The Theory of the Two Lefts
Thoughts on restoring the idea of the left, why rivalry overwhelms the left and how psychoanalysis can repair the divide between the "two lefts"
In a casual conversation with someone I hadn’t seen for a while they asked me what I think about the left these days. Upon further prodding they asked what I’m doing with my writing, podcast and general efforts in public education. They wanted to know if I still believe in the left. So I told them what I believe. I said that I want to re-connect the left to the revolutionary tradition and that I believe that Marxism remains the backbone of the left and that the only way a new political practice and strategy can emerge is through learning from the historical lessons of the worker’s movement and the distinct role Marx and Engels offer as the guiding theorists of the left.
I take C.L.R. James’ educational approach to heart. He was fond of saying that there is nothing the working class needs more than Marxist education. For James, Marxism is qualified as a form of knowledge that has distinct class application, by which he meant that Marxist knowledge is not useful to the bourgeoisie. The working class benefits from Marxist theory because it stands as a corrective to the deleterious direction of bourgeois politics. Marxist knowledge, once it is incorporated into politics makes legible a whole series of fetishes on social and political life. Marxist knowledge is what keeps the class struggle grounded in reality, it is what pushes the forces of the left in a strategic direction. As I have recently wrote, western Marxism needs to wake up from its slumber and restore the political core to Marxist practice.
After saying all of this my friend said, “wait but doesn’t the left no longer really exist?” And at the level of common sense we should admit that they are correct. But just then I realized that for many on the left this is a downright offensive proposition that the left does not exist. That is because many on the left would maintain, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the left does not signify a primary set of ideas and principles. For many on the left, the left signifies the movement of all oppressed groups; the left signifies the existing movements of struggle and agitation against all forms of oppression. For many on the left, the left is an almost angelic entity which to even struggle over its meaning, its foundational principles or its direction would be anathema to what the left does. Many on the left possess an implicit Kantian position on the left, they see the left as a regulative idea; for them the left is an undefinable and ultimately an unknowable idea. The left is therefore not really eligible to be critiqued.
From Post-Marxism to the Extra-Class Left
I want to argue that the left should be construed as a field of ideological struggle and that the adoption of a post-critical position on the left should concern us. As I write about in the conclusion to my Parasite book, post-critique is a trend in the contemporary left that has abandoned what Paul Ricœur called the hermeneutics of suspicion.1 The hermeneutics of suspicion can be understood as the crucial critical direction of the left; it is the idea that relations of domination are hidden, that they reside beneath the surface of institutions and that power has to therefore be pried open through a ruthless critique. Pick your fighter: Marx, Nietzsche or Freud, but be careful when you try to combine them!
Now there is a historical trajectory that has led to this conception of the left and it stems from the New Left and the 68’ period which tended to define the left’s priorities in distinct ways: they align the subject of the revolution as totally contingent, as no longer reliant on existing class forces or emanating from social structure. This has led to the tendency to align the left with the most marginal, to prioritize the counterculture, and to eschew the working class as the revolutionary agency in favor of a more contingent conception of subjective agency.
In this regard, it is important that we remember that the meaning of the left involves not only a commitment to principles and the idea of the left (an argument I will make here in a moment); it also involves a commitment to a conception of the revolutionary subject. And I think that the disarray in the idea of the left today is bound up with the problem of a fundamental confusion over the revolutionary subject. In addition to the New Left, western Marxists, from Laclau, Negri, Badiou to Žižek each argue—in different ways of course—that the revolutionary subject is contingent, and no longer bound up with the social structure. As Rodrigo Nunes puts it in Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal, “political subjectivation, and the concrete forms that it can take, do not follow necessarily from a position in the structure. They are contingent and must be composed; they must be organised.”
Nunes points out that the working class was abandoned around the time of the fall of the U.S.S.R. by western Marxists. They argued that the working class no longer has a ‘transitive’ relation to social structure, to use Badiou’s term. This means that political organization has to account for a much wider series of probable revolutionary subjects in lieu of a working class agency that preexists by virtue of the division of labor or due to proximity to the means of production or to the generation of surplus value. Nunes finds this contingent basis of the revolutionary subject to shape the reality of the left and as such, the post-Marxist insights into class and revolution force us to re-tool leftist strategy: no longer does the labor power of the working class pose the single greatest threat to the perpetuation of the capitalist order. And therefore no longer is the task of the left to organize the working class towards ends that would emancipate its condition of commodified labor and dependency on wage labor.
