Why do I bother? What is it about this activity called writing that I seem to enjoy despite every reason not to? How, even when I am at my most depressingly convinced that absolutely nobody will read what I put out into the world, do I keep returning to the keyboard, compelled to hammer away at it until something resembling coherent ideas come together?
I don’t ask this out of self-indulgence. Like most of us, I’m aware that today we write more but say less than ever before, that the bumbling homunculus of “misinformation” stalks around every corner of this reality. Words, and the ideas that represent them, like everything else, are overproduced, and thus more disposable than any prior time. I know this. And yet something in me cannot help but contribute to the pollution.
Part of it is surely a compulsion, a way of coping with a neurosis so widespread it’s become mundane. When we comment or post or write in the online mall that has replaced nearly every public forum, we are all scratching that itch. The social industry is designed with this in mind. The only thing that separates me and others who try to “professionalize” their output, to arrange their compulsion in the forms of articles or what we might have once called blog posts, is that we are trying, probably in vain, to organize.
And what exactly are we organizing? Our thoughts? Sure, but more than this. To compose something that attempts to be (likely) longer, with more of an arc and argument behind it; this is to push against the cacophonous tide of knowing. The race to come up with the exact and correct and best thing written at the moment, to best all other comers with the snazziest zing: these flatten life into a series of one-ups where anyone who manages to claw their way up the first rung is only bound to be snatched back down to the bottom.
Of all the tools employed by this doomed band of scribes, the strongest and most ubiquitous, the most essential, is negativity. The practice of summing up an event in 240 characters or a picture of your face accompanied by a bit of text your brain vomited up is designed not only to disregard nuance and contingency, but to insist that their existence is heresy. What is can only be what is. Which means that what isn’t is more dangerous than perhaps anything else. The unexpected ways an event's moving parts can shift, the void they leave behind, these consume us if we do not account for them, even (and especially) if we can do nothing to change them.
We know what this kind of worldview – the preoccupation with what is and therefore can only be – looks like. It is often cynical and bloody-minded. But it also relies on an unexpected disposition. That is the disposition of optimism. Optimism isn’t just a bland belief that the good will always prevail. It’s the belief that what is must be easily explained, therefore easily controlled, and therefore, that the good will prevail, whatever the “good” may be. It is an impulse shared in common by conspiracy theorists, the most wooden adherents of Enlightenment thinking, the liberal appeal to the best of “the American tradition,” and yes, much of the left (particularly its terminally online sectors). All are prone to explain away the inexplicable – the “not good” – with a tribal accusation of apostasy. It’s not just disagreement this worldview cannot brook, but even the practice of questions.
Again, we have all seen the outcome. Yes, the unknown will consume us at some point, but not before we consume each other. Optimism, like the written word, is cheap. Easily disproved. But in this world of planned obsolescence, the cheaper something is, the fiercer we cling to it.
When the optimist’s plan of action fails, more often than not it means they are rendered immobile, frozen in place, unable to admit they did something incorrectly. Aware they cannot proceed as they did before, but stuck in stubborn refusal to embrace the pessimism their situation clearly requires, they smilingly retreat. It is one of the reasons why so many who seek the change the world, in whatever fashion, end up doing little more than posting and tweeting, even as we watch social media lose what little purpose it had to begin with.
Pessimism, however, is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s not merely that lower expectations means never being disappointed (though that is perennially true). There is a humility that accompanies pessimism. An admission that one doesn’t know exactly what to do at all times, and therefore the patience to assess and see what, if anything, there actually is to be done. When something works, it isn’t simply a chance to puff out our chests. It is a revelation. If toxic optimism sneers at disagreement, true negativity yearns to be wrong.
There was plenty of reason to be pessimistic a month ago, even morose. Still is. There are two kinds of things happening in the North Atlantic world’s field of vision: wars and elections. One of these wars is plodding on more or less unopposed, while the other has caused mass outrage around the world and rightly been labeled a genocide. Still, it continues.
As for the elections, and the prospects they seemed to present, they weren’t any less bleak. Sure, the Tories were about to finally be routed in the UK, but their replacement was a party unable to muster anything more than the most mealy-mouthed apologetics on any meaningful issue. If anything, this is a Labour Party better positioned to roadblock the left and what it stands for at every turn. Keir Starmer may have the dead, gormless stare of a toothless shark with brain damage, but he can still gum you to death.
