What’s a Revolutionary? What is the Left?

In yesterday’s post, I talked about the mainstream left and what defines it, what the familiar divide between these two gangs of politicians and their various hangers-on is all about.

But there’s a similar divide within that so-called ‘left’, a fairly familiar one between two sorts of statists. On the one hand, there’s those who put their hopes in the existing state, and try to find accomodation with it in various ways. On the other hand, there’s those who think this is hopeless, and want to replace that state with a new and completely different ‘revolutionary state’.

One suggests that the existing state is the legitimate expression of what ‘the electorate’ wants, the other suggests that their new-and-improved state will be the legitimate expression of what ‘the revolutionary proletariat’ wants.

The Left, the Pseudoleft, and the State

Most of us have probably been in the situation of hearing some young or not so young student of politics, trying to tie together what they understand of politics in the following formula:

“being more left-wing means wanting the state to intervene more in society”

Conversely, being more right-wing means wanting a ‘small state’, and a society of people left to themselves.

Now, this formula is wrong, for various reasons which I’ll assume my readers are already aware of, but I think there’s an important element of truth to it. There is a systematic connection between the state and a certain sort of ‘left’.

In yesterday’s post I called this the ‘pseudoleft’, and described it as an attempt to compensate for the impotence that comes from the divide between the various holders of radical views and opinions, and the social forces capable of making them a reality, most obviously socialists and proletarians, between the do-gooders and well-wishers dreaming of a classless, co-operative society, and the classes of non-owners with the economic position that allows them to re-arrange society from the bottom up.

Now, we might suppose then that this would produce a lot of people who can see what’s wrong, who can see the problems and the unhappiness in class society, but who don’t know what to do about it. They may be confident of its eventual self-defeat in a century or so, but not patient or callous enough to just sit and wait. So what they’d really like would be an easy way to ‘paper over’ the cracks, to take problems as they appear and either solve them or conceal them or a mixture of both.

And guess what! That’s just what states do! That’s what ‘politics’ is: the place where conflicts appear and get resolved. And the state justifies itself, and makes itself functional, by being the mechanism that can enforce such ‘solutions’. If religion is ‘the heart of a heartless world’, the state is ‘the unity of a divided society’.

The result is that under normal (i.e. non-revolutionary conditions), people who notice that society is grossly unfair and a lot of people are being made very unhappy, naturally gravitate around the state. They write letters, they present petitions, they announce initiatives. They struggle and then eventually a politician of their camp gets into the position to deliver a rousing speech about how they will mend the world and help all the poor needy X’s, and they feel themselves to have scored a great victory. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the problems never seem to dry up.

On being ‘Left-Wing’

What is ‘the left’? What characterises the ‘left-wing’?

It’s sometimes suggested that ‘the left-right spectrum is too simplistic’, which is fairly obvious (what with it being, you know, one-dimensional) but which has sometimes prompted attempts to ‘replace it’, most commonly with ‘the political compass’, a two-dimension chart which has an economic axis from planning (left) to market (right) and a political axis from ‘libertarian’ to ‘authoritarian’.

I’m not too impressed with this. For a start, it always seems a bit invented – it’s designed to reflect logical differences in ideas, whereas part of the rationale for the left-right spectrum is to reflect ideological differences in orientations, i.e. sides in a conflict, not in an academic debate. But more importantly, if these two axes are to be separated, we might as well introduce more – an axis reflecting views about the roles of women, men, sex, and families, an axis reflecting views about science, nature, religion, and technology, and however many others.

But once you have five or six axes, you find that you haven’t actually helped yourself to understand real politics, just clarified certain logical distinctions about ideas – the question poses itself, why do positions on some axes correlate with positions on other axes? Why are feminists and socialists generally ‘on the same side’? And what you find yourself doing is looking for over-arching dimensions, such as ‘being on the side of the oppressed against the more powerful’ or something, and then you find that you’ve stumbled back to something very much like the left-right spectrum.

So let’s suppose that there is some meaning to ‘left-wing’, and in particular, let’s suppose that it is something like ‘supporting the oppressed against oppression’. Let’s take, for instance, the idea that ‘left-wing’ is in a certain sense defined by socialism, by the struggle of labour against capital. These definitions still leave questions about that real entity that’s called ‘the left’: what manner of beast is it?

