Liberal intellectuals and statesmen once knew how to think historically. The architects of the post-1945 order understood that they were operating in a period of systemic transformation. They studied how orders collapse and reconstitute. They thought in terms of decades, not news cycles.

What happened? Why do the professionals staffing contemporary liberal institutions seem incapable of the same kind of thinking? Why do they respond to obvious systemic crisis with denial, nostalgia, and procedural hand-wringing?

The conventional answer points to post-Cold War triumphalism. Fukuyama’s “End of History” gave permission to stop thinking historically. If liberal-democratic capitalism is the terminus of human development, the task becomes technical management, not understanding how orders rise and fall.

This is true but incomplete. Liberals roused themselves from interwar complacency to fight fascism, and from postwar exhaustion to contain communism. Why can’t they rouse themselves again?

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Although capitalist development in Europe and European colonial exploitation are incidentally entwined, and, as Lauesen correctly observes, the latter “boosts” the former, they can only be understood as separable phenomena. Not only was colonial exploitation distinctly non-capitalist in character, relying upon forms of surplus extraction characteristic of the feudal and slave modes of production, but the mere absorption of surplus from this exploitation was in no way sufficient to secure the development of capitalist production. The clearest proof of this is immediately referenced in his own exposition when he details the role of the Spanish colonies in drastically increasing the means of exchange available to European economies. Spain, despite the immense wealth it extracted from colonial exploitation, itself remained a largely semi-feudal economy and failed to develop a predominance of capitalist production relations along the trajectory exemplified by England and the Netherlands. We can see from this simple fact alone that colonial exploitation is in no way sufficient to explain capitalist development in Europe and the qualitative transformation of productive forces this entailed, which (rather colonial exploitation) formed the main foundation for the unprecedented wealth of early capitalist societies.

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Engels wrote the phrase in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845. The book is a structural diagnosis of industrial capitalism, written by a young man who would spend the rest of his life funding and building organized political work. “Social murder” names the arrangement under which premature death follows predictably from the conditions a society maintains with full knowledge of the result. The diagnosis is the foundation for organized response: labor organization, labor party formation, structural reform of the conditions themselves. It is not a license for individual violence and Engels never deployed it as one. He spent decades arguing against the comrades who did deploy it this way to license anarchist individualist violence.

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Today, much of the radical left considers a defense, however qualified, of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and of the political line of the organizations which carried it out, as a kind of litmus test separating the authentic advocates of a nebulously defined “resistance” from state-compatible careerists grouped under the shameful banner of controlled opposition. In societies where, due to a complex of historical contingencies, reason of state has become practically synonymous with Zionist reason, this has a certain empirical logic which has nothing to do with the disingenuous accusations of “antisemitism” emanating from the paid mouthpieces of a barbaric racist regime. However, as Marx observed, in a world where appearance corresponded with essence there would be no need for science.

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The actions allowing one to overcome war and the system of capitalist imperialism which always generates war anew, is shown by the proletarian revolution in Russia in October 1917. Since the victory of the proletariat in one country, since the construction of the first socialist state, the world has been fundamentally transformed. At the same time the existence of a socialist state amid bourgeois states means a new cause for war.

Translated from: LINKSKURVE
WARUM SIND WIR KEINE PAZIFISTEN Josef Lenz

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The New Left’s theoretical turn reinforced this trajectory. The abandonment of the working class as revolutionary subject (supposedly too bought off, too racist, too consumerist, or simply non-industrial now and therefore not a proletariat somehow) in favor of students, minorities, and Third World national liberation movements reflected the class composition of the movement itself. If you’re a graduate student, you theorize students as the revolutionary vanguard. The turn toward cultural politics, toward ‘personal is political’, toward fighting on terrain where the petty bourgeoisie has advantages—credentials, cultural capital, institutional access—this all followed naturally from who was usually theorizing.

The defeat of the 1960s-70s upheaval thus produced a double deformation of the American left. The revolutionary movement was destroyed, and its liberal remnant was integrated into the petty bourgeoisie as the face of ‘diversity’. The white New Left retreated into academia and lifestyle politics, abandoning the material terrain where class struggle actually occurs. The ground was prepared for the neoliberal turn: a left that fights over representation rather than redistribution, that moralizes rather than organizes, that speaks the language of identity rather than class not because identity doesn’t matter, but because identity without class politics is compatible with capitalism in a way that class politics never can be.

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The latest war in the Middle East serves to highlight how contemporary radical left discourse, with all its Marxist pretensions, dissolves upon examination into a patchwork of petty bourgeois democratic clichés. Historian Salar Mohandesi’s “Organizing in the Heart of Empire” at the Verso Blog is a typical and instructive example.

According to him: The situation in Iran poses a political challenge for anyone who cares about emancipation.

Every Marxist should know that general claims about “emancipation” as an abstraction floating above classes are not forgivable in this day and age. We are always duty bound to ask; Emancipation for whom? To do what? Emancipation of the concrete proletarian from the bondage of the capitalist mercantile regime in the tradition of Stuchka or emancipation of the abstract man (or woman...) to participate in this regime in the tradition of Sieyes. There is no third way and there can be no ambiguity.

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We cannot understand the current period of comprehensive decomposition of the working class and a capitalist push, spanning decades and still far from finished, to erase the historic conquests of the prior period, defined by the October Revolution, without a severe criticism of the insufficiencies of those who attempted to go beyond the limits of that period. It was their failure to accomplish a leap forward which condemned us to the ongoing night of perpetual humiliation we still endure. As such we should have no support for those who make their influence over such a debacle into a claim for authority.

Rather we should carry out the closest and the coldest possible reading of the texts we inherit from them in order to understand and avoid the mistakes which constitute their legacy. Operaismo, the “area of autonomy”, the Little Red Book, the “Panthers” and the “armed struggle”, the NCM and the K groups, feminism and the “ultra left” these are not so much treasured heirlooms to be defended against reaction as the sad relics of the shipwreck of a generation. A shipwreck in whose wake we are still drowning.

Operaismo is one piece of flotsam from this wreck to which some continue to cling.

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