I am opposed to the post-Marxist turn in contemporary leftist thought but my opposition is only formed and shaped by my direct experience with this body of thought.2 This is the seabed from which I learned Marxism and it has not only influenced me, it has shaped the direction of leftist strategy writ large. And to that end, a ruthless honesty must be had in regards to post-Marxism. Not only must we identify its shortcomings at a theoretical level, we must recognize that it has a role to play in accounting for the collective defeats on the left in our lifetime. I would argue that the Laclauian theory of the left remains the dominant, albeit the failed, vision of the left. This is a vision in which the idea of the left in the west is shaped by heterogenous social groups and social causes that aim for a hegemonic coalition. The Laclauian left was known as left-populist because Laclau himself warmed to this label ‘populism’ in his later years. But this general orientation far exceeds left-populism and the specific failures of PODEMOS and Syriza, even though their failures within the electoral arena are highly instructive.
Hegel famously maintains that philosophical forms are only truly speculated on in their hour of waning and failure. When it comes to how we assess post-Marxism this could not be more true. For some on the left it is taboo to even invoke this term; one person’s post-Marxism is another person’s Marxism. But as I have argued, building off of Isabelle Garo’s work, Laclau’s concept of the left reduced Marx to a class reductionist based in a reading of Marx’s original political prescriptions, not based in Marxism. This led Laclau to formulate a theory of leftist strategy that eschews not only class, but the primacy of ‘labor power’ as the central countervailing force of political organization. In other words, the consequences of the contingent theory of social position, and the ‘extra class’ view, which is today championed by William Clare Roberts and others, has resulted in a fundamental confusion regarding the left’s commitment to its core principles. This perspective maintains that the revolutionary subject is up for grabs, that it only appears as an evanescent or rare event, triggered typically by a spontaneous protest or riot.
The extra-class left makes up one pole of the left, which I will elaborate on later. But first we have to recognize a fact that those of us on the left know too well, which is that life within the left resembles a chaotic game of capture the flag, in which sub-communities—that are often highly disconnected from one another in terms of their strategy, demands and vision—engage in struggles that are parochial and disconnected from a common platform or set of demands. This is not to say that the righteousness of any particular struggle or cause is to be questioned or that the rights that are demanded from these groups should not be included into the meaning of the left. It is to say that the left is at a turning point, a crisis born from its rivalries along with its abandonment of a commitment to class emancipation. We seem to be experiencing the exhaustion of the possibility of the left to rediscover its foothold in the universal emancipatory tradition.
How Rivalry Works on the Left
Rivalry is a central concept in psychoanalysis. Lacan maintains that racism resembles a rivalrous structure in our times because the psychic mechanism at work in racism revolves around the threat of the theft of enjoyment. This sense of theft is structural, it operates on a persecutory mechanism. To understand how widespread the experience of theft is in our society, just investigate the numbers on the theft of wages and then consider the relations of domination that must occur in capitalist labor relations in order for this to continue and be normalized. Bourgeois institutions fuel aggression because they must maintain these fraught relations. Although it must be said that this aggression is not universally experienced by each subject alike within bourgeois institutions, however, I would argue that the affect of aggressive rivalry shapes most social environments across our culture, including the environment in which we hash out the meaning of the left, namely the public sphere.
We have to understand rivalry as a perpetual effect of market individualism and entrepreneurial competition. The market creates a paternalism that forces every movement and individual on the left to adhere to the logics of market competition. This causes the culture of the left to mirror the frameworks of bourgeois institutions. Market individualism is violent, it reduces the basis of social conflict to moralism, it fosters an obsession with what Michel Clouscard calls the ‘the playful, the marginal and the libidinal.’ While market individualism feeds off of rivalry because its logic is a zero-sum game—its unconscious is sado-masochist—it assumes that what is determined on the site of the market to be a true reflection of reality. But its operation cannot fully assume this in-built structure, so the playful, the marginal and the libidinal offset this reality.
