Varieties of Leftism
I recently finished a book on the French Syndicalist movement; around the same time, I have been reading "Distributist" columns from G.K. Chesterton as well as newspaper columns from the founder of so-called "Guild Socialism," A.J. Penty. All of this reflects a longstanding interest in what I would call the "non-Marxist Left"--or rather more precisely the "non-Marxist-Leninist Left," or even more precisely the history of various labor and anti-capitalist movements in the 19th and early 20th century, especially those that either preceded or avoided the final reduction of Leftism into Fabian-style democratic socialism and Soviet state socialism.
There are a lot of reasons I find these movements interesting: but the main one is that I think that there are many useful things to be learned from them about modernity, modern economics and society, and where to go from here. If the tendency of the Cold War was to reduce political and economic issues into an ideological, militarist, institutional binary, the tendency of the contemporary Internet age is to reduce those same issues to an ever-proliferating array of binary, absolute symbolic conflicts. As Chesterton argued, this is the real danger of competition, war, and conflict in human life: that they tend to make human life far more uniform than its need to be. After all, as Rene Girard pointed out, most conflicts are created precisely because two people are aiming at the same end, seeking the same desirable object. Fundamentally, conflict or competition is always and inevitably destructive of alternatives and diversity and complexity and fundamentally difference itself.
There is hardly a better example of this than Soviet Communism and American Capitalism. Before the Cold War, before the World Wars, the Left or labor and anti-capitalist movement was a vast, complex, feuding array of different fundamental beliefs and tactics: anarchists and syndicalists and distributists and "non-political" unionists and positivists and guild socialists and Fabians arguing against each other and against capitalists alike. Likewise, the European radical Right was a large and feuding array of Catholics and Calvinists and aristocrats and anti-aristocrat populists and monarchists and radical democrats and Nietzscheans and localists and agrarians and anarchists that overlapped significantly with the Left. Thanks to the Cold War, however, practically all these groups were suppressed, not by force, but simply by pressure, subsumed into the single ideological alternatives of "Communism" and "Capitalism."
When the Cold War ended, alas, and that simple binary itself faded into the mist, Western political life was left as a very limited and very shallow debate among a few different interest groups that agreed with each on other on more or less 99% of political and economic questions, at least 50% of which would been absolutely astounding and shocking to any other society in history. And then that consensus itself fell to pieces, and we find ourselves in our current uncertain times.
Here, though, is the fundamental lesson that historical conflicts about the shape and tenor society have to teach us. As Chesterton argued, human social, political, and economic arrangements are first and foremost a matter of collective human intellect and will and effort: works of ingenuity and craft and creativity that we shape to serve certain purposes and embody certain values. And the truth that human history demonstrates beyond all doubt is that a vast number of possible arrangements are possible and have been considered desirable by different groups of people throughout time--and many, many more are possible in theory, and could be enacted in practice given sufficient will and desire. We are not trapped into a tiny range of political or economic alternatives by "natural" "scientific" forces; we simply find ourselves, for a variety of reasons, in one highly particular social or economic arrangement among many; and if we wished, we could change it. If we have made our bed badly, we can make it over again.
All of this is another unnecessarily long intro. What I really wanted to do in this post was to offer a sort of syllabus or personality test of Leftism, presenting the main divisions within the tradition over which anti-capitalists once feuded. As I said earlier, "Leftism" is here a terribly imprecise term: the original Left-Right binary was a division created by and centered on the French Revolution and defined with reference to a few particular French institutions. It has since given way to an American political spectrum that is largely a matter of memes on the Internet. As will become clear, many of the fundamental questions involved in historical "Leftism" are as related if not more to questions on the political "Right," and indeed it is extremely difficult to clearly rule out historical "Right-wing" groups from this discourse. I myself prefer the term "anti-capitalist" and/or "radical" for my own beliefs; I have used "Leftism" here simply because it is a more commonly-used and so straightforward term for most people today.
