Introduction to the history of the Left: Changes in the meaning of class struggles

With the Trotskyist group the Spartacist League/U.S., founded in 1966 and named after the German Spartakists who were in turn named after the leader of the great slave revolt, we come to be in a late, tertiary phase in the history of the Left. Unlike its predecessor namesakes, the Spartacist League has encountered no great defeat through which the truth of its historical moment could be revealed, for the SL has never been in a position to influence history at all. Its politics are rather the virtual politics of a propaganda group —like all other sectarian “Marxist” groups of the late 20th Century—and hence one can judge such groups only by the content of their ideas, in the absence of their effective historical action. This is where Platypus’s emphatically theoretical and ideological project of critique of the Left and development of critical historical consciousness of the Left might come into play.

For “orthodox Marxists,” the meaning of a Leftist politics comes down to a belief in a deus absconditus—a “hidden god”—the “class struggle,” which will, in the end, supposedly force the working class to take up its Historic Role. In the meantime all that such “Marxists” need to do is “hold the line” and repeat themselves like automata until someone, someday listens. This is called “historical”—or even “revolutionary”—”continuity.” In this way, the “progressive politics” is understood in terms of struggles against oppression instead of in terms of social emancipation.

Platypus rejects the assumption that “resistance” is necessarily a good thing. Nor, alas, can we take comfort, as our “Marxist” predecessors could, in the “struggles” of “the working class.” We do not believe that the problems of the Left over the last few decades, since the 1960s, can be understood as the result of “defeats” like that suffered by Luxemburg’s Spartakusbund in 1919. Platypus’s focus on questions of historical “regression” reveals a radically different problem and explanation from that of “defeat,” although conditioned by it. We argue that the greatest problems the Left faces—including the prospect of its own extinction—arise from within the Left itself and are deeply rooted in its own history. Indeed, for us, the Right is a secondary phenomenon and its victories are the result of failures of the Left. Hence our focus is primarily on criticizing the existing “Left” and the history of its problematic selfunderstanding, rather than “fighting the Right.” We do not share the false optimism that the “struggle continues,” but face the stark reality that the struggles that defined the historical Left ended a while ago, in failure. We try to understand the meaning of this historical discontinuity for the present.

In our next and first proper installment of this series on the history of the Left, we will turn to the historical origins of the “Left” in the late 18th Century.

1. See, for example: Spartacus Youth Club (Chicago), “Platypus: Pseudo-‘Marxist,’ Pro-Imperialist, Academic Claptrap” (November 6, 2007).

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