Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
—Robert Lowell, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’
‘Y’know, it was nice to be at a protest and stand next to an actual family…’
Dan, a former student of mine and now an academic, activist and friend, is referring to the regular rallies that are taking place across the world in response to Israel’s annihilation of Gaza. We are talking, at my instigation, about the character of those gatherings; and while in some ways it feels indecent to focus on anything other than the cause itself, it is clear that this spectacular eruption of solidarity with the Palestinian people and cause represents something new to those who regularly attend political rallies, and that Dan is right to note their inclusive and (in particular) familial character. Have the protests mounted in support of Palestine changed the course of Israel’s conduct in this ‘war’? Hardly, though some gentile politicians have come to regret their initial responses to actions now deemed genocidal by commentators schooled in international law. What is clear, however, or is becoming so, is that the protests have changed—are changing—the Left. The precise nature of that change is difficult to articulate, but that it is a change is not to be doubted.
The protests against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza have been an impressive phenomenon, and the Left has played an impressive role in their organisation and prolongation. Naturally, many of the groups involved are dedicated pro-Palestinian outfits, but without the input of antiwar organisations such as Stop the War or CND, or indeed from trade unions or green/left groups, the protests would not have had anything like the reach and energy on display across the world. This is the Left (broadly defined) at its best: people of good conscience expressing support for a persecuted and despised people while recalling other, nonaligned parties to the historical causes of that persecution—its place in the process, still ongoing, of imperial expansion and consolidation. Of course, not everyone attending the rallies would call themselves ‘left-wing’ at all. Quite possibly a majority wouldn’t. But these are left-wing protests all right, albeit of an unusual kind. The vibe is unmistakably solidaristic.
What, then, is different or unusual about them? As Dan implies, the answer to that question relates to the sense that a certain form of politics has been—perhaps only temporarily—suspended. As far as we can recall, there have been no earnest debates about whether non-Arabs should wear the keffiyeh, and if there have they certainly haven’t been elevated to the level of political controversy. Nor have there been any clumsy attempts to link the Palestinian cause with issues of identity more broadly: when queer or feminist groups, for example, have offered solidarity with Palestine they have done so unconditionally, as an expression of the most basic humanity. Attempts by Israel to paint itself as an oasis of (sexual, youthful) tolerance in a desert of Islamic bigotry have been rejected as blatant misdirection, while snide comments on Sky After Dark and its equivalents to the effect that this or that (usually queer) protestor wouldn’t last long in Gaza City have an air of desperation about them. Nobody is biting. Nobody cares.
This sense that things have moved, or are moving—again, perhaps only temporarily—has been evident in other areas too. In the early days of the Israeli bombardment, as the footage of hysterical fathers and blue-lipped babies entered our feeds, articles on the deleterious effects of such images on people’s emotional health began to appear in the mainstream media, some of them accompanied by tips on how to avoid ‘vicarious’ or ‘secondary’ trauma. The ABC and SBS both ran pieces along these lines, as did many other outlets, while The Guardian published a cretinous article by veteran journalist Simon Jenkins suggesting that the relentless coverage of Israel’s relentless campaign of destruction was not in any real sense news, and needlessly upsetting to some. Meanwhile, RN’s Patricia Karvelas, concerned that the feelings aroused by pictures of children being blown to pieces were in danger of undermining social cohesion, fretted openly about the need for ‘respect’ among commentators and activists. But such panicky sentiments simply did not ‘take’ in the milieux one might have expected them to. The Right is not completely wrong to associate the rise of ‘safety culture’ with the Left, which has spent decades redefining the ‘harm principle’ along broadly psychosocial lines in a way that has made certain utterances and positions more than merely analogous to violence. But if the left-wing craze for trigger warnings, safe spaces, campus deplatforming and the like has now migrated to progressive culture more broadly, losing its radical edge in the process, the current Left shows no great appetite for such psychological insulation. A key moment here was The Guardian’s question to the United Nations’s Jessica Albanese at the National Press Club in Canberra, about the latter’s use of the word ‘domination’ to describe Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and whether it could be taken as an antisemitic ‘trope’. The reporter became a laughing-stock, and Albanese’s eloquent exasperation played to a full house on radical Twitter.
