June 10, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- If we were to look at most people who have existed throughout history – we can say that they lived in obscurity, dire poverty, possessing no titles or pretensions to greatness. They lived and died in toil. The vast majority of humanity has passed through these conditions. Yet what did these people think about their circumstances and what to do about them? While there has always been resistance and struggle to oppression, most people have understood their conditions to be divinely ordained, the natural “order of things,” that human nature is unchangeable, or that this is best of all possible worlds. In other words, there was often little concrete thinking about how to change their fate. In fact, we can safely say that the whole structure and ideology of class society from the Pax Romana to Pax Americana is designed to exclude the consideration of any alternatives.
The revolutionary left, more often than not, rather than challenging these modes of thinking, has tended to reinforce them. Trends such as economism, a naïve belief in “scientific laws” of history, reformism, faith in the development of the productive force or evolutionary social change have tended to encourage passivity and, ultimately, acceptance of the established order. These tendencies are not confined to any single group on the far left, but can be found amongst all them – Moscow-line Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists, etc. These modes of thought encourage mechanical determinism which foreclose action and serious thinking about politics and strategy.
In our time though, the predominant view on the left is not one of determinism or fatalism, but cynicism. According to the philosopher, Slavoj Zizek,
We all know the innocent child from Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" who publicly proclaims the fact that the emperor is naked-today, in our cynical era, such a strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects. that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed.[1]
Even though we all know the “emperor has no clothes,” we still go through the motions and rituals of pretending that we believe, which helps to perpetuate the social order and the reigning ideology.
Despite the openly voiced cynicism when we utter that the system 'is corrupt and irreformable,' Zizek says that “we only imagine that we do not "really believe" in our ideology-in spite of this imaginary distance, we continue to practice it.”[2] This cynicism is not emancipatory and the message it conveys is “a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad, such that any radical change will only make things worse.”[3] And in contrast to our cynical society with its lack of belief, those who do take their beliefs seriously, whether “terrorists” or communists are dismissed as barbarians and “a threat to culture—they dare to take their beliefs seriously?”[4] And if we do take our belief in an emancipated society seriously, then it is imperative upon us to not succumb to any of the pitfalls that our society is the “natural order,” passive determinism or cynicism. What it requires is that we do something else.
What I will propose here, basing myself largely upon Machiavelli (and drawing heavily from Gramsci and Althusser's readings of him), is another approach for Marxists – that of the primacy of politics. It is only through revolutionary praxis, building alliances of the oppressed and exploited, creating independent political organizations, and the development of strategy that we can win. This has been true of the great Marxist revolutionaries throughout history – whether Lenin, Gramsci or Mao. In other words, our approach, following that of Machiavelli is to grasp the primacy of politics by understanding our moment with its relation of forces, how to apply our strengths and act to create a new order that endures.
