The Conservative Agony of Left-Wing Humanism
In 2018, UK Labour Member of Parliament Jon Cruddas decried what he called “Cyborg Socialism” - an ideological undercurrent which he accused of abandoning the notion of human nature. It’s only with this category of human nature, he claims, that further commodification could be resisted.
Generally speaking, there are two tendencies within this leftwing humanism - a reformist tendency embedded in Cruddas and contemporary Social Democracy, and a revolutionary tendency found in movements such as Communization. Both demand political organizing and action for the purpose of rolling back market power, with the reformists focusing on political action by the working class, and the communizers and other radicals hoping for a resistance born out of the human subject as such (the working class having already been defeated).
One refrain common among Cruddas and populist social democrats at large is that the left which doesn’t have its roots in ethical humanism is secretly responsible for our current identity politics. There is something of a leap of logic here, but the basis for this critique is that both structuralist and post-structuralist theory rejects a fixed essence of human nature. He claims that without this human essence to guide our political project, to show what we need to preserve, all we are left with is a self-obsessed politics built around accommodating a constantly fluctuating set of identities. This identity politics is then much more amenable to ever increasing commodification.
But this can only be said to be true of identity politics since the 90s, when poststructural theory gained popularity. If you were to look at identity based movements before 1990, whether it was the black nationalist, feminist, or even (with some notable exceptions) the LGBT movement, these were all based to a very large extent on the essence of the identity in question.
More importantly, Cruddas and others fear the possibility of the historical transcending of this essence. To seek to change human nature is to possibly permit the worst instincts of modernity - eugenics, mind altering cybernetics and other dystopian schemes. But this is also to miss what’s going on right before our eyes - human nature has already changed. The cat is out of the bag. The smartphone and the laptop are cybernetic appendages which have changed our ways of thinking and acting in the world. We are all already cyborgs. How precisely are we to go about preventing this transcendence? From the standpoint of social democracy, are we really supposed to expect that evolutionary reforms and regulations are fundamentally going to prevent new technologies from changing us - or that these political reforms could even keep pace with such developments? If the goal is to stop this development all together, then in a world with many competing national economies this simply means having China be the source of this transcendence rather than a western power.
The only practical, responsible solution from a reformist perspective must be to shape these technologies, and therefore human essence, in a positive rather than negative way. To reject the positive project of shaping human essence, whether you call it transhumanism or something else, in the framework of reformism, is to simply accept the transformation of the human soul by capitalism.
There is an interesting overlap between Cruddas and Communization theorists like Dauve in their analysis of fascism. Cruddas identifies the Nazi project of eugenics as one of the consequences of trying to change human nature. Dauve talks of fascism as the embodiment of capital - big business - and the state without pretense for the democratic façade - a subjectivity born of a crushed middle class and a reactionary appeal to workers through rhetoric and symbolism about an organic community beyond capitalist relations. There are grains of truth to both these narratives. But they both fail on one fundamental level - they are idealist. Take note of the fact that for both there is no specific class agent behind fascism - it is capital and the state in the abstract, the ideology, the conception of humanity. Neither so much as mention the fact that it was always the middle classes, the petty bourg, the shopkeepers which were the class basis of fascism. It did not begin with the bureaucracy or military officer corps. Nor did it begin with the bankers and industrial magnates.
Much like Trumpism, the petty bourg was forced to enter a governing coalition with this big business in order to rule - a rule that carried with it the fantasy of the organic community, a parody of the Prussian bureaucracy, and a normative human essence which perfectly fit these aspects. The collectivism of the atomized petty bourg is always pathological in this way - they’re very existence is defined by being alienated from any real communal life, all they can do is fantasize and obsess about the reunion.
Dauve considers Social Democracy to be different from fascism only in terms of a select few new methods of social control it employs - he doesn’t stop to consider that the class coalitions of the US and the USSR were vastly different from the Fascist states in WW2, or that this has historical significance.
