Left Unity? At Any Cost?
24 July 2022
Whenever there is a disagreement, no matter how serious or trivial, among leftists (I should say among American and British leftists particularly), there is always someone ready to bemoan the loss of left unity. “With a politically ascendant right wing,” the line goes, “we simply do not have time to entertain these disagreements, these arguments.” For many the exhortation to left unity is not merely a. You would think that the only thing standing in the way of white supremacist christo-fascism of the Bush, then Trump, and once Reagan, administration, is that Trotskyists, Maoists, Social Democrats, and Anarchists can’t stop fighting amongst themselves. Many leftists envy the right, and point to the immense success of both right wing conservatives in shaping the laws and judicial system, and in setting the terms of public debate. Conservatives managed to push marginal views to the center, from the current row over “critical race theory” to the right-wing extremism of America’s courts.
I want to challenge these views, both historically (as I don’t think they reflect the reality of our political history) and as as a strategic question (as I don’t believe left unity, even if it were a possible and desirable thing, would get the kinds of victories these groups think are in our grasp). Furthermore, I want to argue that left unity is itself a challenge to the success of the left as a political project.
I’ve been drawn to writing this essay for some time, but have been given new motivation by the recent events surrounding #RiseUp4AbortionRights, a front group for the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP is not a serious political organization, it is a cult of personality organized around Bob Avakian, a former SDS member who has spent the last 50 years getting other people to stroke his ego. It is so transparently a fraud, yet it continues to attract new members. Many people are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, in the name of left unity. The RCP front group #RiseUp4AbortionRights and its defenders make the same argument, insisting that now is not the time for “divisiveness” or purity testing, that we need every body in the streets to protest agains the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. I find nothing to disagree with here, we need all the individuals we can get. But why should that extend to organizations that act in bad faith? Wherever the RCP goes, its focus has been self-promotion, ever expanding to include new due-paying members, to waste and frustrate the energies of organizers, and buy ads in the New York Times, the home of true communist activism (I’m being sarcastic if that isn’t clear enough).
While I don’t think it is terribly productive to engage with members of the RCP directly (many of them are too far gone to be reasoned with), it is imperative that groups and individuals speak up about malicious actors, be they personality cults like the RevComs, or sexual harassers and racists who harm the reputations of left-wing organizations, and cause more disfunction by their presence.
I do think that the line between rejecting naive left-unity and creating a punitive culture that is hostile to well-intentioned and still learning members is a fine one. What makes such distinctions even more fraught is that they trade on the judgement of individuals (their awareness of a person’s behavior, is this person a misogynist?) while it is precisely the judgement of each person involved (the leaders of an organization or the sentiment of a collective) that is being questioned. The current understanding of structural racism and sexism has only made such judgements harder, if not impossible. The history of the left is in many cases a history of overcorrections. The New Left of SDS and CND rejected the authoritarianism of Moscow and in the process became dysfunctional and cliquish organizations that quickly lost momentum.
This loss of momentum is not a surprise, and a hierarchical organization is no guarantee of motivation, it can at the most offer a simulacra of it. What is lost in the current debate over left-unity is any consideration of ideological struggle. Understandably, people want to get their hands dirty, to protest, to do something to throw their bodies in the machinery of capital and bring this thing to a halt. The problem is that nothing in our politics is or can hope to be obvious. It is not at all clear how or in what way the goals of the left can be achieved, or even what precisely those goals are. The whole reason there are such strong disagreements is because of the difficulty of coming to an answer. The task the left is faced with now, everyone, all of us, is to do the serious work of political education. To really understand the history, the theory, the politics, not only of the left but of the larger history of political thought. This is not something that is done by any one individual all at once. This is the work of an entire lifetime of study and contemplation. I think it is a fiction to suppose that theory and practice ought to be seen as competing enterprises. As Lenin allegedly said, there are three keys to success: read, read read! Not even Lenin’s detractors could claim that he was merely navel-gazing.
Have conservatives been as successful as we suppose them to be? While it may seem that conservatism has only been racking up victories, when you look at the actual ambitions and goals of the right in America and elsewhere, they are still far from victory. Major right-wing goals, like the abolition of public education, or a federal abortion ban, remain out of their grasp. The extent of the victories of the right reflects what capital has allowed them to get away with, more so than some sort of Kasparov-like strategic mastery. Too many people on the left psyche themselves out thinking that the right is so brilliant and strategic, while in reality their organizations are just as dysfunctional and drama filled as left wing ones, they’re just as ideologically divided. The difference is most right wing goals benefit the capitalist class, and fewer left wing goals do. They don’t face the same headwinds the left does.
I have some plans to cover more left-wing education, mainly by putting together reading lists covering what I take to be the major areas that anyone on the left should familiarize themselves with. It will be a lot of fun for everyone involved.