“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battles slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
– Karl Marx
Recent and Current Nightmares
The Marx quote above is rarely repeated in its full form. The first sentence’s famous declaration that tradition persists through time as a nightmare is more often than not all one will encounter of this explosive passage unless digging through Marx’s original text. Is this simply a coincidence or is there more at work beyond the surface appearance? Certainly one could interpret this tendency as a general weakness in theory or lack of familiarity with Marx’s original writing on behalf of the user. This approach does little to explain the repetition and general pattern of its omission by those identifying as socialists or communists with obvious familiarity of Marx’s writings, however. Instead, we must take the risk of questioning of what someone writes and how about a passage such as this tells us about what they see as the primary content to focus on. It does more than this, however. It also tells us about all the things that are not said and lie outside of the bounds of their own thinking as they are shaped by the larger structural forces at play. As the Marxist theorist, Louis Althusser, would say, what we encounter here is the way our structures of understanding and thinking about any particular problem lead to what we can say about it but also about what we cannot say. This unspoken, unthought content then persists as an “unconscious” companion to the conscious content. It does more than just persist within some dark, forgotten space in our minds, of course. This unstated, unconscious material stays alive in a way much more akin to the way ghosts and the Otherworldly live and encroach upon the living. It is there haunting us like a grey wraith that manifests as an absence and hovers, eerily flickering, at the edge of experience. It is almost as if we are possessed by it – acting based on the whims of a mysterious, invisible force that is outside of our perception but inescapably powerful.
To explore this process and its implications for today’s Left in full, we will at all times be guided by a basic principle of dialectics which states: characteristics of past developments continue to persist and change into future developments through a process which can only be understood by a thorough and rigorous analysis of material and ideological conditions of past and future. Only with this principle in mind are we adequately equipped to tackle any political problem or contradiction in a way that will not reduce it to simply ideas in people’s minds or reduce them to atoms simply obeying the larger Newtonian forces of economics. It also will help undermine any attempt to reduce the past to dust or a glorify it as a lost paradise. This is precisely what is at stake here: a tremendous and uncanny political problem grounded in the contradictions of historical development that structure and plague the minds and souls of us on the Left. This condition forces us into a relationship with the past, with history, as either an absence or a monstrous distortion. It is also clear that the standard political strategies and ideas typically discussed in Leftist politics today lead so quickly to deadlock, banality and crisis that it is vitally necessary to find new ways of analyzing and theorizing the political tasks and contradictions at hand. To do so, we must sometimes turn to modes of thought and experience much stranger than the standard approaches.
In horror films, it is a common when a character enters a place of alternate reality or is in the presence of whatever terrifying monster serves as the destructive force of the film, perception shifts and the normal categories of experience they are possessed with fail due to encountering something so beyond the normal capacity of understanding and threatening to our basic humanity that it warps reality around us. Our stomachs lurch and our minds recoil from the unspeakable threat and a sense of the uncanny or unearthly rises up in us. These types of experiences liquefy our basic sense of time and identity which leads to muteness or screams of terror precisely because they no longer make it possible to orient ourselves to the world around us in the same way once in the presence of the Thing. More often than not, what causes the mounting and intense anticipation and dread leading up to the climax moments in horror are the faint hints of something evil, demonic, being present in the world but lying just outside the boundaries of what the characters can understand or grasp. Consider the use of clicks and the complete paralyzing force that overwhelms Peter when he gazes at face of the demonic presence haunting him in the film, Hereditary. The demon presents itself to its victim, its host, in the only terms he can adequately grasp and thereby terrifying him all the more completely: his own reflection.
The confusion arising from the uncanny nature of such experiences causes for most of us a striving to avoid the implications of that encounter in any way possible. We can, of course, also find pleasure in these experiences of terror lurking at the boundaries of the knowable and the human. We can sublimate our terror of the unknown and face our own enamor with death or violence in a way that is low stakes and less lethal through the encounter on a screen. Terror becomes release becomes joy through the mediation of an image. More often than not, however, we avert our gaze from the horror or we preserve our reality by cramming the nightmare into whatever concepts we utilize normally to make sense of our worlds. When we are faced with something excessively Real, something that has not and can not be fully incorporated into our minds and language, it shakes the very foundations of how we make sense of the world and ourselves. Horror films need this tendency of ours towards avoidance and self-preservation to function properly and create their nightmarish effects. Part of what makes escaping the nightmare of history as Marx described so difficult, especially when the stakes are revolutionary social change, is due to the uncanny feeling arising when we come into contact with a contradiction in our thought, feeling, or actions in political work. When we encounter the Real. Our coping mechanism is a hysteric repetition but more on this to come. We avoid and preserve ourselves in a way similar to how we react in the face of the uncanny and the horror.
It has been said that the monsters, zombies and vampires of horror films are always the unconscious fears and terror we feel about social and political phenomena that threaten our basic existence and ways of life. In the U.S., zombie films arose in the late 1960’s and symbolized the terror that the white middle and upper classes felt about civil unrest and increasing radicalism and militancy of poor and people of color rising openly in rebellion across the country. The figure of the zombie also spoke to an increasing sense of alienation and leveling of human experience as a structural effect of consumer capitalism with the shoddy universality it promised. And the larger changes related to shifting production and opening up of new markets in peripheral countries outside the imperialist center while stoking the fires of Third World revolutions also exercised their influence in the background. This is to say nothing about the faceless masses the U.S. was at war with in Vietnam and their influence on the collective political unconscious. David McNally has written about similar aspects of zombies and the uncanny in sub-Saharan Africa folklore related the representations of the incursion of wage labor and the terror of free market capitalism obliterating traditional ways of life. But the crucial point is that those inferences and unconscious connections were not fully understood and explicit for the filmmakers or the enamored consumers of zombie films that experienced some deep, psychological response from the images on screen due to their activating their own deeply rooted fears and terrors. Sublimated horror can be pleasurable. These images activate the unspoken, unconscious content of the audience’s basic structures of thinking and feeling about people of color across the globe, the poor and lower classes and the social upheavals that threatened the basic status quo and social hierarchies that seemed so timeless and indestructible. This terror felt by the middle and upper classes was directed at other unrecognizable forms of human life that was responding to shifts in global capitalism. These mindless masses for them were easier to understand as monstrous threats seething and writhing in the darkness than effects of larger structural and social forces such as globalized political and economic destruction on others besides themselves. The true face of the victim is the uncanny horror of the conqueror. Dehumanization is indispensable.
