Leftism these days [4]

“To overthrow the existing system of class rule was not sufficient; there had to be an end to class rule as such. All this would have fulfilled the Commune’s vision … It would have added up to self-government of the producers.”

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/paris-commune-radical-change-history-revolution

This is indicative of what has always been the problem with workerist Red-leftism.

It centers around a worldview conceiving of the sociological essence as class structure and conceiving of the social identity of wage-earners as “workers” (productive functionality).

This resonated during a period of history where masses were first being compelled to participate in the industrial wage-labor system (transition from feudalism to capitalism) and the masses reacted by mobilizing into trade unions and bulding movements for labor rights.

The latter were powerful movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The labor unions were mostly defensive organs but also used their collective power to improve conditions overall. Viewing the situation through a delusionary ideological lens, socialists thought they were the harbinger of a politico-social transformation movement — “the proactive movement of workers conscious of their historic mission to institute a classless society.”

That was rarely the case.

Red-leftism glorifies workers, labor, production. But people don’t care to identify as workers. People want to be liberated from alienated labor. The world of industrial production is inherently a dreary treadmill world (whether capitalist or socialist).

That’s why the Red-leftist worldview ultimately does not resonate.

Viewing the situation through an ideological lens leads to inane judgments such as: “Although it would survive for no more than seventy-two days, [the Paris Commune] was the most important political event in the history of the nineteenth-century workers’ movement.”

Only a Marxist could think that.

The discrediting of that worldview is why leftism these days is confused and unfocused; bogged down re: lists of oppressions; a morass of identity politics, grudges, and sensitivities.