While left ideals are excellent, and left theory overall is pretty good…

 

Yes, while left ideals are excellent, and left theory overall is pretty good, left practice leaves much, very much, to be desired.  Our left political practice is not good enough for our left movement, to put it bluntly.  We of the left lack not only political understanding and sophistication, but our tactical and strategic acumen is woefully inadequate.  As a result, all we can appeal to is our ideals, which we ofttimes simply can’t put into practice, make realizable.  That is why, while the left ofttimes punches above its weight (to borrow a phrase from fellow critical leftist Barry Finger, my closest political comrade), we leftists normally remain a minority, and an often beleaguered and marginalized minority at that.  While we incessantly talk of galvanizing the masses, typically we don’t galvanize them; they ignore us, or express hostility to us.  And that is our great tragedy as leftists.  Try as we may to be effective, ofttimes we fail at that.

This abstractly expressed argument above was made concrete for me recently, as I read a book about how Jeremy Corbyn became British Labour Party head in 2015, staved off a challenge to is leadership in 2016 (where the book ended), only to go down to ignominious defeat in the British elections of 2019, where Labour was trounced, suffering its greatest defeat since 1935.  Corbyn, who in 2015 was a little-known left backbencher Labour MP (Member of Parliament) from a safe district near London with no previous leadership experienced, galvanized many Labour Party members, it is true; he was especially strong among the young (under 39) and with women, but garnered only a plurality among trade unionist Labour members, had the open hostility of many fellow Labour MPs and the Labour bureaucracy, and his stunning win in 2015, coupled with his stunning reduction to ignominy in 2019, proved decisively that it takes more than a surprise insurgent candidacy to transform a party hierarchy that is strongly in place.  He came out of the antiwar and Palestinian movements, and many of his political views can be described as naïve at best.  Personally a nice, if somewhat colorless, person, he was drafted reluctantly as the left Labour leadership candidate, and while probably not anti-Semitic himself, had a real blind spot to left anti-Semitism, which rendered him open to attack on that front; also, his campaigning in support remaining in the EU, both in 2016 and in 2019, was tepid at best also.  He also had a campaign team that was enthusiastic and earnest, but inexperienced.  His seeming strengths overshadowed his glaring weaknesses.

There were similarities, of course, between Corbyn’s insurgency and the insurgent Democratic Presidential campaign of 2016 by Bernie Sanders, which also started in 2015.  But there were important differences.  For one thing, Sanders was a much more adept and eloquent politician than Corbyn, who, coming from a safe Labour seat of little importance for decades, where he was just another backbencher, had never been tested as a leader.  Also, Sanders was much more discriminating in who he publicly allied with and supported than was Corbyn, whose past uncritical and campist solidarities came back to haunt him not only throughout his campaign for Labour leadership, but also his time serving in office.  (Chief among these was his seeming support for “left” antisemitism, to which he was notably blind.)  Further, although British English is notably drier and more formal than American English, Corbyn’s spoken English in speeches (of which this writer has only seen snippets in print; but revealing snippets) was far more colorless and lackluster than was Sanders’s, who could be notably aggressive and forceful in making points—which he did with cogency and alacrity!  In short, Sanders was much more a natural-born leader than was Corbyn; and he had demonstrated that successfully not only while in legislative (and executive—he began his political career as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont) office, but during his campaign for the Presidential nomination.  Notably in this regard was the way Sanders responded on Sunday-morning TV to journalist George Stephanopoulos’s redbaiting objection that calling himself a “democratic socialist” would only hurt him, Sanders snapped back, “What’s wrong with that?” and proceeded to briefly but effectively explain what democratic socialism was. 

