02.18.11

Some suggestions for a new left

Posted in General at 1:46 pm by nemo

The American public is being taken to the cleaners by the rightwing whackos and globalization capitalists who are destroying a whole civilization. In this crisis there is nothing that corresponds to a real leftist initiative. That’s because the format of classic Marxism followed by Lenininsm is played out. One indication of that is the near impossibility of stating what the history of the left since Marx really was!! Too much mythology has distorted the record. As in the previous post, the simple fact that Marx and Engels adopted a revisionist strategy after 1850 is lost to the record. Whether that was good or bad, the fact is that it is hard to understand what these two actually did.
Another example is the catastrophe of the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (which actually referred to democratic action) which entered the bloodstream, changed its meaning, ending up in Leninist fantasy land.
Almost everything in the whole canon is riddled with quicksand like this, and the attempts at correcton usually make the problem worse.

Beside that a host of critical attacks, some of them classic, have complexified the legacy making it problematical when a leftist amateur raised on propaganda makes assumptions that have been ‘refuted’ in such works. You can simply ignore the critics as ideologists, but at some point it ceases to work. The literature of the left is unreliable in that regard. Time to start over.
There is ample precedent for this: the early socialists critiqued and transcended the ideologies of the French Revolution, and the Marxists critiqued and transcended (and borrowed from) the early socialists. In a way Marx did a disservice here: his Capital is a mummy’s tomb whose secret is beyond ordinary leftist types who can only worship the text in awe. Set this junk aside and explicate the issues in plain english without theoretical ambitions, Hegelian mystifications or dialectical nonsense.
Historical materialism is a theory of history, wishing to be a science, and doomed to fail for that reason. All that is needed is an historical chronicle of economic systems and the reality of class, exploitation and revolutionary facts (but not theories of revolution). Why hand victory to critics with a theory of history? Has noone read Kant and the exposure of the antinomies in such a history?

A few things that are worth thinking about:
The Feuerbachian critique of religion was brilliant, but not enough. The atheism, and then materialism, of the nineteenth century is a millstone around the neck of the left. The left needs to retreat to agnosticism, the critique of historical religion as an exploiter, and a twentieth view of physics that is something better than the idiot scientism that came into existence in the generation of Marx.
Instead of an Hegelian fixation which has muddled every leftist since Marx, make the whole of German Classical philosophy the backdrop to ideology. A Kantian left makes a lot of sense, and in fact came into existence next to the Second Internationale, but was outflanked by that movement with its Engels orientation.

Abandon Darwinism, which is, as Marx originally understood, is a concealed economic ideology with Social Darwinist latencies. It should have been the job of the left to expose Darwin at once, yet now the left is the worst and most confused offender here.

There is a lot more possible here, but I fear that the current generation is going to flounder forever in the morass of the fragments of Second Internationale/Leninist ideologies and be eyewitnesses to the destruction of all the gains of labor since the nineteenth century.

Permalink