The postmodern left: part one

(This is not to overlook the need for ongoing democratic struggles in response to the conservative-backed corporate abuse of modernity in the form of global warming, for example, or the continuing exploitation of Third World and Indigenous people by global capital.)

So to the extent that, today, ordinary working people in the West have a measure of democratic social power they didn’t have a century ago, and to the extent they have a quality of life along with industrial and democratic rights they didn’t have back in 1845 when Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England, their position is owed to a tradition of politically-conscious labour struggles animated by the spirit of democracy. And it is owed to those who fought and sometimes died in those struggles, on behalf of democracy to come.

Now, how very twee all this sounds today. What a comforting little delusion to suppose that all the complexities of the real world are reducible to a theory of underlying conflict between antagonistic social forces.

But if such a “theory”, such an eventful idea, is not the undeconstructible ground of the left today and in any future to come, what could be used to distinguish the left from its political alternatives? Without any allegiance whatsoever to an idea of class, in the complete absence of any form of relation to the event of such an idea - what could “the left” possibly be or mean?

We’re not so naïve as to think that the category, or the concept, of class is stable and universal. While acknowledging, though, that class is not a grand narrative or a transcendental signified, this is not to say that therefore there is no such thing as class. Like a dragon, which may not be real but is still a very powerful idea, the idea of class cannot be emptied of all political force and meaning simply because real-world class formations today are taken to have transcended their 19th-century origins. An idea of class (along with the idea that “class” is an evolving concept) is part of the political inheritance of today’s left, and such an idea can be abandoned only at the risk of losing that inheritance and hence a crucial part of what the left means.

The seeming intent of present-day Labor, for example, to sever its historical ties to blue-collar workers and their unions, raises the question of whose interests the ALP now seeks to govern on behalf of. No doubt, in the bipartisan political rhetoric of the moment, it would claim to seek government on behalf of “all Australians”. But what’s left about that?

The idea that all Australians could have anything in common - a common language, common values, common interests, a shared cultural heritage or such like - is entwined with a conservative myth of society as a naturally classless and egalitarian state. Why would Labor want to buy into it?

Traditionally, Labor rhetoric was on the side of workers’ interests over those of, say, bankers and corporate executives, on the understanding that working people once had little or no social, economic or political power at all. What power they may have today was won through struggles (in which the ALP played its part) between competing social interests that are fundamentally incommensurable. It was not won by pondering the “mutual obligations” of various social “stakeholders”.

Today, the hollow solidarity of the postmodern left clings to the free-floating signifier of the ALP, a party for all Australians, for crooks and celebrities alike, from Brian Burke to Maxine McKew. In turn, this Labor joins in solidarity with the conservatives in maintaining a consensual silence around the events of labour history. For this Labor, then, for the postmodern left - as for conservatism - the greatest enemy is Marx.

Read part two here.