Anti-Modern Currents within Socialism
Discussion
Marlene Laruelle:
"within socialism, there have always been anti-modern currents that understood the defense of place, community, and inherited forms of life as inseparable from the emancipatory project. From Proudhon and Lafargue to Péguy, Simone Weil, George Orwell, Christopher Lasch, and Jean-Claude Michéa, this tradition kept alive what the mainstream left abandoned: the recognition that you cannot liberate people from a living world you have already destroyed. What these figures mostly fought/fight for is stopping capitalism in its tracks and reversing its damage, not working through capitalism on the road to a “brighter future.”
But within socialism, there have always been anti-modern currents that understood the defense of place, community, and inherited forms of life as inseparable from the emancipatory project. From Proudhon and Lafargue to Péguy, Simone Weil, George Orwell, Christopher Lasch, and Jean-Claude Michéa, this tradition kept alive what the mainstream left abandoned: the recognition that you cannot liberate people from a living world you have already destroyed. What these figures mostly fought/fight for is stopping capitalism in its tracks and reversing its damage, not working through capitalism on the road to a “brighter future.”
A parallel recovery has come from outside socialism altogether: John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, writing from within a Christian and communitarian tradition, have reconstructed much of the same ground, recovering associationism and guild socialism against market individualism.
The question was thus never whether to conserve. Every politics conserves something. Liberalism conserves the rights-bearing individual and the market society that promises to protect their choices. Conservatism conserves hierarchy, inheritance, and the authority of institutions that claim to speak for the moral order. A left conservatism attempts to conserve, or more exactly to reinvent, the living conditions of collective life."
(https://post-liberalism.org/p/what-if-postliberalism-were-on-the?)