>>1822035Youre right that the left begins in the french revolution, but the idea of opposing "hierarchy" is needless contrivance. The whole republican revolution in france (and america) was about capturing the state and instituting *constitutional* protections for the rights of persons in an attempt to procure universal political subjectivity (i.e. democracy). So i would say the left is concerned with justice, but a justice which is oriented around equality. Equality doesnt mean horizontalism.
>but america wasnt equalYes, because it modeled itself largely after the roman republic, with the separation of free citizens and slaves. Lincoln comes around later to give discourse to the case for an extended equality in citizenship, and marx was obviously a massive supoorter of lincoln.
My contention is that marx's major criticism with capital's internal contradictions is that it doesnt circulate commodities at a sustained rate of production, and so it's production is inherently tied to consumption, and while capitalists control production, they rule consumption too. So in my opinion, marx would be very happy with a capitalism that had a broader chain of distribution, or of mitigating the crises of overproduction through subsidies (which is largely what the keynesian revolution is about). The fruits of labour have greater reach to the masses. Thats why much of the left CAN support things like UBI or welfare, even though they are extensions of capital's contradictions.
The leftist impulse here in a consumerist politics is the flattening of distribution (even by the market), and so bringing equality by the formlessness of cosmopolitan life. But here see how a conservative will hate big cities and the welfare state. Conservatives are 'anticapitalist' in this case, and so their anticapitalism is in the name of a deeper political subjectivity, which i think is in the name of inequality (which is also why fascists are accused of holding back technology). Capital thus as our social relation contains a progressive and reactionary tendency. There is no formal anti-capitalist politics thus, but only a sublation of bourgeois society, as the communists understand it.
i believe it was zizek who said that marx wanted capitalism without capital. Its not totally untrue. The utopian socialists also wanted a sublation of industrial production while maintaining a mode of exchange