The Left is Socialist and Universalist or it is no Left at all
“The entire historical and political basis of the Left is solidarity, which is only possible by stressing what people have in common. Slicing and dicing humans into dozens of fragmented ID groups based on race and ‘gender’ is literally the stupidest thing the Left could do. It did it.” (Capel Lofft on Twitter).
It is with bitter irony that I read this criticism from a conservative, bitter because it is right, ironically because the principal force driving this remaking of the old Social Left practising solidarity in the name of universalist principles and values has been the neoliberalism which so many conservatives advanced aggressively in the economic sphere.
Conservatives now make this point to expose the self-destructive lunacy of what now passes for the Left.
They are probably afraid that this divisive Left is the one that will win.
Very many of these conservatives need to examine their own culpability in aggressively promoting policies of desolidarisation and desocialisation. They moved Heaven and Earth with all the power and resources at their command to destroy the Socialist Left, and so paved the way for an atomising cultural degeneration.
You can still find conservatives hailing the true, the good, and the beautiful, and professing a faith in God, faith, family, tradition, and the country, whilst also affirming liberty and prosperity. I would strongly advise people to examine precisely what is entailed by such ‘liberty’ and ‘prosperity.’ You don’t need to look too far to hear the same old neoliberal justification of free trade and free markets. Classical liberalism, then. And we can see clearly where this has led us – a concentration and centralisation of capital and power under the corporate form. Liberalisation here stnds revealed as an ideological cover for corporatisation and commodification on global scale.
Now the libertarian revolution is devouring its own children, conservatives condemn the divisive Left, little realising that this is a Left made in the political and cultural image of the economic libertarians.
Said conservatives were not conservatives at all, but promoted an economic liberatarianism in order to uproot all social supports and collective centres of resistance in order to remake society as a congeries of individuals who were powerless in face of ‘the market’ (that slipperly euphemism for private and corporate economic forces).
Liberalisation uproots and disembeds society and culture, leaving one and all prey to external force – the corporate form cannibalises the world to itself: this is the ultimate completion of the initial expropriation and enclosure unleashed by the capital system, what the Marxist William Morris called “the great sundering” in the late nineteenth century.
As a socialist, I warned against all of this degeneration and division from an impeccably socialist perspective a quarter of a century ago. If I was to now warn of ‘woke’ I would instantly be dismissed by self-styled revolutionaries as a reactionary (and worse). I remain singularly unimpressed by bourgeois and vanguards. They were a blight on socialism in the past and they remain so. They have zero connection with the people that make, move, build, and grow things (often holding them in contempt for their ‘false consciousness’). How do they square the political circle? By the magic thinking of ‘intersectionality’ and a justification by faith and praxis – acceptance and obedience is a condition of understanding. This is precisely how Marx criticised the ‘magic circle’ of bureaucracy and the bureaucratic ideology of power/knowledge in his critique of Hegel’s ‘universal class.’ The biggest critic of modern day Leftists is Marx himself.
A quarter of a century ago I wrote:
“A major concern of this thesis has been to relate the universal ethic implied by ‘rational’ philosophical conceptions of city life to the ways in which urban histories are lived, experienced and actively interpreted by the different publics who comprise actual cities. The critical question which this section addresses is that of constituting a universal moral frame which respects plural identities whilst nevertheless canalising them into the common good so as to enhance their shared and mutual interests. This involves a critical analysis of the practical strategies employed by different publics in appropriating and reinterpreting urban space and entails means respecting the view that, within each particular context there are different configurations of urban space for each of these different publics.
A united front in face of common sources of oppression is required to enable groups to confront collective and general structures of power and oppression in their communities. The question concerns how identity politics, with its tendency to dislocation, can obtain a unified discourse of justice, making the necessary connections between groups within an openly unified framework. How can a unified organisation be established without the particular agendas of social groups being subsumed under a universalist discourse or political agenda.
At a time when there is a unified capitalist class presiding over global relations of domination, creating an international framework to entrench and extend this power, subjecting urban life to external processes of investment, accumulation and production, confining inhabitants within zero-sum contexts, there are indications that some compartmentalisation is occurring within identity politics. Such compartmentalisation serves to prevent a united front. A meaningful identity politics has to be devised in terms of a universal interest and an agreed, consensual community.
