CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

What’s Wrong With the American Left: Symbols Instead of Substance

Once class recedes and the professional class sets the agenda, politics changes character. It becomes a contest over symbols rather than substance, over the words we use and the images we project rather than the distribution of power and resources. This is the most visible fault to ordinary people, who can sense when a movement is more exercised about terminology than about whether they can pay for insulin.

I want to be careful here, because symbols matter and language has real effects. The mistake is not attending to them; it is letting them substitute for the material struggle that the tradition placed at the center. Harrington defined socialism as the democratization of economic decision making, the redistribution not merely of income but of control. Measured against that standard, a politics that wins a change in official vocabulary while ownership and investment remain untouched has won almost nothing.

This is a result that the powerful can live with comfortably, which is why the analysis of Chomsky and Herman in Manufacturing Consent is so pertinent. Their argument was that the media system filters public debate so that a narrow range of acceptable opinion gets aired while the fundamental questions of ownership and class are kept off the table. A left that pours its energy into symbolic contests does the filtering work for free, accepting a debate about representation........

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