What is the relevance of this analysis for the Left? It is that we are all haunted by larger historical forces and political events of the past which died and of futures that were wished for and struggled over but were lost. They haunt us as an absences in political consciousness and set limits to our thinking, feeling and acting in the politics. These are the traditions and history, our nightmare, that weigh on us which Marx described and some idea of how they do so. If there is anything to learn from the traditions of the U.S. Left, it is that there is no escape from our history but it is never what it appears. Our very experience of it now is so thoroughly mediated by the social effects of capitalism arising in the 1950’s that it easily morphs into something that appears as history but has a more strange and diabolical relationship to us. It is both dead and alive, zombified, as something once living and breathing but now existing only by some mysterious force propelling it forward. Part exists in what we see in the basic appearance, the rest is submerged into the political unconscious that Althusser pointed us toward.
This framing of political history and its forms is perhaps bizarre to the reader. Most discussions of history by those on the radical or revolutionary Left tend toward analysis of political strategy with some considerations of larger structural forces at play. It is fairly common to see intense frustration and deadlock between different factions and sects based upon what strategies are relevant and worth fighting or even dying for in our current era based on how we read and interpret this history. Some champion building forms of dual power inside (or perhaps outside) the prevailing political and economic forces in the U.S. by building “bases” among the working and lower classes. The Communist Labor Party, Philly Socialists and others involved with the recent work of the Marxist Center coalition are examples of this trend. Others argue for the continued necessity of building some form of a communist political party which will seize power at some future time and place after building up mass organizations focused on key political struggles in a given area (tenant rights, low wage employment etc.) Any number of Marxist-Leninist or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist groups would fall into this category such as Party for Socialism and Liberation on a broader scale or the localized Red Guards groups in Austin or Los Angeles. Some of these groups include calls for armed struggle against the U.S. state and firm commitment to a vanguard of elite political leaders to guide it. What is clear from surveying these various approaches is that none have built any substantial power at this point to implement their political programs and visions. This should not be read as a denouncement of particular groups or a moral judgment. The tasks at hand for anyone identifying as part of the Left today are incredibly vague, uncertain and full of risk of failure from repeating past mistakes. We must try to understand what characterizes this particular period, what its effects are on the actual political agents attempting to carry the historical torch of revolution forward and if there are new directions to be found based on that analysis.
Spend any amount of time engaged with radical Left and it does not take long to observe the bitter frustration and hostility emerge when clashes occur between these various trends mentioned above. Defensiveness, pontificating or the accelerated dissolution of collaborations to build working class power are some of the greater or lesser outcomes. Why is this so common? What are we to make of the interpersonal and group dynamics that give rise to these common patterns? In reality, this trend should not surprise anyone with even cursory knowledge of the political problems at hand at this historical moment. Let us invoke Marx from the beginning: it is rooted in the anxiety provoked by a period of revolutionary crisis which causes us to seek comfort in the battle slogans, names and costumes of the past. We need these comforts because we inherit the historical failure of almost every revolutionary socialist or communist movement in history. Adopting the language and look of these radical traditions gives us the seeming comfort of legitimacy precisely because we are wracked with anxiety that we are illegitimate without them. But who could blame anyone on the Left for feeling this? It is an inevitable result of grappling with revolutionary promises that have long since died while living with the anxieties, uncertainties and difficult questions our fore-bearers could not solve or failed to solve due to new, unforeseen problems after taking power. As Mark Fisher would say, we are haunted by the “lost futures” of what could have been but never was. So we cling to our battle costumes and slogans with the futile hope that we are revolutionizing our current conditions because they are easiest thing we can reach out and touch. What is the terrifying, uncanny thought is that this fascination, obsession, with these past names and costumes reveals that we are driven toward them so strongly because we desire to revolutionize ourselves and escape this anxiety and terror of our own inability to change the present. The current use of historical periods of revolution in the thinking and writing in most working organizations on the U.S. Left, such as Communist China through the Cultural Revolution or the October Revolution in Russia, seethes with this anxiety. We curl ourselves into the warm cocoon of a history which never really existed. We seek refuge in the nostalgia for a peasant insurrection or a great mass movement with very little understanding of the actual conditions and actions of those engaged in those actual revolutionary moments. Nostalgia and anxiety in response to this present crisis is part of our historical nightmare that plagues us and always lurk right outside of the door of the general body meeting of an organization or the blog post about the impurity of another’s political ideology.
If we are to have any hope of escaping this nightmare and exorcising the historical wraith of dead pasts and lost futures, we must see past the idea that our continued failures and division are primarily about questions of strategy and organization. If only it were this simple. The traditions of the dead generations we inherit have affected us the way the death of a loved one would does: by generating profound grief in our collective selves due to the cataclysmic loss of our beloved object. This is a primary component of experience for us living in this period of revolutionary crisis. It is the human, all too human, response to a world-shattering loss over what failed and what could have been. There is little hope of answering real questions of political strategy, collective power and marshaling the forces needed to confront the horrific beast of capitalism effectively until we can see how we are mourning in our words, moods and acts from this nightmare.When this loss and its impact are relegated to the shadows of our political unconscious, it will forever be the untamed horror keeping us trapped in nostalgia, anxiety and despair.
