I’ve always hated the embrace of Nietzsche on the left. I don’t think that Nietzsche had good ideas in the sense of intending anything good for most people. I’ve recently become acquainted with the nihilistic philosophy of Nick Land which strikes me as intensely similar. I usually say that the reason these philosophers get picked up by otherwise sensible leftists is that they “ask the question again”. Essentially, they revisit what seem like obvious assumptions — in progress, in the value of humanity, in the concept and/or usefulness of morality, etc. — and point out absurdities in them. The major flaw in both of them, and I won’t guess at the source, is that they don’t have anything productive to say. All they have to offer is rejection of those assumptions and animosity. People will argue that both are simply being provocative but you are not simply reading between lines at that point, you are reading between atoms.
An aside: I’m not trying to be pro-Catholic or pro-Protestant when I say that Martin Luther (the German priest) was a totally absurd figure, theologically speaking. “Not by works, by faith and scripture alone!” he said, but before long every Protestant sect and church had to say “alright but you also do have to live by the laws and principles of the religion”. I imagine the Catholics going “Right, that’s what we were saying!”
In American politics, a perennial passtime of the liberal center is punching left, as they say: blaming leftists for bad things happening, especially their own failures in elections or in policy. Within “the left”, we have the organizers punching against the theorists. Within “the theorists”, anarchists punch against communists. And on and on it goes. Maybe you think I’ve got one of these pairings backwards. That’s not the point. The point is that if there is a left coalition, whatever it is, one of its chief activities is blaming itself for what it is suffering.
This broad tendency among the Western left, from the end of the French Revolution to the present day, is fueled by an impulse towards self-flagellation. The question then is: why does the left feel the need to lash itself in penance? This is not a thorough study but I have been thinking about this for some time and here is my suggestion: the left self-flagellates because the left is correct and it knows it’s correct but it still cannot win. In 150 years since the Communist Manifesto and the prophecies of Karl Marx, the left has not managed to unseat capital, and it seems in our present day that the widespread desire for progress and peace for all is itself falling away.
In this situation, leftists of all stripes have had to find ways of preserving their dignity. These are all different outcomes of the drive for self-flagellation. If leftist thought is correct, and those who remain leftists tend to believe it is, then it should have won by now. Since it isn’t winning, there must be some deficiency, some flaw in us. We ourselves don’t believe enough, or we ourselves aren’t active enough. We allow in bad elements, we don’t allow in the right elements. We think wrong, we look wrong, we play wrong. If we only fixed what was wrong in ourselves, the thinking goes, we would finally be able to win and achieve our destiny.
Destiny is fake. The problem with destiny, and with the logic of self-flagellation, is that it ignores the agency of the other side.
For self-flagellation to make sense — for the logic of leftists having an inherent flaw to hold up — the failures of the left would have to be the fault of the left alone. That implies that nothing is fighting against the left. This is the problem with destiny, and with the elevation of Marxite use of the process of dialectical materialism to the status of prophecy simply because the argument is extremely persuasive. We have reduced our situation to something like a mountain climb, where no matter how hard it is, it is a stationary obstacle whose challenges are known and just have to be overcome.
That is not what we actually find ourselves in. Our situation is a war that has gone on for 10,000 years or more. It is a continuous process in which one side struggles actively against the other and vice versa. And we have been losing for 10,000 years. Does that make you feel small? Why? Who else has fought for 10,000 years despite losing, despite suffering every calamity, despite its only successes being glimmers of sunlight through a roiling thunderhead?
This war is between two sides. On one side are those who want ultimate ease for a few. On the other side are those who want relative ease for all.
We have been fighting this war against the autocrats, the aristocrats, the sainted few, for 10,000 years. Wives killing abusive husbands. Workers striking against employers. Slave revolts. Revolutions. We may fight it for 10,000 years more. We may lose in the end. We probably won’t, unless the world ends first. But if you think of this as a destiny and not as a strategic assessment, you will get lost.
The problems of the left are not that the left is flawed in itself. Maybe there are flaws. Maybe there are things that can be done better. But if you lose sight of the fact that the true socialists, the true challengers of power, are being attacked and disrupted by the holders of power, then of course you’ll fall into despair at every failure. Of course you’ll grasp onto the thought of people like Nietzsche who tell you that you’re a little bit shitty for even wanting to rebel, for even feeling bad at being abused by the powerful. “Bad conscience.” “Ressentiment.” It all makes sense, in its way.
But there is no real need to self-flagellate, and more than that, it will achieve nothing. You will never find the fatal flaw within the left that is the cause of the left’s failure. The problem is not in the left, the problem is that the autocrats hold all the resources and consistently use them against the left. The modern revolutions were hope spots, not evidence of a final movement. The shift towards republican government has not meant a decrease in the desire for monarchy and/or oligarchy. Republics are not new, nor are oppressive republics. Revolutions are not new, though the ideologies of historical struggles may be mysterious to us now. History has not shown that leftism/socialism “doesn’t work”. We simply have not won yet.
Who but the Vietnamese thought that they would win the Vietnam War? Who but the Haitians thought that they would win their War of Independence?
Do you want dignity? Abandon destiny. Abandon shame at being out of power. This may be hopeless but we have to keep going. To do otherwise means being ground underfoot.
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