Libertarianism and Revolutionary Socialism: Hostile Twins?

Earlier I suggested a tepid acceptance of the Democratic Socialists of America - or at least of some of its proposals. But I grow less sure of this as time goes on, and the emergence of a tendency within the DSA that should be all too familiar to long term students of the American left. Your friend and mine, Vox, recently ran an article on the DSA, following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's surprise victory over before longtime establishment Democrat Joe Crowley in the primary for the 14th Congressional District in New York.

What Vox revealed is genuinely concerning:

Like most socialist organizations, DSA believes in the abolition of capitalism in favor of an economy run either by “the workers” or the state — though the exact specifics of “abolishing capitalism” are fiercely debated by socialists. 

“The academic debates about socialism’s ‘meaning’ are huge and arcane and rife with disagreements, but what all definitions have in common is either the elimination of the market or its strict containment,” said Frances Fox Piven, a scholar of the left at the City University of New York and a former DSA board member. 

If the concept has yet to have an agreed upon definition, despite nearly 200 years of being in existence in its modern form, perhaps there's some wisdom in reserving our support?

In practice, that means DSA believes in ending the private ownership of a wide range of industries whose products are viewed as “necessities,” which they say should not be left to those seeking to turn a profit. According to DSA’s current mission statement, the government should ensure all citizens receive adequate food, housing, health care, child care, and education. DSA also believes that the government should “democratize” private businesses — i.e., force owners to give workers control over them — to the greatest extent possible.

Yikes.

But DSA members also say that overthrowing capitalism must include the eradication of “hierarchical systems” that lie beyond the market as well. As a result, DSA supports the missions of Black Lives Matter, gay and lesbian rights, and environmentalism as integral parts of this broader “anti-capitalist” program.

Socialism is about democratizing the family to get rid of patriarchal relations; democratizing the political sphere to get genuine participatory democracy; democratizing the schools by challenging the hierarchical relationship between the teachers of the school and the students of the school,” said Jared Abbott, a member of DSA’s national steering committee. “Socialism is the democratization of all areas of life, including but not limited to the economy.

So, it's the Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers and the early Radical Feminists all over again, is it?  Rule by the women's studies department?

God help us all.

It's important to stop right here and make some things clear. I'm all for socializing certain essential services, so as to guarantee their universal access to the population. Health care is a good example. Social housing, food supplements and so on for those who need them I'm likewise 100% in favor of. I'm iffy on a universal basic income, but an expansion of the earned income tax credit to help out low income people is something I'm completely down with.

Unions or some other institution that advocates for the working class, both in the workplace and in the halls of power are absolutely vital, and the unions in America are, with some exceptions, generally much weaker than they need to be, at least in the private sector. I likewise have no quarrel with worker and consumer owned enterprises. I've lived in tenant owned cooperative housing most of my life and have been well served by it. Worker owned enterprises like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain are good examples of workable alternatives to typical American corporate structures. I'd applaud any scheme to launch such experiments closer to home.

That said, management over large manufacturing and distribution organizations is an incredibly complex undertaking, and one for which I wonder if "the workers" as a collective whole are adequately qualified, especially if governance over the cooperative is to be direct rather than via an elected body of professional directors with a fiduciary duty towards the worker/shareholders. We should expect direct democratic governance to be the preference of the American left, given its historical propensity for utopian idealism.

Professional, executive levels of management require many years of rigorous education to qualify a person for, and not simply to keep the rank and file out of those positions. One wonders whether "the workers" actually even want the added degree of responsibility and work load that comes with doubling as management, especially under the more utopian ideals of direct democracy so beloved by the American left. The practice of co-determination - labor being able to elect representatives to corporate boards of directors is another matter, and one I'm generally in favor of.

Likewise, a strong case can be made that wealth and capital are too strongly concentrated in America at present, but the idea that those who take the risk to invest capital in a business venture are all completely evil parasites who feed off the blood of the workers is much more revolutionary romanticist mythology than reality. This can be true if your economy lacks sufficient protections for the rights of workers, borrowers, tenants and the like and capital is permitted to accumulate into increasingly few hands due to a lack of at least some redistributive measures, but it's not necessarily true of all capital investment. Without some kind of capital markets, economic growth and expansion would be severely hamstrung and I suspect this is a big part of why successful economies based solely on mutualist or socialist principles are non existent both at present and throughout history.

Besides, why throw away so wonderful a tool when you can make it work for the benefit of all, via something like a sovereign wealth fund in which all citizens could have equal shares, or that the state could use to supplement public finance?

When there's serious talk of "abolishing capitalism" or "ending the private ownership of a wide range of industries" or "elimination of the market" or "forcing owners to give workers control over" private businesses, this is when, in my humble opinion, things have gone too far. Untrammeled socialism is no better, and may even be worse, than untrammeled capitalism, we just have far less experience with it in the west. While the need for regulatory safeguards should be obvious, the capacity of individual citizens to own productive capital and to buy and sell goods and services on a free market are crucial to human liberty and essential for social prosperity, and failing to recognize this has been a very grave failing of regressive leftism during its history.

By itself, the capacity for consumers or workers to "vote with their feet" as it were and find another product or employer is a capacity that libertarians and fiscal conservatives make far too much of - with little capital or purchasing power, working and middle class individuals have little influence this way and it would take an organized move of this sort - a strike or boycott essentially - to truly influence the policies of a large and powerful corporation, and such organized efforts have never been things that conservatives and libertarians have been fans of.

But historically, neither have been authoritarian socialists, at least while in power. And socialism, past a certain point, tends to default to authoritarianism, whatever the initial intentions of its theoreticians may have been. Transforming societies to the extent they propose naturally requires a government with very far reaching powers. The capacity to buy from or work for the competition is a right a lot of people died for back in the dark days behind the Iron Curtain, and not without good reason. It is one tool with which the working and middle classes can hold business accountable, and this option would be lost in the absence of the market as a means of distribution. Why would the defenders of worker's rights want that?

Will the DSA take things to such extremes? Not likely. America's constitutional system of checks and balances and libertarian tradition would likely mitigate the worst excesses. The greater likelihood is that they'll end up being the Libertarian Party of the left: a loud, tight and small ideological grouping too obsessed with internal purity spiraling to become a serious contender for political power. But their rhetoric does concern me, and if you really are a believer in the rights of workers, consumers and above all individuals, it should concern you too.

The Vox article continues:

Examples may help clarify the difference. While both DSA and some left-wing Democrats agree that the government should provide universal health insurance, DSA ultimately wants to nationalize hospitals, providers, and the rest of the health care system as well. While both will work toward higher taxes on Wall Street, DSA ultimately wants to nationalize the entire financial sector. While left-wing Democrats believe in criminal justice reform, some DSA members are calling for the outright abolition of the police and prison systems. While both DSA and left-wing Democrats support reforms to get money out of politics, some in DSA see capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with genuinely free and fair elections. In practice, however, the two wind up ultimately taking the same positions.

If the DSA would go this far, it goes too far. The DSA may see capitalism as fundamentally incompatible with free and fair elections, and I agree there's a lot of tension between the two now and corporate influence in politics is far too great in America at present, I also see the above description of the DSA as being fundamentally incompatible with a free and democratic society. What would happen, after all, if the majority of voters actually wanted some semblance of a free market preserved, and wish only for protections against the predatory excesses of robber baron capitalism, as opposed to having their own capacity to make money be completely hamstrung?

