The Left Will Be Statist Or Will Not Be At All

No better world is possible without technocrats.

I’ve been thinking for a while about articulating my defense of left statism, and

Sam Kahn

’s recent post, entitled “The Left Should Off Itself,” is as good an opportunity as any. I think I share the basic frustration behind Kahn’s piece—that the left can seem more concerned with moralism than with power and governing effectively—while also thinking his characterization of the left is too schematic and historically inaccurate to be very useful.

Kahn sets up a binary between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, or liberals and the left, where the former in each pair is in favor of pragmatic, efficient centralized power and the latter is attached to a romantic ideal of “perfect collectivity and egalitarianism.” The latter will always be a fantasy because it is simply impracticable: “The state ‘withering away’ really isn’t very high level political science.” According to Kahn, the contemporary left is not just the more-radical conscience of liberals, it is their opposite: a force that is simply against the constructive project of governing or exercising power.

Kahn seems to think that the entire left has always believed simplistically in the “withering away of the state,” while in reality that notion has been the source of over a century of bitter theoretical debates and nasty factional splits. It is not the case historically that the left was attached to some romantic, Rousseauist notion of the “general will” that will produce a perfectly unified, perfectly equal collectivity with some kind of benevolent bare-minimum state. To be sure, there have always been currents, (or roughly speaking one “side”) of the left tradition that believes something like this, which goes by varied names like anarchism, syndicalism, or libertarian socialism.¹ But the whole twentieth century was a struggle between this side of the left and what became its (much) more dominant side: statist or government socialism, exemplified first by European socialist parties, and then by the Soviet Union and European communist parties and communist-socialist electoral formations.²

When people today think of “Leninism” or Bolshevism they think, rather incorrectly, of a minoritarian revolutionary cadre that stirs up popular revolution and then installs itself as dictators. This ignores what is most fascinating and historically instructive about the Russian Revolution: the practical challenge of building a state in a backward, falling-apart country being invaded by the world’s mightiest militaries and by its own elites and expert class. Lenin and Trotsky very much believed in Marxist theory, but Marxist theory to them was something alive and being elaborated in practice. They were not voluntarist romantics; they had systematically studied types of states and government institutions, and did not in any way, ever for a moment doubt that the USSR needed the sort of well-structured state required to govern a modern industrial society. Even though their vision “lost” by the late 1920s, they are exemplary figures in the left tradition for the way that they thought about the pragmatics of power and distinctly modern governance, in a way that romantic lefts of all eras have repeatedly failed to do.

By and large, this was also true of European communist leaders, though they were kept in a somewhat infantile position by the Cold War divide and their varying degrees of servility to the now-Stalinized USSR. European socialism always had its anti-statist strongholds, particularly in trade unions whose syndicalist ideology harkened back to the nineteenth century, when socialism was entirely outside the political system. There were always dissident left groups and intellectuals who maintained fanciful notions of decentralized communitarian socialism without a state, or with the kind of self-contradictory mechanism Kahn describes, somehow centralizing and completely egalitarian at the same time. But government socialism was overwhelmingly dominant; communist and socialist leaders were politicians (and, increasingly, technical experts) who envisioned running a modern state, not watching it “wither away.” A regrettably large amount of oxygen in left discourse was consumed by tactical battles over the Cold War, but a significant part also went to technical details that are no less important for seeming “boring” or for being forgotten today: What exactly does a socialist state do? How does it handle geopolitics and war? Does property have to be nationalized or not? If so, how much? What does an egalitarian political system look like when a certain amount of leadership by technical elites is necessary and inevitable? Which kinds of equality matter and which ones don’t? What is an appropriate amount of workers’ control? Etc etc.

The New Lefts of the 1960s were a challenge to government socialism, one we might see as opening the era of the left in the shadow of which we still live today. Kahn writes that the New Left “isn’t necessarily wedded to Marxism, but it is tied to collective action—to these myths of moments of glorious revolution and solidarity, of the people all united together.” A more instructive way to put it is that the New Left was a revival of the anti-statist strain of socialism that had grown marginal in the first half of the twentieth century, a socialisme libertaire that really did come close to wanting to destroy—or in its favored-but-ill-appropriated Leninist term, smash—the state as opposed to take it over and run it. To be fair to the New Left, in their time the USSR was the unfortunate personification of government socialism; to them “states” were all the same: nuclear weapons, colonialist domination, labor discipline, enforced social traditionalism, and the like. They were also mostly very young people, and childishly associated all hierarchy—even the sort necessary for effective political action or governance—with authoritarianism.

“Thank you for leaving the state in the toilet where you found it,” graffiti on the bathroom wall at the École Normale Supérieure in 2018.

