How has the Left become the Ruling Class?
An Attempt at the Social-Psychological Topology of a Career
If it’s true that any current political analysis worth its name must proceed from the realization that the Left has become the Ruling Class, the question is obvious: how the hell did that happen?
Early on in the pandemic, Joshua Pickett and myself have argued that in order to grasp the Left’s turn against labor and towards capital, one must consider its class composition and the class relation of capitalist society at the end of the “old” neoliberal phase (1979-2020).[1] With the rise of the pandemic regime, the Left, or which is the same, the PMC- or “Middle Class Leviathan”, vividly modelling society in its own image (with its own mood swings from lockdown hyper-vigilance to #BLM party-riots) has indeed shed all suspicions of being interested in worker emancipation, whether theoretically or practically. Yet, there was nothing that the Left demanded even before the Covid era that was not equally supported by the ruling class: whether respect for biological or imagined identities, open borders, the bug-eating pod-life, or a Green revolution with 15 Euro for a gallon of gas.
The one single axis of the Left’s unprecedented power grab, then, was precisely the ability to aesthetically shape the world in its own image, and continues to do so today, as we see in the graphics and designs for all that was made for us to consume: it is the image of virtue über alles, of a philosophy of “care”, while getting people sacked for their views, an image of “solidarity”, while making the lives of working people as miserable as possible, an image of “diversity”, in which class simply does not appear, an image of “empowerment”, whose aesthetic value reminds one of the exchangeable characters in a sarariiman manga. The Left purports an image of “inclusivity”, while excluding citizens from society based on a completely arbitrary “health status” - or a specific type of nationality (e.g., Russian). The image that the Left shapes the world after, both symbolically and aesthetically, is also exemplified in the line of Ukrainian flags all along the downtown district shores of Lake Zurich. And just to be sure that especially the university class would be on board, both of Zurich’s Universities called for “Solidarity with the Ukraine!” in a pathetic email sent to all employees last week.[2]
Leaving aside the neurotic virtue-signalling in every aesthetic aspect of the everyday - there is no art exhibition, no movie plot without the Left’s imagery imprinted - the Left’s view of the world is also expressed in the sassy and slightly shabby clothes that everyone wears today and that has successfully replaced all subcultures from the cities. It is in their custom-made Spotify playlist, their “plant-based” and “handcrafted” foods that needs so much advertising because every moron needs to hear it. In sum, it is the image shaped by the archetypical academic, the NGO class, the email caste, workers in the unproductive sector, university staff and its affiliated and associated publications and their employees, which, in a time of general social downward mobility due to privatisations and outsourcing, saw their livelihoods in jeopardy. Up rose a censorious Leviathan: they waged a culture war, and they won.
Of course, nobody belonging to the leftist managerial class really wants to hear that they belong to the leftist managerial class. They will very subjectively feel they have been defeated, or even victimised: by the Right, by the “Covidiots” who had the audacity to have their demand for lifting (almost) all restrictions on social life, including the masking of schoolchildren, responded to.[3] Leftists will continue to tell you they are poor, nevermind their Master of Arts in the history of the Byzantian empire. But the fact that they themselves are at risk of social downward mobility does not make them exploited. The History graduate’s position in the process of production is parasitic to labour. Above all, and that ultimately counts to them, it does not make them aesthetically exploited. This conscious detachment from working class culture and aesthetics is expressed in one’s disdain for the various forms of identitarian discrimination (sexism, racism, ableism etc.), while thinking of workers, “anti-vaxxers”, and Russians as scum.[4]
But there is more to the Left’s rise to power than the Godlike shaping of the world in its own image.
In an article for the German newspaper Neues Deutschland, Swiss Marxist critic Tove Soiland, an incorruptible analyst of the Covid regime from the get-go, attempts a social-psychological topology of the current biopolitical ideology and the Left’s seamless adjustment to it. While she still believes in the left-right dichotomy (with its comportment, the Left prepares the breeding-ground for right-wing ideas, she says), she realizes the fallout produced in the extreme climate created by the lockdown- and vaccination regime under the tyranny of fear:
“The most striking thing is how thoroughly the left has abandoned its traditional fields of criticism since the beginning of the Corona crisis, above all criticism of the international organisations of globalisation, so that one sometimes gets the impression that its attitude is no longer distinguishable from that of the WEF and its founder Klaus Schwab. The fact that 20 million more people are expected to die of hunger worldwide as a result of the measures, not as a result of the virus, as Oxfam already warned last summer, that the vaccination alliance GAVI, from which the current vaccination campaign also emanates, has repeatedly made headlines with problematic vaccination campaigns in the past - among other things, by linking vaccinations in India and Africa with the mass sterilisation of women at the same time and was therefore criticised by feminist organisations for years… that none of that should be of concern for the Left, is quite incomprehensible.”