Both Corbyn and Sanders galvanized youth support for their candidacies, and turned out the youth vote.  Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership by strong support among new Labour members (62%), women (63%), those 25-39 (67%) and newly affiliated trade unionists (57.6%), but among overall Labour members who voted, only won a plurality (49.6%), not an absolute majority.  (Data taken from Alex Nunn, The Candidate [New York and London: OR Books, 2016], the book I read referred to above, pp. 301-302.)  Bernie Sanders, though arguably his base of support was larger and more diversified, was also only a minority candidate—he won 47% of the Democratic primary votes in 2016, and before he aborted his Presidential campaign in 2020, 40% of the vote.  Which indicates that, in both cases, while support for the left is strong, it does not constitute an absolute majority.  In forming his shadow cabinet after winning, Jeremy Corbyn reached out to his opponents and non-supporters in Parliament, only to have them turn against him in the summer of 2016 (ironically, among his most vocal opponents was Hilary Benn, a right-wing Labourite, and son of noted left-wing Labour leader Tony Benn!); while Corbyn won that battle, and under his leadership in the elections of 2017, led Labour to an admirable showing (though not enough to form a government), Labour with him at the helm was massacred in the election of 2019, ousting him not only from power, but making him very vulnerable to his Labour enemies.  (2019 was Labour’s worst showing since 1935, as mentioned above.)  Truth be told, Corbyn had important baggage he carried, and it was very noticeable in 2019:  although possibly (no one is really sure) not personally an antisemite, he had a serious antisemitism problem due to his uncritical pro-Third Worldism, notably in support of the Palestinians against Israel, no matter what; he was also a tepid supporter of Britain remaining in the European Union, and his call for a second Brexit referendum, after three years of Brexit, Brexit, Brexit! turned many past Labour voters against him.  As for the ambitions Labour Party manifesto of 2019, exit polls indicated that a large number of voters thought it unrealistic, and doubted it Labour could fulfill it.  This in sharp contrast to Conservative Party Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cry on long-regurgitated and talked-about Brexit, “Get it done!” 

There was also a clear class divide between the young who supported the Labour left, and the older, more socially conservative and traditionalist, working class and trade unionists who had formerly voted Labour—just as there is such a divide here in the U.S., although the left doesn’t want to admit it, or even talk about it.  The young are often college-educated, in contrast to the older, and come from backgrounds of privilege that enable them to go to college.  They are often better employed than older workers, and despite the rise of the precariat among the young, have better prospects for the future.  This is especially noticeable in the U.S. in the death rate for white males 55 and older, many of whom have lost their once-secure blue-collar and ordinary white-collar jobs—and now die prematurely of opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide, while other demographic groups see their lifespans increase.  Today’s left, both in Europe and in the U.S., is focused on social issues rather than economic ones because, truth be told, youth are more beneficiaries of neoliberalism than have been older workers.  Deindustrialization and globalism have brought layoffs and job disappearance to the traditional working class, or else severe drops in income and status as workers are forced to trade higher-income employment (often in manufacturing) for lower-income employment (often in services).  While youth doesn’t have it that great anymore either, they have employment options in NGOs and in professional employment lacking for the non-college educated.  For the youth, economic precarity is not a compelling issue, despite neoliberalism making it more prevalent.  Hence the turn of youth to social issues away from economic ones, and of course, the rise of neoliberal, pro-capitalist modes of supposedly radical “isms” such as feminism and anti-racism.  But as many a worker will tell you, in the end, there’s no difference, except perhaps stylistically, between a woman boss and a man boss, a boss of color and a boss who’s white!  As The Who sang tellingly, “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.”  Bernie Sanders grasped that.  I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn ever did.  Among other left leaders in the U.S. besides Bernie, only AOC seems to grasp what is really going on—and she often gets accused of “selling out” by certain persons on the U.S. left!

