The left's problem is not alienating language

It's the lack of a coherent political line around which to build a mass politics

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

There are a lot of obstacles to a successful left political movement, and even more obstacles to a specifically socialist one. Obviously, capitalists have more money. They own the media, and they support rightwing politicians and pundits. This means that the prevailing media climate is already anti-left and especially anti anything to do with even a hint of socialism. Add to this the fact that “left” doesn’t really even mean anything anymore besides “people who disagree with the increasingly openly-fascist politics of the right” and this includes everyone from center-right conservatives to Democrats to democratic socialists (I classify all as liberals). You also have some real socialists and communists in the mix, but for the most part when people refer to the left they are referring to the big-tent population described above. The rightwing media treats all of these people in the same way, usually demonizing them as socialists or communists.

As a result, any progressive political program is hard enough to get off the ground and harder still to cohere and gain any momentum as a mass movement. And the left keeps losing elections, and even when they win elections, the machinery of the right makes sure that any gains get quickly reversed. And so the left are constantly in self-criticism and crisis mode. And unfortunately, they seem to never learn the right lessons from their increasing string of losses.

That’s why it’s frustrating when people, even good-intentioned people, end up amplifying the rightwing spin and proffering reasons why the left is not successful that, at worst, just regurgitate rightwing talking points wholesale, or at best highlight things that are really superficially related to the real reasons why the left is stuck in a downward spiral that doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

Case in point: a recent guest article by Cass Hebron on Grace Blakeley’s Substack entitled “The left needs to cut jargon to build power.” When I read this last night, I was frankly surprised to see it coming out of Grace’s newsletter because it struck me as so off-base. I had to read it through several times just to make sure that my first impression wasn’t off. After doing so, I think that this article is a prime example of someone amplifying a criticism that, while important to keep in mind, has been largely manufactured by the rightwing spin machine and therefore represents at best a tangential issue and something that really isn’t a core part of the left’s political failure.

The article makes the argument that a key reason that the left is unable to build a coalition of voters is that the language that they use is alienating and jargon-heavy and so people that would otherwise agree with and join a leftist movement don’t do so because they get put off. On the face of it, this seems to make sense. After all, how many times have we heard people say that the reason that they voted for George Bush or Trump is because they “felt like they could have a beer with him” or “he just talks straight”? Logically then, people who talk straight and can relate to the common woman or man have a better chance of gaining political support.

This position also seems to make sense based on the right’s unending criticism of “wokeness”, where, supposedly all the left think and talk about is identity politics. Antiracism, feminism, transgenderism, DEI, all of this stuff is repeatedly pounded into the ground by the media spin machine as being elitist, out of touch with the common American, socialist, or communist. Rightwing pundits act like progressive politicians and activists care more about policing people’s pronouns or giving puberty blockers to kids than alleviating poverty. As I’ve shown with an analysis of the Greens’ public policy statements here in Aotearoa New Zealand, this is simply not the case. Most progressives talk way more about bread and butter issues than about identity politics. The public perception to the contrary is the result of rightwing disinformation.

The frustrating thing about the article is that it acknowledges the rightwing spin machine but then proceeds to play right into it. To be fair, its focus starts a bit smaller in contending that the specialist lingo and jargon of academia has been imported into leftist organizing spaces and this is a problem because leftists are not able to reach the people online that they need to. But the conclusion then seems to be that one of the main reasons why the left is not successful in recruiting support is that most of them are elitist in their language and policing of terminology.

I have a couple of problems with this logic. First of all, putting aside the fact that many on the right use elitist language as well and it doesn’t seem to cost them votes (I’m looking at your constant use of corporate jargon and idioms, Christopher Luxon), language used on social media or in official professional forums is not the same language that gets used in organizing spaces. The fact that this seems to be a takeaway conflates online political activity with actual organizing, something that is pervasive in politics. There’s a difference between talking to someone at a party or making a post online and actually trying to make yourself understood in a political-organizing capacity. But furthermore, the entire logic of the piece takes a criticism by the right at face value and levels it at the left using only a few personal anecdotes and statements by supporters of the right as evidence in support. The author and her colleagues use jargon and think it’s a problem and have noticed other academics and professionals do it as well.

But she then, in my opinion, grossly inflates the importance of this insight into a statement about something wrong with the left in general. This is where she moves from a useful caution into amplifying the rightwing spin. She does this by invoking infamous public intellectual Slavoj Žižek, who is well-known for his diatribes over the left’s embrace of political correctness and wokeness. Žižek is an interesting figure to cite in favor of this criticism, because his public persona is one of a shock-jock who uses an appeal to Marxist authority combined with scatological, misogynous, and psychosexual pseudo-philosophical word salad to normalize a liberal idealism which often tips over into outright fascism. His public acclaim and ubiquity say more about his lack of constituting any real threat to the capitalist status quo than it says about his intellectual and political contribution. In other words, Žižek runs cover for a rightwing political agenda under the guise of being a Marxist. By invoking him, she attacks the left using a rightwing criticism laundered through a credible left expert and seemingly legitimizes the criticism of political correctness and wokeness as constituting a significant part of leftist organizing and politics when the reality is that, especially in public-facing politics, progressives are much more focused on issues and use language that should connect with voters.

But I digress. It’s understandable that the author would mistake Žižek for a Marxist or even a leftist. After all, that’s how he presents himself and who the hell can understand what he’s talking about half the time anyway? What I take away from the article is a modest and useful caution for academics and professionals having been amplified into a causal claim about why the left in general is failing politically. I think the article overstates both the prevalence of this tendency among leftists and the degree to which it contributes to a failure to secure support for a progressive agenda. In this way it represents the tendency among progressives to amplify the rightwing slander of the left and to misidentify the real reasons that the left has been so hopeless for so long.