The New Left also strongly revived the romantic themes of early socialism, something like what Kahn attributes to leftism in general: pure, unmediated community; the idealization of the local, the pastoral, the non-rationalized, the ungoverned. Tactically, this was expressed in its valorization of communal uprising, protest and occupation, “new forms of living,” etc. I’m oversimplifying radically, but the New Left was an anti-modern turn in the left³, away from the political and technical project of building mass democratic legitimacy, exercising power, and governing. It only seemed confirmation of their position that as the government socialist left eventually gained power in Europe, it became basically indistinguishable from the governing parties of the center-right, and eventually from neoliberalism. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the left was either the sort of clear-eyed but resigned critique-without-a-movement of people like Perry Anderson and the New Left Review⁴, identitarian and single-issue radical groups, or scattered romantic protest movements with no strategy but refusal and disruption.

To my mind, the arc of the left in the Long 2010s was a one-two reckoning with the legacy of the New Left, a partial reconsideration of the weakness engendered by that model of being “beautiful losers,” of being morally correct but powerless.⁵ First came Occupy Wall Street, which was textbook post-New Left in its strategy of affective, communitarian mass protest, of situational theatrics and refusal of structure or program. Occupy was understandable in a situation of a long defeat and attrition of left institutions, in a moment where one simply didn’t know what else to do. Its inevitable failure brought a more interesting second moment: an attempted revival of government socialism, a renewed interest in the labor movement and the “old” left, and a more structure- and power-focused strategy. This was partial and contentious, of course: the DSA was riven with bitter disputes between all factions of the historical left, but principally between government socialists and anarchists, the latter of whom referred to themselves as “communists” and used terms like “electoralism” and “government socialism” as derogatory epithets. The socialism of the 2010s was an admixture of the two: an effort to revive the left as an organized institutional movement that aimed to build democratic legitimacy and run the state, and a radical protest politics attached to revolutionary theatrics and a fantasy of state-smashing that was already thoroughly discredited by the late 1970s.⁶

Here I will pause this chronological narrative to address what Kahn writes about liberals, who he makes into the government-minded, pragmatic foil to the moralistic romanticism of the left. Again, Kahn is not wrong that a kind of resigned, holier-than-thou self-satisfaction with its powerless moral correctness has a marked presence in the late-twentieth-century left. A politics of mourning a lost cause. But if that posture accomplished anything, it was indeed to serve as the conscience of liberals who were celebrating the bleak, bland end of history. Which Kahn denies; instead, he argues that it was a performative position that basically just obstructed and prevented liberals from governing effectively. Here, the left becomes the naysaying Jefferson to the liberals’ pragmatic, state-building Hamiltonianism. But that, too, is historically wrong.⁷ Twentieth-century liberals obstructed their own power with no help from, and even against the wishes of, the left. The statist midcentury liberals that Kahn admires had many of the right impulses; they even served as the model for most of postwar European government socialism. But they backed away all on their own from wielding state power as countervailing force to private interests; it was liberals that guzzled down totalitarianism theory in the 1950s, began to associate the strong, managerial state with authoritarianism, and dressed their reticence in appeals to—you guessed it—Jeffersonian decentralization.⁸

In defense of the big, bureaucratic state and its experts

The current moment has certain echoes, for me, of the late Obama era: the disappointment of a failed idealism; a stagnant, immobilized political system incapable of pursuing any common purpose or vision of the future; and a resignation about democratic agency altogether. Except of course that it’s much darker: because it follows a decade of efforts to revive democratic agency, the resignation and cynicism seems to have metastasized, opening the door for a regime that is simultaneously wielding state power in lawless, violent ways and destroying it from within.

The Trump assault on the administrative state—on every aspect of its role as a guardian of the people against the exploitations and distortions of private interest—highlights what the central political battleground is, what the left has to think about if it is even to exist at all.⁹ The 2010s left began to do that; it saw budding shoots of what we might call “left technocracy” or a left expert class: political organizers and operatives, policy wonks, and people who generally were thinking not about how to play-act revolution, but things like how a Bernie Sanders administration would run the United States military. It was a tough thing to do out in the open of a populist moment where expert rule was so associated with the out-of-touch Democratic Party. But if we learned anything from that moment, and from the bumblings of the first Trump administration, it was that even populism needs technocrats; indeed, they are what determines whether it succeeds or fails. Even if any successful politics in the hyperpolitical era will have to be nominally populist, the real battle line of power in our time is between an elite still committed to an ideal of serving the state on behalf of the people and a new onagocracy that sees the state as a vehicle for megalomaniacal fantasies and science-fiction dystopias.

