Interview with Daniel Randall – 4 July 2024

Daniel Randall, one of the three principal co-authors of the Left Renewal text, spoke to Philippe Mesnard, from the editorial board of the journal Mémoires en jeu in July. The French translation of their conversation is due to be published by Mémoires en jeu in November. The English original is below, which we post with thanks to Philippe and others at Mémoires en jeu for allowing us to publish it in advance.

PM: How did you and your two partners come up with the manifesto and launch this critical reflection?

DR: I’m not sure I would use the word “manifesto”. The text has a mostly accidental genesis. The three of us, myself, Ben Gidley and Daniel Mang, are members of an e-list which brings together activists and scholars working on critical analyses of antisemitism, particularly from a left-wing standpoint. There was some discussion on that list in the days and weeks after 7 October about the need for an intervention that critiqued some of the prevailing moods on the left, in terms of cheerleading for the Hamas attacks, and sketched out an alternative perspective. A number of people started a collective drafting process, and myself, Ben, and Daniel ended up as the principal co-authors simply because we happened to be the people who put most time into that.

In that process of drafting, a number of other people helped revise and rewrite, some of whom were amongst the original co-signatories. We published the text in December 2023. It was no more consciously directed than that. The three of us did not get together with the aim of launching a common political project. And we don’t see the Left Renewal text in those terms; quite apart from anything else, there’s a lot of political differences between the three of us, and certainly a huge range of differing views amongst the co-signatories.

The text doesn’t have the necessary degree of programmatic clarity to qualify as a manifesto. It’s a critique, an intervention, hopefully a spur to wider debate and discussion. We wanted to draw together a common critique of what we saw as some problematic trends on the left and at least adumbrate a potential alternative, and then see where the discussion went.

And have many people engaged in that discussion?

Yes. Certainly more than we were expecting. I think all three of us thought we would maybe get a handful of people who might want to put their names to the text, it would live on the internet, and that would be that. But it has definitely resonated with a layer of activists, which is quite politically heterogeneous within itself. People have co-signed the text from a diverse range of left traditions.

There’s also been criticism of the text, of course, some of it constructive and in good faith, some less so. We’re keen to platform and engage with constructive criticism. We’ve published a number of critical responses on the website and would certainly welcome more. In the immediate term, our main hope for the text is that it will continue to stimulate discussion, in the first place amongst the layer of activists for whom the critique resonates, so they can take that critique into the movements and milieus they’re part of.

In your text, you use the word “reactionary” in different contexts – to describe the far right, but also to describe trends on the left. Could you explain your use of this term? It has a very different meaning in French, where it’s synonymous with the far right.

We’re using it to denote particular policies or perspectives that we see as inimical to the egalitarian, universalist, democratic values we believe the left should affirm.

It’s interesting you raise the idea of reaction as a political property of the far right. We’re critiquing far-left apologism for forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and I think one can certainly see those forces as expressions of a far-right politics in their particular contexts. So in a sense, leftist, or would-be-leftist, apologism for them can be seen as an expression within the left of policies and perspectives that more properly belong on the far right.

Having said that, trying to map all of this precisely onto a left-right spectrum is not necessarily the most clarifying way of thinking about it. I certainly consider many of the positions promoted by Stalinism, such as its ultra-statism, its militarism in certain contexts, and often its nationalism, to be “reactionary”, and as more properly belonging to the far right rather than the far left. One might make that point as a kind of rhetorical flourish. But in historical terms there’s no point denying that Stalinism has roots “within the left”, so to speak, and that its ongoing influence, where it has it, is within left-wing milieus.

In your text, you critique the left’s “fetishisation” of Israel-Palestine. Do you see in this a rise of a new kind of Orientalism?

Yes, very possibly. The usage of the term “Orientalism” in contemporary radical discourse obviously comes mainly from Edward Said; his work and legacy is interesting to discuss on its own terms. I think there are threads in his politics as I read them, humanist, democratic threads, that totally jar with the ways in which his work is superficially applied by some on the contemporary left. His writing, or sometimes just his name, is often invoked and evoked to buttress political conclusions that seem to me to run counter to the things he himself was arguing. Said is actually quoted in the Left Renewal text. I think there are problems and limitations with his concept of “Orientalism”, but his perspective on Israel-Palestine was rooted in a kind of democratic humanism that I think has great value.

