The Reactionary Left: Ghosts of Socialism Past
Can the Left be Rescued from Toxic Nostalgia?
There is a nostalgic tendency within much of Leftism.
This tendency, simply put, is the impulse to insist that history must be rolled back to the time when one’s pet theorists were descriptive of reality and/or that conditions must be re-established under which one’s favorite historical strategies will again make sense.
That is what I mean by ‘toxic nostalgia’.
This concept is not meant as a jab at any particular Leftist tendency. It’s meant as a jab at almost all of them.
“Trade unions are the new society, growing within the shell of the old!”
“Aren’t the trade unions mostly gone? Maybe we should talk about how major changes happened to the jobs available, and the sort of people working them, and how the 100-year-old prediction embedded in that slogan didn’t actually come true? There’s a lot of reasons to think that platform cooperatives and other new strategies might — ”
“Oh, shush. We’re going to rebuild the union movement, and then we can ignore all the reasons that it ever fell apart. The reason we never got above ~30% unionization rates was probably because of unfair repression from the capitalist state, and resisting that is something that happens randomly rather than being a core function of any real labor movement. Hey! Look at Iceland! They have ~90% unionization rates!”
“Uh. Do you not see any significant differences between a tiny extraction-focused economy versus a massive and diversified one focused on IP production, finance, and services?”
“I think you know very well that I refuse to do that”
“Sigh… well, have you at least noticed that Iceland still manages to be capitalist?”
“That’s probably just because of the heavy presence of the US military on the island”
“…do you know where else the US military commonly is?”
It’s old hat, by now, to point out that capitalism is stuck in stasis — that history feels as though it has ended, and the only solution that anyone can articulate is to repeat the past again. It haunts our politics — ‘make America great again’. It haunts our media — endless reboots.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”
So on and so on.
Even this feels tiresome to articulate, yet another step in our endless repetition.
I will, however, point out that this applies also to the Left. I do not think that most Leftists can articulate new solutions, new tendencies. They can be democratic socialists, anarchists, Marxist-Leninists. They can study old, failed ideas, and they refuse to see why these ideas failed. They block-quote dead white dudes — they do not think that their own words might be more suitable arguments. It no longer feels as though they can articulate something new.
“What’s up, an/acc?”
“Oh, hey, Bookchinite. How’ve you been, buddy?”
[indistinct sobbing, in which the word ‘Rojava’ might have been heard]
“Yeah, buddy. I know, I liked it, too”
“Look, it’s fine. We’ll just organize here! It’ll work, it’ll work, it’ll work this time”
“Sure, man, whatever you want. How do you wanna organize?”
“We’ll create a parallel government, neighborhood by neighborhood!”
“I… why?”
“Because people aren’t at all alienated from their neighbors. That’s an authentic community”
“Bro, I don’t know the name of literally anyone who lives on my street. There’s probably a reason that Bookchin’s ideas really caught on in Kurdistan and not in America”
The Left is caught in an endless circle of failed predictions of cataclysmic victories.
If you look at what Marx wrote, he thought that socialism would come to America first. He didn’t even think we needed a revolution. It could just be voted in, here. After all, America had universal white male suffrage.
If you look at Emma Goldman, you’ll see her talking about how she thought (in 1911!) that prisons would be abolished soon.
If you look at manifestos from the 1930s, they didn’t think that the Great Depression would ever end. They thought that this was the final deathbed of capitalism, and that it would all be over soon.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they felt optimistic, too. If you read Bookchin from around that time, he seems to have been very much under the impression that automation was already so advanced as to rule out much more automation, or even much more need for work.
Hey — maybe this is really it. Maybe global warming will kill capitalism. Or, perhaps the rate of profit will finally decline to zero. The Marxists have been insisting that it will for long enough — maybe their predictions will come true through the magic of repetition.
There’s a saying that I’ve heard — something along the lines of “communism collapsed, but capitalism collapses every 4 to 7 years”, in reference to the fall of planned economies all across the world and to the business cycle: for my younger readers, financial crises usually happen with much more usual regularity (we are perhaps 5 years overdue for one) and with much less severity than in 2008.
And, in a sense, this is true — but, in a more realistic one, no: it absolutely is not. Communism (or, at least, ML-style state socialism; apologies to my anarcho-communist readers) came crashing down once, and completely and irreparably died. Capitalism, comparatively, merely gets the hick-ups sometimes — and then, after a breather, continues onwards.
