A list of the problems we face on the left

Thanks to The Social Recession: By the Numbers by Anton Stjepan Cebalo and K-Punk, by Mark Fisher for some of the thinking that inspired this. Also a little Auden quote in Cebalo’s article that caught my eye: “miserable wicked me / how interesting I am.”

This is a list of what I take to be the major problems the anglophone left is facing at the moment. If anyone has any additions, let me know. The existence of this list will make me seem like a curmudgeonly pessimist. Maybe there’s some truth to that, but it’s only half the story. I wouldn’t make a list like this to demoralize people. I also think that there are strong reasons for hope. I’m listing the obstacles to help us think about them in a sobering way, not to argue against the possibility of action. I could easily make a list just as long of reasons to be optimistic.

*People are jaded by events. There’s a sense that things are happening always, all the time, but nothing is changing. So much has happened and nothing has changed that it now feels like time is suspended. It sometimes feels like even if there was, say, a revolution we’d wake up tomorrow and somehow things would still be the same.

*Social engagement is going down. It’s been going down for a long time. No one with any influence seems to care. As Anton Stjepan Cebalo perspicaciously notes in an article that inspired this one, all the official concern only acknowledges it as a problem insofar as it leads to stochastic terrorism and random violence: “The goal here is not to solve a pernicious problem, but instead to pacify its most flagrant outbursts.”

*In the past, people were densely connected together already, all that needed to be done was to take those dense assemblages and repurpose them into weapons of liberation. We could win over unions, sports clubs, community groups, progressive churches- even large friend groups etc. and help articulate them together into a class fighting for its rights. Now things feel less like a web, and more like dust drifting down the road, or like the difference between trying to make a blanket out of patches, and trying to make a blanket out of countless individual bits of thread. Or trying to build a house out of atoms, instead of bricks.

*Any individual with the potential for leadership will be torn down for some perceived wrongdoing- whether imaginary, overmagnified, or, in all too many cases, very real. At the risk of sounding like a nihilist, maybe we needed a certain kind of morally compromised individual.

*We lack now the capacity for strategic thought. Everything has become a matter of principle, tradeoffs are unthinkable. Not only does that make us too rigid to exploit openings, it also leaves us vulnerable to breaking.

*Whenever we react angrily to things, the right is (at least partly) winning. They’re setting the agenda. Moreover, we’re implicitly confirming their worldview- a world full of depraved people who choose, purely out of a sense of wicked discretion, to do the wrong thing.

*Everything now comes down to reflex sentiment. I was going to write a breakdown of whether the typical billionaire is self-made (not really, although it partly depends on where you place the bar.) As I was writing it, I despaired. Anyone who might read it is already pro-billionaire or anti-billionaire, not because of the empirical considerations I’m putting forward, not because of the philosophical considerations I’d like people to make up their minds on the basis of, but on the grounds of whether they find billionaires or people who complain about billionaires more grotesque.

*People are more interested in condemning than persuading. Condemnation over persuasion is selected for by social media algorithms, since it gratifies more quickly. Like a good population under selection pressure, we adapt, and those that don’t adapt have no audience.

*Alliances with those we disagree with on a few issues are considered even more unthinkable than persuasion. Look at the unhinged reactions of people towards Elizabeth Bruenig. She doesn’t think abortion should be illegal and scarcely talks about the subject, but her reservations about it make some people fucking hate her.

*We think about strategy all the time, but when strategy just becomes “individuals should be trying harder” it becomes moralism, and moralism is largely useless because it’s extremely hard to change personal behavior through willpower. Since there is so little organization, what alternative is there to personalized moralism about how leftwing individuals should act? If we can’t strategize for organizations, we’re just preaching at individuals to try harder.

*Most Anglophone countries have terrible voting systems (first past the post). In the past, that didn’t matter so much because it was possible to exercise power on parties through their mass membership structures. Now that parties are hollow assemblages, it is almost impossible to move them, but starting an alternative is very difficult because of the aforementioned FPTP voting systems.

*We’re never bored. It turns out that being outraged with a sense of nothing left to lose wasn’t enough to induce people to organize- you need the space of boredom as well as the lash of oppression.

* People on all sides and in all directions lack the maturity for transformative political work. The general sense that you have to be an adult about things and that once you are an adult you must “put away childish things” might have been arbitrary and overbearing, but this is worse. I don’t want to say that people need to stop watching superhero movies and start reading books about very serious middle-class people having affairs, but whatever this current situation is, it’s unsustainable.

*People have built all sorts of excuses not to talk to others. They’ve somehow managed to go from “it’s futile trying to convince people of something by yelling at them on Twitter” to “trying to persuade anyone of anything under any conditions is impossible”.

*In the past, the people in power might have opened a safety valve or two in response to protests. They have learned now that they can ignore protests seemingly without risk.