The emergence of the new social movements has strengthened the view that ideas of social justice are relative. Each new social movement presses its own particular conception of what justice is. And there appears to be no way of resolving the clash of divergent conceptions. To leave the question in this state of mutual cancellation serves only to reduce the postmodernist celebration of difference to conservatism. For it becomes impossible to avoid oppression coming to be defined in a relativist and particular way. And it becomes impossible to avoid a fragmentation that builds upon existing metropolarities rooted in an actual, objective, socio-economic oppression. In this respect, Eric Hobsbawm is right to point out that whilst the mass social and political movements of the left were coalitions of group alliances, they were held together not by aims specific to the groups but by great universal causes that applied to all humankind. The movements of the left spoke the universal language of social justice and equality (Hobsbawm 1996:42). Noting that the labour movement lost the capacity to be the potential centre of a general people’s mobilisation and general hope for the future when it became narrowed down to being a sectional movement of industrial workers, Hobsbawm emphasises that the ‘political project of the Left is universalist: it is for all human beings’, for everybody as human beings rather than for some sections as something particular. ‘That is why the Left cannot base itself on identity politics. It has a wider agenda’, however much that does involve supporting particular social groups involved in particular struggles against injustice and oppression (Hobsbawm 1996:43).
Hobsbawm thus criticises the extent to which the Left has abandoned the concern with social justice and equality in favour of identity politics. The result is that the Left has come to be conceived as a coalition of minority groups and interests: of race, gender, sexual or other cultural preferences and lifestyles. Such a postmodern politics is defined in terms of otherness, emphasising what separates one group from other groups. This enhances the forces for diremption and fragmentation. Hobsbawm notes that adding up minorities is quite distinct from winning majorities (Hobsbawm 1996:44). It is certainly very different from fostering a genuine public life.
The danger of disintegrating into a pure alliance of minorities is unusually great on the Left because the decline of the great universalist slogans of the Enlightenment, which were essentially slogans of the Left, leaves it without any obvious way of formulating a common interest across sectional boundaries.
Hobsbawm 1996:45
Hobsbawm points out here that the only one of the new social movements which crosses all boundaries is that of the ecologists.
What this means is that, for all the dangers of formulating and imposing overly-moral, overarching and homogeneous conceptions of the common good, the Left has no option other than to develop a conception of community and public life which embodies universal values of social justice and equality. As Todd Gitlin has stated in The Twilight of Common Dreams: ‘What is a Left if it is not, plausibly at least, the voice of the whole people? .. If there is no people, but only peoples, there is no Left’ (Gitlin 1995:165). The task is to encompass difference groups within a universal public in such way as to enhance rather than inhibit their freedom. This means conceiving a way that allows all groups to negotiate the common good so that the freedom of each may coincide with the freedom of all within public life.”
The City of Reason (2004)
And I wrote a lot more besides. The likes of Gitlin and Hobsbawm were theorists with impeccable socialist credentials. I could add more names from the intellectual Left here – Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, Norman Geras, David Harvey, and my good self. Write these words now and you risk condemnation as a reactionary, classed with the people who dare criticise ‘woke,’ the 'new' faith and religion that cannot be questioned. My critique goes back further than 'woke' and goes a whole lot deeper.
