Left Turn

Forging a New Political Future

Stanley Aronowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317256700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Building a new platform for change, prominent social critic Stanley Aronowitz diagnoses America's crisis of democracy and the dangers of the new authoritarianism. Aronowitz draws on his vast knowledge of history and political theory and from currents of political change around the globe, from the traditions of the European left to the newest political trends in Latin America that have challenged the "death of socialism. Demonstrating why Democrats lose when they cling to centrism and compromise their core values, this book shows us what a new left party in America would look like in an era of globalization, terrorism, and a crisis of public confidence in government.

1

The Retreat to Postmodern Politics

What Is Postmodern Politics?

“Postmodernism” is a term of multiple definitions and meanings. Following Jean-Francois Lyotard’s declaration that postmodernism is, essentially, not so much an attitude as a “condition” from which its philosophical and intellectual forms derive, the condition of which Lyotard speaks signifies a kind of social being in which the precepts of modernity are overturned, or at least severely tested.¹ Fredric Jameson has argued that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism; as opposed to modernism—which, even as it depicts estrangement of the subject from itself, retains the dream of the whole person—its forms of artistic representation may be understood in the modes of pastiche and parody.² Postmodern art surrenders to the fractured self and the fragmented social world. Art and politics follow no set rules, but they do obey a few of the imperatives that the Enlightenment dictates: deep respect for scientific thought as much as the results of science; a profound quest for rationality, if by that term we mean the search for explanatory propositions about the natural and social worlds; strict obedience to the rules of evidence upon which to base judgments; and, above all, a renunciation of myth and religious symbols as guides to conduct. While Freud tries to understand the unconscious in order to control it for rational ends, postmodern philosophy acknowledges the reign of the irrational and, implicitly, argues that any effort to conquer it or, indeed, to understand the unconscious with the use of rational categories and scientific methods—even of symptomatic reading—is an exercise in futility.

As a social and political philosophy, postmodernism often connotes the renunciation of “grand narratives”—that is, the point of view of the totality. In its social scientific expression it may be identified with “social construction,” a conception of social things that is radically anti-foundational: Since, according to its precepts, social phenomena are constructed by actors and their sediments, one does not need a theoretical framework consisting of concepts and algorithms in order to engage in social investigation or commentary. In fact, Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis may be read as self-critique since Goffman was among the most persuasive writers in the social constructionist canon. But postmodernism also leads to suspicion of social and political theory itself since the concept of “theory” implies a web of relations that are interconnected. Theory wants to “make sense” of the world by creating concepts of understanding that link otherwise disparate phenomena to each other in schemas that make individual events and phenomena intelligible. In other words, frames. Postmodern thought presumably revels in grasping the essential incoherence of social and cultural things and, in effect, constructs understanding by patchwork and montage.

A second and no less powerful application of some of these predispositions may be found in politics. Postmodern politics may share the marxist critique of contemporary society—that it is increasingly dominated by capital, for example—but has refused to propose a systemic alternative such as socialism or communism—of the social-democratic no less than the leninist or anarchist varieties—on the grounds that these are closed systems that inhibit creative thought and action. This break with both the liberal and marxist pasts of Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, and Marx has come to signify a certain celebration of the fragmentation of the social world because, among other virtues, it can protect the autonomy of individual expression and group identity against concepts such as class or other types of social interest linked to a collectivity that it perceives as oppressive. The reply to the centralization of power by capital is to undermine it from below, to avoid making sweeping, generalized indictments of the system, but instead to resist its power on a piecemeal basis. In this sense postmodern politics has an elective affinity with pragmatism, perhaps the earliest and the most compelling of postmodern political philosophies. Since there are no underlying ideological criteria from which to evaluate the system taken as a totality, pragmatist political theory proposes a piecemeal approach that “tinkers’ with the system.

Beyond theoretical objections to the standpoint of the totality stands the historical failure of the social-democratic and Communist projects to fulfill the dream of human emancipation. In fact, some the most terrible violations of individual and collective freedom have been perpetrated by “really existing” socialist societies such as China and the Soviet bloc, ostensibly in the interest of “emancipation.” And social democracy has become, in its European varieties like modern liberalism in the United States, no better than a version of welfare state liberalism: Politics is now a contest over which political force can best manage the capitalist state in a manner that protects human rights and provides for the welfare of the poor, but there is no challenge to the concept and the rule of capitalism itself and whether it can meet popular needs, especially in the era of post-fordism (when the tie between production and consumption within a national economy is broken). Precisely because late capitalism has become the unchallenged presupposition of social democracy no less than liberalism, the best they can offer is a largely exhausted doctrine of political pluralism. As I argue throughout this book, postmodern politics adds one new dimension: the hope that social movements, particularly those of feminism, black freedom, and ecology and, in a different register, a kind of radical urbanism can, in some way, supplement—or replace—the labor movement and its political parties—Labor, Socialist, Communist, Democratic—as the linchpin of social transformation. But since this hope is rooted in their rejection of marxist orthodoxy according to which the working class alone, or in leadership of a class-based coalition, stands in a privileged position to change the social world, in the main they have been unable, even in the few instances when they were willing, to provide a political vision of transformation. Rather, they offer the program of “resistance” to prevailing state or transnational capital’s policies. To the old vision that the object of the radical project is to create the “whole person” from the thrall of alienation and fragmentation, while acknowledging the accuracy of Marx’s analysis, postmodernism refuses his implied prescription of a new society, especially because the political parties that have invoked his name, and purport to follow his prognostications, have so distorted the emancipatory project that it is no longer worth preserving, at least in its extant form.

