“If our expressions are to be heard then they must be silent”

This title comes in the form of abstract nonsense but nonsense that takes heed of ‘the dilemma’. The dilemma is how to break out of the all encompassing capitalist edifice. Such a task is the mission of the left. After being engaged on the peripheries and sometimes deeper levels of left wing Anarchist and Trotskyite sects of the London UK left I find myself at a double edged sword.

My radical left ambitions seem to be very different from the rest of the left or rather the organised left here in the UK, and doubtless to say most of the UK left.  The title of this article is my attempt at deciphering the disparity between myself and the UK left, the contours of this disagreement encapsulated by this ambiguous title will be depicted and revealed in this article. No doubt it will be of no interest to anyone but myself, although I write this in the hope of someone to completely rip apart my sentiment or ideally help me towards the realisation of what it is I have to say about what it really means to be a member of the Radical Left.  

I have been struggling to see how the UK left hope to achieve a revolution. Their focus, rhetoric and doctrine are embedded in 19^th and 20^th century text, philosophy, and crucially, tactics. It is the tactics which really concern me - as the sentiment of holding onto a Marxist, Trotskyite, Leninist, Luxembourg’s teaching is part and parcel of the constitutional edifice of the Left but - these teaching, especially today, are not sacred and should not be treated as such. What resides in the form of sacredness is the underlying message of these philosophers and revolutionaries, which is - Capitalism is a system that should be opposed and defeated and those opposing capitalism the Proletariat and slum dwellers, who constitute one of the largest proportion of densely populated civilisations around the world) the majority of the population, a section of the population who are suppressed or excluded by the ruling classes and the section of global society, need to rise up and take control of the reigns of history before the capitalist train, we are all riding, collides into oncoming traffic.

A collision is a very likely scenario in light of the current global constellations developing in the sphere of the International Relations of the 21^st century, but it is the 21^st century that is the crucial point here! WE live in the 21^st century and to stick to Socialist tactics of the 19^th and 20^th century, which do not account for slums or ecological propensities, is in my view, the reason for the total failure of the left to engage and ignite with the revolutionary potential of a proletariat, that does not even realise its potentials or even that the proletariat is the proletariat!

Show me a contemporary Marxist arguing for a 21^st century vision of what a left wing revolution would look like? For me, as it is clear if you were to read my blog roll would quickly discover that, although I have my disagreements and criticisms with Zizek, he is the only Marxist philosopher trying to challenge this dilemma that the left face. It is abundantly clear that he is the Anti-Christ of the left, an analogy I am sure he would relish, and this is a just analysis, but at least he is attempting to reconstruct the radical left in order to bring the left face to face with the realities that our old ways and theories, although relevant in many aspects, just do not cut it when it comes to our current epoch!

If the left is to engage with a Politically ignorant and quite frankly capitalist proletariat, a proletariat that is unaware of its existence, as seen in all those who see themselves as ‘Middle Class’ who are in fact the true definition of a working class Proletariat - “those out of joint in the social space, the part of no part lacking their proper place within it...What qualifies the proletariat... is ultimately a negative feature: all other classes are (potentially) capable of reaching the status of the ruling class, while the proletariat cannot achieve this without abolishing itself as a class (Zizek, 2008, pp 414) Owen Jones has recently written on how Middle Class sects of society, will, if the definition of what it means to be working class is defined to them, conceive themselves to be working class.

As for the lefts engagement and relations with, slum dwellers, the unemployed and the underclass is concerned this is a true lack of the left. The riots highlighted the lefts complete inability to engage with a disenfranchised, under-educated and lost sects of society, who hate the system which impoverishes them, most crucially, in the realms of education and health care, but yet still in some perverse way - perverse as their dream has been dictated to them by the system which rules over them and they follow like braying sheep to aspire toward imposed dreams that suppress them. This is well and truly a failure of the left. Not just to engage them but rather for there to not be radical left wing organisations which work outside the parameters of the state, within their own social space which challenges the sate through its very abstraction? Not in children charities funded by the state or shelters or even the farcical liberal construction of Corporate Social Responsibility, but actual bodies who work outside the parameters of the state organisations which can create its own new society behind the back of the overarching failed western neo-liberal edifice.  