If anything, indeed, it has been the Right, not the Left, that has tried to marshal safety culture in defence of its pro-Israeli stance. Across the world, the Right has accused pro-Palestinian protestors of actively intimidating Jews, with some Tory politicians in the United Kingdom referring to the rallies as ‘hate marches’. The confected controversy over the pro-Palestine chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free’, a chant conventionally associated with the multiethnic or one-state solution favoured by the PLO, has acted as a rallying point for the right-wing media in this regard—a bold choice, given that many Israelis look forward to an expanded Israel cleared of its Arab inhabitants with precisely those parameters. But the mendacity of the Right is, I think, secondary to its obvious desperation here: faced with a Left that is as angry and righteous as it has been since the Vietnam War, it has descended into fantasy. This isn’t to say that anti-Semitism isn’t rising, or indeed that it won’t rise further: that species of racism, as we know, is always apt to re-emerge from the sewers in times of social and political conflict, and its memetic and conspiratorial character guarantees its rapid spread. But the Right’s expedient, vicarious snowflakery is something else entirely: a despairing attempt to give its position—unconditional support for the United States and Israel, aggravated by anti-Islamic racism—the gloss of moral legitimacy.
Such desperation is in one sense understandable. Since Israel began its punitive cull, the so-called rules-based international order has been exposed as the purest propaganda to all but the very dullest progressives. Simon Cooper has written of the intersection of mainstream progressivism and imperialism in the recent foreign policy of the Global North—a phenomenon marked by characterisations of this or that country (Hungary, Russia) as an avatar of dangerous homophobia and by the (re)branding of certain military interventions as attempts to widen the circle of rights to cultures yet to shed their backwardness on the point of radical equality and difference. But the terms in which Israeli actions are supported/indulged by the United States and its allies have surely made such characterisations harder to sell to people of good faith, some of whom may soon be asking, on the back of this newfound realism, whether NATO must carry some part of the blame for the current situation in the Ukraine or whether the war in Afghanistan was really a ‘feminist’ intervention after all. The Left thus has an opportunity to articulate a broader narrative about how power works at the global level, and to gain political traction in the process, while those who have supported Israel are left spinning their wheels in a mudbath of their own making.
In some ways, then, the catastrophe in Gaza has conferred the aura of moral maturity on a cohort often associated (fairly or unfairly) with a bickering shrillness. Maligned and satirised in the mainstream media, the ‘social justice warrior’ is a figure of fun and irritation in our culture, but most people will sink their differences with it when the injustices in question are being visited on tens of thousands of babies and children. But if the Left is to rise, not just to the occasion but to the global challenge of which it is, in crucial ways, the antecedent, it will need to do more than simply express its solidarity with a persecuted people: it will need to face the contradictions lurking in its own positions. For what is happening in Gaza will happen again, and more often, as we enter a future defined by dangerous climate change and the geopolitical upheavals attendant on it, and the fact that a whole array of fixations—intersectional identity politics; privilege; pronouns; cultural appropriation; the dissolution of the sex-gender distinction—have proven not only marginal but utterly irrelevant to that catastrophe is not an incidental matter. What we might call the ‘identity Left’ has spent a lot of time and energy constructing a politics that is, in part, a ‘morbid symptom’ of the individualised, techno-scientific societies that will soon be moving to consolidate their advantage as we descend into a generalised mayhem. What form that consolidation will take we do not know for sure—not yet—but it is unlikely to prove a happy story for the poorer, darker inhabitants of the Earth, whose material ‘wretchedness’ will soon be cast, if it isn’t being cast already, as the sign of a basic inferiority. In this sense, and in many others, Palestine is a ‘laboratory’, and any politics that cannot face up to the ontological emergency of which it is one iteration—the confrontation between a ‘Southern’ culture of small-c conservative community life, based in face-to-face relations and bound by traditional systems of belief, and the increasingly bumptious, increasingly ‘progressive’ techno-capitalist dispensation that obtains across the Global North—is not only not fit for political purpose but also based on a profound misreading of where we are and how we got here. In short, and to make my point direct, it is not enough to stand next to a family. It is also necessary to consider whether leftism in its modern, category-busting version was all along the useful idiot of an essentially nihilistic world-picture.