Hey, maybe this time is special. Maybe you’re special. Maybe this time, global warming or crash 2.0 or whatever really will kill off capitalism. But, I want you to understand: there are 200 years of people standing behind you, all equally certain that the end was nigh.
“Yeah, man, fuck that silly anarcho-syndicalist”
“Uh. Sure?”
“I just can’t stand those bourgeoise idealists. It’s so good that you’re demonstrating proper left unity by being on my side”
“Wait, how is Anarcho-Syndicalist bourgeoise?”
“By disagreeing with me”
“He works two service-industry jobs and still finds time to attend IWW meetings. He’s just nostalgic for the time when his father worked one manufacturing industry job”
“And yet, he still persists in his bourgeoisity”
“Fine, whatever. What do you want?”
“To build the vanguard, and organize the workers! It’s the only form of socialism that’s ever worked, silly anarchist”
“Uh. What about all the times it failed horribly?”
“…what times?”
“The USSR, the entire eastern bloc, Yugoslavia, China, North Korea, every African country that went capitalist as soon as the USSR wasn’t around to prop it up…”
“Those were all smashing successes, though?”
“No? The USSR is gone, the eastern bloc is mostly fash at this point, Yugoslavia started collapsing as soon as Tito died, North Korea is a monarchy at this point, and China is extremely capitalist”
“You know, An/Acc, you’re sounding pretty bourgeoise…”
We are facing down our doom. Every tendency has failed — and we are out of time. Climate-driven civilization collapse is coming, and we are not at all ready. We are not even prepared enough to ride out the collapse of capitalism.
The Left has been a beautiful dream of a better and stranger world. I think that we have been poor stewards of that dream. Or maybe it has been killed by outside forces. Or maybe…
Our minds swirl with blame-games. It does not matter. We seem to have lost the trick of creating the dream. The only thing to do is to rediscover how to dream.
The clearest way towards that is through experiencing a dreaming-life. An experimental life. A life of experiences outside of the normalcy of late modernity. The issue, of course, is that you need to be able to dream properly to create such situations.
This is a feedback loop that neoliberalism has largely severed:
“Hey, Social Democrat. How’s it hanging?”
“Actually, I prefer Democratic Socialist now”
“Is there any practical difference?”
“Intentions?”
“That’s not really a practical difference. Is there not a practical difference…?”
“Well… maybe eventually…”
“Sure. Anyways, what’s up?”
“Well, I’m here to talk to you about voting for Bernie. He’s going to bring about a political revolution, and then we’ll get to be just like Scandinavia”
“What does that even mean? A ‘political revolution’? And haven’t things basically been downhill for their social safety net since, like, the 70s? And much more sharply since the 90s? Scandinavian social democracy represents a failed attempt at socialism — as Jacobin is all too fond of telling us.”
“Look, I don’t know about all that. But… I mean… I dunno, man. Do you want healthcare or not? ’Cause I really think that we might get healthcare out of Bernie”
“Yeah, fine. Here’s a 20 for the campaign, best of luck”
There’s a book, published in 1994, that predicts the rise of the global right.
I don’t mean that it’s a science fiction book. I mean that it’s a non-fiction book that lays out the past five years of global politics, in very clear terms.
It’s very simple: globalized capitalism erodes social structures (church, family, etc) and introduces precarity into the lives of workers. The number one demand that voters have, under those circumstances, is social and financial stability. They want to construct a giant, so that he might grab a hold of the world and hold it forever in one place.
That this simple explanation for the rise of right-wing populism has eluded so many on the Left should give us pause.
Why have we refused to contemplate this? Is it, perhaps, because we ourselves hold these desires — and so, we cannot conceptualize them as something Other to us, something to be feared and fought? How many leftists wish merely to put things back the way they were — before communism fell, before the labor movement died, before the shine came off the promise of social democracy? Before the rise of capitalism? Before the rise of civilization?
Why is it that we spend so much time attempting to beat back the tide of capitalism? Why do we so rarely attempt to move with it, and there-by appropriate its power? Why has it become so hard for us to imagine something post-capitalist, rather than thinking endlessly of earlier phases of capitalism or idealizing pre-capitalist structures that have been destroyed or are being destroyed?
