Before and After the “Pre-Political”
Michael McClelland responds to Tom Roud's article on class politics and electoralism, and develops a more expansive notion of the pre-political, social practice, and civil society.
In the most recent issue of The Commonweal [May 2023], Canterbury Socialist Society’s Tom Roud addressed with a sense of foreboding the stormy weather that lay between that issue of the Federation’s newsletter and the forthcoming New Zealand general election. Chagrined by ‘the appearance of opposition, competition, [and] difference without any content of significance’ under capitalism, Roud spoke of the ongoing ‘left/right/left/right hoof beat’ of electoral politics, before signing off, ‘vote if you want to, or not, but let’s get on with discussing what actually needs to be done’.
State capitalist politics and its criticisms are by no means particular to New Zealand; Roud’s assessment of Labour and National as ‘two sides of the new Party of Order’ could be swapped out for Gore Vidal’s famous quip about the ‘two right wings’ of the ‘party of property’ in US politics. Yet, this does not diminish such claims’ necessity, and perhaps the reason for Roud’s weary tone is that his message bears repeating in this country. For socialists, it is troubling to see other groups on the Left embracing electoralism or even advocating for it in a full-throated way. For electoralism’s apologists, on the other hand, there are a few essential factors sustaining their optimism. For instance, there is New Zealand’s geographic particularity, which might offer voters the impression of a more direct pipeline to democracy than other countries. That is, our smallness in size suggests we are closer to our representatives; our distance from other countries suggests we are insulated from their political machines. These are just illusions, but the problem lies in the fact that they are insisted upon.
As for why others, including Roud and members of the Federation, might be less enchanted with electoralism’s prospects in this country, it might have to do with a prevalent nagging feeling in New Zealand that our distance and size are not assets, but liabilities. For those living in far-flung lands, there is always a sense that the world might be changing under their feet—that is, continents away. As the Australian Marxist Guido Baracchi said in 1920, ‘a Communist Europe and America will mean a Communist Australia, whether the proletariat of this country likes it or not [...] but it must “do its bit”.’ If there is any truth to this, the New Zealand Left would similarly do well to not let its particularity turn into provincialism, as it would risk further disorientation with respect to the outside world.
The convenient thing about political elections, at least, is that they function as signposts at which we can all stop and check our bearings in our race to catch up with the reality that capitalism produces. For socialists, elections present a periodic opportunity to look at capitalism’s latest efforts to reform itself, and compare these efforts with the past. By registering the differences in the pressure, aim, object, and source, socialists can form educated guesses as to which direction social reality has headed in, allowing us to more easily track it down. In every case, the starting point is the present.
The ‘evolutionary’ calendar?
While we approach the election, those belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the USA are slumping in number from their high point in 2021. Momentum, in the UK, are reportedly down a third from their peak membership during the Corbyn years. The Jacobin Show, for a brief time, even folded, and the magazine’s headlines are no longer gleeful as they were in the Sanders years. In other countries, like Sweden, Germany, and elsewhere, the more popular Left groups are experiencing similar pangs of torpor, which poses the question of whether the disaffection will trickle down to our part of the world. Interestingly, however, the reverse appears to be true. The Federation of Socialist Societies, which, while much smaller than the groups mentioned above, charts as the largest socialist organisation in the country, and one whose membership has shifted in inverse proportion to declining overseas groups.
To understand this, we might look back two general elections ago, to 2017, when Canterbury Socialist Society (CSS), the Federation’s founding chapter, began. This was a year which, for some, carried enormous weight, with the rise of the DSA in the USA and Corbyn’s face-off against Theresa May in the UK elections. Looked at another way, however, 2017 was haunted by the year before it, with the world’s elites unable to cease wailing about Trump and Brexit in increasing glass-shattering pitches. The liberal media establishment’s chorus of consensus pervaded everyday discourse to such an extent that it induced a state in the Left where Leftists who had traditionally called attention to the fraught nature of electoralism became the cheerleaders of lesser-evilism. It is beyond the scope of this article to wonder aloud whether the talking points hyped up by CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and other friends of the US Democratic Party indirectly helped the New Zealand Labour Party get to the point where they were awarded their last-minute electoral victory in 2017. Yet, what was of immediate relevance for the local Left was the end of the National Party’s reign. National had presided over the Millennial Left’s formative years, taking power in 2008, in the wake of the global financial crisis. The National years had been the Left’s Occupy, anti-TPPA, and anti-GSCB years, and the party’s finale, nine years later, marked a moment less for celebration than for recalibration. Canterbury Socialist Society’s emphasis on Leftist education via public events (e.g., workshops, panels, etc.), then, hinted at the group’s prescience.
