Varieties of Leftism

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.

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 1/9/22

"At the supreme moment of the crisis, the very instant when reciprocal violence is abruptly transformed into unanimous violence, the two faces of violence seem to be juxtaposed; the extremes meet. The surrogate victim serves as catalyst in this metamorphosis. And in performing this function he seems to combine in his person the most pernicious and most beneficial aspect of violence. He becomes the incarnation, as it were, of a game men feign to ignore, one whose basic rules are indeed unknown to them: the game of their own violence.

It is not enough to say that the surrogate victim 'symbolizes' the change from reciprocal violence and destruction to unanimous accord and construction; after all, the victim is directly responsible for this change and is an integral part of the process. From the purely religious point of view, the surrogate victim--or, more simply, the final victim--inevitably appears as a being who submits to violence without provoking a reprisal; a supernatural being who sows violence to reap peace; a mysterious savior who visits affliction on mankind in order subsequently to restore it to good health.

To our modern way of thinking a hero cannot be 'good' without ceasing to be 'evil,' and vice versa. Religious empiricism sees matters in a different light; in a sense, it confines itself to recording events as it sees them. Oedipus is initially an evil force and subsequently a beneficial one. It is not a question of 'exonerating' him, because the question of blaming him, in the modern moralistic sense of the term, never arises.

[...]

The beneficial Oedipus at Colonus supersedes the earlier, evil Oedipus, but he does not negate him. How could he negate him, since it was the expulsion of a guilty Oedipus that prompted the departure of violence? The peaceful outcome of his expulsion confirms the justice of the sentence passed on him, his unanimous conviction for patricide and incest.

If Oedipus is indeed the savior of the community, it is because he is a patricidal and incestuous son."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 12/22/21

"The mechanism of reciprocal violence can be described as a vicious circle. Once a community enters the circle, it is unable to extricate itself. We can define this circle in terms of vengeance and reprisals, and we can offer diverse psychological descriptions of these reactions.

As long as a working capital of accumulated hatred and suspicion exists at the center of the community, it will continue to increase no matter what men do. Each person prepares himself for the probable aggression of his neighbors and interprets his neighbor's preparations as confirmation of the latter's aggressiveness. In more general terms, the mimetic character of violence is so intense that once violence is installed in a community, it cannot burn itself out.

To escape from the circle it is necessary to remove from the scene all those forms of violence that tend to become self-propagating and to spawn new, imitative forms.

When a community succeeds in convincing itself that one alone of its number is responsible for the violent mimesis besetting it; when it is able to view this member as the single 'polluted' enemy who is contaminating the rest; and when the citizens are truly unanimous in this conviction--then the belief becomes a reality, for there will no longer exist elsewhere in the community a form of violence to be followed or opposed, which is to say, imitated and propagated.

In destroying the surrogate victim, men believe that they are ridding themselves of some present ill. And indeed they are, for they are effectively doing away with those forms of violence that beguile the imagination and provoke emulation."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 11/11/21

"Oh, dear. What is this...some kind of sing-off?"

-Mary Worth

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 11/10/21

"The reader will have recognized in this tale a number of familiar themes. All the people in the myth either disfigure others, demand that others disfigure themselves, try in vain to disfigure others, or actually disfigure themselves--all of which amounts ultimately to the same thing. One cannot exert violence without submitting to it: that is the law of reciprocity.

[...]

In the relationship between the two cousins the woman initially has the upper hand. She incarnates beauty, the man ugliness; she is free of desire, while he is caught in its thrall. The relationship is then reversed. Differences cancel each other out; a symmetry is constantly generated, invisible in each synchronic moment taken separately but visible in the accumulation of successive moments.

This is what constitutes the non-difference of the sacrificial crisis, a truth forever inaccessible to the two partners who live out the relationship in the form of alternating differences. The symmetry of the overall picture is reflected in the two sides of the face, each scarred in turn. The same details are reiterated throughout the story (until the conclusion), but never simultaneously.

Between the two cousins and Chief Pestilence's tribesmen there is the same relationship as that between the protagonists of Oedipus the King and the Theban plague victims. The only way to avoid contagion is to turn a deaf ear to the appeals of the enemy brothers.

