Introduction

One of the most basic questions that any struggle has to do, is to identify spaces of resistance that are themselves not contaminated by domination and power!  That is to find spaces that live on the outside of power, spaces that can guarantee a continuous ability to struggle. Yet on the other hand one of the most basic criticisms struggles on the left, is that they themselves occupy positions that may not guarantee freedom and that they have a potential to dominate and can therefore not guarantee future struggles against their own domination. Consequently, neoliberalist have painted Marxism with this brush and the Marxists have never found a convincing response or defence to this critic. Examples provided by the oppressive USSR have been used as a base for a explaining that things can go wrong with a revolution that does not guarantee against its own possible exegencies. The only attempt to defend the leftist revolution from the failures of USSR by the left have been limited to a dead debate that the USSR was not a Marxist or true socialist state. Such arguments are weak because they can only convience those who are worried about variations of the left and right while most people just see the left and the right. Therefore they only fall on deaf ears because even though in reality it may not have been Marxist but it was closest the world has ever been to it and it had a good resemblance and could make a claim to be socialist. The fact of the matter is that when you take everything to its basic levels, USSR was an attempt to reach at some form of Marxism but thing went wrong when the vanguard turned to be oppressors.  

The Problem of Vanguardism

It is clear that Marxists and many of those on the left genuinely want a society free from the domination and oppression of neoliberalism. They envisage a utopia where people will not be viewed as objects of production and as mere markets. They occupy a better moral positioning than neoliberalism, they struggle for equality. Marxists clearly have an agenda that is pro-people rather than a classist approach to life by the neoliberalist and their representative democracy.  However despite this seemingly better positioning of those on the left, they find themselves being suspected by the ordinary people that are themselves posting an ideology of oppression! They and their ideologies are being attacked by the oppressed people! The people don’t trust this altruistic position to be genuine and worth trusting, they view it as a fallacy and trap. The USSR example becomes very useful at this juncture. And the only way to get out of this trap maybe to reject altruism, I will get to this latter!

The question that bothers one is why people would be so unkind to the left, whose agenda is clearly far better than that of the right? Why people are not acting against the clear dominance and abuse of free markets and representative democracy. Why people tolerate the abusive world economic system, which oppresses people from the north to the south and from the east to the west. A system based on inequality! It boggles one’s mind, why this is the case.

In this regard people have argued that the ever powerful media makes it impossible for any struggle to ever take place. Those involved in the struggle have become disillusioned by the odds that are against them. But most of all they find that people see no feasible way of running society other than organising it hierarchically and in terms of domination and inequality. They find that humans can only core exist if they are dominated and oppressed and thus people would prefer the neoliberal society as a better devil than the socialist society that they have been presented with by the USSR.

The overarching question therefore seems to be a soul searching one for those on the left. Asking ourselves why USSR presented such a bad example. And asking ourselves if what happened in USSR is not the true face of Marxism. Doesn’t Marxism run the risk of turning into a monster? And if it does, what then are the alternatives? Should people now accept that neoliberalism is far better than Marxism? It is answering of the question, why Marxists ideology seems to be desperately overshadowed that this paper deals. All the other questioned that are related to it and have been raised here will be addressed in other articles and possibly by other contributors.

Why Marxism seems impossible to the majority of the people in the world? The answer is very simple yet difficult to conceive of. (Please refer to the Section Understanding Resistance for better clarity) The question is a philosophical question which needs a philosophical answer, and that explains why those on the left have played round it. The answer is simple that the leftist approach is itself dominated by the power which it calls its enemy and therefore is not free enough to produce and guarantee future resistance. Given that ordinary people have themselves become the unwitting defenders of capital and domination as instructed by our dominated knowledges, while they may realise that Marxism can produce change in our lives but they do not know if that change will leave them alive. If that change will spare them the little that neoliberalism has offered. 

Taking into account the concept of biopolitics, the left is wrong in assuming that it is fighting against the ruling classes and some oppressor who is separated from the oppressed masses. It is this premise which spends all the energies of the left for nothing. Because when the left claims to fight the system the oppressed masses, who themselves have been made part of the system, in fact feel under attack, they feel like rationality and reason is under attack. In order to defeat these internalised systems the left must start to see the person as the centre of the struggle, as has neoliberalism which has made the individual the guard of the great enlightenment. Thus instead of the left thinking that they have an abstract enemy that can be separated from the society and destroyed, they must notice that they themselves are the strength of the enemy. That the people are the enemy. Therefore what they really need is to find out how the contemporary system is both produced and sustained and how we have all become our own oppressers on behalf of the powers that be.

Resistance and Knowledge (Power)

The core of our subjugation is resident within every one of us and is evident in our everyday actions and interactions. We want to dominate others. We want to win over them. We want to be better than them. We are in constant competition with them. And this social reality only provides ammunition for the system of oppression which claims that we are essentially selfish and fulfil our lives by dominating others. These forms of behaviour, it claims, come so natural to us. But if we look back at the start of this paper I argued that all these, which now feel natural, are socially constructed. If we move from this stand point we can then be able to see our freedom and thus our resistance.

To reverse oppression we must deconstruct our so called nature. Negate the dialectic feelings and the competition. But we also need to notice that these feelings and desires have become permanent residents in our knowledge systems as key creators of our identity and society. Thus negating them may include some very destabilising thought processes. (Are people willing to do that then? Those who want to do resistance must do that and their example will produce more resistance)

Thus resistance must be resistance to the way we think, resistance to who we are. It should be a creation of new people, people who know themselves differently! So it is creating new knowledges about everything. It is not rewriting history but producing history, it is not thinking backwards but thinking forward. (Thinking backwards is what we do every day, e.g. when we get a new experience our mind goes searching backwards for any codes that can decode that experience and that way we give meaning to the new experience. Thinking forward is what we do rarely when we get an experience we separate it from all other experiences and create new knowledge. A good example of this is when Livingston discovered the Victoria Falls, his mind went back to all he new and there was nothing that great but Queen Victoria so he named it Victoria Falls - and a discovery). We need to delegitimize essentialism as it is used as a tool for discouraging us from thinking differently and challenging our current forms of knowledge. We also need to embrace difference as that way shall we know things as different.

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