By the time of the 2020 election, the more infectious contagion was not COVID-19 but Left demoralisation, suggesting that if there was a crisis on the international Left born of a failure to look inward, it would spread to the local Left if left unchecked. The ironic thing about the Federation was that it likely picked up its introspective focus—knowingly or not—from without. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) had, for some years, been publishing sober-minded Left analyses in the Weekly Worker. There had also been the emergence of the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), a group who were inspired by the neo-Kautskyan formulations of the CPGB, and who formed within the DSA. Both CPGB and MUG were featuring on panels and in journalism hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society, another Left educational organisation that grew despite this time of general Left demoralisation, and to which I belong .
Still, these groups were by no means titanic. If their small memberships suggested anything, it was that not only did their theoretical inclinations ensure small numbers of followers, but that critics, if any, might have felt justified in their allegations of parochialism. To an extent, such charges would have been expected, given the movement towards reformism in this period. I have already mentioned the temporary mass appeal of neo-social democracy on the Left; some of which sprang from a desire for consensus (suddenly anyone who supported public spending was a ‘socialist’). Sectarianism’s ever-exploding infinitesimal chunks, meanwhile, were reaching vanishing point, and one reason was that young recruits were unable to suspend their disbelief in the revolutionary necessity of theoretical bone-picking any longer. In the eyes of fierce and politically-minded students who took part in, say, your average Chlöe Swarbrick campaign, self-styled ‘revolutionary’ groups with numbers that needed decimal values to make any sense appeared like a pack of misguided idealists at best and raving hypocrites at worst.[1]
So, if it was remarkable that inward-looking Left groups like the CPGB, MUG, and Platypus evaded accusations of sectarianism and outlasted anti-intellectual snipery,[2] the success of the Federation was not as surprising, since its introspection had a much less theoretical character. ‘Education’ for the Federation did not mean a sectarian effort to indoctrinate or quibble over the classic texts, but to offer a starting point where the Left might meet. These discussions began, after all, over a few beers at the pub in Christchurch.
So, if the Federation’s quick growth of chapters offered models for how the Left might harness its few points of agreement to resist the aforementioned trappings, it also explains Roud’s confidence in arguing that a future independent political organisation might build on such successes and ‘intervene in [this period] of decay’. Roud says in his Commonweal article that by forming alternatives to capitalist state politics, we might form the basis for a party to emerge that would have a ‘dynamic and deeply rooted life of its own’, ensuring its vitality and longevity. For Roud, this independence is possible because, ‘while social reality is often codified and reflected by the state and the law, it is not over-determined by it’.
Civil society, broad and narrow
That which can thrive beyond the remit of the state and the law, for Roud, is civil society. In his article, he cites the turn-of-the-20th-century German Social Democratic Party (SPD) as a useful model of an organisation for civic and social betterment, in that it included ‘an enormous variety of social clubs, sports teams, vocational organisations, and so on’. Such activities assembled working people in numbers it is hard to fathom today. Notions we now take for granted, such as civic participation and the common good, extend from a historical moment which nurtured organisations like the SPD. If we take the late 19th century Second Industrial Revolution as our object of study, and the advancement of working peoples’ lives in this period as our criteria, we can judge the larger models of social organisation (such as those within the American progressive movement or the European social democratic parties) by their legacies which reach us today. However, although social clubs and fraternal organisations continue to exist in the 21st century, they no longer possess a socialist orientation. Roud notes that what few working class bases there remain for ‘community, connection, education, and conviviality’ will degenerate further under conditions of austerity and economic downturn.