The Language of Defeat
There are two primary ways the nightmare of history haunts political language and thinking on the radical/revolutionary Left: amnesia and xenolalia. Amnesia manifests to us as a loss of memory about something that was once there but now gone. It manifests as an empty space in our experience when trying to remember political history and orient ourselves toward future action. Returning to the prior insights of Althusser, amnesia is a subjective state that we experience corresponding to the presence of unconscious elements lying outside the words or language that we can intimate in our readings of history and theorizing about what that history means. Xenolalia is the use of a language in the state of a religious speaker that is known only to the speaker, not those being spoken to. It is similar to its linguistic relative, glossolalia, but the words used have no bearing on others. It is language being used only for the speaker’s own internal gratification and satisfying a devotional urge of a religious or mystical character. The connection between religious ecstatic states and Left politics is an incredibly important one in the U.S. because the strangeness of the connection is itself related to the amnesia we have of the actual historical and cultural conditions that shape our politics: the extremely religious and conservative traditions and ways of being that persist in the social relations of capitalism in the U.S.. When considering the deep, intuitive feel we have for a type of religious discourse of true believers and a Protestant emphasis on our relationship to the True and the Divine being something private and individual, we can begin to understand some of the tendencies toward xenolalia within the U.S. Left. As Adolph Reed might describe it, we are predisposed to translate a type of religious and moral experience into political language through the “politics of personal testimony”. In line with our current analysis and metaphors related to history, we can look to the images in horror films when the possessed speak dead languages at the behest of the demons haunting their bodies and souls. They speak these languages when they have forgotten themselves and their own personal histories.
As stated, xenolalia occurs when one is in a mystical state, feeling as if one is in direct communion with transcendent forces that provide the Truth in a self-evident way. There should be skepticism about whether one is genuinely experiencing a mystical state or simply going through the motions and feigning touching the divine, of course. Questions of authenticity and intention behind our behaviors linger with all things in an era after the birth of irony and cynicism. However, as Slavoj Zizek has insisted, ideology functions even more effectively when we have a ironic or cynical distance to the beliefs and internal experiences behind our actions. One only need encounter online meme culture to find relevant examples of how difficult and strange a task interpreting someone’s intentions and meaning are when they are saturated in this ideological context. The reproduction of systems of dominance and power such as religion or a particular political ideology function in some ways more effectively when we keep this cynical distance but perpetuate the behaviors and practices that accompany them. As before, we are grounding this critique of xenolalia and amnesia within the larger ideological and historical context the Left exists within and is shaped by. They are the necessary appearances of the larger structural forces at play – a true illusion. Both combine to provide us with highly impoverished language and words when seeking to understand historical contexts and current issues in politics. To distill one of the implications of this argument: When one lacks the material power and organization that can give clear definition to our words, language becomes an increasingly murky battleground and struggles there become a proxy for having real collective power. The Left finds itself in exactly this situation at the moment.
Amnesia manifests primarily in the unspoken limitations of our language when employing concepts developed during past eras and places to current material conditions and political problems. In most instances, the meaning of these concepts and the words used to describe them have become so far removed from their original contexts that we are faced with severe difficulties in how they operate for our own time and how to understand them. What they seem to describe is not primarily the thing in front of us but our own experience of the thing. The nightmarish feedback loop of amnesia is even more effective because of this. Great care must be taken to not separate the inherited words and language we use from the other aspects of the nightmare such as our moods and actions that relate to our use of these terms. To do so easily leads one to a completely idealized and limited conception of the issue we are facing. A dialectical approach which begins with the totality of the parts without breaking it into isolated components and focusing on one in particular is the only method suitable to counteracting this tendency. We cannot separate the way a particular word or concept is utilized to describe a feature of an economics system or a political institution like a party or a state without the emotional response it gives rise to and the persistent and pervasive mood we experience based on our ruminations on those very words. “Democracy”, “free markets” or “freedom” do not define our choices and actions in the world because they are simply in alignment with an abstract set of principles or ethics we live by. No, they also operate at the level of our moods and emotions by causing us to feel profound hope, pride or optimism about our selves and the larger political and economic context we are embedded in. These have corresponding forms of political action and behavior which causes us to join a particular organization or decide that electoral politics should be the primary mode of political action, for example. As a historical example of the power of amnesia and xenolalia, consider the Western European conceptions of democracy and freedom arising from the Enlightenment period. For Domenico Losurdo and Charles Mills, they continue to point to the core antagonism persisting in liberal ideology to this day. Underlying the surface appearance of human rights and freedom was the unspoken unconscious content of colonialism and its corresponding racial hierarchy along with mass class struggles across the region. This is not to mention the profound destruction of human life and imperial conquest that functioned in the background which can be strangely absent when liberals and conservatives alike appeal to the historical importance of those concepts and words. The unconscious content of these classically liberal notions of freedom or democracy that are lost in our amnesiac state are profound terror and violence of slavery, colonial conquest and ruthless undermining of democratic states and radical movements abroad to preserve this deformation we call democracy at home.
It is not uncommon to find critiques such as these on the radical left against bourgeois liberalism and conservative politics. What is much more difficult is to take these same methods of criticism and insight and turn them upon oneself. This is the task required to break out of our nightmarish slumber. To reemphasize, this is not a moral critique about how particular groups or individuals discuss Left politics or the particular strategies they advocate for. To operate only with a moral critique would be to regress to the utopian socialist and anarchist methods which Marx critiqued so thoroughly for the limitations of this approach. It would also conform all to the well to the deeply-embedded religious urge we described operating in our social unconscious. The dialectical approach always pushes us to return to grasping the totality of the objective forces such as economic structures with the subjective forces of politics or ideology. To lose our grasp of this totality on the Left is to isolate ourselves and our own understanding of our conditions from the larger forces at play which structure and shape them. Amnesia is a necessary manifestation of the social relations and political history in the imperial core of globalized capitalism. Our own ideological illusions along with the significant gaps in our understanding of larger structural, objective forces are part of our inheritance as the subjects of capital. We must work with the materials that capitalism has provided for us. Part of the materials we have to fashion revolutionary change with are own consciousnesses, for better or for worse. They are part of the social relations of capitalism. Fears of past meanings and historical development flicker at the edge of our understanding but never register fully. They can not be integrated into our understanding because of the unspoken anxiety about our own revolutionary crisis of failure we grapple with. It creates a gap in our consciousness that functions as a barrier to a dialectical understanding of words and concepts.
A Thread of History
As a concrete example of the effects of nightmarish amnesia, let us examine a recent piece by Avery Minnelli of Philly Socialists. Philly Socialists are part of the recent effort to form a broad coalition under the name Marxist Center of socialist and communist groups focused on “base-building” to establish dual power within the United States. Minnelli’s focus on the questionable use of Marx’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat in our current political context is especially instructive for our current analysis. Marx relied on conceptions of dictatorship from Roman law in his use of the word and it stood for a constitutional institution to protect the established political and social order in times of crisis such as insurrection from internal enemies or from outside forces. The emergency powers in this period were granted to a trusted citizen and lasted for only 6 months. This more ancient conception was expanded in the French Revolution by Babeuf and Buonarroti to include a small group of radicals instead of a single individual actively making the revolution in the wake of a reactionary backlash (i.e., a state of emergency). Similarly to the Roman conception, this early form of a “mass dictatorship” would be temporary until a period of crisis was deemed over and a period of transition had been completed where the mass of people were prepared to participate fully as citizens without mortal threats from internal and external enemies.
Marx inherited a conception of “dictatorship” that had been increasingly applied to small revolutionary groups, democratic assemblies and even mass movements which he then applied specifically to a class – the proletariat. And this was applied not as a governmental form but as a statement of the class character of those taking hold of the reins of political power within a society. This slight historical digression is an important and fitting example on the Left of the way ideas and words develop in reference to the dialectical principle stated previously. The meaning of dictatorship continued to develop through the 1848 European revolutions and well beyond Marx through Lenin, Stalin and Mao and onto the fascist regimes of the 20th century. A sense of the uncanny for the reader may arise here. When we consider the word today, we do not picture the barricades but the concentration camp and the Left is not immune to this amnesia. To clamor for some return to its original usage as viable for recuperating a useful conception of dictatorship of the proletariat is to give way to nostalgia out of desperation to recapture the power of material conditions of revolution and working class power long since gone. To insist that dictatorship only means a form of political power defined by mid-20th century fascist regimes is to fall prey to that ideological amnesia which causes us to blot out its much richer historical development.
The Roman conception of a dictatorship used by Marx is much more akin to what we call martial law in the U.S., usually established during the conditions of a state of emergency or crisis. We inherit all of this history and must somehow make sense of it simply because there is no other choice. Its nightmare weighs on our brains whether we desire it to or not. And here is a key point mentioned in Hal Draper’s study of the subject which Minnelli utilizes: the dictatorship of the proletariat was conceived in opposition to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie which was characterized by massive inequality, tremendously destructive wars and rule of the incredibly majority of the masses by a tiny group of elites. This is to say nothing of the evolution of political and economic conditions within globalized capitalism and imperialism today which continues to shrink this dictatorship of the bourgeoisie into a smaller and smaller fraction and undermine some of Draper’s conclusions. But to simply refer to Draper’s analysis as the definitive argument is to neglect the 50 years of fundamental challenges to Marxist thought regarding the critique of capitalism based on the dichotomy of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. These critiques state that class formations are so incredibly varied and diverse across the categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat that they no longer have the same purchase and analytical power. Byung-chul Han and other current theorists even do away with both altogether and propose that the most effective way to understand class relations is simply through the increasingly abstract “dictatorship of Capital” which dominates bourgeoisie and proletariat alike. While this would take us too far from our current focus, it serves as reminder of the amnesia regarding the current use of these concepts.
It must be noted that although Minneli utilizes Draper’s study of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Let the Parties Hit the Floor, the complex path of its evolution as Draper describes it remains absent and it is simply stated that Marx and Engels “never defined it with any sort of precision” and that the Paris Commune, which Engels at one point identifies as a concrete example of an actual dictatorship of the proletariat, did not “look much like what I imagine Maoists mean when they use the term.” Quite right and Minnelli’s directness on this point is appreciated. Did Marx leave ambiguity in his definition of the the proletariat? Certainly. Does this mean there is nothing concrete that can be said of it? Certainly not.
The dictatorship of the proletariat continues to return to our language because we continue to face the brutal, desolating consequences of capitalism that gave rise to it in the first place. What is crucial, however, is that the specific conditions of capitalism which gave rise to Marx’s conception of the dictatorship persist but in a transfigured form much more complex and globalized in our current era than his own. It is not clear how the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat should function when we consider the critiques of classes and the historical trajectory of the Left being discussed in this piece. The social inequality and class stratification of the U.S. and global economic and political conditions of imperialism and super-exploitation of workers in the global south degenerate steadily and will only be accelerated by impending climate catastrophe. Will this most adequately be resisted and stopped by something we could call the dictatorship of the proletariat on a global scale? It is not clear and we serve ourselves and no one else by simple appeals to it in its dead, past usage. If there will be any continued relevance of the phrase, we must dialectically preserve its history with all its complexities and forge it into something new and relevant to these similar yet unprecedented conditions. It would need to describe a political form and strategy that could feasibly overcome the forces and relations of production within global capitalism in light of the failure of global revolution on the Left and in the Third World. It would need to define the working classes in a way that reflects the current material conditions of global capital and division of labor so as to give proletariat a coherent and useful meaning. Additionally, it would also need to answer the question of taking charge of the political means of authority and institutions during a transitional phase leading to a socialist future which will almost certainly entail a reactionary backlash and mortal threat to the revolutionary movement of working people leading the way.
Red Dreams
Another example: the use of words such as “economism” or “opportunism” by groups in the Marxist-Leninist (ML) or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM) vein that stem back to the anti-revisionist trends in the U.S. communist organizations from the post-World War II era onward. Whether we look at the language, communiques or statements from groups in the New Communist Movement in the late 1960’s and 1970’s or those operating now, we also find strong amnesiac trends. Again, this is not simply due to individual or group errors in theorizing or strategy which would again fall prey to the moral critique but is another manifestation of capital’s ideological effects and larger economic and historical forces. It is quite common to encounter the continued use of these phrases that emerged out of the highly specific political struggles between revolutionary movements and the forces allied against them in current debates between Left factions in political discussions online or in-person. Battle slogans and names are wholeheartedly and uncritically adopted from 1917 Russia or China in the late 1950’s to be deployed against other sects. More often than not, they are wielded as cudgels to beat opponents with when they have the appearance of replicating the past failures of the Socialist Party of Germany (SPD) support of imperialist, nationalist policies prior to the First World War or the nascent capitalist trends emerging in the Chinese Communist Party after their victory in 1949 and their struggles to deal with the latent contradictions of the transition toward socialism and communism.
Consider that Lenin was very aware of the dangers of ambiguity in theoretical formulations for key terms such as economism or opportunism. He clearly understood how this could lead to general trends of “Left-wing communism” which fundamentally undermined revolutionary potential through a misunderstanding of the past – an amnesic symptom similar to what is being described here. For him, he saw this manifested in his own time as a vague and confused theorizing of a “party of the leaders” versus a “party of the masses” based on the German Communists skewed understanding of the Bolshevik Revolution’s path to power. The nightmare of historical amnesia was fully present then and Lenin saw it with diamond-sharp clarity. Mao was also very keen to this danger which he spoke to in his constant references to “Left opportunism” which occurred when one greatly overestimated the subjective forces of will power and political organization. He wrote consistently on this during earlier periods of the Communist revolution in China because of the endemic nature of this tendency due to the complex nature of classes and social groups he was attempting to organize and lead. His clarity in 1929 about the role an influx of prisoners into the Red Army from captured White Army forces and how their low levels of political education were influencing the general political consciousness of the party as a whole is instructive here. He saw these historical and ideological factors as leading to an emphasis on a purely military point of view in regard to political tasks at hand for the Communist Party and an emphasis on “putchism”, a view that becomes focused only on insurrection and military takeover of a government by some relatively small group. He saw this as a grave error due to its lack of analysis of the forces of counter-revolution allied against the Communist Party and an overestimation of their own organizational power and capacities to seize power. An even more damning conclusion: some were inclined to “the malady of revolutionary impetuosity” which led to a complete disregard all subjective and objective analysis through being “riddled with illusions” and the “want only to do big things” which he saw as a ideological consequence of bourgeois class character. In his own time and in his own way, Mao’s method of criticism was precisely the same as we are attempting here: to identify the ideological inheritances of the people that were leading and forming the forces of revolution and to clearly state how they led to certain behaviors and political views which undermine the momentum and accomplishing of tasks in organizing for political power.
When one experiences today the use of phrases such as opportunism, economism or revisionism in discussions on the Left, they provoke charges of sectarianism against the users by anyone not aligning with their specific Left tendency. This never seems to stop their use, however, as it mostly invites retaliatory charges of bourgeois revisionism or some other mostly moral critique because they are not answered as desired. While they may appear to have the same validity and power to the users as they did in their original contexts, we must grapple with the fact that the problems they were developed to describe or to critique both are and are not the same problems existing today. When revisionism is discussed, how often do we understand the historical context of the split between Communist China and the Soviet Union in 1960 as a fundamental basis of its historical development or the differences between Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and the positions of the Second International? Some general similarities certainly exist in terms of advocating the engagement in electoral politics or the role of violence and armed struggle in radical political change but the dialectical approach would always conclude that such generalities are grossly underdeveloped for understanding one’s current material conditions and developments. If we fail to factor in the impending crisis of imperialism and global capital’s expansion of markets during the period of the Second International as part of their ultimate failure and the limitations of their focus on parliamentary politics, we remove fundamental historical factors that led to their particular conceptions and strategies labeled as “revisionist” or “opportunist” by other Left figures then and now. An even cursory glance at the criticisms from that initial period, however, has an entirely different character and function than those offered today. Put simply, we speak as if we are still dealing with the same political stakes that were present then when this is simply not the case. So why the continued use of these terms? We must see beyond the surface to understand what it is they are doing in political discussions today.
Two functions of these words as xenolalia: to glorify the user’s strong subjective identification with past revolutionary movements and traditions and to claim that one is an upholder and defenders of these traditions. These are incredibly attractive to us when understood in relation to the increasing challenge of trying to find a sense of identity and firm, predictable ways of structuring our experience of the world in a capitalist nightmare which tends to dissolve all things into air, especially the traditional structures and practices whether they be religious, political or social which historically have served this function. And anything that brings the sense of uncertainty and tenuousness to that sense of stability we have found brings a sense of the uncanny, horror and violent reactions to destroy the threat. If one considers the increasing precariousness of this process of identity formation and psychological safety under advanced capitalist development, it should be no surprise to any of us calling ourselves socialists, communists or anarchists that we also are severely implicated in similar ways. Amnesia serves the primary function of perpetuating the current relations of production under capitalism through ideologically obscuring anything that challenges the use of our political identity as the foundation for a stable sense of sense that can withstand the constant risk of becoming liquid. Xenolalia reinforces this through use of language rooted in nostalgic distortions of past political eras and revolutionary periods which preserve the appearances which grounds that identity. Considering the strong ties between Mao and the Communist Party in China to the framing of political critique and language in the revolutionary strains of the U.S. Left, it would significantly undermine the ideological functions of identifying with the Maoist trend today to know that Mao would have specifically opposed these trends themselves. Ideologically, this also fits in very comfortably with the common form of liberal identity formation which prioritizes symbolizing to others through commodity consumption and cultural symbols our innermost desires and values. It functions smoothly in a world built on market exchange of not just commodities and labor but our very lives and identities themselves. This is a major feature of political consciousness under globalized capitalism. It is a deep underlying social relation of capital, a process and formation inherited from the larger material conditions which cuts across the entire political spectrum. Its necessary appearance to us when considering the political issues at hand on the Left is of disagreements over political principles or strategy. Our amnesia obscures the larger structural imperatives of fashioning ourselves based on language and the primacy of knowing who we are by projecting a set of symbols and words to others. The content may change from a Pantsuit Nation fundamentalist, an anarcho-capitalist online, or a Marxist-Leninist at the mass protest but the endemic form is the same: distinguish yourself by what you project to others as if you are on stage, performing for an audience. The most important audience is usually the person engaging in these acts themselves. There is no escape from this form of political consciousness. We are all subject to it. Underlying the particular political positions is the same ideological function and relation of capital. It is a necessary appearance.