Just across the channel, the far-right was set to sweep the elections in France, aided by the gormless center. Emanuel Macron is both everything the center wants to be and actually is: a competent technocrat completely unable to read the writing on the wall of the popular mood. Everyone said he was essentially handing the country over to fascism by calling a national election right on the tails of the Rassemblement National crushing it in the European elections.
Joe Biden, however, is just everything the political center is. Blinkered, doddering, his mind and perspective shrunk by his belief that he just deserves. During the same ABC News interview in which he inadvertently confirmed to the world his brain was disintegrating, Biden said that if he lost he’d have no regrets, because he’d know “I gave it my all.” A national abortion ban, abolition of any protections of labor, the slow erosion of the most basic precepts of bourgeois democracy, but no matter, Unky Joe tried his best.
That both Starmer and Macron showed what is in essence the same myopia as Biden, the same equation between their personal ambition and the greater good; this says to me that Biden is their future. The only thing separating them in their present state from Biden’s rotting brain is a matter of decades. The extreme center naturally finds its most advanced state of decay in America.
But then, well, I was wrong! Yes, Starmer’s vicious and venal version of the Labour Party was in power, but with nothing that could remotely be called a mandate. All said and done, this Labour Party had gained fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour did when it lost to the Conservatives in 2019. Not only did a now-independent Cobyn manage to keep his seat in Islington, but several left-wing independents and two Greens had snatched seats away from the two big parties on explicitly anti-austerity, pro-Palestine platforms.
More stunning was the fact that the left-wing Nouveau Front Popular pulled into first in the second round of votes in France. The RN came in third. And just a couple weeks later, the famously stubborn Biden was finally convinced to step aside, something that a Democratic incumbent hadn’t done since LBJ in 1968. Whatever can be said about Kamala Harris – and much can be said, more on that later – the certainty of a Trump victory is again, finally, thrown into question. Even the assassination attempt on Trump, and the mewling sympathy it was going to garner him, now seems less of a factor.
I am, of course, on the left. But I don’t per se represent any significant part of it. My being wrong comes with low stakes. Even calling what I write now a retraction feels self-aggrandizing. Still, it is a good thing when you realize you can still be surprised by history unfolding.
This is the surprising and often forgotten reason that the pessimist longs to be proven wrong. When you are, and are willing to acknowledge it, reality is better illuminated. In the unexpected ruptures of history, even the more minor ones, we start to see possibilities widen. It may be brief and contradictory – there is no such thing as a historical rupture that only goes in one direction – but it is there. The bleak narrowness that seemed more or less inevitable before starts to clear, particularly if new and dynamic players are also revealed. As they are now.
First, the bleak narrowness. It may not be sitting exactly how it had before, but it is nothing if not persistent. The left has long said that the center prefers the far-right be in power. That is now certainly being borne out in Europe and the UK. Starmer’s first major disciplinary action since becoming Prime Minister has been to remove the whip from seven Labour MPs who voted against his party line and for the removal of the two-child benefit cap. His moves to ban the English Defence League in the wake of the racist riots in Southport will very likely backfire, particularly if Nigel Farage’s Reform Party seizes upon it. Macron has dismissed outright the idea of his centrist bloc cooperating with the NFP in France as a junior partner and is preventing them from forming a government at all. Whether this parlays into handing the initiative back to a now-fractious RN is unclear, but if so, then Macron and the rest of Ensemble will have done their part.
Now, the dynamic players. They’re not exactly new, at least not all of them. The small handful of independent leftists who have managed to grab seats in the House of Commons – chief among them Corbyn – provide a small center of gravity for a pole of opposition. This doesn’t just have ramifications for the rest of the left in parliament – including those who have just been effectively exiled from the Labour Party – but for those looking to carve out any spaces of dissent or refusal in their lives.
They do so in a moment of profound malaise, though. Celebration of the Tories’ defeat has been muted. A Blairite 1997 this is not. Today’s British worker struggles without anywhere near the infrastructure or stability even the most humbled could rely on fifty or even ten years ago. It is what prompts British Marxist Jonas Marvin to characterize the current moment as one of “proletarian blues,” why he asserts that the task of socialists is to think “about the kinds of practices, cultures and strategies we utilise that can contribute towards repairing the proletariat as both a body politic and a social force.”
Wrecked as conditions are in the UK, its left at least has a stronger memory than the new and young left in the United States. There is, of course, a broad awareness that we lack the kinds of spaces and infrastructures of dissent that are necessary for weathering and changing reality here, but this awareness is still too often diverted into paltry conceptions of mutual aid that seek to redistribute scraps. Our Congressional left, such as it is, still struggles to maintain a sense of purpose, and even clarity on basic issues. Jamaal Bowman is gone, Cori Bush might be next. I’m not convinced those remaining would know what to do if the Democratic establishment came after them in the systematic style of Starmer.
