I found this in the archives of the IDC mailing list, which I quit some months ago, but decided to rejoin after a new invitation from Trebor Scholz. This piece by peer education advocate Stephen Downes, is an important contribution about a renewal of the emancipatory tradition of the left, in a age of networks, and what this could mean in terms of adaptation of that tradition to the demands of the time. I’m publishing it in two parts. Part one, is a critique of atomism, which he sees as the philosophical basis of the tradition of the right; in part two, he proposes a set of positive values. The idea of the mass should be abandoned for the idea of an ecology, a network.

Part One: A critique of atomism:

Stephen Downes:

I have always described myself as ‘left’ and I have been described as everything from a Marxist to a ‘moderate socialist and radical democrat’. I have run politically from the left side of the spectrum, and when asked to describe my politics, will either choose ‘very liberal’ or ‘socialist’, depending on what the choices are. So I am in a position to offer a response.

But a response to what? “What is left?” That is, in the first instance, an empirical question. What do the people who collectively lable themselves ‘left’ believe, in the aggregate? But the result is not likely to be anything I believe, nor is it very likely to be anything a majority of left-leaning people believe, unless it is defined at such a level of vagueness as to be uninformative. Moreover, the answers from such a survey will vary with the questions asked, as Burmeister’s post shows. Is ‘left’ the party of change? Looked at from one perspective, perhaps. Looked at from another, perhaps not.

In any case, we are in such a state of flux that it probably makes more sense to speak, not of what the left is, but what it ought to be. Not so much from the perspective of political advocacy – as in, ‘we ought to save the environment’ and ‘we ought to support labour’ – but as in what ought to be thought of as the foundational views of the left. Because it’s very easy to get this wrong, and misleadingly wrong, by glossing what is the fundamental distinction.

To take an example, we hear that that the left is the party of the poor, the ‘working class’, while the right is the party of the rich. Such a definition automatically disenfranchises any person of means from leaning left. But more importantly, and more significantly, it separates people from their aspirations. Mostly people do not want to be poor, do not want to be a part of the working class, and insofar as the left represents such people, it is because being poor or being a worker is associated with bad things, like poverty and death. The left needs to be able to speak to a person’s aspirations as well and as clearly as it does to their status or to their class, and identifying supporters of the left as ‘the working class’ fails to do this.

Or another example, a commonly made distinction between right and left, specifically, that the right is about ‘individuals’ while the left is about the ‘collective’. It is very tempting to take this definition, and the term ‘socialism’ suggests that the left concerns itself mostly with society, mostly with the affairs of groups, or more, in advocating the rights of groups over those of the individual. But to simply state the distinction thus is to miss some important differences between the right and the left. Because the right will advocate for the rights of the group when it suits them – when promoting nationalism and patriotism, for example, or when appealing to people’s religious convictions. And it leaves the left open to a straw man attack, that it is not concerned with the rights of the individual, which is simply false.

Another common way of distinguishing between left and right is to characterize the left as the party of ‘equality’ while thinking of the right as the party of ‘privilege’. This certainly has historical origins. But it again allows for misinterpretation. We are familiar with the misuse of ‘equality’ as a means of preserving privilege, for example. Opponents of affirmative action argue against the practice on the grounds that it results in ‘unequal’ treatment. The simple doctrine of ‘equality’ needs to be refined, to become something like ‘equality of opportunity’ or ‘proportionality’. With each refinement the basic justice of the position is obscured, as the practice seems to allow more and more unequal treatment. And then there is the clincher, that to any simple observation, people in fact /are/ unequal, and that no amount of ‘social engineering’ is going to change that.

And yet, if we reject all three principles, we get a rich individualist who believes his position is the result of innate ability rather than social injustice. Exactly, it seems, the opposite of what we would call a representative of the left. And therefore, while these principles cannot stand as definitive of the left, it certainly seems that there is something captured by these principles that we would call characteristically left.