That’s somewhat tangential to your question – so, to respond to it more directly, yes, I think one could argue that the way some currents, particularly on the western left, have a hyper-romanticised view of certain struggles has a kind of Orientalising effect.

When we talk about the left “fetishising” Israel-Palestine, we are not arguing that the issue is unimportant or unworthy of activist energies. We’re critiquing the way that it is essentialised, divorced from its historical and contemporary contexts, and seen almost as the wellspring of all social ills. It’s implicitly seen as being globally constitutive in and of itself, rather than as a symptom and product of regional and global trends.

The fetishisation of the situation also has a dehumanising effect. It treats both Palestinians and Israeli Jews as avatars for essential forces, rather than real people. It inhibits efforts to build solidarity with actual democratic struggles. If you see something as a cosmic drama, impelled by historically-transcendent forces… that’s almost Manichean, a dualism of good and evil, and there’s no real way out of that. Framing things in those terms can seem very radical and galvanising, but it’s actually a disempowering and ultimately demoralising perspective.

You’ve argued that the left has blind spots when it comes to situations of violence and oppression in other parts of the world, to which it doesn’t devote the same focus or apply the same analyses as for Israel-Palestine. Is this one of the conditions of what you and others call “campism”?

Yes, there’s an inextricable linkage here. There are many struggles around the world which some currents on the left ignore, downplay, or even take reactionary positions towards, because they don’t fit into neat binaries of “imperialism” vs. “anti-imperialism”. In my analysis, campism, the idea that leftist politics internationally is about lining up with one geopolitical bloc against another, is the root of many of the trends we’re critiquing. It is part of the immense historical distortion that was applied to leftism by Stalinism. That is a historical experience which is still having an effect and has not at all been adequately confronted or worked through.

The campist schema is still prevalent across parts of the left, although not in a uniform way. There are some currents on the international left which previously promoted campist perspectives, but which have come to be quite critical of campism in general, and have produced important critiques of campist approaches to China, Russia, or Iran. But when it comes to Israel-Palestine, they don’t seem to be able to apply the same critical analyses, and end up recycling the same campist ideological mechanics they critique in other instances. Exactly how and why is worthy of some interrogation.

It’s important to stress that developing an anti-campist leftist analysis of Israel-Palestine is not about adopting a position of neutrality or saying, well, because we don’t want to replicate campist modes of thought, we’re not going to take sides. There is a material situation of national and colonial oppression taking place. That’s being enacted in a spectacularly brutal form by the Israeli state at the moment, via the massacres and destruction in Gaza, and the intensification of the occupation of the West Bank. Palestinians are oppressed as a national people, and any emancipatory politics has to be on their side in the basic sense of supporting their right to self-determination.

But it’s not necessary to then say that the entire Israeli Jewish national community belongs to the camp of imperialism and is a historical illegitimacy, and to valorise any form of opposition to Israel, regardless of its subjective political content. That’s the position that a lot of the far left has ended up in on this question, basically because of the dominance of campist thinking. We need to break out of that, and proceed instead from positive principles: self-determination, consistent democracy, equality of rights.

Obviously that implies taking sides in the immediate situation of national oppression between the Israeli state and the Palestinian people. But it doesn’t imply the kind of attitude towards Israeli Jewish nationhood that is prevalent across much of the far left. It doesn’t imply the conferring a kind of historical essence on either of the two peoples, or any people.

This tendency towards essentialisation, the idea that a particular national community is transhistorically “good” or “bad”, is, again, a kind of crude campism. It is not compatible with the pursuit of universal equality and rights. Universalism and humanism are both very much contested across much radical discourse and activism today. To me, universalist humanism is an essential “philosophical”, if you like, grounding for the left-wing project. Why oppose oppression and exploitation at all, why not just accept them as inevitable products of history, unless we see them as constraining and denying basic rights to which humans should be universally entitled?

But universalism and humanism are now often rejected as emanating from a European Enlightenment seen as latently white-supremacist and colonial. I think this is both an ahistorical misunderstanding of how these ideas developed, and an elision of an intellectual moment which was actually comprised of several strands, often in tension or conflict with each other.

Does the contemporary left also make a critique of nationalism from the same perspective, seeing it as a 19th-century idea?

There is a certain degree of selectiveness and inconsistency in the way the contemporary far left thinks about questions of nationhood and national rights. So, for example, it’s quite en vogue in some sections of the far left to evoke the history of the Bund [the General Jewish Labour Bund, a Jewish Marxist party founded in 1897 and based on the mainly Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class of Eastern Europe], which is seen as offering a non-statist, anti-nationalist – that is, anti-Zionist – answer to the question of Jewish peoplehood and collectivity. The Bund is held up as if its approach is applicable today. But often, the same voices which romanticise and idealise Bundism will vicariously adopt narratives that are absolutely statist-nationalist when it comes to other national peoples, including the Palestinians.

Quite apart from anything else, this does a disservice to the theoretical history of Bundism. Their position wasn’t that Jews should not self-determine at the level of a nation state, but other peoples should; they had a sophisticated theory of nationhood, significantly influenced by the so-called “Austro-Marxists” in the Second International, which advocated cultural autonomy for national groups within multinational territorial units, rather than national self-determination in the form of separate states, which was advocated by Lenin and others in the movement.

I do see national self-determination, up to and including independent statehood, as a legitimate democratic demand today, and one that remains important in ongoing instances of national oppression, such as Palestine, Western Sahara, Kurdistan, West Papua, and elsewhere. But I also think it’s important for the left to develop a universalist critique of nationalism, and indeed of nationhood, as a social construct which is ultimately an obstacle to class politics. There’s a lot of value in that, especially in a world in which the globalising tendencies of capitalism have connected workers of different nationalities in ways previously unseen and perhaps unimaginable. Capital is profoundly global, and the resistance to it has to be similarly transnational. It is very much part of my political aspiration to see more open borders throughout the world, and eventually no borders. Developing a class politics that can go beyond national borders does require a critique of nationalism and nationhood. But that critique needs to be applied consistently, to nationalism as such.

The usual justification for the selectiveness and inconsistency is the distinction between “nationalism of the oppressed” and “nationalism of the oppressor”. But that distinction has limits. I wouldn’t want to overstate the case here, obviously the nationalism of an oppressed or colonised people has different immediate political implications to the nationalism of the people of a colonising state. But history shows us that the categories of “nationalism of the oppressed” and “nationalism of the oppressor” are traversable. Zionism itself undeniably emerged as the response of a section of an oppressed people to their oppression, but those origins didn’t prevent it from having an oppressive material impact on another people when enacted in a process of state foundation. The fact that an ideology or movement emerges from, or is based on, an oppressed people, and represents a response to their oppression, doesn’t guarantee that its subjective political content will be progressive.

Ultimately, democratic rights are only meaningful if they are universally applicable and accessible. To advocate the right to national self-determination for some national peoples but not others is not reconcilable with egalitarian politics. The left needs to be consistent; that’s why we gave our text the subtitle “for a consistently democratic and internationalist left.”

In your text, you mention the abandonment of class analysis and class politics. Can you expand on this?

Again, this, for me, is fundamental. This is also perhaps one of the points of contention between myself and my two co-authors; I’m probably the most “class fundamentalist” of the three of us. I’m not, I hope, a “class reductionist”, in the sense of seeing every issue as reducible to class, or believing that all other oppressions will simply come out in the wash of the class struggle. But I do see class, and particularly the wage relation, as absolutely fundamental, in a structural sense, to what capitalism is. I believe that gives class a certain structural privilege as a basis for organisation and struggle.

One of the other effects of Stalinism’s distortion of left-wing politics was to detach the socialist project from the agency of the working class. This is one of the things that provides it with its universalism, because the global working class is a potentially universal agent.

I stress “potentially”; I don’t believe there’s a millenarian inevitability to the proletariat fulfilling its historical mission. Its role as an agent of universal emancipation, which can not only institute its own class rule but abolish class society, exists as a potential, one that relies on the subjective application of human will, which in turn relies on the development of consciousness. But that potential role is a function of material, structural realities.

How does that fit with the current situation in France, where many working-class people are voting for the far right?

I’m not making a moral case here, I don’t see working-class agency in moralistic terms. For me, working-class agency is about the position of the working class as a social collective under capitalism, in terms of its relationship to production. But I don’t think having a particular relationship to production necessarily imbues you with a higher morality, on an individual level. To actualise potential agency requires consciousness. That has to be fought for; the battle of ideas is a key terrain of struggle.