Fundamentally, all the social and intellectual movements of the historical Left were united by some sort of unhappiness with 19th-20th century Western society, and a desire to alter it "radically," that is, in its roots and foundations. They were also united by a discomfort with "capitalism," or that legal and social order in which absolute private ownership over the means of production--land and factories and machines and workers--is allotted largely or entirely on the basis of the possession and use of liquid capital, in such a manner that society is clearly divided between a tiny minority of "owners" and a large mass of "proletariat," workers who sell their labor in exchange for a wage and who labor with the capital-owner's tools and means of production for the profit of the capital-owner. Historically, the emergence of this social order, in tandem with rapid technological change and industrialization, caused over the 19th and 20th centuries without a doubt the largest series of social and communal disruptions in the history of the human race. As the result of these disruptions, numerous groups were brought to fundamentally question their society, its powers, rulers, and underlying principles.
That being said, this system and society can and could be opposed from any number of angles. And that is what I would like to chronicle here.
In doing so, I have attempted to lay out these divisions deliberately in terms of conflicts between paired positions. It should be noted, however, that these represent not so much binaries as polarities, and do not involve absolute logical contradiction: in most cases, then, there are not simply two binary extremes, but a great deal of potential positions in the middle.
Progressive versus Reactionary
As will quickly become clear, most of the divisions within historical anti-capitalism were to a large extent reactive--that is, based around groups' and individuals' response to the actual existing conditions and trends of the 19th and 20th century.
Based on this, one of, if not the most determining, division among historical anti-capitalists has been the very basic question whether the rapid social and technological changes of the 19th and 20th centuries were most basically good or evil, matters for celebration or matters for rejection.
For many Americans, it will likely seem axiomatic that anti-capitalism is allied with progressivism--but in fact, very many historical Leftist movements, and particularly early Leftist movements, had fundamentally reactionary and anti-modern views. Some of the first English socialists, such as William Morris, were anti-modern reactionaries looking back to the Middle Ages as a primary model for the society of the future; and this trend continued to be represented well into the 20th century by the Guild Socialists and Distributists and other Christian Socialist groups. Many of the French revolutionary Syndicalists, while less positive about the Middle Ages in general, were animated by an overriding hatred for 19th and 20th century "bourgeois" society, which they saw as a state of advanced cultural and moral decadence; this led some of them into a (brief) alliance in the 1910s with those monarchists, associated with L'action Francaise, who hoped to restore the ancien regime in some form. And finally, it should be said, even Marx himself has numerous passages that can be read only as reactionary, praising past historical economic arrangements by comparison with the present and lamenting the moral, cultural, and economic decline caused by capitalism.
On the other side, Fabian Socialists were overwhelmingly progressives, seeing in the disruptions and centralizations of modern capitalism hopeful and necessary means toward the future Socialist society; and their successors have generally followed them in this. The Soviet Union, of course, and its Marxist-Leninist imitators have been progressive in a stridently pro-modern, anti-traditional-society way, condemning the "feudal" past absolutely and deliberately enacting rapid industrialization and destruction of traditional communities in a Russia still largely dominated by peasants, and striving to do so, in theory, everywhere on the planet as well.
Historicist versus Tragic/Heroic
Closely related to the above question, both in practice and in theory, is the question of historical processes. Given that anti-capitalism involves, at minimum, a rejection of the prevailing economic order of the world, it might seem surprising that any anti-capitalists could be found with a positive view of modern social change and progress. The underlying belief, however, associated with Marx but perhaps more accurately deriving from Hegel, Engels, and Lenin, is of an underlying teleological historical process culminating more or less inevitably in a better, if not utopian, society and social order. Thus, the Bolsheviks in Russia justified the rapid, brutal industrialization and capitalization of their country as a necessary hurrying of the historical processes necessary for Socialism to emerge; and the Fabians in England likewise tolerated and even encouraged the progress of British industrialization, economic dispossession, and even Imperialism as necessary steps along the path toward the Democratic Socialist state.
On the other hand, Chesterton's Distributists and other Catholic and Christian anti-capitalists rejected this principle absolutely and so consistently opposed all legislation and policy aimed at encouraging the "progress" of industrial capitalism, or even, at times, merely alleviating its effects and so reinforcing its underlying dynamics rather than fundamentally altering its systems (see here in particular Chesterton's opposition to Fabian legislation such as the National Insurance Act).
