The future by default

When the future isn’t what it used to be, but there is nowhere else to ground your politics in.

Drew Beamer on Unsplash.

Another essay in my Worshipping the Future series has been posted on Helen Dale’s Substack. As is my wont, this is the companion post to the essay. Once again prompted by a perspicacious comment.

To those outside the Marxist tradition, the Marxist end-goal of a society completely without alienation, exploitation and commodification, a society entirely run on the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, a society without scarcity, seems obviously utopian.

To those within the Marxist tradition, not so. No, this is scientific socialism, based on a meticulous analysis of the dynamics of human society for, as Engels asserted, Marx was Darwin for social science.

In reality, Marx was nothing of the kind. He proceeded from end goal, which came first, to analysis, which was developed to support the end goal. Marxism is the exemplar of activist scholarship as being degraded scholarship, for the commitment to change drives the analysis.

The failure of Marx’s understanding of social dynamics is such that there is no reason to believe his predictions will come true. Let alone be any sort of basis for political action. The claim that the entire record of revolutionary Marxism in power is not “authentic” because it does not follow the demands of prophecy is classically religious but not remotely scientific.

Nevertheless, the splendour of the end goal, allied with the sense of having knowledge and understanding denied to others (even better, that others refuse to embrace out of their moral and intellectual failure) has clearly been hugely motivating.

Indeed, the splendour of the end goal was such that it went perfectly with the Jacobin model of politics, as Lenin saw very clearly. The Jacobin model being:

Politics unlimited in scope: all human action, and all realms of human action, are subordinated to the absolutely trumping goal.

Politics unlimited in means: any action that brought the end-goal closer is justified.

This is the transformational future as the source of absolutely trumping authority and the legitimation of all action. This, along with hubris of an utterly over-blown sense of the understanding of social dynamics, leads you to the terror-famines that litter the history of revolutionary Marxism.

Including the Holodomor (literally, hunger-murder), though terror-famine is a reasonable translation.  Ukrainian demographers estimate 3.9m excess deaths across the years 1931-4. Yet the Holodomor is not even the most deadly of the Marxist famines.

Just as, once you invoke prophetic-mode politics, the tyrannising tendency follows. For to resist the proper direction of history becomes illegitimate and those who do so become human dross, to be swept away in the creation of the glorious future.

Thus is the tendency to tyrannising mass murder created. Especially if one includes surplus value analysis, which says all those in business are exploitive parasites: human dross, to be swept away in the service of the transformative future.

We have seen again and again the consequences of this combination of hubris, propheticism and the politics of social transformation.

The embrace of which makes one profoundly morally and intellectually superior to others who clearly wilfully refuse to do so. The embrace that gives the authority to act, however is necessary, across all realms of human action, all of which must be brought in line with such politics.

If this does not sound, in its underlying dynamics, familiar, you have not been paying attention. For we live in an age when comedy is not allowed to be comedy, sport to just be sport, entertainment to just be entertainment, medicine to be just be medicine ….

No, all realms of human action are to be trumped by the demands of politics. Of righteous politics that follows the arc of history.

The totalitarian tendency is obvious and based on a sense of the politics of the future, on notions of greater understanding of social dynamics. For the failure to embrace the same shows one’s lack of moral and intellectual character.

No alternative grounding

Nevertheless, we are dealing with a rather different form of the politics of the future than seen in the past. The proponents of the contemporary versions of such politics are not conventional utopians in the “we have a specific vision of the future” sense.

On the contrary, a certain nihilistic pessimism about human action has developed. A lot of which is the underlying Gnosticism coming through: constraint is oppression and in a proper society we should be able to will, or will-to-be, whatever we want. The no-constraint abundance of Marx turned into no-constraint identity politics.

The contemporary warriors of the transformational future are not justified by some specific vision they can spell out to you. They are justified by their rejection of the sin-laden past and the continuing-horrors-present, so judged by standards grounded not in anything that has ever existed anywhere. With any attempt to make comparisons between societies, or the past of our own, being mere comparison of sin with sin, so without resonance or legitimacy.

The logic of this is that the future is the only grounding they are left with. It is the politics of the future by default.

This is salvational, yet not conventionally utopian (even in the Marxian sense), politics ultimately justified by splendid intent. The politics of the splendour-of-their-intentions. An intent never yet realised, so can only be of the future.

However pervasive the nihilistic pessimism about human action in this fallen, oppression-beset world, the past-hell/present-purgatory/future-heaven pattern keeps emerging. Right down to elevating the choices of children over their polluted-by-past-sins parents.

Systemic sincerity

The politics of the future is a rejection of constraint in itself, as future imaginings can be as splendid as one want and one is burdened by nothing that suffers the necessary constraints and trade-offs that existing in the world bring.

Lack of such constraints makes the politics of the future such an absolutely splendid vehicle for developing the most efficient, indeed industrial-strength status plays. Which are, of course, not status plays at all, just moral seriousness.

For nothing in the above implies that such folk are not sincere. On the contrary, adopting the relevant heroic narrative for oneself is typically very sincere, so very motivating.

Self-aware? Perhaps not so much.

We are Homo sapiens. We are very good at rationalising and moralising our self-interest, according to whatever level of self-deception is efficient (i.e., most benefit for least cost) for our circumstances.

Self-deception is how status-seeking is turned into sincerity. A topic for another time.

On the matter of the appeal of Marxism, despite its record of tyrannical horror, responses to this Tweet are well worth considering.

The Dark Fiddling Pirate Jussim @PsychRabble

Nazism has been thoroughly discredited and stigmatized (for good reasons). But Marxism, which has arguably wreaked even more damage (albeit they had more time), is treated as a respectable and serious set of ideas. Why? (please, no dismissiveness like "leftists are all idiots")

References

Anne Applebaum talking about Red Famine: Stalin’s War Against Ukraine.

Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,’ Marx/Engels Internet Archive [1852] 1995, 1999, 2010.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf

V.I.Lenin, ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: (The Crisis In Our Party),’ February-May 1904, published in book form in Geneva, May 1904.

V.I.Lenin, ‘Can “Jacobinism” Frighten the Working Class?,’ Pravda, No. 90, July 7 (June 24), 1917.

Karl Marx, ‘Value, Price and Profit’, in The Essential Left: Five Classic Texts on the Principles of Socialism, ed. David McLellan, Unwin, [1960], 1985, 51-106.