Socialism or Calvinism?

We must shed our petty moralism if we want to win

Since the collapse of the soviet union and the full hollowing out of the left wing in western countries, the left has been mired in the muck of neoliberal conditioning as it attempts to reassert itself. Within this, a kind of new moralism has taken hold where people are cast into either heaven or hell based on their individual choices or place of birth. It’s not difficult to see where how this has arisen. On the liberal side, since at least 2015 there was a promotion of the idea that identity was an original sin, whether it was gender or race or sexuality, and that individuals had to work on their individual complicity with the systems of oppression — individually. This maxim goes directly against the truth that in order to change the dominant ideology, one has to directly confront the systems that benefit from the masses holding those beliefs. You cannot dismantle the concept of whiteness by getting enough white people to feel really bad about it when the structure of society exists in a way that whiteness is a tool by which to divide the working class. You cannot free the prisoners if you don’t understand why this system needs a permanent underclass of free labor to survive.

On the more left wing side this often manifests as a belief that those born in countries that commit the worst atrocities also have a form of original sin by virtue of being born there, and that they - by being subjects of that empire - are irredeemable. These declarations are a lot closer to Calvinist predeterminism - that there are people who will go to heaven and others that will go to hell, and nothing one does can change that - than anything resembling socialism, but are commonly held sentiment among a portion of the left. As people struggle to awaken and drop their false consciousness about society and themselves, they also must work to shed their backwards ideas that people are innately good or evil, that this is the way they were born, and that it is not subject to change.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. - Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

There is a personal benefit to this simplistic belief, of course. If all imperial subjects are innately and immovably bad, the socialist is absolved of any duty to try to raise their consciousness. If the working class of a country is incapable of revolution, then there’s no point in trying. But if instead the people are products of their conditioning, and they are capable of change, the hard work begins. Simple narratives about what is inherent to this or that group have dominated the logic behind the worst atrocities that humankind is capable of. Socialists have a duty to abandon those narratives and apply historical materialism to their judgments.

On an individual level, this eschewing of materialism in favor of moralism manifests in the idea that if a person has backwards beliefs, they actively chose to be bad because they were born that way. If they’re bad they can never become “good” — they are permanently marked. An over-emphasis on the morality of individual choices that render a person “good” or “bad”, but cloaked in intellectual radical language is a poorly disguised surrender to the status quo. The quarterly “doordash discourse” on Twitter is a good-if-banal example of this. While the app and the gig economy writ-large is something that objectively shouldn’t exist, it can only be seen as an expression of impotence that so much time is spent disciplining individual actors that use the service - no matter how loathsome they might be - and virtually no time is spent talking about the people who created these apps and profit from them, and how the gig economy itself is ruinous for the working class. Instead of talking about why so many companies have investments in a genocidal settler state, we end up fixated on which individuals are bad people for buying Starbucks. In short, the left is obsessed with playing on a battlefield where it feels it can score an easy win, instead of on the real one that matters: us versus the state.

It feels more comforting to believe that we all have exponential free will and that society - person by person - is actively choosing this reality, than to contend with the fact that so much of what we do and are is predetermined by our circumstances, and that we have very little control over the machinations of the system we live under until we seize it. It’s easier to say that people chose this government and that’s why both the people and the government are bad, than to say that we have very little choice but to participate until it can be overthrown. It’s easier to say “Joe is a Trump supporter because he’s a prick” instead of asking what combination of conditioning and economics led him there. Conversely, if we are “good” because we make good choices, we can signal that to the community and leftwing Jesus will send us to heaven. In a sense, it’s a reflection of the liberalism that still infects so much of the left to continually overemphasize individual choices over the system that coerces them. But a Marxist at minimum must acknowledge a simple truth: we do not live in a democracy and we do not make our choices in a vacuum.

In State and Revolution Lenin talks about what “democracy” means in a capitalist country:

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”--supposedly petty--details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,--we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

In the United States, the situation is even more dire. At this stage our government is fully and completely captured by capital to the point that no one who isn’t wealthy can gain power, bribery of our representatives is legal, and all the institutions are both unwilling and unable to even pass moderate social policy that could quell the masses. Study after study shows that public sentiment has no effect on policy. As life gets more precarious for the working class, the ruling class exploits their discontent to appeal to their reactionary impulses. “It’s not the bankers, it’s the immigrants! It’s not the CEOs it’s the trans people!” Without an effective alternative to this, in the form of a popular program of redistribution that addresses the dispossession of the masses, the reactionary forces who are exploiting these crises for their own gain will always win.

With this in mind, is the US worker simply born reactionary, backwards, evil, or is he constantly surrounded with this programming from birth so that he doesn’t notice the person picking his pockets? Socialists have to make a choice to believe it’s the latter in a world where simple, easy narratives dominate, if there is ever to be any hope of a better future. If people here are incapable of revolt, then your work is done, if not, you have to start talking to people and changing their minds; presenting them with a vision of the future that isn’t full of struggle and precarity.

One of the most hopeful moments recently was the mass reaction to the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Regardless of political affiliation, the majority of people either celebrated or at minimum said “yep, that’s the inevitable result of being a merchant of death”. People were acutely aware - for once - of who their real enemy is. Almost everyone has had a bad experience with what passes for healthcare in this country. On a fundamental level, people demonstrated that they understood the concept of what Engels called “social murder”

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society ^[1] places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. - Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845

The job of us socialists is to use this sort of glimmer of awakening as an entry point. If people are capable of understanding the barbarism inherent in this system in one place, they are capable of seeing it everywhere given the proper guidance. Right now in the mainstream, there isn’t much left wing thought at all. What passes for left is a center-right liberal party that is fully beholden to capital. In short, there is no countervailing force offsetting the glut of reactionary messaging around us every day, so it’s no surprise that people in this country tend towards reactionary belief. That doesn’t make one incapable of “salvation”, it is the logical conclusion of the material conditions. What is necessary now is to build a strong counterweight that can make its way into the mainstream and turn people’s eyes upwards towards their ruling class. If you are not actively working towards that end, but instead making proclamations about what hundreds of millions of people are or deserve, or surrendering entirely by instead individualizing the system, you’ve given up without a fight.

It would be egregious folly to fear this “reactionism” or to try to evade or leap over it, for it would mean fearing that function of the proletarian vanguard which consists in training, educating, enlightening and drawing into the new life the most backward strata and masses of the working class and the peasantry. On the other hand, it would be a still graver error to postpone the achievement of the dictatorship of the proletariat until a time when there will not be a single worker with a narrow-minded craft outlook, or with craft and craft-union prejudices. The art of politics (and the Communist’s correct understanding of his tasks) consists in correctly gauging the conditions and the moment when the vanguard of the proletariat can successfully assume power, when it is able—during and after the seizure of power—to win adequate support from sufficiently broad strata of the working class and of the non-proletarian working masses, and when it is able thereafter to maintain, consolidate and extend its rule by educating, training and attracting ever broader masses of the working people. - Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder