Rethinking the left for today
How rethinking the Meaning of the left can revive its political aptness for the 21st century by returning to the philosophical genius of Karl Marx.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
“The meaning of a word is its use in the language” claimed Wittgenstein in his “Philosophical Investigations”. Indeed, in thinking about the left, it is only right to begin by recognising the ability of its meaning to exist outside dictionaries for years on end; once a word reaches the ease and security of lexical fixation, it no longer represents Meaning — rather, it resembles a museum exhibit. When not fixated, however, words and their Meanings are destined players in the spectacle of power — Nietzsche clearly lays out how the Will to Power, his all-encompassing principle representing the pursuit to expand power, operates by bending Truth and entertaining Meanings. Those uninterested in modern philosophy can identify the same principle when Shakespeare’s Petruchio gets the tamed Katherina to agree that mornings are evenings and that evenings are mornings. We can formulate, then, that true power is the covert but inescapable force which associates and dissociates words with things, which names things with words — a prerogative (to create by naming) that, for the last few thousand years, belonged to God.
The power of meaning
Historically, the Meaning of the left has been particularly charged with functions of power by being involved in various scenarios of ideological illusionism. For example, a fascinating observation is how, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “the left” in the Eastern Block peaked in ambivalence — to some, it was simply the new name of communism, whereas to others, it was what replaced communism, thereby representing anti-communism. This interplay of Meanings became an unsurmountable contradiction onto which the then ideological leaders of the post-Soviet states had to balance their positions of power — a fundamental barrier to stability, unless a God-like figure intervened to set an unequivocal Meaning of “the left”.
A better way to alleviate the ideological hallucination that many respectable people from Eastern Europe and beyond perhaps experience due to the scattered Meanings of the left, however, is to transition from relative to absolute political addressing. Put simply, we need to understand that “left” and “right” can exist in various ideological spaces; they are like different neighbourhoods in the numerous ideological villages within the province of politics.
There are people on the left and on the right amongst conservatives, their disputes being abundant in the past 200 years of political history and prominently continuing today: in the Kremlin and amongst U.S. Republicans, for instance. Undoubtedly, there are left and right communists: the difference between Trotsky and Stalin is not at all in the characters or morals of these Soviet leaders — the titanic dispute (cruel and bloody, of course) between the followers of the oppositional kinds of communism the two leaders embody resonates to this day. In the liberal space too, differences between left and right have never been concealed; on the contrary, their presence is seen as a clear manifestation of ideological richness, as a flourishing pluralism. The left-right internal division is so universal that it can also be found in fascism and even within Nazism…
So, what did the classics think? Even better, where is ‘the left’ in Marx himself?
The answer? — somewhere in the background; the left is marginal in the semantics and glossary of the great philosopher. In Marx, one would rather find a scientific socialism, a materialist understanding of history, a dialectic of objective and subjective factors, an elucidation of covert substantial interactions (interaction in itself is substance, Hegel had claimed), a fundamental critique of political economy as the dominant consciousness of the upper class, and much more, of course... Yet, the left-right courtly mannerism, as such, doesn’t get much attention. Perhaps this is why today’s adherents of the left can incorporate Marx into their intellectual constructions only by means of badly concealed violations of the classic’s actual conceptual developments (of which, in fact, Lenin is also blameworthy).
To escape the trap of intellectually abusing Marx and enter a healthy engagement with his thinking, we should take a few steps back and understand Marx’s unabridged philosophical matrix.
In “Das Capital”, Marx studies the “proletariat”, the self-awareness of the workers’ movement as a class, how the oppressed perform their historical tasks. Even a brief acquaintance with the work would pick up that the figure of the “proletariat” appears in Marx’s theory with a methodological necessity; in other words, it is born out of the Method that Marx employs to approach the capitalist society, and is by no means an empirical “guest” of the theory. Because for Marx, the Method (in full agreement with Hegel) is the consciousness of the form for the movement of its inherent substance. Put otherwise, Progress to Marx was not the “instrument” of the Proletariat in its class struggle — on the contrary, the Proletariat was the instrument of progress, the means of History that brings capitalism to its end.
Without going into the Hegelian movement of History, it is evident that the means today has changed. The proletariat, traditionally executing the central role of bringing about social change, is no longer sustainable — a self-conscious working class, as Marx conceived it, today seems preposterous. This is simply because capitalism took a different path of development than the one Marx envisaged. The habitat of Marx’s Proletariat — industrial capitalism — is, albeit slowly and gradually (...and against Trump’s efforts), dying out and a new form of economic activity — financial capitalism — asserts its global dominance (read more).The predicament, therefore, of the 19th and 20th-century left (in it being founded on a now hollow economic structure) is to have only an instrumental role in relation to the dominant financial capital. It becomes clear that to be politically adequate today, the left should refrain from using pre-cooked conceptual developments and various inherited “-isms” (although some are undoubtedly useful with their heuristic power) and discover something else in Marx.