Yes trade Unions are important, but it is blatantly clear that this form of social organisation is dwindling and that corporations will not adopt trade unions any time soon. Yes we can infiltrate the state as John Mcdonald and Jeremy Corbyn have done and try to work from within the structures laid out by the state which allow the left to oppose the state but such action is rare if existent at all, and when such opposition does arise the contours of such opposition are hijacked by the state or powerful individuals. Take the recent comments made by Warren Buffet one of the world’s richest men, he proposes that the rich should be taxed more, this is an idea long proposed by socialists and is a prime example of the revolutionary capacity of capitalism to monopolise policies and rhetoric or the left to serve its ever expanding control of all opposition to it, which is why the radical left need to work outside the parameters of a capitalist system that, at the moment, has the capacity and power to control and devour the left.  

Whilst there is no denying the fact that the left do more for the working class and those underrepresented and repressed sects of society, and humbly, do more than I am willing or able to do, due to my disagreement with the way the left functions in the UK, with its bitter, sectarian, clique infighting, and with its obsession over left wing sect disagreements over foreign policy which although valiant in sentiment, such action does more to disenfranchised the Left away from relation to those that it should be concerned with most, those whose thought and action they should be working in UNITY to convert, that being the Workers and unemployed here in the UK and across Europe. Take the Spanish uprising and subsequent direction of an attempted opposition to their government. They claim that a new movement should not be concerned with left or right wing politics but should be in some way apolitical. Such sentiment not only calls on the state to act in such a way ‘without’ ideology, a dangerous ambition, but also proposes that the only way to achieve this is to make demands to the government to reform. And this is the crucial point of their failure. The Spanish revolt should grab the reigns themselves take a radical left wing stance and create their own state from which to construct new socio-economic realities, outside the constructs of their state. This is what the left in the UK should attempt to do.       

This is why I make the statement that if our expressions are to be heard then they must be silent. We must cut off the balls of Capitalism so that they will not realise that capitalism has been overthrown they will just all of a sudden realise that their voices have gotten a bit higher. The only way to do this is to not work within or against the state but rather to operate outside the state. It is not for me on my own to lay out the contours of how such a task should be enacted upon, as this would not be left wing sentiment, but this is the task I believe that the left should be tarrying with, and this is the only way I believe that the left can hope to achieve emancipation and universalism? 

Whilst it is easy to critique capitalism it is much harder to look inside the left and reform it, in order to overthrow capitalism.

In Response to Alan Johnson

This Article has been written in response to an Article By Alan Johnson In the Jacobin Magazine found here http://jacobinmag.com/summer-2011/the-power-of-nonsense/. To understand the context of this post please read this link, if not the post still should make sense.

I have come across Alan Johnsons writings before and his critique of Zizek is typical of this article. What frustrates me immediately is the absence of referencing to all the quotes he uses, as I’d like to see the full context. It is easy to pick something Zizek says and attack his work without fully understanding what he means. 

Alan Johnson is picking and choosing what theories of Lenins he approves of whilst not offering Zizek the same grounds completely dismissing Zizeks works out right; I don’t think that this is acceptable.

If he wishes to be consistent all theoreticians have aspects of work which have many empirical truths in them whether we like it or not. Off the top of my head, take Fukuyama as an example. I completely disagree with his analysis but what he is saying should be understood as a legitimate argument. I do agree that it is important to understand the pit falls particularly in Zizek who does construe jargon throughout his works, but the beauty of jargon is that in many cases is it a puzzle waiting to be unravelled and the nature of jargon is that it often holds different messages for different people. This aspect of theory particularly interests me as opposed to being something that is snobbery, and is thus nothing to be afraid of, and I feel the interjection of it is some of the best writings of Zizek. Take his approach to religion as an example. Although what he does with religion is controversial if an atheist sees no absolute value in religious text, but if it is to be understood as offering ‘value’ then inferences to religion can be suggested, such as; when Jesus died on the cross (Jesus in this instance is the embodiment of god and not Jesus the prophet), that it was no longer the case that people need to pray to god because he is dead. And so it is no longer that we should trust god (as he is dead) but that the death of god meant that god trust us, and so WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR OWN ACTIONS. There is no redemption or forgiveness! As Zizek says “There is no big Other telling you what your duty is... it is up to you to come up with what your duty is.