If I had to characterize what it is about right-wing political philosophy that bothers people from the left, I would characterize this aspect as the inherent ‘atomism’ of the right. This is the atomism that informs classic liberalism, the idea of each individual agent striving for his or her own personal advantage. This atomism is what informs social darwinism, the ‘survival of the fittest’ mantra we so frequently hear from the right (which is why they also declare that collective action is ‘unfair’, since it distorts this /mano-a-mano/ competition). This is the individualism of Ayn Rand and the libertarians, the elevation of ‘genius’ as a natural category, the exaltation of CEOs and political leaders, the suggestion that people – even the children – are in their station in life because of choices they have made. “Take responsibility” and “don’t be a victim.”

Atomism is an important doctrine and is at the heart of most of our contemporary structures and institutions, which is why parties of the right are today characterized as ‘conservatives’. Atomism is, at heart, the doctrine that the qualities of the whole are are not the consequence of properties of the whole, but rather, are a consequence of the properties of the individuals that make up the whole. Just as, say, the nature of the bar of lead is not the ‘leadness’ that the bar as a whole somehow possesses, but rather, is the result of the nature of the individual lead atoms that make up the bar. In the same way, if a society is, say, ‘just’, it is not because of some obscure property of being a ‘just society’, but rather, is made up of the ‘justice’ in each individual member of society.

This way of viewing the right wing allows us to understand some of its most perplexing attributes. We hear, repeated over and over, for example, the doctrine of individuality. The right criticizes the left because of the left’s advocacy of ‘central government’ – and then turns out to be the party encouraging nationalism and patriotism and conformance to a central doctrine, whether it be religious truth or hatred of a common enemy or instilling the values of good citizenship. The right also criticizes the left for favoring rules and regulations – for ‘fettering the marketplace’ – for example, and yet at the same time, characterizes itself as the ‘law and order’ party, insisting that criminals do maximum time. How do we make sense of this?

As follows: the right, on the one hand, celebrates the individualism of each atom, but at the same time, depends on the purity of each atom. If the ‘leadness’ of a lead bar is mad up of the ‘leadness’ of each of its atoms, then atoms that are not lead make the bar less lead-like. The nature of a lead bar comes from its individual atoms, but the value of a lead bar is derived from each of its atoms being the same. This is why it is essential, from the perspective of the right, to preach the apparently contradictory doctrines of individualism and conformity.

Again, I want to stress that this theory is what informs our social and political structures. Essentially, our institutions are made up of ‘atoms’ of similar types. Hence, in a democracy, each person receives a vote, but the government is formed by people who all vote the same way. Similarly, religious faith is a personal decision – this is enshrined in various constitutions – but religious faiths are characterized as people who have all reach the same religious point of view. And nations, being composed of people who have the same race, the same language, the same culture, are typically depicted as people who have the same religion as well. Which is where we get not only the idea that the United states (say) is a ‘Christian country’, but also, the idea that it would be stronger if it were more Christian.

We can see here how the depiction of the left, or of left-leaning causes, as a ‘mass movement’ simply plays right into this picture. By accepting the idea of ‘mass movement’, we are either accepting that political movements are made up of masses of same-thinking individuals, or we are presenting some sort of (fictional) ‘general will’ that will be ascribed to, or imposed in some way, on the individuals comprising the mass. And there then comes to be little to choose from between a fiction imposed by the left and some set of principles, whatever they happen to be, articulated by the self-designated representatives from the right. Moreover, since the representatives from the right have generally some advantage of wealth or position, it appears that there must be /something/ to what they are saying, because they have achieved this position and wealth.

Historically, the left has achieved success by emulating the strategies and tactics of the right. The difference has been in the determination of the beneficiaries of those strategies and tactics. Thus, when the industrialists made themselves wealthy by owning the means of production, members of the left sought to seize the means of production. When the right wing resorted to military means to assert its dominance, the left resorted to military means in kind. When the right adopted the mechanism of the democratic vote (supplanted by influence-generating systems to sway voters) the left also adopted the mechanisms of political parties and propaganda. But what is important, is that none of these strategies – not unionism, not communism, not social democracy – /defines/ the left.

So what does? My own view is that, philosophically, we could see leftism as a blend between the ideas of Immanual Kant and John Stuart Mill. And, specifically, the following: from Mill, the idea that the greatest social good is achieved when each person is able to pursue his or her own good in his or her own way; and from Kant, the idea that each person is, and ought to be treated as, an end, and not a means. These are, I think, principles with which proponents would agree – and more, principles with which, when pressed, proponents of the right would disagree. Because, while at first glance these principles appear to be atomist principles, they are not, and they are not in the way that signifies what (to people on the left) constitutes the fundamental flaw of conservative philosophy.