At the same time, the notion of “vision” itself is criticized on two principal grounds: To propose a totalizing future is to give an example of “bad” utopia. It becomes a “line of march” from which there can be no deviation without dire consequences for the dissenters. From this perspective the vision constitutes a kind of determinism, against which the creativity of practice is measured, usually to the detriment of the latter. So, in the interest of combating dogmatism, postmodern politics tends to lapse into a kind of realism that, in its own way, becomes the mirror image of party marxism. Since utopian thought is strictly precluded, the conversation revolves around the possible. Needless to say, the predilection of postmodern politics is to refuse and denounce the party formations, past, present, and future. In effect, if not in intention, it tends to merge with liberal pluralism: even when—as in Germany and France, the ecologists, for example, formed their own parties that are postmodern in character because they refused to counterpose their vision of a new society to the prevailing versions—the new social movements have gradually taken on the role of pressure groups within a Democratic or Social-Democratic coalition. That they have influenced the parties to become somewhat “greener” there can be no doubt. But they have been unable to counter the hegemonic neoliberal framework of contemporary political parties, right and center. And they have stubbornly clung to a failed coalition politics that generally leaves them ultimately in the cold.

Perhaps the most characteristic aspect of postmodern politics is the degree to which it has accepted the idea that marxism—indeed, all prescriptive and utopian political thought—is identical with its stalinist version. That there are significant trends in contemporary marxism and anarchist social thought that reject the notion that society can be constituted as a consensual identity seems to have escaped their notice. Here I want to carefully distinguish Theodor Adorno’s concept of the “nonidentical” and Jacques Derrida’s nonmarxist idea of “differance” (the play of the distinction between “defer” and “differ”) from the idea that the totality itself is authoritarian. The concept of the nonidentical connotes the fallacy of the reconciliation of opposites into a new state of identity that preserves as it transforms. Derrida insists on difference but does not posit a permanent gulf between knowledge and its object, nor between the categories of understanding and those of existence or being. He merely wants to defer the notion of identity or the unified self as long as such ideas avoid deconstructing the myths of the Enlightenment.³

I want to argue that the “totality” need not be conceived as the point of arrival in a new identity shared by all of humankind. For example, capitalism as the name for the economic, political, and social totality of our time is constituted by its contradictions, and by the opposing actors who embody them. It is not only a question of the nonidentity of the subject and object within the alienated totality of capitalist social relations. It is as well the statement, most forcefully enunciated by Louis Althusser, that communism would not abolish contradictions nor the conflicts among participants.⁴ That is, the new society will not result in the end of politics because neither “interests” nor problems of recognition of, among others, individuals, social formations such as women and their relation to men, and racial formations can be abolished without generations of struggle. Moreover, a new society would inevitably generate unforeseen new contradictions that would surely be different from those that prevail in capitalist social relations.

The period of the long transition to even rough equality in work relations, those in neighborhoods and other forms of association, will undoubtedly be protracted. While we should engage in the effort to overcome these rifts—indeed, politics will consist largely in the conflicts arising from these efforts—we should not expect them to be healed in short order, nor should healing imply the end of social conflict as such. In this respect, utopian hope is a radical futurity, the enunciation of the not-yet, but a full recognition that, in the slogan of the anti-globalization movement, another world is “possible” even when it appears as a vanishing horizon. That postmodern politics cannot accept the not-yet as a legitimate goal for a radical movement reveals its failure of radical imagination.⁵

Needless to say, not all postmodern political thought shares the same perspectives on all questions. In some of its forms, postmodern politics converges with liberal conceptions of a radical democracy (one that, in effect, leaves the workplace to capital because it cannot envision a different workers’ movement save one that remains ensconced in the struggle for bread and butter), but tries to fix the disabled system of representation; in another register, it correctly insists on the importance of the new social movements, although what some writers mean by the “new” refers largely to those that sprung into being in the 1950s and 1960s, partially in protest against the tyranny of the left political parties and organizations that acted like proto-parties. And still another tendency, most often identified with contemporary anarchism, refuses to engage the state in a positive struggle for hegemony. Instead, this tendency wants to concentrate on the restoration of the autonomy of civil society against state interventions. In the words of anthropologist Pierre Clastres and philosopher Michel Foucault, it wants to defend “society against the state.”⁶ We shall have occasion to return to these themes in Chapters 3 and 4.

