There's no such thing as a leftist if you are one
If you stand for everything, you'll fall for anything
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Like many of my peers who got into politics instead of relationships in high school, I went through a phase I would now describe as “reading my horoscope on Wikipedia”. In my adolescence I did not explore political thought by studying the work of interesting or important figures in history, then asking myself if I saw in their ideas a better grasp of objective truth than existed in my head. Instead I pulled a classic smart-ass teenage boy schtick. I defined my politics as a negation of my parents’ politics, and it turned out pretty stupid for a while.
My parents have drifted towards socialism under my influence, but when I came into the world they were typical Religious Right normie conservatives. As a kid, I clearly cared more about the family consensus than they did. In elementary school, I got suspended for attacking another boy, who made a caricature of a Republican politician. This incident forced my father to tell me to cool it. This did not work, honestly. It just made me reject more of his values.
After I “deconstructed” my parents’ conservative Christian beliefs, I retreated into facts and logic. The dishonesty of my appeal to reason in this era is only rivaled by that of legends of the craft like Ben Shapiro himself. I looked at descriptions of a bunch of “leftist ideologies” and picked the one that made the most sense to me — that is, the one best aligned with a pretentious teenager’s ignorant intuitions. Thus I became an anarchist and an Orwell stan, upon which basis I, much like my idol, would waste several years trying to organize with a gaggle of maladjusted post-hippie freaks I couldn’t stand.
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Only years later did I start trying to theorize my hatred of “authoritarian” socialism or learn to respond to good-faith, embarrassingly-basic questions like “How would food get produced and distributed in an anarchist society?” Before venturing into tankie territory, I read a few anarchist-communist critiques of Marxism to inoculate myself. One Manifesto and a few chapters of Lenin later, I realized how much time and effort I’d wasted on anarchy. It became more obvious with each paragraph I voluntarily read that there was a reason the “authoritarians” alone had ever achieved anything.
So I started reading Marx and his intellectual progeny extensively, noting in particular all the points of disagreement among them. By the time Occupy rolled around, I had no remaining sympathy for prefigurative politics, which saved me the trouble of camping out with the most annoying people in the American city where I lived at the time. I could have spared myself much of the earlier wasted time too, had I simply considered different positions on their own merits and assessed their ability to describe and predict reality, rather than first deciding to become a “leftist” and “activist” of some variety.
Stuck in the middle with you?
As regular readers know, I have an enduring critical interest in the ideas of people often described as “far right”. In this piece I will designate such people as the “radical right”, to group them together loosely without reproducing the thought-terminating bias baked into language that positions marginal politics as “extremism”. Under this label I include practically everyone who might self-identify as “right wing” and eschew an individualistic (read: liberal) approach to political economy. My use of even this term is unsatisfying for me, for reasons soon to become clear, but it will have to suffice because I need to move on to sharing my genius opinions with my beloved readers.
When I read or listen to radical rightists it sometimes annoys me that they appear to think of nearly everyone else as “leftists”, including progressives and others that socialists like myself typically consider right-of-center due to their economic policy. If you relate to my experience of bristling at this seemingly slanderous conflation, I ask you to resist that feeling.
Join me instead in considering whether we might actually find that our opposition has given us important insight by using this terminology we may perceive as polemic. The commonality that radical rightists identify by grouping us with the Democratic Party’s lanyard whores shines light on limitations that scientific socialists continuously impose on ourselves, by thinking of our politics in relation to the unstable “center” instead of on independent terms.
Typically when I use the terms “left” and “right”, I am describing whomever I am talking about in terms of the dominant mode of production in the relevant time and place in history. On this definition an ideology or a political position is never inherently left- or right-wing. Instead, anything that seeks to move society away from the status quo of the “center” seeks either (a) to establish a higher mode of production from the “left”, or (b) to restore the relations of a status quo ante mode of production from the “right”. Note that in my formulation it is not really possible for the left to avoid being on the side of working people. This clearly does not allow for the nuance of the self-identification as members of “the left” of PMC progressives in, say, the UK’s retro-Blairite Labour Party.
To invoke the canonical instance of the left-right divide: the French revolutionaries of 1789 were decidedly of the left in their own day, but if you imported to contemporary America the economic policies they fought so intensely to realize, you would find them remarkably similar to the platform of moderate Republicans. My contingent and descriptive application of left-right terminology is probably rather uncontroversial among Marxists — but that’s the problem, isn’t it? Marxists are not the alpha and omega of “the left”. Within countries where socialism holds power, we are not even consistently on the left by the definition I’ve presented.
