“A world without leaders.” What does it mean to be left-handed?

This article seeks to expand the concept of leftism by criticizing traditional leftist arguments about freedom and individualism that are reduced to just liberalism. The report says that socialism as a project goes beyond these simple requirements to raise wages from these minimum reforms to the end. Rather, it is a project that transcends class—Marx’s elusive dream—race and racism.

Elizabeth Brunig wrote about the difference between “liberals” and “leftists”; He suggests that anyone who falls under the broad umbrella of what he calls “non-republicanism” is actually a liberal, in the following sense:

“The second sense in which almost all non-Republicans are libertarians is that they all subscribe to the tenets of liberalism as a philosophy: it is a worldview that supports free, rational, and radical inquiry; equality; individualism; subjective rights; and liberty as the primary political goal.

This is a simple statement for me to agree with – but I also think it misses some important political differences.

Am I a champion of “free, rational and radical inquiry”? I think I am like Marx; I advocate a “stern critique of the existing system” that “will not be reduced either by its discoveries or by a struggle with existing forces.”

Do you believe in “equality”? Of course, one of the fundamental structural features of my book is the distinction between a hierarchical society like ours and a society in which everyone shares the benefits and sacrifices that are possible or necessary given our technological sophistication and ecological limitations.

What about individuality? It is also indisputable, although it is not entirely clear what the term is supposed to mean. I support Oscar Wilde who said that “by abolishing private property we shall have true, beautiful and healthy individualism”. That is, instead of being guilty of cooperating with others for wages—in Marx’s “double sense” freedom means selling our labor power and giving it up for something other than sale and trade—we can have what Philippe van Paris calls “true freedom,” that is, the freedom that comes from owning time and resources.

As for “subjective rights”, I’m not entirely sure what that means. Do I believe that these are rights that are politically defined and democratically distributed rather than derived from a divine concept of natural law? In this case, again, I support him and I think T.H. The “social rights” arguments of people like Marshall can usefully be synthesized with anti-oppression and anti-exploitation politics.

So of course there is freedom. It is a word that has entered deeply into the liberal tradition and the American tradition. I believe that this should be the basis of socialist politics as well. But freedom from what and freedom to do what?

Brunig’s brilliance about the meaning of socialism is evident here: “The economic aspects of liberalism (free market capitalism) create material conditions that actually make people less free.”

I like that, but again, it seems vague. In describing my own political path, I often refer to my parents’ liberal politics, my own journey of discovery and inquiry through which I concluded that their liberal ideals could not be achieved by liberal means, but that something more radical, more Marxist, was needed.

But what does it mean to get rid of the “economic aspects of liberalism”? Does it just mean higher wages? universal health care and education; right of residence; And the establishment of strong trade unions? To be clear, I support all of this.

But we have seen this movie before. This is the tidal wave of the welfare state, which today is sometimes presented as an idyllic model of class peace and human contentment: where everyone has a good job, decent interests and a comfortable retirement. (Though, of course, for much of the working class, this paradise did not exist.) Who wants more than that?

However, the historical reality of the tidal wave of post-war care capitalism is that everyone wanted more. Capitalists wanted, as always, more profits and felt pressure from powerful unions and social democratic parties to undermine this privilege.

Worse, they faced the problem of a working class that had become too powerful politically. This is what Michal Kalecki has called “the political aspects of full employment,” the danger that a sufficiently dedicated working class can challenge the basic structure of an economy based on concentrated property rights and capital accumulation.

Socialists sometimes emphasize economic democracy as the core of our politics. As the Democratic Socialists of America put it: “Capitalism is giving way to democracy in the workplace.” According to this argument, socialism means bringing the liberal ideals of democracy to places where most people do not experience democratic control at all, especially in the workplace.

But when you talk about introducing democracy, you’re talking about giving people control over their lives that they didn’t have before. Once you do this, you open up the possibility of a more radical and destructive type of change.

