SOCIALISM’S CORRUPTION BY THE LEFT
SOCIALISM’S CORRUPTION BY THE LEFT, PART 1
TWO RECENT DISCOVERIES
Over the last couple weeks, I’ve experienced a couple of eye-opening discoveries. In hindsight, perhaps I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was by either. I was faintly cognizant of indicators pointing in both directions. But I guess I’m a little slow on the uptake. While one of the discoveries was of a purely technical capacity, and the other a matter of conceptual insight, they were certainly related. Not only in the obvious way, that the former provided the condition of possibility for the latter. But each was a reminder that new potentialities are so often just beneath the surface of the taken for granted.
The Technical Discovery
So, I made this fascinating discovery some weeks ago. I’m guessing plenty of you will be already familiar with this fact. I’m a bit of a boomer. But for any of you who are not so familiar, this is something really worth knowing. I discovered that Microsoft Word has built into it a translation capacity. Under the Review menu, hit the Language button and you’ll see a Translation option. It will allow you to translate a section of your text or the entire document. It has dozens of language options. So far, I’ve only tried French and Italian. I’ve no idea how good the translations are for Albanian, Cantonese or Zulu, but the two I’ve tried have been great. Sure, there are places where you can recognize the literal translation of an idiom which doesn’t work in English. And as they use pronouns differently in those languages, sometimes the translation will say “she” when you know it should say “it.” But these are minor inconveniences.
Now the amount it can translate, even if you choose an entire document, is limited. So, if you’re translating a whole book, you will likely have to translate one chapter at a time. With all the requisite copying, pasting, translating, copying, and pasting, I’ve found an average length book to take me about half an hour. Which is pretty amazing for the whole new world of ideas it opens up to you.
I have found working with PDFs to be somewhat messier and more difficult. But if you can get an EPUB doc and use an EPUB editor, like Calibre, which breaks the doc into editable files by chapter, it’s super easy to manage!
The downside, of course (yes, all benefits come with costs), is that my personal reading list, which was already a bit overwhelmingly long is now…well. Let’s just say I’m going to die trying. 😉
And for all you tech geniuses out there, if there’s in fact a far easier way to do this than that which I’ve stumbled upon, here. Please don’t tell me. I prefer to think I’ve made a great discovery. A little personal self-delusion never hurts. Right?
The Conceptual Discovery
So, obviously this technical discovery has opened a previously unavailable set of resources. The very first thing I did upon this discovery was to read a book – unavailable in English as far as I could tell – by French New Right darling Alain de Benoist on populism. Naturally, right? However, interesting as that was, reading it led me to investigate another French thinker with whom I’d been completely unfamiliar, who doesn’t appear to have any books available in English translation: Jean-Claude Michéa. In light of some of my own recent posts, particularly the ones on the relevance of the Enlightenment (here) and on the impact of the left (here), Michéa’s analysis is quite intriguing. We might describe him as a revisionist socialist, but his revisionism is more about a recovery of an elided history.
Now, in fairness, Michéa does not provide the kind of methodical, historical documentation that I would like to see for these kinds of claims. And I would still very much like to see such a work. However, given my own background knowledge of what he’s discussing – which while not qualified as expert is surely well above average for most of the population – the claims he makes resonate with plausibility. And given the relevance of them to the ideas I’ve been exploring in this substack, I thought some of you might find them of interest.
Michéa argues that the promise of socialism has been corrupted through its cooptation by the left.
Okay, how many times did you reread that, thinking, huh? Socialism is the left! What the hell is this guy on about? Well, that’s the point. Socialism is not inherently (nor, Michéa would argue, even consistently) of the left. In fact, he claims, none of the 19th century socialists – including Marx – ever called themselves men of the left. That kind of sweeping claim of course immediately raises one’s eyebrows. You must do one hell of a lot of reading to be able to make that sweeping, negating claim. So, let’s try to get off on a less challenging footing.