But the more important question, I argue, centres on what is meant by civil society. Civil society, broadly speaking, should not be thought of narrowly as limited to particular social organisations. Rather, it is the society that encompasses them. Civil society means ‘urban society’, which is to say the general condition of modern society. This is reflected not only in society’s objective and discrete forms, like those Roud mentions, but also its subjective manifestations. In brief, it describes modern (post-feudal) social relations.
To understand this, we might examine civil society in history. Civil society gradually took shape in the late Medieval period via the mass migration of rural peasants to the emerging towns and cities of Europe. With this shift also came the transformation of a society that had long been defined by subsistence agriculture into one that was predicated on the free exchange of urban labour. With this new civil, not agricultural society, there emerged a distinct urban worldview which we now associate with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. As the thought of this urban workers congealed and legitimised rebellion against the old order (e.g., via the Atlantic revolutions that took place in the Netherlands, England, America, and France), feudalism gained an expiry date.
Although urban (civil) commercial social relations persisted and grew during the 1800s through to today, the advent of industrial capitalism—which made production not a means to an end but an end in itself—altered their meaning. It was no longer the case that the division of labour, individual trade, and private reason could contribute to the prosperity of society in general (and behind the backs of its actors, as the Enlightenment philosophes had thought). Instead, industrial machinery accelerated the private accumulation of capital while undermining labour’s share in it. As a result, buoyant enunciations of a free and universalist cosmology began to appear increasingly ill-fated to subsequent generations. Capitalism proceeded while the Enlightenment receded. By the time of the 20th century, social co-operation based on free labour appeared little more than a myth so long as machines existed to render, in Max Horkheimer’s words, ‘not work but the workers superfluous’.[3] Given the physical, mental, and social deterioration of workers’ lives, organisations dedicated to personal, civic, and social betterment took on a remedial character.
I raise these historical points not to quibble with Roud’s application of the concept of civil society—which is not wrong—but to broaden it. So, where Roud writes, ‘as austerity knocks at our door, and economic downturn appears likely, the atrophying of what remains of civil society will no doubt accelerate’, he is right; only, the situation might be regarded as being even worse. That is, not only does neoliberalism impinge upon the ability of ordinary people to organise themselves into free collectives, as Roud suggest but, also, (civil) society in general is its own obstacle, in as far as it is unable to transition beyond capitalism.
Hence, we can regard civil society not only as a practical and immediate problem (i.e., how do we best collectively associate in the direction of freedom?), but as a historical one. While it is true that policy and market concerns endanger ‘civil society’ in the narrow sense (i.e., civic and social organisations), such issues are compounded under ‘civil society’ in the broader sense. Just as individual and local groupings of organisers might face practical and ideological issues building networks of committed activists, society in general struggles to live up to the principle of social cooperation so long as industrial production creates mass unemployment (to name but one consequence). This dynamic can be understood as a self-contradiction taking place within a larger, general process of self-contradiction.
To elide or flatten this dynamic would be to reify it, treating as a fixed state what is really a process that simultaneously arises from and obscures centuries of regression under capitalism. By starting off with a reified conception of civil society, we limit our ability to actualise what civil society represents in its fullest dynamic: A problem. Thus, a full awareness of civil society, including its current untenability, comes prior to an apprehension of the tasks of socialism.