Not only the capitalists want more, but also the workers. A good job is better than a bad job and better than unemployment. A high salary is better than a low salary. But the powerful working class is not inclined to sit back and be content with what it has—it demands more.

Less so, for example, when it comes to the complexity of most jobs. After all, how many people dream of breaking the clock and cashing in at the behest of their boss, regardless of salary or job security?

“Take That Job and Take It” emerged amid an era in which many workers could and did take action against this threat. In the peak year, 1969, there were 766 unauthorized strikes in the United States, but by 1975 there were only 238.

All of this leads us to the point that even if we can restore the post-war welfare state, it is not just the end forever, we need a policy that recognizes and prepares for this reality. It must be linked to a broader vision of what goes beyond the immediate demands of social democracy. This is what I call socialism, or even communism, which, for me, represents the final horizon.

The socialist project, in my view, is about more than just the urgent demand for more jobs, higher wages, universal social programs, or shorter working hours. This is a project about that. But it also goes beyond and excludes what we believe defines our identity and our way of life.

This is the project of canceling the class itself. This means the abolition of capitalist wage labor and thus the abolition of the “working class” as an identity and a social phenomenon. This is not the same as discarding work in its other sense, such as socially necessary work or personally satisfying work.

This project is also about the abolition of “race”, a biologically false but still socially absolute idea. This is a task that cannot be separated from the abolition of class, but many modern liberals may wish to throw us out of this reality.

As David Roediger points out in his recent article on “Class, Race, and Marxism,” much of the forgotten history of terms like “white privilege” comes from communists who tackled the problem of racism not to prevent class politics but to facilitate it. People like Claudia Jones or Theodore Allen, whose major work was “inventing the white race,” as Rodger notes, endured “half a century of radical organizing, much of it specifically in industry.”

Similarly, no socialism worthy of the name of socialism can avoid patriarchy, gender, heterosexuality and the nuclear family. Marx and Engels themselves had some premonitions of this, for some of them understood that the means of reproduction and the means of production were intimately connected with the origin of the family, private property, and the state.

But they could only follow their own logic, so they obeyed Shulamit Firestone to propose radical alternatives to our current ways of regulating childbearing and upbringing. It took communists like Leslie Feinberg and Silvia Federic to challenge our simplistic assumptions about the existence of binary “gender.” The more we win reforms that allow people to define their sexuality and gender identity, give women control over their own bodies, reduce their economic dependence on men, the more open this kind of radical questioning becomes.

This is what “leftist” means to me. [فأن تكون يساريّا] It means envisioning, waiting, and fighting for a world without leaders, a world that transcends class, race, and gender as we understand them today. For me, this is what the fight for individuality and freedom means.

That’s one of the reasons I insist on policies that fight for reforms that serve their own interests — health care, living wages, and everything else — but it doesn’t stop there. It is a politics that strives for “non-reformist” reform: it is a demand that is not aimed at perpetuating human capitalism, but deliberately destabilizes and sabotages it.

The second reason is that, for all the economic and political reasons mentioned above, we cannot achieve a nicer version of capitalism and then stop it. We can build social democracy only to destroy it.

Do all liberals, or even all leftists, believe this? Based on my experience, I don’t think so. This does not mean that it is a defense of sectarianism or dogmatism; I believe in building a broad, united front with everyone who wants to make our society more humane and equal. But I have a vision for something beyond that.

Because if we all agree that the project of the left is based on a vision of freedom and individualism, then we must consider this vision to be radically ambiguous. We can only look briefly into the future – to the point where the working class has loosened its shackles a little, as happened in the best moments of twentieth-century social democracy.

At that point, we once again reach the point where social-democratic class settlement becomes impossible, and the system must either revert to a reactionary form of capitalist survival or change to something else entirely. What our future will do in this situation and what kind of people we will be is unknown and unpredictable – and if our politics were to be authentically democratic, it could not be otherwise.

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Translator: Jacobin