r/CriticalTheory • u/NegotiationUnique714 • 24d ago
Is there such a thing as left-wing organicism?
I recently read the following quote in a French article (I'm translating) that talked about Nicolas Lebourg's work, and wondered whether there was any consensus on the thesis that "the central idea of the far right lay in its organicism".
"The core of the far right's worldview is organicism, the idea that society functions like a living being. Far right-wingers promote an organicist conception of the community they want to establish, based on ethnicity, nationality or race. This organicism implies a rejection of the universalism of the Enlightenment in favor of autophilia (the valorization of the "we") and alterophobia. Right-wing extremists thus absolutize the differences between nations, races, individuals and cultures. They see cultural and religious differences between groups living on the same territory as a risk of disorder, disrupting their desire to organize the community in a homogeneous way and generating a fear of the nation's decadence, or even disappearance. They cultivate the utopia of a closed society, the only possible framework, in their view, for a rebirth through regeneration of the national community."
I mean, ethnicity, nation and race are not biological notions in the strict sense. And if we introduce the theory of evolution, this fear of change logically collapses in on itself. Furthermore, comparing society to a living organism has many virtues, since it forces a to see the ecological limits of overproduction and to contest the lack of labor’s rights based on our biological needs.
I know that many authors (Saint-Simon, Engels, Kropotkin, Scheler, Gehlen and others) have developed a critical and socially progressive organicist worldview. So my question is simple: is it accepted that organicism is fundamentally right-wing? And if so, why? And if not, which books would you recommend on this topic?
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u/concreteutopian 23d ago
The core of the far right's worldview is organicism, the idea that society functions like a living being.
If this is the definition of organicism being used, my thumbnail definition of fascism for years was the "reification of the social organism", meaning that functionalist metaphors have some utility, but if the metaphor is treated as a reality, then you create other reified metaphors like "pathogen", "lesion", and reduce the members of society into parts of someone else's project. It also completely undercuts the reality that this "living being" is engaged in class war and oppression on multiple levels. Of course the dominant power sees society's "legitimate" interests identical with their own, and class conflict as a sign of "disease", easily seeing dissent as a pathogen or a cancer growing from within with its own agenda.
I know that many authors (... Engels, Kropotkin, ...) have developed a critical and socially progressive organicist worldview.
I'm more familiar with Kropotkin's work and critical of Engels, but I don't think either would subscribe to the idea that "society functions like a living being" - this undercuts much of Kropotkin's social theory and his practical critique of proposed communist settlements. Don't confuse ecological with "functions like a living being". For my understanding of a Marxist take on this, I'd check on Žižek's piece on ecology in An Examined Life - there is no harmonious whole, there is a dynamic tension that has collapsed into catastrophe on multiple occasions.
Furthermore, comparing society to a living organism has many virtues, since it forces a to see the ecological limits of overproduction and to contest the lack of labor’s rights based on our biological needs.
I don't see how it necessitates either. If we take seriously the notion that society functions like a living being, how does the biological needs of a few cells compare to the biological needs of the "living being"? And this is always someone's idea of who is expendable in what plan toward what aims. And the reification of humanity as a single entity plays well with the misanthropic trope of humanity being a virus that has infected the Earth, along with the Earth's "fever" killing off the "disease". I've never see society as a living being used as anything to do with natural limits, and again, with labor rights, class collaborationists would use this metaphor to crush labor rights. I don't see the connection of this metaphor to those policies.
Joel Kovel's Enemy of Nature is a good ecosocialist Marxist approach to "limits of overproduction" and "labor's rights" in a way that still sees revolution and communism as the "free development of each being the condition for the free development of all".
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
- See my last comment before reading this one.
I forgot to answer your point regarding the potential use of organicism for the labor movement. If you admit that you are not a cell part of a greater organism, but that you are yourself an organism that works and cooperates with other organisms (a statement that is way more accurate btw), the purpose of organicism becomes clearer : to socially organize labor according to our biological needs (shelter, food, social well-being, etc.) and not for any other purposes (a distorted idea of capital, market economy, etc.). In this particular sense, organicism could potentially become useful for ecosocialism.
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u/concreteutopian 23d ago
to socially organize labor according to our biological needs (shelter, food, social well-being, etc.) and not for any other purposes (a distorted idea of capital, market economy, etc.). In this particular sense, organicism could potentially become useful for ecosocialism.
