I know that increasingly my political views don’t seem to be all that leftist - at least they don’t correspond to actually mobilized leftism in the U.S., Europe, or anywhere I can think really. If I’m for some mitigated, Third-Way socialist-capitalist hybrid, and if I’m only using Marx as a tool to understand class markers, then in what capacity is this site “Left” at all?
But sometimes, I like to turn the question around. What’s so Marxist about the Left, beyond its tendency to speak in the name of the proletariat? Take this blurb from the website of NoSweat, the fair-trade clothing site:
No Sweat defines the market for goods that support independent trade unions - the only historically proven solution to sweatshops. We market direct to consumers, relying primarily on internet sales for distribution.
It’s a powerful statement: sweatshops in 1st world countries only ended with trade unionism, so there’s no reason to think that 3rd world sweatshops will end any other way? But, to play vulgar Marxist, what if early 20th century trade unionism were merely superstructural to an underlying base transformation, namely the transformation from non-capital intensive, entrepreneurial and competitve capitalism to capital-intensive, managerial and oligopolistic capitalism? Viewed this way, trade unionism didn’t cause the end of sweatshops, it was merely part of a transformative process that had its causes elsewhere. And similarly, the 3rd world might shift labor practices not simply from trade unionism but because of deeper transformative shifts unleashed by moving from import-export substitution to more capital-intensive manufacturing.
I don’t mean to diminish the labor struggle of our historical past. In fact, the point of a base-superstructure argument is that the “superstructure” is experienced as the real thing. For instance, there was an overriding structural cause of the Civil Rights Movement in the South: the Great Migration’s undermining of the economic and class structure of the black-belt region and the consequent urbanization of black Southerners. But this doesn’t mean the movement didn’t involve a real transformation of consciousness among Southern blacks and that this transformation wasn’t a crucial catalyst in effecting historical change. Men make history, just not in the conditions of their own making.
But the left seems absolutely unwilling to subject historical agents - particularly if they belong to a union or political movement - to an analysis of historical context. It’s an aporia of certain strains of Marxist thinking that slips into downright humanist volunteerism when it becomes a political agenda.
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