And yet, we must at least try to comprehend it. Drawing on Lacan and on Italian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati, Soiland offers a compelling explanation set in the general attitude toward health, namely a “hypermodern hygienism” brought forward by the neoliberal paradigm of self-optimization since the 1990s. In it, no longer an obligaton towards a specific political system or symbol is to be pledged, but the rule of the void, the loss of meaning of any ideological struggles and its replacement by an obsession with health and “wellbeing”. The disappearance of the political itself then - synonymous with the disappearance of the question of how we want to live - is substituted with the rule of “objective” measures indicating the quantification of health: models, tables, graphs, “nodes and vectors” (Benjamin Bratton), simulations. In practice, biopolitics has replaced political proper as the post-political form of social existence. The technological manufacturing of the imagery of life itself however can only take place as bare life, as life pure and simple, as a paradigmatic reduction. And this reduction, we hear, is synonymous with what Lacan termed “the ‘inner catastrophe’ which we call totalitarianism”, for “happiness”, or “wellbeing” cannot be measured in the way our modern-day optimisers believe it can: it can only come at the cost of desire. This psychoanalytical version of biopolitics, Soiland argues, “emphasizes a totalitarian moment which consists in the extinction of the subject. This is not so much the case because biopolitics, in its claim to universality, overruns the individual, but because this enabling forces the subject to a limitless optimisation that does not take into account its desire for a dimension beyond bare life”. The reduction of life to its bare mode of survival, and the elimination of all content from the prevailing ideology of “hyper-hygienism” whose price is the autonomy of individual subjects, then, is what Soiland, following Recalcati, calls “post-ideological totalitarianism”.
This reduction, however, is itself self-contradictory: for the price that must be paid for the unconditional preservation of life is life itself, whether one's own or that of others. The self-contradictory argument for mandatory vaccinations (“care for others”) has made this clear.[5] And where the argument is self-defeating, pure power, or, in Freudian terms, the Superego puts itself in its place. Reason - the one measuring rod of anti-dogmatism in the waging of arguments, the insistence on logic and the qualifier of truth - no longer obtains. Soiland:
“What we have before us here is that cruel dimension of the Superego described by Lacan, which in its purist pursuit of what is morally right comes up against an obscene enjoyment: The renunciation demanded by the superego becomes libidinal in its absoluteness. But precisely this collapse of enjoyment and asceticism is the effect of the demise of the symbolic in general, which is problematic for Lacan. And so one has to ask whether the Corona measures in their rigidity and immoderateness are not an expression of the fact that the law rejected in the symbolic now reappears in the real: a real law or a collapse of law and the real, in which the law only appears in its senseless-cruel dimension.”
It is precisely this ideological scenario in which the Left has found the fertile soil to its tyrannical growth. The “senseless-cruel” dimension of the Covid measures has corresponded exactly to the Left’s own disposition: the technological-mechanical and managemental vision of society, the biopolitical idealisation of bare life, the limitless void of the digital world, the denial and denunciation of having an actual experience, the face hidden behind an anonymizing mask: the perfect world of “care” and “solidarity” for others, while protecting “diversity” in total synchronization, an “empowerment” for an issue “that is bigger than us”, feigning a kind of commitment that holds “inclusivity” in high regard. Yet, none of these deified paradigms has any meaning beyond itself. In other words, the Leftist paradigm is a sterile template for self-referentiality that has given up any vision beyond the current world order.
This constellation explains why there is not the slightest outcry, but even great approval among left climate protectors and Corona’s witnesses on the WEF’s famous dictum “You will own nothing, and you will be happy”. For the Left’s whole image, its whole spiel is based on the moral glorification of renunciation in order to justify austerity/asceticism. The sheer repression with which the elites of Coronaists and WWIII-catastrophists have propagated this idea is palpable. Austerity is no longer a “price” to pay for years of relative prosperity, but the morally dignified position to assume in a world that has replaced all materialistic demands with meaningless slogans that imply that there simply aren’t enough resources for everyone and fills up the void with “care for one another”.
Finally, the Left has become the ruling class, because it could present itself as the choice for an inhuman ideal that, in catchwords like “solidarity”, presents itself as its complete opposite and therefore represents the new valorisation interests of capital. It embodies the adequate choice for the voluntarily conformist subject of late neoliberalism that longs to “be good” to the point of self-denial.
It will take an extremely Epicurean, hedonistic, and freedom-loving countermovement to topple the Left’s throne. It might even be a consequential class struggle.
Photo: The Stone Roses, “I wanna be adored” video still (1989).
[1] https://crisiscritique.org/uploads/24-11-2020/elena-louisa-lange-and-joshua-pickett-depaolis.pdf.
[2] It is worth checking out the festival of righteousness that is the ETH’s homepage: https://ethz.ch/en.html.
[3] Almost everywhere in Europe: except, notoriously, Germany. Germany, as per usual, is governed by a cohort of authoritarian and dangerous nutcases.
[4] My personal favourite, the dirtbag leftist, in his anti-woke and pro-vaccine mandates glory, will however always be the prime idiot in the leftists’ favourite pastime of self-righteous double think: for he says that the discrimination of Russians is “not ok”, while “there is at least a medical reason” for discrimination against the non-vaccinated. See also what is probably the worst piece of writing, in content and form, that has appeared this year so far: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/02/canada-freedom-convoy-conservative-right-wing-anti-worker-anti-vaccine.
