The Lame Left

Part 5

Dear Readers: My multi-part series on the “lame” US left’s seventeen worst afflictions will resume and conclude below. I paste in the series’ introduction in italics before each installment so you may want to skip that going forward.

Intro (repeated)…Call me an American revolutionary Marxist, socialist, and/ or communist. Just  don’t tell me I’m “on the [US-American] left.” Part of the problem here is that the dominant US media politics culture has let the neo-McCarthyite right dilute the term “the left” so far as to mean anything from hot yoga and wind farms to Madonna, drag queen story times, M&M mascots without high heels, organic vegetables, academia, the Brookings Institution, the AFL-CIO, and the dismal, dollar-drenched corporate-imperialist Democratic Party. The term has been watered down almost beyond recognition. At the same time and more to the central point of this multi-part essay, which will continue through at least next week,  most of what can legitimately be said to constitute “the left” in the United States today is hopelessly and depressingly dysfunctional. Thanks to two intimately related deficits — the lack of any serious notion of a revolutionary societal alternative to capitalism-imperialism and the absence of a properly scientific, evidence-based theory of how to understand and change history in a desirable fashion — the US-American left(s) is(are) stuck in a self-defeating cycle of failed efforts reflecting a doomed project: trying to achieve meaningful human liberation through their country’s nation’s dominant deeply conservative institutions, short of what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels knew to be the proper socialist goal: “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” (imagine!). The alternative to such truly radical change, Marx and Engels wrote in 1848, was “the common ruin of all.”  Those words feel haunting 175 years later, in a time when it is now clear as day that we must — as I argued in a recent Paul Street Report — kill (overthrow and transcend) capitalism before it tips humanity into an epic and potentially terminal environmental catastrophe.

In this and the next four  Paul Street Reports I will go through 17 different pathologies on the US “left,” such as it is: (1) sheep-dogging electoralism and parliamentary cretinism; (2) economism and trade unionism; (3) hyper-identitarianism; (4) dependence on foundations; (5) sentimental standpoint proletarianism; (6) geopolitical neo-campism; (7)  pink-brown Jimmy Dore-ite Trumpenleftism; (8) conspiratorialism; (9) anarchism; (10) direct service-ism; (11) localism; (12) single-issue-ism; (13) pacifism; (14) academicism; (15) pessimism; (16) retreat to self-ism; (17) reflexive anti-communism.  Many of these afflictions overlap and mutually reinforce each other, making up a simultaneous equations system of pathetic defeat and surrender.

Part 5

14. Academicism

Let us dispense from the outset with the wild-eyed Republikaner notion that US academia is under the control of “the radical Marxist Left.” This narrative is every bit as laughable as the claim that the Democratic Party (with whom most academics in the liberal arts and social sciences are affiliated) is “socialist” and “communist.”  Would that the FOX News fantasy of colleges and universities crawling with “Marxist professors” trying to “indoctrinate the nation’s youth” remotely reflected reality! 

The preponderant majority of US academic discourse and conduct takes place within the dull and depressing framework of bourgeois and imperial ideology. This is a nice match for material reality in the nation’s ever more absurdly expensive, class-exclusionary colleges and universities, where escalating tuition has not prevented academic authorities from handing an ever rising share of the teaching to poorly paid adjuncts and other non-tenure track instructors who can be thrown back into the reserve army of academic labor at the slightest hint of serious radicalism

Radical and non-armchair socialists and communists (and left anarchists) are far and few between in the nation’s neoliberal era classrooms, lecture halls, and faculty offices. US-American so-called higher education is packed with all-knowing professors who have never understood or seriously engaged with Marx and Marxist thought and writing but who nevertheless hold forth on why Marx and Marxists were/are supposedly wrong – this as current events now demonstrate to any truly educated person that Marx and Engels had it right in 1848: its “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or “the common ruin” of all.

