A Tale of Two Post-Lefts (Part 1)

The good and bad of the many post-lefts...

The term “post-leftism” or “post-leftist” has the complication of referring to at least two distinct groups of people. On one hand, there is “post-left anarchism”, which represents a certain loose faction or a number of groups within the contemporary anarchist movement, especially of prominence since the 90’s. The post-left anarchists represent a break of anarchism from leftism in some way or another. On the other hand, in more recent years, the term “post-leftism” has come to be used in a different context, which represents a general trend or group of people with a Marxist frame of reference or origin, who may or may not be former Marxists, who break with leftism in their own ways or separate Marxism from the left in their conception.

These two usages of the term “post-left” reflect both similar and different things. What they have in common is some type of critical posture towards some conception of “the left”, though they may emphasize different targets of criticism or take different types of positions from each other. The differences between anarchism and Marxism as a frame of reference naturally colors them, but they may also use some common sources or approaches (such as emphasis on psychoanalysis and social psychology or reaching toward integrating Nietzsche and postmodern stuff into their views) or at times take relatively common positions or hold common political enemies (such as being critical of progressives and prominent socialist figures).

This can be confusing to untangle. Post-left anarchism by itself refers to multiple tendencies, while what might be called post-left Marxism has its own curve balls to bring to the table and it isn’t always clear that the people involved can be accurately called Marxists. As there are apparently two different post-lefts, this will be a two part series of articles with each one on a different post-left. Since its usage is older and I’m somewhat more familiar with it, we’ll have to start by untangling post-left anarchism first, and it is in many ways representative of fundamental clashes of ideas in politics and philosophy going back to the roots of the 19th century.

Post-left Anarchism

Post-left anarchism contrasts itself from the traditional anarchist left in the form of anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-communism, while generally also positioning itself against Marxism. The major themes of post-left anarchism, which some may take up part of or mix and match from, are (1) the adoption of Max Stirner and/or Nietzsche as an influence, including a rejection of morality and enlightenment liberalism, and openness to a postmodern plurality over any kind of universality (2) an individualist “anti-politics” that rejects organizations in general and any type of “mass politics”, including giving up on class-based politics as ultimately mattering (3) the rejection of revolution and anarchism as an ideology of a future society, in favor of a focus on affinity groups and notions of “living free now” or anarchism as a lifestyle and (4) criticisms of technology and civilization and the adoption of primitivist positions.

The resurrection of Stirner and Nietzsche is tricky territory. The cliche readings of them amount to a nihilist posture that is more critical than it is constructive and as such is open to be used in all sorts of ways. They are interpreted in different ways by everyone from fascists to anarchists to even some liberals, such as Walter Kauffman’s relatively sanitized Nietzsche scholarship. On one hand, both of them are required reading if one wants to be critically challenged and I do not agree with those who think they are completely useless or invalid. On the other hand, Nietzsche is politically quite clearly an elitist reactionary in any honest reading, even if it may be unfair to equate him to Nazism. It’s impossible to ignore his contempt for egalitarianism in general in his writings. Stirner isn’t so clearly a reactionary and is more neutral, but can also be interpreted in a crude way, such as by the likes of Ragnar Redbeard, amounting to a “might makes right” perspective.

Stirner doesn’t actually present a politics, in a way, and he never identified as an anarchist himself. He wipes clean the slate of both religion and modern secular ideology only to leave you with the ideology of yourself. Something like this may very well have a valuable cleansing effect, perhaps a necessary phase for one to go through, to clear the mind of haunting specters and transcendental ideation. But the aftertaste of Stirner’s individualist nihilism leaves nothing to go on but present enjoyment. Stirner can only vaguely gesture towards loose temporary voluntary associations of likeminded rebels with no broader goal. It thus seems somewhat anomalous that there is a tradition of Stirnerite anarcho-communists going back to the late 19th century, but this tradition is part of what some post-left anarchists are in fact drawing from, along with the individualist anarchists who took up Stirner as well.

