It has been said that history moves forward by its bad side. To radicalise this further, we could argue that history is advancing through its worse to the catastrophic side. The truth of our situation is that of war. There are (civil or other) wars virtually in every continent. What was once an exception has now become our new normal. We can no longer live in a situation of avoidance, or fetishist disavowal: war is our reality. And it will continue to be so.

This new normal coincides with a massive theoretical, political, and ethical disorientation on a global scale. We are caught in an ideological and political deadlock, lacking the very basic conceptual apparatus to make sense of and articulate the situation. Our situation is that of a blatant absence of pure thinking, a bad “idealism,” of a thinking that is devoid of the compulsion to both act and to have answers. The poverty of imagination necessarily ends up in cynicism as a political position. To put it in a Hegelian fashion, what is needed more than ever is thinking, pure thinking, without further determinations and fillings.

The best way to articulate the poverty of our political and ideological thinking is the recent call to peace. Peace at any cost, peace everywhere, peace is our common and shared goal. But, why peace? Isn’t peace an unjust situation (and notion) in a situation of fighting against occupation? The situation becomes even more paradoxical when figures as different as President Trump and Pope Francis are actively calling for peace. This consensus alone is enough to raise suspicions. That is to say, why peace and not something else, say justice, or liberation, or de-occupation…? And, at a more pragmatic level, what price is worthy of paying for peace?

It has been said that history moves forward by its bad side. To radicalise this further, we could argue that history is advancing through its worse to the catastrophic side. The truth of our situation is that of war. There are (civil or other) wars virtually in every continent. What was once an exception has now become our new normal. We can no longer live in a situation of avoidance, or fetishist disavowal: war is our reality. And it will continue to be so.

This new normal coincides with a massive theoretical, political, and ethical disorientation on a global scale. We are caught in an ideological and political deadlock, lacking the very basic conceptual apparatus to make sense of and articulate the situation. Our situation is that of a blatant absence of pure thinking, a bad “idealism,” of a thinking that is devoid of the compulsion to both act and to have answers. The poverty of imagination necessarily ends up in cynicism as a political position. To put it in a Hegelian fashion, what is needed more than ever is thinking, pure thinking, without further determinations and fillings.

The best way to articulate the poverty of our political and ideological thinking is the recent call to peace. Peace at any cost, peace everywhere, peace is our common and shared goal. But, why peace? Isn’t peace an unjust situation (and notion) in a situation of fighting against occupation? The situation becomes even more paradoxical when figures as different as President Trump and Pope Francis are actively calling for peace. This consensus alone is enough to raise suspicions. That is to say, why peace and not something else, say justice, or liberation, or de-occupation…? And, at a more pragmatic level, what price is worthy of paying for peace?

Peace presupposes that there is a world of stability to return to. It implies that there is a neutral ground, which should be maintained at all costs by making all the necessary compromises. Peace is a retroactive fantasy that obfuscates the contradictions which produced the conflict in the first place. What we call peace is really a state that has yet to be observed as conflictual.

The calls for peace at the expense of justice and liberation are simultaneously calls for the suspension of political ethics and convictions: one should get rid of ethical ideals and become “realistic”. This is a market logic at its purest. Immanuel Kant, in his “The Perpetual Peace”, wrote that the state of peace is established by the force of laws. Within the same logic, we could argue that more often than not, peace is established by force on the battlefield. In this sense, the main obstacle to peace are the conditions which are offered as a realistic solution to war.

There is something utterly hypocritical in attempts to give advice to others on how things are ought to be. In principle, all political opinions are useless, that is to say, one should be highly sceptical of the internationalism of opinions and feelings. More than aiming at having a material effect on the situation, political opinions aim at having a clinical function – making us feel good. Political opinions are not bad in themselves, but they should not be confused with politics. They serve (at best) to relieve anguish.

It is interesting to analyse the responses of the left. The contemporary left exists as a nostalgia for an impossible past. The calls to peace are the calls to depoliticise the causes of the war or invasion, and thus ultimately side with the oppressive forces. One should emphasise over and over again that it is always the occupying forces, the invaders, who are interested in peace. Ukrainians do not want (only) peace, they want (rightly so) liberation and justice.

The best index to the complete disorientation of the left is its lack of trust in itself in the time of crisis. Crises are inevitable; they should be approached without illusions, as something that offers a chance to be exploited. Crises are brutal, painful and very dangerous, but they are also the field on which battles are waged and have to be won. The left today embodies the new sophists, performers of empty rhetorical formulas, who fail to think our situation. But contrary to the sophists in the ancient Athens, our contemporary sophists are both unpopular and marginal. The left is in love with itself, with its “subversion” and “resistance”, but fully residing in the positive order they criticise, completely enjoying their own inconsistencies, while amusing those in power with the choreographies of their false radicality.