The middle decades of the twentieth century were a curiously double-sided period in political thought, one in which the massive expansion of the administrative state was taken to be an inevitable structural development of “industrial society” at the same time it became a source of widespread intellectual anxiety and romantic dissent. The association of bureaucracy with totalitarianism became commonplace in liberal and dissident-left thought by the late 1950s and reached a crescendo in the anti-bureaucratic politics of the New Left. (It’s no accident that the most dramatic spike in left discourse on bureaucracy took place in the 1970s.) For a brief moment, young leftist theorists—the New Left wasn’t all bad—began to think somewhat positively about the social role of the “professional-managerial class” (technicians, engineers and knowledge workers), though they still largely fitted that into a Marxist class critique and simply turned white-collar workers into the new revolutionary vanguard, the nouvelle classe ouvrière. But generally speaking anti-bureaucracy dominated, democratic in intent but always susceptible to romantic anti-modernism: a recurring feedback loop of age-old tropes (“mechanization rationalization big dangerous centralized alienating”) unable to look forward to different possible futures. It turns out that the maligned administrative body of the state was not the gravedigger of democracy, but its last line of defense.¹⁰

Even if I disagree with Kahn that what remains of the left is nothing more than just obstructionist romantics, he’s correct in spirit that it should be primarily concerned with elaborating a vision of power grounded in technical mastery and public-spirited idealism. Generations of leftists return with clockwork predictability to the scholastic texts, to Marx and Engels, to the tactical treatises of Lenin and Trotsky, and especially to the literary, aestheticized canon of leftist thought known as Western Marxism. But the more relevant canon is one still too hidden in archives and dull histories of government, that of the people tasked with developing policies, running bureaucracies, and facing all the technical challenges of actually wielding power.

The wager of government socialism was always that the state could be more than the organizer of capitalist interests, that it could, finally, live up to its full Hegelian promise. I don’t know if “socialism” has any meaning today, or if it could ever be delivered by a mass upheaval of democratic agency. But it’s pretty clear that the leadership of the state—big, powerful, imaginative, vigorous, and efficient—is the only thing that could possibly produce a non-dystopian response to things like America’s imperial decline, the chaotic worldwide unleashing of artificial intelligence, and the looming threat of climate change. I don’t consider the construction of a left force capable of delivering that very likely, but that’s the job—it’s either that or the abyss.

1. In its earliest days socialism had almost explicitly conservative impulses: it foresaw overthrowing the rising industrial regime, but its positive visions were almost all versions of recreating the local, decentralized institutions of pre-modern society.

2. And if we squint hard enough, the New Deal.

3. Or, more precisely, a revival and accentuation of the backward-looking currents of the socialist tradition.

4. If I was affronted by anything in Kahn’s essay, it was the claim there is “nothing at all” worth reading in the New Left Review, which, with the possible exception of the London Review of Books, has the strongest archive of writing about world politics published this century. Anderson himself, of course, continues to be essential.

5. And, closer in the rearview mirror, the Adbusters style of leftism as hipster bohemianism.

6. To be fair to the hapless ultraleft of the DSA, so too, probably, was the government-socialists’ belief in the centrality of working-class political agency.

7. There’s an angle from which this could be somewhat accurate, if you look at the growing association after the 1970s of New Lefty-type politics with suburban class interests, for example in the association of environmentalism and NIMBYism with upper-middle class homeowners. This is beyond my expertise, but see Adam Tooze’s podcast on Abundance for some suggestions in that direction.

8. This created some strange bedfellows, like the increasing alignment of the anti-Stalinist left with Atlanticist Cold War skepticism of the state. And to do justice to the complexity of mid-century social thought, one has to recognize the fusion in almost every major American and European intellectual of a modernist appreciation for science, bureaucracy and administration with recessive romantic worries about centralization and “rationalization.” Thus, a leftist thinker like C. Wright Mills, while making the blistering (and correct) argument that concentrated class power and not “bureaucracy” as such was the danger to American democracy, also indulged in lurid depictions of the mindlessness of office workers and romantic paens to nineteenth-century yeoman farmers.

9. One might offer Kahn the dark rejoinder that the left hardly needs to off itself when it’s already dead.

10. Indeed, the lesson of the New Deal—its administrative and political specifics, not intellectuals’ theorizations of it—was that the new bureaucracies empowered the masses and raised expectations on the basis of which they became even more politically engaged and demanded more. In other words, the social effect of New Deal bureaucracy was more or less the opposite of mid-century sociologists’ and political scientists’ abstract theorizations of it. A version of this reconsideration is also notable in Anton Jäger’s writing on hyperpolitics, which reconsiders the structured, institutional words of Communist parties and labor unions—whose “bureaucracy” the New Left violently detested—as infrastructures of democratic empowerment.