Leftism is about identity-maintenance
Former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias' cringeworthy Taberna Garibaldi is the Che Guevara t-shirt of bars. It expresses the problem with Leftism, an exercise in lifestyle branding.
Pablo Iglesias founded and, until 2021, was the figurehead of Spanish left-populist party Podemos. Spanish news reports today that he is opening a bar in Madrid’s hip Lavapiés neighbourhood. Garibaldi, it will be called, and it’ll serve left-branded cocktails and tapas, like a Fidel martini, a Che daquiri or enchiladas Viva Zapata. Even within the tacky history of leftish puns, these are weak entries; only slightly better are Iglesias’ proposed ‘Durrutti dry martini’ and the ‘first we take Manhattan’.
The experience of Podemos best expresses the Western millennial Left's lifecourse: from street and square to party and parliament, and then to defeat and demoralisation. And now, a surprising a new chapter: as hipster bar!
Asked whether he was now becoming an entrepreneur, Iglesias replied, "We’re going to set up a restaurant, a bar-restaurant. We’re going to set up a place where we can go and have beers. It is going to be an old-school thing, where we can make the stews that we like." Sound – we’ve all dreamed of having our own bar. The menu of Iglesias’ new venture also features a quote from Karl Kautsky: “Taverns are the last bastion of the freedom of the proletariat.” A century on, I don’t know how true that remains, with “third places” under threat from rising rents, regulation and so on (I touch on that here), but at least Madrid, and I believe Spain in general, certainly retains a lively, popular culture of bars and taverns –and long may it continue.
But the branding annoys me. It is lifestyle politics. And this aspect comes through loud and clear with the bar venture coming in succession of political failure and defeat. The Garibaldi tavern is of a piece with a left that is foremost interested in “being left”, with identity, and thus necessarily in our times, with branding.
There is nothing wrong with political militants having their own establishments in which to talk, debate, plan, organise – but also socialise, commiserate or celebrate, have fun, and get drunk (and probably fuck each other, inevitably). Indeed, it is necessary, and probably central to any serious, committed, collective project. And that such an establishment should celebrate its heroes is also natural – it is a place in which to be drunk, and thus a place of romance – political romance.
So what is it that irks about Iglesias’ bar and the like? (Where I live, in São Paulo, the probable equivalent is a Palestinian bar – and it gives me the same vibes. There’s lots of purple, the colour of the new new left, shared by Podemos and Brazil’s Psol, the erstwhile dissident offshoot from Lula’s PT). It’s that the romance feels ersatz, not lived. It is aestheticised, and in our times that means branded.
Ultimately, it is leftist (pejorative).
I always thought "leftism" was a strange term. It's used in disapprobation by the Right; and used by those on the Left who have nothing else to say for themselves.
Except for as a teenager, I've never liked 'leftism'. It means foregrounding the identity of 'being on the left', an identity which is essentially founded on forming opposition to the Right. Leftism lacks a North Star. It stands against whatever 'they' are doing. But ‘they’ might be various things, it might be neoliberal economic policy, or social conservatism on questions of gender and sexulaity, or corporatist management of labour and capital, or isolationism, or warmongering.
The Right is fundamentally opportunist, so any self-defined ‘Leftist’ mirror image ends up being so too.
Leftism is content with the perpetuation of Left vs Right forever, because constituted as it is by this opposition and the identity it provides it with, it’s interested in identity-maintenance. Moreover, as the Right is the party of order, of the status quo, the “ones in power”, Leftism becomes an identity of not-being-in-power, and over the course of repeated defeats (glorious defeats), it becomes an identity of powerlessness. At an extreme, it is an ideology of being a loser. (If this sounds like the usual rightist depiction of the left, recall that my target is Leftism, not socialism per se; and moreover, that the Left has been failing for a century, or in a more generous reading, half a century. Either way, there’s no basis for defensiveness – history provides the ultimate proof of truth.) Resentment, as I noted earlier this week, plays its part here too.
The problem with Leftism, then, is that for the Leftist, the political clash with the Right is paramount. Progress, telos, class struggle, emancipation, etc.,... these all are secondary. At a time when the categories of identity threaten to swallow politics whole, more instrumentalism is needed (not to put too fine a point on it). The question needs to be “what do we want” not “who are we” or “who do we want to be.” The latter inevitably would receive answers like, “the nice guys”, “the good guys”, the “ones who fight the good fight” and other such sentimental drivel. In Iglesias’ bar, after a few cañas, this no doubt slides into the maudlin. It is also dangerous, as left-ish ideas get absorbed by ruling institutions desperate for legitimacy. If being a leftist means defeding 'left’ ideas against the Right, then it’s a short step to defending governing institutions against more plebeian opposition, with little regard for what it all means and the part you’re playing it.
For the same reasons as I’ve laid out here, the so-called ‘post-left’ were always slightly risible to me. If the Left derives the sources of its identity from the Right, then the post-Left does the same with regard to the Left. This political dance can go on ad infinitum too, every shake of the chain, from the first link, sending the articulated links jangling down the line. What good is an anti-Guardian or anti-DSA or what have you? Again, identity-maintenance will predominate over history-making, or even over political clarity. ‘Political independence’ is be a keyword – in Marxism, referring to the independence of the proletariat from bourgeois parties – but it also needs its reflection in consciousness, as independence of leftism, and identity-thinking as whole.
Talking with a dear friend who lives in Madrid about Iglesias’ bar this morning, he likewise cringed and compared it to Che Guevara t-shirts. “Do people still wear those actually?” he asked. I feel like I see them every once in a while here in São Paulo. Though I did also see, the other day, a 20-something guy in a Hamas t-shirt, walking with a friend in a PCO (Workers’ Cause Party) shirt and keffiyeh, closely followed by two middle-aged women, one in a Hezbollah t-shirt. I guess that’s where Guevarism ends up in the 21st century. As I said: leftism.