It must certainly be granted in response to the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist critiques toward other sections of the Left that there is indispensable validity to the ever-present risk of radical movements and groups becoming mired in strategic dead-ends of taking over the Democratic Party or becoming enamored with the next protest event. Groups seen as more liberal or on the Left flank of the Democratic party have certainly provided plenty of reasons to make this criticism. However, to only focus on this is to again fall prey to isolating a single part, namely the subjective aspects of political strategy of a group, versus the whole which must include why those strategies are advocated for and how we ourselves are implicated in the same relations. Using words and language for critiquing these trends in a state of xenolalia serves two more functions: to either define who is part of the in-group versus the out-group and to serve as a demonstration of ideological purity to others but mostly oneself. We need to define who is with us and who are our enemies as if we are in a warlike situation or under occupation by a foreign imperialist power. This is the context which Mao originally posed this question in when he identified it as a primary one. It is easily forgotten that Mao at different times around posing this question advocated for alliances with the national bourgeoisie to oppose Japanese imperial occupation and fairly consistently included the petty bourgeoisie in his list of revolutionary allies along with peasants and workers. Due to the deeply embedded functions of imperialist, settler colonialist ideology of nation states, we always seek to identify a foreign Other that must be destroyed and our historical amnesia defines this Other in progressively expanded ways. In the end, it is just us against the world of hostile others which strangely reinforces a settler colonialist mindset of the lone individual taming the unknown, terrifying wilderness. There are positive and productive aspects, of course. It provides us with the phantasm of a stable identity and security in an increasingly hostile world of diminishing hope and resources under globalized capitalism. But at what cost?
The Left is not immune from these forces which must be continually emphasized. They are part of the social relations we inherit and are molded by throughout our entire lives. They are the social artifacts of capitalism. Samir Amin once said that the removal of ideology from critiques of capitalism ultimately plays into the hands of the standard, bourgeois economic theory that Marx railed so vehemently against. Its emphasis on the economic and material factors only assumes the Enlightenment conceit that the economic could be easily divided from the social or political and was the all-determining, all-powerful force of history. Marx did not share this conceit, of course, as a reading of the first chapters of Capital Vol. 1 illustrates. Without the social, ideological factors occupying a primary place in our understanding of capitalism, we simply buy into that most seductive ideology of the neoliberal age: we live in an age of post-ideology. And the less we take ideology seriously or keep an ironic distance towards it, the more effectively it functions and ensures that everything changes but stays the same. Mark Fisher warned of this when he said we can no longer create the new, we are only stuck in endless recycling of the past that we yearn for nostalgically. But nostalgia is always an illusion. It describes not what we really happened but our deepest desire to escape from the horror and banality of our lives under this regime of capital. Marx saw this in the rise of Bonaparte III in 1848. This pattern arises in the crises of periodic moments of historical upheaval when everything appears uncertain and unstable. In our age, it is increasingly the dominant norm because crisis is the norm. The world is on fire and we all want to find comfort. The past has always proved the easiest form of solace because it is easily accessible in a distorted form to us all. First as tragedy, then as farce. For us, the opposite may be more accurate. Let us dispense with nostalgia.
Compromised Insurgency
A central claim being made here is that the complications and oddities arising from amnesia and xenolalia cuts across various Left tendencies, not just Leninist and Maoist strains. Mass organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) show their own symptoms of amnesia and xenolalia. An analysis of the historical development and defeat of the Western European Left movements organized into the Second International can help illuminate their effects in the general functioning of organizations like the DSA. A common critique of the Second International is that their strategy failed because they could not be fidelitous to their original socialist principles. Whatever initial political purity and adherence to the tenets of Marxism they could claim degenerated into a reform-oriented approach based in their class positions as Left-leaning bourgeois intellectuals. While this critique is an important one, especially considering its emphasis on the material class content of the socialists driving the Second International, it fails to be fully dialectical by overly simplifying the ideological and historical forces underlying their strategy. It becomes all to easy to return to the vulgar Marxist approach which reduces everything to economics. Remember Amin. They chose the route and strategies they did because they also firmly believed that the increasing numbers of people forced into the working and lower classes guaranteed their deterministic ideas of the transition to socialism was all but imminent and inevitable. The increasing rate which the masses of people were being pulled into the embrace of the capitalist wage labor system and the working classes along with the political move toward universal suffrage in Western European states appeared to confirm their assumption that capitalism’s destruction was going to be accomplished with nothing much needed besides the use of the ballot box. The appearance of capitalist development made it logical to divine that it was proceeding to its own destruction just as Marx had predicted. They read the tea leaves of history and divined a socialist future awaited them around the corner.