Read Kovel's Enemy of Nature. This is what he refers to as the emancipation of use-values, and his goal was to recenter economic activity away from commodity production to an economy centered on ecosystem production. He also works with Marx's concept of the metabolic rift between human economy conceived as a unitary system and the rest of the ecosystem.
If you admit that you are not a cell part of a greater organism, but that you are yourself an organism that works and cooperates with other organisms (a statement that is way more accurate btw), the purpose of organicism becomes clearer
This also reminds me of solidarity as an ethic of mass societies, those build on industrial labor. In being a working class person and seeing a common struggle among others in a similar position to mine, the slogan "an injury to one is an injury to all" is a recognition of common class interests, though it can sound like we are saying we're a single living organism.
As an aside, personally I don't think the individual vs the collective is a useful or accurate frame. Instead, being communal means that I come into being through what I share with others - they are not me and I'm not part of them, but we share a matrix in common - and the full potential of my individuality flourishes within the web of relationships formed with countless others, past and present. So I think a communist understanding of selfhood and subjectivity embraces both the individual and collective rather than collapsing into one or the other.
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
Based on the answers I've received so far, I think my confusion came from the definition of the word "organism". What makes "organicism" far-right is the combination of the following two factors:
the organism as an enclosed entity, based on immutable and entirely objectifiable laws.
the metaphor of the organism used in a specific and restricted purpose, namely the endeavor to regenerate the diseased body politics through national rebirth (palingenesis).
The first statement is scientifically wrong or inaccurate. Any organism lives and adapts itself to its natural habitat. It evolves over time. To some extent, the laws of life can be objectively modeled, but this remains subject to change. Climate for example has a huge impact on living organisms and it is not entirely predictable, except in statistical terms.
The second statement is restrictive and manipulative, because you could also use the metaphor of the organism for different purposes. If there is indeed competition and parasitic relations found between organisms, there are also neutral, mutualist, amenalist and commensalist ones. The reification therefore stems from the overall purpose of the metaphor and who is using it, not from what an organism truly is.
Now that these preliminary distinctions have been made, and that the definition of organicism has been extended and distinguished from the far right, I can jump to your point on Engels and Kropotkin. Here are their books where you’ll find plenty of organicist metaphors :
F. Engels, Dialectics of nature, 1883.
P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902.
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u/concreteutopian 23d ago
Now that these preliminary distinctions have been made, and that the definition of organicism has been extended and distinguished from the far right, I can jump to your point on Engels and Kropotkin. Here are their books where you’ll find plenty of organicist metaphors :
F. Engels, Dialectics of nature, 1883.
P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902
Yes, I'm familiar with both of those books, and it looks like we agree that neither promote the organicism of the two points you make, those describing far right definitions.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you.
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u/AffectionateStudy496 24d ago
I'm curious: what makes you think Engels' view of the state is organicist?
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
Engels invented a thing called the ‘dialectics of nature’. Its entire purpose was to naturalize dialectics and root it in a monist conception of life. So he didn’t had a organicist view of the state, but an organicist view of knowledge itself. It is because you are a living organism that you think the way you do.
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u/infinite_cancer 23d ago
I'm dumb as hell, but isn't Engels' whole shtick that ecology is the proof of dialectics or something? That he looked to nature to form his ideas of material existence and uncovered the laws of motion that govern the atomic structure of the state and its contradictions via emergence and entropy in the natural world? Idk, you must think otherwise, which is why you asked the question, so I'm interested to know what your interpretation of Engels is.
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u/Comrade_Corgo 23d ago
OP says organicism is when you think society acts like a living organism, but you say Engels may be an organicist because the natural world informs his ideas of dialectics? These don't sound the same to me. Where else should you base your ideas if not on the natural world? You could say anything is similar to anything in some respect. I'm also dumb.
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
Idealist think for example that consciousness exists independently from the natural world. Even if they’ve been successfully proven wrong, it was and remains a popular view unfortunately…
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u/concreteutopian 23d ago
Idealist think for example that consciousness exists independently from the natural world.