Marx and the wider Marxist tradition instruct us in the logic of bourgeois social relations by showing how they are subordinated to fetishism, and that the basis of this fetishism is furthered by bourgeois class interests that aim for the reproduction of the social order. Fetishism can here be understood as emerging from the nexus of exchange value and commodification and this shapes the class relations, not merely the realm of consumption. As Leon Rozitchner points out, there is an aggressiveness that is intrinsic to bourgeois institutions because the ideological basis of these institutions must conceal (fetishism refers to a covering over of the real) the material basis of the social reproduction of class forces. One of the most important aspects of covering over and what I call nominalizing that occurs within bourgeois institutions takes an ideological form; bourgeois institutions will not produce an adequate or rational framework that describes how exploitation, marginalization and oppression in fact functions in capitalist society.
A left that has removed a commitment to large-scale class organization and opted for a contingent idea of social groups and marginalization theory will risk co-option at every step. This is because the bourgeois worldview has a foundation that is formed in an antagonistic relationship to the working class—and the working class, for its part—is deprived of the means to generate a distinct worldview that would reflect its material interests. This occlusion of working class interests internal to the core composure of the bourgeois worldview is what compels bourgeois institutions to nominally cover over this absence. A left that has abandoned a theory of class antagonism at this level will participate in this very same process of liberal nominalizing of the basis of social struggle.
Because the left is committed to anti-capitalism, it aspires to eradicate all domination and oppression, however in this commitment, the left must also develop its ideas and principles and by extension its practical demands at a distance from bourgeois institutions. The left must avoid capture by bourgeois institutions or the left will risk falling sway to its covering over operations. It must be said that bourgeois institutions can, but yet seldom offer, exceptions which can entail mild reforms, but typically it involves rhetorical interest or pandering to the ideas of the left.
As I will argue in a forthcoming work, the old distinction between proletarian and bourgeois revolution must be dusted off and reintroduced today. It remains a necessary distinction for our time precisely because a huge part of the left has abandoned any analysis of the class forces that makeup bourgeois institutions or that shape the possibility of the development of revolutionary strategy. For any hangups I may have with Alain Badiou, one insight he offers that is of utmost importance today is the strategic claim that the left must subtract itself from bourgeois politics. In my framework of analysis, only a subtraction from market paternalism can foster the public space that would be capable of generating a new rationality on the left. Is such a prospect possible through Marxist streaming, through the various avenues of public education we see sprouting up online? We have to go deeper into the two lefts and the rivalries that take on an ideological form in order to parse that question out.
Rivalry and the Idea of the Left
The fundamental basis of ideological struggles are often elusive today because the left has largely adopted, in many ways, a post-critical position. The trend towards post-critique concerns me a great deal, and it is the prospect of ruthless critique that many on what I will call the ‘counterculture left’ have tended to abandon today. It would be possible, but we do not have the space to do so here, to track the historical trajectory of the social class that forged the New Left, namely the rise of the new middle strata, and how the interests of the middle class has shaped a particular ideology of power and of the task of the left.
The trend towards post-critique was already baked into many trends within the New Left. For example, they aimed to abolish power at its very root, it was the eradication of the Oedipus complex itself that was on offer for Wilhelm Reich (a preeminent New Left theorist), not merely the overcoming or sublating of some egalitarian aspects of the bourgeois family. This is what Philip Rieff has referred to in his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, as a concept of power within the New Left bottoming out into a mystical conception of power that has completely lost a dialectical treatment of power. But I would argue that we have witnessed a strange reversal of this tendency on the left; the aim and the demand is still often presented as an ultra demand, family abolition comes to mind,3 but this demand does not tend to have a commitment to ruthless critique. The waning of critical thought on the left is a troubling prospect because undergirding this position is not only a pessimism about what social critique and theoretical praxis can achieve, there is also an anti-intellectual posture implicit in this turn to post-critique.
