“Seven proposals for a new left-leaning culture”

As it persists, based on the models of 19th-century industrialism, the left lacks the cultural resources to renew itself. Its vocabulary continues to be managed by the program of the realm of needs instilled and governed by consumerism, which oppresses the realm of freedom. Unable to produce a new anthropology as a mode of existence in which freedom is vital, the left has given up on generating an ideology that legitimizes its renewal. Its crisis is, in fact, a crisis of left-wing culture.
Devoid of the perspectivist dimension that was organic to it and which attracted young people, the left is limiting itself to managing its past, falling into a right-wing immobility. It is therefore not surprising that, since the left does not offer young people any dreams, they are attracted by a right wing that, by providing them careers, promotes the “so-called ideology of success” to which the new generations are becoming deplorably sensitive.
We made the mistake of thinking that the energies that made the May ’68 party happen had run out. The 700,000 students who are rising up in France are proof that this ferment is not dead. And those who hastily saw this youth uprising as a mere demand for education that, in a good way, repudiated the blue jeans of ’68 were mistaken because if the circumstances and the language are different, if that May is unrepeatable in form, its energy is waiting for this new insurrectionary breath of youth to be reincarnated on a broader explosion of refusal.
But what new culture can ideologically help the left and its traditional parties?
Since I’m not an ideologue by any means, it’s not my place to give the answer. I have, however, come across some propositions that cannot be forgotten in a revival of the left, which I will briefly mention.

1.
Culture must be valued as a social partner in the interconnection of the political, economic, social, and cultural components so that political, economic, and social forces can be exercised creatively, assuming that cultural awareness will change society.

2.
A prospective left will have to develop the discourse of a re-enchantment of the world that generates creative spontaneity and encourages individual destiny and solidarity. It is, therefore, necessary for the left to rid itself of the rationalist prejudices with which it has expunged liberating experiential expressions such as heart, soul, spirit, pleasure, imagination, dream, feeling, and passion, honoring them in the light of a vitalist ideology, to make them re-enter life. It should be understood that the break with the linguistic universe of the established left implies a break with the continuum of the vocabulary of that left. By recovering terminology from the poetic universe, this linguistic revolt establishes in the discourse the values of a liberating subversion that demands a left that, alongside the political and the social, satisfies the existential. In other words, the left has to be existential without ceasing to be social. It must be concerned with transforming a new humanism opposed to the Promethean degradation of classical humanism, whose cosmocratic and massifying effects atrophy the human that engenders personhood. Developing through the infusion of subjectivity into the poetic individual and the aesthetic in general, the new humanism of the prospective left will have to emphasize the poetic and aesthetic ways of conveying the qualitative against the quantitative that reduces man to a dehumanizing monodimensional. We can’t imagine an existential left that doesn’t understand poetic language and the aesthetic dimension that communicates the new consciousness allied to the art of living.

3.
With the old trade union citadels surrounded by new problems raised by technological change, trade unionism risks remaining as a relic of industrialist workerism if the left doesn’t already chart paths to a future in which wage labor is curbed in favor of the self-production of freely associated individuals so that autonomous activity, based on voluntary cooperation, gains transformative importance. Within the framework of microcomputing, which allows a wide variety of self-determined and self-managed productions on a community scale, the world of work will have to reorganize itself so that it can be reborn in the productive spaces of non-power where the state and economic power cannot penetrate.
This does not diminish the current importance of trade unions. Instead, it points to paths opening up in a context in which socialism, between capitalism’s autonomy and social autonomy, has to opt for the latter, enriching the area of non-state forms of socialization.

 4. 

With the neoconservatives and left-wing pragmatism united in their productivist vision of progress and in the party machines’ sharing of the centralization of the political power of parliamentary decision-making, only the socio-integrative force of solidarity sustained by the unitary triad of realization-participation-communication can advance against the regulatory forces of economic and political powers that increasingly reduce citizens’ initiative. Thus, the goal of a renewed left is the actual participation of all in individual and collective fulfillment.

