Marxist Critiques of the Contemporary Left
* Book: The Conformist Rebellion: Marxist Critiques of the Contemporary Left. By Elena Louisa Lange and Joshua Pickett-Depaolis,. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022
"Instead of criticising the impersonal rule of capitalism, today's left focuses on consternation. With the turn from Marx to identity politics, it can no longer understand capitalism - nor contribute to its overcoming."
Description
"With the rise of myriad forms of identity politics which corresponds to a new “Trinity Formula” of leftist analysis of capitalism (class, race, and gender), major currents in the contemporary radical left in the past decades have shifted their aim. This book addresses the ideological, theoretical, and practical dilemmas of the contemporary academic and activist left from a Marxist standpoint.
Covering contemporary developments in Left thought and ideology and putting them into social and historical context, the chapters provide a theoretical confrontation with the myriad ways it has tended to accommodate itself to neoliberal ideology, rather than fundamentally opposing it.
The contrast between the Marxian emancipatory project and what the progressive left has made of it has never been more glaring than now, a time in which capital no longer seems to confront a political barrier. It is this predicament that The Conformist Rebellion evaluates, for a renewed approach to emancipation from capital."
Discussion
By Elena Louisa Lange and Joshua Pickett-Depaolis 08.04.2022:
(Translated from the German by DeepL)
"What does social critique as critique of totality mean today? How can the self-preservation of capitalism and the complex political apparatuses of rule that serve it be explained? And what exactly should be the object of critique in a period of "post-politics" or even "anti-politics", when the established neoliberal order is moving into a new period of managed stagnation? With the emergence of a now ubiquitous "progressive" social consciousness that critically addresses nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, poverty in the Global South, climate change and the lax handling of the Covid 19 pandemic, is social critique really exhausted? That capitalism is not healthy, beneficial or good seems to have become consensus across a broad spectrum of the educated middle class, whereas previously this insight was limited to the "lived experience" of retail workers, day labourers in agriculture, Amazon Mechanical Turk human intelligence taskers and anyone else who can barely live off the "fruits" of their labour.
The great concern of social critique in the Marxist tradition has always been its relation to the political left. This implies a concern with the repeated inclusion of the labour movement as a stabilising element within bourgeois society. Today, however, with the temporary defeat of the labour movement, bourgeois society has been obscured as a traditional object of critique for the left: by the overwhelming dominance of a left that is no longer based on workers' struggles but on middle-class paternalism. There is a rise of managerial elites, pundits playing their part in social engineering, and the death of politics itself - and with it the death of the politician, who has been replaced by social media pundits courting likes and retweets, whose popularity ratings reflect the programmatic void. The left not only accepts this self-abolition of politics and thus of social emancipation, but actively contributes to it. It does this by paying only lip service to, but not consciously naming, the core problem of capitalist society: class. Thus, it does its best to disguise this fundamental social relationship through an almost unmanageable set of increasingly narrow, cross-class interest groups, expressed in convoluted acronyms, catchy abbreviations or neologisms, based on a subjective consciousness of oppression.
Since "the left" - or what claims that title in the absence of an independent workers' movement - is no longer the political opponent of the social forces that reproduce and promote "capitalist realism" and the neoliberal management that depends on it, it is often its main accomplice. And sometimes even its beneficiary. It is necessary to confront the left in a long overdue critical and theoretical debate with the myriad ways in which it adapts to neoliberal ideology and sometimes even acts as its main producer instead of fundamentally opposing it. The increasing pre-emptive resistance to the independent articulation of workers' interests and the de facto abolition of class struggle constitutes the most serious and devastating predicament of our time.
The left has abandoned the project of abolishing capitalist relations of production. It has thus abandoned the abolition of the concrete form of specifically capitalist domination, namely exploitation, and replaced it with moral concerns about sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and so on as forms of discrimination or oppression, but within the capitalist order. This shift in the discursive reality of the left from abolishing wage labour and thus capitalism to abolishing discrimination within capitalism - while maintaining capitalist relations of production, that is, the relationship between capital and labour - is not only not radical, but also overshadowed by accommodation to the hegemonic ideology of capital. While the neoliberal order seems to crumble and yet persists - "everything prolongs its existence by denying that it exists", as G. K. Chesterton put it - it is unsurprising that the educated class most strongly subscribes to capital's utopia of a technocracy without political antagonism. The professional middle-class cadres of the liberal centre-left have become the "last standard bearers of the neoliberal package", as Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe point out in their book The End of the End of History.
The current "rebellion" of the left is taking place in the context of managed stagnation, increasing mass immiseration and the continued atomisation of the working class following the crisis of capitalist utilisation in the "financial crash" of 2008. We see this not as a rebellion against the liberal status quo, which both produces and disguises the dubious victory of capital, but as a conformist rebellion - a rebellion of the middle classes, who act as shock troops of capitalist domination over labour. However, as soon as critics point out the entanglement of this progressivism with bourgeois goals, moral condemnation and silence is encouraged, and the critics' motivation is portrayed as a direct expression of "bigotry" or "fascism". Accordingly, these movements often protect themselves from criticism by invoking a permanent state of emergency, be it the ubiquitous "fascist creep" or an equally alarming "climate crisis", but certainly not the impoverishment of the global workforce based on specific class interests. Is there a development in intellectual history that leads to the toothless insurgency that is the left today?