Much of what passes for “radical left” academic thought is indecipherable to all but the doctorate-possessing soothsayers themselves, if even to them. As Chomsky observed in a reflection on the “Self-Destruction of the US Left” two decades ago:

“the academic left…[is] mired in intricate, unintelligible discourse of some crazed post-modernist variety, which nobody can understand, including the people who are involved in it – but it’s really good for careers and that sort of thing.  [Like conspiracy theories, …] that pulls a ton of energy into activities that have the great value that they are guaranteed not to affect anything in the world, so therefore they’re very useful for the institutions to support and to tolerate and to encourage people to get involved with.”

Far too few left thinkers within and beyond the incestuous academic bubble have taken Chomsky’s sage counsel on “the moral responsibility of intellectuals:” talk to and write for ordinary citizens in terms they can understand about things that matter and that they can and must do something about (my paraphrase and elaboration). When the academics are not too busy talking to themselves – their main audience – to don the cloak of  “public intellectuals,” they typically address themselves to the ruling classes, not the popular masses. (There are exceptions, of course: I think especially of the people’s historian Howard Zinn, held at arm’s length by the US history profession because of his insistence on writing for the populace and social movements.)

Myself the possessor of a doctorate in US history, I  never miss the academic world, with its insufferable elitism, absurd over-specialization, incestuous discourse, power-serving cowardice, cynicism. moral and intellectual laziness, arrogance, condescension, comic self-importance, pomposity, and shameless exploitation of graduate students and adjunct instructors[1].  It’s an often toxic, deeply conservative (in a “liberal” sort of way), corrupt, unprincipled and notoriously backbiting world about as far removed from “radical Marxist” politics and activism as one might imagine. One reason to not go too far in bemoaning “the fall of the ivory tower” in the current period of insanely high class-exclusivist tuition and vicious neo-fascist assaults on mythically “radical left” academia – assaults that further academics’ timidity, atomization, and spinelessness – is the possibility that more young thinkers who would previously have been channeled into mind- and soul-numbing toil in the capitalist-imperialist university will apply their intellectual faculties to the existentially urgent tasks of making people’s socialist revolution.

15. Pessimism

All the left pathology discussed in this series takes place within a political culture wherein most people are less able and/or willing to conceive the transcendence of the exterminist profits system than they are to envision the end of human existence.  “We live at a time,” Henry Giroux wrote two decades ago, paraphrasing the cultural theorist Frederic Jameson (whose prose I tried to decipher without success at age 19) “when it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For the left,” Giroux observed, “the militant hope of socialism appears to have collapsed into a century of disastrous betrayals of revolutionary dreams, mass murder, and an endless series of self-deceptions about the promise of a future in which human beings realize their full potential…(emphasis added).” The end of capitalism vs the end of life: a chilling dichotomy to contemplate when one considers the fact that capitalism is wired to end life itself.  

In intellectual circles, this suicidal collapse of imagination and hope for a world beyond the rule of capitalism-imperialism is often cloaked as “realism” and “pragmatism.” It’s no small problem. “The need to overcome a debilitating pessimism,” Giroux (a prolific radical academic who seeks and finds an audience beyond the ivory tower) wrote in Public Spaces, Private Lives, “is one of ‘the most important questions that anyone seriously interested in social change must confront.” The “greatest dangers facing the twenty-first century,” Giroux warned, “come from the wish to refrain from thinking of alternatives to the present – allowing intellectual pessimism to become complicit with the status quo by degenerating into indifference and quietism.”

Many left folks of my acquaintance, generally with academic backgrounds, have dropped and perhaps never really embraced the idea of socialist revolution. They roll their eyes and turn away at the mere mention of the “r word.” They either naively think that the critical main dilemmas of our times can be meaningfully tackled and overcome under the capitalist system or believe – in the name of “realism” – that we have no option but to try to solve them under capitalism since Marx and Engels’ “dream” of the “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” (The Communist Manifesto) is simply (sometimes said to be “sadly”) off the historical table – a “God That Failed.”   

