The day after my January 17 Blog of Public Secrets posting, “This Guy for President,” Lee Camp made a few interesting and revealing statements on his ‘Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp’ YouTube programme.1 These bring to light confusion on the contemporary left concerning what socialism is and what it isn’t. Speaking about the World Economic Forum in Davos, which does not concern me here, Camp describes endless economic growth as a form of capitalist cancer. He says that capitalism has to grow regardless of the consequences. How we organize society, labour relations, our metabolic relation to nature, economic markets and foreign relations, etc, are essential political questions. We are reaching a point, he says, where the earth’s environment cannot sustain what humanity is demanding of it. We are starting to see systems breaking down. Climate crisis is one example, as is species extinction. He uses the term market economics because people sometimes think that China is not capitalist. The way we use terms like capitalism, he says, is inconsistent and has shifted over decades. For example, he continues, people use the term socialism to mean different things: a state regime, welfarism, a public utility or service paid for through taxation, or workers owning the means of production. Even if you had a country in which workers owned the means of production and the resources were nationalized, he states, you would still have market economics – an argument, incidentally, that no one would dispute. You would continue to have prices applied to goods.
Camp then says:
“Even if you had a full on socialist, Marxist system where workers decide everything, etc, you would still look at a forest and there would still be that pull to go ‘wow, if we cut down all these trees, we could make a lot of money or we could distribute a lot of paper and shit and furniture to people.’ Whatever the thing. Then you cut down that forest. Then you no longer have a forest. So, market economic forces will destroy this planet despite whether it’s socialist or capitalist. What we need to do is evolve past these systems, which almost no one ever talks about, sadly.”
This is too short a statement from which to derive anything substantial to determine what Camp understands by socialism. His conversation is concerned with the problem of endless growth. Although capitalist markets will seek growth anywhere, there is no reason for growth to imply ecological unsustainability. It would be absurd, nevertheless, to ignore the impact of markets on the climate crisis and this is one reason why Marxists often use the term Capitalocene rather than Anthropocene. And so the limits of growth are related to the limits of capitalism. This understanding is fundamental to ecosocialism, as discussed for example by people like John Bellamy Foster or Kohei Saito. The point that I want to make here is that there is nothing that distinguishes Marxism and socialism from ecology. You can have a socialist approach to ecology, and you can have one that is different from socialism. One can assume that the Soviet Union was a model of industrial devastation and that this somehow discredits the ideology of socialism, but these assumptions would need to be unpacked in countless ways. The notion then that the ecological crisis requires that we “evolve” beyond socialism is a political statement that is non-socialist. I would not suggest that Camp is being anti-socialist here, only that his few words on the subject need elaboration.
What interests me the most in what he says is the idea that socialism and capitalism are “systems” and that we need to evolve beyond both of these. I have no idea what Camp’s assumptions are when it comes to contemporary political theory and postmodern academic trends. His comedy and thinking are clearly influenced by New Left tendencies, by new social movements, by activism and by progressive journalism. He very likely avoids being caught in intellectual “boxes” that would restrict his ability to offer moral critiques of anything he considers reprehensible. While I agree with most of his criticisms there are points of theory that are important to Marxists and that distinguishes socialism from liberalism and from postmodernism. Without delving too deeply into the subject, it is important to understand that socialism, which I use here as coterminous with Marxism, is indeed a political ideology but it is not a system. There have been socialist state regimes and socialist markets that have been referred to as systems, but one should understand the implications and limits of the term system, especially as it forms part of the intellectual study of structuralism, systems theories and cybernetics, which are not incidental to some branches of ecological thinking.
The intellectual core of Marxism is dialectics, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels applied to the study of universal history. Dialectics was disputed in the postwar era by the structuralist theories that have become central to many new social movement activists. Some of the key theorists are Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, though there are many others, including phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and systems theorists like Talcott Parsons. Before Marxists challenged structuralist ideology, they had similar disputes with the formal logic of the analytic tradition and with idealism. Rather than study distinct entities, dialectics examines the relations between them and the contradictory and uneven processes by which things change. Without a deep appreciation of what dialectics and materialism mean to socialists, there is not much point going further. But that is not my purpose here.