Emergence of identity politics
One of the most important political and cultural shifts of recent decades has been the emergence of new and diverse forms of identity politics. They correspond to a new "trinity formula" in the left's analysis of capitalism - "race", class and gender. Following this schema, the main currents of the contemporary left have moved away from problematising capital as a relation. Not only do most left theorists and activists conform to the neoliberal discursive structures of "gender, queer and race theory", of which "intersectional theory" remains the best-selling. They also reduce the analytical categories of class and the dynamics of capitalist accumulation to a sub-category of personal forms of domination.
We believe that this shift has a historical and theoretical antecedent in the New Left and the international student movement of the 1960s. Their idiosyncratic reading of Marx's critical economic work, triggered by an increasing inability to adequately address the problem of impersonal domination constituting capital as a relation, led to a misrecognition of the law of value as transhistorical and neglected the importance of its monetary dimension. A large part of the left was therefore unable to overcome the naturalisms or, in Marx's language, the fetishisms of bourgeois political economy and adequately grasp the fundamental dynamics of capitalist domination, the reproduction of the wage relation and thus the global articulation of impersonal capitalist domination. The radicals increasingly focused on more "concrete" and "personal" forms of power, thus obscuring the constitutive dynamics of modern society by falling back on a pre-Marxist critique of "injustice". Viewing the latter as the main driver of capitalist relations allowed for a convenient displacement of the question of impersonal power - an even more troubling issue. The result was a glaring inability to organise an adequate response to the challenge of capital as a social relation, a failure that continues to have an impact today.
The positivist approach of today's left to capitalist relations of production has largely capitulated to an understanding of capital that conceives of it not as a totality but as a collection of "individual" relations of oppression that can be treated as "parts of a whole that are mutually dependent" and in which each social relation is considered equally significant. This is evident in the regressive tendency towards identity, that is, cultural, ethnic or "gender" communalisation. Their fetishisation not only cancels out Marx's critique of capitalism as a critique of class society, but has also given us a fantastic new repertoire of ever new forms of horizontal oppression. This is evident in terms like "microaggression", the call for managed "diversity" and a whole range of terms that respond to certain cultural sensitivities and serve the neoliberal need to atomise people based on their real or imagined identity.
The moralistic and epistemological logic of the left is based on the alleged ubiquity of oppression, thus obscuring the particular insight of Marx's critique: the problem of unequal exchange between capital and labour based on the formal validity of equivalent exchange. It is wage labour that constitutes the historically specific essence of capitalist exploitation. Exploitation through wage labour is the "conditio sine qua non" of general and universal social mediation under the rule of value. To see "oppression" as central to contemporary social challenges contributes to its mystification.
Oppression and exploitation
There is an important terminological and thus factual omission in contemporary left theorising: the distinction between oppression and exploitation. Its difference, as crucial as it is for theorising about structures of domination, is almost universally disregarded or denied. While in feudal societies rents of labour, food and money rely on direct personal oppression to consolidate an "exploitative" practice, exploitation in its full sense requires the wage form. The economic peculiarity is that the wage appears as paid labour, that is, as something that is the monetary equivalent for the whole working day - and not just for its "necessary" part. So what appears as an equal exchange - in line with "freedom" and "equality" as signifiers of liberal bourgeois society - is in fact an unequal exchange. The whole appeal of bourgeois society is that inequality appears as equality, unfreedom as freedom - as "equal participation in the market".
Oppression, on the other hand, is less specific. It requires the existence of a personal oppressor (or several) and the oppressed, whether economically or otherwise defined. For example, since slaves do not receive wages for their labour, they are victims of oppression but not of exploitation. Nothing more is "taken away" from them than is obvious to oppressors and oppressed: in most cases, some would say, their humanity. But it is precisely because slaves are stripped of their humanity that they are not exploited, because they cannot enter into a "free and equal contract" with their employer - they are not even treated as if they were equal. In pre-capitalist class societies, relations of personal domination and oppression were inseparable from the specific forms of extraction of surplus value from the immediate producers that determined the dynamics of those societies. In capitalism, by contrast, oppression may politically facilitate the maximum exploitation of surplus, but the relation itself is determined by formal freedom and equality. The critique of oppression and the demand for equality is not a Marxist critique of bourgeois society, but a liberal or Jacobin aspiration for its full realisation.
Today's left shifts its "sphere of intervention" away from exploitation to individually and morally motivated forms of critique of oppression, thereby rejecting Marxian analysis. Thus it internalises a method that neoliberalism itself has propagated to undermine workers' resistance worldwide. The contrast between Marx's emancipation project and its caricature in the progressive left today has never been more stark, at a time when capital no longer seems to face a political barrier. In left identity politics and intersectionality theory, the mystification of the capital relation is complete.