Stalinism replaced working-class agency with the agency of the Stalinist states, the Moscow-led bloc, as the vehicles for creating socialism. In today’s degraded version of post-Stalinist campism, the horizon of socialism often doesn’t even feature. The maximum extent of political ambition is “multipolarity”, which is simply about boosting the power of some capitalist states against others. Here, working-class agency is eschewed in favour of the agency of clusters of states, and non-state paramilitary actors allied to them such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which oppose US hegemony. These forces necessarily cannot be universal agents, as their subjective political projects are particularist and chauvinist.

And supported by Iran.

Yes, indeed. One of the many ironies here is that currents on the left that consider themselves unimpeachably “anti-imperialist” are frequently apologists for one side in a rivalry between imperialisms, cheerleading Iranian regional imperialism against Israeli regional imperialism, or claiming that Russian or Chinese imperialism represent progressive bulwarks against US domination. I see it as an almost inevitable consequence of the abandonment of working-class agency that you end up substituting these reactionary agencies in its place.

It’s been put to me that this argument is a bit shallow, because if you look around the left in many western countries, you will find people who are very committed, enthusiastic, and sincere partisans of workers’ struggle in their domestic context, whilst also being apologists for Putin or Hamas. Of course, that’s true. But being an advocate of workers’ struggle in your own domestic sphere is not the same as having a consistent worldview that is rooted in independent working-class politics internationally, in the idea of the global working-class as a universal agent.

My last question is about your sharp critique of contemporary “decolonial” thinking. You critique this from the standpoint of Marxist analysis; there’s an apparent paradox here, as many decolonial thinkers come from a Marxist background. But there seems to have been a development in very different directions, and a potential split between Marxism and “decoloniality”.

I should point out that I’m not an academic, or a scholar in anything but the most amateur sense, so I’m not entirely au fait with all the trends in the academy, where a lot of this discourse plays out. But, in my perhaps limited understanding, I see a criss-crossing of lots of different threads. Some contemporary decolonial thought was presaged by, or has some intellectual relationship with, postmodernism. Many of the originators of postmodernism also came out of Marxist traditions, but developed in a quite different direction.

Of course, Marxism should not be treated as a hermetically-sealed, canonical body of thought or analysis that can’t be revised or developed or improved upon. Part of the impulse behind the broad gamut of theoretical inquiry from within which at least some decolonial thinking emerges is an effort to respond to what were seen as the limitations of Marxism on questions of race or colonial oppression. That’s a legitimate impulse, even if I might disagree with exactly how the limitations are identified, or the perceived deficiencies supplied.

But I do think there is a particular form of decolonial analysis, now quite dominant across some radical activism, which is ultimately a form of campism. It presents coloniser/colonised, or settler/indigenous, as the globally-constitutive binary. It essentialises the very categories it purports to critique, and creates blocs into which not just states, but whole peoples, can be neatly categorised.

This effectively rules out class politics; on the one hand, you’re writing off any progressive potential for the working class of the “coloniser” nations, as those nations as a whole are seen as defined in a fundamental and immutable way by their colonial privilege, with their working classes bought off and complicit. And you’re dismissing any specific agency for the working class of “colonised” nations, by blurring out distinctions of class, and, in fact, also of gender oppression and so on, within those societies, in the name of, usually vicarious, national or communal particularism. So class politics is off the table.

There is also pushback and critique, including from within academia. The Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s book Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, presents a very incisive critique of some of these trends as applied to Africa. The South African scholar, Zine Magubane has written universalist critiques of some contemporary anti-racist and decolonial thinking. She talks about the need to reaffirm class as a “universal analytic category.” Scholars and writers like Kavish Chetty, Camila Bassi, and Kenan Malik have also critiqued “decolonial” theory from broadly universalist perspectives. And Workers’ Liberty, the revolutionary socialist group I’m part of, has recently published a short pamphlet, Critical Notes on Postcolonial Theory, which attempts to elucidate a Marxist, class-based critique of some of these trends. These debates, around, for example, universalism versus particularism, are part of the discourse into which the Left Renewal text is seeking to intervene.

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