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.
Thanks for this Substack-long comment. I don't disagree. As for the intellectual history behind this trend ("the workers are just overfed consumers"), Marcuse is pertinent - if not the whole Frankfurt School. Todd Cronan has an interesting piece in our new collection (The Conformist Rebellion) precisely about this accusation from eminent left thinkers like Marcuse and Adorno, but also Sartre, against the workers. We need to understand how the Left has assumed the place of Leviathan, and your argument helps to enlighten us.
Thanks. This phenomenon is ambient, something that one can pick up, as I certainly did, without or before imbibing of any critical theory, and is certainly something that ordinary people feel, something they intuit - and this is a critical point, because, just as in Christianity, it is not expected that everyone will abandon normal life for the monastery, it is ludicrous to expect everyone to adopt a secular asceticism to struggle in that way for a political state of affairs that most will never witness, that might be centuries off in the future. People cannot be told to wander in the wilderness for 40 years like Moses and the Hebrews in the desert. But the Left tells them precisely this, or, still worse, as they have done under the covidreich, that they will be enslaved, tagged like cattle and forced to surrender their very bodies to the System.
This attitude has reached grotesque and obscene new depths in the antinatalism of the green Left, which seeks to dissuade people from forming families. And the moral coercion is not only direct: complain that leftist policies would prevent you from moving about with your family - ie., that microscopic cars, or no cars at all would present a serious problem in America, which is not a county-sized country like Denmark - they'll rant about your overconsumption and then ask accusingly, "Why did you have more than one child?"
I mean, there are things a priest will not even probe unless a person confessing wants counsel on them; but the Left just subjects every last thing to its puritanical glare. Ordinary life is now a "treat" that one is damned for demanding.
Anyway, it's been ages since I read Adorno, some of whose work I would probably still find... somewhat useful. But it would have been better for all the world had Marcuse never written.
Not to overextend the metaphor, but Moses and the Hebrews in the desert weren't just following some vague promise. They were primarily runaway slaves. The story only makes sense (insofar as it even does, lol) when you account for the push factor of their journey. Likewise, I think a good deal of the Left's ... traumatic anger, their rage over both COVID coming to an end and the postwar consensus working on its own terms, amounts to an expression of grief: the factor that had pushed the workers into the Left's arms is gone, and the pull-factor is not enough to put people on-side any more after the (apparent) failures of Stalinist central planning.
Tbh we probably should have identified this tendency already back when the revolutionary subject/change-agent started shifting around to be anything except the industrial working class, the motor of things anything except labor-power.
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.......
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.
Thanks for this Substack-long comment. I don't disagree. As for the intellectual history behind this trend ("the workers are just overfed consumers"), Marcuse is pertinent - if not the whole Frankfurt School. Todd Cronan has an interesting piece in our new collection (The Conformist Rebellion) precisely about this accusation from eminent left thinkers like Marcuse and Adorno, but also Sartre, against the workers. We need to understand how the Left has assumed the place of Leviathan, and your argument helps to enlighten us.
Thanks. This phenomenon is ambient, something that one can pick up, as I certainly did, without or before imbibing of any critical theory, and is certainly something that ordinary people feel, something they intuit - and this is a critical point, because, just as in Christianity, it is not expected that everyone will abandon normal life for the monastery, it is ludicrous to expect everyone to adopt a secular asceticism to struggle in that way for a political state of affairs that most will never witness, that might be centuries off in the future. People cannot be told to wander in the wilderness for 40 years like Moses and the Hebrews in the desert. But the Left tells them precisely this, or, still worse, as they have done under the covidreich, that they will be enslaved, tagged like cattle and forced to surrender their very bodies to the System.
This attitude has reached grotesque and obscene new depths in the antinatalism of the green Left, which seeks to dissuade people from forming families. And the moral coercion is not only direct: complain that leftist policies would prevent you from moving about with your family - ie., that microscopic cars, or no cars at all would present a serious problem in America, which is not a county-sized country like Denmark - they'll rant about your overconsumption and then ask accusingly, "Why did you have more than one child?"
I mean, there are things a priest will not even probe unless a person confessing wants counsel on them; but the Left just subjects every last thing to its puritanical glare. Ordinary life is now a "treat" that one is damned for demanding.
Anyway, it's been ages since I read Adorno, some of whose work I would probably still find... somewhat useful. But it would have been better for all the world had Marcuse never written.
Oh, dear! The Conformist Rebellion is pricey!
Not to overextend the metaphor, but Moses and the Hebrews in the desert weren't just following some vague promise. They were primarily runaway slaves. The story only makes sense (insofar as it even does, lol) when you account for the push factor of their journey. Likewise, I think a good deal of the Left's ... traumatic anger, their rage over both COVID coming to an end and the postwar consensus working on its own terms, amounts to an expression of grief: the factor that had pushed the workers into the Left's arms is gone, and the pull-factor is not enough to put people on-side any more after the (apparent) failures of Stalinist central planning.
Tbh we probably should have identified this tendency already back when the revolutionary subject/change-agent started shifting around to be anything except the industrial working class, the motor of things anything except labor-power.
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.......
I cant find Soilands text, do you have a link?