Michéa’s interpretation logically starts with the widely acknowledged origins of the very concept of the left. It came of course from where specific “parties” sat within the national assembly during the turbulent days of the French Revolution. Those supporting the maintenance of the monarchy, the privileges of the Catholic Church, and the aristocracy – referred to in France by the shorthand, l’ancien régime – sat on the right side of the chamber. Those who opposed l’ancien régime, usually in the name of republicanism, though often too a form of nascent liberalism, sat on the left side. This original left was inspired by the (French) Enlightenment. It believed that that philosophical awakening had legitimized and laid the groundwork – through the validation of individualism, universalism, reason, and progress – for a new political order, opposed to that of the right and l’ancien régime. Thus far, the story is probably familiar to many of you. Here’s where Michéa’s analysis takes what for many will be an unexpected turn.
He argues that this original left, of the French Revolution era, had nothing of the qualities that, by the early decades of the 19th century, people had come to think of as socialist. This left that grew out of the French Enlightenment was driven by a notion of radical progressivism. It was committed to its vision of a new world, liberated from l’ancien régime. To exercise this liberation, though, it was necessary for the left to thoroughly expunge any remnants of that old world. All its traditions, customs, and habits of mind, had to be purged for humanity to progress into the promising future of individualism and rationalism. Recently regular readers here will recall my observation that this alleged Enlightenment fetish with rational progress was in fact more a reflection of the specifically French Enlightenment, with the Scottish Enlightenment having gone in a very different direction: actually validating the value and importance of a human social and political community being grounded in the concrete institutions of its traditions, customs, and habits (see here).
Michéa argues though that none of this left progressivism is evident in the early socialists, and they in fact, like the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, put great emphasize upon the importance of what we’ve called here the grounding in an organic community (see here, here, and here). In doing so, they were responding to the disruptive and destructive impacts upon working people of the industrial revolution: e.g., the commons enclosures, dangerous factories, filth strewn working class neighborhoods. The socialists that Michéa has in mind here are the likes of Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Robert Owen, or Pierre Proudhon. Of these, Proudhon is the only one I’ve read at any length, already having had the intention to reread him soon for his insights on federalism. And to my foggy recollection, this is a fair depiction of his vision of socialism. The little that I do know of the other early socialists he mentions, leads me to conclude that this sounds like a perfectly plausible characterization of them, too. Which, if true, is kind of fascinating.
Yes, they were open egalitarians, but let’s not confuse their use of that term with the communist ideologue. Like the early North American populists, this egalitarianism was one concerned with preventing the kinds of tremendous disparities of wealth that allow one caste or class to gain political dominance and tip the playing field decidedly in its favor, compromising the freedom and life prospects of everyone else. It’s not so different from the recent dawning realization in quarters of the contemporary right that the corporations and big business aren’t really on their side. Add to that the emphasis on the importance of rejuvenating organic community and the institutions of its concrete order, as an antidote to the system of political and economic inequality, and it increasingly appears that in fact the early socialists were really – in today’s nomenclature – more like early populists. In this sense, then, they were (like the populists) objectively anti-leftists.
So, then, the obvious question arises. How did socialism transform from prototypical anti-leftist populism in the early 19th century, to becoming virtually synonymous with the left by the mid-20th century? That’s a story I’ll save for my next post.
And you don’t want to miss that.
SOCIALISM’S CORRUPTION BY THE LEFT, PART 2
YOU KNEW IT WAS GOING TO BE MARX, RIGHT?
In my last post, I introduced the thought of Jean-Claude Michéa. He made the interesting, and for most people today, somewhat startling, claim that the left and socialism had different points of origin. The left, with its (French) Enlightenment commitments to progress, individualism, universalism, and reason, grew out of the French Revolution. Socialism on the other hand was a response to the privations imposed on working people by the conditions of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution, though, had only been possible with the left’s progressive triumph over the social and economic constraints of l’ancien régime: rooting out the customs and traditions that might hinder the accumulation of capital and deracination of individuals out of organic communities into abstract, highly mobile labor commodities. The early socialists then, like the early North American populists, initially constituted a form of resistance to this colonization of private life by the (French) Enlightenment-inspired left.
Yet clearly that’s not how we perceive the situation today. These days socialism is thought to be quintessentially left. So, how did socialism go from being antagonist of the left to the current perception of being identical with the left? That’s where we left off the last post, and for those interested in the history, trials and tribulations, and prospects of North American populism, it seems like a valuable question to answer.