“Woke” is a perfect way to sum up the age, in its very meaninglessness — like so much else that unites some people whilst dividing all people, it is an empty free-floating signifier that people can fill with whatever they like or dislike. I use the term merely because it is recognisable, if indefinable. My hope is that once people are clued in on the subject under discussion, they will do more than take sides in the surface-level cultural wars, becoming part of the problem rather than a solution to it, and search deeper the roots and causes of the moral and cultural malaise. I’ll give the protagonists in this endless, unwinnable war game a clue, revolutionaries and reactionaries both: the victory of ‘woke’ won’t lead to emancipation and justice, the defeat of ‘woke’ won’t restore the true, the good, and the beautiful – the fractures lie elsewhere: woke is one manifestation of those contradictions, not a cause of them. The people who dismiss ‘woke’ as a non-phenomena, a bogey invented by the reactionary right, are as guilty of looking only at surfaces as are the reactionaries. Few are aware of how deep the roots of the contemporary moral and cultural malaise go. Rampant subjectivism throughout the culture of society and emotivism in ethics makes the challenge of building alliances and forging common purposes not merely harder but well-nigh impossible. The age is loud with the sound of activists and campaigners of all causes insisting that ‘we’ act for the sake of some common good, little realising that this grand ‘we’ doesn’t exist. The common ground has been lost at the level of shared interests and principles and their displacement to the mediated cultural level serves only to foster and entrench further division.
There is something rotten and rancid about the contemporary Left. And don’t get me started on those who have swallowed Prince Harry’s self-serving lies as somehow striking a radical blow against class power. Far too many on the Left – the Left of a media and culture of subjective opinion detached from social roots - have been swallowed by and remade in the image of neoliberalism. Given a platform to voice revolution daily on ‘social’ media, they do so. Whilst it sounds radical enough, it is actually utterly shallow, mere lip service. And whilst it seems popular, it is a mere playing to the galleries of social media tribes. The people who prattle endlessly about democracy and ‘the people’ make me laugh most of all – they have no connection at all with real people and quickly become vituperative whenever any of the great unwashed dare challenge their views. They are lame and predictable conformists whose mediated space and cultural privilege affords them pretensions of radicalism. They speak of and for ‘the people’ in the abstract, express vicious contempt for actual people who dare hold contrary views, and have little by way of rooted social connection to draw on. They are socialists in name only, an identity which fits the nominalism of the age like a glove.
I am very critical of elements of the contemporary Left, but am clear that the degeneration comes not from Leftism as such but from wider socio-political causes with their roots in modernity’s DNA. Antiquated political binaries associated with the class-based socio-economic struggle between Left and Right continue to cloud thought on the issue. The fact is, though, is that it is the dominant politics of the Right, expressing deeper socio-economic and cultural tranformations, that has driven these degenerations in the political formation, uprooting politics from any embedding in social, moral, and economic realities – the individual has been set free to choose and pursue the good as he or she sees fit – and the more money and power the individual has, the more free he or she or it ‘is.’ The individual is ‘free to choose,’ as Milton Friedman insisted. Such people are not conservatives but classical liberals engaging in pure ideology, asserting the principles of individual freedom whilst failing to see that its social and moral conequences have eaten its own roots. This Right has succumbed to a moral and social pathology; it is the Left’s tragedy that too many of its most vocal and active adherents have followed suit.
The best policy, in my judgement, is to refuse to be drawn into the game. Any respone by way of rebuttal cannot but draw you into the endless and unwinnable war between irreconcileable views that feed on themselves in an exponential growth. I frequently post Gustav Doré’s Angel of Peace showing Virgil and Dante the way to peace, hoping that people get the message – there are no winners in these toxic zero-sum political games, only the loss of shared values, loyalties, and commitments in an identifiably public realm. The appropriate response to so much in circulation in this media heavy culture is to ignore thoroughly. Don’t play the game. The problem is that that game will go away when people have developed the nous, the character, and the will to engage in authentic social and public life. It’s an age in which people have drifted away from realities and been swallowed up in a void of surrogacy and simulation.
For the record, I come from a family of builders, coalminers, domestic servants, shopworkers and worked in the building trade and then distribution (whilst working my way from first degree and masters to PhD). I am solidly working class. I’ll not take lessons on socialism from the bourgeois or from those vanguardista who have reverted to the impeccably bourgeois modes of Jacobinism. I know that that they have no roots in the working class and don’t represent the working class.
