Events | 2010.04.19
Human rights: the new secular religion | Anthony Julius
The collapse of the socialist project means the new militant is not the party sectarian but the NGO activist
When asked about the impact of the French revolution, China\'s first communist premier, Zhou Enlai , replied gnomically: "It\'s too soon to say." But from a vantage point after the Jacobin revolution\'s bicentenary in 1989, we can say with some certainty that the era of a revolutionary socialist politics of class struggle and redistribution is over. In its place, a confused and confusing collection of radical causes has rushed to fill the vacuum. But these have some shape and require description.
The causes of the historical defeat and disintegration of socialism are complex. In addition to the failure of the Soviet Union, there was the failure of the leftist opposition to the Soviet Union, the failure of third-world liberation movements, and the continuing (though crisis-ridden) success of the capitalist economies of the west. There were also more proximate causes, chief among which were the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn\'s Gulag Archipelago , the emergence of the Polish Solidarity movement , and the murderous reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia.
The collapse of the socialist project was ideological as well as geopolitical – perhaps, ideological because geopolitical. Acknowledging the "bankruptcy of Marxism" ( Julia Kristeva ), the "collapse of Marxism" ( Brian Barry ), or less enthusiastically, the "theoretical defeat of the Left" ( Slavoj Zizek ), has now become a commonplace of contemporary political theory, but it was an acknowledgment that was slow in coming. As late as 1978, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser was writing, "the crisis [of Marxism] has at last come to a head! It has at last become obvious to one and all! It is at last possible to begin the work of rectification and revision!"
But there was to be no further "beginning". The "new left" of the 1960s turned out to be the last left.
By 1989, the cause of the left had expired, and in its place was to be found certain "boutique movements" and post-leftist accommodations with conventionally liberal and reactionary positions. The boutique movements are the products of a certain scaling back of political ambitions, a championing of more limited or "local" causes. Scattered sets of issues and demands that do not add up to a unified vision or coherent ideology have instead cohered into what might be termed, in Fred Halliday \'s phrase, "semi-ideologies". There are many of these semi-ideologies, among which can be numbered certain versions of feminism, ecologism, third worldism, animal rights activism, and organised support for various "socialist" states or "national liberation" movements.
Each semi-ideology, which takes a variety of institutional forms, falls short of that programme of a general transformation of society that was socialism\'s goal. Each may be supported without reference to any other. This drift away from general revolutionary projects began in the late 1960s; in the decade that followed, the illusion of a shared purpose between these heterogeneous groupings and movements began to wane (for a time, for example, the PLO took its place alongside many other groups similarly engaged elsewhere in the world); by the early 1990s, they had diverged to such an extent that they could no longer be contained within a single frame of reference.
As for the appropriations of, and accommodations with, liberal positions, the general abandonment of Marxist positions in favour of liberal or post-liberal ones is evident wherever one looks, but particularly evident, perhaps, among France\'s political theorists. The "class struggle" between 1848 and 1936 encouraged people on the left to regard rights as mere abstractions, aspects of bourgeois ideology that concealed and legitimised the subordination of one class to another. But this supersession of rights by communism did not take place: on the contrary, it was by exposing the absence of "rights" in the Soviet Union and its satellites that communism was discredited.
A human rights discourse now dominates politics; there is a powerful human rights "movement". It is the new secular religion of our time.
Politics itself has been juridified. Liberalism provides the terms and defines the tone in which both Europeans and Americans now address their political affairs. The post-leftist appropriation of this discourse has been in the development of a "transnational progressivism" or antinational cosmopolitanism. It deprecates unrestrained state sovereignty; it endorses international and transnational legal institutions; it champions human rights against national security considerations; it accepts the liberal critique of imperialism. It sets pacific, post-capitalist and collectivist (or communitarian) values against militarist, capitalist and individualist ones. It esteems postnational, multiple and pluralised forms of citizenship identities.
This new "human rights-ism" accords great value to the United Nations – notwithstanding its inability to enforce its decisions, and its refusal to make practical demands of its members to be democratic or respect the human rights of their citizens. The effect is to maintain a certain challenge to normative liberalism, but on rather different terms than before.
Last, there are what I term the appropriations of, and accommodations with, reactionary positions. Over two centuries, progressive doctrines wreaked many humiliations on national and religious sentiment. No more. In their support for radical Islam (the "red-green alliance"), former leftists elide the secular/religious divide between left and right; in their hatred of the United States, they restate the anti-Americanism shared by left and right for at least 150 years; in their opposition to globalisation or "neoliberalism" or "market fundamentalism" they make common cause with extreme nationalists; many former leftists have abandoned the internationalism of the proletariat for the transnationalism of the Islamic umma.
This pure (in the sense of unqualified) oppositionism emerged in the 1990s, and it is now pervasive among members of ostensibly Leninist parties – victims of a deadening incapacity to think realistically about the world as it is, and a cramped and dishonest unwillingness to rethink, let alone abandon, their "progressive" ideas about third-world movements. They are happy to treat with far-right groupings, with obscurantists and theocrats of all kinds and, of course, with those antisemites prepared to characterise their Jew hatred as anti-globalist, or anti-colonialist, or anti-American, or anti-racist.
As heterogeneous as these developments have been, they share certain antagonisms – specifically, an antagonism towards America, and a broader antagonism towards "imperialism". These antagonisms comprise the points of contact between old-style leftists and their new allies among the specialist or boutique campaigners, the reactionaries and the liberals.
The impossibility of imagining a leftist alternative to the existing state of affairs – that is, the complete absence of a leftist programme – has encouraged the embracing of any politics hostile to the world as it is. If we cannot make a new world, we can at least tear down the present one. This is the nihilism of the "unreconstructed left", "pseudo-left" or "third-worldist" left, though some of their positions have also begun to infect more mainstream progressive politics.
This is, in any event, a post-left, one reconciled to the impossibility of revolutionary transformations: the abolition of class, self-government in place of representative government, and the common ownership of the means of production. But where disappointed in political economy, its transitional demands have been resurrected in the shrill discourse of human rights and their "abuses". The new militant is not the party sectarian but the NGO activist.
• This is an edited excerpt, with Anthony Julius\'s permission and revision, from his new book, The Trials of the Diaspora
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