SOCIALISM’S CORRUPTION BY THE LEFT, PART 2

YOU KNEW IT WAS GOING TO BE MARX, RIGHT?

In my last post, I introduced the thought of Jean-Claude Michéa. He made the interesting, and for most people today, somewhat startling, claim that the left and socialism had different points of origin. The left, with its (French) Enlightenment commitments to progress, individualism, universalism, and reason, grew out of the French Revolution. Socialism on the other hand was a response to the privations imposed on working people by the conditions of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution, though, had only been possible with the left’s progressive triumph over the social and economic constraints of l’ancien régime: rooting out the customs and traditions that might hinder the accumulation of capital and deracination of individuals out of organic communities into abstract, highly mobile labor commodities. The early socialists then, like the early North American populists, initially constituted a form of resistance to this colonization of private life by the (French) Enlightenment-inspired left.

Yet clearly that’s not how we perceive the situation today. These days socialism is thought to be quintessentially left. So, how did socialism go from being antagonist of the left to the current perception of being identical with the left? That’s where we left off the last post, and for those interested in the history, trials and tribulations, and prospects of North American populism, it seems like a valuable question to answer.

The beginning of this flip in the identity and commitments of socialism have their theoretical origins in the contributions of Karl Marx. This is an explanation that will resonate for long time readers of this substack. While I identify as a right-wing Marxist (briefly discussed here and here, as well as in my [must read!] book, The Managerial Class on Trial), I have emphasized that what distinguishes my Marxism from the standard brand is Marx’s Hegelianism. To get to right-wing Marxism, it is necessary to expunge Marx of all Hegel. (Or, at least most of it. Michéa seems to see more value in it than I do.) It’s a shame because, as Michéa notes, there is much in Marx that can be used as a valuable contribution to that earlier manifestation of socialism. For example, a socialist or populist critique of the culture industry, with its corrosive impact on organic community, resulting in abstract, possessive individualism, would benefit greatly from a careful unpacking of Marx’s analysis of the distinction between use value and exchange value. (A topic I’ll unpack in a future post.¹)

In terms of the history of socialism, though, all such theoretical benefits are set off against the deleterious impact of Marx’s Hegelization of socialism. With Hegel, Marx presumed to win the battle against the left and capitalism in the world of theory. There he discovered the unfolding logic of history. The forces of history were pushing us toward a resolution that would bring in the eternal reign of the socialist ideal. Except, in the process, Marx had transformed the socialist ideal away from a grounding in organic community to a raft riding the rapids of progress. Those early, some call them romantic, socialists that Michéa invokes – e.g., Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Robert Owen, and Pierre Proudhon – Marx had dismissed as “utopian” socialists. They dreamed of a better socialist world, but failed to recognize the real material, historical forces giving birth to socialism. But Marx saw beyond their limits because he had enlisted Hegel and so understood the dialectic of history. Realistic socialism didn’t lay in a romantic, utopian return to organic community, but rather in an enthusiastic embrace of capitalism’s mass industrialization.

But Hegel of course was the epitome of the French Enlightenment school, with its fascination with progress and reason; in Hegel’s philosophy none other than abstract reason itself becomes the revolutionary subject of history. It was no doubt this fascination with the promise of progress that led Marx – contrary to many mischaracterizations of him – to admire capitalists. In contrast to the idea perpetuated by some lazy ideologues, Marx did not hate capitalists. On the contrary he heralded them as a revolutionary and progressive force, laying the infrastructural grounding for the coming liberated world. Marx, as a Hegel epigone, was a philosophical progressive.

And of course, the other lesson to be taken from this – which we’ll have occasion to discuss at length in future posts – is that little is more left-wing than capitalism²: with its constant progressive, revolutionizing of economic production and social order. Its relentless cycle of obsolescence and innovation is the endless making and remaking of the material world; ever demanding new social relationships around its constant streams of new commodities; even while it demands abstract, deracinated individuals to both produce and consume its products; ever more eroding the communal bonds, whose traditional norms and virtues threaten the moral flexibility required to ensure constant adaptation to its newest forms of commercial penetration into people’s lives and families. In the famous words of Marx and Engels: all that is solid melts into air. So, Marx’s fascination with capitalism as a progressive and revolutionary force is hardly surprising. It was though a long way from where socialism began earlier in the 19th century.

Marx though only laid the conceptual groundwork. For Michéa, the real decisive moment in the transition of socialism from anti-left to left-identified was the Dreyfus Affair. For those a little rusty on their Introduction to European History 101: While the Dreyfus Affair is entrenched in the contemporary imagination as a chapter in the history of, and struggle against, antisemitism, its political implications cut far deeper than that for the relatively young Third French Republic. In the decade or so straddling the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, the Dreyfus Affair became a lightning rod for the struggle over the country’s future. Throughout the 19th century the left had been engaged in a tug of war with l’ancien régime (for elaboration, see here), with the latter regularly threatening restoration. Michéa argues that during the Dreyfus Affair this risk was raised to an alarming threat level, with a coup by the reactionary forces seeming like a real possibility.³ It was in this context, he says, that the left and the socialists joined forces to repel such a threat.

