According to a common narrative, the Old Left was concerned with the issue of workers and their rights, seeing them as the prime vehicle of progress, while the New Left turned to ‘identity politics’ and oppressed minorities—racial, ethnic, gender, etc. This is a claim that is largely uncontroversial. The Right uses this distinction to accuse the New Left of betraying the working class in whose name it once spoke.
But the question arises, how could such a sharp departure occur in the first place? Indeed, is this narrative of leftist capitulation even plausible? In this essay, I will argue that the New and the Old Left share a common denominator that supports variation on the surface, without actually departing from the core essence of the ideology, as disillusioned old leftists would like to claim.
Among the latter is philosopher Susan Neiman, whose recently published book Left Is Not Woke is a criticism of the ‘woke Left.’ In an essay for UnHerd, she argues that the traditional Left was characterized by universalism and international solidarity, i.e., transnational ideological solidarity as opposed to national particularisms. In contrast, Neiman claims that irrational tribalism is part of identity politics, including its ‘woke’ manifestation. She writes:
The concept of universalism once defined the Left; international solidarity was its watchword. This was just what distinguished it from the Right, which recognised no deep connections, and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle. The Left demanded that the circle encompass the globe. This was what standing Left meant: to care about striking coal miners in Wales, or Republican volunteers in Spain, or freedom fighters in South Africa. What united was not blood but conviction — first and foremost the conviction that behind all the differences of time and space which separate us, human beings are deeply connected in a wealth of ways. To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial. To say they determine us is false.
She then argues that identity politics represents a betrayal of this left-wing universalism. “Identity politics not only contract the multiple components of our identities to one: they essentialize that component over which we have the least control.” But to what extent did the ‘Old Left’ actually reflect the image of humanitarian universalism projected by Neiman, and how far is the ‘New Left’ actually separated from the old? To begin with the latter question, Neiman would probably put the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the category that she criticizes as a departure from the traditional Left. But in actual fact, the BLM movement combines its new woke ideology with that of the old communist Left. In the leadership of BLM, there are many open Marxists who do not hide that their goal is to undermine capitalism and the concept of the nation-state as one of the embodiments of tribalism. “Black lives can’t matter under capitalism,” said BLM cofounder Alizia Garza. “And it’s not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression and gender oppression,” she added.
The strategy is clear from these sentences: the oppression of ethnic, racial, and gender groups cannot be solved under capitalism. Marxism’s ultimate goal is the abolition of national peculiarities and the establishment of global communism. National struggle is sometimes useful, for Marxists in the first step (instrumentally) against the existing order only to be abolished in the second. So, the Bolsheviks affirmed the right to self-determination of peoples, which—even in multinational communist federations such as Yugoslavia and the USSR—has never been carried to its logical end, but has always been a dead letter. Not only this, such a right is effectively canceled in the event of the triumph of global communism.
It is well-established that the pre-’68 Left based its ideology on Marx’s idea that the economic base or infrastructure of society precedes and determines the cultural and moral superstructures of society, including those ‘tribal’ identities into which humans are often inclined to group themselves. The latter are only a reflection of the underlying economic relations, which are governed by the interests of the ruling class. There is nothing theoretically objectionable about this remark, but in practice, the implementation of Marxism by the communist parties shows that these two poles were never strictly separated. Quite the contrary, communists frequently made use of ‘tribal’ differences to establish their rule. For example, in countries affected by inter-ethnic conflicts, the communists positioned themselves well, skillfully harnessing national sentiments to serve their own ends. They never suppressed national sentiment before coming to power, but hid their real program beneath the disguise of such sentiments.
Indeed, every communist victory was rooted in either a struggle for national liberation, manipulated to produce a communist revolution, or in a struggle for the rights of peasants, who violently acquired land from large landowners only to be turned into slaves of the state Leviathan in Soviet ‘kolkhozes.’ “The tactic of confiscating property from the enemy and dividing it among the peasants was important for winning over local populations,” argues historian Melissa K. Bokovoy in a book about communism in Yugoslavia. Indeed, every communist revolution was carried out by peasants, while national liberation was proclaimed to be the precondition for communist victory in many cases (Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.).
Moreover, in the vast majority of cases where there was a significant ethnic minority, the communists would use it for their own purposes, arguing that they would carry out ethnic liberation by means of their social revolution. For instance, writes historian Andrew Rosos, “The Macedonians of Aegean or Greek Macedonia made a significant, indeeda critical, contribution to the communist side during the Civil War in Greece.”