On the level of the tribesmen--that is, the collectivity--the myth speaks objectively. It does what we ourselves did in our opening chapters: it 'shortcircuits' the alternating differences. It does so with good reason, for this difference only ends in similarity. The reciprocal mutation takes the direct form of a loss of differences, a 'becoming the same' at the hands of those whom violence has already made identical. When we note that this process consists of turning men into doubles as well as into monsters, it is clear that we are dealing here with a sacrificial crisis.

Mutilation symbolizes the working of the crisis in dramatic fashion. Clearly, it must be viewed both as the creation of fearfully deformed beings and as the elimination of all distinguishing characteristics, all the salient features of these beings. The process imposes uniformity and eliminates differences, but it never succeeds in establishing harmony.

In the image of monstrous mutilation the procedures of reciprocal violence are expressed in such a powerfully condensed form that they appear bizarre, indecipherable, and 'mythic.'"

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 10/23/21

"Contemporary thought is in chaos, as it must be when progress is real. Where it still survives, it displays pathological symptoms. Thought, in fact, is caught up in a circle, the very circle drawn for us by Euripidean tragedy. In striving to escape from the circle, thought only enters more deeply into it, and as the radius of the circle shrinks, thought moves ever faster, spinning itself into an obsession.

[...]

Nothing now exists to interfere with a full revelation of violence--not even violence itself, which men and its own extraordinary growth have combined to deprive of that freedom of moment that formerly assured the efficiency of the generative mechanism and the repression of the truth. The trap that the Western Oedipus has set for himself will snap closed at the precise moment when the quest is finished, for trap and quest, here again, are one and the same thing.

Today the reign of violence is made manifest. It assumes the awesome and horrific form of technological weaponry. These weapons, as the 'experts' blandly inform us, are what is keeping the whole world more or less in line. The idea of 'limitless' violence, long scorned by sophisticated Westerners, suddenly looms up before us. Absolute vengeance, formerly the prerogative of the gods, now returns, precisely weighed and calibrated, on the wings of science. And it is this force, we are told, that prevents the first planetary society, the society that already encompasses or will encompass the whole of humanity, from destroying itself.

It seems increasingly clear that the pressure of violence or the insistence of truth (for whom man acts as a kind of torchbearer) has forced modern man to come face to face with this same violence or truth. For the first time he is confronted with a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 09/13/21

 

"If the history of modern society is marked by the dissolution of differences, that clearly has something to do with the sacrificial crisis to which we have repeatedly referred. Indeed, the phrase 'modern world' seems almost like a synonym for 'sacrificial crisis.' It should be noted, however, that the modern world manages to retain its balance, precarious though it may be; and the methods it employs to do so, though extreme, are not so extreme as to destroy the fabric of society. [...] The wearing away of differences proceeds at a slow but steady pace, and the results are absorbed more or less gracefully by a community that is slowly but steadily coming to encompass the entire globe.

[...]

We can witness here the same process of disintegration that takes place in primitive societies during the sacrificial crisis, but in this case the process is gradual, kept more or less in rein, with no catastrophic outbursts of violence and no resolution of any kind taking place. The astonishing flexibility of the 'modern,' along with its extraordinary functionalism, is here on view. Equally visible are the ever-increasing tensions that beset modern times."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 09/04/21

 A new series at The Adventures of Captain Peabody:

"The rhythm of the action is faster and more abrupt; it is reflected in the tragic dialogue or stichomythia, that is, in the exchange of insults and accusations that corresponds to the exchange of blows between warriors locked in single combat.

[...]

Whether the violence is physical or verbal, an interval of time passes between each blow. And each blow is delivered in the hope that it will bring the duel or dialogue to an end, constitute the coup de grace or final word.

The recipient of the blow is thrown momentarily off balance and needs time to pull himself together, to prepare a suitable reply. During this interval his adversary may well believe that the decisive blow has indeed been struck. Victory--or rather, the act of violence that permits no response--thus oscillates between the combatants, without either managing to lay final claim to it.

Only an act of collective expulsion can bring this oscillation to a halt and cast violence outside the community."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred