What Lefty Intellectuals Get Wrong
revolution destroys the old order, but then what?
As I’ve been re-reading Jerry Z. Muller’s The Mind and the Market I’ve been trying to figure out what the lefty intellectuals in the tradition of Marx to Lukács to Adorno to Marcuse thought they were doing.
Stephen Soukup in “Revolutionaries without a Cause” points out the problem with the lefty revolutionary “march through the institutions”:
They never anticipated, therefore, that they would repeat the mistakes of their Enlightenment-era predecessors, that they would tear down the institutional and moral frameworks of their era, only for them to be replaced with nothing of consequence, leaving a lost generation (or more).
One of Lukács’ criticisms of capitalism is that of “reification,” meaning experiencing everything as objects:
In capitalism, human social relations and activities appear as relations between things (commodities, bureaucracies, institutions) with a “phantom objectivity.”
Yes, corporations tend to objectify the production and distribution of goods. They tear down the old city community of the guilds and replace them with the purely economic institution of the corporation.
But corporations come and go: the average corporation in the Dow Jones Industrials only gets to be there for 20 years. On the other hand, there has never been anything like the objectification of everything with Communism and the Administrative State.
And another thing, mentioned by Stephen Soukup in “Fenway Park, College Basketball, and the Loss of Community.” He discusses a video of Fenway Park reliving the old days of the 1950s, how it prompted everyone to realize that there was a sense of community back in the day that had since been lost.
[T]he need for community is deeply embedded in man’s character. It is something that we absolutely require, that we crave, that enables us to live in tranquility and contentment.
Earth to lefties: in the 19th century, when capitalism was supposedly objectifying everything, there was a world of voluntary community organizations, all kinds of fraternal societies, lodges, and mutual-aid societies. And everyone belonged.
But your welfare state has destroyed all that “community.”
When Marx prophesied life under socialism he wrote that people would “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.” Nothing there about “reifications” and bureaucracy and administration. Nothing about politics. Everyone was just doing their thing, without expert supervision and objectivity.
But when you fight for a revolution you tear down the pre-existing “institutional and moral frameworks,” and after the revolution you start again from zero. And because you are believers in politics you replace the old institutions with government and administration and bureaucracy. In other words, you “reify” — objectify — society, and “human social relations and activities appear as relations between things (commodities, bureaucracies, institutions)” just like in the capitalism you deplore.
In Soukup’s account, the purpose of all the lefty revolution and the “march through the institutions” is to place Marxist intellectuals in important roles in society ready for Phase II, the creation of new norms and structures.
The problem is that politics and government don’t set up new norms and structures. They just bash away at the ruling class’s enemy and gift the ruling class’s friends. Because government and politics can’t get beyond the political and its friend / enemy distinction.
The result of this permanent revolution is what we have now. We have lefty activists calling for revolution, and we have lefty politicians twerking the welfare state with “affordability” initiatives to try an alleviate the failures of the previous generation’s government programs.
But that doesn’t solve our problem. Our problem is to let people create and grow organic organizations and mutual-aid societies and clubs in which people work together and create community and help each other, because that is what humans do when they don’t have a club in their hand.
So NY Mayor Mamdani completely missse the point with his comment:
We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
Currently we don’t have “the frigidity of rugged individualism;” we have the frigidity of rigid government programs and regulations and funding and fraud. The “warmth of collectivism” would be a network of voluntary and organic institutions completely independent of government and politics and power where people come together voluntarily in community to help each other.
And it would feel great just like the crowd at Fenway Park back in the day seemed like something that anyone would want to experience and enjoy.