Critique of liberal-progressive consensus: is multiculturalism, political correctness, and tolerance the ideology of late capitalism?

Slavoj Žižek, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Multiculturalism, tolerance, and identity-political recognition are the ideological forms in which late capitalism manages its own contradictions — depoliticizing class antagonism by refiguring it as cultural respect.¹ The critique is leftist auto-criticism, not concession to the right; the targets are the liberal-managerial consensus, not the marginalized groups whose concrete struggles often serve as alibi for that consensus.²³⁴

Sources

1. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today's world.

   The Ticklish Subject, pp. 218–219

2. Now, unless we are confronted with a situation of extreme exploitation, the worker's attitude vis-à-vis capitalism will depend entirely on how his or her identity is constituted — as socialists knew a long time ago, when they were confronted by reformist tendencies in the trade-union movement. There is nothing in the worker's demands which is intrinsically anti-capitalist.

   Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 211

3. Their differences are ultimately reduced to opposed cultural attitudes: multiculturalist, sexual, etc., 'openness' versus traditional 'family values'.

   Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism, pp. 247–248

4. They point towards a third domain, which belongs neither to the global market society nor to the new forms of ethnic fundamentalism: the domain of the political, the public space of civil society, of active responsible citizenship (the fight for human rights, ecology, etc.).

   The Ticklish Subject, p. 222

Where the argument is made

• Living in the End Times (2010), Trouble in Paradise (2014), The Courage of Hopelessness (2017), Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (2018), Heaven in Disorder (2021), Substack essays 2023–2026

How the argument was received

Increasingly central in the late period (post-2010). The Substack column is the most concentrated venue for this position. Frequently misread, especially by US identity-political critics, as crypto-conservatism — a misreading explicitly addressed and rejected in multiple texts.