The first tendency is the counterculture left. Its affect tends to be joyful and collective, its focus is libertine, it is concerned with furthering the project of micropolitics and counterculture. It construes politics as an act that itself is liberating, it relies on a theory of the commune as a site where experimental forms of living should be furthered. Its advocates tend to be highly ensconced in bourgeois institutions in part because much of its praxis entails a radicalization of welfare for the poor and the marginal. It maintains a relationship to bourgeois institutions that will often support forms of paternalism as long as that paternalism is giving cover to marginal groups. It maintains the view that the subject of revolution is fully contingent, and that there is no transitive relation of any particular class to the social structure or to labor. If anything, they follow the liberal and progressive liberal view that within American society it is black populations that remain the only viable revolutionary subject.
Rather, this tendency of the left conceives of the left as needing to remain in fidelity to the working class as possessing a transitive relation to the social structure. It will tend to maintain that the task of the left is to independently organize the working class for emancipation. Its affect risks falling sway to frustration due to the resistance it experiences with liberal institutions as well as with the counterculture left. The forces of liberalism and leftism insist that any determined or transitive theory of class emancipation will risk fomenting an impending fascism, to which the counterculture left and the liberal left claim is imminent. It is to this Leninist expression of the left that we must center the reinvention of leftwing practice, but only by carefully resolving the basis of rivalry it has with the counterculture left
Competitive bourgeois individualism not only reproduces a fetishism that conceals the true basis of class-based exploitation that retains existing class hierarchies, it adheres us to a form of doing politics that is illusory.
What anchors the left is not merely an idea of the left; the left is defined by the organization of social and class forces capable of revolutionizing the existing class forces that perpetuate exploitation. This means that the left is defined both by its utopian impulse to remain committed to the ending of exploitation and oppression, combined with a rational and materialist strategy for achieving emancipation.
What post-Marxists who insist that the left need only rely on a contingent series of social groups and not the wide scale organization of the working class get wrong about the meaning of the ‘abolition of the existing order’ is that they fail to see that Marx and Engels formulated a political vision from the class standpoint of the working class.
Marx at one point says that communists should help to remind existing struggles why they struggle, which is a statement that requires some parsing out to fully understand. Because if you have rejected the necessity of the cultivation of a political organization that is grounded in the standpoint of the working class and you read this statement, you could quite easily find yourself complicit with the post-Marxist view that all struggles are contingent. But the notion that there is a contingency of struggles only negates Marx and Engels’s core insight into the independent organization of the working class.
The vision of bourgeois politics is a reflection of the logic of the market, and the logic of the market molds the wider field of politics as a web of fetishism, i.e., bourgeois politics covers over class-based forces, it conceals the real basis and therefore the true function of class power and domination. Marx and Engels also realized that this fetishism is so entrenched that it is necessary for the working class to develop a distinct worldview and thus to subtract from bourgeois institutions.
some struggles (like tenant unions) are easily reducible to marxist conceptions, while others (like medicare for all) are more involved (people don't often say "you can leave your shit job without fear", rather its "wouldnt it be nice to not pay bills"), one is marxist-ish, the other is liberation-ish, while talking same policy. but obviously not all struggles are easily reducced to class interests tbh