But let us return to the basis of ideological rivalry on the left. What is the schism or wedge that drives the left apart? Frederic Jameson, in his important essay “Pleasure: A Political Issue” argues that there are really two lefts. We cannot diagnose these two lefts as purely class-based formations, as emanating from determined or fixed class positions. Class after all is a relation, not a position, and as such, the construction of the two lefts is better understood as a process of construction based around proximity to bourgeois institutions. And let me reiterate, as I do in my book on the family, that we should look to synthesize these two tendencies on the left, we should not adopt the Nietzschean conception of power and aim for the destruction of one tendency over another. This is one of the reasons why Freud matters to Marxism and it is why Freudian-Marxism helps us to pinpoint this split and work-through it.
One way to think about the two lefts is that they are made up of two competing relations to a conception of pleasure and to the reality of the mass commodification of everyday life.[2] Another way to construe of this division is by two competing theories of revolution and the revolutionary subject. I want to describe these two tendencies in ways that do not box any existing groups in too rigidly, but once I begin to describe these tendencies you should be able to register existing groups, tendencies, podcasts, publishing houses etc. as reflective of one or the other.
The first tendency is the counterculture left. Its affect tends to be joyful and collective, its focus is libertine, it is concerned with furthering the project of micropolitics and counterculture. It construes politics as an act that itself is liberating, it relies on a theory of the commune as a site where experimental forms of living should be furthered. Its advocates tend to be highly ensconced in bourgeois institutions in part because much of its praxis entails a radicalization of welfare for the poor and the marginal. It maintains a relationship to bourgeois institutions that will often support forms of paternalism as long as that paternalism is giving cover to marginal groups. It maintains the view that the subject of revolution is fully contingent, and that there is no transitive relation of any particular class to the social structure or to labor. If anything, they follow the liberal and progressive liberal view that within American society it is black populations that remain the only viable revolutionary subject.
On the other pole, we have what Mark Fisher once referred to as the Leninist left, but he did not invoke this label to refer to existing ML groups or even to designate particular prescriptions or agreed upon lines. Rather, this tendency of the left conceives of the left as needing to remain in fidelity to the working class as possessing a transitive relation to the social structure. It will tend to maintain that the task of the left is to independently organize the working class for emancipation. Its affect risks falling sway to frustration due to the resistance it experiences with liberal institutions as well as with the counterculture left. The forces of liberalism and leftism insist that any determined or transitive theory of class emancipation will risk fomenting an impending fascism, to which the counterculture left and the liberal left claim is imminent. It is to this Leninist expression of the left that we must center the reinvention of leftwing practice, but only by carefully resolving the basis of rivalry it has with the counterculture left.4
To return to my friend’s question: working-through this rivalry is the aim of my work. To do so requires the cultivation of profound patience. As I recently argued on Ben Burgis’s show, the rivalries on the left are heightened and made symbolically violent due to the privatization of the public sphere in which the left operates. This is because the ideological field of rivalry intersects with the paternalism of the market, and that is why this chasm takes on the appearance of a fight that mirrors market competition: disagreements are settled by ostracization (firing) or cancellation (excommnication). People are deemed fascist for association with leftists who may have at one time associated with rightwing ideas or networks. While privatized public spheres foments this brutal in-group / out-group rivalry, the move towards ostracization and cancellation functions as a disavowal to interrogate the meaning of the left, it functions also as a shelter for the counterculture left and for the extra-class left. While the Leninist left will look at this as self-righteous and as obsessed with a purist conception of the left, the truth is often in-between. Some degree of purity and self-critique is necessary.
We now have an automatic sense of rivalry on the left whereas rivalries used to be governed far more rationally. It used to be that a sect or faction broke off from tendencies or parties due to ideological differences, but today rivalry and sectarianism is stoked by the market itself and the inescapability of its overly-personalizing force. We often talk about non-personal domination as the cornerstone of the neo-Republican tradition that Marx identifies and links up with. But within the culture of the left, governed as it is by bourgeois institutions in which the market dominates, the forces are highly personal. It may sound odd to claim that the market is paternal, but that is exactly what it is. The market incentivizes splits and rivalries not at the level of ideology but at the level of affect and mood; the market is an engine for the making-superficial of the left and it thus makes micropolitics seem inevitable. The market is paternal in the sense that it reduces the two lefts to a glamorous but seemingly arbitrary series of fights as if they are two wayward siblings. If all we are is atomized individuals caught in market dependence relations; new sects, new political tendencies, new podcast communities, new experimental magazines, and even new parties will form but they will struggle to overcome the paternalism of the market.
