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Title: Leftism 101 Author: Lawrence Jarach Language: en Topics: history, marxism, philosophy, post-left, reformism Source: Retrieved on August 8, 2009 from http://www.greenanarchy.org/index.php?action=viewwritingdetail&writingId=236 Notes: from Back to Basics volume #2 — The Problem of the Left
For most it means some form of socialism, despite the fact that there
are plenty of leftists who are not opposed to capitalism (clearly from
the actual history of socialism, not all socialists are opposed to
capitalism either). Plenty of other arguments can be made about that,
but let’s just keep things simple and assume that the two terms are
synonymous. As is the case with most vague terms, however, it’s easier
to come up with a list of characteristics than a definition. Leftism
encompasses many divergent ideas, strategies, and tactics; are there any
common threads that unite all leftists, despite some obvious
differences? In order to begin an attempt at an answer, it is necessary
to examine the philosophical antecedents to what can broadly be termed
Socialism.
Liberalism, Humanism, and Republicanism are political and philosophical
schools of thought deriving from the modern European tradition (roughly
beginning during the Renaissance). Without going into details, adherents
of the three (especially Liberalism) presume the existence of an ideal
property-owning male individual who is a fully rational (or at least a
potentially rational) agent. This idealized individual stands opposed to
the arbitrary authority of the economic and political systems of
monarchism and feudalism, as well as the spiritual authority of the
Catholic Church. All three (LH&R) presume the capacity of anyone (male),
through education and hard work, to succeed in a free market (of
commodities and ideas). Competition is the overall ethos of all three.
The promoters of LH&R insist that these modernist philosophies-compared
to monarchism, elitism, and feudalism-are advances on the road to human
freedom. They believe it more beneficial for what they call The Greater
Good to adhere to and promote a philosophy that at least proposes the
ability of anyone to gain some kind of control over her/his own life,
whether in the realm of education, economic prosperity, or political
interactions. The ultimate goals of LH&R are to do away with economic
scarcity and intellectual/spiritual poverty, while promoting the idea of
more democratic governance. They promote this under the rubric of
Justice, and they see the State as its ultimate guarantor.
Socialism as a modern movement has been greatly influenced by these
three philosophies. Like those who adhere to LH&R, leftists are
concerned with, and are opposed to, economic and social injustice. They
all propose ameliorating social ills through active intervention or
charity, whether under the auspices of the State, NGOs, or other formal
organizations. Very few of the proposed solutions or stopgaps promote
(or even acknowledge) self-organized solutions engaged in by those
directly suffering such ills. Welfare, affirmative action programs,
psychiatric hospitals, drug rehabilitation facilities, etc. are all
examples of various attempts to deal with social problems. Given the
premises of these overlapping philosophies and their practical
frameworks, they have the appearance of being the results of
intelligence and knowledge mixed with empathy and the desire to help
people. Cooperation for The Common Good is seen as more beneficial to
humanity than individual competition. However, socialism also takes the
existence of competition for granted. Liberals and socialists alike
believe that human beings do not naturally get along, so we must be
educated and encouraged to be cooperative. When all else fails, this can
always be enforced by the State.
Regardless of the fact that there is plenty of overlap and
blending-precluding real, discrete boundaries-I hope that describing
these various manifestations of leftism will be a way to identify
certain particular characteristics.
In terms of strategy and tactics, moderate leftists believe that things
can be made better by working within current structures and
institutions. Clearly reformist, moderate leftists promote legal,
peaceful, and polite superficial alterations in the status quo,
eventually hoping to legislate socialism into existence. The democracy
they champion is bourgeois: one person, one vote, majority rule.
Radical leftists promotes a mixture of legal and illegal tactics,
depending on whatever appears to have a better chance of succeeding at
the moment, but they ultimately want the sanction of some properly
constituted legal institutions (especially when they get to make most of
the rules to be enforced). They are pragmatic, hoping for peaceful
change, but ready to fight if they believe it to be necessary. The
democracy they promote is more proletarian: they aren’t worried about
the process of any particular election, so long as gains are made at the
expense of the bosses and mainstream politicians.
Extreme leftists are amoral pragmatists, a strategic orientation that
can also be termed opportunistic. They are decidedly impolite,
explicitly desiring the destruction of current institutions (often
including the State), with the desire to remake them so that only they
themselves will be able to make and enforce new laws. They are much more
willing to use force in the service of their goals. The democracy they
promote is usually based on a Party.