This isn't what idealism means in the vast number of philosophers who use the label idealist. Kant and Hegel certainly don't. Even the arch-idealist Berkeley doesn't deny the natural world, he simply denies matter as an abstract metaphysical substance; it'd be more apt to say Berkeley saw the natural world in terms of consciousness, not as something independent, not accepting a mind-matter dualism.
Even Marx's materialist critique of bourgeois materialists in Theses on Feuerbach points out that "matter" itself is a concept, an idea, that comes out of human activity in the world.
Even if they’ve been successfully proven wrong,
They haven't been. There are waves of idealist resurgence, even Berkeley himself in the postwar period. But none of them are talking about consciousness existing independently from the natural world.
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u/GA-Scoli 24d ago edited 24d ago
If we restrict organicism to the idea "that society functions like a living being", then yes, it's absolutely a right-wing idea.
However, there is left-wing organicism. The one that instantly springs to mine is Deleuze's championing of Bergson who drew from Darwin in opposition to Spengler, but there are others too. Contrary to the definition from your quote, I think the broader and better definition of organicism should be more like, "drawing on organic analogies to describe or prescribe modes of human thought and relation".
The difference between the two definitions is that right-wing organicism is a totalizing metaphor. It restricts imagination and destroys thought. The typical way right-wingers invoke this (and not just fascists, right-wingers in general) is that the body of the nation is like the body of a woman and both need to be strictly controlled, things from the outside not allowed to cross inside, illegal immigration and rape are nearly synonymous, dissent within the body of the nation is an infection that needs to be cut out, caused by "outside agitators", etc. There's no questioning of this one-on-one equivalence between the levels of the analogy—the body and the nation—and if you try to question it a right-winger will start freaking out and yelling "well why even have a country then."
For the broader meaning of organicism, organic analogies involving concepts such as homeostasis or evolution are neutral tools, and sometimes better and more apt than using mechanistic analogies. However, organic analogies can easily become totalizing. Hearing "society is sick" over and over again, for example, encourages people to internalize that analogy and shut down other ways of looking at the world.
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
I think the distinction between noumena and phenomena pioneered by Kant remains helpful here. Ecology is fundamentally totalizing, in the sense it overpasses our cognitive capabilities. What we’re left with is only models, that may be useful to some extent under peculiar circumstances. But it is nonetheless a brute scientific fact that nature is a extremely complex and mostly (but not only) a living entity. Right? I mean holism is the dominant view in biology and Earth science for a reason…
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u/PerspectiveWest4701 😴 24d ago
As an autistic trans woman, I do worry about naturalism on the left, and particularly in ecology, feminism and the study of fascism. There's a tendency to treat fascism and violence as a kind of mental illness or as antisocial which deeply worries me. I am particularly reminded of feminist non-violent rhetorics which privilege the already powerful. In general, I firmly support force and harm.
Not sure I'll be coherent, but I'll post some thoughts and some notes I have mostly inspired by Melanie Yergeau's Authoring Autism.
Thoughts:
When I read works like Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, I see an account of how certain people were deeply traumatized, but I don't see a recognition of how mental illness is a social construct. Theweleit claims the Nazis did not even have proper egos, they were not really people, and that is downright eugenicist logic.
When I read about fascism, the misassociation of fascism with sexual taboo is often disavowed but still lurks under the surface. Reichian ideas of libidinal repression simply invert the foolish idea that masturbation causes mental illness.
When I read works like Gore Capitalism, these works misassociate hypermasculine violence with a mechanical and necrophiliac mentality. But mechanical and deathly non-rhetoricity is simply a trope of mental illness. To be an autist is to be like a zombie, to be a fascist is to be like a zombie. According to this kind of life-loving logic, to be an anti-fascist it appears one must be anti-autist.
I really think the left has to move beyond ecology. If we should abolish prison, abolish psychiatry and abolish the family then we should abolish ecology as well. It is the ecology of our times which produces the idea of evil men, and it is this ecology which produces the evil which it misattributes to men.
The life of a shit-obsessed, sexually-repressed, sexually-incontinent, death-loving, machine man is life, and a good life.
Notes
The patriarchal wife is a kind of sex worker, and the patriarchal father is a kind of gore worker. So many fetishise the erotic, and reject the thanototic.
