Who loves capitalism?
The Right is pessimistic and no longer proposes a universal vision of progress. But the Left is as motivated by resentment as the Right. The Green New Deal thus occupies a paradoxical position.
Green New Dealers, New New Dealers, and European Green Dealers are the last true believers in Capitalism.
The Right, the market Right, has become pessimistic anew. They now openly admit that a bright future will not admit most comers. The confident, universalising vision of peak neoliberalism is gone. It has nothing with which to confront socialist promises of a better life – but, then, it doesn't have to, because those don't exist anymore. So the Right just sells various ways of carving up society into a group of winners and a large mass of losers. Yes, it always did this in practice, but now it does it in rhetoric too, and the tone is dark, morose.
So the Left is left holding the candle for infinite accumulation, inclusion in the labour market, renewed legitimacy for the corporate state. You would, given the lack of prospects or promises of progress elsewhere, probably deal on this. You’d take it at this stage of proceedings. At its most self-consciously revolutionary (or deluded?) the advocates of green re-industrialisation, jobs programmes, etc. (let’s call them ‘Dealers’) works as a gamble: do a new new deal, get an organised industrial working class, and you go from there, onward to greater class power, and who knows, maybe revolution. It's a low-stakes gamble on the part of the players, because if they don’t get their end-goal, well at least you've decarbonised the economy and got some well paid jobs out of it.
There's a whole load of reasons why this won't work, or why the stakes are not actually that low. This was the subject of a wide-ranging debate, which started with a New Left Review article by Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley, but was really sparked by a shorter article in Sidecar by Dylan Riley; it led to a debate between Seth Ackerman and Aaron Benanav, a contribution from JW Mason, and a useful summary of it all from Benjamin Fong, along with his own take. No doubt more had their say too. The basic critical point with regard to the Dealers is that these politics might only work for the US, and at the expense of other countries, including ostensible “allies” in Europe – a process that is already underway as a consequence of Biden’s IRA and German economic suicide. And even if it works, it will only contribute to worsening the situation of global overcapacity. Moreover, the worst case logical consequence is economic war turning into hot, world war, principally between the US and China.
The debate though has unfortunately sufferered from a confusion of fact and norm, analysis and politics, theory and practice – a point which Fong highlighted. My interest here is to look at the politics and imaginations that sustain those politics.
As Steve Fraser notes in a recent essay in Jacobin, the right is motivated by resentment, and by a desire for restoration. It is backward-looking. Nothing new there, of course. But the left is too. Taking the example of Black Lives Matter and ‘racial justice’ more broadly, Fraser argues:
Victory in this fight would be heartening and is hardly a foregone conclusion. Yet it would not constitute a revolutionary transformation of American society, based as it is on traditional pledges from the past. Mainstream economic and cultural institutions as well as leading political ones are “woke,” supporting precisely the advances in racial, ethnic, and gender equality they once either opposed or delayed. This is indicative. Revolution is not on the table.
Fraser concedes that it might be a step too far to call the conemporary Left “restorationist” but “restorationist or not, led by avowedly left-wing organizations or by those content to think of themselves as social liberals, [social justice politics are] struggles to make the present conform to some idealized past. Nobody here is contemplating crafting the ‘New Man.’” Indeed.
But I would go further. Resentment – really, ressentiment – also characterises the Left. Would most on the Left today admit to admiring the revolutionary élan of the bourgeoisie, or given its absence today, lament this absence? Would they concede that the freedom achieved under capitalism marks an advance, something to be preserved and built upon? That the achievements of capitalist modernity are indeed achievements (say, the ability to travel the world; to be educated and access information; to have lightweight cheap plastics that are better than clunky, heavy wood; that to have an excess of calories is still better than a deficit)? I suspect they would not. Only the dark side of these things must be highlighted. To do otherwise would be to give those in a position of authority their due. Or that’s how they would see it. In sum, the Left is resentful.
Capitalism doesn't work, it doesn’t provide on the promise of freedom – but it would be good if it did. This the contemporary Left could never admit. Rarely these days is there an evocation of a confident spirit. Instead the general disposition is of backs to the wall, defending lost causes, wailing about those trampled underfoot by the wheels of progress. It is a cult of victimhood, not of man’s overcoming.
