Past Voices | An Anarchist Plea to Leave "Right" and "Left" Behind by Heiner Koechlin (1973)

The sense that “Left” and “Right” no longer clearly describe political reality is not new; it first became impossible to ignore (to those paying attention) in the political wreckage of the interwar years.

The rise of Bolshevism and fascism during and after the First World War completely upended the traditional and fairly well-defined divide between Right and Left, a distinction that ultimately dates back to the French Revolution. Indeed, Bolshevik authoritarianism served as a model for fascist dictatorship. Although the two appeared to occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum, many European anarchists (and others) argued that they shared the same underlying commitment to centralized power. They revived an older critique, dating to the 1870s, that authority itself, rather than any ideological label, was the central problem.

The real divide—and test—is between authoritarian arrangements (left or right) and libertarian ones.¹ Although the political spectrum traditionally suggests opposition between fascism and Communism, anarchists argued that both shared a commitment to centralized authority. Rudolf Rocker was very lucid on this point. In 1947, he observed that Communist parties “everywhere strive for the dictatorship of a total state modeled after Russia, which achieves a degree of power through the development of an all-powerful state capitalism that even princely absolutism could never attain.” He concluded that “today, right and left are hollow words that possess no meaning and merely serve to obscure former concepts.”²

This development in postwar anarchist thought is often overlooked today, particularly now that categories of Right and Left have arguably lost even more of their relevance than they possessed in the mid-twentieth century. Rocker and Koechlin, whose essay is presented here, should not be read as precursors of the so-called “post-left anarchism” that emerged later in the century, but rather as a distinct critique shaped by the twin catastrophes of Bolshevism and fascism. The breakdown of Left and Right as meaningful categories is also not a sign of postmodern confusion, but a feature of clearer thinking about power and authority.

In any case, Koechlin’s essay reflects the broader postwar anarchist effort to rethink political categories and remains strikingly relevant today. Koechlin (1918–96) was born in Basel, Switzerland, to Social Democratic parents and embraced socialism in his youth. Around 1940, however, he left the Socialist Youth organization and joined a Swiss-Italian anarchist group. Over the following decades, he edited several anarchist newspapers and journals, including Akratie (1973–1981), and published numerous articles and books. In 1951, he founded an antiquarian bookshop in Basel that remains in operation today, and he also helped establish several self-managed housing cooperatives. The essay below originally appeared as “Reflexionen über Rechts und Links” (“Reflections on Right and Left”) in the Hamburg-based anarchist periodical Zeitgeist (Vol. 15, No. 22), and was translated by me. — Tom Goyens

Heiner Koechlin, undated | www.schuerchkoellreuter.ch

Here is Koechlin in 1973:

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For about 10 years, people have once again been speaking of “right” and “left.” During the postwar period, these expressions had nearly disappeared from political discourse.

In the face of the catastrophic consequences of the war and its even more catastrophic side effects, the symbols of traditional political ideologies could no longer be taken seriously. To the younger generation of the time, “right” and “left” appeared as antiquated, dusty relics. Before the war, there had been right-wing and left-wing parties, but back then, people were less hesitant than today to call things by their names and openly declare allegiance to liberalism, socialism, communism, or even fascism. Today, by contrast, it seems preferable to merely hint at a stance through right- or left-wing symbolism, as if a clearer ideological commitment were something to be ashamed of.

What is understood by “right” and “left” is thus varied, contradictory, and vague. I recall, from the time when existentialism was still in vogue, a lecturer placing the most prominent existentialist philosophers as follows: on the left, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre; on the right, Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber; in the center, Albert Camus. One could hardly invent a more paradoxical arrangement: the “leftist” Heidegger was an active member of the National Socialist Party. The “right-wing” Jaspers was a critic of all totalitarian systems, and the “right-wing” Buber was a liberal socialist sympathetic to anarchism. The explanation: Heidegger and Sartre were atheists, while Jaspers and Buber were transcendental philosophers. As for Albert Camus being placed to the right of Sartre, that can simply be explained by the fact that Sartre condemned only right-wing concentration camps, whereas Camus condemned concentration camps on both the right and the left.

Given such confusion, it is perhaps understandable that today’s “young leftists” ally themselves with former Nazis in the fight against “Zionism,” practically speaking, in support of eradicating Jews in the Middle East.

The aims of today’s left range from a totalitarian state to total individualism, from puritanical Stakhanovite discipline to the free consumption of intoxicants, from the ideal of unconditional technological progress to criticism of the “consumer society,” and so forth.³ This possibility for such ambiguity and contradiction lies in the concepts of “right” and “left” themselves.