To elucidate this point, we might consider the part in Roud’s Commonweal article where he admits that a narrowly social democratic movement, and not a far-reaching or revolutionary one, might be the best hope we have at present. He argues that the goal of socialism lies in ‘establish[ing] a state of affairs where working people come to power at all levels of society and set about reorganising it’. In a certain sense, this is like how Marx, in his critique of the Gotha Programme, says that ‘freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it’.[4] Marx recognises that this claim, by itself, is not socialism, but merely a traditional civil social demand.[5] What causes to Marx raise it, though, is the fact of capitalism’s historical advance through and beyond civil society, outstripping and undermining such demands. The state intervenes in affairs that were once self-legislated by freely co-operating labourers. This means, for Marx, that there have emerged problems which are not for civil society to resolve, but for socialism to raise.[6]
Our pre-political moment
The good news is that even though we live under general conditions of decay and defeat on the Left, we have not yet lost the ability to reflect upon the conditions for revolution in the long term. This is because civil society has not lost its chief influence and product: the tradition of critique. Critique means the ability to reflect upon conditions of possibility for change, which is significant for politics in that it means theory’s capacity to reflect upon and transform practice. This is important for any civil social organisation, and I suspect it is particularly relevant for the Federation, in its openness towards new members, new chapters, and new discussions and debates. Indeed, it is why I am a member of the Federation, and it is why I am writing this article.
However, it is Roud’s call for an independent party that I think requires further exploration. Rather than argue against the need for a party—which, as I will make clear, I do not wish to do, since I agree with it—I call attention to what Roud has previously described as our ‘pre-political’ moment.[7] That we live in ‘pre-political’ conditions is a unique claim on the Left, and the only group I am aware of who shares this sentiment is Platypus. There is plenty of reason for it. This recognition of the ‘pre-political’ character of the present not only calls up the memory of overarching failures and defeats on the Left, but also ideological obstacles the Left itself has produced. The vocabulary, methods, and thought of a genuine socialist movement appear to lie not in the immediate future, but in the past, needing to be examined. So, lacking a meaningful way beyond capitalism, we must assume as our starting point that we have also lost the necessary understanding of it.
To find clarity, we can start by looking at what the term ‘pre-political’ means. The ‘pre-‘ prefix suggests preparations are needed in order to overcome barriers in the way of genuine politics. I have already covered some of these obstacles, which are not only objective and limited to neoliberalism and the Right, but also subjective and pertaining to the Left. Similarly, as I have stated, the crisis of civil society should be understood as a general condition which reproduces itself in all of its particular manifestations. As for the other half of the phrase ‘pre-political’, Roud addresses the ‘political’ by calling for the groundwork to be laid towards what might eventually become a party for socialism. This party, for Roud, would be defined by its independence from, its opposition to, and its programme to circumvent the ‘two sides of the new Party of Order’ (among other representatives of capital).
What glues together the ‘pre-‘ and the ‘political’ aspects of Roud’s thesis is his suggestion, summarised above, that there be the further establishment of civil social organisations by socialists. By this, Roud means groups dedicated to ‘community, connection, education, and conviviality’ that once made Social- Democratic parties ‘not merely electoral vehicles but […] social and civic organisations’. By the ‘largely self-reliant character of such an ‘ecosystem’, the independence of a party from state capitalist political machinery would be assured, which in turn would strengthen its oppositional character as well as its programme. It might be too soon to tell whether such an ecosystem would survive very long. Lacking this ecosystem at present, all we can do is hypothesise about the potentials and pitfalls lying ahead for a would-be socialist party. Yet, that we live in a pre-political time should not foreclose the prospects of doing political work. It is merely that the potentials offered by political work are constrained by pre-political conditions, and that these must be consciously inscribed into such a project.
An interesting model as to how a socialist organisation might organise pre-politically, then, is the USA’s Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP). As the name suggests, this project, founded by Platypus members in 2016, set out not to initiate a socialist party, but to ‘explore interest’ in doing so. Early in the Campaign, a fellow traveller of the project described it as an act of ‘generational sacrifice’, meaning that if mass socialism is not possible now, the project would at least sustain the questions that socialism would raise, so that future generations would not have to begin from scratch in uncovering their historical memory.
