WHAT'S LEFT OF WHAT'S RIGHT, PART 3

POLITICS, VALUES, AND GETTING THE LEFT RIGHT

For a general introduction to this series, see here.

In my first post to this series, I introduced it as a reconsideration of the left-right nomenclature and its political implications. As noted there, to be able to provide the smoothest discussion of the implications that seem to me to arise from such a reconsideration, it will be valuable to clarify what I mean when I use the terms “politics/political” and “values.” They’re powerful signifiers, if you understand them, and the later discussion will be much advanced by having the terms cleared up in advance of their more casual use.

That’s where this instalment will begin, and it will go on from there to provide a discussion which acts both as a review and elaboration of Michéa’s historical distinction between the left and the right. With both those areas cleared up, we’ll be better situated analytically for the subsequent instalments which will dig more deeply into the theoretical and political implications of this reconsideration of the left-right dichotomy.

Over the years I’ve been impressed with the definition of politics offered by several different thinkers. In the end, though, the one about to be elaborated here I’ve settled upon as the one I find both most explanatory and most rooted in biological realism – though I don’t discuss such matters much, here. Nonetheless, biological realism remains fundamental to my both ontological and epistemological assumptions. To briefly review, here as mere axioms, arguments that I’ve fleshed out in considerable detail elsewhere (see my (other) must read book, Biological Realism): for specific historical and geographic reasons, values phenotypes tend to cluster in shared dimensions of the human reaction norm. And these values phenotypes then appear in common times and places. This is what distinguishes cultures. It might be helpful to think this through the lens of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In fact, the word “needs” might well be replaced with the word “values.” The lower down his hierarchy is any stratum, the more likely it is to be a generalized, shared human value. The higher up the hierarchy is any stratum, the more likely it is to exhibit phenotypic diversity.

Humans that aren’t suicidal or mentally dysfunctional will share a valuing of food, shelter, and reproduction. However, when it comes to matters like social connection and belonging, status, recognition, strength, the good, the beautiful, and the moral, there will be far greater phenotypic diversity of values. This will be due to both geographic clustering of genetically heritable traits and ontogenesis resulting from circumstances particular to a specific environment, availability of resources, climate, etc. Once a particular culture forms around a specific set of such values, it tends to become reinforcing.

Geographically distinctive value differences (reaction norm clustering) can then give rise to conflict between such groups. However, insofar as value differences are the product of self-sustaining culture or genetic heritability, such values conflict can arise within groups. And the larger, demographically and/or geographically, are such groups the greater the prospect of such values conflict. The trouble with such values conflict is that such competitors tend to see the other values holders as aliens, so are prone to see them as less human. Conflicts arising at Maslow’s lower strata, conflicts over say access to material resources, express motivations that can be recognized as comprehensible by either side in the conflict. However, conflicts over what god is, proper sexual mores, or essential hygiene, are more alienating, and more likely to generate feelings of disgust or sanctimony.

Particularly, when such different values phenotypes share a common group, it becomes challenging to resolve such differences without resorting to group destroying conflict. This is the domain of politics. For me, then, politics does not refer to any specific kind of action. For instance, it is certainly not restricted to elections. The activities of Solidarność discussed in the last series on this substack were political actions. Politics are the actions, and is the playing field upon which, these values differences are resolved without the resort to war.

As I’ve cited Carl Schmitt at some length in earlier posts, I’ll note here then that my use of politics does not refer to an existential conflict. “The political” certainly can address irreconcilable values differences, but it doesn’t have to address irreconcilable conflicts arising from those values differences. Political action may well result in a workable compromise. Though, of course, compromise is hardly guaranteed.

What results from such values conflict, though, as long as it falls short of war, is what I’m describing as politics or the political. This of course is not to deny the existence of friend-enemy conflicts. Rather than defining such conflicts as “the political” though, I’d say that they are conflicts which are stretching the political to its very limits. But, again, all this was merely to help readers understand how I’m using words like politics and values, which should make what follows, both in this instalment and the entire series, a little clearer. (Though, to reiterate one more time: a full understanding of these arguments would require examining their considerable elaboration in Biological Realism.)