What, then, is left in Marx (pun intended)? — above all, it is his Method. Indeed, to be politically apt in the 21st century, the left should transform its theoretical reflection by returning to Marx’s Method. At its heart, this Method is deductive — Marx never reduced material reality to any ideological, moral or political laws, principles, or norms; on the contrary, Marx derived his understanding from the reality of capitalist relations of production. It is not the subjugation, rather the derivation of the forms from the given historical content of the epoch that is characteristic of Marx’s theoretical laboratory — and this should underpin the left’s thought today.
Marx’s Method for Today
A series of questions await: What kind of political culture, what sort of socio-political dynamics, what oppositional social impulses does today’s financial capitalism produce as it develops?
To answer these, the left should employ Marx’s Method to look upon today’s global financial capitalism as a qualitatively new historical phenomenon, the study of which requires the production of a new epistemology, a new cognitive mapping of reality, and, most importantly, a new, authentic understanding of the mysterious, in fact, Platonic method of philosophical argument: dialectics (a dialectician is one who thinks of the whole, presents it as a synapse). Undoubtedly, this is an extensive intellectual task of particular difficulty.
The “rational reading” of dialectics put forward by Hegel and then dexterously reimagined by Marx follows a simple structure: thesis-antithesis-synthesis, where mediation of opposing sides itself is the revealed secret of every change; rethinking it requires identifying its setbacks. In Marx’s age, industrial capital, with all its complexity, was reproduced socially and politically through established and comprehensible forms of representation — put simply, one could derive the dialectically opposed bourgeoise and proletariat by identifying the mode of production. Representation itself was not only possible, but quite necessary. In the age of global financial capitalism, however, representation is, if not impossible, at least incredibly difficult — a dominant role in the economy today plays the intermediation of saving to investment. That is, an intermediation of a fiction of today’s financial system to another such fiction — but how is it possible to think of something that is not amenable to transcendental apperception, how is it possible to conceptualise a representation of the unthinkable? There is, after all, no Concept for this that does not have an Image.
Indeed, today’s capitalism is produced by the internal Image-less dynamics of financial capital; as if the financial system has achieved a complete autarky in which very few humans participate — it is a mysterious, non-Euclidean mode of production, full of paralogisms (read more). Today’s dialectical efforts, therefore, cannot be efforts of Mediation and Transition between opposites, since the financial system is one whole that has come to dominate economic life. The dialectician, instead of both giving descriptions and explanations of economic activity (respectively, the philosophical categories “phenomenon” and “essence”), is entangled in explaining descriptions of the financial system (that is, “phenomenon” and “essence” cannot be distinguished). In this sense, much can be known but far less can be understood — an abundance of information has conquered Meaning. Perhaps this is why today we often observe that truth differs from untruth only in it being true; in other words, only through unusual epistemological ways can one come to understand.
So, what’s next?
Put broadly, our postmodern world, in being the cultural and historical equivalent of the dominant financial capital, is a radically unconventional ambience for practical reason. It resists hitherto established explanatory and cognitive theoretical models. It is a world of dominant simulacra: the representations in it have no link to the referents (video). The left should, again, focus on the Marxist methodological culture — it suspects the existence of “non-traditional objectivity” and “transformed forms”; in other words, it suspects the possibility not only that object X exists through object Y, but also that a concept exists through another concept, yet has a life on its own (something categorically forbidden by Aristotle’s logic — a prohibition valid until the late modernity).
The left, of course, can decide whether to apply Marx’s Method or not. Should it decide in favour, however, one mandatory obligation (beyond the need to master its unimaginable complexity, of course) is to differentiate between Marx’s liberated and creative thought, and the vast array of petrified “Marxisms” that obscure the living tissue of Marx’s methodological reflection. The perplexity of the left’s current predicament could be solved by taking into account and realizing that the content of Marx’s thought is the property of industrialism, but that its dynamics, form, and Method are apt intellectual tools for today. Most simply, the left’s Meaning at the beginning of the 21st century should merely be to give a second breath to Marx’s Method, without any connection — real or imagined — with the ideologically entrenched “left” (but also “right”) abstractions of history that undoubtedly serve not the Age, but the Conjuncture.
Pi Opinion content does not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial team, Pi Media society, Students’ Union UCL or University College London. We aim to publish opinions from across the student body — if you read anything you would like to respond to, get in touch via email.