What's Left for the Non-Weitlingized Left?

I am what might be called an Egalitarian-Productivist. It is our natural estate as humans, I think, to create. And since this is true of each of us, we all have equal claims upon the materials with which we produce. (In the more cosmic or 'spiritual' dimension, one might say that being made in the image of a Creator G-d means that our lot is to co-create the world, our shared Olam, with that G-d.) 

This is why I have loved Marx, who from the start of his theoretical and polemical life wrote poignantly on the artist in each of us, since my youth.

Now while Marx died in the course of developing his unsurpassedly deep understanding of capitalism, and hence didn't reach his goal of more fully schematizing what productive relations more consonant with our creative natures would look like after Capitalism, he did leave a number of evocative descriptions and brief characterizations. Of these my favorite has long been 'a republic of freely associating, independent producers.' 

So formative has this vision been in my little life that even the title of my latest book, which shows why and how to financially-engineer this republic into existence, is derived from it. 

For a very long time, I have been optimistic that a full left agenda - one appealing even to some who mistakenly think themselves rightwing - might be developed around this vision. 

For one thing, as the mentioned book shows, the oldest and most noble traditions of American political, economic, and legal thought are deeply consonant with it. For another thing, we have many legal and governmental doctrines and institutions that originate in that vision that can readily be reactivated and put to work in now realizing the vision at last. 

Countless draft bills, many of which I have persuaded multiple Members of Congress actually to introduce, would do just that.

Lately, however, I have lost much of my hope for these plans. For I have lost nearly all hope and confidence both in our ersatz-progressive 'leaders' and in our most populous ersatz-progressive 'movements' on whom all those leaders depend. Positive vision seems to have come to be fully supplanted, rather than supplemented, by visionless resentment and revanchism - in effect, by unalloyed negation. 

'Tax the rich,' as it were, with no vision or program for how to produce more universally realized material riches with the proceeds. 

And with this devolution, political unity and even class unity seem to have terminally degenerated into entropic 'dysphorias' and directionless hysterias. In short, Weitlingian windbaggery, not Marxian deliberation and elaboration, are much of the self-styled but now misnamed left's dominant character. 

In the past, it was easy to see such developments as mere 'setbacks' that would be overcome over time. The energy generated or reinforced by every political success, I suspect many of us on the left used to think, would be reinvested in deeper study and hence fuller positive elaboration. And, crucially, elaboration not just of what and why, but of how, too.

But it's harder to see that as possible now, as its deep epistemic prerequisites - the human capacity for both joint and several deliberation - seems itself now to have been 'deconstructed' by the logic of capital's 'playing out' 'on the [proverbial] ground.' 

One need posit no actual conspiracy or directedness in this development - we need not personify 'capital.' It is simply how an 'attention economy' operating on profit-purposive 'communications' platforms develops and ends. In a formula: Profit Max -> AttentionByte Quantity Max -> AttentionByte Duration Min -> SustainedThoughtCapacity Min.

Either way, the result is the same: we lose, first, our capacity to think together; and second, our capacity to think at all. 

Three relatively recent developments, two of them quite close to home, have led me to believe that hope is now all but lost for a real left in the 'developed' 'West.' In reverse chronological order, and proceeding from merely symptomatic to more deeply systemic, these are ... 

(1) My 'Class Unity' offshoot of DSA, which my comrades and I formed explicitly to cleanse ourselves of what I will call the 'identity-dysphoria' and 'trauma-purge' politics that began to afflict DSA after the 2016 national elections in the lead-up to the 2020 elections (a capitulation to the Clinton-originated 'Bernie Bro' idiocy?), has now voted (over my and others' objections), to drop all references to class, socialism, and communism in its self-characterization. In other words, our very raison d'etre is now repudiated. The proffered reason is fear of Trump persecution, but a new rhetoric among erstwhile comrades I think gives the lie to that. 

(2) My erstwhile political associates in government itself, sadly including the most high-profile 'stars' among them in both House and Senate, have conspicuously succumbed to the same process of degeneration. They are now programmatically timid if not indeed fully aphasiac where actual production and reconstruction are concerned, no longer willing even to mention what they would actually push, even if but tentatively, a mere three or four years ago. Instead they content themselves simply with joining the Blood Libel bandwagon that has become the new facile left peacocking since late 2023. (By way of but one example: the fellow I got to push my Stop Wall Street Landlords Act of 2022 refuses to re-up it now, saying that private equity firms are not so bad and preferring instead to define himself entirely by dogwhistling 'AIPAC' as reactionaries dogwhistle 'Soros' and earlier mediocrities dogwhistled 'Rothschild.') The same affliction now afflicts nearly all former comrades of whom I'd hoped most - including, most painfully of all, our now defunct New Consensus think tank. 

(3) Finally, and most deeply, in trying to explain to myself how all of the foregoing has been so much as possible, I've come to believe 'thought' isn't part of the developments in question, and perhaps never really was. Electoral imperatives, profit imperatives, and indeed even psychological herd imperatives (posturing, performing, and 'feel-good' imperatives), I now think, drive most of the vocalic emissions and word-resembling alphabetic symbol-streams we find disseminated over media and social media alike. Algorithms constructed pursuant to the same imperatives then multiply the pseudo-meaning fragments in question, upping the ratio of literally unthinking -to- thinking 'communications' to dizzying heights. 

Given such developments, there seems little left for the real Left to do but to find like-minds and like-toilers where we can and then work together, both in designing and in then realizing at smaller scale what for now we won't realize at larger scale. Happily we still can find one another, often on the same platforms as are now mediating our polities' broader disintegration.

And as productive-egalitarian communities in Israel, India, and Mondragon, among a few other places, still show, the prospect of building and maintaining 'lights unto the nations' is still alive and available to those willing to fight barbarisms both old and new in the cause.