Politics in the contemporary world is divided between
a) a philistine right that sees ‘globalism’ everywhere, little realising its own complicity in a globalisation extending and entrenching the corporate form via neoliberal economics;
b) an identitarian left that is determined to trash history, culture, tradition, and unravel social connection;
c) a reheated ‘centrism’ that defaults to power every time, and which is also complicit in globlisation, liberalisation, and corporatisation;
d) increasingly authoritarian neoliberal technocrats engineering collapse / managing decline so as to impose an austerity that preserves asymmetrical power relations;
e) a Green politics that is an anti-politics, a scientism telling pre-political truths to government, sliding very easily over into that most anti-ecological politics of all, the top-down bureaucratic management of society.
All of the above exist in incestuous relation and I oppose every single one of them. I was a Green for a long time, entertaining the hope that people concerned with planetary despoliation would come in time to envisage the ecological transformation of the political that would return us to an originary politics by way of a thoroughgoing democratisation and socialisation. That’s the Green Republicanism I have sought to develop in my work, joining the natural ecology to a political, social, and moral ecology. After years of arguing this case I have been forced to conclude that Greens don’t have the first idea of what I’m talking about – and don’t know because they don’t want to know: when you presume to already know the truth, you tend to talk (down) to others rather than listen to them. People who have made fetishes of science, technology, and nature think little of politics, ethics, people, and dialogue – they know better. It never occurs to them that decades of political failure might be down to their political ineptitude.
I can write the very same with respect to the liberal 'centrists,’ ‘modernisers,’ and ‘progressives’ who, from the early 1990s on, have told us that ‘globalisation’ is the only game in town. Such liberal ‘centrists’ are still with us. They were the slogan ‘neither left nor right’ as a badge of honour, as if they possess an Archimedean vantage point from which to judge, order, and organise the world. They can see through the delusions and prejudices of everyone from the ‘populist right’ to the ‘extremist left,’ but are utterly blind to their own – this despite the fact that it was their delusions and prejudices and the attempt to sustain them in the teeth of political and social dissolution that is the breeding ground for those ‘hard’ political groups they scorn.
These liberal ‘centrists’ are the class that dare not speak its name, a ‘classless’ class which is Hegel’s ‘universal class’ of bureaucratic managerialists on the global stage. Technocracy.
The politics of choosing the lesser evil here simply fails to address the issues that need to be addressed, allowing the problem to develop until the underlying forces become irresistible rendering choices between all sides mere hot air. I suspect we are already very close to that end. The only question is how long the partisans involved in one or other of these sides can maintain the pretence that it all matters. Despite a delusion and futility that is manifest, hatred of others goes a long way indeed. People make a fetish of their causes, little realising the almost complete absence of substance. We have known since Plato that people become entranced by shadows on the wall, and will argue to infinity about spectres.
It is not the least of liberal modernity’s achievements / ironies to so easily embroil its self-made men in endlessly debilitating and increasingly fractious dispute over illusory antagonisms and antitheses, miring freely choosing individuals in dichotomies which can only be properly understood by being traced to their roots in an alienated system of power, politics, and production which must endlessly engender false contradictions in order to better conceal the fundamental ones. All the sides locked in daily heated conflict in the contemporary political terrain share in common the tendency to approach problems from entire the wrong end, disputing over surface manifestations to the neglect of true causes. At the surface level, the contradictory dynamics of the system are glimpsed only fleetingly and partially, causing us to mis-identity the nature of the problems that afflict us.
The only sane solution is to follow the lead of the Angel of Peace, look deeper, look further, cleave to essential truths, and look beyond transitory rages and furies. That is not so much ignoring politics as reclaiming politics as a concern for the human good from the madness. In refusing to choose sides among non-options I am affirming a greater, originary, politics that is not so much beyond the bounds as their condition.
The best policy, in my judgement, is to refuse to be drawn into the game. Any response by way of rebuttal cannot but draw you into the endless and unwinnable war between irreconcileable views that feed on themselves in an exponential growth. I frequently post Gustav Doré’s Angel of Peace showing Virgil and Dante the way to peace, hoping that people get the message – there are no winners in these toxic zero-sum political games, only the loss of shared values, loyalties, and commitments in an identifiably public realm. The appropriate response to so much in circulation in this media heavy culture is to ignore thoroughly. Don’t play the game. The problem is that that game will go away when people have developed the nous, the character, and the will to engage in authentic social and public life. It’s an age in which people have drifted away from realities and been swallowed up in a void of surrogacy and simulation.