On democracy thinking that zizek is anti-democracy is wrong in an abstract sense. When he is critiquing democracy as the greatest of all evils he is trying to encourage a debate over the real possibility of society ordering itself in a much more radical manner not yet conceived. Society is often and in this instance all too willing to maintain the way things function, as this is form of democratic organisation is what we know as opposed to approaching the much more difficult task of trying to conceive ‘radical new modes of social production’. In my understanding, if what would form as a result of taking a Zizekian approach would turn out to be a dictatorship suppressing and maiming the world population, then Zizek would see this as “an absolute failure” and far from the message he, somewhat awkwardly, tries to convey.

I would also mention here that I recently read a collaborative book called Democracy in What state? http://www.amazon.com/Demo​cracy-State-Directions-Cri​tical-Theory/dp/0231152981 and I would like to write the closing paragraph:

When Rosa Louxembourg wrote that “dictatorship consists in the way in which democracy is used and not in its absolution,” her point was not that democracy is an empty frame that can be used by different political agents (Hitler also came to power through – more or less –free democratic elections), but that there is a “class bias” inscribed into this very empty (procedural) frame. That is why when radical leftists came to power through elections, their signe de reconnaissance is that they move to “change the rules”, to transform not only electoral and other state mechanisms but also the entire logic of the political space (relying directly on the power of the mobilised movements; imposing different forms of local self-organisation; etc.) to guarantee the hegemony of their base, they are guided by the right intuition about the “class bias” of the democratic form.

This is far from the simple assumption that Zizek dismisses democracy.

On Violence I do feel that the Liberal message of peaceful revolution and radical social change whether in the form of a workers democracy or a communist realisation would most necessarily end result in some form of violence. It is ignorant to believe that no violence would occur in the event of such an act. And so it is right of Zizek to contextualise that very possibility and to theoritise over the meaning and outcome of such inevitabilities. If such scenarios where to take place we must not cower over the reality that it was a good message turned bad and so therefore failed from the start but to move on with the understanding that violence is, whether humans like it or not, part and parcel of what it means to be a human. This is not to suggest that systematic violence, such as the atrocities caused by Stalin and Hitler is the same as the violence that occurred during the 1917 Russian revolution, and to jump slightly, it is not the same violence as domestic abuse, violence indeed needs to be contextualised and understood, it is not a topic that we can dismiss or claim not to be an inherent occurrence in the human social edifice!

An article by Zizek article in the same issue of the Jacobin Magazinehttp://jacobinmag.com/summ​er-2011/the-jacobin-spirit​/ is a good accompaniment to this article. 

Whilst I recognise the need for these types of Zizeks works, as Zizek is indeed as this article suggests lurking in the realms of the unknown, a theoretical arena of how to come to terms with the mission to overhaul the current organisms of neo-liberal capitalism, and how to re-appropriate them if the revolution was to occur. I am very aware of the dangers that lurk in zizeks writing, as the task he sees is an empty space where conceptions for a new society, as he puts it, a blank paper have yet to be created and this is a dangerous almost taboo area to be dealing with. So it is only natural for people like Alan Johnson to view Zizek in this misconstrued way, a result of which leads me to conclude that he fails in his, necessary critique.