According to an influential study by Chalmers A. Johnson, it was precisely a combination of peasant support and nationalism that brought communists to power in China:
The fact that this ‘boiling point’ took the form of a war between the Chinese peasants and the Japanese Army is important. The war was not merely the final aggregate of foreign pressure on China; it ruptured the old order in a particular way. The invasion and the resistance movement gave definition to the Chinese mobilization: it placed the leadership of the awakened people in the hands of the Communist Party, and it determined the means by which the new Chinese nation was to emerge—namely, the military unification of China by its armed and militarized population.
Similarly, communists in power often attempted to consolidate their power by giving privileges to minorities. For precisely that reason, even today in Moldova, the Gagauz minority is nostalgic for the Soviet Union.
Marxism is all about freeing man from perceived shackles. That is why it manifests itself in the dichotomy of internationalism versus nationalism, sexual liberation versus traditional social morality, state versus private property, etc. Although Marxist theory predicted that the workers would carry out the liberation, in practice it was the peasant classes who carried out the communist agenda. For some reason, contrary to Marxist predictions, communism was mostly carried out in economically backward and rural countries rather than in the advanced industrial countries. Indeed, according to a famous saying, “demography is destiny.” There is no traditional ‘working class,’ and the historical process in this respect will hardly be reversible. Their role is therefore taken over by ‘marginalized groups’—ethnic, racial, gender, and others.
That is why the contemporary Left in Western Europe relies on Muslims as its privileged minority, even though they do not share the values of traditional Islam. For instance, Turks in Germany vote overwhelmingly for Social Democrats and Greens, while in Turkey’s last elections they predominantly supported Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The concept of a ‘revolutionary subject’ is crucial for understanding this change. As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, has explained:
There is no longer any privileged subject that we can refer to. You know, the whole history of Marxism—when it was seen that the working class was not as progressive or active as it seemed—the whole history of Marxism is the history of searching for some authentic revolutionary subject. Third world peoples, Chinese peasants, Cuba, whatever.
Despite the differences in focus, the Old and New Left have the same foundation. Today’s Left retains essentially the same worldview and sentiment as the Old Left—the same essential disdain for national, cultural, religious, and civilizational differences, even though these differences are used for leftists’ own purposes. The common denominator between the Old and the New Left is the doctrine of radical egalitarianism, the unquestionable will to power, the belief that human nature can be radically changed, and that a radically better society can be created. As Leo Trotsky said:
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.
In this process, both the Old and the New Left bend reality to fit with their own grandiose plans. The essence of the two ideologies is the same: a doctrine of radical egalitarianism and faith in a better future for which Marxist government is needed. The doctrine is often vague, which allows leftists to shift easily between different revolutionary subjects when convenient—with the laughable result that the working-class quickly turns from the ‘fist of the revolution’ into a xenophobic nativist element that supports the ‘extreme right.’ As the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton wrote:
Marxism abolishes reality in favor of an idea. And this idea is modeled on the transcendental freedom of the ‘for-itself’. The promise of full communism is a noumenal promise, a ghostly beckoning from the Kingdom of Ends. We know nothing of that Kingdom, except that all its citizens live free and equal, and all its laws are authentically chosen.
In this context, both the Old and the New Left are, like all political ideologies, a secularized form of religion. The theologians of this secular religion are not above modifying the original idea for a perceived greater good. The destruction of working-class property at the hands of BLM rioters is permissible and legitimate because it serves a higher cause, just as the USSR was once justified in annexing neighboring territories. As the Polish philosopher and Marxist renegade Leszek Kolakowski wrote, “Socialism, by definition, cannot practice national oppression, and thus what appear to be invasions are in fact acts of liberation.”
A final similarity between the Old Left and the New Left is their apocalyptic quality. The Old Left was largely defined by its zealous belief in the self-destructive character of capitalism, due to its own internal contradictions, and the inevitable triumph of communism as a consequence. This was part of the classic doctrine of dialectical materialism. Of course, it was not capitalism, but communism, that ultimately collapsed. Yet a similar ideology is alive and well today, namely a zealous belief in the impending climate catastrophe and the destruction of the planet. In the view of some Marxists, such an extraordinary catastrophe will inevitably lead to some form of global governance, because it could not possibly be solved within national borders.
In this sense, the radical Left in all its forms is perhaps best understood as a manifestation of the obvious tendency of human beings, and of intellectuals in particular, to believe in the possibility of changing human nature and establishing a radically egalitarian society. Whether it is the older communist iteration of leftist ideology or today’s ‘woke’ version, leftists of all stripes share the conviction that the future of humanity can and must be radically engineered from the top down.