In what follows I want to examine the work of Sheldon Wolin, one of the major political theorists of our time. Wolin exemplifies a pastiche of radical analysis that borrows, among other sources, from historical materialism, while refusing to depart from the conclusion that postmodernism provides the best chance for a radical politics.

Postmodern Political Theory

Since the appearance of his landmark work of political philosophy, Politics and Vision, in 1960, Sheldon Wolin has been a major influence in turning the study of politics from its abstract ethical orientation toward social theory. The main presupposition of social theory is that the possibility for what Wolin terms “participatory democracy” is immanent in the totality of economic, political, and social relations. Inspired largely by his example, but also appalled by the slow erosion of democratic institutions in the United States and around the world, a considerable fraction of succeeding generations within political theory has adopted the stance of social theory rather than remaining within the orbit of conventional political philosophy concerned with the old questions: What are the first principles of politics? How can politics be autonomous from economic and social influences? How do political philosophers free themselves from the pernicious influences of Machiavelli and Rousseau, let alone Hegel and Marx, all of whom insisted that politics was integral to class power?

The turn that began with Politics and Vision signifies that for a left-liberal American political theory class, inequality, power, and the role and obligations of the capitalist state have been thrust from the shadows to center stage. So it was with anticipation that the expanded edition of his classic text appeared in 2004,⁷ especially given that, in the more than forty years since the first edition, Wolin has arguably become the leading left-liberal political philosopher in the United States. While he has lost none of his capacity for brilliant, often scorching commentary on the tepid liberalism that dominates today’s intellectual landscape, Wolin’s conclusion confirms not only the end of the liberal phase of political philosophy but the crisis in social theory that seems unable to rise above the despair that marked most of the history of the Frankfurt School—which, in the aftermath of the fascist era and the apparent betrayals of workers’ power by the states of the Soviet orbit, concluded that the rule of law within a liberal democratic regime was the best we could expect. Indeed, in this new edition, it is glaringly apparent that Critical Theory has influenced Wolin, including the resignation to the prevailing setup that marked its late development.

Like Benjamin Barber, Robert Weibe, Robert Dahl (whose migration from the pluralist ideology was a stunning aspect of his later writings), Amy Guttmann, Mark Warren, and many others, Wolin’s project is to determine the prospects for, and conditions of, democratic renewal in the wake of what he perceives as a near-complete corporate capitalist takeover of the modern state. In the light of this project I will try to assess what he has and has not achieved and what remains to be theorized in order to realize the project. My chief conclusion is that, despite a sincere and often trenchant analysis of the current state of affairs, Wolin’s retreat to a modest, episodic (he calls it “fugitive”) democracy is a symptom of the isolation of many left-liberal intellectuals from actual oppositional movements, and of their refusal to take seriously a sophisticated marxist analysis; his misreading of Marx and contemporary marxism prevents Wolin from taking the point of view of the totality and produces only a fragmented vision, which he calls postmodern. In Chapter 6, I outline a different direction for social and political theory to take if the project of radical democracy is to be realized.

The Decline of Liberal Democracy

Ours is a time when a relatively honest election almost anywhere in the world is greeted by many as a triumph because wide participation in the act of voting has become the virtual definition of citizenship and of democracy. A citizen confers consent on the prevailing system of political rule, choosing among contenders for power who, nevertheless, are pledged to manage and reproduce the liberal state. To be sure, this is a definition as old as the origins of liberal democratic governance in seventeenth-century England. One may question whether representative democracy is real democracy because elections are rigged by, among other means, legislative decisions about districts, exclusion of some voters from entering the process, and the huge funds needed to run a credible campaign. But in this reactionary era we are admonished to accept the idea that the farthest horizon of democracy consists in legal protections for individual and collective political expression, short of insurrection; a justice system that guarantees individual civil and criminal rights before the law; and representative government in which citizens confer consent on the prevailing system of political and economic power through the transparent exercise of the franchise and are free to choose among competing parties that offer platforms that promise to rule in a lawful way corresponding to accepted practice. This view is hegemonic in all liberal democracies, whether ruled by conservatives, the authoritarian right, or labor and socialist parties. In the American system, private property shields its owner(s) from being required to share decision-making with workers or nongovernmental citizens, and only collective bargaining agreements ensure a degree of worker voice in decisions affecting a limited range of enterprise activities; many aspects of economic life are not democratic but, indeed, correspond to the most authoritarian practices of anti-democracy. Recall Andre Gorz’s characterization of the industrial workplace as a “prison factory.”⁸

In the sphere of state functions, Wolin’s pithy comment says it all: “The citizen is shrunk to the voter: periodically courted, warned and confused but otherwise kept at a distance from actual decision-making and allowed to emerge only ephemerally in a cameo appearance according to a script composed by the opinion-takers/makers.”⁹ Wolin attributes this reconstitution of the “civic culture” to the emergence of capitalist subsumption of all aspects of society, including its political in...