Norman Finkelstein: Listen, when I was your age, I was a Maoist, a follower of Chairman Mao [Norman bursts into an old Maoist song]. Young people go through radical phases. And I think a lot of it is absolutely genuine, absolutely decent, totally idealistic. But you make mistakes in youth. Part of it is from idealism, and part of it is there’s a certain egotistical gratification in striking a radical pose: “Look how radical I am.”

Part of the radical agenda, of course, is tolerance and being respectful of others. But I think it’s the job of more experienced activists to point out that identity politics is a distraction, and a large part of it has no radical content. It’s becoming destructive, because you’re forcing people to say things which they don’t believe, and I don’t think they should be obliged to believe.

Of course society should be tolerant. And to the extent that such tolerance is being denied to you, of course you should fight. That part I have no problem with. What I have a problem with is when you think you’re going to build a radical movement over these identities, which simply fragment a movement and are totally unthreatening to the ruling class.

Final question, Norman. You made big personal sacrifices for your principles. In 2007 you were fired from your university for your public views on the exploitation of the Holocaust, the Israel-Palestine conflict and for exposing famous Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz as a liar and a plagiarizer. You were cancelled in activist circles after criticizing the pro-Palestinian Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement. You haven’t been able to find steady employment since. How do you feel, being cancelled? Is there life after cancellation?

Norman Finkelstein: There’s still life after cancellation. The question is discipline. You know, Rosa Luxemburg [the Polish and naturalised-German socialist] did a lot of her writing in prison. The discipline would come from the cause. That’s what keeps you going after cancellation: the cause.

But if the cause dies, then it’s very hard to summon the discipline. I’ll be honest with you, it’s very hard. You know, the Palestine cause died. It absorbed me for 40 years, and then suddenly I realized it was over. The cause lost.

And then it’s very hard when you’re canceled because cancellation means one thing, besides no income: the end of external structure. When you have a job, you have to get up, have to go somewhere, have to perform certain tasks, teaching office hours, departmental responsibilities.

I was canceled both in terms of my teaching, but also no publisher would publish anything I wrote. And so there were no deadlines to meet, none. So every morning you have to kind of fabricate an excuse for your existence.

Rosa Luxemburg, when she got out of prison [after World War I], was still like a ball of fire. I wish I had that. I tremendously admire Rosa. But she lived in different times where there was a burning purpose to life. And I just kind of lost that, unfortunately.

And with this candid confession we end the interview. One thing is clear. Norman is obviously not a man of compromises or sweet talk. And that comes with a price. We do admire his radicalness, but we are not jealous of his life. He leaves us wondering, how far we ourselves would go, and at what cost, for our opinions and principles.