A list of the reasons for the Anglophone left to be optimistic
The other day I wrote a piece on the barriers facing the Anglophone left. Now I want to write a piece giving the reasons to be optimistic- and there are many such reasons:
Capitalism has never felt more discredited, more tired. No one except a handful of Panglossian ideologues believes in the status quo as a good thing. The only two defenses left are
The “there is no alternative doctrine” or capitalist realism- we need to stick with capitalism because no other system is possible. A pallid, uninspiring ploy and
the “utopian capitalism” defense- there is something called “true capitalism” which is an alternative- and if you elect the right messianic conservatives we will reach it. This stuff has a pretty small constituency - there’s a reason the libertarian vote has always been tiny.
The right has overplayed their hand. Donald Trump was entertaining, but a lot of the people who have followed him are whiny, dull, and presume too much. Their splits are becoming harder to paper over- see the UK’s leadership struggles, and Ron de Santis v Trump.
Although the terminally woke are doing their very best to keep it going, the moral panic over wokeness seems to me to be losing steam and people are starting to wake up to the right being gigantic snowflakes. Even the right recognize it on some level- there’s a reason why Donald Trump started calling Ron de Santis “Ron deSanctamonious”. The culture war fanaticism on the right is fucking boring and New York Times articles about the scourge of college campus wokeness can only hide that for so long. In the previous piece about our problems, I complained that the right has been successful in portraying itself as the rebellious id, raging against the moralizing leftist/liberal superego. That’s true, but I think there are signs that the ice is breaking up, and the left is close to reclaiming rebellion’s mantle.
The right themselves have undermined the “there is no alternative” doctrine by constantly claiming that any small change is creeping socialism. Through their own actions, the right have helped to make capitalism look fragile.
People under 45 are much to the left of people over 45, so prima facie, the future is ours. Many would respond to this by saying “yes, but these young radicals will soon drift to the right”. But that model of political change was based on previous generations, which were pretty politically similar to their relatives to begin with, and moved to the right fairly quickly as they aged- neither of these things apply to millennials. This is a good article that debunks a lot of the myths about age and politics, and makes the case that current age trends should really worry the right: https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/6/14/progressives-control-the-future . Suffice it to say that if the right haven’t successfully implemented the end of bourgeoise democracy and legal freedoms within ten years, and if millennials or Gen Z don’t suddenly, and without precedent, shift political orientation, the right are in a lot of trouble. At the present rate, gen Z and millennials will never be conservative by contemporary standards.
The global hegemony is breaking up. The same competitive dynamics that forced the US and its allies to appease to their populations during the cold war may well restart.
Outside of America, the American right has discredited the right. Everywhere the right wins, they discredit the right- names like Bolsonaro and Trump are bandied as weapons against the local bands of fascists.
Yes the internet sucks and it’s killed our attention span, but now anyone can get a message out to thousands of people with, at most, a few days work and that matters. I don’t think the change is going to come from the internet, but I do have a lot of optimism about projects like Mastodon. I don’t envisage them becoming Twitter competitors any time soon, but they are a genuine alternative with which cadre can circulate ideas informally in a space not controlled by the enemy.
There are signs that the union drop-off is stabilizing, maybe even on the verge of reversing. Approval of unions has not been higher in a very long time.
AI is going to play a big part in the recent future. While of course, the people who own the big tech companies are scummy, I take great comfort in the fact that those working on the development of this technology are leftwing. Machine learning researchers and engineers have their critics of course, but as a group they strike me as politically and socially aware, more so than many other groups working in tech.
The armed forces of the United States- from the privates to the generals- are far, far to the left of where they were in the Bush era, although of course they are still very rightwing, they no longer represent a reliable base of support for the American far right. The right’s center of [martial] power is now the cops. In some ways this is alarming- Hannah Arendt noted that fascism involves a shift in the center of gravity from the army to the police. Still, if it really, really comes down to it, that split in the army could be vital. I think it was, of all things, an Endnotes article I read once that said “The sine non qua of a successful revolution in the contemporary period would be the defection of the army”.
Both conservatives and liberals aim to rhetorically incorporate leftism into liberalism. That’s getting harder and harder. It also gives us an easy selling tactic to conservatives- point out that we’re little like the liberals they expected us to be.
What we have to do is, in some senses not very hard. Yes, the hands are few, but the harvest is plentiful. All the immediate steps we have to take are perfectly legal, and there are plenty of people out there more than willing to listen if you just make contact. In many places, our views aren’t even despised. We just need need to:
Talk to people about our politics in a persuasive, nonconfrontational way.
Ideally in real life and not on the internet.
Try to start unions.
Start organizations of other sorts e.g. socialist parties and societies, chapters of existing organizations, socialist reading groups, community groups, tenant support groups, electoral interventions etc.
There have never been more genuine leftists in America than now than at least since 1980.
The left has by now I think, thoroughly recognized that neither purist horizontalism nor purist Leninism is the way forward. That’s real strategic progress. The horizontalism v Leninism dialectic of about 1980 to 2016 was poisonous. So many years were wasted because people couldn’t see that “I dunno, maybe a bit of both, but stop getting so hung up on it” was the correct answer.
The weird moralism that YOU MUST NOT VOTE IN ELECTIONS OR ELSE YOU ARE A BAD PERSON mostly seems to have faded.
There’s a few weird effects of machine learning that I think will be to our advantage, I’ll include them in one category because I don’t want to make too much hay of them- they are speculative at the moment- nevertheless:
This is going to sound weird but hear me out on this one. Very soon, the idea of an “English-speaking” internet will start to break down as machine translation becomes very good and automatic. The left has always been particularly weak in English-speaking countries this is a huge opportunity for us. Such cross-pollination isn’t guaranteed to have positive results (e.g. we could see the flow of far-right ideologies in both directions) but I think there is reason to be optimistic.
A lot of the causes of the left’s weakness have to do with economic stagnation (this has harmed the liberals as well). If I’m right about the near future, AI is going to start moving things very quickly. I think the right has a hard time playing in that environment- economic stagnation suits them.
Corbyn almost won in the UK. Our views are quite popular already, especially when explained in a straight forward way. The ground we have to cover is great, but it is not that great.