Neither a Rightist nor a Leftist Be

By Crispin Sartwell

 

     One traditional task of philosophy is to examine the conceptual underpinnings of other areas of inquiry: for logical consistency, for example, or in relation to various aspects of intellectual history. A particularly urgent case is provided by the basic way we define political positions: the left-right spectrum.

    I think that the arrangement of positions along this axis - progressive to reactionary, or conservative to liberal, or socialist to capitalist, or for that matter Democrat to Republican - is conceptually confused and historically contingent. Let's take a few minutes to think about the left-right spectrum rather than from it.

     It can seem permanent and inevitable. But this taxonomy arose at earliest immediately before and during the French Revolution, in the late 18th century, with figures such as Rousseau and Burke. It only crystallized fully with the emergence of Marxism in the middle of the 19th century. Before that, or elsewhere than in the West, there have been many intellectual structures for defining and arranging political positions. There are likely to be many others after the left-right spectrum dissolves.

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    One way people talk about left and right is in terms of time: progressives want time to continue to move forward or even want to accelerate it, taking us into a future bright with promise, while conservatives want time to stand still or even run backward to a golden age. Either approach appears to depend on a conception of time on which it is extremely malleable, its pace and direction depending on the outcome of the next election.

   I think that is incompatible with any plausible conception of time in metaphysics or in ordinary experience. No one needs to help make sure that time keeps moving forward and, proverbially, no one can stand in its way. Sarah Palin and Rafael Correa, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Beyonce, the 'stone-age' Suruwaha people of the Amazon and the prime-time hosts of MSNBC: they overlap in time, all moving temporally in the same direction at the same rate, contemporaneously. Among other moments, they all exist precisely right now.

 

    Another way that the left-right spectrum is conceived is as state against capital. This is central to contemporary American politics, as Democrats urge that government makes many positive contributions to our lives, while Republicans argue that it is a barrier to the prosperity created by free markets. On the outer ends we might identify Chairman Mao against Ayn Rand: state communism against laissez-faire capitalism.

    Much of the left wants to constrain the power of capital by increasing the power of the state, while many on the right want to reduce the power of the state in order to unleash the power of capital. Putting it mildly, the assumption of both groups that state and capital, or political power and wealth, are opposed forces, or can be pitted against one another, is not historically supported. As a matter of historical fact, political hierarchies and economic hierarchies tend to coincide. Beefing up one almost always beefs up the other.

    We might consider, for example, the relation of the NSA to Booz Allen or to Google, or the relation of Goldman-Sachs to the Department of the Treasury, or Halliburton to Defense, or regulators to the corporations they regulate. In many ways, the distinction between state and corporation in the U.S. is notional.

    As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue in their recent book The Making of Global Capitalism, capitalism arises together with the modern state, and each is inconceivable without the other. From the East India Companies to the robber barons to neo-liberalism, capitalism has depended on the state to project force; subdue, train, and control populations; and curtail competition.

     Communism of the variety practiced in Maoist China or the Soviet Union only represented a slightly different and even more extreme merger of state and capital, placing both squarely in the hands of party bureaucrats who lived in luxury and had at their disposal an abject population. Marx prescribed placing banking, transportation, and communication into the hands of the state, an evidently unpromising direction in which to pursue human equality. Contemporary China, the EU, the United States, and the Islamic Republic of Iran are all intensifying and increasingly sophisticated mergers of polity and economy.

 

 

    One way to see the incoherence of the left is to focus on one of its basic values: equality. The means proposed by the left to increase economic equality almost always increase political inequality, because these means consist of larger state programs: that is, of more resources and rules, coercion and surveillance in the hands of officials or state contractors, including in welfare-type programs. But wealth flows toward power, and vice versa, and it is plausible, I believe, to argue that ever-more pervasive state power has coincided with ever-more extreme and chronic structural inequalities of resources.

    The right runs into similar problems with the concept of liberty. Right-wingers' commitment to individual rights is often baldly incompatible with their enthusiasm for the security state or opposition to gay marriage or marijuana legalization. Probably, both left and right were invented by the people who became 'the left'. But 'the right' has encompassed an extraordinary range of positions, from fundamentalism to fascism to libertarianism. These positions are at least as incompatible with one another as any of them is with American liberalism, for example.

 

    Indeed, we might think of all the positions that fall comfortably anywhere on the left-right scale as a single ideology, because they all in practice prescribe extremely pervasive hierarchies, and hierarchies tend to coincide. We tend to oscillate between an emphasis on state and corporate hierarchies, while the overwhelming fact is that they are not distinct; the thing grows ever larger.

    If this criticism can even be meaningfully articulated, then the left-right spectrum should not be uncritically pre-supposed as a neutral or factual way of characterizing political positions. It needs to be established. People who find impossible the task I suggested earlier  - thinking about it rather than from it - accept it as a sheer irrational dogma.

    Left and right are arrangements in practical politics, and many political parties in many parts of the world understand themselves as falling along that spectrum somewhere. But as a framework or taxonomy of political positions, or for the purposes of, say, research in political science, it has got to be optional. You've got to keep open the possibility that it is a flawed or tendentious paradigm or could be replaced with a better explanatory framework. If not, then you are yourself embroiled in the ideologies that you're supposed, in political science or political philosophy, to be trying to understand; you are inquiring in a circle.

    As a first move, I'd suggest replacing left and right with up and down. We might usefully think about political positions in terms of whether they seek to constitute political/economic inequalities or to dismantle them.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches in the political science department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is Political Aesthetics.