Re: Disband the Left? The 'left' which preserves identities shaped and distorted by capital?Archived Message
Posted by margo on December 26, 2018, 9:15 am, in reply to "Disband the Left?"
Copy and paste of further Mark Fisher writings, of interest to a discussion of the left? Is collectivity best organized on the basis of an indifference to difference?"
Previous Message
Capital subdued the organised working class by decomposing class consciousness, viciously subjugating trade unions while seducing ‘hard working families’ into identifying with their own narrowly defined interests instead of the interests of the wider class; but why would capital be concerned about a ‘left’ that replaces class politics with a moralizing individualism, and that, far from building solidarity, spreads fear and insecurity?
The second reason is what Jodi Dean has called communicative capitalism. It might have been possible to ignore the Vampires’ Castle and the neo-anarchists if it weren’t for capitalist cyberspace. The VC’s pious moralizing has been a feature of a certain “left” for many years — but, if one wasn’t a member of this particular church, its sermons could be avoided. Social media means that this is no longer the case, and there is little protection from the psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses.
So what can we do now? First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognize that there are no identities, only desires, interests and identifications. [...] Instead of freezing people into chains of already-existing equivalences, the point was to treat any articulation as provisional and plastic. New articulations can always be created. No one is essentially anything. Sadly, the right act on this insight more effectively than the left does.
The bourgeois-identitarian left knows how to propagate guilt and conduct a witch hunt, but it doesn’t know how to make converts. But that, after all, is not the point. The aim is not to popularise a leftist position, or to win people over to it, but to remain in a position of elite superiority, but now with class superiority redoubled by moral superiority too. “How dare you talk — it’s we who speak for those who suffer!”
But the rejection of identitarianism can only be achieved by the reassertion of class.
A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group.
Class consciousness is always double: it involves a simultaneous knowledge of the way in which class frames and shapes all experience, and a knowledge of the particular position that we occupy in the class structure. It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure — a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it — that must be destroyed.
The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.
If this seems like a forbidding and daunting task, it is. But we can start to engage in many prefigurative activities right now. Actually, such activities would go beyond prefiguration — they could start a virtuous cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy in which bourgeois modes of subjectivity are dismantled and a new universality starts to build itself.
We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree — on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.
We need to think very strategically about how to use social media — always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t occupy the terrain and start to use it for the purposes of producing class consciousness. We must break out of the “debate” that communicative capitalism in which capital is endlessly cajoling us to participate in, and remember that we are involved in a class struggle.
The goal is not to “be” an activist, but to aid the working class to activate — and transform — itself. Outside the Vampires’ Castle, anything is possible.