【Turn】Turn right! Why are we defending the net left today?

Original link: https://yuukoamamiya.github.io/p/pour-online-leftist/

Original address: Turn right! Why are we defending the net left today?

Original Author: Kaori Minamiya

Original Editor: Shi Chushan

Editor’s note: Backlash originally refers to the questioning of gender through specific media forms such as news, advertisements, magazines, romances, and talk shows, reflecting on the interaction between the feminist movement and the media and the backlash that feminism has suffered here. frustrated. It is more appropriate to borrow it in the context we are going to discuss now. Modern media use irony metaphors and various new forms of ideological annihilation warfare to continue and reproduce the castration and panic of left-wing ideological trends, and to make everything contrary to it. The appeal of the current hierarchical order is suppressed. At the same time, it is worth noting that the two sides confronting the front of the modern media are no longer a clear ideological confrontation, such as the free world and the Comintern. Now we share the same banner and support It seems to be the same doctrine, so it’s not surprising why @Cangxianluochen, the owner of the B station up, used an ironic title (content) like “Let’s Align” to attack the left.

I’m going to point out their true intentions here in the words of Lu Xun:

At that time, I was a little suspicious of those young people who called themselves “instructors” and Xu Maoyong, because according to my experience, those who pretended to be “revolutionaries” on the surface would easily frame others as “traitors” and “counter-revolutionaries”. Most of those who are “trotskyists” or even “traitors” are not righteous people; because they skillfully kill the power of the revolutionary nation, disregard the interests of the revolutionary masses, and only use the revolution for personal gain. To be honest, I even doubt that Whether they were sent by the enemy or not.

Foreword:

As “left-wing thought” seems to be more and more a “trend” of the moment, and criticism of “net left” is also emerging, this article attempts to point out that criticism based on populist and conservative positions – no matter what Whether the issues pointed out by these voices are true—cannot constitute real criticism, on the contrary, it is just an ideological attack full of prejudice and dogmatism; at the same time, this article also hopes to give a useful direction of criticism— What we have to do is not even deny the critical content of populists and conservatives (although they are largely the same), but to hope to “invert” it, to discover the hidden but “criticized” content of home” what they missed.

1. Who are the “friends of the people” and how they attack the “net left”

In the eyes of some people, “net left” seems to be such a synonym: full of petty bourgeoisie, likes to report some inexplicable names of dishes, detached from reality, only fantasizing and unwilling to take practical actions. As a result, the group of “net left” was successfully dismissed as a category, and critics were able to claim the position of “people”.

The author does not deny the reality of the above criticism, but we need to be vigilant to divide the “net left” into a group without authorization based on these characteristics, so as to use these characteristics for identification (this is the same as the infamous ” original first Laws ” are similar in purpose). If we borrow a Hegelian concept here (perhaps “friends” are here to accuse it of being a shameless post), this is the empty and dead abstract universality: everything in it is nothing. so different that even this generality itself is empty. If I were to give an example, it would be the ideology of twentieth century Nazism: **Jews are Jews for nothing but because they are Jews. **There is nothing practical under the general concept of “Jews” because it’s just something that fills the void (things that we can’t explain, such as economic crises, famines, murders, can all be explained as evil Jews control everything behind the scenes).

Under this logic, it is no longer important whether the “net left” really has the above characteristics. Once someone who fits this characteristic is found, he will be mercilessly placed under the banner of “net left”. As for those who don’t? It doesn’t matter, because the concept of “net left” does not need to actually refer to a specific person or thing to exist: as long as there is a person who meets the above conditions, even if there is no one, our “friends” can be very happy. It’s absolutely safe to hit the target with ease, without paying any price: even an intellectual one, because all the complex problems are compressed into a tautology.

By constructing such a concept of “net left”, populists have succeeded in confirming their position. A child who is just learning to speak can’t say, “I have three brothers, my brother, my brother, and me.” Because “I” is illegal in the statement “brothers”, “I” cannot be “I” “Brothers. By excluding “I” from the declarative sentence, the meaning of the sentence itself is legitimate. By the same token, right-wing populists (who occasionally claim to be “righteous leftists”) can only find their place precisely with the help of a “net left” image “disconnected from the masses”.

In other words, their “internal logic” is reversed: it’s not that there are people first, and then we find a group of “non-people” who are separated from the masses; ** instead, a position of “non-people” is first positioned , so as to determine their own coordinate system, and then they can become the role of “friends of the people”** with peace of mind. Friends here may feel offended to hear: “My attitude towards the people is absolutely sincere! Your self-righteous appearance is exactly the ugly attitude of the net left!” Yes, no one will deny the enthusiasm you feel emotionally And sincerity, but what should be known: Touch and enthusiasm “can be” the cheapest thing because it requires no thought and no money.

