The Sharp Edge and the Bridge
On Drawing Distinctions
Some readers may have noticed, I certainly have, that a certain thread runs through most of my recent written works. That is the act of drawing distinctions. At least hopefully, not the petty drawing of arbitrary lines that has so often and so long plagued our movement, not the venomous splitting of who is "sufficiently pure" and who "must be cast into the darkness." That is childish sectarianism. The distinctions I aim to speak on are of a different quality entirely. We must seek to analyze the expression of the class struggle at the level of contemporary theory and program, and without such distinctions, a movement is lost in a fog of well-meaning phrases stumbling toward a cliff it refuses to see or name.
Why this recurring insistence? Why does a scientific approach to politics so often present itself as a sharp, clean cut between concepts that the popular discourse has fused together? Why does this process feel to many as though it is an attack directed against them personally? The foundation lies in the nature of the times we're living. We live in a time of tremendous ideological pressure, a pressure to blend, to harmonize, to smooth over. In a word, liberalism. The bourgeois market system compels this blending, it takes the language of liberation and packages it with the logic of exploitation, creating a seamless and sterile product that allows one to feel a revolutionary while acting as a perfect consumer. The bourgeois state compels this blending, it speaks of defending democracy while wielding a baton against the masses, calling the resulting mixture freedom. In this environment, the most radical intellectual act is often the simplest: to point at this fused mass and say, these are not one thing, but actually two things. These two things actually stand in opposition to each other.
Consider the popular conception of a political program. "Great ideas" surround us, demands piled upon demands, a veritable mountain of good intentions. Many tell me this is a sufficient enough political program, this wishlist, for unity of action. This distinction is foundational. Qualitative. A wishlist originates in the realm of desire and idealism. It asks, “What would a good world look like? Wouldn't that be nice?” and assembles an inventory of wishes. It is disconnected from the actual engine of history, from the actually existing class forces that grind against each other. A Marxist political program originates in material conditions. It asks, “What is the next necessary step in the development of the real struggle of the working class, given the present level of its organization and consciousness, and the disposition of the enemy’s class forces?” The wishlist is a utopian catalogue. The program is a bridge, built from an analysis of the river’s current and the materials flowing through that river. To confuse the two is to substitute moral dreaming, idealism, for scientific strategy, materialism. My intention has been forcing this distinction relentlessly, because a movement that marches on a wishlist will find itself marching in a flat circle.
The same imperative drives the distinctions made on all questions. The bourgeois society of the spectacle presents us with an endless parade of events that demand our passionate investment while leaving the material substructure untouched. Infatuation with the narrowest forms of practical activity is regularly sold as revolutionary activity. This is a deadly blend. Revolution is the forcible overthrow of one class by another and the reorganization of the social relations of production. It is a long struggle for power. I draw these distinctions without apology because the conflation of spectacle and science is a primary mechanism by which the ruling class disarms us ideologically, siphoning genuine rage and discontent into a harmless simulation of resistance and pacification. The material conditions of advanced capitalism constantly produce and reproduce this confusion, and so theoretical work must constantly, with relentless clarity, work to annihilate it.
These distinctions are not, must not become, a sign of a dogmatic transmission of rigid formulas. They are an expression of a unified, coherent analytical method, dialectical materialism. The method demands that a phenomenon be examined not by its name or its appearance, but by its material, class content, its role in the class struggle, its effects on the organization and consciousness of the proletariat. When this is done, the ostensibly fused concepts reveal their true, opposed natures. The superficial commonality that the charlatans of eclecticism seize upon, a shared word or emotion, an idea, dissolves under the acid of materialist investigation. The effect of a wishlist is to demobilize, the effect of a program is to organize. The effect of spectacle is to subordinate, the effect of scientific revolution is to liberate. The effect of capitulation is to disarm, the effect of a principled compromise is to prepare the next advance. The foundation for drawing these lines is not a rhetorical passive obsession with definitions and linguistics, it is the practical, life-or-death imperative of a class that seeks to navigate the increasingly treacherous terrain of the class struggle and lead the working and oppressed masses to victory.
And this brings me to the apparent contradiction that folks like to point out to me, I spend so much time drawing these distinctions, "separating" things, yet I condemn the drawing of sectarian distinctions and advocate for the broadest possible unity of the class.