This makes the ‘Dealers’ rather paradoxical. The social-democrat nostalgics are one of the few tendencies on the Left that could be credibly called left-wing – they are universalist and materialist. And they seem to proffer at least some sunnier vision of the future, in a context of identitarian misery, both left and right.
But is it forward-looking? Fraser again:
Take the Green New Deal. Climate change was not an issue in Roosevelt’s day. So, the Green New Deal is new in that sense. However, its essential means are not and are entirely at home within the house of the New Deal. Jobs are created by government-subsidized private investment in renewable energies and other ways of mitigating climate change. The jobs are intended as well-paying and skilled and come along with some vague rhetoric about the right to organize unions (although it’s a measure of how far things have regressed that the rhetoric is vague and toothless, and that the lion’s share of new investment is happening, quite purposely, in nonunion locales).
This makes the Dealers ultimately conservative. Not just in the sense of offering nothing new, or of being backward-looking, but also in that they aim to preserve and strengthen the state, reubild corporatism, sustain investment and accumulation. So, Fraser argues:
A Green New Deal is better than no deal. But it also assumes the limitless accumulation of capital on into a future not fundamentally different than what came before. And as Rosa Luxemburg observed, “if the limitless accumulation of capital can be assumed, then the limitless viability of capitalism must follow.”
The Left is now as powered by ressentiment as the Right. But, the Dealers retort: we might love capitalism yet!
If this configuration weren’t bad enough, consider what happens when a world of competing ‘Rights’ (the Right proper and the degenerated Left) gets passed through the sausage machine of ideological scrambling that increasingly occurs today: when ideas pioneered in North America, or occasionally Europe, get imported into the periphery.
Restoration may have appeal among US-American MAGA types, or supporters of Le Pen in France. As paradoxical as it may sound, those politics express nostalgia for social democracy too – even if, unlike on the Left, it often comes coded in racial forms. But it makes sense: let’s go back to 1959, when an orderly life that promised gradual improvement was on offer. This was a world of working-class incorporation and inclusion. And maybe more to the point concerning Trump and Le Pen supporters, an age of petit-bourgeois survival and independence, before small businesses were outcompeted by oligopolies fostered by globalisation.
But when sentiments similar to these are voiced in a country like Brazil, it takes on an absurd hue. I’ve seen memes here that repeat almost verbatim leftish millennial ones that circulate in the US or UK, lamenting how 20-somethings will never be able to afford a house like their parents did. Excuse me? What golden age of home ownership are we referring to here? If nostalgia for the Trente Glorieuses is politically not very useful in Europe, it is a nonsense in Brazil. Yes, Brazil had the highest growth rates in the world between the 1930s and 70s, but the picture of Fordist inclusion of North America and Western Europe was not a reality in Brazil.
On the Right, and especially far-Right, nostalgia in Brazil attaches itself to the 1964-1985 dictatorship. It is not a vision of freedom. That is why I have always considered Bolsonaro to be more reactionary, more troubling, than Trump or Marine Le Pen, who, whatever their faults, speak in some way to a social-democratic aspiration (restoration!).
In any case, this seems evocative of what the great Brazilian literary theorist called “ideas out of place” (or “misplaced ideas” as the existing English translation has it), in relation to the way European liberal ideas were imported to 19th century slaveholding Brazil. The mismatch between ideas and reality was greater than just the way socialists have always criticised liberalism – say, the way rhetorical advocacy of the freedom to work whatever job you want combined with the real unfreedom of being subject to your boss’s whim, wherever it is that you might work. It ran deeper than that.
In this context, ideologies do not describe reality, not even falsely, and they do not move according to a law of their own; we shall therefore call them “ideologies of the second degree.”
This sense of ideological scrambling, of words encountering no accountability for their truth content, meant that, in 19th century Brazil, “one could methodically call dependence independence, capriciousness utility, exceptions universality, kinship merit, privilege equality, and so on.”
I keep returning to this because it seems to capture something not just about core:periphery relations but about the general situation in which ideas are transmitted and circulate, often via the internet, and land like cuckoos, laying their eggs in nests that aren’t their own. Left and Right are unified in their ressentiment and nostalgia – but in some places they’re nostalgic for a past that never existed.