The Western European Enlightenment’s underlying theoretical and cultural assumptions that “progress” is inevitable and history moves in only one direction haunted them. Hope and faith in a future that was inexorable wove itself into their organization and strategy. It was a fatal theoretical error and one that continues to wreak havoc on us as part of our own historical nightmare. They failed to understand the flexibility and resilience of capital due to belief in the iron-clad laws of historical development. The forces of capitalism not only did not develop the way they anticipated but it grew into a global imperialist force that brought unprecedented destruction and death that the socialist nations threw themselves into willingly. They were devoured by the beast of capital and machines of war. International class solidarity became secondary to the interests of nations of people and states. This was a development of ideology and political formations that in hindsight seems both inevitable and unstoppable. To only see the failures of the Left during the Second International period as the result of ideas in people’s minds is to fall prey to a strange idealism that is outside of any Marxist approach to politics. To believe one’s own ideas about revolution or that there is some hand guiding history that will lead the working classes to victory have both proven to be a dead end. And who has paid the price? The working classes and those on the Left who were brutally suppressed.
So what is the relevance of this extremely brief historical analysis for groups like DSA today? The historical contradiction between allegiance to the international solidarity of the working classes or one’s own nation and people (broadly defined) is part of the dead traditions and nightmare of the Second International weighing on today’s U.S. Left. Our amnesia banishes this history to the unconscious ghostly realm of our political ideas and understanding. This is to say nothing of the persisting contradiction’s effects during the late 1960’s and 1970’s Left organizations reflected in their urban guerrilla strategy of insurrection in hopes it would lead to a revolution in the U.S. that corresponded to developments in the Third World. This was also a theoretical error based on a flawed analysis of the conditions of global capitalism and the scourge of U.S. empire. But it was one that was shaped by the historical nightmare of the futility of reforming capitalism into socialism through parlimentary and electoral means stemming back to the Second International. Returning to the DSA, we must ask how their overall political strategies and unstated theoretical assumptions reflect the amnesia of the described historical developments. Any approach that advocates for a takeover of the Democratic Party faces serious strategic questions due precisely to the prevailing conditions of global capitalism which continue to brutally discipline even those less radical movements willing to utilize existing forms of electoral and state power to force concessions (such Syriza in Greece). Compromises have come all too easy from even those Left movements beginning with a more radical political program and a wide base of support among the masses of people. Engaging with these questions does occur in groups like the DSA but the issue at hand is the wider neglect and uninterest in these questions for the broader membership. One factor is the class character of membership but this cannot be separated from their socialization and interaction with the larger ideological formations of capital in the U.S. There are of course members of the DSA very interested and engaged with these questions on the contradictions of international solidarity versus focus on domestic welfare programs and reforms. The task is not to explain the exception but the general tendency, however. A distorted and amnesiac form of the history of socialist and communist revolutions grounded in being socialized and educated in the U.S. can easily drive us to advocate for winning what gains we can out of the terror of the past. This historical understanding is a child of ideological conditioning vital to maintaining of class structures and consent to the global order of capital and U.S. supremacy. It appears as self-evident and non-negotiable the way all ideological forms do – they are simply the natural order, reality itself.
Let us focus on imperialism and U.S. empire more to continue drawing this out. A recent survey of DSA membership shows the effects of amensia under the modern regime of imperialist capital relations. While it is not the lowest, the importance that imperialism holds for members in terms of their priorities as socialists and members of the largest mass organization in recent memory is indicative. One cannot help but see a strange fog surrounding this gap and indicates that wraith of the political unconscious is present. Another anecdote: on an episode of Radio War Nerd podcast, one of the hosts, Mark Ames, describes attending a 2017 event hosted by Verso Books, the major academic Left publishing company today, debating whether the U.S. should intervene in Syria. Ames stated that an overwhelming majority (somewhere around 80%) of the attendees supported intervention. Those in attendance may not have all been socialists but it is a fair assumption that a high percentage of socialists were in attendance did support intervention based on Verso’s reputation and Left readership. And how many of those understand or have even cursory awareness that U.S. “humanitarian interventions” are connected to a century’s worth of history of both the U.S. and Britain destroying secular nationalist, some of which were socialist, movements in the Middle East that would challenge the power of capitalist imperial interests in the region. They did this by murder, undermining democratic governments and processes and through funding radical Islamic groups (some of which are the same ones we call terrorists today) to destroy these movements. Intervention in Syria is another chess piece in this age-old game of imperialism and maintaining U.S. influence in the region. The memory of the masses may be short but the memory of power and interest is long.
What to make of this? Two fairly logical conclusions:
- There are serious and disastrous limitations for most DSA members and U.S. socialists in general in terms of their ability to grasp the place of U.S. domestic policies and socialist politics in the larger global context. The long history of Marxist analysis showing the inextricable connection between surplus resources in the U.S. being available for more expanded social programs, a strong welfare state and the increasing super-exploitation of workers in countries such as India, Pakistan, or Vietnam. An aspect of our amnesia in the U.S. is we do not even have a framework to understand our individual experiences in relation to the global whole. Totality is completely disintegrated into individuals and family units. There is no society – even less so a global one. It is also related to the ideology of American Exceptionalism which sees itself as exempt from the same constraints and limitations binding “lesser” nations. More aspects of our social conditions under global capitalism. It is much easier to exploit and destroy to keep the engines of profit running when the masses of people simply do not have a way to see the carnage that keeps their daily lives from disintegrating. We simply do not think about it.
- Organizations like DSA utilize strategies and political solutions that are not just tenuous at best (such as running political candidates for major Democratic party elections to influence the party’s politics in a more Left direction) but have faced major defeats historically such as the Second International period described previously. They may be simply repeating attempts by Left organizations of various stripes through much of U.S. history post-World War II which ultimately failed for a variety of reasons. For example, one of the great untold stories of the politics of the 1960’s era of Black Power was their eventual transformation into more middle-class and liberal establishment politics led by the emerging leaders of the bourgeois party politicians of black and brown communities in the 1970’s. Even more alarming are the forces that were contributing and influencing their development in these directions. These include people like McGeorge Bundy of the Ford Foundation who had deep ties to the Council on Foreign Relations and the C.I.A. The DSA’s own history is haunted by the effects of amnesia. Michael Harrington formed the DSA as a vehicle for taking over the Democratic Party because this appeared to be the only viable socialist strategy during the Reagan era and the global conservative backlash that also birthed Margaret Thatcher’s reign of terror. It will be left up to the reader to judge whether the DSA’s history of focusing only on white, middle-class membership has enduring ramifications for their membership today. Amnesia’s embrace can be comforting.