The beginning of this flip in the identity and commitments of socialism have their theoretical origins in the contributions of Karl Marx. This is an explanation that will resonate for long time readers of this substack. While I identify as a right-wing Marxist (briefly discussed here and here, as well as in my [must read!] book, The Managerial Class on Trial), I have emphasized that what distinguishes my Marxism from the standard brand is Marx’s Hegelianism. To get to right-wing Marxism, it is necessary to expunge Marx of all Hegel. (Or, at least most of it. Michéa seems to see more value in it than I do.) It’s a shame because, as Michéa notes, there is much in Marx that can be used as a valuable contribution to that earlier manifestation of socialism. For example, a socialist or populist critique of the culture industry, with its corrosive impact on organic community, resulting in abstract, possessive individualism, would benefit greatly from a careful unpacking of Marx’s analysis of the distinction between use value and exchange value. (A topic I’ll unpack in a future post.1)
In terms of the history of socialism, though, all such theoretical benefits are set off against the deleterious impact of Marx’s Hegelization of socialism. With Hegel, Marx presumed to win the battle against the left and capitalism in the world of theory. There he discovered the unfolding logic of history. The forces of history were pushing us toward a resolution that would bring in the eternal reign of the socialist ideal. Except, in the process, Marx had transformed the socialist ideal away from a grounding in organic community to a raft riding the rapids of progress. Those early, some call them romantic, socialists that Michéa invokes – e.g., Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Robert Owen, and Pierre Proudhon – Marx had dismissed as “utopian” socialists. They dreamed of a better socialist world, but failed to recognize the real material, historical forces giving birth to socialism. But Marx saw beyond their limits because he had enlisted Hegel and so understood the dialectic of history. Realistic socialism didn’t lay in a romantic, utopian return to organic community, but rather in an enthusiastic embrace of capitalism’s mass industrialization.
But Hegel of course was the epitome of the French Enlightenment school, with its fascination with progress and reason; in Hegel’s philosophy none other than abstract reason itself becomes the revolutionary subject of history. It was no doubt this fascination with the promise of progress that led Marx – contrary to many mischaracterizations of him – to admire capitalists. In contrast to the idea perpetuated by some lazy ideologues, Marx did not hate capitalists. On the contrary he heralded them as a revolutionary and progressive force, laying the infrastructural grounding for the coming liberated world. Marx, as a Hegel epigone, was a philosophical progressive.
And of course, the other lesson to be taken from this – which we’ll have occasion to discuss at length in future posts – is that little is more left-wing than capitalism2: with its constant progressive, revolutionizing of economic production and social order. Its relentless cycle of obsolescence and innovation is the endless making and remaking of the material world; ever demanding new social relationships around its constant streams of new commodities; even while it demands abstract, deracinated individuals to both produce and consume its products; ever more eroding the communal bonds, whose traditional norms and virtues threaten the moral flexibility required to ensure constant adaptation to its newest forms of commercial penetration into people’s lives and families. In the famous words of Marx and Engels: all that is solid melts into air. So, Marx’s fascination with capitalism as a progressive and revolutionary force is hardly surprising. It was though a long way from where socialism began earlier in the 19th century.
Marx though only laid the conceptual groundwork. For Michéa, the real decisive moment in the transition of socialism from anti-left to left-identified was the Dreyfus Affair. For those a little rusty on their Introduction to European History 101: While the Dreyfus Affair is entrenched in the contemporary imagination as a chapter in the history of, and struggle against, antisemitism, its political implications cut far deeper than that for the relatively young Third French Republic. In the decade or so straddling the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, the Dreyfus Affair became a lightening rod for the struggle over the country’s future. Throughout the 19th century the left had been engaged in a tug of war with l’ancien régime (for elaboration, see here), with the latter regularly threatening restoration. Michéa argues that during the Dreyfus Affair this risk was raised to an alarming threat level, with a coup by the reactionary forces seeming like a real possibility.3 It was in this context, he says, that the left and the socialists joined forces to repel such a threat.
