Radical Republicanism

Sorry in advance for shooting from the hip. This is a ramble.

My friend Ènziramire shared with me a quote by some liberal economist or philosopher—can’t find it, so bear with me—that Marxist critics and politicians alike have all failed to consider the question of freedom, except for Marx himself. I said then that I would take the L on that because, yeah, [Mr. Liberal] got me there. But then we were talking about Reconstruction. There was a certain abolitionist, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who at first sided with the Radical Republicans in hastening emancipation, but during Reconstruction began siding with the Liberal Republicans because she believed that southerners should not have been deprived of their rights. Then the Compromise of 1877 hit, and Dickinson was so dismayed by the South’s reactionary barbarism that, even when she had gained the right to vote as a female citizen in 1919, she chose never to vote. It’s the basic bitch question of liberalism: how much freedom should be sacrificed in order to maintain any level of freedom without it coming undone?

The analogous question in what one might call “leftist” politics (loathe as I am to do so—left of what, exactly?) is about the state. Where liberalism has, if I may, republican and democratic poles sacrificing more or less freedom, “leftism” has what have been referred to as statist and anarchist poles. For both politeiai, I’d argue, neither pole exists as such, and they are more like limits or leanings; plus, neither republican liberals nor statist leftists really consider their position to be for its own sake. Marxists also usually advocate for the destruction of the state. They differ from so-called anarchists on two dimensions. First, practically, how should the revolution be organized and executed? Lenin positions himself rhetorically as a centrist in State & Revolution, arguing (against the anarchists) you need an organized vehicle of class warfare to carry out the revolution, but (against the Orthodox Marxists) that the existing state cannot do. Mao for his part is considered by some to be a crypto-anarchist, transforming the party structure for top-down political imposition to a bottom-up translation of mass demands. The second dimension is theoretical or critical: whether formal structures like the state or even aggregate structures like (gasp!) class are the sources of social dynamics, or if they are crystalized expressions of those dynamics. James C. Scott and David Graeber, for example, see capitalism as an outgrowth of early states which themselves participated in capitalist dynamics; but a Marxist (hello!) might reply that those early states were preceded and structured by the various dynamics they went on to reinforce. It’s very chicken-and-egg, except answering “chicken” prevents one from asking more incisive questions (and maybe so does “egg”… dialectics, baby).

That is all to say I’m not interested in the question of Marxism versus anarchism, because I’m about to advocate for a position against most Marxists who are in my view (no thanks, Mr. Liberal!) far too attached to the question of freedom to be either pragmatic or honest. PSL’s Socialist Reconstruction is quite the misnomer because, although its title is evocative, it’s an optimistic work having nothing to do with a major goal of the historical post-bellum Reconstruction, the very one with which Anna Elizabeth Dickinson took issue: repression. One can imagine the awe-some hatred in the hearts of the Confederates who were ruled for a time by the very people they’d once enslaved. We should’ve made them deal with it. Instead, the North liberated the South again, this time to subject free black people to the violent whims of their ex-captors. I want you coastal freaks to hear me. You are not going to solve the problems of capitalism by abolishing the state or even abolishing social class. As my partner often puts it, if you put actual democracy in the hands of the rural south, they will happily lynch undesirables en masse. These were the subjects of Jacksonian democracy after all. Let’s generalize a quote by Mao: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.” Heavy is the foot that wears the boot.

But can you actually get rid of the boot? I think someone who answers in the affirmative is being either idealist or dishonest. We all know the state is an instrument of repression, whether you’re a liberal or an anarchist or a fascist or a Marxist. No one is under delusion about the nature of the state, but everyone is under one delusion or another about their relationship to it. Liberals think you need the state to maintain capitalism. True! Except for the implication that capitalism is a natural state that also needs violence to be reinforced or made fair. Anarchists believe that repression as such is unjust and, at best, will one day result in repression for its own sake. Fascists desire to wield the state against out-groups to reinforce their in-group. Marxists understand you need a repressive organization to combat another repressive organization, but believe Jesus-like that we’ll no longer need an instrument of repression after the abolition of class society (which is, in fact, the goal: no classes, no states). Thus far I’ve defended the baseline Marxist view, but in case you can’t tell, I disagree with the end. I won’t say it’s class-reductionist, because I think most aggregate social dynamics are structured like classes even if they exist orthogonally with respect to what we traditionally consider classes (e.g., race and sex). I won’t even say it’s because I think we just need a longer period of repression than leftists would like to think. No. I think we will always need to monopolize violence.

I cringe when anarchists take the phrase from Weber as if it were one of the state’s sins. Agreeing with Weber, I don’t want everyone to get to be violent! But this turns to a blind spot for Marxists as well, if I may agree with [Mr. Liberal], albeit in the opposite sense he had likely intended. We rightly criticize liberals for naturalizing capitalism, and therefore naturalizing the bourgeois state, but we should understand this as a lie in guise of a truth: that a social network requires repression of antisocial elements, no matter how systemic or incidental, to maintain itself—it just happens that the liberal social network sucks shit. By instrumentalizing the state for proletarian revolution, treating it as a means to the end of both class and state, we confuse the other (and more historically consistent) functions of the state. And this is where some Marxists are like, a-ha, that’s not the state, idiot liberal! That’s the government! As if narrowly defining the state to refer strictly to organized class violence can dodge the question of how we regulate power and violence in a post-class society, hopefully to avoid it unnecessarily. Meanwhile, anything the state does can be justified by its self-identified end goals. We need to think more critically about governance, and that’s where liberals have us beat: not because they consider freedom, but because they consider repression. This is something about which we should be self-conscious, rather than treating the question of future governance as separate from the question of future social organization. We need to think about governance, and so we need to think about repression.

Anyway. I feel confident in identifying most FDR democrats as fascists. I’d like to think of myself as more like a Radical Republican.