Most critiques of these trends in the DSA from revolutionary Left groups fall back on the use of xenolalia as their method of attack which includes charging their membership and local chapters of liberalism, economism, opportunism, etc. In some sense, most of the debates between these two tendencies could be seen as xenolalia being deployed in against each other but both originating in their respective amnesic trends. It is not surprising that the common response by DSA members to these criticisms is that they are simply sectarianism. This is an all-too-easy shorthand for almost a century of the historical developments of revolutionary socialist and communist movements. It should not be surprising that a large percentage of members may not even to able to discern what actually is the charge against them due to this. Another typical response is the familiar sense of the uncanny when something beyond the normal categories of understanding are present. It leads to a strange silence due to a lack of a sufficient basis in history and theory to respond adequately to the criticisms. It as if a strange Other has spoken to you in a tongue of unknown origin with no possibility of translation. Of course, this is not the case with all DSA members. There are most certainly highly knowledgeable and experienced Leftists in the organization with clear political theories leading to their strategies and developed political consciousness. This by and large does not encapsulate most new members that joined after the “Trump Bump” surge in number post-election, however. It is crucial to remember that no social group or organization is a completely coherent bloc without variations and contradictions. DSA is no exception and neither are the groups of the revolutionary Left. For the DSA, it is reasonable to assume that a vast majority of those members are not from long histories of Left struggle and thinking but are in a process of political redefinition from more liberal/centrist positions or even some right of the political center. These members would be even more removed from any basis to understand what defines someone’s words or actions as liberalism or opportunism.
Let us simply state here that these tendencies and interactions of social groups can be especially counterproductive because they are grounded in specific ideological forms and effects without acknowledging themselves as such. While there is certainly a structural critique to be made of the DSA and its membership related to their positions in the production process or larger class society as a whole, the charges of liberalism or opportunism more often than not obscure this through xenolalia. It becomes a moral critique about their ideology but appears to itself as a critique of material conditions. To actually pose a criticism of organizations like the DSA requires a more historically-oriented analysis along with a much stronger ideological critique based not in their becoming decadent compared to past revolutionary movements but through a dialectical approach: a concrete analysis of their conditions as an organization and of their membership along with sharp analysis of the contradictions at play in their ideological development and political strategies.
While it would be too far from our focus to attempt a full analysis of the DSA in this vein, we can at least make some comment on perhaps the core contradiction of the DSA in relation to the function of Left amnesia. This contradiction is both an economic and political one connected to imperialism with corresponding existential, psychological effects. The economic and political contradiction consists of the ease of movement of labor pools and production sites to peripheral states in a globalized capitalist system that functions smoothly with nation states still intact and the pressing by the masses of people on those same capitalist forces to grant more concessions to workers in the imperialist core such as increased wages or universal health care. While there is some talk of manufacturing and formerly outsourced jobs returning to places like the U.S., whatever trend may be at play seems to bring back the lessons of the peripheral wage labor context in China or Pakistan when it returns home. The jobs return with the lessons of labor discipline and exploitation learned in the peripheral countries. There is no return to the Golden Age of Capitalism after World War II. All in all, it is perhaps too early to definitively state how a globalized capitalist system will resolve its ongoing contradictions into the future but we can definitely assume this based on its history: capital will continue to demonstrate tremendous creativity and ruthlessness in its attempts perpetuate itself as long as possible, whatever the cost.
What is crucial to grasp in our current analysis is this: the continued calls for either re-unionizing and rebuilding a labor movement resembling what existed during age of capitalism post-World War II or to focus only on winning concrete gains for the working classes (which is itself a very ambiguous category at this stage of history) are similar forms of nostalgia and amnesiac identification with the past compared to our descriptions ML or MLM groups earlier. They are a shared ideological effect of capitalist social relations. Some DSA members and sympathizers exemplified by Dead Pundits Society podcast strive to grapple with the question of strategy after the destruction of unions and labor movements during the reactionary backlash of Reagan and Thatcher beginning in the 1970’s. Their energy and enthusiasm for at least attempting to seriously engage with the challenges of these questions is admirable indeed. But for most, the past simply repeats itself in the same battle slogans and costumes. The content may appear different but the form, the nightmare, is the same. Nothing new is created. We return over and over again to the same dead corpse without much in the way of dialectical transformations of these past movements into something that can significantly challenge the current structural and ideological conditions oppressing us in some wholly new and terrifying ways.
While the use of Marx’s method and ideas here to critique the Left internally for spurring clarification and development is not by any means novel, why has this generated seemingly so little effect and transformation in the past? Why are these tendencies toward amnesia and xenolalia so powerful and entrancing? Some factors driving this process could be the continuing political and economic structures of capitalism generating tremendous political apathy, lack of access to the knowledge and training to utilize these tools or the capitalist education system’s function of destroying whatever capacity most of us have to think critically about these issues for the purpose of turning us into docile, disciplined workers. While these are all certainly relevant and indispensable, they also focus explanations so heavily on the “objective factors” and the potentially vulgar reduction of all to the economic that the risk of simply regurgitating answers from past eras is significant. What we must attempt to do is what all dialectical thinkers have pushed for: not a wholesale embrace of the past and rejection of the future but a working through of both past and present into something new. So we must confront and wrestle with what is the corresponding ideological and cultural content of late capitalism that arose after World War II that we inherit and are shaped by as individuals prior to ever encountering the Left. We will look to that nebulous idea of postmodernism to help us understand what exactly is driving these tendencies toward amnesia and xenolalia that cut deeply through politics as a whole as we experience it. No time to waste.
Continued in Recurring Nightmares (Theoretical Inventory Pt. 2)
Capillaries 