“we” who?

In the following interview Naomi Klein says “this is what we need to do” . . .

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/naomi-klein-neoliberalism-rebuild

The left feels that it’s “for the people.” So leftist movements feel they can speak for “we the people” and talk about “what we need to do.”

It’s fallacious thinking.

There’s no coherent or operationally meaningful “we the people” or “working class” or “agency of social change.” In fact, there’s some hubris in thinking that there is and that your movement can speak for them or “has their best interest at heart.”

There’s no “they” there.

It’s fine, of course, to say that we live in a country (the United States of America) that has a government and the government has policies. To do political work to affect those policies makes sense and is commendable, but to have much in the way of illusions about what can be accomplished at that level is ill-advised.

Within the context of modern mass society, the “we” of the nation-state is too big; the citizenry of the nation-state is too atomized. The scale of the “communities” (urban, online, etc.) is insane. That’s why trying to organize “we the people” via social media is a noisy waste of time. And thinking that your movement represents the interests of “the masses” is pretentious.

Lenin saw the Bolsheviks as “the tribune of the people.” The mistakeness of that whole paradigm is embodied in that fallacy.

* * * *

Here’s another example . . . from a Libertarian:

“We the proletariat need to build the voluntary communal institutions that can make this utopian dream a reality.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/02/a-marxist-joins-the-libertarian-party/

The article is focused on anti-statism. Great. But it fails to acknowledge that there’s a Green type of anti-statism. It’s called ‘bioregionalism.’

A problem with the Libertarian Party is that they think all governments should be minimalist, as a universal principle. (Just as the problem with the Socialist Party is that they think all economies should collectivized, as a universal principle.) Libertarians hate taxation. They are rigidly for ‘one best way’ . . . private enterprise.

A key value of the Greens is: ‘Respect for Diversity.’ I think that applies to cultural diversity as well as group and individual diversity. We could envision that, in a green world, all bioregional units would exhibit diversity of governing structures, economies, institutions, and lifeways in general. Levels of taxation would vary. Property relations (degrees of social ownership vs. degrees of private ownership) would vary.

At a reasonable scale, a communitarian “we” could effectively make collective decisions.