Further confusing matters is Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist” but supports a policy program that would essentially leave capitalism intact. His candidacy spurred a dramatic growth in DSA membership, and DSA backed him, but the Vermont senator has also referred to himself a “New Deal” Democrat who views Lyndon Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt — rather than Karl Marx or American socialist Norman Thomas — as his true ideological predecessors.

Let's hear it for Bernie Sanders then, and the kind of New Deal Democrat he professes to be. While I do believe Marx had some useful insights into the flawed nature of capitalism, revolutionary overthrow of it by either the ballot box or the gun carries its own huge set of problems, and there are certainly far better examples that we could be following.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

Not what you expected out of me, perhaps? Maybe. But don't misunderstand me: I'm not channeling the spirit of Ayn Rand here. I merely point out that the equal and opposite stupid extreme to what Rand stood for is, well, also stupid. What's unfortunate is that the language of economic freedom has been appropriated by libertarians, and deployed to defend the equally misguided notion that "individuals" (read: capital) be above legally constituted sovereign organizations entirely. A useful line of rationale if one's intent is to protect capital from any and all populist demands for protection against its abuses.

What is very crucial to understand is the necessary role of the state in regulating and limiting institutional power so as to protect individual rights and freedoms from both private and public abuses.

Limited government does not necessarily equal small government. It means government that is subordinate to law, and insures that non governmental actors in society are also subordinate to law. It doesn't mean that government can't regulate or even own capital. However, it does mean that the government cannot stop individuals from owning capital all together, either alone or in tandem with other individuals in some or another kind of corporate entity. It may decide to nationalize and thus own some particular enterprise or industry or another. This is no violation of anyone's rights, since nobody has any right to any share in ownership of any business or industry, as any libertarian worth his salt would be more than happy to tell you. But it absolutely must not forbid its citizens any ownership over its productive capacity whatsoever. It's crucial now that these nuanced distinctions be properly grasped.

It means that whatever government does, it does via a procedure that is transparent and respectful of predetermined limits on its power, as set forth in a constitution or similar document. It means that those who hold government office must face the voters on occasion, and step down if defeated in elections. It means that what was once nationalized may also be privatized, and vice versa. Which is the better option is by no means consistent, and it's worth noting that the kinds of people and regimes that hew strongly to one extreme or the other tend to be violent and authoritarian. Having looked at both Castro's Cuba and Pinoche's Chile, I can say that I don't relish the thought of living in either one. The fact that just about every avid Marxist and avid Randroid I've ever engaged with personally are also horribly unpleasant and peevish people doesn't help either cause much either.

By using the mantle of "freedom" and "individual rights" as a moral rationalization for delegitimizing any role for the state in engaging in some regulation or even ownership of capital, redistribution of wealth and protection of the population from the harmful effects of untrammeled capitalism, the libertarians have opened the door for the 21st century's relegitimization of untrammeled capitalism's ugly socialist twin, and the far left's own equally spurious claims that individualistic conceptions of freedom and rights are mere apologetics for the power of wealth and privilege.

I'd like to think the excesses of the DSA can simply be chalked up to the sudden and dramatic reemergence of economic leftism - socialism even - into the mainstream of public discourse in the US body politic following Bernie Sander's 2016 presidential bid. Hopefully, the more extreme and untenable positions will be dropped from the program over time. This is what happened with other laborite and social democratic parties outside the east bloc during the 20th century, after all. One can only hope.

What this should make even more clear than it has been thus far why something akin to another New Deal is so gravely needed. It would be a huge mistake to think that the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes were crypto-communists hell bent on bringing Soviet central planning to the free world by democratic means. They weren't. Their interest was in saving the public from the excesses of capitalism. Because if that doesn't happen, there will be nothing to save the public from the excesses of socialism.

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Opposition to the SJWs

The SJW types have peaked in recent years.  They are institutionally dominant - in colleges, mainstream media and so on.  But that actually isn't a good sign for them.  Holding institutional power but lacking in actual cultural vigor is a sign of waning influence.  And don't mistake shrill fanaticism for cultural vigor, they're poles apart.   There's a lot of resentment and discontent with them now.  For most of the 2000s, people like me who were critical of the excesses of political correctness were kind of an odd breed.   The winds of popular opinion and cultural progress were in the sails first of the so called new atheists and their criticisms of conservative Christianity, and then of the massive proliferation of social justice and feminist blogs.  

That's not the case anymore, and the social justice crowd would be in a world of trouble if they didn't enjoy such high levels of ideological protectionism in academia and mainstream media.  Their purity spiralling and fanaticism is reflective of deep seated fear - the tide has turned against them and they know it.

I think that if you compare things to, say, four years ago, there's quite a bit of anger and frustration with the SJWs that simply wasn't there before. In fact, you didn't have terms like SJW or regressive left before, say, 2014 or so.  This was because before then, the kinds of views we associate with the SJWs were hegemonic, at least in their respective theaters of operation, particularly racial and sexual politics.  The hysterics we're seeing out of them now are because they're facing something they haven't faced in a long time, and that's real opposition.  

Thing of it is, the inertia of ideas has a long term effect.  Apparently rising popularity of SJW types of ideas and activism today is in part due to the inertia of their ideas over the decades.  It's not going to collapse overnight.  Kind of like the religious right, it's going to be a long process.  I think you can compare the SJWs of the Obama era to where the religious right was in George W. Bush's time.  Perhaps maximal in terms of actual institutional power, and their supporters were at a level of peak belief and fanaticism.  But the vigor and vitality had shifted to their opponents, and had been for a while.  The religious right was faltering by the late 1990s.  Anyone under 30 in the Bush years was quoting Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens etc. as if they were gospel.  How ironic.  And you're seeing levels of religiosity declining to this day because of it.  The SJWs are, I think, headed in the same direction

So the SJWs peaked in terms of institutional power during the Obama years, and you can see the results of this in the vitriol shown by mainstream media towards Trump.  But the mere fact that this vitriol is now visible and ostentatious is itself a sign that we've turned a corner.  If the SJWs were truly hegemonic, Hillary Clinton would now be president and these issues wouldn't be a matter of controversy.  Shrillness and hysteria is a common reaction of movements when it begins to dawn on them that they ain't gonna pull it off.  

As to the democratic party capitulating to the SJWs, well, would this be the same democratic party that lost, if only by a narrow margin, last November.  The same Democratic party that lost the House in 2010, gone from a 60 seat supermajority in '08 to a 46 seat minority today, many hundreds of state legislature seats and how many governorships?  Twelve is the figure I've seen.  

Now, does this mean the Democrats are going to suddenly make a dramatic change of course?  Of course not.  Again, these kinds of changes take a long time to really play themselves out.  Movements as given over to fanaticism as the SJWs don't give in nearly that easily, and institutional change could well have to wait until the current crop retires or moves on from their positions of influence.  The DLC has been almost laughably reluctant to look long and hard at their policy platform, their ideology and their broader political culture since Clinton's defeat.  It's all still the Russian's fault, the last time I checked.  Thing is though, Clinton's loss was narrow, and it's quite possible that Trump could really blow it and push support back in the Dem's direction.  Indeed, Trump's win has given them a cause to rally around.  A lot will depend on how things go in 2018 and 2020.

There's something to be said for the fact that there's more opposition [to the SJWS] than I'm giving credit for, and it's not always immediately apparent when you're at the peak until you've actually crossed it and started going down again.