‘The great ungrounding’
To address that question meaningfully, it is necessary to understand the ways in which the politics of the modern Left are related to what Guy Rundle has called ‘the great ungrounding’ of social life—i.e. the crisis of stable selfhood that emerges as a consequence, not merely of neoliberalism, but of habituation to ‘high’ technologies. Here the core critique of Arena, which has existed in a critical relationship to what we might call the mainstream radical Left, is, I think, directly relevant. That critique is substantially founded on the insight that the Left in general lacks a social account of the peculiar character of ‘advanced’ societies, in which science, technology and ‘intellectual practices’ have engendered an abstract, disembodied sociality that is in crucial ways antithetical to human flourishing. This abstract sociality has in recent decades fused with the processes of neoliberalisation and globalisation, which have led in turn to the rapid expansion of a social formation that is neither the old bourgeoise nor the industrial proletariat, but a cohort of intellectual or ‘knowledge’ labourers (not quite a class in the conventional leftist sense but on its way to becoming so) who now stand (or sit) at the centre of the economy and exercise enormous cultural power. As heavy industry was offshored by the North in the 1980s and 1990s, and educational meritocracy came to the centre of social and economic life, increasing amounts of social capital began to accrue to these ‘intellectual workers’, whose views on the world—whose subjectivities, indeed—were shaped within and through these processes, and the technologies (the personal computer, the Internet) on which they were in many ways reliant.
In his 2017 book The Road to Somewhere, the British journalist David Goodhart described this social grouping’s view of the world as an ‘anywhere’ ideology—that is, one stemming in part from the kind of work its members do and the kind of education they required to get it. Such work is organised around cognitive ability, creativity, systemic thinking and so on, and the kind of world-picture to which it gives rise is one to which ‘human capital’ and an attitude of openness are increasingly central. Politically that ethic translates into a focus on ‘achieved’ identities as opposed to ‘ascribed’ ones, and into what Goodhart calls ‘progressive individualism’—a political outlook that is often accepting of the ‘double liberalism’ (economic and social) represented by, say, Hillary Clinton and politicians of her ilk. This is, it should be obvious, precisely the sort of ideology globalisation needs to function. Abstract rights and ideas of equality are placed above more grounded politics, and ‘openness’ is preferred to ‘closedness’ in both the economic and social spheres. (The open-closed dichotomy was first suggested by Tony Blair, to describe the divide between a culturally liberal globalist worldview and a culturally conservative protectionist one.) Fluidity, flexibility, hybridity—these concepts are increasingly central to the knowledge economy and the knowledge class, occupationally and politically. And yet it is these very concepts that are implicated in the ‘great ungrounding’ of social life identified by Rundle.
To a great extent, the preoccupations of the identity Left are symptoms of this change in the social composition of techno-capitalist societies, and the deeper processes underlying it. The shift from relatively stable relations based in community, tradition and so on to an increasingly atomised society populated by increasingly precarious selves finds expression in a politics of fragility and ever-expanding, ever-multiplying demands for respect, recognition and so on. Far from evolving naturally from the social movements of the 1970s, whose innovation was to combine the politics of race, gender and sexuality with the politics of social and economic class, often in intellectually rigorous ways, the kind of identity politics described by the Right (erroneously) as ‘cultural Marxism’ has more to do with a lack of ground on which to found our sense of self—a situation in which the self we present to the world (i.e. our identity) needs constant, anxious validation lest the hollowed-out core be exposed to it and to ourselves. In a knowledge society, that’s to say, stable selfhood goes from being a given to a task, and the contemporary Left is in many ways implicated in the effort to shore up this fragile entity. Drawn largely from the knowledge grouping itself, it combines this quest with its own traditions of anti-racism, economic equality and so on.
