Left Well Lost?

More clippings from the cutting room floor.

In any sufficiently complex and spatially disseminated functional division of labor such that the contribution of any individual to the civilization on which all its members depend for their survival and flourishing becomes impossible to specify within the terms enabling and hence available to all its contributors themselves, that determination of contribution and standing and reward will depend in part on the work of ideological formulations to the preferential benefit of incumbent elites, just as in any hierarchical society sufficiently democratic for legitimacy of government to depend on the apparent consent of the governed the appearance of consent will be maintained by ideological formations to the preferential benefit of incumbent elites. This means that every hierarchical society of any complexity is permanently susceptible to the deceptive and delusive work of ideology to the benefit of reactionary politics and oligarchy.

I do not agree that such permanent susceptibility is the same thing as ineradicability, and I certainly do not sympathize with cynical (essentially moralizing) accounts which would reduce every charge of ideology simply to an inappropriately grandiose signal of personal disapproval of some truth-claim well warranted to differently situated peers. I regard both of these positions as rationalizations for complacency, often all the worse for being proposed in tonalities of phony radicalism. I will add that the first error -- mistaking permanent susceptibility to ideology as ineradicability of ideology -- is almost justified as an injunction to a permanent vigilance equal to the risk of assimilation to or collaboration with injustice, but that the second error -- mistaking every claim to legitimacy as always only parochial and so declaring illegitimate legitimacy as such -- is never justified (not that this should matter, given that the formulation denigrates justification as such, but of course it always does turn out to matter just the same), especially as a signal of a radicalism the very possibility of which it disdains.

I maintain that the distinction of the academic and activist Left from liberalism has hitherto depended on a distinction of Revolution from reform that has usually been a wholesome effort to learn from and stay true to demands of the permanent susceptibility of complex, hierarchical societies, even notionally democratic ones, to ideological formulations and formations -- an effort that has sometimes, and understandably, made the error of mistaking permanent susceptibility for ineradicability precisely in order to maintain necessary discipline in the face of ubiquitous and insidious forces abetting assimilation to and collaboration with injustice, exploitation, violence, and oligarchy (not to mention the perils of reconciling the righteous demand of the impossible that fuels our idealism and directs our pragmatism with the pragmatic considerations at the left wing of the possible out of which come the reforms through which we actually arrive at the ideal from the real where we are here and now).

To those of the academic and activist Left who still bemoan the loss of the Communist Other at the end of the Cold War as the loss of an actually existing alternative to capitalism in which those who would aspire to a more radical transformational Left than reformist liberalisms enable (despite the inappropriateness of what actually existed in the name of Communism as a site for such imaginative investment), it is unclear to me why a contest over what counts as a properly capitalist order is assumed necessarily to be less radical and transformational and emancipatory than a contest of what passes as capitalism with what passes as communism. In my view, for example, the provision of a basic guaranteed income (among other elements in a strong suite of welfare entitlements including single payer healthcare, lifelong education and training, and access to wholesome affordable housing) would be a necessary precondition for the emergence of any capitalist order for which the moral claims of typical of market fundamentalists that only contractarian orders truly repudiate coercion can have the slightest chance to apply in reality, since in the absence of such guarantees what passes for consensual outcomes are too easily misinformed through conspicuously unequal recourse to reliable information and education, unequal recourse to law, and duressed by the threat of poverty and precarity. But notice the curiosity that it is actually quite difficult to distinguish such a construal of a morally righteous consensually contractarian capitalism from many construals of socialism.

To those who declare reform always only the responce to limited, local, strategic, parochial injustices and concerns while leaving deeper structural injustices and irrationalities intact, awaiting no doubt the more sweeping and totalizing transformations of muscular and audacious radical critique and revolutionary action, it is unclear to me why reform campaigns struggling, again say, to implement the provision of a basic guaranteed income (very likely preceded and enabled by reform campaigns to render taxation more progressive, achieve a more equitable sensible healthcare system, expand public education, and improve other welfare programs) would not eventuate, without revolution, at a transformation of society quite as radical in its democratizing aspirations as any revolutionary vision one would care to propose.

I still see the sense of Michael Harrington's declaration that "the best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but... I want to be on the left wing of the possible." I begin to suspect that I am a reformist more than a revolutionary, a liberal more than a Leftist, a radical democrat more than a progressive one, especially inasmuch as mine is a vision of a democratizing struggle imagined and practiced as an ongoing and interminable expression and experimentation of equity-in-diversity already well underway more than a progressive struggle toward a final and definitive "accomplishment" of equity-in-diversity as an eidos we presumably know well in advance.

While it may well be true that such a reformist, liberal, experimentalist but still radical democracy (this is not, after all, an apologia for the confinement of politics to partisan efforts by any means) does lack any totalizing critique of existing institutions and norms, I must say I think it healthy to regard such totalizing vantages at least with skepticism if not as always only mirages altogether well lost, and also as so alienated from the present world as to risk the solidarity with present peers without which politics will tend to be the more elitist and tyrannical precisely the more radical they are.

I tend to find revolutionaries more congenial than reformers, and liberationists more congenial than liberals, at least as a matter of temperament -- so I am not without qualms in delineating this perspective, and I am more open to dissuasion than you might think. But I must say it is very hard for me to see what this understanding of radicalism loses the democratic left, substantially, but very easy for me to see what the revolutionary and totalizing Left gains instead is more self-indulgent and self-congratulatory than substantial as far as it goes.