SOCIALISM’S CORRUPTION BY THE LEFT, PART 1

TWO RECENT DISCOVERIES

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve experienced a couple of eye-opening discoveries. In hindsight, perhaps I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was by either. I was faintly cognizant of indicators pointing in both directions. But I guess I’m a little slow on the uptake. While one of the discoveries was of a purely technical capacity, and the other a matter of conceptual insight, they were certainly related. Not only in the obvious way, that the former provided the condition of possibility for the latter. But each was a reminder that new potentialities are so often just beneath the surface of the taken for granted.

The Technical Discovery

So, I made this fascinating discovery some weeks ago. I’m guessing plenty of you will be already familiar with this fact. I’m a bit of a boomer. But for any of you who are not so familiar, this is something really worth knowing. I discovered that Microsoft Word has built into it a translation capacity. Under the Review menu, hit the Language button and you’ll see a Translation option. It will allow you to translate a section of your text or the entire document. It has dozens of language options. So far, I’ve only tried French and Italian. I’ve no idea how good the translations are for Albanian, Cantonese or Zulu, but the two I’ve tried have been great. Sure, there are places where you can recognize the literal translation of an idiom which doesn’t work in English. And as they use pronouns differently in those languages, sometimes the translation will say “she” when you know it should say “it.” But these are minor inconveniences.

Now the amount it can translate, even if you choose an entire document, is limited. So, if you’re translating a whole book, you will likely have to translate one chapter at a time. With all the requisite copying, pasting, translating, copying, and pasting, I’ve found an average length book to take me about half an hour. Which is pretty amazing for the whole new world of ideas it opens up to you.

I have found working with PDFs to be somewhat messier and more difficult. But if you can get an EPUB doc and use an EPUB editor, like Calibre, which breaks the doc into editable files by chapter, it’s super easy to manage!

The downside, of course (yes, all benefits come with costs), is that my personal reading list, which was already a bit overwhelmingly long is now…well. Let’s just say I’m going to die trying. 😉

And for all you tech geniuses out there, if there’s in fact a far easier way to do this than that which I’ve stumbled upon, here. Please don’t tell me. I prefer to think I’ve made a great discovery. A little personal self-delusion never hurts. Right?

The Conceptual Discovery

So, obviously this technical discovery has opened a previously unavailable set of resources. The very first thing I did upon this discovery was to read a book – unavailable in English as far as I could tell – by French New Right darling Alain de Benoist on populism. Naturally, right? However, interesting as that was, reading it led me to investigate another French thinker with whom I’d been completely unfamiliar, who doesn’t appear to have any books available in English translation: Jean-Claude Michéa. In light of some of my own recent posts, particularly the ones on the relevance of the Enlightenment (here) and on the impact of the left (here), Michéa’s analysis is quite intriguing. We might describe him as a revisionist socialist, but his revisionism is more about a recovery of an elided history.

Now, in fairness, Michéa does not provide the kind of methodical, historical documentation that I would like to see for these kinds of claims. And I would still very much like to see such a work. However, given my own background knowledge of what he’s discussing – which while not qualified as expert is surely well above average for most of the population – the claims he makes resonate with plausibility. And given the relevance of them to the ideas I’ve been exploring in this substack, I thought some of you might find them of interest.

Michéa argues that the promise of socialism has been corrupted through its cooptation by the left.

Okay, how many times did you reread that, thinking, huh? Socialism is the left! What the hell is this guy on about? Well, that’s the point. Socialism is not inherently (nor, Michéa would argue, even consistently) of the left. In fact, he claims, none of the 19th century socialists – including Marx – ever called themselves men of the left. That kind of sweeping claim of course immediately raises one’s eyebrows. You must do one hell of a lot of reading to be able to make that sweeping, negating claim. So, let’s try to get off on a less challenging footing.

Michéa’s interpretation logically starts with the widely acknowledged origins of the very concept of the left. It came of course from where specific “parties” sat within the national assembly during the turbulent days of the French Revolution. Those supporting the maintenance of the monarchy, the privileges of the Catholic Church, and the aristocracy – referred to in France by the shorthand, l’ancien régime – sat on the right side of the chamber. Those who opposed l’ancien régime, usually in the name of republicanism, though often too a form of nascent liberalism, sat on the left side. This original left was inspired by the (French) Enlightenment. It believed that that philosophical awakening had legitimized and laid the groundwork – through the validation of individualism, universalism, reason, and progress – for a new political order, opposed to that of the right and l’ancien régime. Thus far, the story is probably familiar to many of you. Here’s where Michéa’s analysis takes what for many will be an unexpected turn.

He argues that this original left, of the French Revolution era, had nothing of the qualities that, by the early decades of the 19th century, people had come to think of as socialist. This left that grew out of the French Enlightenment was driven by a notion of radical progressivism. It was committed to its vision of a new world, liberated from l’ancien régime. To exercise this liberation, though, it was necessary for the left to thoroughly expunge any remnants of that old world. All its traditions, customs, and habits of mind, had to be purged for humanity to progress into the promising future of individualism and rationalism. Recently regular readers here will recall my observation that this alleged Enlightenment fetish with rational progress was in fact more a reflection of the specifically French Enlightenment, with the Scottish Enlightenment having gone in a very different direction: actually validating the value and importance of a human social and political community being grounded in the concrete institutions of its traditions, customs, and habits (see here).

Michéa argues though that none of this left progressivism is evident in the early socialists, and they in fact, like the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, put great emphasize upon the importance of what we’ve called here the grounding in an organic community (see here, here, and here). In doing so, they were responding to the disruptive and destructive impacts upon working people of the industrial revolution: e.g., the commons enclosures, dangerous factories, filth strewn working class neighborhoods. The socialists that Michéa has in mind here are the likes of Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Robert Owen, or Pierre Proudhon. Of these, Proudhon is the only one I’ve read at any length, already having had the intention to reread him soon for his insights on federalism. And to my foggy recollection, this is a fair depiction of his vision of socialism. The little that I do know of the other early socialists he mentions, leads me to conclude that this sounds like a perfectly plausible characterization of them, too. Which, if true, is kind of fascinating.

Yes, they were open egalitarians, but let’s not confuse their use of that term with the communist ideologue. Like the early North American populists, this egalitarianism was one concerned with preventing the kinds of tremendous disparities of wealth that allow one caste or class to gain political dominance and tip the playing field decidedly in its favor, compromising the freedom and life prospects of everyone else. It’s not so different from the recent dawning realization in quarters of the contemporary right that the corporations and big business aren’t really on their side. Add to that the emphasis on the importance of rejuvenating organic community and the institutions of its concrete order, as an antidote to the system of political and economic inequality, and it increasingly appears that in fact the early socialists were really – in today’s nomenclature – more like early populists. In this sense, then, they were (like the populists) objectively anti-leftists.

So, then, the obvious question arises. How did socialism transform from prototypical anti-leftist populism in the early 19th century, to becoming virtually synonymous with the left by the mid-20th century? That’s a story I’ll save for my next post.

And you don’t want to miss that. So, if you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know anyone else who might be interested in what we discuss here, please…