The Left Against Progress?
CHRIS MAISANO
Because it traces its origins to the Enlightenment tradition, the left has tended to conceive of itself as a “progressive” force, steering the course of History toward a more or less inevitable higher stage of development as the right tries to conserve traditional society from the onslaught of modernity. Today, the term “progressive” is applied to more or less the entire left from moderate liberals to socialists, and we tend to accept the moniker and the historical narrative completely unreflectively.
But what if this framework no longer applies? Could our reflexive identification with “progress” be undermining our political project? What if we are the political force that is more accurately defined as conservative (in the best, non-pejorative sense), defending society from the obviously corrosive tendencies of contemporary historical developments?
That’s the argument the historian Tony Judt makes in his 2009 Remarque Lecture, reprinted in the newest edition of the New York Review of Books:
If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear.. Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them.
The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.
That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?
Leaving his relative political timidity aside, this is somewhat similar to recent arguments made by Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, and others on the left who don’t necessarily inhabit the same ideological neighborhood as Tony Judt. I happen to think that they may be right, and in any case it’s healthy to question the left’s tendency to see history as moving ever onward and upward. William F. Buckley launched National Review with the motto, “It stands athwart History, yelling Stop!” As we hurtle toward potentially terminal environmental and social catastrophes, perhaps we should adopt it as one of our own.
Once upon a time, social democracy was understood to mean social ownership of the means of production under democratic rule. Thus, social democracy would result in a proletarian democracy with classes still intact or a classless society with a government but no political State. Liberalism is not social democracy. see: http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/
I don’t think anyone on the left in the past 50 years or so at least, has thought that History was inexorably going into a progressive direction. Rosa Luxemburg wrote in the Junius Pamphlet “socialism or barbarism,” after all.
But I made a similar point to Judt when I argued that the operative social democratic politics of the Congressional Progressive Caucus were fundamentally conservative: http://theactivist.org/blog/nostalgia-for-a-gentler-politics
Yes, a fine way of articulating a socialist politics is explaining why “liberalism” is good, but not enough, but we shouldn’t shy away from explaining why the old politics are dead and any attempts to revive them are doomed. The social democratic alternative within the nation-state doesn’t exist. It was a product of a certain set of conditions that aren’t coming back. The socialism of the 21st century must embrace the emancipatory, Universalist rhetoric of the Enlightenment. The problem today with the left is essentially its conservatism, “apolitical-ness” and willingness to embrace reaction–the reason why the neoliberals have been in the history’s driver-seat for long.
(I think Zizek’s point about putting the “brakes on History” and “beginning at the beginning” [he's misinterpreting a Lenin quote here] then resurrecting an emancipatory politics is a lot different than what Judt means.)
Check out Reinhart Koselleck’s conception of history in Critique and Crisis. Highly critical of the Enlightenment conception of history as a progress through “inovative modernity”.
“I happen to think that they may be right, and in any case it’s healthy to question the left’s tendency to see history as moving ever onward and upward.” I agree, but want to hear more. A more anti-colonialist perspective would consider other views of progress and history, For example history could be either episodic (routedness in African American traditions, giving hope that justice can be won and new era’s forged) or cyclical (routedness in Mestizo and Chican@ culture, giving hope to decolonization movements). In other words Judt’s conception of history lacks a race analysis. This generalized notion of progress is somewhat axiomatic.
Barrington Moore made a similar argument in the 1970s, that fights for justice were defensive fights against forces of fragmentation that would destroy organic communities and leave desolation and anomie in their place. I bought it as far as it goes. It goes, but not that far. And I wouldn’t be so quick to junk progress as a left-wing goal, let alone as a disposable Enlightenment artifact. If global capitalism is creating a world proletariat and “all that is sacred is profaned,” the job of the left is to socialize that world movement, to unify it and not retreat into ethnic, racial, gendered or even class enclaves, which I read as the logic of Judt’s and your argument. Tell me I’m wrong, please.
No, I definitely wouldn’t argue for the recreation of some organic community, whether by race, gender, class, or whatever. That would be pretty crazy. I don’t think Judt says that either. Judt just sees the left’s struggle as primarily defensive at this stage of the game, protecting the gains of the 20th century as much as possible. But I do think that there are certain tendencies in current historical development generally considered “progressive” in some sense that generally work against democratic and egalitarian political priorities. Think about how innovations in computing and communications have helped bosses to deskill workers and outsource jobs. Urbanization is generally considered a sign of progress, but I’m not sure if you can consider the creation of vast megaslums outside of cities like Rio or Lagos a net good, and hell if I know how those agglomerations could be positively socialized. And so on. I just think that those of us on the left should be a little bit more skeptical about certain kinds of problematic historical developments instead of just saying, “let’s just socialize it” and leave it at that.
That being said, it’s not probably not possible or desirable to turn back the clock on anything. I just shudder at the magnitude of the problems we face in this century and fear that we might not be able to do much at this point to avert global disaster.
