Rosa Janis responds to Jacob Richter’s April 9th, 2020 letter to Cosmonaut on social conservatism and the left.
Normally we do not respond to letters that are sent to us. However, Jacob Richter’s recent letter, which is more of a short article, merits a response for a number of reasons. The sentiments expressed are, to put it bluntly, a deadly spew. This poison of “anti-idpol” social conservatism is spreading quite quickly among certain parts of the socialist movement in the wake of the defeat of both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It’s always easier to scapegoat others than applying Marxist analysis to political failures. We are forced to respond to this sentiment both on the level of our political commitments as Communists towards general social progress as well as on the personal level of two people on the Cosmonaut editorial board being trans women (myself included) who would be affected negatively by a tolerance toward social conservatism in our movement. Also, while we welcome disagreement among comrades, it is particularly disappointing that Richter would express such reactionary sentiments, as he was an early proponent of the “neo-kautskyism” that influenced us. Despite taking a polemical tone here, we genuinely hope that he and those who hold similar views can be reasoned with.
Does Reaction have a class character?
Richter claims that social conservatism can be divided into two distinct categories of class character: proletarian and petit-bourgeois. The difference between these two categories of social conservatism can be traced out through empirical data that has been gathered by mainstream social scientists like Thomas Piketty. While it’s impossible to deny that there are reactionary sentiments common among the working class, to argue that there is social conservatism with particular class characteristics is an abuse of class analysis. At first glance it may be obvious that certain social conservative sentiments have a working-class basis, with anti-immigrant sentiment tied to working-class fears about being replaced by illegal immigrants who are willing to work at starvation wages. However, this is one of the few examples where It can appear to be as clear-cut as this. The vast majority of reactionary sentiments cut across class. For example, racism was practically universal among American whites before and during the Civil Rights Movement. In a Gallup poll from 1963, 78% of the white participants said they would move out if a black family moved into their neighborhood, while 60% said that they disapproved of the marches of MLK while a plurality of Americans thought the Civil Rights Movement was made up of Communists. Although it could be argued that the white population the United States at the time were unevenly proletarianized and consisted of a large labor aristocracy (a claim one can dismiss as cheap Maoism), this reality leaves one in a particularly sticky situation, as whites were the majority of workers in the United States and expressed racist attitudes. Therefore, according to this logic it makes sense to say that racism at the time had a working-class character, making it possible to rationalize racism in workerist terms. The introduction of more blacks and women into the workforce drastically reduced the wages of white men since such minority workers were willing to work for less, meaning the worker’s movement in the United States accommodated racist and sexist views on numerous occasions. However, racist attitudes were nearly universal among the white population of all classes. The same can be said for a number of different forms of prejudice ranging from sexism to homophobia.
If these sentiments are not born out of a particular class character, then where do they come from? For this, I will give you the standard Marxist answer which was best articulated by the great theorist Louis Althusser: these reactionary sentiments only come to be thought of as common sense throughout society because they are spread through the social practices of ideological state apparatuses such as the church, the school, media, etc. Ideology, spread through the social practices of such institutions, unconsciously reinforces the status quo of capitalism. One might point out that such civil institutions have been weakened by the advancement of neoliberal capitalism, yet this does not mean that said institutions do not exist in their entirety, but rather only in weaker forms. Thus, we see weaker and less universal forms of these reactionary sentiments.
It could even be argued that social conservative sentiments are more common among the petty-bourgeois than they are among working-class People. Thomas Piketty’s tome Capital and ideology argues that social progressivism correlates the views of “professional-managerial class” but Thomas is not using a Marxist understanding of class to analyze class politics. The professional-managerial class is not a class unto itself but rather a subsection of a larger petty-bourgeoisie. When this fact is taken into account we get a much different picture of the social politics of class. The petty-bourgeois in the United States consistently votes for the Republican party on average, with your average Trump voter having a significantly higher income than even the majority of Hillary supporters. This preference towards social conservatism among the petty-bourgeois can be explained by the fact that the ideological state apparatuses of civil society are more well-funded and operational among the petty-bourgeois then they are among the proletariat. The proletariat is more likely to be politically apathetic rather than socially conservative. They might express reactionary or progressive sentiments but these do not amount to a meaningful ideological commitment to social conservatism. So, in a certain sense, it could be said that social reaction, in general, does have a particular class character. However, when it was in its prime it was a universal ideology across classes and in the current moment, it more strongly correlates to the petty-bourgeois than the proletariat.
