Why Do So Many Leftists Become Reactionaries?
The following is a little mini-essay I wrote at 3am in about 15 minutes. Apologies for its unpolished nature but I wanted to get my main ideas down on paper so they can be articulated later.
It seems to me, at least online (which is honestly the only way I experience politics outside the liberal milieu), there is a growing trend of former leftists coming to find a new home amongst right-wing reaction. Off the top of my head I immediately think of the fate of the Red Scare Podcast girls. Dasha going from “Sailor Socialism” to paling around with Alex Jones and trying to get into the pants and pockets of venture capitalist vampire Peter Thiel. Other than them, in the past couple of days or so, I have seen posts of people showing their political journey (one posting they went from Contrapoints to Blaire White, another going from leftist to Satanic Panic)
Why is this? Is it possible that our principles are simply not up to snuff? I would argue no. What it really comes down to is a matter of laziness and a lack of intellectual rigor. Moving from Social Democrat to Social Fascist or regular Fascist is not as big of a leap as social democrats would like to think it is. These people never broke from bourgeois conceptions of politics to begin with so why wouldn’t they move to reaction as our world falls deeper into crisis and the left of capital continues to fail to do anything about it?
It is important to remind ourselves that these people were leftists and not committed communists or Marxists (although there were those who went from Marxism to reaction, I will speak of them later). This matters because leftism still perceives of the world through a bourgeois lens. The goal of the leftists is not to establish a new mode of production or to inaugurate a radical change to society, rather it is their mission to establish “capitalism with a human face”. They seek the welfare state not the cooperative commonwealth. These desires stem from an immature analysis of history and politics. Class struggle, if they even acknowledge it at all, is limited to struggles in the unions or at the ballot box. Because they already had insufficient theory, when the world continues to plunge into crisis they have no way of properly analyzing reality. For all the faults of right wing reaction, the reactionaries first premise is that there is something wrong with society and that the problems of society can be tied to a group of people. For them the groups of people causing the crisis at hand are “the elite”: Gays, celebrities, journalists, academics, and, of course, the Jews. It offers a simplistic, duelistic conception of society where struggle is not between classes with material interests and roles within society, but is instead a struggle of “the people” against whatever interloper the individual reactionary understands the least. It is a struggle between cultural signifiers, a struggle of aesthetics.
Reaction is the socialism of fools, it only makes sense that the most foolish of “socialists” are attracted to it.
Something we only previously touched upon are those who were genuine revolutionaries whose lives ended with them being reactionary conservatives. People in this camp include American Trotskyists like Bertrand Wolff and Max Eastman. Trotskyists to Social Democrats like Denis Bratt and Max Schatmann. I don’t wish to imply that Trotskyists are unique in being the only tendency of Marxism that moves to the right, they are just the first ones that come to mind. For these people I think it is simply a matter of becoming tired of it all. I remember reading a Marx anecdote: “Marx had bumped into a fellow revolutionary from the 1848 barricades, now prosperous and complacent. The acquaintance reflected that, as one got older, one became less radical and less political. ‘Do you?’ Marx replied. ‘Do you? Well, I do not!’” I think it is most likely that these gentlemen had gone the way of the old barricader. It does take energy to be actively on the left, more than it takes to be a reactionary and even more than being a centrist. This is because reaction and centrism are to some degree premised on the status quo whereas Communism wishes for complete upheaval of the status quo.
While the conversion of leftists to reactionaries may be discerning, we shouldn’t elevate it to an issue of prime importance. It is good that those with the weakest grasp and weakest conviction regularly purge themselves from our ranks. Part of our task should be to actively gate keep these kind of people from ever wanting to call themselves communists in the first place!