These terms do not denote fixed positions but can only express the relationship of one position to another. Nothing is situated on the right or left except in relation to something further to the right or left, and so on. Moreover, whether something is perceived as right or left depends on the perspective of the observer. If I look southward, the east lies to my left and the west to my right; if I look northward, the reverse is true. The origin of “right” and “left” in political language lies in the early parliamentarism of the last century.

Conservative members sat on the right, liberals on the left. Every new movement emerging from society aligned itself to the left—Democrats, Republicans, and eventually Socialists, all attaching themselves to the liberals. Parties that were originally on the left were gradually pushed toward the center and eventually to the right. On the left sat the new, the rebellious, reforming, and revolutionary; on the right, the old, the resistant, and the preservative. On the left was progress; in the center, the status quo; on the right, regression. But what the “new” sought on the left was not defined by the word “left,” just as “right” does not define what the old and preservative entail. The prerequisite for a political stance identifying as “left” is the belief that the new, the “progressive,” is also the good. Conversely, the prerequisite for a stance identifying as “right” is the belief that the old, the preservative, is the good. That the new, “progressive” forces aligned themselves with the left and not the right is likely no coincidence, as “right” and “left” are deeply psychological symbols, already familiar to the Kabbalists. In psychology as in politics, “left” signifies rebellion against a traditional order and authority, while their engagement with the new is expressed through the symbol of the right.

However, the new, progressive, “leftist” can be as varied and contradictory as the old, reactionary, “rightist.”

The content of “right” and “left” has not only undergone historical transformations but also often simultaneously signified fundamentally different things. Both the right and the left were always internally divided and fragmented. These divisions could become so pronounced that one segment of the left could ally with a segment of the right against another segment of both the right and the left. Alternatively, a left faction could shift to the right, and vice versa. A classic example of such a shift is provided by the politically engaged German Romantic movement. Initially, it sympathized with the French Revolution. During the struggle for liberation against Napoleonic imperialism, it fought on the side of legitimist monarchy. After Napoleon’s defeat, it turned leftward and became the vanguard of emerging liberalism. Within the right itself, there was little commonality between a conservative right that idealized the revival of medieval corporatist order and the feudal-bourgeois neo-absolutism of a Bismarck.

Similarly, the bourgeois left was divided into centralists and federalists, descendants of the authoritarian Jacobins and the anti-authoritarian Girondins. A similar divide ran through socialism: on one side were the advocates of a centralized unitary state, represented by Karl Marx and Lassalle; on the other, the proponents of a federation of autonomous communities and regions, represented by Proudhon and Bakunin.

Despite these internal divisions within both the left and the right, there were characteristic features that defined the left and the right as ideological realities. Despite splits between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians, whose full significance we can only appreciate today, a shared spirit united the left and distinguished it from the right: the spirit of liberalism. This term is as discredited among today’s leftists as it is among the right. However, the right has always been fundamentally anti-liberal, whereas the left has become anti-liberal. This occurred for two reasons: originally, liberalism meant nothing other than the liberation of the individual from all forms of spiritual and secular paternalism, oppression, and exploitation. Socialism is nothing more than a direct consequence of this idea.

On the other hand, liberalism was commercialized and degenerated into mere freedom of trade and profit-making. This freedom, to protect itself, resorted to measures of violence against other human freedoms (e.g., the basic freedom to defend oneself against material deprivation), thereby distorting the original idea of liberalism. Liberalism became increasingly monopolized by a specific form of capitalism. The left, for its part, turned away from the authentic spirit of liberalism, which had nothing to do with capitalism and had given life to the left itself. Left and liberal had once meant nearly the same thing. The reason for this is simple. As we have seen, left means nothing other than rebellion against the established order and authority. As long as there was no authority or order other than the established one, there was no restriction on freedom other than that imposed by the traditional state power. There was no exploitation other than that carried out by an old, traditionally dominant class. There were no wars other than those ordered by rulers embodying traditional authority. A movement opposing the established authority was, under these circumstances, logically opposed to unfreedom, oppression, injustice, exploitation, and inhumanity as such.

Thus, whatever political and economic programs it advocated, the left was inherently liberal. Liberalism meant, for example, that leftists, however divided they might have been in their political and economic goals, were united in their opposition to the death penalty and all overreach by state power against the inalienable rights of individuals. To be leftist meant to be cosmopolitan and to oppose every form of aggressive nationalism. This shared spirit among leftists found expression in the statutes of Masonic lodges and the practical objectives of the League for Human Rights.

The Dreyfus Affair, in which the Jewish officer was wrongfully convicted of treason by the French military elite and sent to Cayenne, became a defining moment. On the right stood the chauvinists, worshippers of militarism and unquestionable state authority, anti-Semites, colonialists, and advocates of the Jesuitical doctrine that the ends justify the means. On the left stood the defenders of human dignity, freedom, and equality.