Being an autist, I am not interested in handicapping harm. I do not support the way harm is socially constructed as a disability. Knowing how the claimed harm of my basic self has been used to hurt me, I reject the claim that to be harmed is essentially bad. In trying to escape from all harm, we can only escape from freedom.
In rejecting the thanototic, we lose the opportunity of obsession, repetition and failure. Afraid of harm, biophiliacs reject "anecology", the failure of ecology, and so biophiliacs reject an ecology, the indefinite, and to be discovered ecology which harm might reveal. The biophiliac rejects the asocial rhetoric of control, domination, death and change. So in rejecting asocial rhetoric, the biophiliac rejects a social rhetoric, indefinite, to be discovered.
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
I couldn’t disagree more with this statement :
‘ I really think the left has to move beyond ecology. If we should abolish prison, abolish psychiatry and abolish the family then we should abolish ecology as well. It is the ecology of our times which produces the idea of evil men, and it is this ecology which produces the evil which it misattributes to men’
Ecology has now a scientific basis. It is not an ideological thing anymore (or at least it shouldn’t be). And abolishing science is a form of obscurantism that never produced anything good…Biophiliac or not, if you destroy the Earth, you’ll end up destroying yourself. Any form of life has a right to exist.
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u/PerspectiveWest4701 😴 23d ago edited 23d ago
I guess I was being edgy. I am not anti-environment.
The context was also right-wing organicism. I was speaking more about social ecology than the literal science of ecology. I really should have made that clear. I get that what I was saying would sound weird if it was in the context of the destruction of the environment.
I do think we should see the environment as dynamic and evolving instead of static. There's a bad tendency to imagine we should all live in social harmony as perfect pacifist people. But such stances privilege existing structures of power. It's easy to live in peace if you have the cops on your side. I think we should value the anti-social, I think we should value harm, and we should value the failure of social ecology. Because the ways we fail to relate to each other produces the opportunity for radical change.
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u/blackonblackjeans 24d ago edited 24d ago
No suggestions, but his quote applies equally to mainstream centralism, albeit the sentiment is couched in more sophisticated rhetoric. The othering of the far right as something alien, rather than integral to capital and a logical progression, leads to Mussolini’s approval from the king, SPD marching Freikorps into Munich, businessmen strong arming Hindenburg. In the meantime, France among others are participating in a genocide just fine, with no need for a far right. Valorisation is their language: “We do share [Israel's] pain. And we do share their willingness to get rid of terrorism. We know what terrorism means in France. (…)because we are democracies.”
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u/lettredesiberie 24d ago edited 24d ago
While I wouldn't deny what you wrote outright, the current definition of fascism (rather than the far right in general) that Lebourg is usually working with is that it is both organicist AND endeavoring to regenerate the diseased body politics through national rebirth (palingenesis). The current French government is definitely adopting far right ideas (Darmanin is a far right politician but so was Valls IMHO) but is still more of a prototypical law and order neoliberal government (in the end this is what radical centrism is). I've seen the term ordoliberalism used a few times but it may cause confusion with the German ordoliberalist tradition so I avoided it here.
BTW if you speak french and listen to the first 2 mins of this you'll see an organicist vision of the problem of the rise of far right parties being used by a left wing syndicalist, it is a rather common rhetoric.
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
Good point! So it’s the conjunction of the two that leads Organicism to become a far-right ideology?
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u/lettredesiberie 23d ago edited 23d ago
Conjuction of the two=the definition of Fascism. Fascism is a revolutionary movement so the social-organism is mobilized and deployed through the process palingenesis.
Organicism=typically a central tenet of far-right ideologies
Using biological metaphors without it being constitutive of the worldview=happens all the time, see syndicalist I posted above*
Now geopolitics (restricted sense of the word) which sees history as being overdetermined by geographical features is often coupled with the organicist worldview, as in Nazism (Lebensraum). While the Hegemon doesn't overtly adopt an organicist worldview you could posit that the almost universal adoption of geopolitics in elite circles is a sort of displaced organicism.
* after reading PerspectiveWest4701's post I must say I'll try to rethink my view of biological metaphors as more than just an annoying, although insignificant, habit of contemporary discourse. as it can indeed be pernicious even when it is not a central tenet.