For radical-right authors, in contrast, “leftist” seems to denote a personality or a psychological type, of debated malleability and characterized by resentment and delusion, more often than it describes a historically-situated political program. Whereas for me a political position can be identified as left or right by assessing its specifics in historical context, on this view any concrete policy or coherent theory on the left is secondary to its advocates’ leftist mentality.
The leftist, in this sense, is thus someone who resents the authentic natural order, as identified by the radical-right critic. He or she will find any way to engage in rebellion against this order, so it doesn’t matter much whether s/he does so through dialectical materialism or postmodern identitarianism. As a transhistorical force or impulse, sometimes literally described as Satanic, “the left” precedes any particular position associated with its members. Leftists’ views manifest our underlying leftism, a term which makes sense in context and which no self-identified leftist could meaningfully use to describe his or her political vision. Ultimately, for the right-wing intellectual, “leftism” boils down to an impossible and futile rejection of that which is true, of our own nature and/or our place within nature itself.
As you can see, these two definitions have nothing in common. It remains a comical feature of the left-right spectrum as a model that no two people can agree on what left-vs-right means, despite the fact that they can probably agree on their positions on that spectrum relative to each other. My own use of left-right terminology, in this piece and in others, is unavoidably biased towards my own Marxist understanding of history, and applies the definition I have given with as much consistency as I can manage.
All around me are unfamiliar faces
Nonetheless, my unapologetic and “authoritarian” Marxism is still Marxism, and so it comes with as many biases as its axioms demand. Chief among these is the idea that class society is a temporary feature of civilization whose development leads us, irreversibly but not inevitably, towards its abolition. Despite the delusions of many of my comrades, this means that some societies are “better” than others in a non-arbitrary sense. (More on that in later pieces, because we don’t have the space for it here.)
From a number of incompatible and similarly-influential perspectives, there is no logic to the development of history and civilization that would allow us to characterize one mode of production as “higher” or “lower” than another. The concept of a “mode of production” itself lacks a counterpart in many worldviews. Our estranged Hegelian cousins, for whom the logic of history is still dialectical, reject that material factors figure so prominently in the dialectic of history, much less that they take some kind of primacy within it. Advocates of fascist or national-conservative corporatism would likely reject my assessment that they are reactionary rather than revolutionary in their nationalist political economy, i.e. that corporatism attempts to recreate and stabilize an obsolete developmental snapshot of capitalism.
All of this I say to encourage you to think about how you determine whether a political figure or group is right- or left-wing, and how that affects your perception of their political proximity to you. While I won’t answer that question on your behalf, I doubt I risk much in wagering that for many of us, the response looks something like my definition, albeit perhaps less technical. I believe most people I recognize as “on the left” understand the left as a coalition defined in negative terms by its opposition to the right, including the status quo.
The common thread connecting the left in the capitalist world, then, is our shared opposition to capitalism and that which we describe as yet further to its right. This peacekeeping definition does not admit any positive formulation of what should supersede capitalism. Neither does it allow for a shared understanding of what capitalism is and why and how we ought to abolish it, which reveals that “leftists” have nothing in common with each other that is not also shared with a number of radical-right critics of capitalism.
Does the left mean anything, really? Basically I don’t think so, despite the fact I have a hard time avoiding the term. Because its factions’ positive visions are irreconcilable, it boils down to “anti-capitalism” and thus, as just described, cannot distinguish its uniting principles from criticisms of capitalism aesthetically identified with the radical right.
Futile attempts to make the distinction devolve into variations on the dogmatic insistence that there is something that makes anarchists and Marxists more like each other than either is like fascists. To take this position is to simply ignore a thousand connections that fascism has to the historical contexts that also shaped the chasm between anarchism and Marxism. It leaves you with no explanation for the existence of anarcho-capitalism, or Strasserism, or even social democracy that doesn’t boil down to people being wacky, crazy, or evil.
Big-tent “leftist” organizations with leadership allergies allow contrarian narcissists with no values of their own to join and shit on anyone who dares to believe in any specific political vision. They don’t know what they want and they contribute nothing, but they reliably show up to play the role of haters. If you try to do anything, they will quickly generate a reason it can’t happen or isn’t sufficiently revolutionary — oh, and by the way you’re an omniphobic nazbol infiltrator for suggesting it, so you should get kicked out. Are these people useful as internal dissidents themselves? No, they’re worse than useless. Some of them are literally spooks, and the others have the same effect. They sure are leftists, though. They sure don’t like capitalism — or, frankly, anything at all.
Actually, you lazy idiot, I do dream of labor
My argument faces frustration from the fact that the left-right spectrum is one of those concepts where nobody actually agrees on its meaning, despite constantly arguing with each other as though we had an objective shared definition. This allows us to avoid bringing up subjects that cause conflict among our perceived peers — or, failing that, to insist on excluding them from the category of “left wing”. Perhaps one day we will discover what makes me a confirmed leftist, despite the occasional leftist’s insistence that I am a nazi, or a confirmed rightist, despite the occasional rightist’s insistence that I am a nazi.