In France, meanwhile, the revolutionary French Syndicalists such as Sorel or Monatte sought to develop an alternate anti-historicist interpretation of Marx himself, rejecting what they saw as the foreign intrusion of Hegelian historicism ascribable to Engels. As Georges Sorel himself argued, such historicism was characteristic of a hedonistic bourgeois society whose lives centered on their own pleasure and who had overwhelmingly benefited from the "progress" of the present unjust system, and who thereby naturally assumed that history would inevitably conduce to the perpetual improvement of their own lot, while Christianity and (secular) Syndicalism alike saw history and human life as fundamentally tragic and centered on heroic labor and struggle--for Christians, the saints and martyrs, for Syndicalists, the creative, artistic "producers," the true protagonists of history. Other revolutionary syndicalists argued equally stridently that such belief in inevitable historical progress produced nothing so much as lassitude and loss of confidence in workers, who were brought to lose confidence in themselves, bow to broader liberal society, and so be defeated.
Romantic/Religious versus Scientific/Materialist
Of course, the historicist view of history was itself in essence an adjunct and result of the remarkable success of modern science in altering the world and social conditions, and the rapid, indeed overwhelming pace of scientific progress over the 19th and early 20th centuries. The belief that it was possible to discover a relatively simple, mechanical "process" of history was the direct result of the general scientific belief that in many spheres, from cosmology (where infinite-space, gaseous-equilibrium models predominated) to physics (where billiard-ball models predominated) to biology (where a simplistic natural-selection Darwinism had triumphed), the overwhelming complexity of reality had been successfully proven to be nothing more than the mechanical result of a few deterministic principles. Famously, in presenting Marx's work to the world, Engels described it as the precise scientific equivalent for history of Darwin's Origin of Species for biology. And of course, on the other side, lurking behind the industrial capitalism and rabid militarism of the 19th century was the practical, institutional presence of organized science churning out factory machines and consumer goods and Maxim guns and poison gas alike.
Hence, the Marxist-Leninist Left, taking its cue from Engels' identification of Leftism with science tended to be affiliated, theoretically and practically, with the predominant scientific rationalism of the 19th century. In doing so, they naturally rejected belief in the supernatural or miracles, organized religion, and the vast majority of the "folk" culture of the nations they found themselves in. Upon gaining power, whether in England or Russia or America, they worked to destroy all these cultural features with deliberate force.
On the other side, however, the 19th century saw, in response to the dominant materialism, a new wave of cultural "romanticism," while waves of religious revivalism crested intermittently throughout Europe and America, bringing with them the Oxford Movement and the Great Awakenings and a great deal of poetry and art and music focused on folk traditions and myths and the religious past. Of course, these trends were not entirely or necessarily opposed to modern science or secularism: the revolutionary liberalism of the great 19th century revolutions, for instance, tended to both extreme anti-religious and anti-supernatural views based on scientific-industrialist rationalism and a highly colored, romanticized view of life based around heroic struggle. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that, as time went on, secular romantics and religious believers were more and more united precisely through their shared opposition to the increasing dominance of materialistic rationalism embodied alike in organized science, academic scholarship, and utilitarian capitalist economics.
In short, secular romantics and religious believers frequently reacted with similar horror to industrial capitalism and its results, and thus formed the center of many of the early anti-capitalist groups and movements. Marx himself, again, could be and has been read as, not a scientific rationalist, but a romantic, even a religious author.
All Christian anti-capitalist groups naturally participated to some degree in this trend, including Distributism, Guild Socialism, and the Catholic labor unions inspired by Catholic Social Teaching beginning with Leo XIII. In doing so, they saw themselves, not unreasonably, as far more consistent than their opponents in refusing to make their peace with the dominant rationalism and industrial science that had reduced the working-classes to slavery.
Still, as time went on, romantic or religious Leftists found themselves increasingly divided by a sub-question that might be put as the question of machinery or (as I myself would put it) the question of technology. This question was, put simply, whether, once the materialistic beliefs and economic systems underlying modern science and industry were rejected, the technologies and industrial-scientific machines themselves could or should be used. This was by no means a simple question, or an easily resolvable one.