The Campaign for a Socialist Party USA began before my time in Platypus, and it is technically a separate organisation, so I cannot comment approvingly or disapprovingly as to its usefulness as a model, or whether it even succeeded according to its self-understanding. Still, I would be remiss not to offer it for comparison, both for its uniqueness and for how it explicitly identifies itself as a ‘pre-political’ project. Its framework, for instance, is not laid out definitively, but rather as a loose collection of ‘Points of Agreement’. By this, it allows for participation by a wide array of those committed to activism on the Left. Among the ‘Points of Agreement’ is the claim that the Campaign would not limit itself to Marxists, welcoming the present avowed Left, from liberals to anarchists. It would also oppose the ineffectiveness of the extant Left, who have, during the Sanders era and earlier, ‘more or less support[ed] the Democrats’. Further, the building of a socialist party would be a ‘painstaking and patient’ process that would likely take decades. Most important, though, is the Campaign’s final claim, which calls attention to civil society as a general condition of crisis: ‘Socialism will be the realization of the social potential made possible—but held back—by capitalism. We need a party to pursue the politics of this task.—Join us!’
So, members of the Federation interested in the possibility of forming a party in a pre-political time might consider such a project not as one that would be positive in character, but negative. Which is to say that it could function as a critical intervention into the present state of politics. Through activism, a project for a party could show how it is precisely activism that is currently limited in its horizons. By revealing such potential shortcomings in a conscious and self-inscribed way, these would appear less like pure liabilities and more like lessons for future generations. Although the project would not aim to fail, it would ready itself for that likely outcome: Through the inevitable setbacks that would face those involved in the project, they might realise not only that the duality between theory and practice is a false one, but that it is one that elides how practice is reliant on theory. However, instead of this meaning merely that ‘theory reflects upon practice’ in the activist sense, i.e., so that campaigners can learn how to do better demonstrations, strikes, door-knocking, etc., it would reveal that practice per se is limited, if all it has come to mean is negotiating for better terms upon which the state manages the crisis of society (e.g., by ‘asking for a seat at the table’). In brief, whereas the formation of a socialist party in the short term would involve starting off with undigested presuppositions inherited from the Left’s decline and defeat, a project towards a socialist party would hope to learn what it can practically do to clear the obstacles.
The New Zealand experiment
I began this article with Roud’s suggestion that there is, at present, something fundamentally undemocratic about politics in this country. Roud suggests that to rectify this problem, we must first recognise it, and understand how electoral politics and capitalism cloud the issue. This responsibility, for Roud, rests on the shoulders of those committed to building socialism, and particularly those who see a genuine socialist movement as a meaningful alternative to electoralism. The question, however, is what form the alternative would take. I argued that it should be considered how Roud’s call for civil social organising in the narrow sense (i.e., particular organisations for and by workers and friends of socialism) might be constrained under the crisis of civil society in the broader sense (i.e., the unresolved transition of capitalism into socialism).
As members of the Federation probably know, little is currently at stake for those committed to setting up civil social organisations, including those Roud broadly suggests. If our moment is truly pre-political, any avowedly socialist organisation should not have much to lose from an open-door policy. At the same time, however, it would be regrettable to lose sight of the fact that the ‘pre-‘ in the ‘pre-political’ implies not only objective, but subjective barriers. This would mean ideological obstacles; for instance, the lack of mass socialism in our time, which conditions the way we think about it as a prospect. So, were such civic and social organisations to grow in size or significance, they would need to reckon with their political precepts. These carry over from the past, in however (un)digested a state.
What would be helpful would be a conscious apprehension of such pitfalls. Each must be recognised in advance as necessary in a period of Left degeneration. Otherwise, the most persistent and potent threats may well not arise from the Right, but from the Left, in that they would arrive in veiled form. We have no reason to dismiss the likelihood of a Left that fails itself. Already, we see instances of the Left not only abandoning civil social causes, but calling for their abolition. When the Left cedes to ‘common sense’ apprehensions and acts out through spontaneous expressions, it cedes to capitalist reality, leaving the status quo unquestioned. This dynamic perpetuates a feedback loop that has, so far, obfuscated and not clarified the way beyond capitalism.