5.
The economic activity that reflects the consequences of participatory creativity can be found in the social economy, which encompasses various forms of association. Cultural and other types of associations, cooperatives, and self-management ventures follow common principles that intertwine freedom and collective effort, economic democracy and self-management participation, productivity and lifelong learning, collective ownership, and the development of regions.
Between the liberal temptation and the far-fetched solutions in the old Marxist heritage, the left should value the third way of the social economy structured by non-state forms of socialization, which are, in fact, rooted in the Portuguese social tradition (F. Ferreira da Costa, As Sementes do Futuro), such as the old confraternities and misericórdias and the mutual aid associations and mutual societies of the 19th century.

6.
An ecological policy is considered imperative, covering a range of problems such as: the imposition of a limit on the exhaustive exploitation of nature, the elimination of food contamination, the refusal of technological possibilities to take precedence over human needs, the fight against the degradation of life caused by urban congestion; the attack on the problem of the depletion of natural resources, hunger in the Third World, nuclear waste; the humanization of work, removing the obligation to produce, which alienates the pleasure of creating, and directing it towards the production of civil and useful goods; opposition to the operation of nuclear power stations and to the production and storage of atomic weapons; the reduction of warmongering tensions and a growing willingness for peace in the world.
The coherence of all the problems embodied in the ecological perspective of a new model of society raises the imperative of another economic, political, social, and cultural order that establishes, from an eco-socialist perspective, a new relationship between individuals and the community, work, and production, the environment and nature.

7.
Finally, the prospectivist aim of changing society gives the renewed left an extraordinary concern with overthrowing the patterns established and governed by the hegemony of male culture. This deposition requires the historical objectification of feminine culture, or preferably the feminine of culture, in which the unitary and affective values that are more or less consciously or assumedly also engraved in the psychology of men but which are subjugated by the historical stereotypes of masculinity, stand out. This transformative project requires an increasingly significant participation of women, not only in the cultural work of reviving the left but also in the structures that emerge from this revival. However, I want to make it clear that, in considering women’s participation to be imperative, I refuse to allow it to be protected by the allocation of quotas, which cynically perpetuate the old discrimination against the “second sex” and fight against the dignity inherent in the creative sense of women’s participation in the transformation of society. Underestimating this contribution of women to culture is not acceptable to a left that cannot be reborn without developing a new way of perceiving existence that has a lot to do with female sensitivity and imagination.
One demonstration of the senility of the traditional left is the ridiculously small number of women in its party apparatus. Compare this misogyny with the majority participation of women (6 women out of 11) in the leadership of the Greens in Federal Germany, and you get the image of a contrast between a left that expires clinging to the corpse of phallocracy and a left that blossoms wrapped in the freshness of the feminine worldview.
I’m not unaware of the difficulties that the heavy party machinery has in receiving the fuel of ideas that animate the notes I’ve set out, some of which I see inscribed in the ideals of the new social movements. But I also bear in mind – and this is how I end – the warning from post-socialist doctrinaires who place the alliance between the traditional left-wing parties and the new social movements at the heart of the present day, arguing that this alliance is mainly in charge of the future of the left.
For my part, in the cultural perspective that intertwines the propositions I have listed, I would add that the future of the left depends on the confidence of leftist culture.

This was published on the 15th of December 1986 in the cultural newspaper Jornal de Letras.

Translated by Diniz borges

Natália Correia was an independet thinker and one of Portugal’s leading voices in poetry and in thought for the last 50 years of the 20th century. Thus, the reason PBBI has created the Cátedra Natalia Correia. Every week, we feature a segment with her works, translated to English.

The text published today was from a presenatation she made to a Convention on the New Left, held in Lisbon in 1986. and later published in the Jornal de letras. We thank poeta Dr. Angela Almeida who is one of the curators of the Cátedra Natália Correia for reseraching and furnin us these liteary and cultural texts.