In rejecting the scientific-technical progressivism and historicism underlying many secular Leftisms, romantics and believers lost the ability to simply or automatically accept technological changes and developments; instead, they had to decide what use to make of these technologies, which to accept, which to use in which way, and which to fundamentally undo and destroy. AJ Penty, the founder of guild socialism, was insistent that the modern economic problem was fundamentally a problem of machinery and the labor specialization and alienation it intrinsically led to--and so insisted on the total rejection of those forms of machinery that required such specialization and alienation. While Chesterton and Belloc were qualified supporters of the use of modern industrial machinery in a lesser role, Vincent McNabb, a prominent Distributist, was equally insistent on a "return to land"--and debates within Distributist groups could be and were bitter over this question.
These anti-technological radicals had their counterparts in the secular romantic Left throughout the 19th century, going back, of course, to the original Luddites. Fundamentally, all Secular anti-progressives and anti-historicists were forced to in some form or fashion come to grip with this challenge. The French revolutionary Syndicalists consequently tended to a fierce internal conflict between an eager desire to increase the activity of producers and a hopeful belief that technological advancement could and would do this, and an absolute horror at actual technical improvements in industry (especially managerial "Taylorism") and their deleterious effect on the working class, reducing them, in the view of leading Syndicalists, from heroic creators to mere demoralized, alienated appendages of machines.
Anarchists, meanwhile, had always been rooted in the creative and artisanal classes, and their rapid and almost total loss of support can be ascribed in large part to technological changes rendering such classes obsolete and the anarchists' accompanying inability to appeal to the newer, more organized factory classes. Even these purist anarchists, however, tended to a similar basic ambiguity in their general rejection of religion and embrace of rationalism combined with hatred for modern organized science and highly romanticized, heroic utopian visions of life.
Revolutionary versus Reformist
Democratic versus Anti-Democratic
Central to the debate between reformists and revolutionaries at practically all periods was the question of how much, if at all, modern liberal-democratic institutions and processes could be trusted, and hence used as means to achieve desirable ends. After all, the promise of the French Revolution and 19th century revolutionary liberalism had been that, once established, basic national and democratic institutions would from that point on simply guarantee justice and peace for all citizens. If you want socialism, you vote for it.
Of course, this belief was radically challenged for anti-capitalists by the obvious reality that the victory of modern democratic institutions had meant in practically every practical instance the victory of industrial capitalism and its further spread. Radicals, then, were faced with a rather fundamental choice between the acceptance and use of these means and their rejection. At the same time, of course, the rejection of this set of institutions need not mean the rejection of some concept of democracy, or rule by the people, as an underlying goal or source of legitimacy.
This choice could likewise be highly gradated. Labor politics in England generally made use both of means such as labor unions and strikes and the sort of participation in democratic politics that ultimately led to the formation of the Labour Party. The Fabian Society naturally embraced modern governmental institutions pervasively, even while emphasizing the more technocratic, centralizing features of those institutions. Chesterton and the Distributists and Guild Socialists, on the other hand, were associated with, not an absolute rejection of modern democratic institutions, but a belief that they were not, in and of themselves, sufficient to achieve radical ends, and eventually to a general dissillusionment with the practical reality of modern liberal democracy, which, Chesterton came to believe, had been fatally and near-totally undermined by the power of international finance, aristocratic oligarchy, plutocracy, secret funds, and secret societies. This meant a theoretical embrace of democratic institutions and a practical near-total rejection of them.
In France, meanwhile, revolutionary Syndicalists were from the beginning theoretically committed to an absolute rejection of modern political institutions, including democratic institutions. In practice, however, they generally started out as relative defenders of the new Republic against its monarchist and Catholic opponents--until the Dreyfus Affair. In this remarkable event, the leading Syndicalists generally embraced the Dreyfusard cause initially, and then reacted with utter horror and fury to what the saw as the rapid and total betrayal of the labour movement by the liberal Dreyfusards and democratic socialists, crystallized in their increasing use of military force against strikers. After this, the leading revolutionary syndicalists committed themselves to a total rejection of modern liberal society and democratic institutions, even as the actual syndicalist movement gradually and inevitably made some measure of peace with the French Republic and, later, the Party system of the Soviet Union, laying the groundwork for the eventual triumph throughout Europe of reformist democratic socialists committed to operating almost totally through the modern liberal state.