We need to look at Rousseau to understand this. “Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains.” Why is this? Where does our imprisonment, our enslavement, come from? From /the requirement to be the same/. From the requirement that we constitute, in our atomism, one of the whole. When proponents of the right argue for, say, the freedom to pursue the good, they do not mean a person’s ‘/his or her own good/’, but rather, some sort of absolutist declaration of what constitutes ‘the good’, whether it be derived from religion or from misguided sense of national purity. And when proponents of the right consider the ‘value’ of a person, they see this value as conditional, based on a person’s natural abilities, based on whether they ‘contribute to society’, based on whether they are of the right faith or the right nationality. /People are means/ to make a company great, to make a nation great.

The fundamental principle of the left is that each individual person is of value in and of him or her self, that this value is unconditional, and that derived from this value ought to be certain (socially constructed) rights and privileges. This is the origin of the doctrine of equality, this idea that each person ought to have an equitable share of the pie, a fair shot at the brass ring, or a right to a say at the meeting. This is the origin of the idea that social systems that leave people in poverty, in starvation, dispossessed and enslaved, is fundamentally wrong – not because of some higher principle, about the nature of the world or of society, but because of the simple truth, that each person, including the indigent, has a basic and fundamental standing in society.

But why? You may ask. The answer is two-fold. First, in atomism, the who may never be more than the sum of the parts. Atomism is a /quantitative/ philosophy. We don’t ask what, where or why, we ask, “how much?” And second, because atomism is a philosophy based on sameness, the whole may never be better than the best of its parts. The best a bar of lead can get is to be as good (as pure) as the best lead atom in the bar. The point of atomism is not merely individualism, but that some individuals in society /set a standard/, to which the rest ought to aspire. But also, it is the idea that the decisions made by such a society, will be the decisions made by individuals, with which the rest will concur. The best decision, the best ideas, a society can have, are the ideas articulated by an individual, to which the rest will adhere.

But we know the weaknesses of each of those two parts. First, we know that (to use the popular slogan) /the whole is greater than the sum of its parts./ That a population – or even a mass of metal – has properties that are over and above the properties of its individual atoms. And second (and crucially), we know that these properties are /better/ than the properties of any individual in society. ‘Better’ not so much in the sense of ‘ethically good’ (though a strong case could be made for this) but, more concretely, ‘better’ in the sense of ‘more accurate’. If the ship of state is governed by one person, the captain, then it has a greater probability of hitting an iceberg than if it is governed by the whole.

What the left has lacked for many years (what it has always lacked, in my view) is an articulation of /why/ the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, of /how/ that whole comes to be expressed, and in the context where the fundamental principles, just articulated, are essential elements of that articulation, and not accidental correlates that could, in a contingency, be ignored. In other words, it needs an articulation of why the whole is greater than some of the parts in such a way that the essential liberty and standing of the individual is never threatened.

And that is accomplished by defining the whole as the result in autonomous, thinking, communicating, rational autonomous agents, rather than merely passive elemental atoms. Where the whole is created, not by what we /are/, but by what we /do/, such that where the actions of each person are seeing always as /contributing/ to the whole, not merely ‘adding to’ it or ‘subtracting from’ it. By viewing, in other words, society, not as a mass, not as a machine, but as an ecology, a network.

In an ecology and in a network, the properties of the whole are not created from the sameness of the components, but rather, as a result of the interactions of the components. Consequently, the /properties/ of the network are not contained in any one individual in the network. The network is not some big copy of an individual of the network. Nor does it operate under the guidance and direction of one entity in the network. If we think of a forest, for example. It is made up of a mixture of trees and shrubs and birds and bears. There is no one part of the forest that the rest copies. There is no ‘sameness’ in a forest, except at very superficial levels. And the forest isn’t governed in any sense by any of its members, or by anything. The forest becomes what it is as a result of the interactions of its members, such that /every/ entity in the forest contributes to what the forest becomes.