Contradictions of bourgeois emancipation
Although the postmodern identitarian iteration of the trinity formula is the most obvious and pervasive manifestation of the left's conformist rebellion, the phenomenon itself has deeper roots. The precondition for the almost universal acceptance of the "trinity formula" is an intellectual culture of empiricism, positivism and even vitalist irrationality that prides itself on mistaking appearances for essentials. This intellectual culture forms the basis not only for the technocratic jargon of the left-liberal elite, but also for the "common sense" to which its populist nemesis appeals.
Criticising the historically specific form of social totality and illuminating its irreducible but unfulfilled emancipatory potential has become the domain of fringe sects and isolated critics. The monetary form of social mediation appears as fundamentally equivalent to the socialisation of labour itself, and so the disaffected are left with two options: Either to demand that the society of universal exchange correspond to their own mystical self-understanding and to hail the accelerated or already accomplished decomposition of archaic forms of oppression as the telos of freedom itself - or to lament the socialisation of labour as the loss of primitive immediacy. Marx already identified this sterile alternative as that between liberalism and romanticism. In the absence of a critique of capitalism as a totality that sees the universality of the exchange relation as the necessary basis of a universal community that is qualitatively different from the former, intellectual engagement remains helplessly suspended between these complementary and mutually reinforcing poles.
It is this dynamic that constitutes the constitutive internal contradiction of conformist rebellion in its broadest sense. The neoliberal left, with its striving for a borderless world of atomised individuals who find freedom without security in limitless impermanence, tends towards the first variant. Their "post-liberal" conservative and reactionary critics, meanwhile, seek refuge from the ravages of the global market in the comforting arms of the second variant. At the extreme fringes of contemporary thought are those who recoil in horror from the social totality constituted by exchange value: they indulge in nightmarish fantasies of a rupture in the socialisation of labour in general and a return to primitive barbarism.
Whereas at the beginnings of modern bourgeois society Hegel had still consistently asserted that reality was rational, in the period of its decline the intellectuals celebrate or denounce its supernatural appearance. In both cases, physical constants are equated with historically changing social forms and an understanding of the overall dynamics of the social whole is rejected in favour of an empirical grasp of "facts". These facts, however, are more akin to the hodgepodge of events gathered by medieval chroniclers than to a systematic understanding of the logic of process - a logic that would be stigmatised as "dogmatic" or "mystical" from the standpoint of the empiricist approach that prevails today. The postmodern trinity formula is only one of many symptoms of a comprehensive regression in the ability to understand the historical process.
Fetish of democracy
For the adherents of the trinity formula, from slick technocratic politicians to the nihilistic connoisseurs of riot tourism, all social evil is primarily due to sexism, racism, fascism, patriarchy, colonialism, in short, anything that is not part of the normal operation of the bourgeois democratic regime of abstract equality. In their effort to evade the real contradictions of the present, they blank out the incredible social progress of recent times. Unlike our ancestors a century ago, we now live in a world where national self-determination and equality before the law are global norms. The long arc of national liberation struggles from Indochina to Zimbabwe played a crucial role in this unprecedented historical progress, which had its basis in the global spread of capitalist relations of production.
Today we are dealing with the results of a century of struggles against colonialism and racial discrimination. And what are these? Unchecked capitalism and the most ruthless exploitation and oppression of the working class. This would not have surprised Marx or Lenin, who enthusiastically supported democracy and national liberation precisely because they provided the framework for the fullest possible development of capitalist exploitation and thus the possibility of its overthrow. For today's left, however, which has long forgotten the communist critique of universal democracy as the political expression of the universalisation of the commodity form, such an outcome is incomprehensible. As a result, we find ourselves in a topsy-turvy world where a nominally Marxist left stigmatises the critique of democracy as "reactionary". At the same time, the real movement of history has transformed democracy itself from the preeminent banner of struggle against absolutism and colonialism into the main bulwark of reaction. Whereas yesterday democracy and self-determination were indispensable battering rams against the divine right of kings and the white man's burden, today they are the eternal battle cry of a new absolutism that is taking hold worldwide. This is the impersonal absolutism of capital, which liberates the citizen as an individual by enslaving him insofar as he belongs to a class.
In our epoch, the most barbaric acts of exploitation, from the disintegration of Yugoslavia to the invasion of Iraq, are always justified with reference to democracy and self-determination. They form the indispensable legal-ideological packaging for the most sophisticated and exploitative forms of labour exploitation. The long twilight of capitalist stagnation is a morbid celebration of democracy, freedom and human rights. Those who are still faithful to reason and the Enlightenment need democratic freedom like "light and air", as Kautsky said, precisely in order to freely criticise the democratic order itself."
(https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1162887.marxismus-die-konformistische-rebellion.html)