The Soviet Union itself, of course, while in a sense far from democratic, paradoxically stood both for the revolutionary clearing-away of Western democratic and liberal institutions in favor of its own "revolutionary" institutions, and an absolute commitment to those institutions, and in particular the mass-democracy-inspired bureaucratic "Party," as the sole allowable means to achieve change throughout the world. Over time, then, the debate over democracy became simply a debate over loyalty to two binary sets of institutions--both democratic ideologically, both bureaucratic in reality, but one "liberal" and the other "collectivist." It was with this debate that the Cold War ended.
Cooperativist/Subsidiarist versus Coercive/Collectivist
Disagreement over how to relate to the modern state was indelibly tied to the question of how to conceive of the concept of the State or government as such. Here the division run deep indeed, and goes back, in some form, to the very earliest stages of anti-capitalist organizing. Many early radicals were inspired by a "liberal" or "libertarian" vision of life emphasizing leisure and the freedom of the individual from constraint--associated, quite naturally, with liberal revolutions against autocratic regimes. However, as modern democratic nationalist regimes were created, it naturally occurred to people that in many ways these regimes were more "militant" and more coercive than ever before, both in the areas of life over which they held sway and the degree of force commonly used against dissenters. The French Republic, which had introduced mass conscription into the world, was rapidly overtaken by Napoleon and his Empire--echoed down the line by Napoleon III and eventually by the great Socialist Dictators of the 20th century.
Here, again, the issue was complex. After all, in typical Marxist-Leninist discourse, the ultimate goal was a libertarian state of freedom and leisure--one, however, which had to be inevitably preceded by a coercive collectivist "Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Many Leftist movements accepted this basic dichotomy in one form or fashion, helped along by the general aversion in modern democratic states toward open or public displays of coercion. Leftists could and did support their nations' efforts at mass conscription and mass industrial warfare in the World Wars--while other Leftists, even in rejecting these "capitalist" wars, continued to embrace the highly collectivist coercive Soviet Union and other Socialist States or would-be States.
On the other hand, from the very beginning, a more "anarchic" strand of anti-capitalism was always present. The "anarchists" of Bakunin and Proudhon were never particularly successful at building a mass movement, but their intellectual influence went far beyond their practical organizing. Their influence was felt in anti-capitalist and radical groups of all sorts, in an emphasis on individual liberty and a heightened suspicion of modern states, with their vast bureaucracies and technical organizations, as such.
Here it is good to emphasize that the core of "anarchism" in this proper historical sense was not, as many modern Americans fondly imagine, a mere rejection of all order and organization whatsoever. Anarchists, in fact, tended overwhelmingly to be institution-builders, since in their view these institutions would at some point have to, not merely pressure the State or transform it, but actually replace it.
This was very much the vision and labor of the French Syndicalist movement, whose early luminaries were mostly former anarchists, and whose goal was precisely to build up a massive web of interconnected cooperative institutions capable of taking over from the French Republic upon its collapse due to a general strike.
The distinction here, then, was between the localized, cooperative organizations characteristic of anarchism or syndicalism, and what was imagined as the inherently tyrannical, violent, militarist force of modern states, embodied most immediately in the use of conscript soldiers to shoot down striking workers in the great strikes of early-20th century France. The concept of cooperation versus coercion, however, has by its nature (as I have recently emphasized) some rather large ambiguities. Cooperativst institutions certainly made rules, applied punishments, even expelled members, and so were coercive in fundamental ways--but tended to reject certain coercive methods involved in modern government, warfare, and industry, as well as certain centralized and bureaucratic structures associated with such coercion. This opposition to the modern state and economy as uniquely or newly coercive was naturally often tied to suspicion of and rejection of modern technology, especially industrial and military technology.
Also central to this debate over coercion was the basic question of centralization versus localism. French syndicalism, like other anarchist movements, insisted on the necessity of small-scale institutions controlled locally, and coordinated on higher levels only by a web of mutual connections, not by a centralized executive. It was this that led prominent revolutionary syndicalists to reject the centralized party structure of Soviet Marxism-Leninism, even as it gradually came to subsume syndicalist structures themselves. Many other radical groups, including the Distributists and other Christian Socialists, also emphasized greater degrees of subsidarity and local control against modern centralized nation-states as a key facet of their programme.