The Contours of History: Now let’s re-appropriate

 Blade Runner? See link

A battle has been ensuing since the writings of Karl Marx and Frederic Engels who were the first to critique the political economy, of which they had seen the start of the capitalist process, the full extent of which they could never contemplate. They would never learn  the true extent  that the monopolisation of capitalism would have over the governing of the entire globe. The purpose of what Marx and Engels stood for most was class war and the ability of capitalism to manipulate and control, the violently pacifistic, classes, and dominate the workers of the world. This collective of the population has diversified immensely since the social capacities of the 18^th century.

Never before has their existed a more populace globe than the era we currently inhabit and never before have we lived in an era where communication and information have been more readily available. What such a scenario has created is one where the greater the size of the population the lesser the amount the upper classes will number. However the rulers and elitists are still holding the reins of history, one where the workers, proletariat and underclass are being steered down a path of a dark future.

In large part this is to do the way neo-liberalism has re-appropriated the contours of history and how the West sees no alternative organisation to the world we live in. A world deeply disparate and unrepresentative of its inhabitants, this world caters for the survival and prosperity of the wealthy. No other example of this could be more clear than the fact that after the worst financial collapse in history the less economically endowed are becoming less so whilst the oligarchic, monopolistic, birth coincidence... amongst; bankers, bosses, hereditary wealthy are ever increasing their wealth.

Why have we let such a scenario go on for so long, and let them make us believe that we really don’t believe that, “There may be light at the end of the tunnel but that light might be another train coming towards us”,  Why does society choose to accept such contours of history? We know that we are affecting the temperature of the earth, or even we are at the whim of the earth’s temperature or anything else it has to throw at us; earthquakes volcanoes and such. What would happen if a huge population would be displaced by a mega volcanic eruption, and they do happen, where would the inhabitants go? We have no provisions to cater for such a scenario.         

The human catastrophe in the Congo as poignantly re-emphasised in the recent BBC episode by Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace what this episode highlights is how endemic the current neo-liberal capitalist construct is. This endemic disease prevents the abolition of charity, a world which would exist without the need for charities, a world where no one went hungry, without decent shelter and basic access to health care, a world which entailed little, if any, citizenry discrimination by the state and perhaps even its inhabitants, where no one was a migrant or immigrant but merely a citizen only the corrupt and murderers would be excluded. Exclusion would not be based on discrimination but on the basis of one’s actions. There would be no privileging of education all would be educated to the highest possible standard not with the intention of gaining wealth but to better the course of history toward a trajectory of global sustainability, the abolition of private property, and the increase in leisure time for the worlds inhabitancy who presently work with the bare minimum of leisure time to contemplate and evaluate the human experience, yet we are stuck with cultural capitalism.  

Many of the left today, amongst the ‘disenfranchised’ (or rather those violently pacifistic ‘apathetic, citizens) have forgotten or have chosen to ignore the formidability of the neo-liberal capitalist system. It is ingrained in our very being! The ruling class has given us the tools with which to fight it. It gave us multi-culturalism then demeaned it, and then we fought for it. It gave us charity, and then decreased it, and then we fought for it. It gave us protests, and then impeded them and we fought for them. They gave us trade unions, and they attacked them, and we fight for them. This is Capitalism with a human face... a little bit reform here and there.

The recent unrest we have seen at the end of the last decade and which continues today is a small window of grace, these are dark times the global edifice has never been more fragile and interdependent, the unrest represents the outbursts from the void. The void being the failure of neo-liberal ideology; where any real alternative is absent from debate. We see catastrophe movies by the abundance but never alternative realities in the movies. That is to say democracy in its current form is not democracy but a pathetic choice between two parties, parties which consist of the elites and in no way are representative of its mass population. The western culture under capitalism has failed to produce an alternative society and the regimes of the Middle East, which are a direct result of imperial intervention, are beginning to crumble in dramatic and in some instances in tragic ways. But lest not forget it is not the revolution that is the important part it is what happens after that matters. 

Now is the time to end the suffocation of the left and NOT continue fighting within the proposed parameters introduced by the enemy but to re-appropriate the struggle for humanity on our terms and fight for radical reform. To alter the contours of history. We must re-appropriate the contours of history.


Part 2 coming soon!