I had to cycle to Rosengård this morning to get some olive oil—what can I say; it’s a Malmö thing, y’all—and so I took it as an opportunity to make a tiny dent in the podcast backlog1.
My selection, perhaps unwisely for a Monday morning, was a recording of Ash Sarkar interviewing Slavoj Žižek on the occasion of his 75th birthday. The main point I took away was Žižek’s argument that it’s time for leftism to take up the mantle of moral majoritarianism, given that the right has appropriated the former leftist staples of crass invective, violent insurrection and so forth.
This fits somewhat with a feeling I’ve had for a while that, in a sense, leftism has become a small-c conservative movement, whose main aims are the preservation of a viable ecosystemic climate and some semblance of the old social-democratic / welfare-state paradigm. Big-C Conservatism, meanwhile, has given up on its worship of the state in favour of a poorly-thought-through identitarian-libertarianism, and is less interested in a Burkean preservation of the best aspects of tradition (which, while problematic for all the obvious and established reasons, does at least have an ethos) than in the manic short-term maximisation of Number Go Up.
These are hardly original observations on my part! And I further doubt I’m the first to connect these shifts with the concept of enantiodromia, which I have mentioned here before, and upon which I have become somewhat fixated. Nonetheless: though it is surely present in all times and in all places, this really does feel to me like a period in which a whole lot of sociopolitical dynamics are undergoing particularly drastic enantiodromic inversions: abruptly becoming, in some respects, the exact opposite of what they have been (or have claimed to be) heretofore.
(I have considered, and indeed am still considering, that this is less a unique property of the times, and more a property of the perspective that one acquires as one enters middle-age.)
The risk here is that of being accused of centrism. As with the Zizek suggestion, to which the easy riposte would be “oh, well, that’s just what Starmer’s doing already, isn’t it—continuity neoliberalism with a red tie”.
But that’s not what Zizek is suggesting at all, as I understood it. His argument is that the left should point at its enduring core beliefs and claim them—with some statistical justification, as I understand it—to be representative of a moral majority, at least in a lot of European and Anglosphere countries. By contrast, what Starmer’s doing is sailing as close to Telegraph Toryism as possible (by drawing on the unspoken yet persistently omnipresent nationalist-patrician outlook of Fabianism, which has always dominated the UK Labour Party), and claiming that straw-man majoritarianism as the enduring core beliefs of leftism—a move which most self-identifying leftists, whatever you may think of them and their positions, quite accurately recognise as being some bravura liberal bullshit.
That’s centrism in the raw, I would argue: an equivocation aimed primarily at the pursuit of power for its own sake, but aimed also at sustaining the existing polarity, in tacit recognition that, absent said polarity, it would be obvious that you don’t really stand for anything, other than a persistent but increasingly hollow tribal identification.
I am reminded of a line which, so I was told back in the early Noughties, should be attributed to Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas. I’m most likely mangling the poetry of it in paraphrase, but it was something along the lines of “left and right are merely directions which allow the chauffeur to park the limousine”.
I’m reminded also of this passage from a fairly long thing by some guy whose name surely determined his career as a professor of political philosophy, which I encountered via Jay Springett’s end-of-week roundup yesterday evening:
I do not think it’s useful to pretend to ourselves that we are not on one side or the other. That is just a question of sociological fact. We find ourselves on one side or the other, willy-nilly. The problem comes when we start to take our orders – our directions about what to think and what to do about it – from our side. Because of our thoughts, we find ourselves on a side; but when we find ourselves thinking what we think not because we have thought about it, but because our side thinks it, then we are not following the proper authority.
I’m really not sure I buy Professor Smith’s notion of a “just culture war”, but something in that passage chimed strongly enough that it stuck with me overnight… and given how tired I was this weekend just gone, that’s quite the achievement.
- I think it’s high time I declared bankruptcy on podcasts, to be honest. I seem to lack the ability that enables their greatest advocates to enjoy them while also doing something else; I just can’t concentrate enough to follow them properly unless the monologue or conversation is the only thing demanding my attention, which means that the very few must-listens in my list get treated rather more like television than radio. ↩︎
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