There is a lot of opposition, but like I said, it's unorganized, and it doesn't really know how to organize.  That's the countervailing force.  That's the one thing the SJWs really have going for them.  The core of the anti-SJWs, typically net savvy younger white males, are not the types of people that are well disposed to working effectively together over a long term to achieve political goals, the occasional 4chan meme or prank notwithstanding.  

So while I think the SJWs have peaked, they will be around a while yet.  Quite a while.  There's a reason the colleges and most major news outlets are pro-SJW.  The SJWs are directly traceable to the west coast new left of the 1960s.  These guys did not peter out in the 1970s, contrary to popular belief.  They retreated into academia and they did not waste their time when they got there, again contrary to popular belief.  They stopped with the Marxist stance on economics, so the FBI finally left them alone.  They were no longer a threat to the real power after that.  So they didn't matter.  Except when they did.

Look at these French postmodernist philosophers they studied.  Derrida, Foucault and that whole crew.  They have a reputation for being a bunch of unintelligible gobbledygook.  And it was true to a fair extent.  But literary deconstruction is not a wasted skill.  It's why academic feminists are so damn good in flame wars.  They don't even bother wasting their time answering their opponent's arguments directly.  They dive right into the assumption that their opponents are merely defending a position of power and privilege, because that's all human behavior ever boils down to as far as they're concerned, and it drives their opponents - usually 4chan or manosphere types, batty.  Studying that stuff also leads to an understanding of narrative and cognitive framing.  They understand media, and they understand it on a social, economic and psychological level, not just its basic workings.  A lot of this goes back to the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Rudi Dutschke and others had about a long march through the institutions, which ties into their hegemony in academia.  From there, they learned how to look at the way institutions work and how to coordinate their efforts to strategically apply pressure to get what they want.  The ideas of Saul Alinsky and stuff like that.  

Again, to their opponents, typically paleoconservatives, neoreactionaries and the right wing of the so called skeptic community - think YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad and the like, everything I've described above is what they call cultural Marxism.  It's all bad, horrible stuff because it's supposedly Marxism and we all know that didn't work from the history of the USSR.  Well that's just patent nonsense.  Cultural Marxism is a contradiction in terms.  Marx was adamant about the primacy of economic relations and how culture ultimately flowed from that.  

Marx was proven right when this huge shift to the left in academia and the mainstreaming of feminism, multiculturalism, mass immigration and so on coincided with the mainstreaming of neoliberal capitalism.  And it makes sense because rapacious capitalism always needs new markets to expand into, and if women and minorities are going to provide that, then that's what's going to happen.  But the neoreactionaries and the paleocons can't see that.  They're totally fixated on Marx the way the dumb lefties can't get over Hitler.  And what's really funny is that they usually don't have a clue what Marx actually believed.  I suggest Marxist ideas to alt-rightists and they tend to actually like it, as long as it's not recognizably Marx to them.

The SJWs won't be defeated by anything on the right, because a lot of the population doesn't trust the right wing, and with good reason I think, and also because mainstream conservatism doesn't really mind the cultural left, truth be told.  It's a steam valve for dissent, for one thing.  Better a bunch of angry feminists than a revitalized trade union movement, for example.  That would be a real threat to corporate power.  Occupy Wall Street unnerved them, and I think it's kind of remarkable that the SJWs emerged so suddenly into the social media mainstream not too long after that.  

So the left can have the cultural stuff, since it's actually good for capital anyway, and the right keeps what it really wants: a low tax, deregulated economic structure.  Weak unions and so on, as well as a hawkish foreign policy.  A strong capacity to project power in the middle east to protect petrodollar interests.  The deep state is happy with that, they could give a rat's ass about college feminists being oppressed by privileged white males, and are frankly glad, I suspect, that such things are a huge big hairy deal to the left.  The culture wars distract people from what's really happening at the deep state level, and that's where the real action is.  So this is a perfect arrangement for them.

I'm thinking back to the height of the Religious Right... maybe, late 90s, early 00s?  This was the last time the GOP could run on something like the marriage amendment and it was a winning issue for them nationally.  Was it obvious at the time that the religious right was about to begin the decline?  Not necessarily.  The boomers had turned sharply to the right in the 80s and Generation X was also a right-leaning generation.  Only the oldest of millennials had come of age by that time and it was unknown what their voting patterns would be like.

I frankly think the religious right peaked in the late 1980s and kind of plateaued through much of the 1990s.  The 90s were harder on the religious right than you might think.  The big GOP win in 1994 was kind of a last hurrah, so to speak. The Clinton/Lewinsky affair, I think, was an early major signal that moral conservatism was in decline.  There was all kinds of wailing and gnashing of teeth in right wing circles back then over the fact that Clinton was not removed from office because of that.  The death of outrage, I remember conservative pundits calling it.  People just didn't care that much.  It was between Bill, Monica and Hillary as far as a lot of people were concerned.  

And even during the Bush years, this kind of thinking didn't really change all that much.  The GOP was sitting pretty when it came to electoral success, but the culture was slipping away from them and they damn well knew it.  The religious right were soon to lose over gay marriage, which was the death blow for the religious right, I think, though that wasn't finalized until the Obama years.  Sure, the religious right is still around and managed to get one of their guys as VP, but frankly, I think they're about as undead as their purported savior at this point.

Time will tell.  One piece of evidence could be whether the Dems run a Kamala Harris type in 2020 and go all-in on the identity politics campaign again.  An even bigger piece of evidence will be whether it works or not.  And yet even more important may be analyzing demographic trends in 2020 and (more importantly) 2024 and beyond, when the generation after millenials starts voting and we start getting some data on how conservative/liberal this generation will be and what trends will continue/end (is there a name of this generation yet?)

Well yes, that will be big.  A lot depends on what happens in 2018.  A lot more depends on 2020.  The post-millennials are quite conservative from what I've heard, but it's too early to tell, like you say.  As for the democrats, it doesn't look like they're going to change all that much.  The mainstream voices on the US left - the HuffPost, Salon and so on, are doubling down on the intersectional feminism, and so on.  It's hard to tell if that's what the base really believes, or if the privilege checking tail is wagging a much more populist dog at this point.  

As for the intersectional SJWs, that movement is very self destructive.  Women of color are calling out their white sisters for being "white feminists", black cishet males are being called "the white people of black people" and cisgender gay males are being accused of being more misogynistic than even straight white dudes, if you can believe it.  Plus they're lionizing Islam now, with leaders like Linda Sarsour and the like.  Squaring feminism with the circle of Shari'a law is doubtlessly an irrational fool's errand to a rational person, but irrationality has long since passed critical mass, and there's a lot of woke pink hat wearers that are more than prepared to take the whole thing at face value. 

But then, the opposition doesn't win elections.  The incumbent party loses them, so what happens in 2018 and 2020 will have a lot more to do with the performance of the Tweeter in Chief's administration than any kind of shift of the ideological poles that might occur between now and then.  I don't find that a comforting thought.

Regressive Left Pt. 7: Marxist Mayhem

In previous installments of this series, we've examined the development and influence of regressive leftism in post WW2 western societies. It is partially due to the failures of Marxist-Leninism that critical theory and postmodern strands of leftist critique and activism rose to prominence.

What has thus far saved the 1^st world can, I believe, be attributed to the psychological effects of white European male guilt on the western psyche.  Ironic, given how crucial this has been as a foundation for regressive left ideology in the first place. Those who believe themselves and their cultural traditions to be inherently tainted, who view their identities as a kind of secular, postmodern original sin, are more likely to have a diminished “will to power” so to speak.  

