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A Manifesto Against the Robotic Left
by Jonathan M. Feldman
December 28, 2001
1. LEARNING FROM WEIL
Simone Weil suggested in an essay that political parties of all sorts tend to screen out political reflection and a necessary deliberation about policy and political choices. Instead, she argued that persons who have a given shared point of view should coalesce around journals. The assessment is somewhat relevant today, only the problem even extends to journals and various computer lists that only appear to promote reflection but instead recycle ideas found elsewhere. We thus see the extension of what I shall call “robotism” to various spheres of political life within the larger left movement. I use the term robotism because it reflects a kind of automatic—and automation in—thinking which is mass reproduced, hierarchical and avoids little critical intervention via human capacities for thinking, judging and willing.
The robotic responses to the 9/11 crisis involved at least two varieties: a) those who largely abandoned any sense of responsibility for providing
security and devising ways to improve it (instead assuming that their responsibility was simply to stop the war) and b) those who jumped on the war bandwagon and thought the Pentagon would do the dirty work for them. In neither case did either camp provide any meaningful alternatives to terrorism, militarism or their roots. For those thinking that the war was designed to root out Bin Laden an item in the New York Times of December 27th, shows how the Pentagon was trying to entice Afghans to search cave bunkers for Al Qaeda members, i.e. this was not even the professional
responsibility of the U.S. military. The effectiveness of this and other parts of the war effort (according to its stated aims) can also be questioned because: a) Bin Laden may have apparently slipped into Pakistan and U.S. war operations did not prevent this; b) the U.S. refused to accept extensive intelligence from the Sudanese on the Al Qaeda network prior to September 11th, 2001 (as Noam Chomsky documents in his recent book “9-11”), i.e. the instrument for the war was clearly ineffective (as measured by its own self-defined objectives) because it refused valuable data to pursue the war against terror.
2. THE DOMESTIC REPRESSION
One rallying point for robotic responses was the very real repression of civil liberties. Just as real was the terrorist violence that was used as a pretext to rally support for this repression. Part of the left attempted to grapple with the security issue, but poorly, offering various degrees of repression to address the problem of terrorist infiltration and attacks, e.g. the use of torture, the suspension of civil liberties. Then others, another group of left robots, just dismissed the issue altogether. These robots were especially found among hard leftists, some of whom are in alliance with terrorist groups and terrorist strategies, e.g. terrorists in Palestine, Ireland or elsewhere. These are robots who sanction domestic violence if it occurs outside their own country or in countries they think illegitimate. Then there are the social democratic and other liberal apologists for state terrorism conducted by the United Kingdom, U.S., and Israel. Here the robots rally behind the militarist flag and value U.S. civilian deaths more than those in “target” nations. From here on out, I refer to non-state terrorists as "nominal terrorists" to make the distinctions that are needed.
3. IS THE U.S. STATE OUR ONLY OBJECT OF INTEREST?
The argument that state terror exists does not preclude that other forms of terror exist, but I am far from convinced that a political response to 9-11 that is simply based on the ending of U.S. terror (complemented by anti-globalization and legal strategies) solves anything for two reasons. (I am not trying to create a straw person here because my larger point is the sins of omission of the robotic lefts).
First, leverage against the U.S. warfare state would require the creation of a network of democratic (worker and community controlled) and socially responsible firms, e.g. to create the economic capital necessary to accumulate the required scale of political capital to provide alternatives to Pentagon hegemony. Yet, this program was not on the agenda of those who believed that politics begins and ends with antiwar demonstrations and legalistic apprehension of terrorist murderers. For some reason protests and legal maneuvers were seen as a substitute for (economic) mass action from below. Moreover, the global justice movement would benefit from the extension of economic democracy as manifested in networked cooperatives but this strategy was relegated to irrelevance by a myopic focus on street protests and intellectual debates.
Second, the “working class” (and humanity generally) was a victim of the terror attacks and are in an historical moment where they have limited leverage vis-à-vis stopping state terror. Substitute for “working class” the idea of persons outside the sphere of decision-making power and you get a better idea of the underlying concept. The “disempowered” are held hostage to both U.S. imperial adventures and nominal terrorists. Various factions of the left did not care about an operational strategy to address the plight of the hostages. They lack the power to do much about changing U.S. policies that would ever prevent a foreign-based terror attack. Their strategy is to wait and left “life go on.” There is something to this view if the only alternative to doing nothing was the installation of a repressive legal regime in the U.S. And yet, this was not the only choice, although the alternatives may be difficult to come by.
