I’m reminded this year of the time the Puritans tried to cancel Christmas. Literally. First in England at the head of a short-lived bourgeois revolution, and then in the New England colonies. Turns out people really hate having excuses for celebrating ripped out from under them. Are there any leftists today so puritanical (root word: pure) as to not celebrate at least some form of the year-end holidays?
The point of life isn’t really about socialism. And yet, how easy it is to define oneself by that very struggle. I believe it was Weber of all people who finally proved that social democrats were ‘normal’ human beings with the same capacities for virtue and vice as other members of their contemporaneous society—as against the widespread notion that socialists were sociopaths constitutionally incapable of integrating themselves into polite society. Boy, did the history of political socialism disprove that thesis!
And so, it is worth keeping in mind that life isn’t worth living because of the class struggle. The class struggle may be the dynamic that keeps history moving in one direction or another. But it certainly isn’t the point of life. It may indeed be the only engine capable of producing a life worth living. But even today we can find relationships that are worthwhile. There’s no tribunal (yet!) that will find one guilty of straying from the red brick road for the crime of spending time with one’s loved ones, the self included.
“The struggle continues.” This has been leftists’ mantra for decades now. There is a very important sense in which they are wrong. The working class simply isn’t what it used to be. It doesn’t publish its own organs, it doesn’t operate its own taverns and trading posts, it doesn’t put the neighbors’ furniture back in their house after an eviction, it doesn’t demand that society be true to the promises it made way back in 1789. This is because the left isn’t what it used to be either. It doesn’t contest winnable elections, it doesn’t keep alive the memory of working-class history, it doesn’t maintain stubborn independence from the Bonapartist state—hell, it doesn’t even engage in terrorism any more!
The mantra, though, casts an opaque veil over this reality. It prevents the kind of dissent necessary to open up a critique of the conditions under which a revival of the struggle would be possible. And without dissent and critique, a change in practice is unlikely.
Yet there is also an important sense in which this slogan is right. The working class has nothing if not its history. And its history is overwhelmingly a history of defeat, defeatism, and immaturity. For the buck to stop somewhere, it must have been on the move in the first place. There will be no victory without defeat. Every day that goes by is another accumulated bundle of theory, practice, and strategy that can serve our class on the way toward its prophesied victory. This is the leftist reappropriation of the silly commonsense slogan, everything happens for a reason. Currently, this is false. By “currently,” I mean in the absence of a functional left, a left that accepts the task history has assigned to it. But this may only be temporary. The struggle continues on a latent plane waiting only to be actualized. The fact that contemporaneous working-class discontent looks different from older iterations may turn out to be advantageous. But only if catalyzed by a left worthy of the name. The struggle could and should continue. But only if we accept that it has ended can we make its absence a lacuna instead of a permanent cessation.
I’m further reminded of the sappy John Lennon Christmas song. A utopian dirge about how pointless war is. A typically nuclear-age sentiment! Though it does emphasize—subtly—one important point. It’s up to us (read: the proletariat) to end war. “If you want it” is the line the children’s chorus sings in the background. It’s up to the proletariat to make good on capitalism’s promise to end all war forever. The political scientists love talking about the “capitalist peace.” It doesn’t exist, but it could. Already the empirical grounds for imagining such a phenomenon are deep-rooted. But it’s a misnomer because capitalism is primarily the creation of perpetual warfare through the means of achieving peace. Only such a thing as a proletarian capitalist peace could ever be said to exist. But now we’re not using succinct language—better to call a spade a spade. Socialism. Only in that world could the means of generating conflict and war be used to achieve a perpetual peace.
To go back to Lennon we ought first to digress via Steinbeck. The word is Hebrew: timshel, “thou mayest.” We can indeed end war. We can indeed put the Victorian, steampunk nightmare of socialism behind us. We can indeed come into a full knowledge of the totality that capitalism encompasses. We can indeed create a new and permanently sustainable relationship with the earth. Or we could not. The choice is ours. Not ours as a species, but rather ours as a class. The buck could stop with us. Or not. So far we’ve chosen the latter. But things don’t have to be that way forever.
All this is occasioned by Christmas 2021, in which the winds seem to be blowing the Omicron Covid variant onto new shores from seemingly nowhere at all. There’s nothing wrong with trying to enjoy some of it. And there’s nothing problematic about drinking to forget it all. Each is a distorted means of explaining the same phenomenon. The mutual incompatibility of both reactions to the status quo proves that it is the status quo itself that needs fixing, not our individual psychologies. This is a problem that runs too deep for therapy. It requires politics.
We will once again be buffeted by calls for “unity.” For the landlord to be generous to the tenant; for the corporations to “have a heart;” for the politicians to “remember what it’s all about;” for stressed shoppers to donate to The Salvation Army, etc. Bullshit right down the line! Unity covers up what has been so painstakingly unmasked. The proletariat needs political independence if it is ever to realize its potential. Even the most advanced segments within it need independence from the rest, if only to perfect their experiments in consciousness to then apply them to the whole. Unity is indeed a worthy goal, but it can only be imposed by the dictatorship of the proletariat. But to get that far, we first need dissent, discord, critique, and disunity—this the Bolsheviks proved beyond doubt.