It is to this cultural inferiority complex that I suspect the relative lack of political success enjoyed by the post WW2 western left can be attributed.  Even when they do achieve periods of relative success and influence, such as during the late 1960s or the early 2010s, they can’t help but end up sabotaging this success, usually by a descent into ideological excess, factionalization, indulgence in rioting and other antisocial behavior, the deliberate cultivation of an adversarial stance vis-à-vis mainstream society, withdraw from society and so on.

This has, in part, been our saving grace, as has been the checks and balances and limitations and separation of powers inherent to constitutional liberal democracies.  As the history of regressive leftism in the former communist bloc and 3^rd world illustrates, they are infinitely worse where and when these checks and limitations are absent.

I won’t lay out a history of the Soviet bloc here. What is of interest, though, are elements of Marxist Leninist theory that echo down to the present day. The ideology of the Kremlin never gained much traction in the western world, especially after McCarthyism. But, as mentioned above, Frankfurt School and postmodern academics were inspired, to some degree, by Marx.  Marcuse’s doctrine of repressive tolerance, or Patricia Bidol-Padva’s doctrine of power plus prejudice trod worn paths even in their own time. 

As some relevant examples:

Martin Ivanovich Lācis, deputy chief of the Cheka in Ukraine in 1918, established the principle that sentences in criminal cases were to be determined not by guilt or innocence but by social class. He is quoted as explaining the Red Terror as follows: “Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror.”

Soviet legal theorist Andrey Vyshinsky, “Procurator General” of the Soviet Union from 1935 to 39 – while Stalin’s terror was at its height, according to his Wikipedia article: “recommended that investigators and judges consider "the wider social perspective" of each individual case in the context of class struggle. As a result, an actual committing of a crime was not required for conviction: people could have been convicted for being perceived as bourgeois ("class responsibility") or simply if that was considered to be beneficial for the Communist Party, for example in the "educational" role of the judicial system (thus, the importance of show trials, even with completely false accusations).  Regressive left God-mother Catherine MacKinnon did not invent this kind of legal thinking, and would indeed seem to have been inspired by it.

The heart of Soviet regressivism was embodied in the concept that Lenin called “Kto Kovo” meaning “Who, whom?”  Who benefits?  Leon Trotsky expressed the same basic concept in a 1925 article entitled, “Towards capitalism or towards socialism?”  Fundamentally, the extremely Manichean and apocalyptic doctrine of Marxist-Leninism, later expanded upon by Mao and others, saw the world as being locked in a titanic, winner take all struggle of good – embodied by “the workers”, “the people” or “socialism” vs. evil, embodied by inherently exploitative “capitalists”, “imperialists” and “oppressors.”  

This lends itself to a reductionist logic whereby any actions taken by the forces of good, either directly or by their self appointed vanguard, were by definition good.  Naturally, the reverse is also true – since exploitation is at the heart of any non-socialist social system, definitions of human rights and civil liberties not based in Marxist-Leninist thought and not advanced by Kremlin sanctioned Marxist Leninist sources amounted to nothing more than apologetics for capitalism, imperialism and exploitation.

Western postmodernism did not pioneer the rejection of western liberal notions of universal human rights on relativistic grounds.  Quote Lenin, “In the guise of equality of persons generally, bourgeois democracy proclaims the formal or juridical equality between the property owner and the proletarian, between the exploiter and the exploited, and thereby deceives the oppressed classes. The bourgeoisie transforms the idea of equality which is itself the reflection of commodity production relations into a weapon in the struggle against the abolition of classes on the plea of alleged absolute equality between individuals.  The real meaning of the demand for equality lies exclusively in the demand for the abolition of classes.”

In this view, dignifying the rights of the individual requires first the abolition of class distinctions, as defined in Marxist materialist terms.

This is not to say that class (or race or gender) inequalities cannot undermine liberal notions of liberty and rights.  This is not even to say that “rights” in the “bourgeois liberal” sense cannot be leveraged by the powerful and privileged to maximize their advantage vis-à-vis the disadvantaged.  But there is a huge difference between criticizing the corrupting effects of inequality and privilege on outcomes in a liberal democratic polity, on the one hand, and viewing the entire concept of equal rights before the law as little more than a rationalization for or even a conspiracy to buttress inequality and privilege, on the other.  Failure to make this distinction is a consistent core feature of regressive leftism.

The manipulation of the meaning of social power differentials, from the currently popular “power plus prejudice” doctrine to its Leninist precedent in “Kto Kovo” is the perhaps the most dangerous tendency in regressive leftism.  While the capacity for powerful and propertied majorities to oppress minorities with a history of marginalization should be obviously much greater than the reverse, the flagrant abuse of this doctrine and its persistent use as a get out of jail free card for preferred groups is behind many of their most obnoxious behaviors.  

By this line of reasoning, they can rationalize any self serving double standard or offensive behavior they wish.  The consequences that this kind of thinking can excuse and enable run the full gamut from the obnoxious but generally harmless self righteousness and double standards of internet feminists and social justice warriors, to notions that women are incapable of domestic abuse or that minorities are incapable of hate crimes which can at least potentially be admitted in a court of law, if not inhibit their arrest for such crimes in the purpose, and finally to the bloody extremes of Stalin’s liquidation of the Kulaks in the Ukraine, a crime against humanity that approaches the holocaust in its viciousness and body count.

It is imperative that we learn to factor out the unjust realities of power differentials between groups and legitimate struggles against those inequalities from our evaluation of the conduct of individual members of those groups.  All people must be accountable and responsible for their actions, regardless of the range of their influence in a more abstract, sociological sense.  Statistics demonstrating social inequality are fair to use when justifying social programs aimed at reducing those inequalities.  They must not be admissible when justifying demonstrably malicious behavior perpetrated by members of supposedly disadvantaged groups.  

The grotesque errors in logic inherent in “power plus prejudice” thinking, ranging from two wrongs making a right to the fallacy of relative privation to ad hominems and false dilemmas make it an obviously deeply flawed way of thinking completely independent of the shitty behavior it enables and its natural tendency to provoke counter reaction in the supposedly “privileged” people who are often its targets.

Compounding this are legitimate questions about just how powerless so called “marginalized people” – or at least the pseudo intellectual class that so consistently appropriates their identities and struggles for their own political purposes – are when this line of reasoning is so pervasive in academia, media, government bureaucracy, human resources departments and so on, to say nothing of the full resources of a totalitarian state in the case of the former Soviet sphere?  It should be borne in mind that it is the state, not the poor minorities themselves that oppresses when regressive leftists get their hands on real political power.  

As a direct corollary to this, those deemed “privileged” in these reductionist ideological indexes of power quite frequently aren’t.  The image of the six digit salary earning tenured college administrator, celebrity or media personality using their bully pulpit to tell unemployed white male laborers to “check their privilege” has become almost cliché in criticisms of SJWs.  Sadly, it is a cliché too frequently based in truth.

Perhaps that is why the tendency to sweep the glaring problems with “power plus prejudice” and “Kto Kovo” lines of thinking under the rug is so strong in cultural institutions.  It is so much easier to reduce complex questions of power, privilege and the abuse thereof to simple, two variable equations that make the good guy and bad guy easy to identify.  But this is done at the expense of the intellectual and moral integrity of left wing movements.  So long as the scapegoat – be it a male falsely accused of rape, a white Donald Trump supporter assaulted by Black Lives Matter or Antifa fanatics or a Kulak who dared hoard corn from Stalin’s secret police - has some arbitrary characteristic that the “revolutionary class” or “marginalized peoples” don’t have, the actual tendency of those scapegoated in this manner to be quite powerless can safely be ignored and any actions taken against them justified.  Just don’t ask troublesome questions and you shouldn’t get in trouble.