Innumerable arguments have taken place over the question of whether a “leftist” by definition must support the existence of the state, or desire the abolition of borders, or hate the police, et cetera. Some shibboleths I find particularly annoying, such as tolerance of “anti-work” dropouts and those who think all poor people are working-class, which is not accurate. I dislike the use of No True Leftist fallacies as an excuse to avoid complexity, a favorite for those who are morally rather than intellectually convinced of their few positively-defined beliefs. As an informal example of the latter phenomenon, in recent months I’ve seen many implications that Labor Zionists were “fake leftists”, whatever that means. At that point, you’re just saying no one on your team can be wrong about anything, because your team doesn’t endorse “being wrong”.
On some or even most topics I agree with the most commonly-held positions “on the left”, and on others I do not. Yet the more often I think in terms that imply enduring proximity among everyone labeled “leftists”, the more I’ve failed to learn my lesson. Regularly I notice I’ve fallen back into the mimetic trap of giving a shit what anarchists and progressives think about a topic I should instead approach through study. This happens despite my conviction that the reason I am not one of them is that their methods, insofar as they have methods, produce incorrect conclusions. I’ve again mistaken the enemy of my enemy for a problematic friend, rather than an ally of convenience.
Why do leftists insist on cribbing progressive ideas, radicalizing them by intensifying the bad progressive logic, and then presenting them as “the real leftist position” that dishonest progressives are trying to avoid taking? Why can’t the progressives simply be what they are, which means in most cases as immediate an enemy as any conservative? Why do I even care about policing the application of the word “leftist” to progressives?
Despite my hope to find answers to these questions in the process of writing, my head now fills with more than I had when I started: Why does the abstraction of “the left” take priority over the concrete and incompatible political actors that supposedly constitute it? Why does this identity so easily overshadow the whole point of organized political activity, which is to engage in conflict and persuasion so as to gain the power to reshape social relations as you think is best? Why does it feel like we are in a book club instead of an army?
Preaching to the choir
Ultimately I think it’s fine for Marxists to consider non-Marxist “leftists” to be on our side in a general sense, as long as we remember that leadership is our responsibility and that those incapable of leading are not our equal partners therein. I think most people who self-identify as “on the left”, regardless of how they define that position, are at least sympathetic to the interests of the working classes.
Nonetheless, I think all of us who have overidentified with the left should take care to distinguish ourselves continuously on the level of principles and loyalties. If we have to choose between being recognized as “leftists” and being recognized as Marxists, we should choose the latter. Hell, if we have to choose between being recognized as Marxists and being recognized as working-class revolutionaries, we should choose the latter.
Ultimately the left-right distinction stripped of a precise working definition is cultural, and the cultural similarities that put Marxists in immediate political proximity to bourgeois socialists or anarchists might not actually have survived the world wars. For me the key thing is that Marxists should not be afraid to be excommunicated from a broader navel-gazing “leftism” that has no methodological rigor. We are scientists, if we’re serious, and as such we owe no allegiance to trends. It is more important to be correct than it is to be leftists.
One key contemporary fight we have is the PMC-lumpen alliance that seeks to impose ideological discipline on “leftists” in its own terms. In trying to seem less “tankie” or “authoritarian” or whatever, we cede ground to race-baiters and aspiring social parasites. While we may have tactical reasons to make common cause with such groups, they typically have nothing practical to offer us strategically, and yielding to them ideologically is a departure from working-class politics that you can make if you want, but only if you acknowledge it. Marx himself clowned on anti-work figures for this kind of thing in his often misunderstood joke: “If this is Marxism, then all I know is that I am not a Marxist.”
We are not and never have been a movement of the lumpenproletariat, much less of the professional-managerial class. We are not and never have been primarily concerned with the specific interests of laptop jockeys like myself, whose blue collars have faded and whose occupational hazards are repetitive strain injury and anxiety instead of death and dismemberment. Deviations in these directions, from the New Left decades back to Verso Loft socialites today, have proven worthless as means of establishing socialism. It isn’t actually useful to keep the peace by pretending that career criminals are just temporarily embarrassed Stakhanovs, or that jerking off on camera is a real job, or that making bits move around in computer memory is the economic activity of a revolutionary class. Full employment is a necessary part of large-scale human flourishing, but the flourishing derives from a less-alienated experience of socially productive work rather than the mere existence of full employment.
Everyone wants to eat the rich. No one wants to talk about what happens when we run out of them. As for me and my house, we will grow the food.