What is the material content of a sectarian distinction? It is an unbreakable and uncrossable line drawn based on abstract formulas, historical analogies wielded like clubs, or based on questions of personality, which has the material effect of splitting and isolating the revolutionary forces in the face of the enemy. It is a distinction rooted in the superstructure of the movement's own internal quarrels, detached from the base of the mass struggle. What is the material content of the distinctions I seek to point out? They are lines drawn to identify what are actually competing class concepts and therefore clarify the mass struggle itself, to arm the working class with the ability to see through the ideological fog generated by the bourgeoisie, and to forge a program that can actually lead to the conquest of power by the working class.
A sectarian distinction divides the vanguard from potential allies in the service of a feeling of purity and superiority. A scientific distinction divides the working class from bourgeois ideology in the service of its revolutionary independence and mass organizational expression.
And here, I should address a criticism that has been leveled, sometimes in good faith, sometimes as a lazy dismissal. The argument says, by insisting on drawing such sharp distinctions, I am violating the dialectical law of the unity of opposites. The described method, so the argument goes, treats things, phenomena, etc., as permanently severed, mutually exclusive and unrelated categories, when a "true dialectician" understands that opposites interrelate, that each contains the other within itself, that the line between them is fluid, historical, and in constant motion. My method of making such distinctions must therefore be undialectical.
The unity of opposites is indeed a fundamental law of dialectics. Every phenomenon contains its negation. Life carries death within it. The bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers. A thing is, at once, itself and not itself, in constant motion, and to pretend otherwise is indeed an error of metaphysical thinking. The question here is whether drawing a sharp, principled distinction between two competing concepts, thought of as a unity, amounts to denying their dialectical interrelation, or whether the drawing of such distinctions is itself a necessary moment within the dialectical process of that struggle.
Examine what the unity of opposites actually means in practice. It does not mean that the opposites are identical. It does not mean the boundary between them is an illusion, or that one can substitute for the other without consequence. The unity of opposites means that opposites exist in relation to each other, that each presupposes the other, that they struggle against each other within a single framework, and that this struggle drives development. But struggle presupposes distinction. Without distinction, there is no struggle. Without struggle, there is no development. The dialectic does not dissolve opposites into a bland soup. It identifies them, clarifies their relation, and traces their motion. The first act of dialectical cognition is to properly distinguish. The second is to trace the unity. The error is not in making the distinction. The error is in stopping at that point.
A concept, in the dialectical sense, is a unity of opposites. The unity is a structured, tension-laden relationship between distinct things. The concept of a commodity, for instance, is a particular form of unity of use-value and exchange-value. These are opposites. They exist in tension. They interrelate. But Marx does not begin Capital by saying use-value and exchange-value are one and the same, or that the boundary between them is arbitrary and unimportant. He begins by distinguishing them with surgical precision. Only then can he demonstrate their dialectical unity in the commodity form. The distinction is the precondition for understanding the dialectic.
This is what I mean by a dialectical distinction. It is a distinction drawn not to freeze and separate reality but to set it in motion. It is a distinction drawn in order to understand the struggle between opposites, the process by which one passes into the other, the conditions under which a compromise becomes a capitulation, a reform struggle becomes a revolutionary rupture, a spontaneous outburst becomes a disciplined program. So, the criticism is still instructive, but it is inverted. It is not the drawing of distinctions that abandons the dialectical method. It is the refusal to draw them, the flight into an undifferentiated unity where everything blends into everything else, that is the true abandonment of dialectical materialism for a lazy idealism.
There exists a battle on two fronts, a struggle against two deviations from the proletarian class line that are themselves a blended pair of opposites. On one side is right opportunism, the pressure to dissolve distinctions, to blur revolutionary politics into reformist administration, to turn a program into a wishlist and compromise into capitulation. Its watchword is, “These things are all, in the end, the same, so don't be a splitter.” On the other side is “left” dogmatism, the pressure to multiply distinctions into a thousand tiny, sterile splinters, to mistake radical phrase-mongering for revolutionary activity, and to transform the necessary boundary of the party into an impassable moat of jargon and impossible demands. Its watchword is, “This, and only this, and only my very exact version of this, is the one true path, and all else is betrayal.”
My intention is to stand against both deviations and struggle toward a coherent, collective, disciplined working class consciousness. To draw the line where the line must be drawn, and to refuse to draw one where it serves nothing but vanity and the comfort of a small circle. A scientific line clarifies and arms. A sectarian line obscures and scatters. The method for telling them apart is the concrete analysis of concrete conditions, applied without sentimentality and without mercy, beginning always with the fundamental question: does this distinction advance the real movement of the working class toward the conquest of power, or does it stand in the way?