Thank you, thank you! Thank you for so clearly articulating the bait and switch disaster of the European Enlightenment project. My mind was so blown after reading Schama's "Citizen" years ago. The distortion within the accepted history of the French revolution is staggering.
Wow. Fantastic piece. I pushed back a bit in the comments on Paul's piece, but I'll refrain from doing so here. Meanwhile I am going to order your book ...
Very interesting stuff again Rhyd, and of course I appreciate the mention. It's nourishing to have conversations like this in this medium. Nourishing also to to be reminded of just how good Marx and Engels' analysis of bourgeois values really was.
I hope you don't mind me saying a couple of things. Starting with this quote:
'That other left looked much more like the pre-leftist rebellions of Europe than anything the bourgeoisie argued for. This, I think, is the only other blind spot in Paul Kingsnorth’s analysis about the French Revolution and its relationship to our present situation. The lower classes who were swept up into the revolutionary fervor were not mere stooges for the bourgeoisie. They had their own history of revolt, a folk memory of the heretical millenarian rebellions and shared dreams of a classless society, a real revolution which the bourgeoisie never would have allowed'
I expect I have other blind spots, but in this case I made precisely this point in the piece - and more so in the essay before ('A monster that grows in deserts.') I will be writing more as my series goes on, but this 'history of revolt' amongst the rooted classes, if you like, is what I refer to as 'reactionary radicalism.' You can see it throughout English history. It's not revolution (that's what the rich left in the cities want, as you say: a clearance operation). It's a desire for custom that works: as you say, a reversion to a sacred order.
For that reason, I don't think are 'two lefts.' I think the 'left' is a direct result of that seating arrangement: it has always been an elite movement, and that goes for the Marxists and the anarchists too (anything with an 'ism' on it is theoretical.) The 'left' have always been middle class intellectuals (like us ...) The poor tend to be more - well, reactionary. But also rebellious.
That would be my other qualm here: you say that 'the desire for common wealth without artificial identity barriers (gender, race, etc) is the dream of the lower classes.' Hm. Do you think so? I don't see much evidence of 'the lower classes' clamouring for an end to 'gender identity.' That's very much a woke bourgeois occupation. I think that you have to be honest about the social conservatism of the 'lower classes'. That's the 'reactionary' element. If you want to change that - well, capitalism is in fact the best way to do it. The 'sacred order' is inherently conservative.
The only final thing I would say is: Marx's analysis is brilliant, but he too was an urban intellectual, deeply rational, and very anti-religious. That's one reason Marxist revolutions always fail. Simone Weil called Marxism 'a badly constructed religion' and she wasn't far wrong. How does that sit for a pagan? Not a challenge, a genuine inquiry.
To be fair, I think anarchists have shared your critique of middle class intellectualism and abstract theory since the late 1800s. In fact it forms part of their critique of Marxism, and they tend to see theory as deeply imbricated with practice and emerging from the everyday lives of ordinary people (see Bakunin's discussions of what Marx disparaged as the 'lumpenproletariat' for instance).
I say this as an anarchist who tends to balk at 'isms' but who also recognises their occasional utility as useful mechanisms to encounter like-minded people, mobilise actions and so forth. Additionally, the underlying structural features of 'isms' remain even when we're not being explicit about them - 'Dark Mountainism' for instance, if you'll forgive the gentle provocation from a long-time reader.
I take your point, and you're right of course. I have more synpathy with anarchism than with most other isms. And yet in practice I have found my experiences with anarchists to be perhaps more ideologically rigid than with anyone else. It's curious. But that's my general experience on the left as a whole, which is why in the end I cam to wonder why anyone attaches to 'isms' rather than simply trying to make things work at a local level. Do we need anarchsim when we have living local communities still, that can be engaged with? Do isms not simply abstract us from this messy reality? I think they do; speaking as someone who is very prone indeed to that kind of abstraction.
Maybe you're right and 'isms' will always be lurking in the background. But I increasingly think all this is a substitute for that broken sacred order.
