Groucho Marxism

A month ago today I received an unexpected Christmas present: a book by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman entitled Moral Ambition. I had read and enjoyed Bregman’s first book, Utopia for Realists, so I was keen to give this one a go as well. Fast forward a month and, having just finished reading Moral Ambition, I thought it would be helpful to pull out some key themes. Bregman begins his book by highlighting the deep and corrosive ennui experienced by so many people who find themselves doing jobs that are (at best) pointless. Here Bregman is channeling the late, great American anthropologist David Graeber, who first highlighted this in an article published in 2013 entitled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.

I still remember the feeling of elation when I first read this article over 10 years ago. It felt as though Graeber had managed to articulate everything that I intuitively knew was wrong with the working world. I had already been working in office jobs for around 10 years at that point and had always felt like a square peg in a round hole. There was a phoniness and a lack of authenticity about it that gnawed away at me. Graeber’s article enabled me to finally see that what I had always suspected: I wasn’t broken, the system is. We live in a world where millions of people spend the majority of their working lives doing jobs they secretly think don’t need to be done. Being forced to perform such bullshit jobs inevitably takes a toll on your mental well-being.

In Moral Ambition, Bregman argues that the financial, organisational, technological, and analytical skills that so many of us currently waste doing bullshit jobs could be used instead to make tangible improvements to the world. Of course, we all know that is true in theory, but Bregman makes the case that it is also true in practice. He does this by citing a number of historical examples of people who have used their skills to improve the world, from people sheltering Jews in Nazi-occupied France and the Netherlands, to people in the 20th-century US naming and shaming naked abuses of corporate power, to people in the 18th century decisively campaigning to end slavery. And to be fair, these stories are genuinely inspiring.

Moral Ambition also has important things to say about the nature of effective leadership, including distributing responsibilities and allowing room for people to take ownership. Whilst provocatively claiming that to make a difference, you have to create something like a ‘cult’, Bregman is clear that top-down decision-making is ineffective and can be actively harmful. He is rightly critical of the so-called ‘effective altruism’ movement and its nonsensical belief that it is possible to accurately quantify the future costs and benefits of any particular course of action (see my previous blog post on the philosophy of utilitarianism for more details on this). Bregman also argues that to achieve our goals, we sometimes need to make alliances with people we don’t 100% agree with.

In making this last point, Bregman seems to be having a not-so-subtle dig at those of us on the left of the political spectrum. It is a well-known cliché that the left always ends up expending all its time and energy on factional infighting instead of actually getting anything done. Whilst this claim is wildly exaggerated, there is definitely a kernel of truth to it. Just the other day I witnessed a Twitter spat between two leftists I otherwise admire which was sparked by the first criticizing ‘Trotskyists’, a group to which the second claims to belong. I don’t really see why we need to factionalize ourselves based on a long-dead leader of a country that no longer exists. This kind of infighting is unhelpful and alienates the left from the ordinary people it claims to represent.

More broadly, a debate is currently being waged on the British left on whether we should give our support to the Green Party or to Your Party. Proponents for the Green Party argue that it is much better organised, is not mired in infighting (unlike Your Party), and has a much better chance of making gains at the next general election – all of which is undoubtedly true. Proponents for Your Party, on the other hand, argue that the Green Party is a reformist organization that does not represent working people, has no program to dismantle existing power structures, and will not bring about the end of capitalism – all of which is true as well. For these people, supporting the Green Party makes little more sense than supporting Labour.

Bregman would almost certainly argue that this precisely the kind of situation where we on the left need to form an alliance with people we don’t 100% agree with (i.e. the Greens). In Moral Ambition he describes a number of successful movements that have made tactical compromises and accepted delay in order to arrive at a more secure if less positive outcome. However in putting forward this argument, Bregman seems to negate his book’s central thesis, which is that we should aim high! This highlights a conundrum that we on the left need to grapple with. On the one hand we must stick to our principles, but on the other hand there are times when we need to be pragmatic and do what needs to be done to achieve our short-term aims. The key is to do the latter whilst making sure we also do the former.