Left isn't meaningless

Recently, I got in an argument with another political theorist. She was incensed by my claim that Obama isn't left. While I pointed out his neoliberalism, she emphasized that he's to the left of Bush and McCain. She didn't think much of my response, "so was Nixon." After a bit of this, she accused me of having an essentialist notion of what's left.

This is absolutely true. Despite the stupidities of American politics and policy, "left" is not a meaningless term. Despite all the damage done to it by well-meaning multiculturalists and feminists, it hasn't floated into the ether. We know full well that there were Nazi feminists and that capitalism is compatible with multiculturalism. Despite the attempt of democrats to hegemonize the term, it still means more than democracy.

To refer to a political issue or position as left is to link it to a Marxist, communist, and socialist tradition. It is to draw a line in the stand regarding capitalism and inequality. It is to say that collective production, distribution, and responsibility trumps the preferences of individuals.

Of course, one can disagree with this position. And this means one isn't left.

Comments

[old - Doug Johnson]

Wonderfully put.

How does Obama end up ranked as the most liberal Senator when there is a genuine socialist from Vermont in the Senate? I think there must be a dozen or so different ranking systems such that whenever conservatives want to rip into an opponent, they can somehow place them in the top 3-4 most liberal. I remember Kerry and Edwards ranked 1st and 3rd according to Republican attacks four years ago. I mean, it's just clear that someone like Ted Kennedy is genuinely to the left of Obama, even if he did endorse Obama. I'm assuming you'd count Ted as left, right? Any others in the Senate.

[Joe Clement]

Nice post, Jodi. I agree. In addition to the Marxist/communist/socialist tradition, which is at any rate the mature form of Leftist politics, I think it's hard to understand the Left without understanding the radical politics of the 18th Century. Of course, our problems aren't the crown or the pope, but as Ajurn Appadurai recently put it, the "faith-based economy" (http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/10/14/welcome-to-the-faith-based-economy/).

[Teo]

And you still have to say this to a fellow political theorist?

One can always concede that Obama is to the left of this or that politician.

But first things first -- and that involves clarifying what Left really stands for.

Amen to your post.

[Craig]

Having a moderately viable social democratic party and an on-the-verge-of-being-moderately-viable green party in Canada, it is always shocking to see someone like Obama called "left." And the NDP shouldn't under any circumstance be characterized as a "left" political party. They aren't even a reformist party. I think, at best, Obama would find a home in the center/center-right wing of the Liberal Party in Canada sitting beside other establishment cosmopolitans like Ignatieff or Rae. (Note: this should not be construed as a "Yay Canada!" comment.)

[Sinthome]

Jodi, perhaps you could say a bit more as to just why this is the case:

"To refer to a political issue or position as left is to link it to a Marxist, communist, and socialist tradition. It is to draw a line in the stand regarding capitalism and inequality. It is to say that collective production, distribution, and responsibility trumps the preferences of individuals."

I do not at all disagree with you on these points, but it seems to me that an argument is needed here. It seems to me that one of the central problems within the American context is that the possibility of discussing these positions is almost entirely lacking within our symbolic. That is, Marxist perspectives are almost entirely invisible or absent within the symbolic sphere. Where they do appear, it is always in negative terms, presenting a forced vel or alternative: "your money or your life!", "capitalism and liberalism or socialism!" I think one of the most important things thinkers like Badiou, Ranciere, and Zizek is doing is developing a robust concept of the political where politics isn't simply governance, but a break with the structure of situations. One of the things I find deeply depressing when I read democratic blogs is how hostile their posters are to Marxist thought whenever discussions of socialism come up. How can democrats effect any change when they can't even clearly formulate the problems and when the axiomatic assumptions of our current form of government and economy aren't even problematized?

[pebird]

What kind of political theorist could believe that ANY US president could be conceived as "left"?

Now, since there isn't a left left in the US - there is a void that anyone could step into - and from a relative perspective, X can be seen "to the left" of Y.

