No Disrespect to the “Reactionary”

Abstract

The article addresses the question of why, despite the seemingly long-standing accumulation of economic and technical conditions sufficient for building, if not communism, then socialism, the left-wing forces are unable to take advantage of this, and yield the initiative to the right-wing, conservative, and even reactionary forces. The author explains this situation by the rationale that the mindset of the left is still dominated by a flat liberal progressivism characterized by cliché ideas about the progressive and the reactionary, but it lacks tools to adequately assess the reasons for the “reactionary” sympathies of the broad masses and to admit that these masses have “grounds for concern” at the very least. As a theoretical basis, the article uses the concept of human prehistory of the classics of Marxism. The author demonstrates that the underlying dichotomy of the alienated and authentic, human and inhuman does not coincide with the dichotomy of “reactionary” and “progressive”. The Modern Age is examined as both an epoch of reaction (in the literal sense of the word, net of ideological connotations) and that of progress. In order to resolve these issues, the author introduces the concept of retropractice, which is supposed to help adequately describe these seemingly “reactionary” and “conservative” sides of Modernity. Retropractices, in contrast to “reaction”, possess an emancipatory and alienation-reducing potential. The flaw of the left is that they fail to comprehensively conceptualize the meaning of retropractices because they view them only as “reaction” and “conservatism” in the usual sense. However, socialism, if realized, will largely turn out to be precisely a set of retropractices.