The consumerist left
What passes for the left has adopted an incoherent ideology without even realising
For some reason I can’t really fathom - perhaps a sense of morbid curiosity - the other day I listened to an episode of Jameela Jamil’s podcast IWeigh, where the host interviewed Owen Jones.
The episode was titled What is Socialism, but I do think anyone tuning in to gain an answer to that question would have been rather disappointed.
A lot of the chat was Jamil and Jones telling each other how great they were, though beyond that Jones did provide a brief overview of the theories of Karl Marx and the dialectic.
At one point Jamil asked how Jones responds when right-wingers point out the various times socialism has failed horribly, and Owen replied by enthusing about the NHS and the Swedish welfare state. These are fine things, but they both exist in capitalist societies. Is socialism, on this line of thinking, any different to welfare capitalism? Had this podcast been recorded ten years ago, rather than promoting the Nordic model, Jones might have given the example of Venezuela as a shining beacon of socialism, an inspiration to the world. For some reason he didn’t mention it this time. Jones was prepared to talk about elements of capitalist societies which chime with socialist logic, but not any of the societies which tried to manage themselves on socialist principles.
There was some discussion of policy; a decent amount of time was spent on the emancipatory potential of the four day week and universal basic income, but very little was devoted to answering the question posed in the episode’s title. The only response we really get is one sentence, where Jones says that socialism to him means “spreading democracy as far as you can”.
In his book “Why You Should Be A Socialist”, Nathan Robinson - the editor-in-chief of American left-wing magazine Current Affairs - is even more difficult to pin down.
“You will notice that I am not providing a blueprint for what socialism will look like. This is because my kind of socialism does not have blueprints. It is not a fixed picture of how every single thing ought to look. Rather, it’s a set of principles that we use to measure whether society is operating fairly and guide us as we move toward a better world.”
Now, I do think that if you’re writing a book arguing that people should be socialists, it might be an idea to give them some idea of what they are signing up for. Maybe we don’t need a full policy suite setting out, but the risk here is the definitions are so broad as to become meaningless. Judging “whether society is operating fairly” looks pretty different to a conservative than it does to a liberal.
Elsewhere, Robinson states that “economic democracy” is the goal of socialism, that we should aim to increase democratic control. This is consistent with Jones’ definition, and although it is rather vague in terms of that it means in practice, I suspect it is a more mellifluous version of the demand for large-scale nationalisation of industry.
I’m now much more of the social democratic persuasion and I don’t intend to speak for socialists here, but as someone who spent some time in far-left circles back in the day: where was the discussion around collectivism? Where was the mention of class analysis? I appreciate socialism is broad, with many meanings to many people, but it feels like both men are missing big chunks out of their socialism. I’m very much a milquetoast social democrat and yet I feel even I would be more radical in power than anything Owen Jones suggested to Jameela.
But what I find really notable, for both Jones and Robinson, is their genuine reluctance to talk about much in the way of ideological solutions. Much of the discussion is taken up with critiques of the way capitalism works; very real problems such as inequality, poverty, poor working conditions, housing, and so forth. Jones offers a few policies, Robinson a few vibes, but in general far less is offered on what the solution looks like.
This really isn’t good enough for people who purport to be left-wing public intellectuals, thinkers, to go out and argue for a socialism they can’t even really explain.
I think this reflects a bigger shift in approach and a real weakness in leftist circles; very few are bothering to think deeply about political ideology, about working with a consistent moral and political framework. Instead, what we have is a consumerist approach to political activism, where campaigners focus on discrete causes which appeal to them, a pick and choose model of political engagement.
This disconnect between socialism as a professed ideology and leftism as a collection of causes leads to various points of incoherence, tensions between the two.
The left’s tolerance, if not support, for what typically gets termed “cancel culture”, is a really good example. When they’re not pretending the phenomenon doesn’t exist, leftists want to frame people getting fired for having the wrong opinions as “consequence culture”. You said something we don’t like, we’ve made a fuss, your employer found it easier to cut you loose, it’s your own fault. For anyone who works with a frame of class analysis, this is obviously a terrible thing for workers’ rights. Why on earth would you want to push to create an environment which makes it easier for employers to get rid of workers? Presumably because you think it’ll only ever happen to your enemies, but this is tilting the scales in favour of capital. Socialism this ain’t.
On a related point, much of the left has a real tendency to mock free speech as just being a conservative talking point, without ever considering who wins and who loses when speech becomes less free.
A similar lack of class analysis was evident during Labour’s antisemitism crisis. There was a real lack of reflection as to why the antisemitism crisis went hand in hand with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party. There was no consideration of the underlying ideology and how this manifested. Instead, the Corbynite commentators who acknowledged the problem tended to individualise it. To say antisemites are bad and must be expelled, but then to probe no further. But you can’t address a problem if you refuse to understand it. You can’t fix a collective problem solely with individualist solutions.
Support for prostitution is just another issue on which self-proclaimed socialists seem bafflingly out of step with the ideology they think they believe in. How can socialists fail to see that prostitution is to commodify women, to extend the reaches of capitalism to cover access to the insides of women’s bodies? “Sex work is work”, comes the standard retort, but what kind of socialist defends such violent, exploitative, dangerous work with just a trite four word response?
So why are so many leftists campaigning on a platform of issues which is an ideological mess? For sure, part of the explanation is antisemitism, or misogyny, or tribalism. It seems every issue now is just more grist for the culture war.
But my personal pet theory is that, as with so much in leftist discourse, part of the answer tracks back to the Iraq war.
The protests in 2003 rejuvenated a leftist politics which had been sidelined by New Labour, but also dragged in many people who had no socialist grounding but on the single issue at hand were in agreement. Make Poverty History followed soon after; UK Uncut in the 2010s.
The internet accelerated the trend; engagement was quick, single issue, shallow. You didn’t need an ideological background to take part, just an interest in the issue. You could choose the campaigns you wanted to get involved in, the ones that appealed to you. The old left got overtaken by a new generation which cared far more about activism, personal expression, and identity than about reading theory.
This is why prominent socialists can’t tell you what socialism is, or means; it’s because they don’t really know. Sure, they will call themselves socialists, for cachet, to indicate opposition to capitalism, or because they genuinely believe they are, but there is just no deeper ideology here. There’s no framework underpinning their responses to issues.
What we’re really dealing with here is not socialism but a sort of consumer-leftism; campaigners with a custom suite of unconnected issues rather than a set of ideological beliefs. Activists might still use the old words, like muscle memory, a phantom limb, but they’re just invoking the dead, wandering through a land of ghosts. None of it means anything.
This isn’t all a bad thing. One of the many off-putting things about the older left was the informal barriers to entry, and that’s now been swept away. Political engagement is a positive, however people get there.
But I think it is reasonable to expect that people in the media who call themselves socialists should be able to articulate what that means; why would you so publicly declare yourself a believer in a particular philosophy if you couldn’t explain it to people? Aren’t you supposed to be out there, advocating for this? All the old socialists I used to know could have told you about socialism for hours, whether you wanted them to or not.
Politics right now seems more polarised than ever, yet at the same time, the terms of debate have become much narrower. Ideology has given way to policy; but without an ideology of some sort, without that over-arching framework, what guides those policy decisions? No wonder we all end up fighting pointless culture wars, fighting over semiotics.
Socialism is surely more than a handful of policies or a feeling in the gut. Ill-served are we by our current crop of left-wing public intellectuals.