The Sanders, Corbyn, struggles for leadership encapsulate many of the failings of the contemporary left.  We are long past the golden days of Marxism and Marxist leaders of the first part of the 20^th Century such as Trotsky, Max Shachtman, Rosa Luxemburg, her nemesis Eduard Bernstein, Gramsci, even Lenin and Kautsky, not to mention Marx and Engels themselves, who lived and died entirely within the 19^th Century; and we are sorely missing later leaders such as Michael Harrington.  In my opinion, our current left “leadership,” as represented by such figures as Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad, and Medea Benjamin, are really not suitable leaders at all; hence our left descent into mediocrity, obsessive focus on cultural and social issues, including identity politics to the detriment of real class analysis and focus on economics and economic reality.  Today’s left, as it has been since the 1960s, is overwhelmingly college-educated, but not any smarter because of it.  We of the left are not terribly good at talking to average workers; we are far “better” talking (or rather, lecturing, hectoring) at them!  That is especially noticeable in the rise of “cancel culture,” the left equivalent of irredeemable Original Sin.  If we of today’s left were truly honest, we would read to everyone we talk to or about this version of their Miranda Rights:  “Not only will anything and everything you ever said or wrote be held against you, it will mark you forever, even at the expense of losing your reputation and employment.”  While leftists may protest, “But we have good intentions!” such intentions are never enough; politics, especially left politics, is not a morality play; it is a push to achieve power to effect substantive change.  It is not, decidedly not, about forming consensus-agreeing affinity groups, it is about forming coalitions, often diverse and even on some issues, contradictory coalitions, where not everyone agrees on every single issue.  It is also about using tact, sophistication, and nuance in organizing, and having a healthy skepticism of what we advocate, what we are for, so that we of the left are able to say to ourselves, “While I think I’m right in this, I will also admit I could be wrong.  I do not think so at present, because I have thought this over thoroughly.  But I may have overlooked something.”  Let us recall as leftists, many of us as Marxists, the dialectic, and how the dialectic means change, transformation, over time, so that what is so certain today may be substantially not so in the future.  That is what we of the left must do today—come to that understanding.

 

AHISTOICAL “IDENTITY POLITICS” AND THE LEFT NEWSMAGAZINE IN THESE TIMES

 

Normally I like, and am impressed by, articles in the left news magazine/website In These Times (ITT).  However, four articles which appeared in the February and March 2014 issues have raised hackles with me, hackles insistent enough to move me to write this riposte.  For all four show a tendentiousness and “identity politics” lack of clarity that I consider destructive to the further development of the left in our present time—and in their essentially non-class, ahistorical approach both illuminate a severe fault in present left analysis, and through their critique, present ways to overcome it.

The four are:  Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s “Where Obama’s Class Speech Failed,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16121/where_obamas_class_speech_failed, and Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16113/the_pope_vs._capitalism, in the February issue; and Susan J. Douglas’ “Grand Old Race-Baiting,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16260/grand_old_race_baiting,

and Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16275/a_canon_without_balls, in the March issue.  While each of the articles does have some merit (in a publication of such caliber as I consistently find ITT to be, it would really be surprising to find an article within that completely lacked merit), this merit is very much attenuated and truncated by the essentially non-class, ahistorical “identity politics” approach that runs through each and all.  An approach that is fundamentally problematic in itself, and only creates more problems when the authors above try to use it.

 

Yamahtta-Taylor’s and Douglas’ articles are about race, and while Yamahtta-Taylor’s does give a gloss of social class and its importance to her argument, she seems to argue more for the irrelevance of class in relation to race and presents an argument that is more a variant of a “new revolutionary working class vanguard based on race” that was once in vogue in left circles, but hasn’t materialized in fact.  This is evident in her noting that blacks and Latinos make up 40% of the low-paid workforce, which, by simple arithmetic, means that a clear majority—60%—of the low-wage workforce is white and “persons of color” generally excluded by the left as such from the “persons of color” distinction—persons of East, Southeast, South and Central Asian descent.  She also omits noticing that often blacks and Latinos fight ethnically and racially with each other over the fruits of labor and entitlements, that they aren’t this homogeneous category of “blacks and Latinos,” even in both constituting major sectors of the low-wage working class.  Also excluded from consideration is that the CEO of the epitome of low-wage labor, McDonald’s Don Thompson, is himself African American—a problem for a race-based analysis, but not so for a class-based analysis, especially one that incorporates Lenin’s understanding of the comprador bourgeoisie.