There is this fantasy in muddled liberal thought for a "Left Big Other" to take over and clean things up. Just like FDR did - except FDR didn't, there were political parties and unions and organizations and a whole lot of what appears to be absent today.

[old]

Craig, I think Obama is far to the left of Ignatieff. Rae, okay maybe. Ignatieff not only supported the Iraq war, he cheerleaded and gave intellectual support to it. He's to the right of Hilary, and may just be the next 'liberal' party leader in Canada. I hear this kind of thing all the time here in Toronto, and I think it does smack of some kind of, yay Canada thing. I'd place the Clintons center right, in line with Canadian Liberals and Obama center left, much closer to the NDP than to Liberals. And when I read about his days as a law professor, I have some hope that a democratic supermajority (a big if) and a major recession might just coax a little more left out of Obama then we've previously expected.

[Jodi]

Thanks for the responses. A couple of quick ones.

PE Bird--the way I've been making what I take to be a point similar to yours is to say that FDR wasn't FDR when he was elected. There was a lot of trial and error in the New Deal, and much that depended on the context created by radical labor as well as by a communist potential not yet diminished by decades of red-baiting. Shoot, Stalin was an ally!

Sinthome--there are points where I agree with you and points where I diverge. For me, an answer to your question about 'why' would be historical (and here I think I would be agreeing with Old, Joe Clement, and maybe even that crazy "Yay Canada" Canadian nationalist Craig--always Yay Canada at the drop of a hat...).

From where I sit in debates in contemporary political theory, the problem is a turn away from governance and the state (I associate this with folks influenced by Deleuze and Agamben). I also read Zizek's embrace of law and the Party and his criticisms of Badiou and Ranciere in this vein. My concern with an idea like 'break with the structure of situations' is the ease with which it can allied with the old cultural studies pluralization of politics such that anything and everything is political. That move is not a necessary one, but it is an easy one.

[Jodi]

Old--I've commented on your post at the weblog but it doesn't show up in the comment list. And, it still says that there are only 2 comments rather than 4.

[old]

ahh, that's shit. I haven't gotten a message in my box either saying that you've commented, which is how it happens now that Adam has switched to wordpress.

[miggy]

We shouldn't forget to include the anarchist tradition here either . . .

[Sinthome]

To be fair to Deleuze and Guattari, Jodi, I think they're the most Marxist of the bunch coming out of France during the late 60s. In many respects, I think the manner in which Deleuze and Guattari got appropriated by the American academy is largely an accident of timing with respect to when their work was translated. The Marxist dimension of Anti-Oedipus was almost entirely ignored-- a dimension which very closely follows Grundrisse and Capital in its own way --and certain passages about desiring-machines were privileged, playing into the dominance of identity politics. Deleuze and Guattari were singular among the 68ers in that they took Marxist historical materialism and political economy seriously. The rest largely took the Gramscian turn following Althusser, which led to a culturalist appropriation of Marx and rendered questions of political economy almost entirely invisible. One of Deleuze and Guattari's major contributions was to attempt a reconciliation of these very diverse approaches. By contrast, the work of Badiou and Ranciere tends largely towards the cultural register, which leads to a sort of hybrid identity politics (yes, I'm aware that Badiou makes identity politics a central object of his critique, but he also rejects political economy as, well, political). Zizek fairs a bit better in his more recent work, but I still think he's a bit too Gramscian in his basic orientation. His talk of a parallax goes some of the way towards resolving this problem, but I think he still has a long way to go (here I would agree with Doug's remarks in a previous thread). Balibar would be another notable exception here.

One of the most interesting things about the times that we're living in is that they caught those deeply entrenched in political theory-- especially in the French continental tradition --unaware. Many of us just didn't have our eye on the economy, seeing the real questions as lying in the realm of the signifier, identifications, ideology, etc. Yet surprisingly, as economic conditions have begun to change, we've also seen not only significant changes in economy begin to take place (where they'll lead, we don't know... so far they look a lot like what Klein describes in the Shock Doctrine, i.e., they won't be good), but more profoundly we've also begun to see a significant change in how the voters are thinking about politics. I personally would not have thought this possible back in 2004. They're not as big a change as I would have liked, but they certainly suggest to me that a number of theorists need to go back to the drawing board as to just where political strategy and struggle lie.