Currently, with civil society at a choke point, liberal democracy has come to appear as a vexed project to its supporters and a doomed enterprise to its detractors. For many sections of the Left, the idea of being an ‘alternative’ means a challenge to, not a movement beyond, liberalism. This would be a perverse denial of the accomplishments of civil society. In a time when the ‘good liberals’ of old—champions of free speech, the right to protest, and other civil liberties—are already few in number, it would defy the aims of civil society as well as prove its crisis for there to be Leftists who join ranks with conservatives in denouncing liberalism as a failed project. This approach would not clarify, but liquidate the historical tasks of socialism.
It would also enable the continuance of the state’s influence over society, which Roud identifies. During the vaccines, lockdowns, and mandates of recent years, few were the voices on the Left who openly questioned the state’s involvement in regulating ordinary peoples’ lives. A similar awkward silence gripped the Left during the Freedom Convoy protests outside Parliament in early 2022. If there was ‘healthy disagreement’ on the Left, it went, with few exceptions, unpublicised. (The Federation, to its credit, was one of the few homes for careful discussion during that time.) This should not be regarded as a lapse in judgment, but a significant component in the Left’s gradual historical abandonment of the cause of civil society. If Guido Baracchi was right that communism in Europe or America would mean communism in the South Pacific, we might similarly observe that the tailism of the Left in America might mean a Democrat New Zealand. Indeed, there is little evidence to the contrary, and I agree with Roud’s indirect suggestion that Labour and the Greens appear to set the agenda on which the Left speaks. This produces the regrettable and tragic consequence that young people in particular discover progressivism not through participating in a genuine Left movement, as they once did, but via talking points that are presented to them by the Greens and their allies. These talking points excuse young minds from thinking independently and openly, which means a tragic foreclosure of what is a necessary and vital part of one’s entry into maturity as well as civil society.
These are some of the problems that a pre-political project faces. If civil social organising is to be correctly carried out, it should be first regarded not as an antithesis to capitalist state politics (including liberalism) in the undialectical sense, but as a working-through. This is to say that it would need to be understood as a simultaneous necessity and impossibility. A pre-political project for a socialist party would not offer answers, but instead reveal important questions that have so far not been asked. In doing so, it would reveal the stakes and depths of forming an independent organisation in civil society. Through the necessary incompleteness of its definite and concrete actions (i.e., its forms of activism), such a project would negatively reveal socialism in absentia. That is, the given conditions cannot solve the crisis of civil society; that would be the task of socialism.
So, to properly raise the question of civil society would mean to raise it as a problem, which in turn would mean showing how it has fallen below its own concept. This would need to be done not romantically, but soberly. It would be more practical than theoretical, but only in as far as practice has become more credible than theory, since there is a false distinction that posits each term as mutually exclusive. (Or, in a sub-Maoist terms, that theory’s only job is to narrowly ‘reflect’ on practice, meaning limiting itself to already-existing forms of ‘practice’, i.e., postering; striking; attending demonstrations). Through direct intervention in the community, the workplace, the university, the press, and elsewhere, there might be the hope of undermining the strongholds of Labour, the Greens, and other parties that are contributing to the state’s vampire-like possession of civil society.
Fortunately, it is easier to say of our country than other, larger ones, that such a project might offer promise. After all, this country’s small size has been useful for capitalism as a testing ground, from the Wakefield plan (‘systematic colonisation’) to Rogernomics (‘the New Zealand experiment’). Likewise, a pre-political project would not need to aim too high in order to leave a measurable imprint. Localities are close together and their inhabitants even closer. Nor does it seem too difficult to make the national news in this country (although I may stand corrected), if that were even decided to be a useful goal for such a project. That is, publicity and other means to quantitative gains would be less important than the qualitative. To be a successful sacrifice for future generations, a pre-political project would need to make its mark in the memory of the culture, so that its depth can later—when the crisis develops—turn into breadth.
Although performing definite, concrete, and meaningful forms of activism would make an impression in the minds of the public, such activity’s necessarily inconsistent and incomplete character—which cannot be avoided—would, so long as it is made conscious, reveal the limitations of the present conditions. In other words, it would show the need for socialism to go beyond capitalism. Thus, rather than overlooking or concealing activism’s shortcomings, it would publicise itself by drawing attention to them. To properly raise the question of civil society would mean to raise it as a problem, which in turn would mean showing how it has sunk below itself. This would need to be carried out not romantically, but soberly, because even if it were to fail, this would at least ensure it the title of the first honest political project in this country.