Towards a Materialist Idea of the Left
In this situation, psychoanalytic theory can be inducted into the cause of helping the left to transcend market-imposed group rivalry. As I have argued, the concepts of superego and Oedipus remain highly useful for understanding the process by which rivalries are overcome and worked-through. My claim is historical, I argue that the period of finance capitalism and the rise of monopoly capitalism following World War II has eroded the basis of subjectivity to such an extent that it has reduced the worker to a mere needy opportunist. Psychoanalysis offers a means for understanding how rivalries can be neutralized and thus how political solidarity can take new form, beyond mirroring the logics of competitive bourgeois individualism. Competitive bourgeois individualism not only reproduces a fetishism that conceals the true basis of class-based exploitation that retains existing class hierarchies, it adheres us to a form of doing politics that is illusory. The left must be in favor of ending rivalries internal to itself; it must be for the development of a new rationality that has resolved the divisions of the left. This is a project that requires that the left constantly work to understand itself, not as a Kantian regulative idea, i.e., the left is not an undefinable or ultimately an unknowable idea.
What anchors the left is not merely an idea of the left; the left is defined by the organization of social and class forces capable of revolutionizing the existing class forces that perpetuate exploitation. This means that the left is defined both by its utopian impulse to remain committed to the ending of exploitation and oppression, combined with a rational and materialist strategy for achieving emancipation. This means that the two tiers of rivalry that plague the left today, the institutional and the ideational are both at stake in re-defining the left.
What post-Marxists who insist that the left need only rely on a contingent series of social groups and not the wide scale organization of the working class get wrong about the meaning of the ‘abolition of the existing order’ is that they fail to see that Marx and Engels formulated a political vision from the class standpoint of the working class. This vision first emerges in Marx and Engels’s break from the Communist League, an organization they realized was problematic precisely because it formed its mission de-tethered from working class interests. The Communist League taught Marx and Engels something about the problem of forming the interests of a party off of petit-bourgeois ideals; it inevitably results in a theory of socialism that is disconnected from real struggles and that is merely a reflection of the ideals of its founders and intellectuals, which are themselves disinterested but ultimately not dynamic enough to capture the real movement of struggle.
This is the heart of the issue. Marx at one point says that communists should help to remind existing struggles why they struggle, which is a statement that requires some parsing out to fully understand. Because if you have rejected the necessity of the cultivation of a political organization that is grounded in the standpoint of the working class and you read this statement, you could quite easily find yourself complicit with the post-Marxist view that all struggles are contingent. But the notion that there is a contingency of struggles only negates Marx and Engels’s core insight into the independent organization of the working class.5 The independent organization of the working class means that the party understand how interests become convex mirrors of existing class interests and how bourgeois institutions are themselves formed in such a way that they exclude the possible development of independent working class interests. The interests of the working class are not somehow the most righteous—we are not making a utilitarian argument that the working class suffers the most—although a case could be made that the immiseration thesis was in fact what drove Marx and Engles to privilege the working class at the time.
Regardless of whether we experience a working class after the welfare state as no longer subordinated to a Dickensenian condition of immiseration, the independent organization of the working class remains the strategic priority for socialist politics. A left that centers the working class has the unique advantage of leveraging its labor power and thus forcing politics to take the shape of class-based politics. Let me offer a reminder that we often forget that Marx’s theory of fetishism also implies not only that the reign of commodities and their exchange value covers over reality, it also means that institutions also shape nominal and thus fetishistic conceptions of social conflict. Bourgeois politics and its class-based forces impose a fake idea of social struggle, increasingly under the pretense of heightened racial conflict, and they do so in an authoritarian way that is increasingly only taken up as plausible by the bourgeoisie themselves (only just over 20% of Americans identify as ‘Democrats’).
