Before Nancy Pelosi was voted back in as Speaker of the House a fight erupted between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the internet personality Jimmy Dore. The fight was about whether the progressive democrats should withhold their vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the house in exchange for a vote on Medicare for all, or whether such a move would be counter-productive.
This video will not be about which of the two sides of this debate were correct, but rather it will look at how we might overcome the question, transcend it. And in order to arrive at a way around the politics of both AOC and Dore, we’ll have to start by considering what they have in common.
Both AOC and Dore share the same fantasy: The fantasy of the Democratic party as a party representing everyday working people.
Both AOC and Dore think of the everyday person as oppressed and both think that political power is in the hands of politicians and, by extension, in the hands of voters.
Both AOC and Dore accept that their favored policy, that Medicare for all, can not be realized in the present because the wrong politicians are in power. Dore’s call for a vote on M4All is justified as a way to fight back against the centrist “neoliberal” faction that dominates the Democrats by exposing their betrayal of the popular will to the voters. AOC argues against the strategy because she thinks that such a vote will be poorly received by the mainstream media, that some other demands might be made instead, and that structural rules like PAYGO should be repealed before a Medicare for All bill is to be brought up for a vote.
Even more deeply, AOC and Dore share a worldview that the late Mark Fisher might’ve called Capitalist Realism, but in order to understand just what this Capitalism is and how it determines or shapes our understanding...our politics. Let’s examine Georg Lukacs essay “Class Consciousness” and consider whether such a consciousness might offer us a way out.
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For Mark Fisher, the concept of Capitalist Realism described a failure of imagination, a failure resulting from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of culture. He wrote that “Whether we’re speaking of religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, [everything under capitalism] is reduced to a monetary value.”
However, it is worth considering that where Fisher saw Capitalist realism, the Marxist theorist Georg Lukacs saw an opportunity for the development of working-class power.
In his chapter entitled “The Standpoint of the Proletariat from History and Class consciousness,” Lukacs explained how the proles surpass the bourgeoisie in terms of understanding by referring to the work of Heinrich Rickert. Rickert was a Prussian academic and writer whose book The Limits of Concept-Formation in Natural Science: An Introduction to the Historical Sciences describes the difference between the natural sciences and the historical sciences as a difference in methodologies rather than a difference in content alone.
Scientists aim to form concepts by examining the world for patterns that can be reduced into universal laws. They ignore particular or individual facts about the world unless those facts are repeatable and can be fit within a concept that applies universally. For example, Napoleon might throw an apple very high into the air, but this would not tell us about the properties of throwing or apples, except in so much as it could be used as an example of the laws of muscle function, aerodynamics, gravity, and the rest.
For the historical sciences, on the other hand, the activity of a Napoleon would be of great interest, as long as the figure of Napoleon was universally considered to be important to the culture or society under consideration. In an entry on Rickert at the Standford encyclopedia of philosophy, the following quote from Rickert explains the sort of procedure a scientific historian must adhere to if he or she is to avoid the trap of being arbitrary or eccentric:
“If it is to express the character of history as a theoretical science, the procedure that we speak of as oriented to values is to be most sharply separated from one that posits values. This means that history treats values only in so far as they are actually accepted by subjects so that certain objects are actually denoted as goods. Thus, even if history deals with values, it is not a science that posits values.”
According to Lukacs this approach to understanding history or politics is bourgeois as it is blind to the underlying source of values in society, blind to the way cultural values are not uniform and given, but split along class lines and dynamically changing as the class conflict and capitalist development chugs along.
“By positing the materially unknown and only formally valid ‘cultural values’ as the founders of a ‘value-related’ historical objectivity, the subjectivity of the historian is, to all appearances, eliminated. However, this does no more than enthrone as the measure and the index of objectivity, the “cultural values” actually “prevailing in his community” (i.e. in his class).”
If we were to approach our evaluation of history, or better still to our evaluation of this current conflict between Jimmy Dore and AOC, from the standpoint of the proletariat we would, according to Lukacs, be able to see how the conflict itself fits into the totality of relations that set up the objective values involved in the conflict. Not only would the significance of the Democratic party as a reflection of cultural and political values become questionable, but the values that we use to judge the Democrats would also become a contested territory. Or, at least, this is what Lukacs proposes that the proletariat can achieve.
If we apply the notion of the totality to the question of democratic party support for medicare for all, if we consider how it is that this rather moderate approach to providing universal healthcare is both enormously popular amongst the electorate AND considered to be on the fringe of acceptable policy proposals, we would have to consider the totality of the specifically American historical forces that have brought us to this point. But, considering history as a historical force creates enormous problems as the true totality when considered as a collection of isolated facts is unknown and unknowable, and the reductive categories of understanding that we can instrumentalize in order to create conceptual tools for understanding themselves arise from within history.
However, as Lukacs points out, so do we. He wrote, “Reality can only be understood and penetrated as a totality, and only a subject which is itself a totality is capable of this penetration. It was not for nothing that the young Hegel erected his philosophy upon the principle that ‘truth must be understood and expressed not merely as substance, but also as subject.’”
For Jimmy Dore and AOC, politics is aimed at the proper management of conditions that appear as natural, immutable. For both Dore and AOC the substance of the world, the money, and labor that directs and produces our society is out there beyond us and our task is to act upon the brutal facts and change them. Even the form of our politics is taken as immediate and obvious and the debate is argued on the level of what sorts of actions, both symbolic and practical, will create conditions wherein the left can win the game as it is currently played. What gestures and moves will allow the left-wing of the democrats to move, to persuade, to craft a voting bloc? What consequences can we unleash upon our political enemies, what forms of punishment can we deploy, as we act within the system as it is?
A proletarian politics, according to Lukacs, would move beyond this by understanding the current political moment as an instance that embodied the totality of society.
When explaining how the totality of society can be embodied in or instantiated in a particular moment or act, Lukacs points to the beginning of Capital and to a line Marx wrote to Engels in 1851 wherein he said that the simple exchange of 20 yards of linen for 1 coat contains the seed for commodity exchange as we know it. That is 20 yards of linen for 2 pounds or for money.
For the proletariat, however, the knowledge of the totality becomes a form of self-knowledge. Lukacs wrote, “By adding self-consciousness to the commodity structure a new element is introduced, one that is different in principle and in quality from what is normally described as consciousness ‘of’ an object.”
The worker, when she grasps the reality of commodification, or when she understands that her own objectification is the source of power and money in the world, then she grasps not only the truth of her own objective place in the world but also her own subjective power. The working class, when politicized as a class, can move beyond bourgeois politics because they can move beyond reacting to the world as they find it and, instead, move to alter it at its foundation.
This is why a truly proletarian politics would have to include a politics of work, a politics of production, and material change. It would not merely be a matter of reallocating resources produced by capitalism, but rather would change the very form and that these resources took as they were brought into the world.
A workers revolution may need to take up State power, it may even look at times like the recent riot at the Capitol building, but far more than that it would include taking charge of production and changing the terms by which it operated.
For revolutionaries, for socialists, the aim of our immediate politics should not be to wrest control of the Democratic party or even to split with it, but rather should be aimed at creating a movement and politics of self-realization. We will have to appear outside the normal process. We will have to organize and act upon a different terrain, breaking rules and causing disruption as we go.
The trick will be to create disorder without loving it. The trick will be to create more than we destroy.