In contrast, we could have mobilized for a comprehensive alternative
security program that included many items. First on the list would be better and more thorough airport security. The program would involve community town meetings about security choices (as we saw in San Francisco), community policing of Islamic fundamentalist sites, and an open and democratic debate, review and inspection system that challenged the silent minority of domestic supporters for the fundamentalist movement in the U.S. and Europe. The limits to this alternative approach are that vigilance could easily turn into vigilante-ism, i.e. inspectors become vigilantes. And yet the transformation of vigilance into vigilante-ism is based on the inability of the left to create and nourish democratic institutions, a failure underlined by the absence of reflective thinking and manifested by robotism itself.
This comprehensive alternative security program was opposed by the hard robotic left because I fear that some of them (admittedly a very very small number in deed) are unconsciously in league with the terrorist element, and more plausibly, because the nominal terrorist threat is a political reality which is uncomfortable for them. It is uncomfortable for reasons which a subset of social democrats and liberals (hereafter called “modero-robots”)
have pointed out, e.g. they prefer to see the USA as the sole enemy. The modero-robots have very little credibility, however, because they themselves offer excuses for U.S. state terror or themselves are aligned with it. This lack of credibility tends to lead hard left and other robots to reject just about anything the modero-robots (or conservatives for that matter) say. This kind of neo-Stalinist filtering itself is another casualty of democracy in the Western industrial world. The neo-Stalinists fail to understand that it is possible to be for improved security and against U.S. state terror.
Another interesting tendency which received vilification from the hard left was the critique of “third worldism” among the left. This perspective
suggests a politically irrational sanctioning of everything we see coming out of the Third World. The militarism of the Third World, e.g. Mugabe, is excused or ignored by some because of U.S. state terror. This is a serious mistake as is the sanctioning of Palestinian terrorism which victimizes the working class of Israel. The demonization of Israelis (as worthy victims) is allowed because the country is now run by militarist thugs. Recently, Edward Said has written in “Counter Punch” about the poor choice of tactics by Palestinians, their failure to adopt various non-terroristic strategies, their lack of a Gandhi, but the point is sometimes lost that this failure is part of the ingredients that lend credibility to Israeli militarist thugs. Extremists on each side of the Middle East conflict have a symbiotic
relation, much like that of Bin Ladenists and the Pentagon. Also forgotten is that after World War 2, Palestine as Israel offered one of the few sanctuaries for post-holocaust victims. The collaboration between Zionists and Nazis did not eliminate this fact which is similarly unpleasant for hard left robots to digest. In any event, much of the so-called hard left is soft on militarism that does not originate in the NATO powers. (Even as we decry the extension of U.S. military hegemony via the growth of NATO we must also place the elimination of nominal terrorism squarely on the agenda and part of nominal terrorism’s growth is based on factors independent of U.S. initiation and control. Christopher Hitchens wrote about this problem in The Nation but engaged in a kind of robotism which ignored the links between U.S. militarism and nominalist terrorist violence).
4. THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF THE LEFT
Some time ago Barbara and John Ehrenreich wrote an essay about the “Professional Managerial Class” (reproduced in a book edited by Pat Walker and published by South End Press). They suggested that Leninist groups and ideologies mirrored the professionalist division of labor with its hierarchies of formulators and executors. The pattern laid out by Harry Braverman in “Labor and Monopoly Capital” with conception (or formulators) governing the work of executors (or manual workers and workers at the bottom of the job hierarchy) specifies a division of labor in which a group at the top does more of the thinking for those at the bottom in the work enterprise.
This professionalization has three important dimensions in the U.S. Left. First, it becomes hard for the left to advocate taking responsibility for necessary policies and activities like security against nominal terrorism because these are thought to be the job of someone else. Security is left to state bureaucrats or, alternatively, security is a function the hard left discredits or ignores. In contrast, the reconstructionist left (including many sophisticated liberals) advocates community policing that is far less repressive and far more effective.
Second, legal professionalism within the left sometimes precludes mass involvement in security and policing issues. A number of civil liberties lawyers (sometimes these become celebrities) can only criticize domestic repression but fail to support engage popular participation in the whole governance system vis-à-vis security measures necessary for protection
against nominal terrorist violence. Lawyers can play an important role (by protecting and highlighting innocent victims of FBI witch hunts) but the solution to nominal terrorism can not simply begin and end in the courts because (a) catching some terrorists often depends on some prior military act; and (b) mass involvement of citizens from below in first and third worlds may actually be more effective in blocking, catching and pursuing nominal terrorists than either professional police or military actions.
For some, the only meaningful mode of politics is resistance and dissent, a political mode that leaves hierarchical decision making processes and professionalized security structures in tact. In contrast, the community policing strategies broaden responsibilities for security to a wider population. In sum, the problem with dissentism is that it leaves in place ineffective or repressive security systems and fails to replace them with more effective, decentralized and popular means of providing security. We need to convert the security function and place it squarely under popular control but to do so we need to train ourselves in this function and create the necessary checks and balances that abide by ethics and laws (and reform laws which are oppressive).