The vision of bourgeois politics is a reflection of the logic of the market, and the logic of the market molds the wider field of politics as a web of fetishism, i.e., bourgeois politics covers over class-based forces, it conceals the real basis and therefore the true function of class power and domination. Marx and Engels also realized that this fetishism is so entrenched that it is necessary for the working class to develop a distinct worldview and thus to subtract from bourgeois institutions. The basis of this subtraction from bourgeois institutions requires a commitment to the idea of the left. In a follow-up essay, I will turn to an analysis of utopia from a psychoanalytic perspective because it is to a commitment to utopia that the division of the two lefts might begin to be repaired.
The best book on the turn to post-critique is The Ruse of Repair by Patricia Stuelke. In this work we discover how the reparative turn in contemporary leftist thought has resulted in a turn away from ruthless critique, and towards a conception of power that no longer engages systems of power with a truly critical appraoch.
I gave a talk in Beirut as part of the BICAR conference on The Revolutionary Subject that overlaps with much of what I am developing in this piece.
I have a great deal to say about family abolition, here is a good place to start:
It is this particular type of rivalry that interests me and I have written about it in the concluding chapter of my book on the family.
When you hear independent organization of the working class it is important to remember that is simply a shorthand for the concept Marx said was his most important, namely ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat.’
Thank you for your post. Well put but I suspect we are less clear about the pathways to achieve such a unification of the cultural and political left.
I asked CHAT gpt to clarify some of the concepts with examples. It’s done a fair job.
Certainly! Here are some simple examples illustrating the concepts of commodity fetishism and false consciousness applied to everyday products like cars and soap.
### Example 1: Production of Cars
**Commodity Fetishism:**
- When you look at a car in a showroom, it appears as a finished product with a certain price tag. The car seems to have a value that is inherent to the car itself.
- However, what is obscured is the labor of the factory workers who assembled the car, the miners who extracted the raw materials, and the engineers who designed it. The social labor involved in producing the car is hidden behind the glossy surface of the car in the showroom.
- The car is seen as a powerful and desirable object with features that enhance one’s status or lifestyle, rather than as the result of collective human labor.
**False Consciousness:**
- Car buyers may believe that their purchase is a purely personal decision that enhances their social status or meets their individual needs.
- They might not recognize the exploitative labor conditions of the workers in car factories or the environmental impact of car production. This lack of awareness is a form of false consciousness.
- Workers in the car industry might not see their common interests with workers in other industries or their potential power to demand better working conditions because the focus is on the end product (the car) rather than the production process and labor relations.
### Example 2: Production of Soap
**Commodity Fetishism:**
- A bar of soap on a supermarket shelf appears to have value due to its brand, scent, or moisturizing properties. The soap is treated as a commodity with an inherent value.
- The social labor that went into producing the soap—such as the work of farmers growing palm oil, factory workers processing ingredients, and marketers promoting the product—is hidden from the consumer’s view.
- The soap is seen as a magical product that can transform cleanliness and beauty, overshadowing the complex production chain behind it.
**False Consciousness:**
- Consumers might be drawn to certain soap brands due to marketing that suggests the soap will make them healthier or more attractive, without understanding the labor exploitation and environmental harm that might be involved in its production.
- Workers in soap factories might not perceive their labor as the source of the soap’s value. They may accept poor working conditions or low wages, not realizing their role in creating the commodity and the profit it generates for the company.
- The focus on the consumer benefits of the soap distracts both consumers and workers from the exploitative production conditions, maintaining false consciousness.
### Simplified Illustration:
Imagine a simple production line for soap:
1. **Production Process:**
- Farmers harvest palm oil.
- Factory workers process palm oil into soap.
- Marketers create advertising campaigns to sell the soap.
2. **In the Supermarket:**
- Consumers see beautifully packaged soap bars with attractive advertisements suggesting the soap will make them cleaner, healthier, or more attractive.
3. **Commodity Fetishism:**
- The soap appears to have magical properties and intrinsic value.
- The labor of the farmers, factory workers, and marketers is invisible.
4. **False Consciousness:**
- Consumers focus on the benefits of the soap and are unaware of the labor exploitation and environmental impact.
- Workers do not see their collective power and potential to improve working conditions because they are separated by the market process.
In both examples, the fetishization of commodities and the resulting false consciousness obscure the true social relations and labor conditions involved in production. This understanding helps illustrate Marx’s critique of capitalism and the mechanisms by which it maintains social inequality and exploitation.
Hmm, we await developments.