And that brings us to the real reason that the left continues to lose. And that is the lack of a coherent political line with which to build a mass politics. You’d think this wouldn’t be a problem given that misery and precarity and destitution are ramping up precipitously all over the world. Surely a leftist message of social democracy should resonate with people?

I think there are two main roadblocks to consider. First, since the 1980s, all mainstream liberal democratic governments and politicians on both the nominal left and right have bought into the logic of debt-reduction and austerity (public budget and job cuts and wage decreases). This makes enacting any legislative agenda that seeks to redistribute wealth extremely difficult. “How are you going to pay for that?” is the watchword of policy debates, nevermind routine passage of tax cuts for the wealthy which inflate the deficits. The logic of household debt has been infused deeply into the public consciousness, and it doesn’t appear to be budging, despite the many proponents of Modern Monetary Theory or more logical economic approaches. What this means is that even politicians who run on a progressive agenda have to walk back campaign promises after the election, or in some cases do the exact opposite of what they have been elected to do, leading to disillusionment, voter apathy, and disengagement from politics altogether.

Second, and this to me is the most consequential factor, the left has not been able to come up with a simple and coherent political message that can rally people around the socialist, or even social democratic, standard. The reason for this is obvious. Most on the right and the left are wholly captured by the liberal democratic capitalist system. Best they can do is campaign on some piecemeal reforms that will redistribute wealth a bit more equitably. No one is serious about overturning the system wholly, even though more and more people are recognizing that it is the system as a whole that is not working, or rather is working just as designed. Leftist politicians who campaign on reforms are popular, as evidenced by the campaigns of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and the more recent slate of DSA-endorsed candidates. Yet still, the mainstream Democratic party and the Labour party here in Aotearoa can’t bring themselves to break with the capitalist class in any but the most insignificant ways. The right, for their part, is content to ride the populist wave of economic and social distress to direct hate and blame at immigrants, trans people, radical leftists, and imagined communists. They ride this wave into office where they do nothing to help those who have voted for them, only making things worse and greasing the wheels of the capitalist extraction machine, which makes every social problem worse and touches all intersectionalities.

And here is where I think the left has a chance, if they will take it. It is true that the last 30 years has been pervaded by identity politics. The failure of these both ideologically and politically is due to the fact that the left has refused to connect all intersectional struggles with their capitalist origin and amplification. This has pitted different factions, white people, black people, feminists, LGBTQ+, etc… against one another. Elevation of status and wealth or securing of rights within the liberal democratic capitalist system is viewed as a political success and end in and of itself. Hence you have campaigns for more woman or black CEOs, etc… This struggle and political line negates the relation of the capitalist social and economic system to all of these identities and its role in perpetuating the precarity experienced by all (not to mention often being nationalistic and failing to consider the lives and realities of those in the imperial periphery). Furthermore, political lines that prioritize intersectional identities and agendas necessarily alienate those of other identities, thereby fracturing the left.

This is not the same thing as being alienated by the language we use to describe various political phenomena. It is a matter of the priorities of political action. The most visible example has been the socialist movement in the US being heavily overrepresented by white, middle class, urban young professionals. These movements have eschewed identity politics, preferring instead to focus on what they term class politics. According to this formulation any identity aside from that of a member of the working class is secondary to the struggle against capitalism, hence the figure (however exaggerated or accurate) of the young, white, insufferable male leftist. Being a woman or a racial or sexual minority and the particular struggle that entails must be set aside in order to realize your primary identity as a member of the working class.

Unsurprisingly, this so-called class reductionism has fractured the left. Many articles and perspectives have described the way that racial and other minorities feel dismissed, alienated, and marginalized by the white, mainstream left. The result is that the solidarity needed to form a broad coalition is not there.

What is needed to overcome this lack of solidarity is a political movement that can connect all aspects of political struggle with the capitalist system. Lenin criticized so-called “economists”, those who were focused solely on political action solely or predominantly to improve wages and working conditions, for being short sighted in their political strategy. He argued that to build a revolutionary movement required recognizing the potential for political struggle and education in all aspects of life that are impacted by social and political systems (in Lenin’s case Tsarist Russia, in ours, capitalist liberal democracy). He further suggested that what was standing in the way of a political revolution was

The fact that the working masses are roused to a high pitch of excitement by the social evils of Russian life, but we are unable to gather, if one may so put it, and concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a far larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent. Lenin-What Is To Be Done?

How are these drops and streamlets of public resentment to be channeled into a political torrent? By connecting in the minds of the working class the relation between all of the social ills they experience and the capitalist system. This is the key. People are already experiencing hardship because of the material conditions caused by capitalism, and this is increasing. The exploitation of workers by bosses, the appropriation of unpaid labor of and repression of women, the discrimination and repression and brutalization of racial minorities by police and immigration officials, the marginalization and targeting of LGBTQ+ individuals, the gutting of disability benefits, imperial wars, sanctions, and blockades. All of this serves to reinforce and reproduce the capitalist system. And thus, all political struggle along any of these lines is a struggle against the system and liberation can only be realized fully when the system is toppled.

This is how we build a mass political movement that includes those who have traditionally and historically been alienated from the left. By educating, by theory and practical political action, about the relation between all social evils and the capitalist system. Of course we should use language that people can understand, but we shouldn’t either underestimate their ability to grasp concepts and theory. When people make that connection for themselves, it comes to them in an irrevocable and unmistakable way, regardless of the jargon or clumsiness of the language used to expose them to the idea. Once all political struggles are connected and cuts to teachers wages incite the same degree of political agitation and action as police brutality and legislation against trans people, the path to revolution begins to be that much more clear.