Which brings us to the matter of Kamala Harris herself. Woke capitalism will have its day in the United States: plenty of lip service to fighting oppression, but the minute anyone mentions the possibility of putting real economic heft toward the problem (or, G-d forbid, that white working people might have more in common with their black counterparts than other white people), the most virulent and cynical denunciations shall fly. Many on the left may find themselves on the back foot during a Harris administration, and with little to no idea how they got there.
Where Biden might have enabled Trump and the far-right by simple dint of being a desiccating vessel of spite, Harris’ specific establishment ouevre is far more in line with that of Starmer and Macron: that which will, through its own prevarications and petty viciousness, more actively push people to the right. Yes, she probably has a better shot than Biden at beating Trump (though it’s by no means a sure shot), but shall we forget that she also represents one of the most noxious segments of establishment liberalism? That she built her political career on locking up kids? That she is now calling for the repression of protesters that essentially rolls out the carpet for more violent and systematic repressions down the line? Shall we forget that the K-hive are some of the most insufferable and unprincipled people in recent memory?
One of the most bizarrely American political habits out there is the impulse to give politics a shape. It is the lazy imagination personified, if only because it reveals that most of us can only come up with a few shapes that might work: arcs, circles, horseshoes, pendulums. Even more annoying is when people who fancy themselves smart try to argue which shape is more apt. Because evidently the discourse aspires to be Sesame Street for adults.
The glaring problem with this – no matter which shape it decides on, though we keep coming back, perhaps predictably, to the pendulum – is that it makes the political event blameless. Taken to its logical extreme, every human-made catastrophe or act of ethnic cleansing is simply down to the ineffable pendulum. The pendulum has gone from Trump to Biden, and it must continue to swing in the moderately more progressive direction of Harris. Trump, and all those who were previously front-and-center of major events, are now rendered irrelevant. All they can do is wait for the big swinging knob of history to favor them once again.
It’s an obviously facile way to look at things, even dangerous. But much of the left — at least in the United States, and I’d imagine the rest of the world too — has its own version of this. If mainstream voices insist that the shape of political truth sways and shifts in predictable ways with the times, many of today’s left seem to think it should stand still.
Most of the younger left has come of age in an oddly rare time: one of having initiative handed to them rather than having to create that initiative themselves. The phenomena of Sanders and Corbyn helped mold the general mood and exchange of ideas enough that people could come to us with relatively little persuasion. Perhaps we could have won more, and on a more solid basis, had our own persuasive skills and vision of socialism been sharper. But right now that’s neither here nor there.
What we aren’t used to is swimming against the tide – at least to this degree – without wearing ourselves out. Trump’s first term was destructive and terrifying. It saw too many lives destroyed. But it also made much of the argument for us, albeit in a different way than Sanders did. Harris won’t do that. She may, if she wins, if she’s good at her job, prove quite adept at disorienting the left while never lifting a finger to make anything substantially better. That is, unless we figure out how to make what we do, and our arguments for socialism, actually fucking matter in the here-and-now.
We may have to fearlessly catalog the way our thoughts and arguments are arranged, question whether they are presented in a way that can win people in the short and long term, and come up with new outlines if not. We will have to act like what we do matters, to understand history as something far more visceral and immediate, at least potentially. Running parallel, we will have to understand everyone’s internal and intellectual life to be far broader and more complex than either the mainstream flow of ideas or our puny dogmas can accommodate.
We will have to, for lack of a better term, organize. Not just in the sense of the nebulous definition we are all used to, but in a more ephemeral sense too. It is easy to say that the organizer organizes people. It is also the tiniest bit presumptuous, assuming static willingness on the part of the organized. We might better think of what we do as organizing ideas and visions in relation to people, in such a way that their own hopes and intelligence move them to act. To risk being misunderstood, making mistakes, failing, but also being surprised.
Or we could just keep doing what many of us have already decided we should be doing. Trotting out opaque phraseologies. Standing aside and declaring that this or that campaign or struggle is bound to fail, smugly chuckling when it does. If only they’d listened to you and your big boffin brain. Better to be immobile than proven wrong.
The left as aesthetic. The left as subculture. The left as performance. We know already what this looks like. We also know that performance – like words, like optimism – is cheap. And let’s be clear: this approach, should we call it that, is nothing if not suicidally optimistic. I would love to be wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.
Header photo is Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).