Every so often, people who listen to my disquieting discourse, and who are forced to concede its cogency vis their clearly failing positions, turn and ask:
Since Enlightenment rationality is a fundamental part of the problem and hence cannot be the solution, the only known antidotes to the problem postmodernism are theocracy or barbarism – which is it?
My answer is contained in my writing as a whole. The people who state the options in such bald terms do so because they presume – rightly I think – that people reared on disinfectant will never go back to holy water ever again. They give us a choice between the noble ideals of Enlightenment reason and barbarism, little realising that barbarism below – the primitivism, libertarianism, and naïve nativism embrased by so many who express a contempt for politics - is part reaction against the barbarism above practised by a liberal technocracy which is precisely the end result of Enlightenment rationality. It is also in part the product of a scientistic materialism that reduces human beings to animalistic balls of meat driven by immediate desire in a pointless landscape.
If man doesn’t live by bread alone, stated mathematician A.N. Whitehead (Science and the Modern World), then neither can he live by disinfectants. An arid rationalism is now breeding its twin heresy of fideism, and those wedded to the failing gods of science and technology are so uncomprehending that they have to mount a lame defence by misrepresenting the attempt to revalue religion as motivated by a desire to impose theocracy. Be careful what you wish for, and don’t wish. You may well get theocracy as a result of a wilful refusal to look a failing modernity in the face. Postmodernism is a modernism without the innocence and hypocrisy. If postmodernism isn’t the answer – and no postmodernist would ever be so bold as to offer ‘the answer’ (or even identify as a postmodernist for that matter) – then neither is a blind defence of modernity – such defenders fail to see the issues that now assail us have arisen as a result of processes immanent within modernity.
The attempt to present a recovery of the religious view as theocracy is a flagrant attempt to caricature, producing a bogey to frighten the brave soldiers of the age of positivism back into empty assertions of reason and science. This is a whistling in the dark that will assuredly deliver both technocracy and barbarism.
Belief? ‘Don’t go there,’ an atheist friend comments. As though the world is just fact, about which there is no morality, merely impassive, non-evaluative recognition of reality; as though science and the decision to seek the truth about reality does not involve a faith, a trust, a belief that reality is intelligible to intelligent beings and that the truth will set us free.
There is more to the religious view than theocracy. Nietzsche condemned Christianity because he saw in it the roots of democracy, equality, freedom, and socialism, all the things he loathed. Truth-seeking is a theological concept.
“Cowpats lack belief. No human does. Why are atheists so reluctant to take responsibility for their own chosen opinions? And why are they so keen to maintain that the universe is a pointless giant car-crash?”
(Peter Hitchens)
Natural law is something appointed by reason (St Thomas Aquinas, ST 1-2.94.1).
Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, The Third Century
53
And what rule do you think I walked by? Truly a strange one, but the best in the whole world. I was guided by an implicit faith in God’s goodness: and therefore led to the study of the most obvious and common things. For thus I thought within myself God being, as we generally believe, infinite in goodness, it is most consonant and agreeable with His nature, that the best things should be most common. For nothing is more natural to infinite goodness, than to make the best things most frequent; and only things worthless scarce. Then I began to enquire what things were most common: Air, Light, Heaven and Earth, Water, the Sun, Trees, Men and Women, Cities, Temples, &c. These I found common and obvious to all: Rubies, Pearls, Diamonds, Gold and Silver, these I found scarce, and to the most denied. Then began I to consider and compare the value of them which I measured by their serviceableness, and by the excellencies which would be found in them, should they be taken away. And in conclusion, I saw clearly, that there was a real valuableness in all the common things; in the scarce, a feigned.