This alliance of convenience between the left and the socialists may well not have been possible without Marx’s influence, subtlety feeding leftist progressivism into the socialist movement, laying the terrain for a shared perception of common interest. This Dreyfus era alliance, carrying them through into the early 20th century, soon was reinforcement with the prospect of WWI, in which the branches of Europe’s ancien régime found themselves facing off for one final battle royale. By the time the dust had settled from that war, the political power of Europe’s old aristocracies was largely destroyed. Meanwhile, to the east, increasingly communist governments (USSR, Yugoslavia, China) presented themselves as the party of the future. And to the west, there arose a growing appreciation that capitalist stability required rationalization of labor as a partner in the mass industrial process – pioneered as Gomperism, institutionalized in the U.S. under the New Deal and with the eventual merging of the AFL-CIO. The cumulative effect of these developments was that the melding of the identities of socialism and the left became a fait accompli.
It has been in this way, according to Michéa, that the contemporary socialist movement has come to partake of what he calls its Orpheus Complex: like the left, it must never look back to the past, but always progress forward. The route to socialism, and liberation from capitalism, can only come from a steadfast progress, through capitalism, into the bright socialist future. However, just as the left was the agent of capitalism, and their Marxian progenitor thereby admired the revolutionary capitalists, socialists who have come to identify with the left find it ever more difficult to imagine a post-capitalist world. It is after all, the wealth producing power of the capitalist engine that will provide the prosperity that socialism will share among the workers. By this path, socialism has transformed from a protector of organic community and traditional values to a celebration of capitalism with some redistribution of wealth.
To be sure – and I don’t believe Michéa gives adequate consideration of this – the bourgeoisie did, in their own way, attempt to impose renewed constraints of proper conduct and moral standards.4 Promoters of this ethos, captured in the notion of the Victorian era, weren’t prepared to surrender to the logic of the very capitalism that underpinned the material conditions of their bourgeoisie lives. Even then though, the logic of the left was ever at work, revolutionizing the world. By the turn of the century, the bourgeoisie no more than the socialists understood what the left was up to, and what its agenda entailed. The price of the left’s endless revolution, its relentless progress, against individuals rooted in organic communities, eroding traditions and norms – ensuring that all that was solid melted into air – in the constant pursuit of innovation and the disposable new-thing, has left the original socialist dream but a dwindling light in a foggy rearview mirror.
And just to state the obvious, in case it isn’t yet clear, that left, ever in pursuit of deracinated individuals, subject to its progressive logic, informed by its French Enlightenment inspired fetish for reason, has ever been the emerging spirit of the current ruling managerial class. From the French Revolution, it may have taken them a century to finally start to consolidate practical power, but their values and interests constantly animated the social, political, and economic forces that eventually led to that consolidation.
Michéa holds out hope that a reborn socialism might yet again rise to oppose the left. I suspect that that torch already may have been passed to the new populism. In any event, much rides on the new populism not likewise succumbing to the left’s siren call of unconstrained reason and progress.
Briefly: producing for exchange value biases the productive process toward optimizing conditions of profitability. All the obsolescence and innovation associated with exchange value encourage the endless production of the new. Production for use value assumes the production of goods that will be durable — ideally as durable as possible. That durability though obviously would be sub-optimal for profit, with its reduction of the constant turnover of new sales units. Maintaining a social order presumes production of a durable world — material as well as cultural. Exchange value production flies in the face of such a durable social order, constantly revolutionizing the material and cultural world. Obviously, there’s much more to be explored in this, but hopefully these cursory remarks at least point the reader in the direction of considering the potential impact and significance of such a distinction and analysis.
Admittedly a contested term which, as the French semioticians might say, is something of a shifting signifier. For now, let’s think of it as roughly referring to a blend of primarily (if not exclusively) private property, unregulated markets and industrialism.
In fact, this whole period of French history, which had so much impact on the rest of Europe, and even the world, is complicated and fascinating. The brief remarks in the text don’t do it justice. Really unpacking Michéa’s arguments would require a much more detailed exploration than is possible here.
Parenthetically, I’d also point out that an interesting development in all of this has been the uses made of Freud. In both his most socially normative and probably most popular book, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud endorsed Victorian impulse suppression and sublimation as necessary measures for creating and maintaining civilization. The left, though, throughout the 20th century, attempted to leverage and weaponize Freud’s work as a means to berate and mock bourgeois cultural conservatism. There’s a whole history to be written here on the political uses of Freud.
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