It also may be notable that, even going back to the 19th century, there is a contingent of Stirner’s followers who use his ideas in conjunction with the LGTBQ, Polyamory and BDSM communities and ideas. Thus, post-left anarchism sometimes overlaps with affinity groups related to those things. This makes a certain level of sense, as Stirner’s rejection of moralism could easily be used for such purposes. But it can also be an example of post-left anarchism reducing to affinity groups or perhaps not having much of a practical political implication or effect. “Alternative lifestyles” in general are of course something permissible in my view, but it also isn’t itself political or can function as performative deviance, such as what the hippy notion of “free love”, itself taken up by early anarchists, devolved into. While something like the modern polyamory community is basically just a cultural interest group, not a political thing.

Some post-left anarchists may make individualist criticisms of identity politics, since essentialist collective categories contradicts Stirner’s individualist egoism and identity politics does face the issue of dealing in essentialism. For Stirner, abstraction and reification are problematic, while the individual’s identity is irreducible and fluid. There is no “essence of man” for Stirner, let alone subcategories of man such as race, sex, class, nationality, and so on. This does have some weight when it comes to untangling the conflation of the individual with group categories. It may, however, also be seen as underdetermining the value of “social reality” or emergent groups. The classic criticism of Stirner from Marx and Engels was that he was tunnel visioned by his borderline solipsistic individualism and unable to face the realities of social contingency, and that the individual is ultimately shaped by social forces. Thus, Stirner’s pure authentic individual ego itself collapses as a “spook”.

Specters of Stirner…

It must be said that Stirner and even Nietzsche aren’t entirely without merit in their critical outlooks on religion, morality, and power, or in their criticisms of ideology. They could be characterized as philosophers of suspicion along with Marx, with a keen sense for human fragility and analyzing power realistically or seeing power in places others might not, things which might be considered innocuous to the casual observer or even good upon first impression. In philosophy, foundationalist attempts at proving morality ultimately fail, while even many attempts at secular philosophy inherit Judeo-Christianity or otherwise function much like religion, and Stirner and Nietzsche are among the first thinkers to aknowledge this and problematize it. The problem of postmodernism is basically the nihilistic black hole you face without finding some way past the void created by such a position though. And Stirner and Nietzsche are importantly among the early influences on postmodernism.

The potential power of Stirner is as a reminder of the fragility of human ideology, in ways that anticipate critical theory and postmodernism and later discourses about ideology from the likes of Zizek. The problem with such a discourse, however, is that it easily devolves into a skeptical cul-de-sac with a point of no return. It is also practically impossible to truly escape ideology in the conditions of the world, and the individual is inescapably socially shaped in ways inconvenient to Stirner’s view. Nietzsche may have similarly been skeptical and challenging of enlightenment assumptions and principles as Stirner, but what he ultimately presents is an ad hoc ideology of reversal relative to Judeo-Christianity and egalitarianism, which Ayn Rand later picks up on and formalizes in some ways (while simultaneously trying to “complete” the enlightenment project and rejecting existentialism). Stirner is in a sense the most neutrally grounded of the “three egoists”, open to interpretation.

This dovetails into post-left anarchism’s rejection of organizations and mass politics, and Stirner is a better model than Nietzsche for such purposes. Nietzsche, unlike Stirner, believes in the need for animating myths or noble lies, and he gets abused to justify nationalism and Nazism by others later on. Stirner’s position would reject nationalism and Nazism as ideology, and it would do away with Nietzsche’s felt need for an animating myth (except for perhaps the ego). Stirner’s position allows one to steer clear of such things by focusing on the individual and rejecting transcendental ideation. As a natural consequence, this also puts it in conflict with both Marxism and social democracy as a political practice, since this involves some type of mass politics. It also puts it in conflict with socialist or communist anarchism as a political practice that believes in organization through unions and democratic collectives.