Susan Douglas notes perceptively how the Republican Party has successfully used race-baiting to divide white workers from feeling affinity with workers of color, especially blacks and, more recently, from Latinos as well, but the illustration accompanying her article contains a photo of Bill Cosby, himself African American and a vigorous critic of what he sees as major dysfunction among his fellow African Americans—an indication in itself that more is involved that simply a black-white dichotomy.  Of course, the real kernel of truth in Douglas’ analysis is that the Republican Party and the Tea Party within have been very successful in the so-called “culture wars” in dividing white workers, especially white male workers, from their counterparts along racial lines, disingenuously channeling white economic populist concerns into racial resentments, into support for policies that go against the needs of white male workers themselves.  Further, this policy has been very successful, and has created a fertile base of support for Republicans and Tea Partiers that has enabled the absolute stymying of progressive efforts to change the political and economic status quo.  But this successful polarization that is so much part of US politics today should give progressives and leftists real concern, because changing demographics that are empowering more and more racial minorities, women and youth to support progressive politics are not in themselves going to end the political impasse that we’ve experienced so frustratingly these past few years, and could well continue for many more years to come. 

Yes, that small but fanatical minority that encompasses the Republican and Tea Parties, and that can also mobilize resentful white male workers as part of its base (a significant part of the Tea Party/Republican base, to be sure, but far from being its entirety, or even its majority), has demonstrated a real political staying power so far unmatched by anything the left and progressives can muster; something clearly demonstrated by the politics of inaction that has plagued the Obama Administration almost from its beginning.  This politics of paralysis has certainly proven its force—another good reason not to abandon the white male working class in favor of a supposedly triumphant future demographics.  Because racial resentment is against the real wishes and needs of the white male working class itself, a nuanced left politics of both race and class could have a positive effect even in the short run, which is as soon as the upcoming 2014 elections—elections which should make all of us progressives and leftists nervous.  But  the progressive and left forces will have to stress commonalities of interest, not triumphalist notions of non-white race-based “vanguard workers,” to bring white male workers back where they belong—in a unified populist movement that stresses social and economic justice for all, while also addressing residuals of past societal racism in a constructive, not divisive, way.

Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism” strikes this ex-Catholic left writer as too much a gushing, teenage-crush love letter on the new Pope instead of a sober analysis.  Truth is, the new Pope is far more ambiguous and even doctrinally reactionary than Coday portrays.  And the Pope’s first encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, not only critiques capitalism sharply, as Coday correctly notes, it also upholds the Catholic Church’s traditional opposition to birth control and abortion, insists on the male-only Catholic priesthood, and when discussing women and their concerns, has a distinctive air of patronizing about it.  A patronizing further demonstrated in a later interview with the Jesuit magazine America, September 30, 2013,  http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview, in which the Pope dismissed women’s concerns over equality in the Church as “female machismo.”  Further, even Pope Benedict XVI spoke in opposition to “unbridled capitalism” (during his Papal visit to Brazil in 2007; see “In Brazil, pope assails capitalism, Marxism. Sees decline in church influence,” Victor L. Simpson, Associated Press, May 14, 2007), so Pope Francis’ economic message isn’t completely novel, though certainly his tone and his broader sweep are—and are enough to cause the political right to mistake him for an actual Marxist! (Give credit where credit is due.)   However, on the issue of Catholic priest-pedophilia, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires Pope Francis sent very conflicting messages on this, as he hardly moved decisively against priest-pedophiles in his own diocese.  (For further reading on these matters see Adele Stan’s dissection of Evangelii Gaudium in AlterNet, December 6, 2013, “Killing Them Softly: Pope Francis Condemns Income Inequality, Sanctions Gender Inequality,” http://www.alternet.org/killing-them-softly-pope-francis-condemns-income-inequality-sanctions-gender-inequality; the British National Secular Society’s provocative October 31, 2013 blog by Terry Sanderson, “Are we being bamboozled by this charming Pope?” http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/2013/10/are-we-being-bamboozled-by-this-charming-pope;  and Catholic investigative reporter Jason Berry’s December 31, 2013 article on GlobalPost which examines the new Pope’s ambiguous record on priest-pedophilia as bishop in Argentina, “How Pope Francis took 2013 by storm,” http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/italy/131231/how-pope-francis-took-2013-storm.)  As for the Pope’s establishing a Commission to “study” the priest-pedophilia issue, noted by Coday and now operational, wouldn’t it be far better to just turn over suspected priest-pedophiles and their personnel records over to the civil authorities for investigation and, if warranted, prosecution?  And same with covering-up clergy and bishops—turn them and their personnel records, correspondence and e-mails over as well to the civil authorities for investigation and possible prosecution of child endangerment or obstruction of justice?  Shouldn’t that be at the top of the new Commission’s agenda for “study”?  I believe a lot of people, Catholic, non-Catholic and ex-Catholic alike, would agree!