[Sinthome]

I should add that this Marxist dimension was almost entirely ignored because political economy itself had become invisible in the American situation between the Reagan and the Clinton years. In Heideggerian terms, the triumph of neoliberal capitalism had become something like an unspoken assumption, a being-in-the-world, so proximal that only questions of identity could appear as political.

[dionysusstoned]

most of the time i call myself a marxist, albeit a marxist of a particular kind

...but i hate the left. and, to be sure, the left IS a relational category. where i live, for instance, the ruling party - which often explicitly invokes sacred texts of the communist tradition (marx, lenin...) - is certainly left of the parties bred in liberal tradition. all the same, neoliberal restructuring here would have not been possible except for its alliance with this breed of left nationalism. a paradox for sure, but one that i think is telling...that is, the survival of capitalism is unintelligible except of the basis of understanding how the dialectic between left and right in liberal democracies mediates social antagonism.

so, from my side, the issue is not to recover a more authentic notion of left (or right), or to police the borders of who might authentically be called left, but to leave behind such categories altogether. this, it seems to me, would improve our chances in our struggle against capitalism. the problem of course is that having gotten rid of the category of left, i suspect that folk like yourself wont know that they are anymore...that is, 'the left' (as a substantial identity) need a notion of 'an authentic left' to reconcile their participation (and its forms) in a national community - and therein lies, at least in part, the problem

of course obama is left (although, perhaps, not as left as you)...but, that is, after all, one of the problems with obama

[old - Doug Johnson]

Jodi, Thankfully, the comments have showed up now over at the weblog. I'm glad it was just a cyberglitch as I was beginning to think the post was a total dud. I'll respond to them over there.

[Jodi]

from where I sit in political theory, Empire was huge in part because it was shifting away from identity and cultural politics. It came out in 2000. Yet Zizek was already writing critically about capitalism, a theme that was explicit in his work already in For They No Not What They Do. On the Frankfurt side, there were debates over recognition and redistribution (Honneth v. Fraser). And socialist feminism was still present although it had been struggling a lot during the 90s.

[Jodi]

I should add that there was at least one other place where economic thinking was going on in contemporary theory: digital media and the internet, via celebrations of immaterial labor, the commons, post-property regimes, forms of collective production etc. And thinking about that reminds me of Negri's work and that of other Italians. To make a long story short, my own academic background was situated in post-Marxism and identity politics (I critically explore this in my next book that's coming out with Duke). But I think that it's important to acknowledge that other work was going on.

[old]

title? expected publication date?

[Richard Grusin]

Good post, Jodi, but I would quarrel with your claim that insisting on a link between the Left and Marxist, socialist, and communist traditions is "essentialist." This is a historical affiliation, not an "essential" one, I would think, and as such it could have been different (and might prove to be some time in the future).

[Joe Clement]

I agree with you, Richard, and not to Jodi's detriment either. I think the value of snapping back with affirmation at the accusation of essentialism is that, in a time (since the late '60s) when "the Left" is bandied about as a kind of brand, it assumes more than while no less than what the other person meant.

I don't know if it would be correct to say it returns to the other person in Jodi's opening story her message in inverted form, but perhaps that's another way of appreciating the function of Jodi's response. That said, given the rest of her post, with her concluding sentiments about the Marxist/communist/socialist tradition, I worry that it's all too easy for us to hear Jodi's response without the fullness of its original context.

That's why when Jodi writes that "to refer to a political issue or position as left is to link it to a Marxist, communist, and socialist tradition," I want to add that the roots are deeper still. The historical situation of "the Left" is determined by the history of the "Marxist, communist, and socialist tradition" to be sure, but even Zizek's desire to "use Lacan as a privileged intellectual tool for re-activating German Idealism," Badiou's rehabilitating of Plato, or both of their interest in St. Paul show that where the Left goes today will be determined by the rehabilitation of a much broader history of critical thought and emancipatory politics than what is typically conveyed by "a Marxist/communist/socialist tradition." Otherwise, I don't think we could appreciate what thinkers like Zizek and Badiou mean when they say, "I'm a Leftist."