Left v Right

In a couple earlier posts (here and here), I sketched the outlines of Jean-Claude Michéa’s position on the distinction in the origins and nature of the left and socialism. The former is the politicized legacy of the French Enlightenment (I’d add, notably distinct from the Scottish Enlightenment) which, in France, first gained political traction in the French Revolution. The conventional identifier for this political tendency, la gauche, derived from the side of the national assembly upon which they gathered. In contrast to a common narrative about the French Revolution, which pits the left as this French Enlightenment party, against the party of l’ancien régime (monarchy, aristocracy, church), the previous post in this series revealed that there was an additional “party” in the form of a large swathe of the peasants. They opposed the revolutionaries, not in defense of the national power structure of the old regime, but rather on the grounds of the revolutionaries’ insidious interventions, through the corrosive imposition of market forces and social engineering regulation, which eroded the fabric and foundations of their traditional communities.

In this way, the peasant revolts of the French Revolution constituted a new, communitarian conservative right. Indeed, as speculated in my last post, it may be considered the original such right, at least by le nom propre. This resistance of the French peasantry to the left during the French Revolution points to the phenomenon emphasized by Michéa (see here). His point was that originally socialism was not a manifestation of the left, but on the contrary a reaction against the left. The socialists of the first half of the 19th century were largely the product of a revulsion against the crimes, indignities, and immiseration imposed on working people through the triumph of the left. This began with massive enclosure acts, going back hundreds of years, but dramatically escalating from the mid-18th into the 19th century. These practices completely overturned centuries of established common law, communal custom and obligation, and social norms, depriving peasants of their livelihoods, destroying their homes, driving them off the land, and crushing their communities.¹

Driven off the land into the cities, so many of these disposed peasants became the reserve army of the unemployed that ensured a steady supply of workers to serve as the cannon fodder for Blake’s Satanic Mills of the industrial revolution. And we can add that even once relocated into industrial towns, many of these people attempted recover their communal rights and community norms, against the onslaught of “industrial discipline.”² It was in response to all of this that the early socialists emerged.

As I discussed in that earlier Michéa post, it was in the hands of Marx that the clear differences between the left and socialism began to be theoretically confused. However, what Marx was involved in was of course an exercise in managerial class ventriloquism. In my (must read!) book, The Managerial Class on Trial, I emphasized how that ventriloquism was about marshalling the working class as the foot soldiers in a class war between the emergent managerial class and the bourgeois capitalists.

However, with the insights from Michéa, I now realize that Marx’s ventriloquism was up to more than just that. Yes, it was about coopting the working class and its instinctively anti-left socialism, but it was also a gambit in an internal strategy competition within the larger left. I’ve elsewhere made the point that the managerial class has both its left and right wings. Though, it’s certainly true that the class traits of the managerial class certainly incline them to what I’d now call the left.

However, as noted above, phenotypic outcomes can be diversely dispersed across the reaction norm. So, values diversity will produce some right-oriented members of the managerial class – few though they are likely to be in comparison. However, I now appreciate that there is an additional wrinkle in all these analyses. The left, too, is not a strategic monolith, but different phenotypes within it are in competition over the best means to achieve the goals of the left. It is necessary to unpack this, equally non-intuitive, Michéa-inspired insight to fully appreciate the implications of Marx’s ventriloquism, what its historical impacts have been, and determine what an appropriate populist response today needs to be to the world following from all of this.

We start unpacking all that in the next instalment. So, if you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know anyone else whom you think would be interested in this discussion, please…

1. Parenthetically: if the current state of things – in which constitutional rights and freedoms (particularly under the COVID regimes) are sweepingly violated by governments, apparently with impunity, since courts seem increasingly unreliable, and elections seem increasingly untrustworthy – feels to many today like a world turned upside down, you might be interested to look into the social history of the enclosures: where, as I said in the text, centuries of established common law, custom and social norms were simply turned on their heads, once it proved necessary for the ruling class to completely and uttered abandon and betray their ancient obligations. The parallels between ruling classes deciding (in historical terms, virtually overnight) to completely remake the world, the peasants be damned, is striking.

2. For the classic work on these processes, in the leading-edge English context, see: E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Classic, 2013).