Marxism was not contrived to be a regressive leftist doctrine – Marx himself insisted that his worldview was a “science” based on demonstrable material and economic factors.  For Marx, who was exploited and who was privileged could be demonstrated through analysis of relations of production and how alienated labor produced surplus value for the benefit of the capitalists at the expense of the workers.

Nevertheless, it did open the door to many regressive tendencies, most notable of which was its secular variation of apocalyptic eschatology.  The end times were conceived of as an inevitable confrontation between a proletariat made morally pure by its lack of exploitative relationship vis-à-vis another class, and a bourgeoisie wholly and utterly corrupt beyond anything seen prior to the capitalist era.   

The popularity of heroic narratives stressing conflict of good vs evil is timeless and seems to be beyond even Marx’s notions of economic primacy, as demonstrated by the consistency of these themes in mythology, religion and even present day popular culture.  But projecting this kind of thinking onto one’s view of the world carries with it certain innate dangers. 

Like religious zealots thinking themselves God’s chosen people and theirs the one true faith, Marxism ennobled its followers with a sense of grand historical mission and therefore vulnerability to the notion that they could do no wrong.  The “scientific” aspects of Marxism strengthened rather than tempered their self righteous resolve.  It naturally lent itself to the “ends justify the means” kinds of logic used to rationalize the egregious human rights violations in Soviet Russia, Maoist China and elsewhere.  

While orthodox Marxism straight out of Das Kapital  is rare among 21^st century regressive leftists (though it is making a bit of a comeback), its influence on current regressive leftism cannot be understated.  

It was not a large jump for the disillusioned remnants of the 1960s New Left to substitute race and gender based identity politics for class analysis into the Marxist oppressed/oppressor dialectic, although the materialist economic relations were a core aspect of Marx’s theories.  

The result was an ideology stressing a bourgeoisie/proletariat style contradiction across race and gender lines that was insoluble by a revolution in the relations and means of production, as Marx stressed was both possible and necessary in class relations.  This has left us with race and gender based theories of privilege that negate economic relations, however essential such relations may have been to the rise of racial and gender inequality in the first place.  What we are now left with is an endless future of strained racial and sexual relations and endless culture wars, wherein innocuous comments are considered “microaggressions” and “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” are among the few tools left with which intersectional regressive leftists – themselves oddly ensconced in high places in media and academic institutions – may fight privilege and inequality.

But do some elements of even today’s regressive leftism predate even Marx?

... Continued in Part 8: The Regressive Soul

Ernest Everhard, Do You Even Socialist, Bro?

Do you even socialist, bro?

"Ernest Everhard" - my personal meme stash and blogging page on Facebook, named for the Marxist protagonist in Jack London's dystopian classic, The Iron Heel, received the following message earlier today:

"Also, do you think you could establish a doctrine beyond just anti SJW? You say you a communist but in your policy you are a social democrat. Are you a revolutionary socialist?"

Fair question and fair point, though I do think I'm more than merely anti SJW.  I'm against closed, manichean systems of thought, of which intersectional feminism is one.  Revolutionary socialism is another, so I guess that answers that question.

I think there's a great deal to be said for Marxist materialism as a means of analyzing the economic structure of a given society.  But my messenger makes a good point: for someone who so insists that part of how leftism has gone wrong recently is its neglect of economics in favor of cultural issues, I do tend to neglect economics in favor of cultural issues.  Physician, heal thyself!

So here goes ...

Marxist materialism was a work of genius for its time.  But it hasn't aged well, obviously.  Marx wrote at a time when early industrial capitalism still had an almost feudal character to it.  Some top-hat and tails tycoon - think any antagonist from Charles Dickens novel or Sir Topham Hatt - owned the textile mill, sewing floor or whatever.  Whatever was left over after all of his expenses were paid was his, straight out, unless he was indebted to a bank or other patron.

For reasons too complex to detail here, Marx thought this system doomed to fail.  Capital would amass into fewer and fewer hands and downward pressure on wages, and hence demand, would contrast with increased productivity, and therefore supply, driving the whole thing to collapse like a house of cards.  His famous predictions of a dictatorship of the proletariat and eventual rise of communism are, of course, well known.  To this day, the mystique of "worker controlled" economies continues to enamor idealists.  Perhaps had things remained that way, Marx's predictions would have come to pass by now.  In my experience, workers aren't that interested in worker's control.  Worker's control actually entails more work.  Best to leave it to professional managers, That's what they're paid the big bucks for, is the general attitude.

The emergence of the joint-stock corporation in the mid 19th century changed things.  Somewhat.  Larger industrial concerns - steel mills and the like, became too costly for all but the most obscenely wealthy people to afford.  Joint-stock made it possible for somewhat less obscenely wealthy people to get in on the action as well.  Now, instead of one Sir Topham Hat, many could go in together as shareholders, who would elect a Board of Directors to run the organization.  In most models of corporate governance, the Board hires a CEO to manage things on a day-to-day basis.  This model had the effect of separating the managers from the owners - profits accrued to the shareholders, and the board/CEO were salaried employees much like the workers themselves were, albeit more generously compensated.

Of course, the same downward pressure on wages remained, since profit still amounted to the difference between income and expense.  But the countervailing measures we're all familiar with began to emerge: the rise of organized labor, government regulation of wage levels and working conditions, and progressive income tax schemes used to fund social programs for the benefit of the needy - the basic planks of social democracy.  Once these measures were in place, however, capitalism was allowed to remain.  Back in the USSR (bonus points if you read that in Paul McCartney's voice), capitalism was abolished entirely, and Lenin and his successors would try out actual socialism in earnest.

History has generally not been kind to either the socialist or the social democratic ideals.  I'll consider the reasons below:

Places where capitalism was done away with entirely encountered varying degrees of bad results.  The reasons included lack of competition and lack of profit incentives stifling innovation and productivity, and the economic calculation problem - when markets are not used to allocate goods, price fluctuations are not able to signal increases or decreases in demand.  What really kills socialism, though, resides in Marx's theory of surplus value.  The assumption at all profit = exploitation and that therefore the whole value of labor should accrue to the workers or the state results in an absence of capital markets.  You see, not all of those profits went towards top hats and tails.  Of course, a lot of it did and obscene differences in wealth emerged and continue to emerge.  But a lot of it was reinvested too, and this allowed economic growth and jobs to increase.  Where capital markets cannot exist; where stocks and bonds cannot be issued, this becomes much more difficult.  This, I suspect, is why thoroughly socialized economies tend to descend into stagnation and failure.

What of social democracy, then?  Traditionally social democratic mixed economies tend to be top performers in the world economy, so social democracy is the horse to bet on, is it not?  While it is superior to either Sir Topham Hat capitalism or communism, it's not without limitations.  Limitations that have grown harder to get around as the economy has become more globalized, though wiggle-room still exists and governments, particularly neoliberal ones, are as likely to use these factors to rationalize giving away the store to corporate interests as they are to face these factors as true constraints.