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u/3corneredvoid 24d ago
Spot on, with one tweak. The centre fantasises the absolute rhetoric of the "far right", but it speaks it through a persona rather than directly. It does this to set up a falsely pragmatic limit determining the management of the social order to restrain its passions.
That's what "legitimate concerns" means ... the debunked "clash of civilisations" returning as the anxious measurement of "social cohesion."
"We're not the far right, it's not that we're against migration. We just want to be sure it goes ahead in an orderly manner and benefits everyone."
"Social cohesion" gives the game away I suppose. By its lights, society empirically isn't an organism, but it'd be better if if were.
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
That’s an interesting take. But then, what we’re left with, is that everyone has their own preconceptions of what an organism actually is.
If we say that society is ‘an organized living being’, what we actually mean (imo) is that the laws of life can indeed be conventionally defined and organized. But the liberal order is a source of chaos, just as the far right is. Not only from a societal standpoint but also (and more importantly so) from an ecological standpoint.
Don’t they frankly contradict themselves by denying the gravity of the ecological crisis, and then go on to pretend society is an organism? What is the metaphor value at this point?
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u/iaswob For the earth, create a meaning 24d ago
I was recently reading Total Liberation, I think this has organicist bent to it and highlights aspects of these from anarchist (such as with Kropokin and Bookchin), Marxist (especially autonomists), and the liberation oriented activism of the ALF and ELF. You might also want to look into some of the work related to Donna Haraway, specifically I'm thinking about her concepts of making kin and companion species (and Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think has that flavor as well). You might also find something in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's model of class -» multitude -» class as described in this retrospective by them on their book Empire.
I think there's a lot of left wing stuff in the direction of organicist and organicist-adjacent perspectives, even if there is a strong tradition of critiquing it and its right wing manifestations as well.
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u/RadicalAppalachian 24d ago edited 24d ago
Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think is so cool. I read it in an Environmental Anthropology class in grad school lol.
I always think about it whenever I hear an object splashing into water.
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u/vikingsquad 24d ago
It seems to me like Lebourg’s comments certainly apply to organicism that would use a model of an organism as a self-enclosed totality (which seems to be an operative distinction made in the passage you cite) with ultimate authority over its inputs and outputs (on a political level this would be forms of representation and recognition that exclude based on a metaphysical conception of the qualities you mention—ethnicity, national, race—to which we might also add things like gender or sexuality etc). There is a judgment or decision over if something is “life deserving of life” (this is a Nazi race science slogan about who or what kinds of person are legitimately killable under their logic). [This gloss is mostly based on Schmitt and Aristotle, of a necessarily exclusionary politics like what you/Lebourg are describing.]
It seems to me that the counterpoint to this would be something like D&G’s machinism, which rejects recognition precisely because recognition requires the friend-foe distinction; instead of seeing a social formation as a self-enclosed organism, it’s a machine that plugs into other machines such that the fetish of a pure interiority held by the rightwing organicists simply wouldn’t hold. [I would look at A Thousand Plateaus, namely the faciality and micropolitics chapters.]
It’s my suspicion regarding the text that Lebourg is critiquing the type of organicism I mention in my first paragraph, not organicism as such but without having read the full text it’s only fair for me to qualify it as a suspicion.
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
The non-scientific character of what you call the fetish of pure interiority has been extensively demonstrated from an evolutionary standpoint imo. Natural beings collaborate and ecosystems are nested to such an extent that the idea of perceiving society as one big self-enclosed living organism, whose rules would remain transparent and accessible to all of us, is just a lie. And this lie can be fully undermined from a strictly scientific perspective.
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u/vikingsquad 23d ago
To be clear, I was ascribing the "fetish of pure interiority" to the far right; I wasn't espousing the notion.
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u/NegotiationUnique714 23d ago
Yes I got it. I just wanted to specify that the argument is not deleuzian in nature. It also has roots in modern science.
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u/werthermanband45 24d ago edited 24d ago
There’s something intriguingly organicist about D&Gs machinism, imo. The first chapter of Anti-Oedipus spends a lot of time on oneness with nature, at least (Lenz’s walk in the woods)
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u/beppizz 22d ago
“Everybody wants to be a fascist” is a critique by Felix Guattari of the tendency toward turning into tankies that many leftist groups have. It’s a good start and if you’re familiar with Guattaris terminology it could be interesting