On Being Middle-Class

By almost any measure, I’m painfully middle class. I don’t just mean in terms of economic or social facts (occupation, family, manners, education, etc.) but also, and more interestingly, in terms of temperament: the way I approach things, including political issues, is marked by a mentality that I think has a certain association with ‘the middle classes’ – in particular by being, as I will discuss, non-judgmental, individualistic, and ‘xenophilic’.

Now, the relationship between the middle classes and the left is one that’s often brought up, but regarding which sober analysis is often obscured by a dialogue of accusation and defense – both outside the left, which is castigated as a whole for being supposedly full of ‘idealistic’ and ‘naïve’ middle-class intellectuals and ‘champagne socialists’, and within the left, where one group denounces another for its ‘middle-class’ orientation/membership/methodology (also sometimes called ‘petit-bourgeois’) and counter-poses the genuine working class nature that the left is supposed to have. What exactly is involved in middle-classness politically is sometimes unclear.

This is not a post about my guilt, privilege, or anything like that. What I’m going to try to do is cash out more precisely the respects in which I recognise myself as conforming to a certain ‘type’ of the middle-class lefty, and what implications this has.

This ‘type’ is of course one which is  neither shared by all of the middle classes, all of the left, or all of the middle-class left, nor exclusive to them. There may well be other middle-class ‘types’, including some quite opposed to this one, but it seemed an interesting and worthwhile topic to consider nonetheless.

Note also, these are not positions or beliefs, but features of temperament – which will be one influence among others in deciding between positions.

Modern Art: like the Bible?

Missives from Marx has a post up about how, upon actually reading the ancient holy religious texts, they turn out to be actually fairly childish and mundane. The point essentially is that most of the Rig Veda is about cows, but that “priestly and scholarly interpreters invested those texts with novel sense via creative hermeneutics.” [quote from someone called Bruce Lincoln). That is – the profound meanings aren’t ‘there’ at all – if they exist, they’re in the smart people who have found it necessary or convenient to invent profound meanings and attribute them to “oh mighty cow spirit please make me have many cows”. In which case, y’know, it would make much more sense to just have smart people inventing profound meanings and presenting them as such rather than mystifying their connection to some obscure and enigmatic fetish-object.

What this immediately made me think of though was art. I’m a bit of a philistine in general, but I am especially unimpressed with ‘modern art’. Stuff like this. Or this.  Or this and this. And while I don’t really know anything about it, the following reasoning seems quite strong to me: these items can be interpreted in an endless number of ways. No single interpretation is identifiably the correct one (in the way that, for example, with most written sentences interpretations converge on a fairly limited range of meanings, that give us some confidence about what the speaker meant).

If that’s true, then whatever meaning is found in the work by a viewer is principally the viewer’s own creation: they create whatever meaning is involved by the effort expended in thinking ‘what the hell does this mean?’ The meaning they come up with may be profound, insightful, and important, or it may be banal, stupid, and trivial. But either way, it’s something they came up with. And it’s quite likely that, equipped with the same brain and the same background, they could have come up with a similar meaning independently of the work of art – if they had stopped and stood in front of a lamp-post ‘interpreting’ it, or just staring into space or watching a mouse eat rice.

“The Genealogy of Morals”: A Communist Manifesto?

This is the final part of my reading of, and critique of, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, focused on the third section, and through it, on Nietzsche’s overall thrust in the work.

The best way I can think of to summarise what Nietzsche is doing in this last section is this: that he explaining the workings of the class system, of oppression, of the methods by which the ruling classes maintain control, and piercing through the lies and evasions which it usually uses to cloak this – and replacing them with the simple and profound lie that those who suffer do so because they are inherently set up to suffer.

He repeatedly speaks of ‘the sick’: “Those people who are, from the outset, failures, oppressed, broken”. Now it’s an open and interesting question how far some people are born with a greater disposition to suffering, a greater sensitivity – or, more likely, born with a greater sensitivity to all forms of experience, and then unfortunate enough to have a childhood that sets up mental loops that turn this into ongoing and inescapable negative experience.