When some people shout “Material Dialectics” and hold high the “Dragon Slaying Book”, they actually have such an expectation: my ancestors have already helped me think about it, and I just need to get ready-made things, I don’t It’s not that I don’t reflect, I don’t think, on the contrary, when I was learning dragon slaying, I had naturally acquired reflection and was already on the side of the people. Even when some friends criticize the Internet Left for being a religious believer who only cites scriptures, they don’t realize that the real “believers” are not far from them. “Kneel down, open your mouth to pray, and you will believe!” “I” beliefs are all externalized into my actions here, and even this logic is completely reversed here: my beliefs are only in the actions I do , my prayer “replaces my mind” to believe.

Therefore, they are precisely the people who are furthest away from dialectics: neither Hegel nor Marx’s dialectics tells us that dialectics can be regarded as a ready-made thing that is only talked about, or that can be used directly. What dialectics needs to do is to draw general principles from “general things”, while “concrete analysis of specific problems” refers to the particularity of each dialectical movement link, and it is definitely not something that can be simply obtained by relying on experience or images. . Stepping back 10,000 steps, I said, “Thoughts should confirm their own reality/reality in practice”, but who is stealing their own standards for “practice” guidelines?

2. “Conservative” or “Progressive”, or, Criticism of Criticism

Although, as we said in the foreword, populist/conservative critiques of “net left” and their own ideological positions do not have real legitimacy. But the previous argument is also tantamount to scratching the surface.

Attentive readers may realize that the vast majority of attacks against the Internet Left are accusing the group of various deficiencies and vices, but in fact, such attacks always point to the denial of the entire left-wing ideological position. The book “Children of the Middle Class” once evaluated the left-wing ideological trend in France as “the rebellion of otherness within the bourgeoisie” and believed that this eventually led to the silence of the left-wing position itself; The criticism of the “Young Rebels” was never directed at the left itself, but, in Lenin’s words, was “criticism from the left”. However, conservatives will claim that the unreliability of the Net Left stems from the unreliability of its ideological stance, which itself loses its reality and can only be reduced to a mere castle in the air.

First of all, regardless of what kind of brain upgrades people’s thinking this wonderful and profound logic short-circuit comes from, what conservatives really want to express is a logic of “defending our modern life”: ** Not to mention left-wing criticism, it is Criticism of the entire social order, whether from the left or the right, is unreasonable. **In their eyes, capital can only be the culprit of brutal and ruthless intrusion, destroying the good life we ​​should have enjoyed. Anyone who tries to escalate conflict is misguided… In short, in their eyes, “our life” is something worth defending.

Therefore, their criticism of the Internet Left is not actually determined by anything else, but only by their own ideological standpoint , or (ironically) criticism of criticism. It is they who are really stuck at the level of “unreality”, because they cannot realize that there is still a distance, a gap, between “experience” and “general reality”. Dialectics does not bring anything more, it just brings out the contradictions, antagonisms and fissures that are already there, and dialectics does not try to bridge it, the process of thesis-antithesis to synthesis is not a unity of the two , but the “negation of negation” is to negate the existing thesis-antithesis framework. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx once ridiculed Proudhon’s vulgar dialectics as “only trying to eliminate the bad side of contradictions and keep the good side”, and finally went to a kind of vulgar conciliationism. The same applies to critiques of contemporary conservatives. Therefore, the materialist dialectical position that we really need to defend is the progressive position that breaks with the old things and the old order, not the conservative position that is empty of illusions about modern society and unwilling to face the contradiction itself.

3. What is the real way out for the “Internet Left”?

From this point of view, if we want to criticize the “Internet Left” from the left, we should not accuse them of having a problem with their position, or something else, but should point out that the “Internet Left” is really right and wrong precisely because it doesn’t. Really, thoroughly, and stay true to your position. **To let reflection remain in pure speculation can only be a dead end. As mentioned above, we will not deny the content of conservatives and populists’ criticism of “net left”, but criticize the position and purpose of such criticism. (In short, the form. In the essentialist part of the Logic, Hegel tells us that the form should not be regarded as a mere external expression of the content, on the contrary, the form falls into itself and becomes a special kind of content , that is, the so-called “concrete universality”.) The author once expressed his attitude in an old article ¹ : To allow speculation to fall into real reality, and to prevent philosophy/theory from “becoming” reality, it cannot be eliminated. (This is what Marx expressed in his “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”).

Of course, this does not refer to the kind of sneering that conservatives often have (the left people only dare to swear on the Internet, they can’t do anything in reality, they are just a group of Internet giants), ** we should regard this kind of sneer as a This kind of enemy’s aggressive method: everyone knows that their so-called “practice” can only be a meaningless suicide, but the most unrealistic fantasy. **The combination of theory and reality means that on the premise of being able to grasp the general appearance of reality through theory, recognizing the situation (what you can do and what you should do), and have the enthusiasm to give to it, and Courage to act, instead of being stuck in a page full of scriptures, stuck in some kind of fetishism/fetish for text/theory.

This article is reprinted from: https://yuukoamamiya.github.io/p/pour-online-leftist/
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.