*So much is argued on the terrain of economics, so few have any knowledge of that subject. There are many excuses “I’m not a maths person”, and “Didn’t Marx solve all of that”. The right also knows nothing about contemporary economics, but their enthusiasm for claiming they do carries them over a lot of barriers.

*We’re haunted by our own history, by splits and labels, that should long be dead.

*Obviously, people interested in politics are polarizing into two sides, liberals and conservatives. Obviously, neither of those sides is leftwing. But this leaves two possibilities when you try to explain something, either people hear you as repeating the lines of the enemy, or people hear you repeating their own lines, and assume that you are just saying what they believe in other words. Either way, not only do your words not get through, they haven’t even been rejected as such. Only what is heard can be rejected- and only the words of the hated enemy, or the words of the ally, can be heard clearly. Breaking through is so difficult.

*Our communication online is gated, not just by bans and moderation policies (in the main, this isn’t a problem so long as you’re disciplined) but also by completely inscrutable algorithms that are controlled by our enemies. Moreover, being subtly censored in this way has none of the sex appeal- none of the attraction- of being able to say you’re a victim of overt censorship.

*If you tell people that something bad has happened to someone, their immediate reaction will be to try to find a way in which it’s the victim’s fault. If you tell people that something good has happened to someone, their immediate reaction will often be to complain that it’s undeserved. Negative solidarity.

* We are all too fragile, myself more than most. Our hurt is real, but there is a kind of healthy repression that we’ve forgotten.

* So many people lack organizational discipline. I’m not talking about Leninist discipline here, I’m talking about a basic modicum of loyalty and reliability. Like so many of these problems, this applies to the right and the liberals as well, but for them, this doesn’t matter, because they can just slot into the defacto structuring created by money.

*A lot of the aforementioned lack of discipline is because phones have wrecked our attention. Barring Adderall for all or transhuman technological fixes, how do you unwind a process like that?

*The left has always had some problems with being a subculture but now all politics is just a subculture.

*Society depends on forgetting and forgiving. Technology has made the former harder, our conditions have made the latter harder.

*This isn’t a discrete point as such, but I’m reading Mark Fisher at the moment, and it’s pretty clear that in him we had a once-in-a-generation mind, able to bridge the gap between action and thought. He published “exiting the vampire castle”, was viciously attacked, and became a ‘controversial’ figure until four years later when he killed himself and became an acceptable figure of hero worship again. Collectively the left’s behavior was totally unacceptable, morally and intellectually. It’s a case study in what’s wrong with us.

*To speak in (amateur) psychodynamic terms for a moment. Historically speaking the left has a kind of libidinal energy whereas the right has portrayed itself as the superego. No one likes the superego, but hey, if you’ve got the whip you’ve got the whip. Now the left is being portrayed as the superego, but it doesn’t have any of the material power that the right held when it was in that position. Moralism without power, what’s there to like? At least rebellion without power held a certain charm that could be parlayed into power.

*It’s incredibly difficult to form an image of the future that can be debated because there are so many singularities on the horizon. Nuclear war looms, if that happens, no one knows what comes after. Climate change is happening, no one knows what that will look like. It seems to me that we are approaching artificial general intelligence (or at least verbal parity) very quickly, no one knows what that will look like. It’s hard to hold debates over what the future looks like when it is.

*Property is naturalized and moralized in a way which is completely illogical, but which appears logical unless you think about it quite hard. It forms part of deep commonsense, and explaining why it doesn’t make sense, even on liberal terms, takes a lot of time and cognitve energy- time and cognitive energy we often do not have. I remember when I was a child it seemed to me that taxes were stealing. I didn’t, of course, oppose taxes, it just seemed to me a regrettable truth- I had to acknowledge that they were stolen. The idea is somewhat odd when you break it down. Was the claim that, legally, taxes belong to their earner? Of course they don’t. Was the claim that taxes morally belonged to their owners- well obviously I didn’t support that, otherwise I wouldn’t have still supported taxes. Morally the idea is untenable for many reasons- for one thing, property would be much, much scarcer and less secure without taxes, so complaining about taxes on the grounds that they violate property rights is odd. For another thing, if this absolutist theory of property is right, how on earth did people acquire an absolute right to certain bits of the earth, a right that trumps others rights even to survival? Nevertheless, it seemed to me, to be commonsense that it was at least “technically true” that taxes were theft, even though I didn’t agree with the political implications. The idea of (fairly absolute) property is drilled into us as children. It takes one thirtieth as much energy to appeal to the notion of property rights as it does to critically interrogate it. That’s the nature of ideology. We know that other cultures have much looser concepts of ownership, but in our culture pre-reflexive libertarianism about property is in the air we breathe.*

The only thing I have to say about solutions is this. We need to talk to people who aren’t already on the far left, ideally not on the computer. We also need to form and join unions and political organizations and get others to do so. Even non-political associations ‘thicken’ working class society in a way that gives it the potential to resist. Unless we go talk to people and go organize, nothing will change by our initiative.