But it’s clearly not the primary explanation for who suffers and whose dreams are broken on the rack. The obvious primary explanation is that some people’s lives are destroyed and curtailed and kept in a cage by social rules, in order to maintain and gratify the power of others. The sick, that is, are not sick – they are injured, and injured by those who Nietzshe calls ‘the strong’, “the successful and victorious”.

If we keep this in mind – if we ‘read between the lines’ of Nietzsche’s sometimes lurid prose to see the role of class (economic class as well as sex class), we can see Nietzsche as sketching out for us the contours of how morality, religion, asceticism, function to defend class interests.

The Ten Commandments are Deeply Immoral

Apologies for the break in blogging recently, have been a little busy. Was watching TV last night and came across one of those ubiquitous ‘the Top Ten ____s of all time!’ shows. This reminded me of probably the most famous example of this genre, the Ten Commandments.

Now, the Ten Commandments are quite popular among the fans of Abraham, who at least claim to constitute about half of the world’s human population. But what’s interesting is that as well as this, there are plenty of non-Abrahamists, or people lukewarm about Abrahamism, who nevertheless say that this collection of instructions are in some sense ‘a good guide’ to morality, a good expression of ‘moral basics’, or even ‘the foundations of our civilisation’ (meaning that in a good way).

This seems odd to me, since the Ten Commandments actually seem a very good example of an immoral document, one that gives very bad moral advice. Indeed, I think society would be much improved if they ceased to be anybody’s ‘moral basics’. So I thought I’d briefly explain why I think they’re so wrong.

Reasonable Irrationality: War Without Casualties

In the UK’s war/occupation in Afghanistan, 142 military personnel have been killed. That’s tiny. There have been plenty of wars when that many soldiers died in a week or a day. For the British army, it’s been a remarkably harmless war.

Yet each casualty seems to garner more publicity than any other cause of death – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard on the news, in a very serious tone, ’2 UK soldiers were killed in Afghanistan’. 2? Really? Of the 150,000 people who died today, of the hundreds who died violently, these two are a news story? Did they die in a strange or unexpected way? Is their death so improbable that we can be pleasantly surprised at such an unlikely occurence? No, they died fighting a war.

So there seems to be a phenomenon of greatly increased public sensitivity to military deaths, even as the actual number thereof falls. Although I may mock this slightly, I think it’s actually a very good thing.

A Socialist Reading of Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals” – Part 2

A while ago I posted about the first section of Friedrich Nitzsche’s famous work, ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, talking about how socialists might take the useful ideas from this rabidly anti-socialist thinker and use them for illumination, while criticising Nietzsche’s conclusions on his own terms.

So now I figured I might as well complete the series with posts on the second and third sections of that work. So here’s section 2 – which announces itself as being about guilt, justice, and punishment.

Nietzsche begins however by posing a surprising and unfamiliar question: how is it possible to breed an animal that can promise? A two-year-old child, or a cat, or a monkey, seem to be simply incapable of promising – whatever promise a two-year-old expresses now, we can put no weight on it, cannot accept it as a guarantee of the future.

And yet with adult humans, it seems, we can. How is this possible, if the latter developed out of the former – the growth of the child of course is largely governed by society, but this pushes the question back to how such a human society is possible on the basis of the monkey societies it evolved out of?

Psycho-Politics: what are the laws of motion of power-gratification?

I  often talk here about power, motivations and pleasures surrounding power, and the role they play in the psycho-politics of patriarchy, capitalism, and other such forces of oppression. I sometimes get a desire to try and systematise this, or a feeling that there’s the potential here for something similar to economics in its rigour (which is of course not all that rigorous). As a gesture in that direction, I started thinking about what sort of ‘laws of motion’ might be involved in such a ‘mechanics of power’.

A few sprang to my mind, but I’d be very interested in hearing thoughts or suggestions in comments. So I pose the question: if power is the subject of politics, and if the psychology of power is therefore the key political part of psychology, what could be the ‘axioms’, ‘theorems’, and ‘hypotheses’ of this study?

(of course I haven’t defined exactly what I mean by ‘power’, because it might be complex and potentially it’s more interesting to see how others define it)

So my thoughts were: