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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Jayatilleka’s Alt-Left Project
I applaud Dayan Jayatilleka’s plea for
an international ‘Alt-Left’ project—a descriptor that seems immediately
obvious but nevertheless brilliant. Since the end of the Soviet Union
and the ideological triumph of neoliberal thought in the 1980s there has
really been no Left left, at least not of any economic variety (though
plenty of Leftist cultural warriors, as Jayatilleka notes). But
re-establishing a viable economic Left is a hard ask, despite the
failure of the neoliberal project whose collapse created the vacuum that
various Alt-Right movements have proceeded to fill. To be sure, some
Left-liberal fellow-travellers such as Krugman (2012), Stiglitz (2014),
even Summers (2016) are now questioning the validity of the neoliberal
model of globalization they once advocated. They generally focus on just
one of the factors noted by Jayatilleka: the fact that national elites
in their rush to globalize forgot to look after their own working
classes with the eventual political backlash we are now experiencing.
Their principal remedy is better redistributive measures to ensure that
the benefits of increased trade are equitably shared.
Fine
as far as it goes, but this hardly approaches what Jayatilleka seeks,
namely a new ‘global public imagination.’ The latter intends much more,
in Jayatilleka’s adumbration, than a Leftish corrective to the rightward
shift of New Labor and New Democrats and their international followers
during the post-stagflationary era. It implies a critique of traditional
hard-Leftism as much as of a pusillanimous ‘third way’ that was in
reality a capitulation to the blandishments of the Right. Any successful
new Alt-Left movement must, according to Jayatilleka, establish itself
on secure moral-political ground, the ‘moral’ element being crucial. It
was in fact always crucial given that traditional Leftism meant a
commitment to equality over arbitrary inequality, the dignity of labor
over its exploitation, fairness over privilege, and so on. Such moral
feelings were central to Leftist motivation but unfortunately difficult
to admit within the structures of ‘scientific’ Marxism. According to the
hard ‘realism’ of historicist Marxism, morality was suspect as being
squeamishly or exploitatively ‘bourgeois’, the values of any period
being inevitably the values of its ruling class. Not only that, but
moral suasion was necessarily ineffectual against gigantic forces of
History driven by crude class interest. ‘Justice’ (and Marx seldom used
the term except in scare quotes) would be taken care of in the long run
as class-conflictual History took its inexorable course.
This
left individual Marxists in a psychological bind, driven by moral
feelings their theory proclaimed inadmissible. And the resulting moral
ambivalence allowed monstrosities to become, not just conceivable, but
actual under the guise of historical necessity (and we should have
learnt by now that any claim of ‘necessity’ in political discourse is
fallacious). Coleridge (1938), writing of Robespierre, long ago warned
that undisciplined benevolence could seduce us into malignity, leading
us into “the dangerous and gigantic error of making certain evil the
means to contingent good.” Jayatilleka’s long-term project has been to
correct this fundamental error of the Left. He is an arch-realist, as
anyone familiar with his writings will attest, but for him any realism
that omits the moral factor is in fact unrealism. Any Left movement that
forfeits the moral high ground—through lethal internecine conflict,
through the suppression of thought and the promulgation of blatant lies,
through resort even to mass murder—has already doomed itself to
ultimate defeat whatever its short-term political successes. In
Jayatilleka’s view, political realism inevitably requires hard,
sometimes brutal choices, but if these are not adequately and believably
justified within an authentically moral framework they will prove
counterproductive in the long run.
His
other corrective of traditional Leftism is an insistence on retrieving
nationalism and patriotism from the grip of the xenophobic Right and
from the denigration of liberal cosmopolitans. In this effort he enlists
the more subtle and immanent dialecticism of Antonio Gramsci, for whom
the ‘self-nationalization’ of the working class—by which he meant its
creation of a collective national popular will—constituted a final
moment in its ascent to a genuinely expansive and consensual hegemony.
Jayatilleka thus assumes that Gramscian theory has continuing relevance
even after the destructive attacks of modern Leftist critics, notably
Althusser (2006) and Perry Anderson (1976). Stuart Hall (1988) tried to
demonstrate this relevance in the age of Thatcher (as mentioned by
Jayatilleka). He argued that Gramsci did not give the contemporary Left
the tools to solve its puzzles but the means to ask the right kind of
questions, which could be done only by directing attention unswervingly
to what was specific and different about the present moment.
The
world has moved on from the 1980s and ‘90s, never mind the 1930s when
Gramsci was writing his prison notebooks. The ‘working class’ of
Gramsci’s day, or even of Thatcher’s, is surely not what it was nor ever
likely to be reconstituted as such given the fragmental impact of
neoliberal policies and the trajectory of global economics. This makes
the Gramscian hope of a proletarian moral-political-intellectual
hegemony seem quite forlorn.
And
yet recent events have shown that class consciousness, and class
resentment, still exist. And nationalism, often of the most regressive
kind, has once more shown its remarkable resilience. Nationalism was of
course the bane of old-fashioned Leftists looking to develop an
international class consciousness (if, as Jayatilleka notes, Mao, Ho,
Fidel and Cabral fused nationalism securely into their revolutionary
projects it must have been through an intuitive grasp of its effectual
power rather than any theory they imbibed—I may be wrong, but I’m not
aware any of them was familiar with Gramsci). What is less often noted
is that nationalism is also a puzzle for liberal and democratic
theorists, who seem to depend on it to contain the polity in which their
principles may apply yet have no theoretical means of grasping it.
Liberals fear cultural nationalism’s capacity for excess and would like
to tame it if possible, but they flounder with weaker forms based on
‘liberal values’ (which are shared of course by many nations). I would
go so far as to say there are no true, full-blooded modern theorists who
defend the concept of nationalism, although there are many who theorize
sociologically about nationalism. One has to go way back to Montesquieu, Rousseau, Herder and Fichte even to discern elements of a possible defense.
And
yet there nationalism still is, in all its potency, promise and threat,
from China to India to Russia to the United States (whose ideological
heart, like France’s, has always been torn between theoretical
universalism and de facto cultural nationalism). What has been most
revealing and alarming about the economic and financial crisis in Europe
is how swiftly the ideal of Europeanization collapsed as mutually
antagonistic nationalities reasserted their relevance. Creating and
maintaining a nation has always been a stern, extended, often violent
political and cultural exercise; creating viable entities larger than a
nation obviously presents even greater challenges. So, to take
Jayatilleka’s Gramscian lesson to heart, we must start with the world as
it is, one in which both class and nation remain important
elements—along with many others, of course—that any plausible Alt-Left
movement must grasp and inform.
There
is some sense of back to the future in all this. The post-WWII Western
order implied a social contract that was implicitly international and
nationalistic: if the Depression that had led to war was to be avoided
in the future, then the worst excesses of capital must be managed and
regulated internationally. Regulation of trade and finance plus the
Keynesian focus on full employment domestically meant that each nation’s
working class was protected and assured its (growing) share of national
wealth even as that wealth was increased by steadily expanding trade.
This was really an historic compromise between capital and labor: the
kind that Keynes thought was the only way to avoid the worst extremes of
either side.