[Jodi]

I agree with Joe's response to Richard regarding my answer to someone accusing me of essentialism. Yes! For historical reasons. I'll add that the term left is clearly not an ontological term, but a situated one, and that as situated it shifts and is polemical, but that this in no way means that it can shift anywhere...for historical reasons.

On St. Paul: I would say that the appropriation of St. Paul happens from within a situation in Marxism (I'm not using the term situation here as a term of art). St. Paul is retroactively reactivated.

[Dale]

Thanks, Jodi. It's gratifying to hear someone willing to anchor the idea of "the left" -- whether as an essentialist category, or as a very unmalleable historical one -- in the tradition of historical materialism and political economy.

It remains to be seen whether the current situation -- Greespan being shocked, shocked! I tell you. at the recent appearence of "flaws" in the neoliberal ointment -- might inspire more erstwhile multiculturalists to embrace a more bold alignment with the materialist tradition of the left.

[Sinthome]

It seems to me that one of the central theses of any historical materialist position is that we must account for how certain norms or values emerge within a specific historical situation. This is what I was getting at in raising the question of how we can establish that indeed the left is necessarily Marxist in character. Under what conditions does this understanding of the political arise? By contrast, wouldn't an essentialist position necessarily be ideological in the sense that it presents a realm outside of history floating about in Platonic space as a set of eternal values and ideals?

[Jodi]

The political theorist was called my position essentialist was doing so in the context of a political disagreement. It was a dinner conversation following a somewhat controversial talk I had given. Feelings were running high, feelings associated more with hope in Obama and hope for political change. My gesture to Obama in my talk was brief and polemical. But this is one the sites to which a variety of intense investments were attached. The criticism of my position as essentialist and my identification of it as essentialist was not about Platonic spaces of eternal values and ideas. The conversation was not a reflective discussion but a political argument. In this setting, essentialist evoked arguments among feminists and anti-racists as well as Laclau and Mouffe's critique of Marxism. So essentialist could and did designate a position within rather than outside history.

[Sinthome]

Jodi, that makes more sense. I suppose what I'm looking for or trying to figure out is how one might argue that a socialist-marxist politics is the real of our historical moment or the concrete universal haunting our historical situation. One of the things I find most appealing in Marx's own approach to politics is the manner in which he analyzes the emergence of a particular politics as the universal of that historical moment through an analysis of all the scraps and remainders belonging to the social field, e.g. worker sabotage, conflicts with owners, etc. Where, from the standpoint of the symbolic, all these things are coded as illegalities and aberrations, Marx discerns the emergence of a new politics and set of potentialities allowing for structural change. One of the things that bothers me most about Badiou's approach is that all of this is largely lost, instead making the political a site of declaration and fidelity based on the institution of norms.

[Jodi]

I would say that Marx's politics (Marxist politics?) emerges through the analysis, that it is a product of the analysis, not that it is present as a politics that is not yet discovered. The sense of a politics as there, as present, is a retroactive effect of the analysis. That said, I fully agree that there are potentials unrealized in the social field. I like the way Eric Santner describes these in his contribution to THe NEighbor (which I can't seem to locate at the moment)--they are signifying stresses (although signifying shouldn't be over-read here as in terms of determinate meaning). Maybe another way I would say this is to see a conjunction between Marx and Badiou where you see disjunction--identifying scraps and reminders depends on a prior fidelity.

[Nate]

hi Jodi,
I don't agree with you about damages done by feminism and multiculturalism, but I share the spirit of the post. I've often found that people say really weird things about The Left (either for or against) and invoke views that I don't recognize as left. Along the same lines I find this Marx quote useful for drawing clear lines: “how grossly Feuerbach is deceiving himself when by virtue of the qualification “common man” he declares himself a communist, transforms the latter into a predicate of “man,” and thereby thinks it possible to change the word “communist,” which in the real world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere category.”

cheers,
Nate

[nonono]

I am totally with you! But one thing: What are (or were) "Nazi feminists"? I really never have heard of something like that!

