Reading Nicolas D Villarreal’s letter responding to my attempt to break the Marxist left from its lockstep march into irrelevance and/or complicity, I am reminded of a joke often cited by Slavoj Zizek:
There is a delicious old Soviet joke from the “Radio Yerevan” genre: a listener asks “Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car on lottery?”, and the radio answers: “In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.”
Every single claim or argument made in Villarreal’s letter is simply and absurdly wrong. It seems that Villarreal’s mind has been so damaged by the standards of Twitter and or the online left that he is incapable of reading the texts he quotes.
Villarreal’s misreading of Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 is a prime example. Here he claims that there is no universal position from which we can judge what Villarreal calls “partisan issues,” such as where the COVID-19 virus originated, whether or not the public was lied to by the intelligence community about collusion between Trump and Russia, or the opportunistic way the security state continued to cling to and expand the emergency powers it granted itself after the attacks of 9/11 by treating the election of Trump as an emergency on par with a terrorist attack.
In fact, Marx does not claim that there is no universal self-transcending position within civil society. What he points to as both the universal position and the self-transforming position during the revolutions of 1848 is the working class. It was the working class who, by insisting that the bourgeois order make good on its own promises, might have been able to overcome capitalist conditions and negate its own class position. Marx wrote:
“The first draft of the constitution, made before the June days, still contained the droit au travail, the right to work, the first clumsy formula wherein the revolutionary demands of the proletariat are summarized. It was transformed into the droit à l’assistance, the right to public relief, and what modern state does not feed its paupers in some form or other? The right to work is, in the bourgeois sense, an absurdity, a miserable, pious wish. But behind the right to work stands the power over capital; behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class, and therefore the abolition of wage labor, of capital, and of their mutual relations.”
The working class is, of course, not a formation within the state, but constituting and operating from within civil society. Even the most bourgeois of all rights, the right to property, originates within the laborer and her right to herself, to her own body and mind as her own, which she is free to use as she chooses.
The freedom of labor within civil society is a contradictory freedom. The workers are both free and unfree precisely because capital is always and everywhere the product of their right to freely dispose of their labor power. For Marx, the working class is unique, different from all other classes within society, insomuch as it is both the source of the mediating value that sets up all other relations and because the interests of the working class ultimately lead to the transcendence of its own class position and interests.
Villarreal demonstrates his abandonment of the working class and his fealty to the democratic party when he asks, rhetorically, “After decades of illegal actions by the American state against the international working class, should we bemoan along with Tucker Carlson the fact that the bourgeois parties and their deep state collaborators were able to outmaneuver Trump, the usurper representative of the militant petty bourgeois? I don’t think so.”
If he’d bothered to read Marx, or just remember history, rather than misread him or distort it, he’d know that “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850” is primarily the story of how both the petty and big bourgeoisie inevitably hollowed out republican principles, and even more how the petty bourgeoisie’s betrayal of the workers, their turn against a revolution rising out of civil society, inevitably led to both the rise of the Farcical Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and to the petty bourgeoise’s own defeat at the hands of big capital.
Marx believed that it was only the dictatorship of the proletariat that could realize the freedom and equality that the revolutions of 1848 aimed to accomplish. He would not celebrate the democrats’ attacks on the right to associate, the right to speak, and the right to petition today. Further, Marx believed that the petty bourgeoisie could potentially ally with the working class in a revolutionary struggle against big capital and the state. He would not celebrate the triumph of big capital nor opportunistically grant the Capitalist State the right to ignore its own constitution and laws.
To reiterate:
Under modern capitalist conditions, the universal position in society is the position of labor, specifically abstract labor. Workers are the universal subject. However, the conditions necessary for workers to arise are bourgeois. This means that capital is the universal property relation. Both big and small capitalists can claim to be operating on the basis of this historically produced universal value – the value of labor. What’s more, big capital and the working class appear to be abstract due to the fetish nature of the commodity form. Whereas small capitalists, the petty bourgeois, are the concrete and sensuous appearance of capital within capitalism. The petty bourgeoisie, whether urban and cosmopolitan or rural and deplorable, are connected to local communities, they represent direct concrete interests, and thereby due to their relationship to particular cultures, they appear as concrete and particular moments within the universal category of labor.