This belief--that there was something uniquely coercive about the essence and methods of the modern nation-state--was embodied in perhaps its strongest form by Dorothy Day and her followers, who were able to accept traditional Catholic teaching on the state and just war while insisting that the modern centralizing capitalist, Imperialist state was no true state at all, and could in no way be cooperated with even in the service of doing good.
Somewhere in-between these cooperativist and State-Socialist polarities are those movements that, while not rejecting the modern state as such, nonetheless tended to view modern State bureaucracy, centralization, and militarism with suspicion, or who at the very least came to ultimately reject the extreme practical centralization and authoritarian-cum-totalitarian view of the State upheld by Soviet State Socialists and their allies. Among these are Chesterton's Distributists (inspired by older liberal-democratic traditions as well as by Catholicism), the Guild Socialists, and of course many European Democratic Socialists also inspired to some degree by liberal or libertarian concepts.
Class-Warfare versus Class-Collaborationist
I have quite deliberately saved some of the most important factors for last. Already alluded to in many of the above debates is the more fundamental question of just who should control institutions, whether those institutions are new revolutionary institutions or the institutions of the modern democratic state.
One of the main objections of the French Syndicalists to participation in democratic institutions was their belief that these institutions were dominated by "parasitic" bourgeoisie, the rich, and "intellectuals"--a belief countered by their absolute insistence that their own institutions, the syndicats, be participated and controlled only by the working classes, the heroic-creative "producers" of society. Meanwhile, the Fabian Socialists were quite proud of the domination of their own institutions by the privileged and educated classes and saw their essential mission as "educating" the workers to their own standards. Somewhat similarly, Chesterton's Distributism had at its core the English middle-classes, buttressed by Chesterton's own proud middle-class origins, even as it tended to strongly emphasize the moral and cultural dignity and capacity of the lower classes and see its mission as their empowerment politically and economically. Anarchism itself was centered, not on the urban proletariat, but on the fading artisanal classes, and largely disappeared with their disappearance. And Soviet Communism proclaimed the "dictatorship of the proletariat" by proletiaritizing as much of their citizenry as possible while giving unchecked power to classless ideological bureaucrats.
In one way or other, at the heart of most organized anti-capitalism over the past two centuries has been the conceptualization of work and the working class, and their enemies. Even very minor differences in how this conflict is imagined lead, in practice, to highly different systems.
Again: both anarchism and early Syndicalism were dominated by an overwhelmingly positive, even heroic view of the worker and the working class. These creative "producers" were the true, morally worthy center of society, the protagonists of the future. All that was needed was for these heroes to recognize their strength, recover their confidence, and step forward to assume the functions wrongfully usurped by the weak, parasitic classes.
On the other hand, many other Leftist movements, perhaps beginning with Fabianism but certainly continuing overwhelmingly into our own day, conceptualized the working class almost entirely in negative terms: deprived, degraded, exploited, fundamentally powerless victims in need of being rescued by the State or other organized effort by the educated, empowered classes of society.
Victimhood, though, can mean rather different things. There is a Christian view of victimhood that can acknowledge fault and degradation while at the same time affirming the dignity of the sufferer and even sanctifying those sufferings and (innocent) victimhood; there is also what may be called a "Girardian" view of victimhood, where the victim is merely a mimetic rival of his oppressor animated by the desire to take revenge and victimize in turn. Both are very evident in our society today.
These views, while they may often be taken as synonyms, are in reality something like opposites; and they have defined these movements from the beginning.
Of course, not all those who view the working classes as essentially good and powerful need necessarily view them as absolutely opposed to all other groups within the State. There has been at times quite substantial alliances between middle and working-classes, united by the shared self-image of both as creative producers and/or exploited victims of the capitalist system, and even between working-classes and employers, united by shared economic interests. Allegedly "classless" states like the Soviet Union have in fact largely operated on a class-collaborationist basis between proletariat, bureaucrats, soldiers, and intellectuals.