Chris,
The issue, which I think Judt and you fudge, is what we mean by “progress.” Of course the mega-slums are not progress, only change–and for the worse. Neither is the cause of the slums progressive–the elimination of a rural proletariat at a time when urban areas are not producing jobs to maintain them. Whatever we can say about the brutality of the industrial revolution, including Scotland’s Highland Clearances, the outcome was at least cumulatively progressive. An urban working class was born in the textile mills and the ship yards of Glasgow. A good thing? Only in one sense; it creates the system’s gravediggers. More than gravediggers, its successors. It’s in that sense that modernity is progressive, and only in that sense–from an atomized peasantry to a highly concentrated working class capable of collective action on a mass scale. And, as I said before, Judt didn’t discover defensive politics. The argument is over what to defend and how to expand on it. EP Thompson makes defense of a moral community the heart of his explanation of class formation, and he’s right. That’s not in contention.
I also think Judt and you are attacking straw men. Certainly an element in the old social democratic movement stressed inevitability. So did the Stalinists, largely as justification for their own oppressive class rule: “Today may suck, comrades, but there’s a new world aborning, so just shut up, ask no questions and work harder.” But I’d like to think we’re descended from better stuff, from Rosa Luxemburg, who–as Bhaskar notes–posed at the eve of WWI the stark possibilities as either socialism or barbarism. Going back to “protecting the gains of the 20th century as much as possible,” as you say, is a peculiar way to explain a radical mission. I was around for half of the 20th century, and the less bloody half, too. Not much there I want to protect. More that I’d like to protect from, frankly. Anyway, the best defense is a good offense, as Knut Rockne is supposed to have said. I’m all in favor of one step forward and two steps back, but progress hinges on the one step forward, not just the necessary retreats.
One last point: Deskilling isn’t progress, any more than Fordism was progress. It was meant to enhance exploitation, not to end it. It was a move with not just economic and profit-based ends but with political ramifications, too. It was about power and who held it. I’m no more interested in socializing Fordism than I am in making prisons into collectives. Or (except as a tactic) democratizing a boss culture that remains top- down. Socialism means a different organization of production and distribution, not a return to a less criminal and vicious capitalism, if indeed one ever existed.
Okay, one more point: When Judt writes, and he made the same point in his NYU talk in early fall, “If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek,” he’s fighting the last ideological war. Stalinism and Fascism may have had a common thread in a belief in a final solution, whether to class conflict or the Jewish question, but that’s not what’s on the table today. Today’s left doesn’t suffer from an excess of purity or zeal; it suffers from a lack of self-confidence and a dearth of ideas. How else explain the collapse of “Medicare for All” into “public option.” And Harry Reid just gave up on the public option; Obama did months ago. That’s the problem; we’re too weak to force the Democrats to do the right thing. We’re not stargazing at a perfect future, as Judt suggests, or paying the price for past left excesses (and there were plenty of past excesses). We’re mostly contemplating our navels. So is Judt. (And there are worse people–his book on Europe after 1945 is mostly terrific.) All that’s sufficient to know re: combating revolutionary zealotry (at least for today) is Marx’s maxim that “the present is pre-history.” Socialism is the beginning of human history. Not its end, just the beginning. All economic and social problems are not solved by displacing the old ruling class–even ours–but they are mostly solveable under a reconfigured social order. It’s not economics that stands in our way; an alternative world IS possible. It’s politics.
Fin
Mike
I don’t think that defending the gains of the 20th century is the essence of left politics today, nor am I interesting in fighting the ghosts of Stalin and Mao. I have higher hopes that Judt, and I’d like to have a left that’s more interested in what’s going on in the 21st century than the last one. I’m just pointing out what Judt is saying, and that others on the left that are more radical than he are also using a similar vocabulary (in service of different goals), that I find that interesting, and that perhaps we need to at least consider the potential impossibility of subjecting certain trends to democratic socialization.
You should comment more frequently here Mike!
Well, I don’t know. It seems to me that if we continue to just play defense, we will never get ahead, indeed, we will be finding ourselves attempting to hold on to, the ever diminishing remnants of past achievements.
While, social democrats might be satisfied with defending what is left of the welfare state, we should keep in mind the reasons why leftists of the past, were dissatisfied with it and found it inadequate. They realized that while the development of the welfare state provided real gains for the working class, it also provided the ruling class with new means for exerting social control over workers too. This was something that was pointed out by such writers as Herbert Marcuse back in the 1960s. Other writers like Frances Piven and Richard Cloward in their book, *Regulating the Poor* pointed out how state relief for the poor has always been a means by which the state regulates the behaviors of the poor and the working class generally. In times of great social unrest the state expands access to relief in order to pacify the poor. Then, when times get better, access to relief is restricted in order to enforce work norms. At all times, the ruling class attempts to stigmatize relief, so that going on it is a humiliating experience. Employed workers are encouraged to look down upon those members of their class who find themselves subsisting on welfare.
Historically, we might also wish to keep in mind that the modern welfare state had its genesis in Bismarck’s Germany of the late 19th century. At the very same time that Bismarck was banning the SPD and attempting to clamp down on the workers movement, Bismarck was also introducing social security legislation in Germany in order to placate German workers.
So yes, it is necessary for the left to defend the welfare state from attacks from the right, but we should not forget the inadequacies of it and our goal should be to go beyond the welfare state by a transformation of the mode of production.