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I don't intend this as a Boomercon argument, though to some it will inevitably seem that way, but it is my opinion, after 15 misspent years on the Left, that one of the deepest structures of the Leftist Sub/Unconscious is now, and has been for the better part of a century, at least, a belief that Capitalism bought off the working class, made things too good for them to dedicate themselves to the labor of The Revolution. This was, I suppose, intended as a structural argument that could be fleshed out with details of how this or that faction of Capital made concessions in order to buy labor peace and stave off the possibility of Revolution, under pressure both domestically and internationally, from the Soviet Union.
But I don't believe that structural arguments really motivate anyone, even the Left. Stated differently, the structural argument has always been the form of the argument, but the substance, the matter, has always been a moralistic argument to the effect that the masses have sinned, have allowed themselves to be led astray by the wiles of the World and the lusts of the flesh; and that, complicit in their own oppression and alienation, which they celebrate, they have refused the narrow path of Revolution, one that might well promise generations of deprivation and struggle before yielding the slightest fruit. Thus, the Left's moralistic critique stigmatizes the working classes for this failure. To use the language of the New Testament, the Left cast the fruitful seed of its theory on the barren, rocky soil of the workers, where it quickly took root and then withered, and the Left then critiqued the soil for being what it was.
The Left spilled oceans of ink, unburdened itself of titanic quantities of theory, endeavoring to explain how this happened - how the workers turned away from Revolution, how they were bamboozled, and how they supposedly came to celebrate their own exploitation and alienation. The New Deal. The Culture Industry. Eros and Civilization. And on and on ad nauseum. The New Deal blocked socialism in the US. The Culture Industry interpellates the consuming capitalist subject with ideology in every product, even the very forms of the products. Capitalism anchors the norms of civilization as against unfettered desire, which would somehow, if unleashed, lead to socialism.
But, again, I believe that theory always has an affective element. However recondite its speculations and critiques, it has a motive force of moral judgment, and the motive force was that the workers, the masses, were fools, dupes, greedy little consooomers gleefully sucking down the wretched excesses of Capital, unwilling to undertake the hardships of forswearing these for the harsh, ascetical path of Revolution. For generations, at least since '68, the Left has loathed and judged the masses: for consuming too much, or for consuming the wrong things, for wanting family instead of communes, for wanting family over bureaucrats owning and managing their children for the collective. The rancid moralism curdled into outright contempt, that contempt assuming the form of the demand, always and everywhere, that the masses be subjected to austerity and deprivation, that the baubles that lead them away from Revolution and Progress and some Collective Thing be taken from them. Everything the Left has advocated for generations has been of this character, regardless of the cause de jour: whether global cooling, global warming, climate change, the Green New Deal, Covid, Russia and sanctions, or even smaller-bore issues like residential development and planning, the thrust of every single goddamned thing the Left demands is that ordinary people be forced to do with Less. Always less. Less heat in winter, less cooling in summer, give up your cars, give up your travel, give up your house for a tiny shitty flat, give up influence in your childrens' education, give up control over how you spend your money, give up meat, give up most of your recreational activities, give up your sense of material security (it's privilege!), give up your control of what and how much you consume (there must be rationing and allowances for everyone, well, everyone except the Leftists and their paymasters, of course), give up any voice in how your country is governed and the character of its laws and culture. Just give up everything for "rational" and "just" administration by technocratic managers. The Left whipsaws from one of these moralistic austerity campaigns to the next, but the abiding constants are their repulsive cynicism and their fervent, festering desire to simply take things from ordinary people, force them to make do with Less.
The Left doesn't really speak any longer about Revolution. To be honest, the Left tacitly identifies Revolution, or Socialism, or whatever they're calling it this week, with the acceleration of all existing tendencies within Capitalism. They seldom admit that, though they hint at it when they valorize Amazon, et al over smaller competitors, and even - or especially - when they valorize all of the deranged cultural tendencies of the moment, all of which represent the demands of Capital, and when they demand the biosecurity state that constitutes the fondest dream of Capital, because it would transform into capital, with which to fill chasms on balance sheets, our very bodies and minds.
Yes, in the end, the Left demands that ordinary people have everything taken from them, not only their control over their circumstances, limited though it may be, but their comforts, their pleasures, their very bodies themselves. It is the Dictatorship of the Commissariat, rationing out the bare means of subsistence to the masses, who are wretched worms and rats wriggling, writhing, and scurrying in the filth, all because they wanted some comfort in this life, and by demanding it, held off the Dictatorship of the Commissariat. But now the Left will put them in their place, in the filth, by taking things from them and coercing them to confess this abnegation as virtue, as desert.
The left is fully captured by agencies perception management, though they are barely the waiters of oligarchs and plutocrats..... they have this aspiration to match their identity with them...... pretty strong brainwashing I say.......