[French writer Anatole France is drawn wearing a flowery tie]
The law,
in its majestic equality,
forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread
-Anatole France
[French writer Anatole France is drawn wearing a flowery tie]
The law,
in its majestic equality,
forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread
-Anatole France
Agree completely.
I do not believe in separating the two, I dont believe they are separable. Even beyond that, I tend to de-emphasize economics, for better or worse. I dont think that is an imperative for our movements, but a matter of personal style and experience.
However I think in your analysis you are separating capitalism, the economic base, from liberalism, the ideological superstructure. It reads to me you want to discredit the ideology, which is great, but this isnt possible without affecting the economic base. Unions defeat liberal illusions and create the basis for worker ideology by organizing on economic and verifiable material gains, never has a worker organization been successful by condemning liberalism as its primary strategy in and of itself.
The reason elites and alienated workers adhere to liberalism is because it validates lived experiences, or personally benefits an individual. So the real difference between the two kinds of liberals is economic, not ideological. Its kind of like there is two liberalisms, liberalism for capitalists is freedom achieved through private ownership, or more acutely, power through mass exploitation. All liberal values of equality, human rights, progress, etc., are secondary to the private property question, I think you’ll agree. But to the workers, who benefit materially from peace, unity, solidarity, liberalism is the rights and equality stuff. The dual character hides the private property issue from workers, which is how it subjugates us ideologically. But the basis for the ideology is material, not just ideas.
I dont really see the difference between being openly cold toward leftist definitions like communist and socialist; and being vocally anti liberal toward workers. If you go down to the protest or the picket line and ask a union member their political alignment, they might tell you they are liberal, or (in the USA) a democrat. But there are many conservative republicans who will also fight for better work conditions. This shows that worker politics are material, not ideal; and that political difference between workers is local rather than universal. But if you tell that liberal union member that liberalism is like a fucked up evil ideology, they won’t understand it any more than if you say that they should be communist or socialist. I dont see the distinction except as a matter of perspective.
In order to teach worker-liberals a theory of change we have to convince them first that change is possible. And to do that there needs to be democratic organization of the masses, effective campaigning for change, and to win changes. Once people experience this, it strikes at the falsity of liberal ideology, but attacking the ideology itself is too abstract, too philosophical, as an approach all on its own. I think it is just as alienating and esoteric as terms like “communist” or “bourgeoisie”.
The most important pieces imo are theory of change, and the organization to carry that change out, verifiably. Capitalism is essentially an organizing of the ruling class against the workers, and workers organized against the ruling class has a distinct character that is worthy of a name.
However I concede that I often use commie talk when it might not be effective, or directed at the wrong audiences. So I intentionally I find work where people challenge me for it. It can be a pain, but it keeps us honest.
Also I talk to and work with normie workers all the time and not all of your characterizations are supported by my experiences. Different people of different ages, in different places, at different times can all effect how theyll react to certain messaging. Determinations of what workers will and will not accept must come from evidence and democracy; and the way to determine this is by talking with workers, studying reactions, The last person who told me not to use terms like “socialism” also told me people in her neighborhood lived in $700k+ houses. She couldn’t understand that other workers are actually turned off by being too moderate, and want radical change. Both things are true, but this adds complexity to the work. Her observations were grounded in fact, but she wanted to universalize her local conditions, because her experience taught her incorrectly that her experiences were universal. Specificity is essential to concreteness, and concreteness is essential to develop conditions for change.
I think we make an error if we dont consider the left as workers too. Sectarianism is historic and structural; and capitalism creates socialists. The progressive ideals espoused by liberalism find their practical expression in socialism. Like you said, almost all of us grew up in a liberal milieu, and many socialists start out as progressive liberals. Personally I became a socialist once I realized capitalism could never deliver the progressive values of liberalism, which I believed in as strongly then as I do now.
I might be over emphasizing parts of your arguments so that it appears to me that your focus on ideology is slightly too idealist to be practical. So please correct my miscalibrations. But I enjoy this conversation and deeply appreciate the great detail you’ve gone into describing your positions.
That’s not my doing. They have already been separated through ideological means - it’s the reason why working class people in the US (for instance) can be convinced that a political establishment that obviously and overtly only represents oligarchic elite interests will, somehow, also end up representing their interests as long as they “vote harder” (or whatever gimmicky party line they come up with next).
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Liberal narratives bases itself on the lived experience of the working class - or, to be more accurate, liberal narratives bases itself on the lived experience of those elements of the working class whose support it needs to maintain the status quo - not the other way around. Examples are not hard to find - the “bUt wHeRe wIll tHE mOneY cOmE fRoM?!?” (or it’s various variations) gibbering you see liberal economic pundits peddle on tv screens every time somebody proposes building any kind of infrastructure that will benefit the working class is thoroughly based on the mundane, end-of-the-month economic pressures plenty of working class families can identify with. That is why it works so well. In fact, it works so well that it literally becomes self-perpetuating - the working class conflating the economic pressures of working-class economic deprivation with national and even global economics allows the liberal media machine a cornucopia of ways in which to easily justify the machinations of the status quo.
Faced with this kind of enemy, it shouldn’t be that hard for the left to see that leftist ideas of “educating” the working class into radicalism is a stillborn one that is based on romanticised - I would even say magical - thinking… yet it is.
