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THE FEAR OF PARTICULARITY ON THE LEFT


John Clarke
July 24, 2018


Some time ago, an especially dogmatic and thus ultimately unendurable Facebook friend, made a testy response to something I put up on the refugee crisis. This person denounced me for even speaking of a 'refugee crisis'. The person believed that it was because it was, they asserted, really a crisis of capitalism. That struck me as rather like condemning someone for saying they were eating an orange on the grounds that what they were actually eating was fruit.

What I unfortunately see all the time among dogmatic and narrow thinkers on the left, is a stubborn refusal to consider engaging in discussion of incredibly important particular issues and developments out of a fear that this might contaminate previously established general concepts. By doing this, however, those fundamentally correct concepts are reduced to mere lifeless abstractions. Thus, rather than test previously established conclusions against a developing reality, that reality must be made to conform to a previously determined letter of the law. The lengths that some will go to in this regard are quite remarkable.

I recently put up another post on Facebook, something about impoverished disabled people in Bolivia demanding a bare pension and facing police brutality in the process. Someone, not the same person as above, replied that these people were dupes of the American State Department and even questioned if they were really disabled. You encounter a blanket view, in fact, that popular struggles in oppressed countries can only serve imperialism.

Social democracy is not a revolutionary force and socialism will not come from a vote in some Parliament, but to suggest that Jeremy Corbyn is no different to Tony Blair and the rejuvenation of the Labour Party is only a distraction is absurd. Without relating to and intervening in such developments, we are reduced to forming a small band of like minded people and preparing for the Revolution in the way you wait of the number nine bus to show up.

Liberals constantly present Trump as an inexplicable evil who came out of nowhere. He emerged from what came before, of course, but to suggest that the present ascendency of the most ruthless and reckless elements in the USA ruling class is of no consequence is disorientated. At times I've even been challenged when I have suggested that the Israeli leadership is discarding pretensions of liberal democracy and a 'peace process' and working to complete the colonial project, on the grounds that I am sowing illusions in liberal Zionism.

The general concepts about capitalism and its global order that we have developed are of enormous importance but they have validity only to the extent that they are applied. They ossify if they are misused as a way of blocking consideration of particularity and a
meaningful intervention in the complex and rapidly developing reality of the capitalist crisis and class struggle.

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