The main problems are investment strike and capital flight.  Those with the capital to do so simply don't invest and therefore fewer jobs, less credit and reduced growth long term.  This article in the great Jacobin magazine illustrates the pressures that international investors can bring to bear upon governments in order to erode social democratic protections.  These result in reduced taxes on high incomes, weakened unions, working class taxpayers shelling out for bail-outs, job losses due to free trade deals, taxpayers shelling out for startup costs, weakened consumer, shareholder, labor and environmental protection legislation and everything else that excite Thatcherites and Reaganites.

The competitive nature of capitalism and the drive for ever reduced costs and increased profits drive transnational corporations to exert these pressures on governments.  This is how Bill Clintons and Tony Blairs happen.  We are back to where we were before we considered socialism and social democracy to begin with.

So what can be done?

The core problem seems to be that revolutionary socialism goes too far while social democracy doesn't go far enough.  I believe the answer is to go back to the basic corporate model of ownership and governance, and work with rather than against market forces.  If tax or wage increases eat into net income and therefore disincentivize further investment, then we can achieve the desired results - increased incomes for the working class and revenues for the state to then spend on social welfare - through increased state and/or worker ownership of shares in the publicly traded corporations.

To achieve this, I would make the following proposals:

• That a public investment authority be created in order to establish sovereign wealth funds.  This has been done with some success in other places - the Norwegians did it with their oil industry and have been quite successful.  Doing this would require the state to begin acquiring shares in publicly traded corporations at home (preferably) and abroad.
• All citizens receive a capital endowment upon reaching a certain age.  This endowment would take the form of a non-transferable share in the aforementioned sovereign wealth fund.  This share would naturally be equal in size only to every other share that every other citizen likewise receives.  So one share of millions.  Plus, the state would not divest the entire value of its sovereign wealth fund in this manner.  The state would retain a sizable share, and reinvest the profits as well as use some of the income so generated for public finance.  All told, not enough to put anyone on easy street, but should help with those "pay the rent vs. feed the kids" conundrums that the underclasses contend with.
• The entirety of the nation's publicly traded stock would not be nationalized in this manner.  A capital market would continue to be permitted to exist.  No single person or entity would be permitted a complete controlling interest in any corporation.

And yet the basic corporate model of governance and operation remains.  Except that the shareholders entitled to vote at annual shareholder meetings are now much of the population, or at least trust companies, banks or investment firms retained by much of the population to manage their investments, should they so choose.  This means partial, if not majority votes to the board of directors.  Which would still be required by its fiduciary duties to maximize shareholder value, but could also be restrained by limitations imposed by the shareholders.  

The obscene and ridiculous American habit of allowing the Chair of the Board to also serve as the Chief Executive Officer could be made against the corporate charter or bylaws, for example, though this should simply be outlawed by fiat.  In other regards, regulation of the corporation would thus be as much a matter of internal governance as compliance with government legislation.

Beyond this, social democratic measures would be vastly easier to implement, though they'd likely be less necessary since the above measures deal with the structural inequalities of capitalism.  This will be especially important as advances in artificial intelligence and robotics kill ever more jobs.  Fully automated luxury communism just might be possible after all!

Still, utilities and essential services would still be best delivered by crown corporations and universal social programs.  Social safety nets, a negative income tax, a basic income or even a job guarantee would still be worth considering.  Unions would still be a part of things, both as a means of codetermination - representing company staff on corporate boards of directors (like they do in Germany) and standard collective bargaining roles more generally.  

Well, it is seizing the means of production, in a manner of speaking, is it not?

If You Are Going to Be Anti-Capitalist, At Least Be Smart About It.

If You Are Going to Be Anti-Capitalist, At Least Be Smart About It.

The Resist Capitalism hashtag has been circulating on Twitter lately.  Not surprisingly, a lot of what's been appearing under this hashtag has a lot more to do with women's studies talking points than with any actual analysis of how capitalism actually works.

Some people apparently haven't taken their other red pill recently.

So how does capitalism actually work.  When you're confused, look at the facts.  Merriam-Webster offers this definition:

An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market,

The most historically prevalent critical analysis of capitalism comes from Marxist theory, whose definition of capitalism isn't all of that much different than the Merriam-Webster definition.  The Wikipedia article on Marx's theory on the "Capitalist Mode of Production" attributes to capitalism the following characteristics:

• Both the inputs and outputs of production are mainly privately owned, priced goods and services purchased in the market. 

• Production is carried out for exchange and circulation in the market, aiming to obtain a net profit income from it.

• The owners of the means of production (capitalists) are the dominant class (bourgeoisie) who derive their income from the surplus product produced by the workers and appropriated freely by the capitalists.

• A defining feature of capitalism is the dependency on wage-labor for a large segment of the population; specifically, the working class (proletariat) do not own capital and must live by selling their labour power in exchange for a wage.

Thus, definitions of capitalism that actually understand that capitalism is an economic system are remarkably consistent in their descriptions of the characteristics that capitalism actually has.  Whether capitalist profit constitutes "surplus value produced by the workers" is, perhaps debatable. I think it does after a point, but a strong case can be made for profit constituting compensation for the risks capitalists take when they invest.  How much is too much is a fair point to consider.

But that capitalism is marked by private ownership of capital is undebatable as its key feature.

So let's look at some of these tweets to come out of what's passing for anti-capitalist thought these days.

Because Capitalism is inherently sexist, racist, classist, ableist and ageist.  It is universally the most oppressive force.

Okay, classist. We'll definitely give her that.  But where does any of the rest of this come in at all, at least as being fundamental to the nature of the capitalist system.  Of course, capitalism is not completely incompatible with racism, sexism and so on, though it does produce a kind of social levelling in that it systematically erodes the importance of relations based on kinship, blood and soil in favor of relationships based entirely on financial transaction.  This was actually a part of Marx's critique of capitalism.  But the above quote explicitly claims that capitalism is inherently sexist, racist, etc.  Well, what happens if the means of production are owned by women or minorities and white dudes are selling their labor power in order to scrape by?

Raising children, domestic chores, and caregiving for the elderly/disabled are all forms of undervalued or unpaid labor.

This is frankly as close as we're going to get to a good and valid criticism of capitalism here.  A lot of social services are not easily commodified and sold for a profit, unless the people on whose behalf these services are being performed are wealthy enough to pay for them.  And even then, they will naturally wish to pay as little as possible for these services.  In The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Frederick Engels did make what was at the time a valid comparison of women's role in the home vis-a-vis the male breadwinner with the relationship of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, particularly if she's inhibited or barred from having an independent source of income, which a lack of childcare would inevitably contribute to.

Nevertheless, this is not a damning indictment of capitalism.  What happens when, as they do a minority of the time, men perform these duties?  Child and eldercare and household maintenance are not imposed by capitalism, but rather would be necessities regardless of the mode of production.

Meanwhile, forcing men into the role of breadwinner contributes to heteronormativity, cisnormativity and toxic masculinity.

What characterizes periods of untrammelled capitalism, such as the industrial revolution and the present day, is an erosion in gendered differences in the home.  Women worked in the dark Satanic mills of the Dickensian era as well as in the dark Satanic cubicles of the information age.

I dare you, dear reader, to beg, borrow or steal (don't buy - it will make the capitalists rich!) a copy of The Condition of the Working Class in England, again by Frederick Engels, published all the way back in 1845.  It has page after page of lurid details of the effects of rampant industrial capitalism on the family structure of working class families unfortunate enough to live in the quintessential Dickensian time.

