On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 3:57 PM Dmytri Kleiner <[email protected]> wrote:
> They are narcissistic propagandists. > Yes, pathological narcissism is a real problem. But since you never ask a genuine question, never look closely at the actual forces in play, and continually center yourself as the source of an absolute truth veiled to everyone else - well, you're doing pretty well in the pathology department, Dmitry. The point is not to find perfectly obedient subjects for your own already perfect ideology. That's a form of identitarianism. The point is to contribute to what's actually happening. Double-baked rhetoric and "us and them" purism reveal one of the main problems with the left's lack of strategy: the inability to challenge liberalism's exceptionally strong capacity to recognize distinct orientations to a changing context, and to more-or-less peacefully integrate them into a political process of argumentation and negotiation. "Liberal" here refers to the Enlightenment idea of individual autonomy within a market society governed by parliamentary democracy. Liberalism has had a lot of terrible results (I've analyzed a few of them), but there are still good reasons why it emerged victorious from the ideological struggles of the twentieth century. The inability to come anywhere near the liberals in terms of political pluralism is the main reason why the left, unfortunately for ourselves and planet Earth, has so far largely lost the historical struggle to shape society's evolution. Today in the US, the term "left" is mostly used by the right, precisely in order to tar both leftists and liberals with the legacy of Dimitry's grand heroes: the Soviet, Chinese and Cuban communists. The right's strategy is to polarize the situation, eliminate all complexity and reduce all political discourse to massive accusations and outraged denial - in short, reduce politics to the friend/enemy distinction of Carl Shmitt. That technique creates the rhetorical smokescreen behind which they organize the complex technical activities of corporate expropriation. When leftists spout outdated ideology, use disruptive or insurrectional tactics, make absolute moral demands and refuse to reckon with anyone's issues but their own, they support this reductivist technique - playing exactly into the hands of their opponents. We need a better strategy. Because the world is politically complex, this cannot simply be an orientation "against capitalism." Instead, we have to deal with a spectrum of forces which includes neoliberal oligarchs, entitled liberals who tacitly support parts of their agenda, entitled conservatives who explicitly support the oligarchical agenda, national populists who recoil from all the damage done by the previously mentioned groups, and oppressed minorities who are definitely against the conservatives, populists and liberals, but not always certain they are part of the left. As Ryan points out, the main progress on the US left in recent years has come from White people embracing Black, Brown and Indigenous leadership. What has been reconfigured in this way is the so-called "progressive" bloc, whose chief issues now are minority rights, workers' rights, consumers' rights (against corporate expropriation) and ecological regulation (especially under the auspices of environmental justice). The progressive bloc, including the Democratic Socialists, now represents some 40% of the "left" electorate. They do have a strategy, whose most integral expression is the Green New Deal. However, they have been decisively weakened by their inability to communicate this strategy - and by the widespread narcissistic refusal to think about anything in any particular detail. White leftists, who made "no demands" during the Occupy sequence, are at their best when they back up Black, Brown or Indigenous people, as the Antifa movements have done to their great credit. It's often a little more difficult to get them to state what they believe, even for themselves, let alone for the entire collectivity. If they're not Bernie supporters or part of the DSA, they're likely to be nihilistic street fighters, confused clowns or paleo-Communist orgmen and women who didn't even notice the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the conversion of China to organized neoliberalism. A political strategy is not just a set of talking points focused on political economy, however important that may be. It also includes an aesthetic, by which I mean an expressive translation of attitudes into forms, and forms back into attitudes (this is the canonical feedback definition of contemporary art). Leftism as a social-scale phenomenon is still dominated by the Sixties aesthetic of the disruptive partisan. This is why so many leftists don't know what to say about the storming of the Capitol - they may be disgusted, but they also think, "that could have (should have) been us." The surprising eruption of weirdly costumed individuals without demands in the middle of a political event has often been inspirational for the affiliated crowd, but its capacity to put new issues on the table has already been spent (to relatively good effect I'd say), and beyond that, it has largely failed to deliver on its claim to catalyze social change. As I said in the original post, the national-populist right has now adopted those disruptive techniques and coupled them to the great anarchist dream of popular insurrection, which makes all that completely obsolete for our purposes. We have many self-declared enemies in an extremely complex and confusing world. But the friend-enemy relation is useless for our purposes: it culminates in armed conflict, and in the US like everywhere else I know, that kind of conflict ends in a massacre for our side, because under current conditions, the right is always going to have more guns, off-duty cops and ex-military snipers. A political strategy involves alliance-building and disciplined negotiation with opponents, as well as absolute resistance to that which is intolerable (basically, racism, sexism, classism, imperialism and ecological destruction). Such a strategy must always be able to justify whatever is done, and to do so convincingly for at least some of those not directly affiliated with the actions. In order to achieve such things, the strategy also has to be widely sharable, both discursively and also aesthetically. We don't have such a strategy, and the nostalgic memory of earlier failures to develop one is definitely standing in the way of further progress. A lot is happening, many new things are being developed, and the ticking clock of climate change is helping everyone to realize that this decade, and maybe even the upcoming days and months, offer the crucial last chance to develop one. It has to be far more politically sophisticated and far more integrative than leftist strategies of the recent past. Because if we can't convince well over 50% of society to make a change of course, then it's game over. There's no reason to be pessimistic or cynical. Right now there's a tremendous chance to achieve something - because the friend-enemy relation leads ultimately to a coup. What's more, in terms of aesthetics, the Capitol rioters just showed everyone what not to do. best, Brian
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