These classes themselves can also be reduced to more fundamental polarities, and modified in various ways. Thus Chesterton's Distributists made the fundamental category "the people" against the oligarchy and aristocracy, perceiving this unit as a whole as exploited but also as fundamentally morally better and more worthy than their oppressors, and strong enough to effect revolutionary change on their own. Chesterton's self-conscious goal was to abolish the fundamental category of proletariat, perceived in negative terms as a mark of exploitation, by abolishing wage labor as such--replacing it, however, with small agricultural and artisanal property preserving and furthering the positive qualities and desires of the people and embodying a life still focused on production and creativity. Many other movements have accepted classes as fundamental categories, but nevertheless seen them as in some degree compatible, resulting in corporatist or Guild systems where they are brought together in shared efforts.
Labor versus Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism
The polarity on which I shall end, then, is perhaps the most fundamental one of all. I owe it to J.A. Penty, the founder of Guild Socialism, who in a column from 1922 that I read recently pointed out that this constituted his true difference from many contemporary Socialists: that they were, in one form or fashion, aiming at a Leisure State, a fundamental transformation of human society into one where labor was no longer required to sustain human life and recreation and enjoyment had almost totally replaced it for most people most of the time, while he was aiming for a society where labor was still necessary and fundamental to life. I think he was quite right to see this as a fundamental divide.
After all, implicit in the above disagreement over the status and class of the workers or producers of society is the very simple question of whether labor or production is in and of itself degrading and bad, or only accidentally so. Syndicalists and Distributists and even, it should be said, Soviet Communists alike recognized the current conditions of labor as involving real evils and real (even monstrous) exploitation--but nonetheless saw labor as fundamentally an ennobling and creative activity central to human life and dignity. They thus sought to alter the conditions of labor in such a way that it would become so for most people most of the time--the Distributists through a widespread distribution of private property allowing for free, creative work by people in secure control of their livelihood, Syndicalists through local syndicats led by the most brilliant, creative producers heroically pushing human society forward and distributing the results locally based on need, and the Soviet Communists through better organization of labor and the more equal distribution of its fruits to all.
On the other hand, there is a tradition, which is certainly found in Marx but amplified by many modern movements, that views labor and its necessity as fundamentally evil, or at least something that will or ought to be superseded by the advance of technology. Here, the goal is not to ennoble labor and production and glorify those who participate in it, but to gradually reduce that labor to the barest minimum and ultimately bring an end to it altogether. The modern Internet has coined the beautiful term Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism to describe this vision of a society based on the elimination of production and labor by humans and its total replacement by hedonistic recreation and enjoyment, sexual or otherwise. Such a vision is necessarily, of course, progressive and based around modern science--and also, of course, in practice utterly contemptuous of the working classes, viewing them merely or solely as degraded victims.
Of course, most earlier versions of such a concept were not so extreme. Many utopian socialists have merely emphasized "leisure," and in a somewhat equivocal way. Historically it has been associated primarily not with recreation or hedonistic enjoyment, but with certain forms of intellectual and artistic creativity. When certain early Socialists like Marx or William Morris described their utopia in terms of leisure, they mean precisely "leisured" forms of individual, artistic production--maintaining, in other words, the centrality of production and labor to human life, but merely improving its form by making it freer, more creative, and more beautiful.
Still, even here, a fundamental divide remains between those who see it as possible or desirable that at least the necessities of life, food, water, housing, etc, might ultimately be provided for all purely through technology and automation, freeing man at least from the necessity of labor for those goods, and those who glory in the connection between labor and livelihood.
I have deliberately not invoked any difference here between so-called realist or utopian forms of Leftism or indeed politics in general. In truth, any revolutionary change in society can be dubbed a utopia, and any refusal to engage in any change, no matter small, dubbed realism. The question is not whether society is to be altered, but how fundamentally, and in what ways.
Here, though, is an issue where a more basic, even metaphysical divide has emerged. It is one thing to alter human society and politics and economics, which are, again, a creation of the human will--it is another to hope to alter, through technology, the fundamental nature of the world, and the fundamental nature of human beings. This, I think, though I give it no name, is perhaps the most essential divide in all of modern life; and it separates, frequently, not just group from group, but individual from individual. It is one thing to say that one has discovered how human beings may be more easily or more securely made good and happy, whether it is through creativity or labor or leisure or even pure hedonistic recreation: it is quite another thing to say that you can change, fundamentally, what makes human beings good and happy, and cause them to accept it.
This has been, by design, a fairly neutral examination of a set of differing viewpoints; but I cannot pretend to be neutral on this last question.
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