The majority of the left today, including socialist governments and parties, silently accept that capitalism is the ultimate and unquestioned form of social organisation. Everyone is both ‘Marxist’ at the level of analysis and non-Marxist, that is to say, not-Communist in practice. This distinction takes this kind of form: yes, we know capitalism is bad, but Marxism does not provide a solution or vision for politics, and, therefore, the struggle against capitalism has to be fought culturally, etc. As a consequence, leftist politics and theory exist only as a reaction to the actions of the ruling class, precisely because Marxism is taken as a critical tool, and as such only reactive politics becomes possible.

Being a Marxist without being a Communist ultimately means that even when we speak of systematic change (from a Marxist perspective), we still end up lacking a practical point of view of totality from which to think action in equally global terms (that is, the Communist point of view). This lack of vision is the postmodern turn of the left. It is postmodern because it accepts Marxism as a de-constructionist tool, a critical weapon, but not as an invitation to build a new form of society – something that is equated with a “grand narrative.” In the same line and within the same horizon, class struggle has been replaced with the cultural politics of recognition. The problem with this turn is that it ignores class analysis and struggle and instead engages in the reformist level of improving what can be justified to be improved within the capitalist coordinates of social organisation.

Taking this as the starting point and its premise, the left is confronted with one of the darkest and weakest points of its history. There is a paradigmatic shift in the aims and goals of what the left stands for today. While accepting Marx’s fundamental thesis that capitalism is a global system, the left today struggles for moderate changes at the level of reforms within the socio-political system, which is to say, bringing the contradictions of capitalism to more acceptable levels and more palatable forms.

Anti-capitalism is not a radical position anymore and the left is the name of an ideological malady, of a historical anachronism. The left today is essentially conservative: it strives not only to resuscitate the past (i.e., socialism) but it struggles to preserve the welfare state, against the “deep state” (which is in itself a tricky concept), for democracy, against “fake news”, and so on.

For Marxists, capitalism is determined by the mode of production, and not some indeterminate socio-economic or political regime. Social systems are not determined by the political, economic, social or other rights the subjects enjoy or not. All these notions, together with the call for the return to or for rethinking socialism, are not only anti-Marxist; they also ignore the basic Marxist thesis that capitalism is not determined by the form of state power, but by the capitalist relations of production.

So, why should one go through a detour of the critique of the left, a marginal and insignificant political and ideological force that it is, when we are dealing with a situation of war, which according to pundits, might accelerate to a nuclear or/and world war? On top of this, why evoke the left, an ideology that from the perspective of the narrow Ukrainian nationalism, is always associated with being pro-Russian? Here is where the left if united with its opposite. The first lesson we need to learn is that today’s Russia is the negation of the Soviet Union (if one has the proclivities to align itself with it), and especially of Lenin. President Putin dismisses Ukraine and its nation and language as products of Bolshevism, that is to say, of Lenin. As he said in February 2022, “So, I will start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, or to be more precise, by the Bolshevik, Communist Russia. This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution.”[i] V.I. Lenin was very clear about this, and his book on the right of self-determination is worth recalling and rereading in our predicament, especially with regard to Ukraine. He argues that “those who fail to demand freedom of secession for Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, etc., etc.—are behaving like chauvinists, like lackeys of the blood-and-mud-stained imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie.”[ii] This is an incredible aspect of Lenin’s vision: his staunch anti-chauvinistic positions, which are clearly the very opposite of the existing regime in Russia. And one could add, of the majority of the contemporary left. The left should take a hard look at itself with who it is aligning itself with.

With the new geo-political and ideological shifts, the future of Ukraine looks very grim. It is likely that it will be forced into conceding about 20% of its territory to Russia and giving its rare earth (and all the other economic assets) to the US. No wonder a new joke is now circulating in Ukraine: “Territory to Russia, resources to the US, debt-repayment to Europe, Glory to Ukraine…”[iii]

There is no doubt that the main enemy of the new US administration is Europe. Here the USA has allied itself with Russia, China, as well as with right-wing and left-wing populisms, radical Islamists, evangelical Christians, post/anti-colonial forces, etc. The crisis in which both Ukraine and Europe in general find themselves might serve as a unique opportunity for Europe (and the left) to reinvent itself. The European Union, in its actual depoliticised structure and composition, stands for a negation of Enlightenment, the only genuine legacy of Europe worth fighting for. The EU is like a figure of the living dead, of a force which has no political efficacy: it struggles to remain alive, pretending it still has a grasp of reality. Against the unholy alliance against it, Europe should reinvent itself, in the spirit of the Enlightenment. This is not a long-term project, but it is a matter of innermost urgency; every lost day on this might have catastrophic consequences. Only in this way can it stand up for Ukraine. Instead of engaging in the endless guilty self-criticism and distancing from “Eurocentrism”, the left should insist on re-inventing what is genuinely emancipatory in the European legacy. In a way, the fate of Ukraine will decide this.

Notes:

[i] Address by the President of the Russian Federation, available online at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828

[ii] V.I. Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm

[iii] Thanks to Michael Marder for pointing this out to me.