The first idea is mistaken. Beyond the important fact the “four apocalyptic horsemen,” to use Chomsky’s language, of the 21^st Century – ecocide, pandemicide, the escalating threat of terminal war, and fascism – are caused by capitalism, the more relevant point is that none of those cataclysmic equestrians – or patriarchy (please the gender of “horsemen”) or racism – can be meaningfully overcome under capitalism. This is quite clearly the case true in regard to the climate crisis, which is just the biggest issue of our or any time since there’s no democracy, social justice, freedom, love, and beauty on a dead planet. To say, as Chomsky has, that we don’t have time for revolutionary transformation beyond capitalism before solving the climate crisis is to say that humanity is doomed. “Anthropogenic” (really capitalogenic) global warming will only worsen in a world still locked into what the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) leader Bob Avakian calls “the killing confines of capitalism.”

True realism says that the young German philosophers of scientific socialism and proletarian revolution were right: it’s “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” (and down to its material base) or  “common ruin.” Sorry to repeat the quote but it’s important: the goal really needs to be “revolution, nothing less,” to use the name of the RCP’s weekly Thursday night YouTube broadcast.  As Che Guevara (who admittedly died in an arguably romantic, un-Marxist adventure in Bolivia) once said, “it’s not my fault that reality is Marxist.”  

The second idea – that revolution is simply off the historical table – is a surrender to the bourgeois revocation of a decent future.  Call it class rule cancel culture. If I am right (and of course I am) that there are no meaningful solutions under the continuing reign of (sorry to use such an “old timey” phrase but it still fits) “the bourgeoisie” (that is, under capitalism), then we have no choice but to figure out how to birth a socialist revolution.  It’s an existential duty. In that key sense, “pessimism” and “optimism” are really besides the point. It’s not about the crystal ball. (Can we please dispense with Antonio Gramsci’s self-cancelling maxim “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will?” Let’s put that up on the shelf with other self-destructive left axioms like “speak truth to power.”)  

16.  Retreat to Self-ism

A related part of the surrender that I have noted among many often left-identified folks are the beliefs that the structure and purpose of society are now so far beyond their and others’ sphere of influence that it is “dysfunctional” and useless to work for popular and revolutionary political struggle.  The real path to liberation, many such apolitical or ex-political left people seem to think, is individual, internal, and even spiritual: self-transformation. In the world view of such folks, many of whom view capitalism-imperialism and its related oppression structures with disdain, the path to a better world is all through individual healing. 

The kernel of truth in this conclusion is that people who are in poor personal shape (physical and/or mental) are rarely in a state to contribute positively to the enlightenment, inspiration, organization, and liberation of others. In an airplane that loses pressure in the cabin you must first put on your own oxygen mask and breathe before you can help your seatmates do the same.  People strung out on opiates and whose homes are so jammed with junk that they can barely walk three feet without knocking shit over are going to have a difficult time getting it together to lead or even join a revolutionary movement. So, yes, all who aspire to engage in the necessary tasks of socialist revolution would do well to take basic care of themselves through basic things like adequate exercise and time outdoors, healthy food, a proper sleep regime, meditation/mindfulness, de-cluttering, and play.  But one must always balance “the micro” with an even bigger dose of “the macro”: the necessary task of societal transformation/revolution remains since there’s really no sustainably healthy and balanced life to be had for the masses in the apocalyptic world that capitalism-imperialism has made.   

17. Left Anti-Communism Characterized by Reflexive and Arrogant Disdain for the 20th Century Socialist Sates in Russia and China

Another and related problem, especially common among left intellectuals is a kind of reflexive anti-communism characterized by sneering disdain for the 20th Century socialist revolutions and states in Russia and China and for Revolutionary Communist thinkers today.