The problem is that Stirner’s view has no real alternative, just a critical posture. For the socialist and communist left, either of a Marxist or anarchist variety, the invocation of the specter of Stirner is anathema to any class-based organization. It is consequently no surprise that Murray Bookchin, essentially functioning as taking the last stand of the New Left’s modernized anarchism, pushed back on the post-left anarchists as “lifestyle anarchists” who were only about the cultural scene and momentary gratifications. While Bookchin may come off as dogmatic and moralistic in his tirade about lifestyle anarchism, his criticism does carry some weight. In some ways post-leftism is a reversion of anarchism to crude individualism, and even if or when it does position itself against capitalism, it can only suggest living as if capitalism didn’t exist, which amounts to escapism or passive resignation to it.

Thus Bob Black, an important figure in post-left anarchism, advocates “the abolition of work” without regard for the preconditions of such a thing or a real collective plan. What’s interesting about the fact that Black emphasizes the abolition of work is that, in a sense, it’s a long-term goal of communism or along the lines of what traditionally might be considered a left-communist position. Yet Bob Black is heavily outspoken against communism and Marxism in pretty broad and bold terms. Some of his criticisms are things that carry some weight, such as the problem of workerism, the fragilities of existing labor organizations, the well-known problems associated with Leninism and Stalinism, and so on. But he ends with the conclusion of simply rejecting class-based politics in his general rhetoric, while otherwise basically telling people to just not get a job and just do things they enjoy as “play”, as if that’s something one could realistically do without being either dependent on others or well to do. Most people can’t afford to just “play”. Work isn’t a matter of morality but practical necessity in current conditions. It can’t be wished away.

The abolition of work, or at least the abolition of the necessity of labor for basic survival, only makes practical sense when paired with post-scarcity conditions of mass abundance and some sort of collective mechanism for allowing access to resources for basic needs. One may have variable opinions on how that could be done or if it’s truly possible, but that’s the practical political implication that Bob Black does not seem to take up. Instead, he would seem to simply suggest removing yourself from the labor force and disassociating completely from any labor movement, while perhaps encouraging people who do have jobs to be slackers on purpose. While this may stick it to the doubtlessly lamentable protestant work ethic and Stalinist notions of “worker discipline”, it’s unclear that it’s a true solution to anything itself.

This follows the model of “dropping out of society”. There may well be various personal reasons people may have for doing so in one way or another. However, dropping out of society doesn’t practically function as a politics, certainly not a radical politics, because it can’t transform society. This tendency of post-left anarchism could be seen as functionally conservative in the sense that it implies some kind of passive resignation, because you position yourself against mass society and atomize. On one hand, criticisms of electoral and party politics can actually be quite valid, and post-left anarchists can often engage in that. But as post-left anarchists they also don’t believe even in an organized alternative to electoral and party politics, ultimately rejecting any formal political or economic organization at all.

This may very well be a “true pure anarchism” in its implications, since unlike the social anarchist tendency, which generally preoccupies itself with unions, co-ops, democratic institutions and alliances with democratic socialist and Marxist groups, the post-left anarchists take a consistent stand against anything that could be construed as an alienating organizational power in relation to the individual. But the more that anarchism is functionally reduced to a type of political nihilism, the less it can actually stand for anything but negation and resentment. Furthermore, the more that post-left anarchism is reduced to a pure postmodern pluralism with no guiding center of political gravity, the more it becomes an open-ended panacea or a defacto “panarchy” for any old person’s whacky idea to mingle or have some influence, such as the phenomenon of national anarchism in some spaces some years back.

It is debatable as to the extent that post-left anarchists play into reactionary right-wing intrigues or not as a result of their posture against the left. It would seem that some of them certainly do, while others are paradoxically themselves still leftists at some level, almost as if you can’t be “post” anything without retaining some element of that thing or being dependent on its existence or significance. Some post-left anarchists certainly are themselves former social anarchists or former Marxists. But perhaps for others the term got picked up later more arbitrarily or without necessarily passing through the left, and it does overlap with the strain of individualist anarchism that at best always had an ambiguous relationship with the left and was often rehabilitated by the libertarian right after the fact. Max Stirner was in fact translated in America by individualist Benjamin Tucker and he was one of his chief exponents.

Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room with post-left anarchism is the primitivists and/or the anti-civilization camp, which is especially associated with John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen. This position essentially takes the previously described tendencies of anti-organizationalism and rejection of mass society to its logical conclusion. This naturally comes with some strong criticisms of technology, and strong environmental or ecological concerns, some of which certainly can carry some weight from a skeptical or realistic perspective, but which ultimately can radically be taken up to a point of arguing against civilization itself when filtered through the post-left anarchist sensibility. It makes sense that, even among people with socialist or social anarchist backgrounds, green considerations could ultimately negate economic and class concerns, as industrial society is pitted against nature. Thus, any vision of an industrial socialist or communist society is anathema to post-left anarchism, especially from the anti-civilization and primitivist angle.

In some ways the anti-civilization logic holds pretty well from a perspective critical of property, as property at any meaningful scale is an important part of the development of modern civilization and technological society. In some tribal cultures, there are customary rules meant to prevent the accumulation of property and the formation of much of a hierarchy that most naturally work out precisely at the scale of the tribe, which exists in a relative state of some type of “primitive communism”. And even in some parts of medieval western societies considered to be feudal, there was a distinct zone of “the commons”. Marxism and syndicalism, meanwhile, traditionally take industrial civilization and large organizational scales that engender a certain level of hierarchy for granted, so it makes sense that anti-civ would clash with it.

The beginning of modern states, as well as the development of capitalism, importantly came from significant land property claims acquired either through conquest or arbitrary decree or contract, the enclosure of the commons, and the instrumental harnessing of technology. And while I think that technology is an instrumental double-edged sword that can be either good and bad, in many ways the truth about technology is definitely unpleasant and inconvenient for technophiles and techno-futurists. Even some more moderate commentators such as Michael Sandel have some valuable work on this. You see this pop up on common discourse in different places. People want to feel connected to the natural world and feel that technology alienates them, erodes their privacy, and harms public psychology. And this isn’t exactly wrong. It’s a valid impulse to push back against technological dehumanization.

But the problem with this radical green tendency of anarchism that culminates in primitivism is that it is the ultimate politics of negation while functionally having the most conservative vision to present, one of ancient primitive human practices. Being unable to turn back the actual clock of time, as any kind of conservatism never can do, and in the face of some legitimate concerns of environmental degradation if not predictions of environmental catastrophe that will inherently imply a post-apocalyptic type of scenario, such green anarchism is otherwise effectively left to be the ultimate position of pessimism and despair, either left to suffer the collapse of society or watch it fall as some sort of symbolic natural justice returning us to the true natural order, or ultimately embrace depopulation, perhaps entertain some type of dangerous accelerationism, or entertain escapist naturalist fantasies.

At its best, the anti-civ literature presents an ecological awareness that can be insightful and challenging, and in some ways this ecological and anthropological tendency within anarchism can be traced back to classic anarcho-communists like Kropotkin, but at the same time it presents no solution that would attract anyone who embraces modernity or wants a future-oriented politics. As such this sort of position often tends to point people to doomerism, as a politics that can’t imagine a future at all and considers civilization to be inherently doomed. In some cases, this has ended up manifesting as random violence or people arbitrarily lashing out, such as was the infamous case of the Unabomber that blew up back in the 90’s, which conforms to classic negative stereotypes of anarchists as terrorists. But primitivism also probably is the most philosophically “pure” type of anarchism, as it stays as consistent as possible to principles that prevent hierarchy in ways that normal leftists do not.