Ah, those anarchists... In my experience a lot of our sentiments around a particular 'ism' can be traced back to our initial encounters with its proponents. If I'd met some of today's annoyingly tone deaf vegans 15 years back when I was first becoming aware of animal exploitation I'd think veganism was a delusional cult for rich white people. Similarly, I've met some astonishingly dogmatic anarchists in my time, but also many more nuanced, reflective, 'anti-ism' types too, so I guess at some point we need to grapple with the underlying ideas and how they're inflected in our own thoughts and values without reducing them to any given interlocutor.
I guess the tricky question for me is whether we can ever escape ideology, abstraction and so forth. Valorising local community and sacred order - and I'm very much for a particular egalitarian, complex ecosystemic form of these things - could still be said to rely on ideological premises, even where these are born out of immediate phenomenological or intersubjective experience. My personal sense is that it's more useful to reconcile concrete action and abstract thought as part of a messy feedback loop than to separate them out and valorise one or the other, but these are thorny philosophical and pragmatic issues...
I should add, by the way, that my anarchism is very much based in practice and prefiguration. I don't think people with strong political views need to go around indoctrinating people into ideology by forcing them to read Kropotkin and wave black flags or anything like that. Instead I see anarchism more as a kind of tentative seeding and fertilising of the kinds of communitarian relations of mutual aid, solidarity, consensus, connectedness, equality, positive freedom and so forth that Graeber used to speak about as the communism of everyday life.
This all makes a lot of sense to me, especially the importance of somehow reconciling the concrete and the abstract. I too have met (and read) thoughtful anarchists. But I think that even the word itself is so alienating as to be a bit useless in actual reality. Of course, many such words are alienating: Marxist and Christian included. It has to come down to putting these things into practice as best we can, or we ring hollow.
Re the squad, I think the issue isn’t that they are bourgeois in their hearts (i think it’s hard to tell if they really are) but the fact that what’s in their hearts doesn’t matter nearly as much as woke-types imagine it does. They’re part of a capitalist bourgeois institution.
Their most enthusiastic supporters overvalue the wokeness in their hearts.
Their most enthusiastic from-the-left detractors overemphasize their “treason”to the left.
Both miss the point, which is that, in the world we live in, a world where class actually matters, individual politicians are far less important than American culture teaches us they are.
Thank you, thank you! Thank you for so clearly articulating the bait and switch disaster of the European Enlightenment project. My mind was so blown after reading Schama's "Citizen" years ago. The distortion within the accepted history of the French revolution is staggering.
Wow. Fantastic piece. I pushed back a bit in the comments on Paul's piece, but I'll refrain from doing so here. Meanwhile I am going to order your book ...
Fantastic clarity needed now more than ever.
Very interesting stuff again Rhyd, and of course I appreciate the mention. It's nourishing to have conversations like this in this medium. Nourishing also to to be reminded of just how good Marx and Engels' analysis of bourgeois values really was.
I hope you don't mind me saying a couple of things. Starting with this quote:
'That other left looked much more like the pre-leftist rebellions of Europe than anything the bourgeoisie argued for. This, I think, is the only other blind spot in Paul Kingsnorth’s analysis about the French Revolution and its relationship to our present situation. The lower classes who were swept up into the revolutionary fervor were not mere stooges for the bourgeoisie. They had their own history of revolt, a folk memory of the heretical millenarian rebellions and shared dreams of a classless society, a real revolution which the bourgeoisie never would have allowed'
I expect I have other blind spots, but in this case I made precisely this point in the piece - and more so in the essay before ('A monster that grows in deserts.') I will be writing more as my series goes on, but this 'history of revolt' amongst the rooted classes, if you like, is what I refer to as 'reactionary radicalism.' You can see it throughout English history. It's not revolution (that's what the rich left in the cities want, as you say: a clearance operation). It's a desire for custom that works: as you say, a reversion to a sacred order.
For that reason, I don't think are 'two lefts.' I think the 'left' is a direct result of that seating arrangement: it has always been an elite movement, and that goes for the Marxists and the anarchists too (anything with an 'ism' on it is theoretical.) The 'left' have always been middle class intellectuals (like us ...) The poor tend to be more - well, reactionary. But also rebellious.