Of course, this account is strenuously resisted by what remains of the Marxist Left, which is (not unreasonably) suspicious of accounts of a ‘new class’ or an ‘intellectual elite’, associated as those concepts are with culture-war-style conservative politics that reach back to the 1970s and are very much alive today. Defining ‘class’ in one dimension only, as a relation of socioeconomic power emerging from the forces of production, it squeezes the above developments into a conventionally Marxist framework, thereby translating a new situation back into the language it already knows (to borrow a metaphor from the Old Man himself). In what amounts to a fallacy of composition, it therefore misses, and misses completely, the peculiar character of social life in a techno-scientific society defined by intellectual practices, characterising ‘identity politics’ as either an entirely logical compliment to the politics of economic class or as a sort of tactical error—a ‘liberal’ attempt to achieve the goals of equality and social justice through non-material political means. In doing so, it fails to recognise the extent to which this form of politics is a response to a new material reality: the reality of life in a media-dominated, techno-scientific culture characterised increasingly by abstract relations.
This profound misunderstanding has caused the Left to misread what is by far the most consequential political development of our time: the rise of reactionary populism. For what Goodhart calls ‘the somewhere ideology’ evinced by right-wing populists and their supporters is in large part a reaction to the great ungrounding. Yes, there are ‘hard authoritarians’ to be found within the populist insurgency—far too many, indeed, to ignore—but a great deal of this ‘somewhere’ sentiment is not aggressively racist or xenophobic but rather nostalgic for a more settled society in which social roles are more strictly defined. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, bear in mind that the progressive unwillingness to distinguish between implicit and explicit racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and the like is itself a symptom of the politics that many small-c conservatives regard as alien. When they report that they feel like ‘strangers in their own land’, it is to this moving of the moral goalposts that they’re referring as much as it is to race and immigration.
The left-progressive response to populism thus has a double character. On the one hand, progressives and liberal leftists dismiss it on purely moral grounds, as a late and desperate efflorescence of racism, xenophobia, misogyny and stupidity—this last being a very important concept to a broadly progressive knowledge class whose social status is deeply connected to its tertiary-level education and training. On the other hand, the Marx-inflected leftism of Jacobin and its analogues will tend to characterise populism as a highly toxic strain of false consciousness. Thus, it is claimed, progressive values are really ‘somewhere’ values, too, or will become so once the excluded classes recognise that their interests are no different from those of refugees, transgender people or any of the other marginalised groups that now take the part of the oppressed in progressive-left thinking. The key division remains where it always was—between the class in control of capital and the class not in control of capital—and since pretty much everyone can be bundled up in the latter ‘subject class’ category there is no need to deal with the divisions within it, however disruptive of the model they become.
The question is, what would happen to the model, or to the views of those who subscribe to it, if an even more fundamental disruption entered the political frame?
The clash of ontologies
The above may seem like a long way from Gaza. But if the Left can misread a political phenomenon as important as reactionary populism, it can also misread the global breakdown signalled by Israel’s brutal response to the terror attacks of October 7. Needless to say, that response has its own, and very well-known, historical drivers, not the least of which is the ethno-nationalist concept of Zionism itself (and even to characterise it as a response is to disguise the extent to which this atrocity is, in one sense, business as usual). But if I’m right to suggest that the incredible savagery currently on display in Israel is an ‘echo’ from a future defined by escalating hemispheric conflict, by huge movements of people and by the battle for resources, then this moment also represents a crossroads for the radical Left, whose approach is both a projection and a misreading of our current, Global Northern ontology. The point is made by Arena’s John Hinkson in an article on the US withdrawal from (or abandonment of) Afghanistan:
This was no mere failure of bureaucracy or military knowledge on the part of the United States. Nor does it bear directly on this or that person or even the president of the day. It is a consequence of the institutional transformation that has overwhelmed lives in the West for at least the last four decades. In a strong sense we have so changed that we can no longer understand cultures that have not experienced this transformation of how we live and think. This new setting is actually the source of what we now tend to call freedom, a notion far different to the sense of freedom against power that is our historical tradition starting with Magna Carta.