If New Zealand is sensitive to the prevailing winds that blow from other parts of the world, as I posed earlier with the Guido Baracchi quote, it is also vulnerable to the shifting weight of history. Were we to fetishise civil society without reckoning with its fullest implications (i.e., its historical necessity and its crisis), we would yield to the same hazards that have rained upon all aspects of the Left in the last few decades, from activist movements liquidated into capitalist state politics to revolutionary groups obliterated by sectarianism. Likewise, if we have learned anything from the repeated defeats of the Left, we should be wary of the ‘left/right/left/right hoof beat’ that Roud ascribes to electoral politics. Given its loud echo, the Left might inadvertently fall into step with this rhythm. So, in order to begin positioning itself for forward movement, a pre-political organisation should be able to reflect upon itself fully, which would include taking stock of its own shortcomings. This would include consideration of liabilities that might initially appear as successes. If all we know to have inherited from the past are setbacks, should we not be wary of building a party in the short term without considering what its failure would look like? Would we not first consider how it is liable to turn into another flimsy ‘pressure group’ upon those who govern? Or, perhaps more concerningly, that entirely eschewing electoral politics might end up aiming at even more reformist ends? Or, worst of all, that propagandising on the basis of the given and the same, and not the new and the different, would spread the liquidation of socialism across the land, cementing the Left as a force not for the transformation of society, but one that is for the reproduction of already-existing reality? One should consider how, if the Left loses its memory as it enters old age, it might begin to repeat itself, forgetting these questions along with its own name. If we are in a ‘pre-political’ moment, the most pressing task for a movement for socialism is not to abandon these questions. The ‘new Party of Order’ that Roud rightly condemns must not gain another wing.
[1] There is a joke that goes, ‘What do you call one Leftist in a reading group? A tendency. What do you call two Leftists in a reading group? A split’, but its punchline might be updated for timeliness as well as comic effect by replacing ‘a split’ with ‘a sex scandal’, as it was this type of controversy that rocked the sectarian Left internationally, from the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) in the USA to the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), the Revolutionary Communist Group, and Red Fightback in the UK, among others.
[2] If it is true that the immediate appeal of ‘social movementism’ has given the Left its firmest foothold among the young since at least Occupy, if not the Iraq War and WTO protests of the previous decades, and if it is also generally true that intellectually inclined groups are fated to be in the minority, while outright sectarians recede from view, we cannot be surprised when new Leftist groups who emerge reach not for Marx’s Grundrisse, but the rhetoric and methods of their older activist peers from the generation before them. Nor can we be shocked when the young try to outdo the old in tactics: If Lenin called terrorists ‘liberals with bombs’, we might call the climate activists of our current year reformists with superglue.
[3] Horkheimer, Max. (1926–31). ‘The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom’, Dammerung.
[4] Marx, Karl. (1875). ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme.’ The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker.
[5] This echoes the Enlightenment philosophy of John Locke or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the revolutionary proclamations of that era, such as the Abbé Sieyès’ claim that ‘the Third Estate is the nation’, or where, in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson writes that governments derive ‘their just powers from the consent of the governed’.
[6] This is why we cannot say that socialism develops within capitalism. Those civil social relations that have developed within capitalism are to be realised through their negation, which would be the responsibility of a proletariat that is conscious of its own role via the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather than offering the model of a future society, the dictatorship of the proletariat—which refers not to a totalitarian dictatorship so much as the Roman Republican sense of a dictator as a temporary magistrate who was granted extraordinary powers in order to deal with state crises—would be the manifestation of the current society’s crisis.
[7] Roud, T. (2023). ‘Room for Social Democracy?’ address at Wellington Socialist Society panel (Social Democracy—Then & Now), 13 June 2023.