Perhaps you can already tell by now… my background is in propaganda. And the left gets theirs very, VERY wrong.
There’s a very big difference between telling somebody that liberalism is a “fucked up evil ideology,” and simply exposing liberalism as the fundamentally oligarchic ideology it is, always has been and always will be. The former does not explain why Obama promised “Yes We Can!” and then spent his regime-time bailing out corporations with public money while the working class was kicked further into the economic abyss of (so-called) “austerity” - the latter does. With the latter, there simply aren’t too many dots for the average working class person to connect.
Since when? The reactionaries are literally attacking ideologies all the damn time - even including liberalism itself when most of the people propagating these narratives qualify as private-property loving liberals themselves! It certainly doesn’t seem too abstract for them, does it now?
Are you suggesting right-wingers are “too philosophical?”
That’s just a purely operational thing. In my experience, any political conversation involves somebody calling me a socialist or a communist five minutes in - my response is usually just, “And what if I am?” and then I carry on regardless.
Yeah… and it shows. The “kid glove” treatment liberalism gets from the left shows. And the working class notices it as well. Working class people all over the world loved watching Richard Spencer getting punched by an antifascist - they literally swoon over Luigi Mangione. Yet, despite all this, the working class has as little confidence in the left as ever.
Why is that?
So I agree that the left indoctrinating onto left ideas is naive. My major contribution (and fight) lately is that we dont need people to repeat our ideas we need people to think for themselves, critically and scientifically. If people do that, we will become leaders ourselves and the partybwill emerge from the practical work.
Propaganda in a Leninist sense is essential to the party, and I am a partyist, but asking questions, criticizing my own thinking and others, is what made me a leftist. But in this way, I am skeptical of theory first approaches, probably because I’m so critical of myself.
It does show that leftists start out progressive libs, but that is a structural fact, not localized wrongheadedness. The ambient idealism of the left is one of our nastiest, most liberal adjacent habits. You’ll notice I use the word practical a lot. Attacking the ideology itself as an individual is crank shit. The right is able to attack ideology because of the economic base they already control! This is where your theories just dont match up with Gramsci’s formulation of hegemony, which the right understands better than the left.
Counter - propaganda is worthless without a party or org to carry it out, not just critical words but critical action. In order to convince people of ideas, the circumstances in which people got those ideas has to change. Thats happening now with trump and the feckless Dems, but what it is changing into is decidedly not leftist, and prob won’t bring better ideas without strong left organization to win some shit. This is happening in small ways, Mamdani victory, Sanders pres campaign, George Floyd 2020, Palestine encampments, etc., but we are still in the quantitative change phase, we have a lot of work to do and running out of time to do it.
The right isnt just spreading ideas, they are buying up and getting control of every possible way that ideas spread. They own the platforms. And what do they do with them? Their ideas are wildly unpopular yet they are still winning. It isnt because their ideas are food, its because they are changing the world and making it worse. This is extremely confusing to people who lack a materialist analysis and a clear political direction, and the problem is much deeper than just condemning liberals. I’d rather soften liberal vitriol hoping a few of them dont become repulsed by sectarian leftists; rather than become a sectarian in response to workers repeating the last political ideas that made sense to them, especially when many of them not completely terrible when you remove the private property component. Unfortunately, when we do try and remove the private property piece, the question becomes, well than what will replace it, and we won’t know until we build it democratically.
There’s no horse and cart. There is objective reality and subjective reality and the two are intrinsically bound up together. You can use abstractions to suss them out, but that’s all they are. Confusing abstractions for reality is exactly the problem we inherit from enlightenment - liberal philosophy that creates all these dumb political consequences for the left. We say, “oh we need to make a party like the Bolsheviks, look how well that worked!” And then never bother to understand that the reason the Bolshies were effective in ways that the SRs and Menshies weren’t is because the Bolshies actually went and talked to people, held conferences about their findings, made plans based on their findings, took those plans back to the workers and peasants, made changes – and then carried out those plans. The moment they stopped that, and let bureaucrats dictate how the world worked, the revolution didn’t last 5 good years.
Sectarianism is structural, it’s due to having our movements wiped out and having to start from scratch. Trying to blame people for what is in their brain seems to me an underdeveloped sense of how praxis functions as a object/subject relation. Contextualizing liberalism as a set of ideas and not a structural expression of economic power of the ruling class is, imo, wildly wrong headed. People have bad ideas in a bad structure. Fight the bad structure, make something new, dont be a sucker. Arguing against the ideas created by objective reality isnt putting a cart before a horse, it is the difference between the idea of how a horse and cart works, and how it actually works, having the expertise to do a good job of putting them together, and getting where we actually need to go.
And if all this makes me come off as sort of a crank, you wouldn’t be the only one with that opinion. People are contradictory because conditions are contradictory.
Great! So what’s the very first obstacle we can tackle that prevents people from doing just that?
The foundations of the dominant ideology we are drenched in from birth, perhaps?
But never mind that… I think this conversation has reached deadlock. I have pointed out the weakest spot in the enemy’s ideological armour - there is no point in me wasting energy and focus arguing with those who has no intention of trying to exploit it.
Good luck and good bye.
Thanks for helping me sharpen my position against idealism, it will help me in an ongoing debate against others who also wrongly attribute the abstract “changing of ideology” as a viable road to change.
Good luck to you as well.