When I read Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” the first thought that entered my mind was how it reminded me of feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon’s Andy Warhol fifteen-minutes-of-fame during her speech before the Harvard Law School in the early 1990s advocating censorship on feminist grounds, dismissing works of “literary or scientific merit” with a cavalier “If a woman is involved, why should it matter?”  For what Doyle seemed clearly to be proposing was a feminist litmus test for deciding if any work of literature was “politically correct” or not.  Indeed, her screed harkened me back to my reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s powerful dystopian novel We, and how it had run afoul of militant “political correctness.”  Zamyatin, a Soviet writer in the 1920s, had written We as a science-fiction extrapolation of disturbing trends he’d already found apparent in the fledgling Soviet Union; and in 1923 the reading of his manuscript elicited vigorous and indignant attack from the new commissars of Socialist Realism, i.e., literature that conformed to the “needs” of Socialist Revolution, at the meeting of the All-Russian Writers Union.  My impression of Doyle’s essay is that she is reading literature in the spirit of these Socialist Realism commissars—more concerned with “correct political line” than with quality literature as such.  But all quality literature, whatever its ideological bent, is a contribution by the best of humanity to the best of humanity as its audience, and of course that includes within it that half of humanity which is female. 

As for “bad,” “harmful” and “reactionary” ideas, the purging of them “to protect the innocent” from the “offensive” has always been the rationale of censors, whether overt, or more “benign,” as through “ideological criticism.” Yet it has been censorship or tendentious “criticism” that has more often than not given such “bad” ideas their attractive force—and yes, there are indeed “bad,” reactionary and chauvinist ideas in many great works, and yet—while they may give “offense” to some readers, has anyone been harmed by them who read them as literature should be read, with a critical yet open mind, a mind capable of separating the wheat from the chaff?  In just my own particular case, did I become a neoliberal because I read Wealth of Nations and the popular works of Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose?  Was I made susceptible to sadism because I read the account of God-sanctioned genocide in the Book of Joshua?  And haven’t feminists themselves been more harmed by censorship than by exposure to “male chauvinist” writers such as Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac?  To ask the question is to answer it.

Just as an updated footnote to the above, we can also pointedly note what the Atlantic, in May 2014,  termed “empathetic correctness,” http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/empathetically-correct-is-the-new-politically-correct/371442/, the new push for “trigger warnings” to preface readings and films shown in academic settings that might—just might, not necessarily would, even among the most  squeamish and vulnerable—set off emotional reactions of unease, discomfort and panic.  Which we should invidiously dismiss as just another unfortunate example of our contemporary left’s penchant for protecting people—from fundamental reality itself!  Of course, this is just another “benign” form of censorship, and is patronizing itself to the 3% of the population (according to the Center for Disease Control) which suffers from PTSD, “concern” for whom motivates the “trigger warning” advocates to embrace yet another variant of censorship.  But just as censorship is no substitute for therapy, it is also no preventative of panic, or any other “disturbance”—although it does encourage, even directly cause, disturbance, disruption, and even elimination of the capacity for critical thought!  Truly a “cure” far worse than any disease it supposedly prevents.