The US failure in Afghanistan was, for Hinkson, an ‘epochal’ failure, one bearing on the ontological differences between the various belligerents—differences, that is to say, not merely of politics and ideology but of the very texture of being and selfhood. The point is that cultures such as our own are now so removed from the traditional cultures that obtain in places like Afghanistan that the liberal dream of projection abroad is drawing, very quickly, to a close. Since we cannot view ourselves from without, we miss the radical nature of our culture—its historical distinctiveness, if that is not too weak a word. Hinkson again:
This ‘culture’ is given its power by the revolution of high technology that has unfolded in stages through the twentieth century. While it is a revolution of potential and practical reality when it comes to technology, its other side—our way of life—is increasingly composed of fragile and fleeting social relations that are a mystery to cultures that constitute the whole history of Homo sapiens prior to the twentieth century. The latter are typically structured around kinship and generational renewal of a predominantly face-to-face social life. The cosmopolitan life of fleeting others is found to a degree in all cultures, but it moves towards becoming a norm in the life of the West. In a strong sense the West can no longer rely upon intuition to grasp and understand the core assumptions of cultures in the Middle East or Afghanistan. And those cultures are often appalled by what they now encounter in the West. Difference in belief and practice has now become difference in social kind.
This is the deep reason for the catastrophe of Afghanistan, and in its wake will emerge—has already emerged—a ‘forever war’ of technological subjugation. Like the levitating, tech-obsessed island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which keeps order in its colonies with threats to rain down death from above, technologically advanced societies will simply use their technological superiority to keep their enemies on the run and the poorer peoples of the Earth in their place. The Global South will become simply other—a chaotic realm of ‘lesser breeds’ whose cultures mark them out as backward, benighted and comprehensively strange.
That, at any rate, is what will happen in the absence of a global left movement that can recognise its own relationship to the culture of which it is both a critic and a symptom, and turn its attention to the ‘clash of ontologies’ that will define the coming decades—a process that will entail a more reflexive attitude than its current approach to politics allows. The Left will have to think more carefully about the sources of social solidarity and connection, finessing—and perhaps somewhat more than finessing—its reductive base-superstructure-ideology model, the effect of which is, increasingly, to obscure the character of contemporary politics. At the same time, those who consider identity to be the most important feature of that politics will have to think a lot more deeply about how that category came to have such prominence, while accepting that the healthy human selfhood for which it is (I would argue) the surrogate has far deeper, and far more meaningful, sources than are often recognised on the Left and not all of them—tradition, religion, a sense of settlement, a degree of homogeneity—to the Left’s taste. That will entail a less hostile attitude to the ‘somewhere’ sentiment identified by Goodhart, which will entail, in turn, a less strident approach to issues of identity, sexuality and so on—issues that reflect what the philosopher John Gray has termed the Left’s ‘hyperliberalism’ and are, in a deep sense, the signs and symptoms of the very ontology identified by Hinkson. To continue to channel that ontology through its own (commendable, righteous) traditions of equality and social justice would entangle the Left in a contradiction that might ultimately undermine the solidarity currently being expressed with Palestine, or damn it to the superficiality of progressive-humanitarian ‘concern’.
I began this essay by saying that it felt indecent to focus on the status of the Left rather than on the issue—Gaza—that the Left has proven so impressive in facing, and that feeling has not gone away. But I’m convinced that in the years to come the Left will have to revisit, and to revise, its most cherished causes and shibboleths if it is to remain on the right side of history, by which I mean only the just side of developments. Could it be that the technologies being used over Gaza are related at some deep, deep level to the attitudes evinced in their deployment? Could it be, indeed, that the Gaza atrocity is reflective of a deeper ‘identity politics’ that places certain populations outside the liberal-techno-scientific fold—a process that has affinities with historical colonialism but is in crucial ways distinct from it? These are the kind of questions that confront us as the world lurches towards a fundamental reckoning. As the bombs rain down on the Gaza Strip, ‘cleansing’ it of its terrified populace one extended family at a time, the question of whom we intend to ‘stand next to’ in the decades to come, and on what basis we do so, becomes inevitable and unavoidable.