If the petty bourgeoisie, for instance, the intellectuals, were to align with labor against big capital, there would be a chance for revolutionary struggle. If, on the other hand, the petty bourgeoisie align with big capital, for instance, the capitalist state, the chance for revolutionary struggle is diminished.
Villarreal claims that the State cannot be opposed because it is “overcoded.” He says that there is no universal position or set of interests that can adequately interpret the State’s behavior. However, determining whether or not the State has made good on its commitments, often inscribed in law, is not beyond the working class nor the petty-bourgeois intellectuals. It is only when we hold ourselves to be identical to the state, only when we take the state to be both the subject and the object of society, rather than society being the collective life of individuals and the state arising through the failure of society’s self-realization, that this authoritarian understanding of the world can take hold.
What Trump represented as a spectacular object is not the same thing as what Trump was in the political form of the president. As a spectacular object, that is, as a mediatic figure constructed through the State’s ideological system of domination and control, his appearance closed off all potential for reflection or contestation. The meaning of Trump was fractured in the same way that society is fractured and atomized by the State. Trump’s meaning was determined in advance by the mediatic State within what Debord called “The Spectacle.”
Whereas as a political figure within a constitutional order, both Trump and the treatment of Trump by the State bureaucracy could be easily understood. It was possible to judge how Trump and his detractors lived up to or failed to live up to the rules and laws that justify the US Imperial State’s power over both the domestic population and the world. It is precisely within the context of the constitutional order that Trump and the reaction to Trump could be judged in relation to the interests of the proletariat and the rest of civil society.
Villarreal’s impoverished thought, his submission to the State’s insistence that one must not think, is nowhere more evident than in these lines: “Overcoding is also evident in Lain’s own letter when he selectively chooses when and where to believe the American government – accepting the report by Special Council John Durham but rejecting the UFO whistleblower as a psyop, despite both being government officials at one point charged with coming to the truth of this shadowy deep state.”
Only if we presume that one accepts or rejects evidence based upon whether one submits to or rejects the authority of the messenger, does this accusation make any sense. The reason to accept Durham’s report is not that his position within the state granted him authority, but rather because the comprehensiveness and quality of evidence presented produced an authoritative report. Unlike Durham’s report, the whistleblower Grusch cited no particular documents, would not name sources, and presented no reason to believe him beyond his credentials and his assurances. The difference between the two examples is self-evident and profound. It can only be missed if one has been thoroughly trained in the art of submission.
Villarreal’s letter is a Gish gallop of misreading and misunderstanding.
He charges me with formal anti-semitism, claiming that I point to some force that is outside of society to explain the regression of society. But I explicitly do not suggest that the regression of society is the product of an external force. What I claimed was that the Marxist left has failed in its efforts to organize civil society politically and assist the self-emancipation of all. To put that in a less sentimental way, I charge the Marxist left with abandoning its own project, choosing instead to side with big capital politically while taking up the failure of bourgeois politics as a limit to its own project and its own imagination.
Further, I do not claim that there is a conspiracy at work. The left is not doing the bidding of the security state in secret, but quite openly. The left’s lack of interest in opposing the war on “disinformation,” an effort that could at least rival its previous effort to thwart the war on terror, demonstrates its subservience to the political party responsible for this war on thought.
Even more, I did not claim that civil society is a neutral space but rather specifically mentioned how civil society is shaped by class relations and the market, and how it is a space managed by the State.
All in all, Villarreal’s response to my letter demonstrates that I was correct to attempt to intervene. It is the perfect expression of the nominally Marxist left’s subservience to the democrats and its ability to deceive itself as it supports the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI as allies fighting the good fight against a supposedly fascist reality TV show host, whose pathetic presidency the contemporary Marxist left apparently still considers to have been a greater threat to socialism than the current war in Ukraine, the expansion of the power of the international bureaucracy, and the direct suppression of working people by a US and EU that fears its own citizens. It is evidence of the Marxist left’s deep disdain, and opposition to, the working class it pretends it wants to emancipate.
-Douglas Lain