Whence the “collapse” of “the militant hope of socialism” into “a century of disastrous betrayals of revolutionary dreams, mass murder, and an endless series of self-deceptions about the promise of a future in which human beings realize their full potential” (Giroux)?  Part of it has to do with the intellectual left’s all too easy surrender to Western-imperial Cold War narratives on those  revolutions and states. Most left thinkers view the 20^th Century Russian and Chinese socialist regimes with contempt for various reasons: defensive fear of red-baiting (which is being chillingly revised and updated by the Trumpist-DeSantisite FOX News right); social-democratic and/or anarchist/left libertarian/”anti-authoritarian” hostility to vanguard parties and state power;  over-attachment to formal bourgeois democracy; the mistaken notion that socialism means the overnight abolition of class and state coercion; false conflation and even (ala Timothy Snyder and under the over-broad Cold War rubric of “totalitarianism”) merger of the socialist state power that arose in Russia and China with the fascist state power that arose in Italy and Germany during the last century. Whatever the specific mix behind their disdain, the anti-communist left intelligentsia’s commonly nee-jerk denunciation of the socialist regimes that arose in Russia and Chinese capitulates to the dominant Western bourgeois notion that the difficulties and collapse these socialist states faced and the failures they suffered prove that communist-left socialist revolution is nothing more than a recipe for disaster and tyranny.

The anti-communist narrative to which most of the intellectual left has submitted deletes the real and remarkable accomplishments achieved by Soviet and Chinese socialism– giant leaps forward in living conditions, lifespan, literacy, and more for millions outside and often against the world capitalist system – and the terrible consequences (beyond as well as within the former socialist states and blocs) of the overthrow of really existing socialism (with all its flaws) in Russia and China. Also critically omitted is how unsurprising the failures experienced by the Russian and Chinese socialist states were in light of the enormous challenges those states faced: internal counterrevolution, mass inertia, ideological and cultural lag, and above all, imperial encirclement, provocation, and invasion. As Avakian wrote in his 2004 book Phony Communism is Dead…Long Live Real Communism:

“in China, as well as in the Soviet Union, …the danger of capitalist restoration was rooted in the underlying contradictions marking socialism as a transition from capitalism to communism, and the triumph of the capitalist-roaders was the outcome of the class struggle, both within the socialist countries and internationally….the loud proclamations these days about the ‘failure’ of communism [fail to] recogniz[e] that what has happened in the Soviet Union and China represents, in its essence, defeats inflicted on the international proletariat by the international bourgeoisie, and that the mistakes were secondary and mainly mistakes made in dealing with the very real problems and dangers caused primarily by imperialism, particularly in the early stages of the conflict between proletarian revolution and bourgeois counterrevolution: the point is to learn from such defeats – to learn the lessons – in order to turn temporary setbacks into new breakthroughs.”   

Soviet socialism was always a “system under siege,” to use the prolific Marxist analyst Michael Parenti’s phrase. The same goes for Chinese socialism, with the unfortunate proviso that the Soviets were among those laying siege to Mao’s China. Without the external hostility and the assistance imperial encirclement and provocation gave to internal counterrevolution and with instead sympathetic socialist revolutions in other nations, imperial ones especially, things would certainly have gone quite differently in Russia, China, and the world during the last and the present century, during which now largely unchallenged global capitalist rule has brought humanity to the very cliff of annihilation. The accomplishments of the Russian and Chinese revolutions would have been immeasurably greater. The mistakes and indeed the crimes committed in the name of socialism in the Soviet Union, the Soviet empire and socialist China would have been much slighter. Soviet and Chinese socialism might not have only survived but thrived in ways that would have inspired socialist revolutions in yet more other countries, putting humanity on the path to a world beyond the soulless and eco-cidal anarchy and oppression of capitalist class dictatorship. (Much the same can be said, I think, for socialist Cuba, whose accomplishments have been quite remarkable considering the presence of the world’ leading imperialist aggressor state just 90 miles north.)

The intellectual left often seems to assume that revolutionary Marxists who think more positively than the dominant Western narrative allows about the Soviet Union and Maoist China – who do not automatically identify those states with “red fascist tyranny” and “seventy years of barbaric rule” (New Yorker editor David Remnick, in his 1997 book on Russia’s supposed Resurrection under the drunken and corrupt “populist” Boris Yeltsin) – have  no substantive criticisms of how those states and their leaders responded to the challenges they encountered. This is false.  In his book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (2001), Parenti – long touted by some as “the communist alternative to the anarchist Chomsky” and naturally shunned by “radical Left” (bourgeois-neoliberal) academia – combined defense of the Soviet Union’s considerable socialist accomplishments and criticism of the “free market” capitalist order’s catastrophic impact on Russians, Eastern Europeans and the world with  forthright (if rather narrow) criticism of the Soviet Union’s internal managerial and political failures. The Mao-inspired RCP has long combined appreciation of the accomplishments of socialist Russia and Mao-led China with significant critiques of “mistakes” made not just by the criminal Stalin (whose transgressions reach far beyond the category of “mistakes” in my view) and his “revisionist” successors (from Khrushchev through Brezhnev and Gorbachev) but also by Lenin and Mao[2].