Remarkable is a passage regarding a male who was unemployed while his wife was condemned to fifteen hour days in a textile mill.  Following this passage, Engles asks, "Can anyone imagine a more insane state of things than that described in this letter?  And yet this condition, which unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness ... this condition which degrades in the most shameful way, both sexes, and through them, humanity ... "  It would seem that the Lehman Bro's meltdown wasn't the first "Mancession" we've ever experienced.  Again, capitalism, if anything, erodes gender roles because it reduces all relationships to buying and selling, which gender is not an essential prerequisite to engage in.

The Patriarchy needs capitalism.  White supremacy needs capitalism.  Capitalism reinforces and maintains systemic oppression.

White supremacy and patriarchy predated the capitalist mode of production, sometimes by milennia.  Are we to believe, based on this, that feudalism or antiquity were times and modes of production marked by gender and racial equality?  How would this be, if patriarchy and white supremacy needed capitalism?

It is possible in a capitalist mode of production to resort to ideologies such as white supremacy or male supremacy to rationalize the relegating of women and minorities to lower positions in the class hierarchy.  This did happen.  But racist and sexist ideologies would be part of the superstructure - which refers to a set of external, cultural traits which can be, and usually are, a consequence of the dominant productive forces, which are the base.  The accompanying chart illustrates this.  The important thing to remember is that the superstructure is "downstream" from the base and is dependent on it, not vice versa, though the superstructure and help to reinforce the base.  So capitalism is not dependent on racism or patriarchy, and in fact may be the force that eventually undermines non-economic social inequality.  Marx and Engels explain how in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” … The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. 

This means that the nature of capitalism is to erode the importance of all factors save one in human relations: economic transaction.  The march of globalization and the push for race and gender based social equality occurring at the same time are not accidents.  Women and minorities are much more valuable as workers, consumers and taxpayers than they are as second class citizens with limited rights to be any of these, once the market for white males is saturated.

Poverty isn't a sign that capitalism is failing.  It is a sign that it is working.

Another claim that may actually be more true than false.  Marx theorized that a gradual immiseration of the working class and poor would gradually occur as capitalism reached the end of its ability to profit off expansion of markets.  We have not seen this in the west because the global division of labor has exported most, though not all proletarian roles to the third world, and social safety nets help with the rest.  Not that there isn't poverty in the first world, but we're generally spared the worst of it.  The real inequalities in wealth between capitalists is unprecedented - we now live in a world of multi billionaires and potentially trillionaires.  Eight billionaires now hold as much wealth as half the world's population.  And this is very much the result of capitalism working precisely the way Marx and Engels said it would.

Capitalism and systemic oppression have a symbiotic relationship.  They feed into one another.  We must dismantle both.

Depends what we mean by systemic oppression.  If this relates to identity politics, then no it doesn't, for reasons already discussed.  If by systemic oppression we refer to class differences reproducing economic inequality, than unregulated capitalism would certainly reproduce this.  I somehow doubt that's what this tweet meant, though.

Capitalism is innately ableist.  I am disabled and unable to work.  Do I not still deserve food, medicine, any quality of life?

I would suggest that nature is innately ableist.  If you are disabled and unable to work, you aren't going to be able to provide for yourself regardless of the mode of production.  Whether charity or social welfare steps in to assist is another matter, and again, one not dependent on the mode of production.

Capitalism is sexist.  It devalues the labor that women/mothers do, and are expected to do, in our society.

Capitalism doesn't care one way or another about your vagina, as I think has been demonstrated by now.  What is incentivized under capitalism is buying low and selling high in an effort to make a profit.  If the work that women/mothers do is unpaid or poorly paid, this has a lot more to do with the fact that the work typically associated with female gender roles is not easily commodified or is not productive from the standpoint of converting paid labor time into profit.  That capitalism fails to adequately remunerate such work when it is socially useful, essential even, is a very real market failure.  But this failure is not contingent on the people doing the work having vaginas.  If men did it, it would still be devalued work.  This is largely why birthrates are falling, and women are increasingly eschewing marriage and motherhood in favor of careers. Looked at this way, it is capitalism that is really behind feminism.

Sexism and capitalism work together to reinforce gender norms that are harmful to women, men and gender non conforming folx.

See above.

There are places to go to learn about capitalism, both for and against.  The women's studies classroom is not one of them.

I discuss Marxist theory, identity and capitalism in my Other Red Pill series.

The Other Red Pill, and I do Mean Red
Living in a Material World
Tense Relations
The Desert of the Real
Class Dismissed!
No Class
Race to the Bottom
Engendered Failure
A Touch of Class
Wake up!  Class is Back in Session

The Other Red Pill: Wake Up! Class is Back in Session!

I mentioned previously that societies that romanticize revolution and demonize capitalists do so at a heavy cost.  But then, so do societies that fail to take materialist definitions of class into account when looking at both economic and social issues.  To say that our society has suffered enormously as a result of a lack of class in its political outlook is an understatement of grand proportions.

Historical materialism was consigned to the dustbin of history very prematurely.  The failure of the USSR was not the failure of this kind of an outlook on political economy.  If anything, we've been failing for a lack of it, as I've tried to demonstrate throughout the Other Red Pill Series.  To address numerous social problems, it must be resurrected and rehabilitated, without a lot of the other Marxist baggage it became burdened with over time.  Let's just pretend that Lenin and everything after in the east and the Frankfurt School and everything after in the west never happened, shall we?

In fact, I would go as far as to say that The resuscitation of economic class, as defined in Marx's materialist conception of history, must be THE central project of alternative-left politics.  This is what the Other Red Pill is ultimately really all about.  What we do with that knowledge, as it becomes more mainstream, is up to us. 

But the truancy of the left must come to an end.  It's time to wake up.  Identitarians of all stripes and neo-liberals have kept the wool over our eyes for far too long now.  It's time for the alt-left to take them back to school: class is back in session!

The Other Red Pill: A Touch of Class

Friedrich Engels wrote:

The materialist conception of history has a lot of [dangerous friends] nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late 70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist." (...) In general, the word "materialistic" serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labeled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and then consider the question disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. 

In short, historical materialism is not a master key to understanding all of history and society, and is not a shortcut to understanding the complexities and nuances of each individual society and era.  Marx and Engels, though they had insights sufficient enough to merit rescue from "the more savage travesties of his critics", were not infallible or omniscient.  No one ever is.

The usefulness of historical materialism as a means of analyzing the way societies worked, and just how powerful a critique it was (and to a considerable extent still is) in criticizing capitalism, combined with with the almost apocalyptic nature of Marx's predictions on where capitalist society was headed (predictions that were overwhelmingly wrong the vast majority of the time) and the resulting romanticization of revolution for its own sake, led to Marxism becoming a kind of surrogate religion for many of its most devoted followers.  Especially since Marxism naturally entailed kicking one's opium (of the masses) habit, and a similar kind of belief system was needed to fill the void.

This resulted in all of the evils of religious fanaticism that were carried out under the cross or the crescent over the centuries being carried out under the hammer and sickle in the 20th century.  These "communist" states carried out countless atrocities and disastrous policies which were driven in large part by a religious fervor towards Marxist ideology, or what these fanatics thought Marxist ideology was, which is very often very different from what both its supporters and opponents thought it was.  Think critically at all times, even towards otherwise good ideas.

It's worth touching upon the age old debate of whether or not the USSR was actually socialist.  This depends on how one defines the term.  What we do know, however, were that the "soviets" - democratic councils of workers established to manage factories and local economies - for which the USSR was named, were taken over, often by force, by the central Bolshevik state as soon as they had the power to do so.  Like the "state priests" of the "Bonapartist State" of the early 19th century that Marx himself criticized, and like the regressive left SJWs in media and academia in our time, the Bolsheviks regarded themselves as a kind of "intellectual" elite who, by virtue of their superior insight into the one true faith, had the right to capture popular democratic institutions and use them to rule over the plebs with an iron fist.  For their own good, of course.

