Theory and the Place of Leftism

Vince Garton

The debate over platforms in Left Unity has revealed some very instructive features of the debate that is going on within the broader leftist movement. I want to draw attention in particular to the fear that some have expressed that by adopting an explicitly socialist platform that calls for radical change in capitalism, we are simply going to reiterate past mistakes and will not be able to appeal to a mass base. The suggestion, in other words, is that if we drop all the outdated or ‘ideological’ language and simply take a ‘common sense’ but ostensibly left-wing approach, we will be able to maximise our support base or potential electoral gains.

To my eyes the use of ‘state ownership’ as a bogeyman is a good starting point on which to respond, because it tells us the force with which received ideology has imposed itself on certain sections of the socialist movement. ‘State ownership’ of the economy ought to be precisely our objective if the state refers to the people in general, which it must do under an authentically democratic system. The disdain with which mainstream economics treats the ‘planned economy’ is belied by the fact that vast swathes of the current global economic system are nothing other than planned—the internal economies of corporations are organised as bureaucratic command hierarchies.

In these terms, the final objective of socialism must be to realise an international ‘command economy’ where the commands are issued not hierarchically by bureaucrats and technocrats serving particular economic interests—as they are in corporate bureaucracies as well as in the former Eastern bloc—but democratically by the greater portion of the people themselves, the part that Marxists classically call the ‘proletariat’.

My intention is not to debate this narrowly economic question, however, because I feel this is simply a new iteration of a perennial problem on the left, namely the separation of abstract understanding and real activism, or to use the conventional jargon, theory and praxis.

There is a famous dictum by Marx, stated in his Theses on Feuerbach, which says that the goal of the philosopher should not be merely to interpret the world, but to change it. Most (except perhaps for analytic philosophers in academia) would agree with this insight now, whether or not they consider themselves ‘Marxists’. But many miss the key point: the idea is not to abandon interpretation and press for change at whatever cost, but to have both: to change on the basis of our interpretation. ‘Scientific socialism’ was supposed to be such a framework of interpretation.

Over the years, however, the left in both East and West has largely given up this pursuit outside of academia. A lot of the popular analysis on the left simply either reiterates analysis that rightfully belongs to a previous stage of history (as in the case of many minor ‘orthodox’ leftist groups), or proposes that this heritage be vacuously jettisoned or unreflectively welded onto mainstream contemporary ideology to produce a kind of populist melange. Deng Xiaoping’s statement that ‘practice is the sole criterion of truth’ is a good, maybe a prototypical, example of the latter, though I feel it also describes many of those pressing for a ‘revitalised’ left in the West.

Of course, there are still people working to produce authentic insights into the working of our global economic system. There are plenty of interesting and insightful critical analyses that challenge the parameters of the reigning socioeconomic system. Very recently, to name just one example, David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years has presented a useful anthropological analysis of the growth of markets, exposing their coercive origins and demonstrating that the rational economic agent of classical economics is a historical aberration.

The problem is that many activists on the left do not have time for these insights, and have instead moved (at the extreme) into the liberal assumption that theory is ideology, ideology is bad, and so we have to leave behind theory and rely on ‘common sense’ to achieve real political gains. But common sense—as Marx pointed out, though he was not the first or last to do so—is ideologically determined. If we abandon substantive analysis in the abstract, we have also abandoned any chance to operate outside the narrow limits of the system we want to transform.

The challenge for the left is not only to work for superficial improvements (improvements which, to be sure, may have a very positive impact on the lives of many who are worse-off), to engage in a kind of ‘blind’ activism, but also to present fundamental alternatives and to work to radically question, and finally to transform, the way in which people understand received concepts such as debt, economy, class, democracy, gender, the state, politics, race.

If we do not take up this task of critical analysis, if we leave it to self-proclaimed academic ‘critical theorists’—because it seems utopian, too abstract or too inconsequential—then we will have surrendered our most basic ultimate mission, to realise not only a better world, but an unequivocally just world. If the ideological field is abandoned to liberal capitalism, any advances we may make will be temporary and any victories will turn, given time, to ashes.

I well recognise that this kind of seemingly abstract criticism would not make us popular in the short term. But telling people what they want to hear should not be our business. If our judgements are borne out, and if we are not simply swept away in the tide of changing circumstances, then we will be able to shape public opinion in a concrete way and create a real opportunity for general transformation. With the increasing instability of the global economic system, I do not think this is a forlorn, apocalyptic hope for some distant utopian future (as it may have seemed to some only ten years ago).

To be sure, we must be broad-based, not sectarian, and this involves cultivating an open climate for analytical debate. This, I think, is after all the basis for Left Unity. But these debates must happen, and not be rejected in the first place as unnecessary abstraction. We not only need policy, but also a deeper understanding of the overall system we find ourselves in—and how it can genuinely be changed.