[Jodi]

During the Third Reich, there were organized women's groups that were not simply oriented towards women's familial roles (although this orientation has also been a feminist standpoint) but towards women's political power in the reich.

[Nate]

Respectfully, I don't find that convincing as an argument against any particular feminists who aren't nazis, and I'm not convinced that those women's groups were feminists. A group advocating for some women isn't always feminist, just as a group with Socialist in the name (and/or a government nationalizing parts of the economy) isn't always socialist. As for the compatibility of multiculturalism and capitalism, sure, but compatibility with capitalism is not the only test for something being worthwhile. The New Deal was compatible with capitalism too. Doesn't make the New Deal a bad idea, just makes it not revolutionary. And that capitalism and some version of multiculturalism are compatible does mean that all identity politics are compatible with capitalism (this compatibility or not is a historical rather than an a priori matter - nationalist movements have on occasion caused tremendous problems for capitalists).

cheers,
Nate

[Jodi]

Nate--my claim is not that feminism and multiculturalism are not worthwhile. Far from it. My intention is also not to say that the fact that there were Nazi feminists casts aspersions on non-Nazi feminists. That would be a stupid thing to claim.

My claim is that the left is not the same the same as identity politics, that identity politics has been extraordinarily beneficial to capitalism (and vice versa), and that to designate a position or view as left means to articulate with a Marxist, socialist, and communist tradition of equality and collective production, distribution, and responsibility.

[Nate]

hi Jodi,
I get the latter part re: Marxism as I already agree with, but what here's what I'm not clear on: are you saying capitalism benefited from identity politics at some moment, capitalism benefits from identity politics now, or identity politics will only benefit capitalism? Or some combo thereof? Because it seems to me that certain things we can look back and call identity politics caused massive problems for capitalism. Likewise certain things in the present or near future that don't fit within this definition of left and might be called identity politics could do the same. (This may be a non sequitur to your post and if so I apologize.)

Final comment, I'd never say that over all Marxism helped capitalism, but there are instances where that happened. The actions of the Spanish Socialist Party in the 30s, for one, and the ComIntern there too. And that's without getting into a debate about state capitalism or so-called socialist primitive accumulation.

take care,
Nate

[Jodi]

Over the past 30-40 years, capitalism has benefited from identity politics and identity politics has benefited from capitalism. We can easily point to struggles in feminist movement and in African-American politics between factions that focused on liberal values and aspirations (equality in the workplace, rights to buy and sell, access to professions, clubs, and associations from which we blocked, essentially a whole set of individual rights to opportunities equal to those of privileged white men) and those focused on socialist aspirations and collective values.

Your point, though, about Marxism helping capitalism is a good one that I need to think about (that is, 'helping capitalism' ends up being too crude a criticism): one of the ways capitalism develops is through class struggle.

[Nate]

hi Jodi,
Thanks for clarifying. I think we're closer than I initially thought re: identity politics and all that. I have a problem sometimes where I can't tell categorical arguments from historical arguments, I think that's part of what happened here. I'm not sure what you'd make of it (I'd be quite curious to know), but re: economic change vs other visions of rights and multiculturalism, there's this book I like a lot. Risa Goluboff, The Lost Promise Of Civil Rights. Goluboff charts use of the 13th Amendment to fight debt peonage in the South and its gradual eclipse by the 14th amendment and formal equality (Brown v. Board is the big marker for Goluboff). I know you're very busy, and I think the book wouldn't satisfy in many ways - not left by your definition - but I'd be keen to know what you make of it. I'm also keen to hear more of your take on the pro-capitalist use of Marxism (whether sellouts by actually existing marxist and socialist parties or theoretical recuperation by capitalist economists).
take care,
Nate