Historical responses to Social Reaction
Since Richter brought up the history of the SPD and Stalin in relation to social conservatism it would be relevant to talk about the particularities of their responses to social conservatism among the working-class. While the SPD in many respects was “conservative” on social issues such as prostitution and gambling, to label them socially conservative would be somewhat mistaken. The “socially conservative” positions that the SPDtook when they were still an authentically socialist mass party were rooted in Marxist rather than conservative reasoning. Prostitution and gambling were opposed not because of the cheap moralism of the petit-bourgeois concerned about the impurity of such acts but because they took advantage of working-class and surplus population poverty by selling people into sexual slavery and debt. The SPD was also willing to push against the prevalent social reactionary sentiments of the time. On 13 January 1898, the great Marxist August Bebel stood before the German Parliament to advocate for the decriminalization of sodomy, arguing clearly and concretely against Victorian social conservatism in favor of a scientific understanding of human sexuality. He would also sign a petition put out by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, an early LGBT advocate group.
Compare the SPD response to homophobia to that of the USSR. Initially, with the abolition of the laws of tsarist Russia, there was a small opening for social progress on the issues of sexuality in the Soviet Union since anti-sodomy laws were effectively gone in certain parts of the Federation. This, along with a number of members of the party like Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko, commissar of Health, actively pushed for a scientific understanding of homosexuality to be the official policy of the USSR. Leading a team of Soviet scientists to meet members of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany, Nikolai Aleksandrovich and a small number of Bolsheviks within the party opened up the possibility of genuine progress during this brief moment. However, with the rise of Stalin, things changed rapidly and in an attempt to appeal to the peasantry Stalin put forward a series of socially conservative policies that would not only set back the small bits of progress made by gay rights activists but also the advances of women and ethnic minorities within the USSR. Stalin was particularly vicious towards homosexuals, imprisoning homosexuals en masse in a witch hunt to take down a supposed fascist pederast conspiracy. After everything was said and done the Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko rationalized Stalin’s anti-gay pogrom as being class warfare against the remnants of the effeminate aristocracy. The same sort of story would repeat in other supposedly socialist nations with the notable exceptions of East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
The worst elements of reaction within the worker’s movement have always been justified as a means of appealing to a socially conservative working-class, leaving oppressed minorities within the working class defenseless against pseudo-democratic demagogues. Social conservatism in the workers’ movement has always been rationalized by appealing to a proletarian class character. As a result, if we were to accept Richter’s arguments, we would have to accept the darkest aspects of our own history as authentic class positions.
Minorities and the Minimum Program
Coming back around to Richter’s initial argument, he seems to be making less of a claim about what issues working-class people happen to be socially conservative than arbitrarily labeling certain positions petit-bourgeois social conservatism as opposed to proletarian. This arbitrary division leaves open a non-scientific approach to this issue and opens the door for simply rationalizing personal bigotry by throwing on the label of class character. This is exemplified by the offhand mentioning of Paul Cockshott’s reactionary views on gender as an example of social-conservatism with a proletarian class character. Cockshott’s views on gender, whatever the merits of the rest of his work, are especially abhorrent in their hatred of transgender identity and belief in homosexuality as bourgeois deviance. To suggest such views are an example of proletarian class positions is personally insulting to the transwomen on the editorial board of Cosmonaut and also seems bluntly absurd when one looks at the specific details of the trans issue. The bulk of anti-trans sentiment is AstroTurf by conservative think-tanks in both the United States and the UK while among the working class general acceptance of LGBT people is popular. The majority of people who identify as LGBT are working class and young according to recent Gallup polling. Expecting a party of the working class to accommodate the bigotry of petty-bourgeois boomers with reactionary views on gender like Paul Cockshott is asinine, to put it bluntly.
Even if trans acceptance was not popular among the working class it would not matter because we are not vulgar workerists. We understand the role of the mass party as leading the working class towards proletarian politics which means we will often have to cut against the grain of what is popular among working-class people. The Party must uphold the Democratic rights of minority groups such as women, oppressed races/nationalities, and LGBT people as a part of the minimum program. Through this commitment to social progress, the party molds the consciousness of the working class towards genuinely proletarian politics.