54
Besides these common things I have named, there were others as common, but invisible. The Laws of God, the Soul of Man, Jesus Christ and His Passion on the Cross, with the ways of God in all Ages. And these by the general credit they had obtained in the world confirmed me more. For the ways of God were transient things, they were past and gone; our Saviour’s sufferings were in one particular, obscure place, the Laws of God were no object of the eye, but only found in the minds of men: these therefore which were so secret in their own nature, and made common only by the esteem men had of them, must of necessity include unspeakable worth for which they were celebrated of all, and so generally remembered. As yet I did not see the wisdom and depths of knowledge, the clear principles, and certain evidences whereby the wise and holy, the ancients and the learned that were abroad in the world knew these things but was led to them only by the fame which they had vulgarly received. Howbeit I believed that there were unspeakable mysteries contained in them, and tho’ they were generally talked of their value was unknown. These therefore I resolved to study, and no other, But to my unspeakable wonder, they brought me to all the things in Heaven and in Earth, in Time and Eternity, possible and impossible, great and little, common and scarce; and discovered them all to be infinite treasures.
55
That anything may be found to be in infinite treasure, its place must be found in Eternity and in God’s esteem. For as there is a .time, so there is a place for all things. Everything in its place is admirable, deep, and glorious; out of its place like a wandering bird, is desolate and good for nothing. How therefore it relateth to God and all creatures must be seen before it can be enjoyed. And this I found by many instances. The Sun is good, only as it relateth to the stars, to the seas, to your eye, to the fields, &c. As it relateth to the stars it raiseth their influences; as to the Seas, it melteth them and maketh the waters flow; as to your eye, it bringeth in the beauty of the world; as to the fields, it clotheth them with fruits and flowers. Did it not relate to others it would not be good. Divest it of these operations, and divide it from these objects, it is useless and good for nothing, and therefore worthless, because worthless and useless go together. A piece of gold cannot be valued, unless we know how it relates to clothes, to wine, to victuals, to the esteem of men and to the owner. Some little piece, in a kingly monument, severed from the rest, hath no beauty at all. It enjoys its value in its place, by the ornament it gives to, and receives from all the parts. By this I discerned, that even a little knowledge could not be had in the mystery of Felicity, without a great deal. And that that was the reason why so many were ignorant of its nature, and why so few did attain it. For by the labour required to much knowledge they were discouraged, and for lack of much did not see any glorious motives to allure them.
56
Therefore of necessity they must at first believe that Felicity is a glorious though an unknown thing. And certainly it was the infinite wisdom of God that did implant by instinct so strong a desire of Felicity in the Soul, that we might be excited to labour after it, though we know it not, the very force wherewith we covet it supplying the place of understanding. That there is a Felicity, we all know by the desires after, that there is a most glorious Felicity we know by the strength and vehemence of those desires. And that nothing but Felicity is worthy of our labour, because all other things are the means only which conduce unto it. I was very much animated by the desires of philosophers, which I saw in heathen books aspiring after it. But the misery is It was unknown. An altar was erected to it like that in Athens with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.
57
Two things in perfect Felicity I saw to be requisite and that Felicity must be perfect, or not Felicity. The first was the perfection of its objects, in nature, serviceableness, number, and excellency. The second was the perfection of the manner wherein they are enjoyed, for sweetness, measure, and duration. And unless in these I could be satisfied, I should never be contented: Especially about the latter. For the manner is always more excellent than the thing. And it far more concerneth us that the manner wherein we enjoy be complete and perfect, than that the matter which we enjoy be complete and perfect. For the manner, as we contemplate its excellency, is itself a great part of the matter of our enjoyment.
58
In discovering the matter or objects to be enjoyed, I was greatly aided by remembering that we were made in God’s Image. For thereupon it must of necessity follow that God’s Treasures be our Treasures, and His joys our joys. So that by enquiring what were God’s, I found the objects of our Felicity, God’s Treasures being ours. For we were made in His Image that we might live in His similitude. And herein I was mightily confirmed by the Apostle’s blaming the Gentiles, and charging it upon them as a very great fault that they were alienated from the life of God, for hereby I perceived that we were to live the life of God, when we lived the true life of nature according to knowledge: and that by, blindness and corruption we had strayed from it. Now God’s Treasures are His own perfections, and all His creatures.
The destruction of truth is at the heart of cultural decline, freeing elites to do as they please in a new hierarchy.
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