All leftists privilege the category of worker as worker/producer, an
entity that exists only within the sphere of the economy. Moderate
leftists campaign for workers’ rights (to strike, to have job security
and safety, to have decent and fair contracts), trying to mitigate the
more obvious abuses of the bosses through the passage and enforcement of
progressive legislation. They want capitalism to be organized with
“People Before Profits” (as the overused slogan has it), ignoring the
internal logic and history of capitalism. Moderate leftists promote
socially responsible investing and want a more just distribution of
wealth; social wealth in the form of the much-touted “safety net,” and
personal wealth in the form of higher wages and increased taxes on
corporations and the rich. They want to balance the rights of property
and labor.
Radical leftists favor workers at the expense of the bosses. Workers are
always right to the radical leftist. They wish to change the legal
structure in such a way to reflect this favoritism, which is supposed to
compensate for the previous history of exploitation. The redistribution
of wealth envisioned by radical leftists builds on the higher wages and
increased taxation of the corporations and the rich to include selective
expropriation/nationalization (with or without compensation) of various
resources (banks, natural resources for example).
Extreme leftists promote the total expropriation — without compensation
— of the capitalist class, not only to right the wrongs of economic
exploitation, but to remove the capitalist class from political power as
well. At some point, the workers are to be at least nominally in charge
of economic and political decision making (although that is usually
meditated through a Party leadership).
Leftists view the State on a continuum of ambivalence. Most are clear
that the role of the State is to further the goals of whatever class
happens to rule at any given period; further they all recognize that the
ruling class always reserves for itself a monopoly on the legitimate use
of force and violence to enforce their rule. In the political
imaginations of all moderate and some radical leftists, the State (even
with a completely capitalist ruling class) can be used to remedy many
social problems, from the excesses of transnational corporations to the
abuses of those who have been traditionally disenfranchised (immigrants,
women, minorities, the homeless, etc.). For extreme leftists, only their
own State can solve such problems, because it is in the interest of the
current ruling class to maintain divisions among those who are not of
the ruling class. Despite the ambivalence, an attachment to the
functions of government as executed by the State remains. This is the
pivotal area of conflict between all leftists and all anarchists,
despite the historical positioning of anarchism within the spectrum of
leftism — about which more below.
Missing from all these different strains of leftism is a discussion of
the individual. While LH&R refer briefly to the individual, these
philosophies do not take into account non-property-owning males,
females, or juveniles — who are indeed considered the property of the
normative individual: the adult property-owning man. This led to the
complete lack on interest in (and the accompanying exploitation of)
peasants and workers, a disregard that is supposed to be corrected by
socialism. Unfortunately, virtually all socialists only posit the
category Worker and Peasant as collective classes — a mass to be molded
and directed — never considering the desires or interests of the
individual (male or female) worker or peasant to control their own
lives. According to the ideological imperatives of leftist thought, the
self-activity of these masses is seen suspiciously through the
ideological blinkers of the competitive ethos of capitalism (since the
masses aren’t yet intelligent enough to be socialists); the workers will
perhaps be able to organize themselves into defensive trade unions in
order to safeguard their wages, while the peasants will only want to own
and work their own piece of land. Again, education and enforcement of
cooperation is necessary for these masses to become conscious political
radicals.
So all leftists share the goals of making up for injustice by decree,
whether the decree comes out of better/more responsive representatives
and leaders, a more democratic political process, or the elimination of
a non-worker power base. They all desire to organize, mobilize, and
direct masses of people, with the eventual goal of attaining a more or
less coherent majority, in order to propel progressive and democratic
change of social institutions. Recruitment, education, and inculcating
leftist values are some of the more mundane strategies leftists use to
increase their influence in the wider political landscape.
All leftists have a common distrust of regular
(non-political/non-politicized) people being able to decide for
themselves how to solve the problems that face them. All leftists share
an abiding faith in leadership. Not just a trust of particular leaders
who portray themselves as having certain moral or ethical virtues over
and above common people, but of the very principle of leadership. This
confidence in leadership never brings representational politics into
question. The existence of elected or appointed leaders who speak and
act on behalf, or in the place, of individuals and groups is a given;
mediation in the realm of politics is taken as a necessity, removing
most decision making from individuals and groups. Leftists share this
commitment to leadership and representation — they believe themselves
able to justly represent those who have traditionally been excluded from
politics: the disenfranchised, the voiceless, the weak.