The third dimension of professionalization is that there is a hierarchy between those “leaders” on the left who define what problems and solutions are to contemporary crises on the one hand and the large mass of “followers” who uncritically accept these definitions on the other. The problem with this mass follower exercise is that it limits the necessary variation in assessments of approaches to crises. Too few different voices are heard, but our “military” and security crises are growing more complicated so it is necessary to have a wider diversity of views, e.g. each new post-Vietnam
military intervention appeared to have greater legitimacy starting with the Gulf War, leading to the human rights imperialism of the Kosovo War, and then to the apparent Afghanistan War of “self defense.”
The necessary diversity was lost in the recent crisis when it came to useful and proactive solutions for nominal terrorism. Instead, we had a kind of debate via character assassination where persons adopting a prowar stance who had some useful observations (e.g. about domestic security threats) were vilified and ignored. Or, those opposing the war were also vilified and ignored. Celebrity leftists often simplified matters which prevented any ideas from taking hold which did not fit into the neat camps of pro and anti-war. The opportunity cost: a mass movement challenging the
intelligence and security failures and substituting the failed
professionalism of the CIA and FBI with an alternative and democratic
security system. Here, the left’s intervention might have resonated with the concerns of the vast majority of the U.S. population, but such practical politics was lost because of the left leadership crisis.
We need to ask ourselves why this opportunity to create a truly radical alternative to the FBI and CIA was lost and instead reactive politics and dissentism were hegemonic. One reason was that the war appeared to be the priority, backed by robotism and the hegemonic corporate media. Another reason was that the big questions were too radical and not of interest to a robotic left that can only define itself as the opposite of whatever the status quo proposes. In any event, the larger problem is that the other side of corporate hegemony in the media and robotism that thinks small (too small to challenge the CIA and FBI’s professional functions) is the absence of meaningful strategies that build mass media networks from below. This project is also of very little interest to the deconstructionist and robotic left.
5. THE ORIGINS OF ROBOTISM
How do robots become robots? Professionalization is of course one reason but robotism is also rooted in ideological mechanisms. They are rooted in left publications and movements which mirror those of the established capitalist system in their capacity for filtering and selectively judging information. They reproduce largely uncritical minds and treat various left wing intellectuals as celebrities, a process which is supported in the larger culture by outlets like MTV, talk shows, etc. The celebritification, very hegemonic in the U.S., has been extended to the U.S. left and embraced as an unconscious ruling principle. The kind of hegemonic form we are talking about is reproduced in web newsletters, intellectual cliques found in left magazines, book publishing houses, etc. Thus, we have teach ins using what Paolo Freire called the “banking theory of knowledge” (as opposed to study circles, a form of reflective thinking championed in Scandinavia).
Certain contemporary figures on the left, perhaps a dozen or so, are doing a lot of the thinking for much of the rest. This division of labor should be uncomfortable for those running the left hegemonic operation but it is not. They often turn to the same stable of thinkers over and over again. Left celebrities who establish a reputation in one arena are given a free license to comment on events and topics in another arena, even in areas for which they have no real expertise. (Expertise need not create boundless hierarchy because what is needed is the marriage of experts and mass participatory
forms and feedback, but the robotic left only creates media banking
systems). The left thus creates a kind of talk show level of discourse. This fawning behavior is driven in part by very capitalist economics, a desire to sell left publications using the celebrity effect. (Celebrities are nevertheless valuable, as when they can be used to create counterpoles to the status quo, but the Left in its various varieties is largely
oblivious to this operational necessity in social transformation because the chosen celebrities market is rather small and inner directed.) Whereas the cultural studies movement rebelled against the Frankfurt School elitism that championed a “high culture” as opposed to a more popular one, the new cultural studies dogma offers no (or not enough) moral hierarchies because of its repressive tolerance. And yet, the current left is elitist without admitting or acknowledging its elitism, another bit of irony to contend with in the robotic era. An alternative to the kind of repressive tolerance I have in mind would be to clearly specify the requirements of a democratic system, the codes of behavior necessary and the new institutions we need to develop. But, the reductionism that filters thought through “culture” does not have this as part of its agenda.
What we have is a kind of rebirthing of the Eisenhower era of the 1950s, a kind of intellectual dark ages, in which the Left can offer some criticism, but only through a kind of myopic filter. The only problem is that Eisenhower, despite his various associations with militarism, provided some deep cuts in the military budget and presently we are heading in the other direction.
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