In materialist terms, what we know is that the Soviet state had utter and complete control over the means of production.  Compared even to monopoly capitalism, ownership was more rather than less concentrated under the USSR system.  Of course, even totalitarian states knew the value of good PR, and so described themselves in ideal socialist terms.  The arrangement was also useful, if in an ironic way, to the capitalist elite in the west, who could then point to the monstrosity that was the Soviet state and claiming that was what socialism really was all about, kill any interest in the materialist outlook that its working classes may have had.  Even western leftists were drinking this Kool-Aid, especially after the Soviet state unraveled, with results I've discussed elsewhere.  

Any Soviet citizen who complained about any aspect of it could expect to find themselves sent to that part of it known as the gulag.  If socialism or communism can be defined as kinds of democratic citizen's or worker's control over the means of production, the USSR and its copycats and sock puppets were as far away from that as you can get.

Perhaps more significantly, is full blown democratic citizen's or worker's control over the entire means of production feasible or even desirable?  Perhaps they were when Marx put pen to paper in the mid 19th century, but are they now?  Are they now that the joint stock or limited liability corporations have become the primary organization in capitalist production and distribution, doing away with the strict dichotomy of bourgeois tycoon vs. propertiless proletariat that so much of Marx's theory depended on?  What would Marx, or Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes for that matter, make of an incorporated entity in which the employees, customers, parts of the broader community or even the state were in part or in whole, the shareholders?  These all seem to be vastly superior models to classic Marxist-Leninism if you ask me.  If we were opt to "in whole" as opposed to "in part" ownership in the above cases, how would these organizations raise capital?

Marx's critique of capitalism relied heavily on the labor theory of value, and the claim that profit resulted from surplus value: the workers receiving less than the value of what they produced, and the difference going into the capitalist's pocket.  I doubt that this is always necessarily true, though it can be, and without a proper regulatory structure, economic forces most likely will result in the kinds of economic meltdowns that Marx believed would eventually destroy capitalism, such as the market crashes of 1929 and 2008.  

If the capitalists compensate themselves for their own work in organizing production, if they compensate shareholders for the risk the run in investing in the business in the first place, if they invest in capital that increases the productivity of the business, resulting in more revenue and allowing for higher salaries across the board, wouldn't this admittedly ideal (meaning not always the really occurring) scenario be, in many ways preferable to the physical laborers simply taking it all as income, while allowing the capital assets to deteriorate?  I've often suspected that this is why real existing socialist societies - from Russia a century ago to Venezuela today, start out so well for the commoners, but the standard of living then deteriorates to a point where capitalist systems surpass them in terms of living standards.  

And don't get me started on the economic calculation problem, demonstrating the almost total lack of feasibility for any system of planned economics.  Societies that romanticize revolution and demonize capitalists pay a heavy price for doing so.  The thing to aspire to, I think, is not a retread of revolutionary socialism, but a capitalism wherein all, or at least most can profit, not just a few.

The Other Red Pill: Class Dismissed!

The Frankfurt school influenced modern leftism a great deal.

It began in 1920s Germany by a group of Marxists, many of whom were Jewish (Marxism appealed to intellectuals who were ostracized from the cultural mainstream; who would have guessed?). They were mainly interested in why European working classes allied with their respective countries during WWI as opposed to uniting across national boundaries to stop the war and overthrow capitalism, as well as not having much class consciousness at all beyond what Lenin called a "trade union consciousness." That meant that the working class was content to win its rights within the capitalist system rather than overthrowing the system all together.

That it simply might not have been necessary or even desirable for the working classes to do this crossed the minds of neither Lenin nor the Frankfurt Theorists.  The nasty effects that this preoccupation with romanticizing revolution had on Marxist theory on both sides of the iron curtain, I've discussed elsewhere.  Lenin and his successors had options that were not open to western Marxists to get the working classes in the Soviet Union thinking along the right lines.

The Frankfurters had no such options open to them.  So they came to believe that ideologies that countermanded class consciousness went deeper into the working class psyche than the mere economic determinism of Marx could have allowed for, and that these beliefs were constantly being reinforced in the broader culture. This brought them into contact with Freudian psychoanalysis for further study of how what they came to call cultural hegemony was internalized by even those whose class interests went against the way the broader system worked. The Frankfurt school came to believe that western culture had deeper problems than merely an exploitative economic system, and thus needed its own kind of psychoanalysis - "deconstruction" in order to make its oppressive characteristics conscious, and so be rejected. Thus critical theory was born.

In the early 1930s, it seemed reasonable for Jewish Marxists in Germany to get the hell out of Dodge. Perhaps one of the few times that desire for a "safe space" in academia was reasonable. So most of them went to America. Some, I think, returned to Europe after the war, especially since it was America's turn to go after the commies (though not nearly as savagely as Germany had done previously) in the 1950s.

The new left of the 1960s, inspired by Frankfurt School ideas to a much greater degree than the "old" left had been, found itself making common cause with emerging civil rights and feminist causes (remember that bit about Marxist appeal to the ostracized), which were also developing bodies of theory of their own. Frankfurt theorists thus had a great impact on feminist theory and critical race theory which emerged in 1970s academia. Perhaps the 3rd world and its "manifestations" among minorities and immigrants in the 1st world, uncorrupted by western culture, would succeed where the proletariat had failed, and become a truly revolutionary class?  Such was the hope in some quarters.  This, I think is where this idea of cultural Marxism that the far right is always on about, comes from.

It must be mentioned that the Frankfurt School was by no means the only group experimenting in what were then different modes of leftist thought that broke from the dull orthodoxies spouted by the Kremlin and its other sock puppets throughout Europe and Asia.  Nor was the Frankfurt School necessarily wrong.  They had useful insights.  Discontent with an obviously corrupt and brutal regime in Moscow was another obvious source of discontent.  Another alternative view came from the French postmodernists (think Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc.)

Contrary to what you might hear, Antonio Gramsci, whose theories of cultural hegemony spook any alt-rightist obsessed with cultural Marxism, wasn't involved with the Frankfurt School and did not coin the phrase "long march through the institutions," whereby Jewish Marxists would infiltrate academia and other cultural institutions and destroy western civilization from within - although Herbert Marcuse, who was associated with the Frankfurt School, did approve of that basic concept.

If the intent of this leftist infiltration of cultural institutions was to erode public faith in western civilization and therefore make ready the people for a revolutionary socialist consciousness, it could not have failed more spectacularly.  Rising popular acceptance for feminism, multiculturalism and secularism throughout the 1980s and early 1990s were not exactly accompanied by an explosion of revolutionary socialist fervor in the western world.  To put it mildly.

And this is less of a coincidence than people are inclined to realize - among Marx's most prescient observations was that rapacious global capitalism would undermine traditional cultures and gradually replace them with a world wide culture built around commerce and consumerism.  So far from undermining capitalism, the emergent social liberalism worked hand-in-glove with it.

Immigration brought cheap labor and spared cash strapped governments the expense of providing services for mothers and children. Multiculturalism opened up new markets at home and abroad. Feminist preferences of career over family were most welcome in corporate board rooms and the cabinets of neo-liberal governments.

... to be continued ...