Structuralist methods in contemporary theory are commonly understood to be anti-humanistic. This is one reason why we now have intellectual trends like cyberfeminism, animal studies, affect theory, new materialisms, and the like. In contrast to these, Marxist dialectics are part of a humanist tradition that socialism has in common with liberalism. Postwar intellectuals who wanted to break away from communism did so by attacking this shared humanist foundation, which is one reason why we have so many forms of identity politics today that reject universality. These would include intersectionality, critical race theory, privilege theory, decoloniality and radical democracy. Structuralist theories simplify human motivations and relations, reducing agency to structure and avoiding the mediating factors through which human understanding proceeds. It is this ability to simplify and cut through the social fabric that has made structuralism attractive to activists, allowing the intellectual who seeks empowerment to redefine the world in much the same way that an artist might. The first important step taken by structuralism was to distinguish the study of language from the study of the origins of words to the representation of a static, non-evolutionary model of distinct words whose meaning is not derived by their use and sense, but in terms of their difference from other words. Structuralism is less concerned with the history and nature of things than it is with providing a complete picture of the world that is analogous to a map. This type of research is generally unconcerned with questions of morality and allows the analyst the feeling of objective distance from the subject of study. From particular cases, general formulas are quickly devised. As linguistics and semiotics shited into anthropology, the temptation was to apply structuralism to Marxism as well, which Louis Althusser attempted to do. This was a nonstarter for Hegelian Marxists especially, for whom the category of subject is essential. The reason why is because the reification of social structures places them beyond the reach of human subjects, making them seem atemporal and therefore prone to a tautological and quasi-Nietzschean eternal return.
This intellectual trend was welcomed in academia because it allowed the managerial class to offer a quick solution in the social sciences to the profound influence of Marxism, which through to the 1960s remained the intellectual core of the global left. Structuralism’s technocratic approach to subjects combined more smoothly with practical and scientific fields of research that did not want to be hampered by moral and political questions. It helped to avoid questions of human progress and justified capitalist modernization by removing the human from, for example, ecology or gender relations. Structuralism also challenged historical understanding by making everything an effect of discourse, as defined by Michel Foucault. In discourse theory, it is no longer people who are the agents of change and instead systems seem to change all by themselves, like the kaleidoscopic fractal patterns of a chaos theory computer program. Much of the contemporary sociology of memes, swarms and algorithms, which are popular for instance with anarchist theorists of the multitude, are structuralist and anti-humanist in this way. This structuralist approach to objective reality does not fight alienation but legitimizes capitalist endo-colonization. The person who resists these processes is ridiculed by postmodern anti-humanists as someone seeking to hold on to their bourgeois individuality. Resistance is futile they say. Most of these people are middle-class and so they hardly know what they are talking about.
In cultural studies, an entire generation of scholars dedicated themselves to the study of fashion, advertising, media and subcultures as systems of codes that are easily detached from the people who created them. This universe of referents and the notion of progress disappears in postmodern theories of simulation. People who talk about political and economic realities are said to ignore the apparatus of the media that make real-world referents vanish. According to thinkers like Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, the Gulf War for instance never happened. Sings are without substance or determination. Rather than communicating important information that is meaningful to others, the transparency of journalistic reportage is said to evacuate its content. Speech is not so much a matter of meaning and intention than it is an effect of the discourse that keeps people trapped in ever-changing structures of power and resistance.
When structuralism evolved into post-structuralism, the keyword became power. This brought in questions of the body and identity with a vengeance. One does not speak in structuralist thinking; one is spoken. For people like Judith Butler, gender is not an expression of who and what you are but is rather a performance of pre-existing social codes. For Jean-François Lyotard, words are not spoken to produce meaning but are drawn from us by libidinal impulses, thereby exposing us to an unending series of language games. Whether these codes and systems are consistent or not does not matter to structuralists and post-structuralists. The same goes for identity and social norms. Rather than being concerned with ideals like freedom and equality, structuralists are concerned with mechanisms of control and constraint, thereby overestimating the power of systems to explain human motivation.
What structuralism and systems theories seem to offer is an analysis of structures. However, what they do, in actuality, is fail to explain those structures, and more nefariously, justify them. Insofar as socialists have addressed, adopted, transformed and rejected structuralist intellectual paradigms, the broader left has been given good reason to stay connected to the fundamentals of Marxism and dialectics. However, the academic technocracy that shapes the thinking of the middle class, if not the majority, has hampered the post-New Left activist sector with a postmodern toolkit that remakes intellectual life into DIY empowerment. This explains to some extent how and why protest narcissism has replaced communist movements. This expediency spurs growth and rapid changes in the creative and knowledge industries without creating the kinds of people and movements that have a comprehensive understanding of history and a humanist vision beyond the narrow boundaries of identity. Systems theories can enrich scientific knowledge but shorn of a humanist basis they can also shackle politics to the ideology of the technocracy.
Notes
1. Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp, “LIVE: The WEF – World’s Richest Gather To Discuss How To Pillage World Better,” YouTube (January 18, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veuv6DJWcfY.