The leftist activist, as a representative of those who suffer, is a
person who believes her/himself to be indispensable to improving the
lives of others. This derives from a dual-pronged notion common to all
leftists:
alter their situations in a radical or revolutionary manner (Lenin’s
dismissal of workers as never being able to move beyond a “trade union
mentality” without some professional outside help comes to mind here);
and
ethical enough to lead (whether through example or by decree) and
organize others for their own good, and perhaps more importantly, the
greater good.
The unspoken but implicit theme that runs through this brief assessment
of leftism is a reliance on authoritarian relations, whether assumed or
enforced, brutally compelling or gently rational. The existence of an
economy (exchange of commodities in a market) presumes the existence of
one or more institutions to mediate disputes between those who produce,
those who own, and those who consume; the existence of a
representational political process presumes the existence of one or more
institutions to mediate disputes between diverse parties based on common
interest (often with conflicting goals); the existence of leadership
presumes that there are substantive differences in the emotional and
intellectual capacities of those who direct and those who follow. There
are plenty of rationalizations contributing to the maintenance of such
institutions of social control (schools, prisons, the military, the
workplace), from efficiency to expediency, but they all ultimately rely
on the legitimate (sanctioned by the State) use of coercive authority to
enforce decisions. Leftists share a faith in the mediating influence of
wise and ethical leaders who can work within politically neutral,
socially progressive, and humane institutional frameworks. Their
thoroughly hierarchical and authoritarian natures, however, should be
clear even after a cursory glance.
All anarchists share a desire to abolish government; that is the
definition of anarchism. Starting with Bakunin, anarchism has been
explicitly anti-statist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian; no
serious anarchist seeks to alter that. Leftists have consistently
supported and promoted the functions of the State, have an ambiguous
relationship to capitalist development, and are all interested in
maintaining hierarchical relationships. In addition, historically they
have either tacitly ignored or actively suppressed the desires of
individuals and groups for autonomy and self-organization, further
eroding any credible solidarity between themselves and anarchists. On a
purely definitional level, then, there should be an automatic
distinction between leftists and anarchists, regardless of how things
have appeared in history.
Despite these differences, many anarchists have thought of themselves as
extreme leftists — and continue to do so — because they share many of
the same analyses and interests (a distaste for capitalism, the
necessity of revolution, for example) as leftists; many revolutionary
leftists have also considered anarchists to be their (naïve) comrades —
except in moments when the leftists gain some power; then the anarchists
are either co-opted, jailed, or executed. The possibility for an extreme
leftist to be anti-statist may be high, but is certainly not guaranteed,
as any analysis history will show.
Left anarchists retain some kind of allegiance to 19^(th) century LH&R
and socialist philosophers, preferring the broad, generalized (and
therefore extremely vague) category of socialism/anti-capitalism and the
strategy of mass political struggles based on coalitions with other
leftists, all the while showing little (if any) interest in promoting
individual and group autonomy. From these premises, they can quite
easily fall prey to the centralizing tendencies and leadership functions
that dominate the tactics of leftists. They are quick to quote Bakunin
(maybe Kropotkin too) and advocate organizational forms that might have
been appropriate in the era of the First International, apparently
oblivious to the sweeping changes that have occurred in the world in the
past hundred-plus years — and they then have the gall to ridicule
Marxists for remaining wedded to Marx’s outdated theories, as if by not
naming their own tendencies after other dead guys they are thereby
immune from similar mistakes.
The drawbacks and problems with Marxism, however — for example that it
promotes the idea of a linear progression of history of order developing
out of chaos, freedom developing out of oppression, material abundance
developing out of scarcity, socialism developing out of capitalism, plus
an absolute faith in Science as the ideologically neutral pursuit of
pure Knowledge, and a similar faith in the liberatory function of all
technology — are the same drawbacks and problems with the anarchism of
Bakunin and Kropotkin. All of this seems lost on left anarchists. They
blithely continue to promote a century-old version of anarchism, clearly
unaware of, or unconcerned by, the fact that the philosophical and
practical failures of leftism — in terms of the individual, the natural
world, and appropriate modes of resistance to the continued domination
of a flexible, adaptable, and expanding capitalism — are shared by this
archaic form of anarchism as well.
Those of us who are interested in promoting radical social change in
general, and anarchy in particular, need to emulate and improve upon
successful (however temporary) revolutionary projects for liberation,
rather than congratulating ourselves for being the heirs of Bakunin (et
al.). We can do this best if we free ourselves from the historical
baggage and the ideological and strategic constraints of all varieties
of leftism.