That would be my other qualm here: you say that 'the desire for common wealth without artificial identity barriers (gender, race, etc) is the dream of the lower classes.' Hm. Do you think so? I don't see much evidence of 'the lower classes' clamouring for an end to 'gender identity.' That's very much a woke bourgeois occupation. I think that you have to be honest about the social conservatism of the 'lower classes'. That's the 'reactionary' element. If you want to change that - well, capitalism is in fact the best way to do it. The 'sacred order' is inherently conservative.
The only final thing I would say is: Marx's analysis is brilliant, but he too was an urban intellectual, deeply rational, and very anti-religious. That's one reason Marxist revolutions always fail. Simone Weil called Marxism 'a badly constructed religion' and she wasn't far wrong. How does that sit for a pagan? Not a challenge, a genuine inquiry.
To be fair, I think anarchists have shared your critique of middle class intellectualism and abstract theory since the late 1800s. In fact it forms part of their critique of Marxism, and they tend to see theory as deeply imbricated with practice and emerging from the everyday lives of ordinary people (see Bakunin's discussions of what Marx disparaged as the 'lumpenproletariat' for instance).
I say this as an anarchist who tends to balk at 'isms' but who also recognises their occasional utility as useful mechanisms to encounter like-minded people, mobilise actions and so forth. Additionally, the underlying structural features of 'isms' remain even when we're not being explicit about them - 'Dark Mountainism' for instance, if you'll forgive the gentle provocation from a long-time reader.
I take your point, and you're right of course. I have more synpathy with anarchism than with most other isms. And yet in practice I have found my experiences with anarchists to be perhaps more ideologically rigid than with anyone else. It's curious. But that's my general experience on the left as a whole, which is why in the end I cam to wonder why anyone attaches to 'isms' rather than simply trying to make things work at a local level. Do we need anarchsim when we have living local communities still, that can be engaged with? Do isms not simply abstract us from this messy reality? I think they do; speaking as someone who is very prone indeed to that kind of abstraction.
Maybe you're right and 'isms' will always be lurking in the background. But I increasingly think all this is a substitute for that broken sacred order.
Ah, those anarchists... In my experience a lot of our sentiments around a particular 'ism' can be traced back to our initial encounters with its proponents. If I'd met some of today's annoyingly tone deaf vegans 15 years back when I was first becoming aware of animal exploitation I'd think veganism was a delusional cult for rich white people. Similarly, I've met some astonishingly dogmatic anarchists in my time, but also many more nuanced, reflective, 'anti-ism' types too, so I guess at some point we need to grapple with the underlying ideas and how they're inflected in our own thoughts and values without reducing them to any given interlocutor.
I guess the tricky question for me is whether we can ever escape ideology, abstraction and so forth. Valorising local community and sacred order - and I'm very much for a particular egalitarian, complex ecosystemic form of these things - could still be said to rely on ideological premises, even where these are born out of immediate phenomenological or intersubjective experience. My personal sense is that it's more useful to reconcile concrete action and abstract thought as part of a messy feedback loop than to separate them out and valorise one or the other, but these are thorny philosophical and pragmatic issues...
I should add, by the way, that my anarchism is very much based in practice and prefiguration. I don't think people with strong political views need to go around indoctrinating people into ideology by forcing them to read Kropotkin and wave black flags or anything like that. Instead I see anarchism more as a kind of tentative seeding and fertilising of the kinds of communitarian relations of mutual aid, solidarity, consensus, connectedness, equality, positive freedom and so forth that Graeber used to speak about as the communism of everyday life.
This all makes a lot of sense to me, especially the importance of somehow reconciling the concrete and the abstract. I too have met (and read) thoughtful anarchists. But I think that even the word itself is so alienating as to be a bit useless in actual reality. Of course, many such words are alienating: Marxist and Christian included. It has to come down to putting these things into practice as best we can, or we ring hollow.
You’re making me smarter. Thank you.
Re the squad, I think the issue isn’t that they are bourgeois in their hearts (i think it’s hard to tell if they really are) but the fact that what’s in their hearts doesn’t matter nearly as much as woke-types imagine it does. They’re part of a capitalist bourgeois institution.
Their most enthusiastic supporters overvalue the wokeness in their hearts.
Their most enthusiastic from-the-left detractors overemphasize their “treason”to the left.
Both miss the point, which is that, in the world we live in, a world where class actually matters, individual politicians are far less important than American culture teaches us they are.
Thank you so much for this!