This alliance of convenience between the left and the socialists may well not have been possible without Marx’s influence, subtlety feeding leftist progressivism into the socialist movement, laying the terrain for a shared perception of common interest. This Dreyfus era alliance, carrying them through into the early 20th century, soon was reinforced with the prospect of WWI, in which the branches of Europe’s ancien régime found themselves facing off for one final battle royale. By the time the dust had settled from that war, the political power of Europe’s old aristocracies was largely destroyed. Meanwhile, to the east, increasingly communist governments (USSR, Yugoslavia, China) presented themselves as the party of the future. And to the west, there arose a growing appreciation that capitalist stability required rationalization of labor as a partner in the mass industrial process – pioneered as Gomperism, institutionalized in the U.S. under the New Deal and with the eventual merging of the AFL-CIO. The cumulative effect of these developments was that the melding of the identities of socialism and the left became a fait accompli.  

It has been in this way, according to Michéa, that the contemporary socialist movement has come to partake of what he calls its Orpheus Complex: like the left, it must never look back to the past, but always progress forward. The route to socialism, and liberation from capitalism, can only come from a steadfast progress, through capitalism, into the bright socialist future. However, just as the left was the agent of capitalism, and their Marxian progenitor thereby admired the revolutionary capitalists, socialists who have come to identify with the left find it ever more difficult to imagine a post-capitalist world. It is after all, the wealth producing power of the capitalist engine that will provide the prosperity that socialism will share among the workers. By this path, socialism has transformed from a protector of organic community and traditional values to a celebration of capitalism with some redistribution of wealth.

To be sure – and I don’t believe Michéa gives adequate consideration of this – the bourgeoisie did, in their own way, attempt to impose renewed constraints of proper conduct and moral standards.⁴ Promoters of this ethos, captured in the notion of the Victorian era, weren’t prepared to surrender to the logic of the very capitalism that underpinned the material conditions of their bourgeois lives. Even then though, the logic of the left was ever at work, revolutionizing the world. By the turn of the century, the bourgeoisie no more than the socialists understood what the left was up to, and what its agenda entailed. The price of the left’s endless revolution, its relentless progress, against individuals rooted in organic communities, eroding traditions and norms – ensuring that all that was solid melted into air – in the constant pursuit of innovation and the disposable new-thing, has left the original socialist dream but a dwindling light in a foggy rearview mirror.

And just to state the obvious, in case it isn’t yet clear, that left, ever in pursuit of deracinated individuals, subject to its progressive logic, informed by its French Enlightenment inspired fetish for reason, has ever been the emerging spirit of the current ruling managerial class. From the French Revolution, it may have taken them a century to finally start to consolidate practical power, but their values and interests constantly animated the social, political, and economic forces that eventually led to that consolidation.

Michéa holds out hope that a reborn socialism might yet again rise to oppose the left. I suspect that that torch already may have been passed to the new populism. In any event, much rides on the new populism not likewise succumbing to the left’s siren call of unconstrained reason and progress.

1. Briefly: producing for exchange value biases the productive process toward optimizing conditions of profitability. All the obsolescence and innovation associated with exchange value encourage the endless production of the new. Production for use value assumes the production of goods that will be durable — ideally as durable as possible. That durability though obviously would be sub-optimal for profit, with its reduction of the constant turnover of new sales units. Maintaining a social order presumes production of a durable world — material as well as cultural. Exchange value production flies in the face of such a durable social order, constantly revolutionizing the material and cultural world. Obviously, there’s much more to be explored in this, but hopefully these cursory remarks at least point the reader in the direction of considering the potential impact and significance of such a distinction and analysis.

2. Admittedly a contested term which, as the French semioticians might say, is something of a shifting signifier. For now, let’s think of it as roughly referring to a blend of primarily (if not exclusively) private property, unregulated markets and industrialism.

3. In fact, this whole period of French history, which had so much impact on the rest of Europe, and even the world, is complicated and fascinating. The brief remarks in the text don’t do it justice. Really unpacking Michéa’s arguments would require a much more detailed exploration than is possible here.

4. Parenthetically, I’d also point out that an interesting development in all of this has been the uses made of Freud. In both his most socially normative and probably most popular book, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud endorsed Victorian impulse suppression and sublimation as necessary measures for creating and maintaining civilization. The left, though, throughout the 20th century, attempted to leverage and weaponize Freud’s work as a means to berate and mock bourgeois cultural conservatism. There’s a whole history to be written here on the political uses of Freud.