Denying the accomplishments of socialist Russia and China and failing to understand the international and historical context within which their failures, crimes, and mistakes occurred means an all too easy surrender to the hegemonic bourgeois notion that the call for socialist revolution is nothing but an invitation to a tyrannical and “totalitarian” nightmare.  Meanwhile, the horrific socioeconomic, political, and environmental  consequences of the overthrow of socialism in Russia and China have been ricocheting around the world for decades – and the now not-so “new” post-Soviet and post-Mao era has seen the anarchy of global capitalism bring the world arguably closer to terminal war than the Cold War standoff ever did.   

As expected, this series has been far less popular than my usual fare of reporting and commentary on the mutually reinforcing/multiplying crimes of US capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, fascism, and ecocide for the simple reason that most of my readers prefer to focus on what’s being done to them by the oppressors than on why they/we aren’t properly fighting back to overthrow the oppressors and (above all) the oppressors’ system.  It is possible that I will pen a follow-up to this now-concluded five-part series in which I might do two things:  tease out a number of overlaps and shared spaces tying together many of the 17  US left afflictions I have examined across the series; detail some of my own past engagements and involvements both inside and against these afflictions.  It is possible also that I will forego such commentary given the onrush of horrific current events brought to us on regular basis courtesy of capitalism-imperialism. As Donald Trump likes to say, “we’ll see what happens.”

Endnotes

+1. Among the professoriate’s many problems, the cowardice stands out – something of which I have too many examples to recount here.  During my year as a ridiculously overworked visiting professor at a formerly and openly Left/Marxist history department in 2005-06, I was shocked at the reluctance of even nominally progressive academics to speak out against the US occupation of Iraq or much of anything else in George W. Bush’s America. (The professoriate there was naturally and foolishly in love with the next president – the neoliberal imperialist Barack Obama, who I was already calling “the empire’s new clothes.”) In more recent years, I have been depressed but unsurprised by the refusal of all but a small handful of academics to rise up against the many-sided neofascist menace that stalks the land, taking special aim at supposedly radical higher education (see the fourth chapter of my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America for a darkly amusing discussion of the different head in the sand narratives US academics and political commentators concocted [here I must sadly include the normally astute Chomsky] to absurdly deny that fascism that had taken up residence in the White House on January 20, 2017)  When I asked an urban studies professor last year what she and other tenured professors at a major state university intended to do about their state’s passage of a law making it illegal to tell the truth about the roles that racism and sexism have played in American history and society, she said this: “I’m just going to try to stay under the radar.” I’m not sure there’s a single open Marxist (or left anarchist) left in her university – something that would hardly stop Tucker Carlson or Ron DeSantis from calling that university an outpost of “radical Left indoctrination.”

+2. For two among many examples, see RCP leader Bob Avakian’s 1981 lecture “Conquer the World; The International Proletariat Must and Will” and Avakian’s aforementioned volume Phony Communism is Dead…Long Live Real Communism. Amusingly enough, getting US left intellectuals to read something by Avakian is a bit like trying to get a child to take unsweetened medicine. Reflexive anti-communism, fear of association with actual revolutionaries, and over-attachment to professional class discourse leads many left intellectuals to automatically dismiss the longtime RCP theoretician. In my experience the mere mention of Avakian’s name to left intellectuals revealingly leads to instant scorn whose intensity is usually matched only by the degree of their total ignorance of anything Avakian has ever said or written. How curiously anti-intellectual.