Vivek Chibber, Professor of Sociology at New York University, discusses neocolonial history and the formation of anti-colonial movements, which effectively began as an elite-dominated push for power, to widen the colonial apparatus for more participation by wealthy Indians. Historicising how anti-colonial, national liberation movements only took off when the internal agendas of national liberation struggles were set as the people unified their narrow struggles to join the mass struggle, Chibber notes that the modern identitarian left has failed in assessing and addressing class struggle. Moving between decolonising countries and the United States, Chibber tells the story of how, in the neoliberal era, as all the institutions of ordinary people were dismantled—bowling alleys, civics centres and neighbourhood organisations—there is no longer a sense of a collective endeavour. As a result, the groups best positioned to get something for themselves were all upper-middle-class and upper-class citizens who sought positions in the halls of power. Chibber narrates how these groups, having abandoned collective struggles, chose to access social power through a language that drew upon identity—gender and race—cashing in on identity while parsing out the universe into smaller and smaller slices, with each group staking claims to being “the most oppressed.” Appraising how such a tiny, minoritarian movement like the transgender movement was given such an enormous amount of power in the United States by the Democrats, Chibber maintains that this adornment of power from above immediately absolved that lobby of the responsibility or necessity of having to seek alliances, thus leading to a toxic political culture of calumniation and slurs.
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