It may be odd that Cruddas emphasizes the transhumanist aspect of fascism while Dauve emphasizes the longing for the non-capitalist organic community - but neither is truly incorrect for doing so. Fascism, after all, was a movement embedded in modernity - the direct avenues for a conservative revolution to achieve such a community had been made impossible many decades ago. So has, coincidentally, the possibility of a natural or organic human essence unsoiled by technology.
We should consider how such a humanist leftism would be carried out in practice. There are some obvious and unfortunate consequences. In the UK, where suspicion of transgender people is quite high even on the left, it might entail curtailing their access to hormones or their rights more generally. The greatest cyborg innovations have come from technologies increasing the mobility and abilities of disabled people - perhaps those too will have to be rolled back to preserve the human essence.
The communizers, in contrast, will note that they do not believe in such a stable human essence - and that all manner of aspects of human nature will change when capitalism and value are abolished. But humanism serves an altogether different purpose in their ideology. It is not a normative measure in the sense of what government policies must be taken, but rather it informs both the possibility and the normative necessity of global revolution to do that abolishing.
Both agree that there is an immense suffering of the human soul under capitalism, and both maintain a somewhat Manichean view of capitalism itself, that all that needs to be done is to do the opposite of the logic of capitalism. Implicit in this is a rejection of economic development, as well as the idea that capitalism contains within it progressive forces, or even that there are tendencies within capitalism that will ultimately undermine it and lead to its downfall. There is only misery and attempts to reject that misery.
Both of them succumb to a sort of utopianism. The sentimental idea that we can have our cake and eat it too for the social democrats - that reformism could actually halt capitalism’s technological development, or that we could even have modernity without a shifting human essence. For the revolutionaries, the fantasy is that the entire world will up and revolt out of their misery, whether in absolute or relative terms, and create a better one in the same instance.
It’s certainly romantic to think that there is something inherently revolutionary or powerful in the suffering of the oppressed. But historically, this is far from the case. Historically, it is when the existing powers are weakest, or when the oppressed are well organized, that we see such action, rather than when suffering is at its height. It was, after all, not the immense tragedy and suffering of the holocaust which ended Nazi rule - but the Allied Powers. Similarly, the greatest resistance to the fascists from within came not in 1940 or 1943, but in the 20s and then in 1945.
Humanism buys into a version of what was called “the immiseration thesis” - whereby the ever more economic development under capitalism, the ever greater the suffering of the oppressed. There are more empirical versions of this thesis, premised around real wages and productivity (which also happen to be empirically false) but the humanist version is uniquely sentimental, suggesting that this suffering is done to the human soul, species essence, whatever. And it's true that we are alienated and increasingly atomized under capitalism - but there are two important ways that economic development decreases human suffering.
The first method is through the increasing capacity to meet human needs. One could simply look at China to see how powerful this force is in lifting people out of poverty.
The second is through the decreasing of the working day. Yes, this decrease is not a necessary aspect of capitalism - it is fought through class struggle and only possible via certain arrangements of class power. But it is a part of a certain kind of capitalist development. It is a part of that capitalist development where productivity rises, where capitalist consumption falls, where the rate of profit falls, and where the rationalization of production reaches its heights. To fight for a shorter working day is to fight for economic development AND human flourishing - if restored as a tendency of capitalism it can even defeat the tendency towards further atomization. Imagine the communities and relations we could form with a 4 hour workday, for example. This was once the Soviet Union’s plan to achieve communism - a plan whose abandonment in the 60s likely contributed to its collapse.
In this sense, the idealist and utopian aspirations of the humanists stand directly in the way of a better future, to the extent they stand for anything. If you are consumed with fighting capital or commodification as abstract forces, you are more likely to make compromises on the side of the petty proprietors, or peripheral actors - those classes and subgroups who are in favor of more communal relations in a purely fantastical manner. It’s how you get foolishness like the free-love hippies or CHAZ.
Indeed, the only way you’re going to get the global action that Duave dreams of, and a general escape from our atomized existence in (post)modernity, is through the cybernetic systems of production and communication we’ve built up. That is, if we’ve got the stones to change them according to how they change human essence.