Five Big Issues Where Left Thought Is Inadequate for the XXI Century
Why has the right been continuously gaining ground for 50 years, despite a century-old agenda? Because the left, yet to face the lessons of XX century, are still holding a century-old line
Recently, I’ve been writing a lot about the ideological and theoretical inadequacy of contemporary left-wing thought to the current historical moment—first of all, to the historical experience accumulated over the last 100-150 years, that has shaped it.
Theoretical inadequacy is the source of political failures of the left. Or, more precisely, the absence of the left as a modern, relevant political force anywhere in the world.
To avoid sounding unfounded, I will outline some specific problematic areas without which there will be no left theory of the 21st century – and there will be no left movement that can take off and declare itself as a relevant political force in the 21st century.
Some major areas of leftist thought that need updating for the 21st century.:
Theory of formations: Left thought is the only ideology that actually looks forward. The right's vision of the future is always from the past — liberals just want to freeze the present forever, conservatives want to go back to some idealized past (it’s in their name), and fascists daydream of a mythical past that never was.
Only the left idea is to build the future in the future, and the theory of formations is not a dead dogma, an abstract theory, but a necessary construction road map for the blueprints of future construction.Theory of money: Western leftists are tiptoeing around Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), when they should be leading the charge in understanding and promoting this crucial economic framework. This hesitation and reluctance highlights a deep-seated issue: a kind of ideological freeze that’s holding back leftists globally.
Nationalism and borders: Ironically, the idea of open borders as one of the fundamental policies of the left in the English-speaking space is most promoted by the right. And thus, they have an uncontested opportunity to present it in their own light - as something bad, rather than as exactly the kind of liberating progressive idea that is needed in the 21st century.
The old Bolshevik line on nationalism was dead wrong, and history has proven that beyond doubt over the past century. Leftists should be championing open borders now as conversation-starter and working towards dismantling borders, passports, and nation-states altogether as a strategic goal.World-system approach: the world-systemic approach appears to be a natural development of the analysis begun by Marx, which was global both in approach — the theory of formations — and in subject matter — due to the global nature of capitalism. World-systemic approach allows to “ground” both ideas by adding spatio-temporal boundaries for their application.
And by doing so, it makes clear two otherwise unnoticed characteristics of capitalism: that capitalism as a formation is global (first of its kind, as opposed to any possible previous systems) and centralized.
Planned economy: Even when Western leftists talk about getting rid of capitalism, they shy away from stating outright what that really means: abolition of the market and private property from the economy. But even more than the Western left’s hesitancy to accept MMT—the timidity to support what is already part of the leftist idea—you won’t hear a word from them about a planned economy.
Only the postulates of market socialism can be heard out loud from the left. The farthest on the left prominent economist of today, Richard Wolff, talks about workers' cooperatives replacing private business - but nothing about the way the economy as a whole is organized, although the existence of cooperatives indicates primarily the preservation of market relations, and market socialism is social democracy, not socialism.
…to be continued.
All the named and unnamed directions where there is no timely, 21st-century, leftist thought are areas where, as a result, there is an absence of relevant left-wing politics.
Cultural politics: Is the only area where the left are on the XXI century ground: on the women's question, sexual orientation and gender identity especially.
All of which, however truly important, are secondary in relation to material issues: the defining role of the economic basis in the cultural superstructure has been one of the main insights of Marxism.
Nevertheless, the left somehow conceded the idea of the primacy of economics to the right. But a century-old right-wing economics can carry a century-old right cultural politics. Yet only a progressive left economic policy can support a progressive left cultural agenda.
That is why nowhere in the world do the left set the political agenda: the political front line is set by the economic, not the culture.
Without updating the materialist basis of their ideology, the left holds the economic front line under attack from the armed with hindsight reactionaries a century behind the cultural battles of our time - thus only contributing to the right-wing project of turning the clock back a hundred years.
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Economics is both an empirical and theoretical science. In the 19th century, we had empirical practitioners of socialist projects, including some who had already impressive track records of success in the conventional capitalist economy, people like Robert Owen, and even Friedrich Engels himself.
In the 20th century, we had the Mondragon cooperatives, the brutal, yet effective, breakneck industrialization of the Soviet Union and later China, and various important social democratic victories in Northern Europe.
And today, we have no shortage of ideas ("community wealth building" ala Preston, England or the Evergreen Cooperatives, "planning from below" ala Harnecker et al, Allende style computational planning, etc).
But you're right that we have lost momentum. Partly because the rightwing seized the initiative in the wake of the Soviet collapse, partly because of changes in technology and the nature of work that have fragmented production, smashed solidarity, and made workers everywhere more precarious.
In any case, it's an open question now as to how we advance the best ideas out there and retake the initiative from the forces of reactionary entropy and fascism.