Murray Bookchin’s social anarchism or his later position of libertarian communalism, by contrast, is a “moderate anarchism” that has made peace with democratic organizationalism and technology and simply favors a smaller scale. While Noam Chomsky’s anarchism long ago got buried beneath what functions as a social democrat type of position. In this regard, the post-leftists have some valid criticisms of the social anarchist milieu, as it would seem to effectively be pseudo-Marxist or otherwise a commitment to democracy and reformism, and curiously accepting of the state for what is supposed to be anarchism. Contemporary social anarchism does essentially come about as a 60’s New Left phenomenon, and that era ultimately ended with a mix of the rise of postmodernism and nihilism, Marxist splinter groups, neo-liberalism and the death of the hippy movement and the rise of the yuppy and consumerism, the absorption of the left into the Democratic Party, and so on.

But while the post-left anarchists might chide the likes of Chomsky righteously and we might think he merits some prodding for his enlightenment liberalism, they do not seem to actually be much more than a nihilist cul-de-sac. Chomsky may be fragile or have some flawed positions and not be much of a functional anarchist, but at least he stands for some socially meaningful political principles. It is not clear that post-left anarchists can do so, at least not without reanimating their inner leftists in some way. Post-left anarchism is in an important sense an anti-politics. Politics comes packed with normative commitments or principles, and it undercuts the ability to navigate politics when one adopts a nihilist outlook or promotes pluralism and individualism to a fault against the common and collective. It also isn’t a very useful or constructive politics to tell people that society is doomed and that mass depopulation is inevitable.

Post-left anarchism is ultimately a niche within a niche with no effect. It makes for some interesting discourse perhaps and sometimes some of the people associated with it may have something insightful to say, but it’s essentially positioned as an oppositional and negation-based stance within a political identity that already is complicated and controversial. I could see it potentially being a path out of movement anarchism for some people, away from anarchism as an ideology and into the realm of anarchism as self-expression for its own sake, or it could also be something exploitable as a void to fill with right-wing propaganda in some cases. But a lot of post-left anarchists would seem to still be anti-capitalists, just with no answer to it.

Perhaps post-left anarchism is merely reflective of the apparent postmodern condition of the times. Historical anarchism in its original form was a 19th century and early 20th century phenomenon, culminating most strongly in syndicalism. Classical anarchism refers to a historical moment that no longer exists, in which capitalism was still relatively new or transitional, or the development of technocracy and the era of total war and totalitarianism had not yet been made so problematic. The fact of the matter is that the traditional left and the socialist movement fractured and was suppressed or otherwise culminated in failed experiments, that the two world wars significantly liquidated the original anarchist movement in multiple ways, and that the libertarian strains of communism more or less lost its historical struggles.

With that being said, while the left may very well have its share of problems, I don’t think that the total hostility to Marxism in general among most post-leftist anarchists is well grounded, and I think that social anarchism has more value to extract out of it than individualist anarchism does. I don’t think that you can so casually give up on mass politics either, even if party politics and electoralism in the current system is untenable as a political mechanism. A social anarchist might at least occasionally present me with an idea that will help the local community or even perhaps marginally benefit the working class and poor in general. Someone who is just out for their own enjoyment is another story, while someone who just has a “relentless criticism of all things” ends up just playing the role of the contrarian nihilist.

Whatever criticisms of the left one wants to make, post-left anarchism suffers from the problem of postmodernism, the inability per its own terms to provide a unifying narrative and the resulting collapse into intensified bifurcation and infinite regress. The inability to imagine a shared political future and the complete rejection of any notion of historical progress at all plagues it. For its part, Marxism, while it may be a flawed framework or have a share of objectionable interpretations or elements within it, at least provides some sort of historically relevant tradition of politics to draw from, a unifying narrative of politics with implications for political and/or social revolution, and it is central to understanding the problem of capitalism. Post-left anarchism just has a void for us when it comes to this and encourages disengagement.

I’m inclined to choose leftism over nihilism, at the end of the day, or at least favor rebuilding what the left could mean in a confusing landscape, and I don’t think the baby should be thrown out of the bathwater of the enlightenment liberal project. Some of these very same considerations should be kept in mind when we take a look at the Marxist version of the post-left in the next part of this series. Stay tuned.