The absent "left" in light of the situation in Ukraine

What in essence is "the left" as an historical political tendency?

I say it advocates advances in liberty and equality (conceiving these as related) against persistent (or reactionary) assertions of authoritarianism as well as the inequalities it is often used to support.

Synonyms include "progressive" and "avant-garde." The left believes in progress and its critiques of modernity always seek an alternative that is (somehow) not less but more "modern." Some of these concepts are indeed vague. That means it is important to try to think them through clearly.

European modernity involved great increases in the available and operative forms of social domination, through science and technology, and through bureaucracy and the administrative logic of the power of states. But it also involved apparent advances in the liberty and autonomy of individuals, and social and political forms that embodied this shift. Critiques of modernity, particularly in romanticism and its sequelae, might reject, or somehow problematize, either or both of these things. Both left and right were bothered by the first of these things. The right tended to rejected both on the grounds of traditional and communitarian values, including nationalism and familialism. What failed to develop was both a clear path to great autonomy, liberty, and democracy and any very viable response to the problems posed by the combination of bureaucracy and technology, which could be used either to make all of us more free, or only to facilitate the aggrandizement of the powers of ruling elites and in the process make us less free. The classical bourgeois models knew two lines of addressing this problem: either make institutions more democratic, or defend liberty by limiting their powers.

The Marxist (and more broadly, the socialist, anarchist, and worker's movement affiliated) left championed the great early modern "bourgeois" revolutions (English, Dutch, American, and French) and sought to go further. Perhaps that could be done in more than one way, and perhaps we don't really know how it can be done best or even at all well. The philosophy of Marx and the allied socialist and workers' movements provided an answer that endured for almost a century and a half. Then it fell into disrepute because the societies where it was officially adopted were such failures. They were in some ways more democratic, in others less so; their citizens wound up wanting both the consumer goods and personal liberties that the capitalist "West" offered more of.

There is little question but that greatly reducing necessary labor time and removing large public utilities, like companies involved in social media and internet marketing, from private control and making their operations subject to a democratic state, both have at least the potential to make all of us more free. This is the line of thinking in Marxism; the question is less about its likely truth than whether this is enough.

Historically, Marxism became associated with socialist states. It championed the cause of workers and became more associated with desires for equality than liberty. Liberty as well as democracy suffered, in part because Marxism had no real independent critique of bureaucracy and the administrative power of states. It did not achieve any unambiguous advances in democracy or liberty.

Some socialists and others on the left think the liberty idea itself is useless or bankrupt; they would concede it to the right. The libertarian right, for its part, has no program to advance the cause of liberty except when workers and the poor are excluded from its selective promise of happiness. The libertarians want liberty for capitalists by privatizing government, thinking that making government a business faced with competition will free people from its coercions. In practice, the liberal right merely divested states of welfare functions while strengthening military and police functions to protect property against those people who make up a society’s labor power, which is most of us. We know the results. Prisons metastatized while urban police forces used military weapons and tactics against the local poor who were treated as potential enemy combatants under a foreign military occupation. If socialism was tragic, libertarianism was a murderous farce.

The bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries were really the last successful mass social movements to introduce new ideas that have survived. The ideas of the socialist revolutions of the 20th century mainly have not survived, though the anti-colonialist movements with which they were often associated did succeed, on bourgeois models of national liberation movements. The left-wing revolutions of the 18th century produced a reaction. Its principal form was anti-democratic and anti-liberal populist nationalism. Fascism was that. It was opposed by both liberals and socialists. The liberals have survived, the socialist governments did not.

The war in Ukraine is over nationalism (and imperialist aggrandizement of the most blatantly amoral kind) versus liberalism. The battles the 18th century left to the 19th and 20th are being refought again. Most people are not hoping to move forward to some new social forms, but to hold the line with the social and political forms that first triumphed in the early modern period. There is something melancholy about this situation in all its moral necessity.

A left worthy of the name wants a society that has more democracy and liberty and less authoritarianism than at present. There is ample reason to believe, as Marx did, that the more liberal and democratic 'bourgeois' nation-states provide the best starting point for trying to move ahead to something better.

There are also forms of political thinking that start out on the left and end up on the right. This has happened often in modern history, and it is partly true of some of forms of fascism. I think this happens because of forms of opposition and critique that are too totalizing, and “un-dialectically” if you like, fail to grasp the pros and cons of the system pertaining to their current situation.