Unity on the left is either an empty, meaningless word with purely demagogic, propagandistic significance, or it signifies unity in the spirit of liberalism. A left that betrays the liberal spirit betrays itself and abolishes itself.

This is precisely what happened when, following the Russian Revolution, leftist regimes emerged, accompanied by leftist parties whose essence was no longer rebellion against traditional authority but rather the defense or acquisition of new power. The revolution occurred in a country whose social structures were not rooted in a liberal tradition. It therefore quickly assumed absolutist characteristics that not only resembled the old overthrown regime but exceeded its despotic nature.

The new regime was less a result of the revolution’s struggle against the old order than of the revolutionaries’ battles among themselves. In the conflicts between Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists, and Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks triumphed, largely because their mindset was most singularly focused on the conquest of power, unencumbered by liberal scruples.

Emerging, like their rivals, from opposition to rightist absolutism, this party, which monopolized the name of communism, considered itself leftist. Yet once in power, it broke with the humanist-liberal tradition of the left and employed, on a much larger scale, the same methods that had characterized rightist rule.

According to Marxist theory, state power was supposed to wither away with the consolidation of proletarian control. The opposite occurred. State power expanded immeasurably, and its proletarian façade crumbled. Leninist absolutism ossified into Stalinist totalitarianism, and the same process later repeated in China. Thus, the modern totalitarian state first arose under leftist auspices, signifying a complete inversion of everything the classical left had stood for. Critical thinkers of the previous century had foreseen this turn of events, though none more clearly than the conservative Jacob Burckhardt and the revolutionary Michael Bakunin. Almost concurrently with the emergence of the new anti-liberal, totalitarian left, a new totalitarian right also arose.

Fascism and National Socialism organized themselves in many respects following the Bolshevik model. This new right was no more conservative than the new left was liberal. Conservative postulates, like socialist ones, held merely propagandistic value for this movement. In truth, its goal was power itself. Nothing fundamentally distinguished the new right from the new left, except that they used one another for mutual justification. Each side relied morally on the crimes of the other. Fascism thrived on anti-communism, and communism on anti-fascism, except when they shook hands, as with the Stalin-Hitler Pact, which enabled the outbreak of the Second World War. The worst aspect of this was not the stance of the totalitarians themselves but the capitulation of the majority of the classical liberal left. Most of the left came to believe that rightist totalitarianism could not be effectively fought without an alliance with the totalitarian left. Some were driven by intellectual opportunism, fear of “homelessness,” or an inability to stand independently of centers of power.

In one of her last books, Simone Weil astutely observed that most people need the support of a legal state authority in order to act; the further this authority is geographically removed, the easier it becomes for revolutionaries to acknowledge it.

This insight surely explains why the Russian dictatorship exerted a magnetic pull on European anti-fascists. Few dared, as Albert Camus later did, to recognize that “all executioners are the same.” Among the few were André Gide, Panait Istrati, and Ignazio Silone, who wrote to Moscow to declare his refusal to become a “red fascist.” Yet the overwhelming majority of the leftist intelligentsia condoned Stalin’s mass murders (called “purges”) and the Moscow Trials of 1936–37, which, as historical witnesses to human depravity, can only be compared to the medieval Inquisition. In doing so, the left pronounced its own death sentence. While it continued to adorn itself with humanist-liberal ideals, it could no longer convincingly uphold them. After the bloody destruction of the liberal left in Spain through a conspiracy of rightist and leftist totalitarian forces, it was finished.

The re-emerged left of our day is but a grotesque caricature. The so-called “new left” directs its attacks exclusively at the West while considering the state totalitarianism of the East compatible with the libertarian goals it ostensibly advocates. By doing so, it indirectly supports the state totalitarianism of the East. Its pseudo-pacifist protests against the Vietnam War cannot be taken seriously as long as they target only the United States without also condemning Russia and China, which, if genuinely committed to peace, could end the war through compromise in short order. Indicative of this “new left” is its admiration for former right-wing extremist and Nazi-affiliated writers like Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn, among others.

Pitiful, too, is the stance of Angela Davis, that “leftist” idol, who claims international solidarity for herself yet denies it to her imprisoned comrades in the East.

If one wanted to use the terms “right” and “left” in their traditional sense, then the communist states, which in their structure are more authoritarian, capitalist, and imperialist than the so-called capitalist states, would represent the far-right. The capitalism of the so-called communist world is harsher than that of the West, as there is here a single omnipotent capitalist, the state, who, in contrast to the capitalists of the liberal world, possesses the power to completely suppress free unions and other means of worker defense. The Russian and Chinese governmental systems look back on ancient imperialist traditions, interrupted only superficially and briefly by the revolutions. The expansionist drive of these powers is limited only by the military strength of their opponents.

In contrast, the expansionist drive of Western capitalism is restrained not only externally but also internally. Liberalism, despite its capitalist degeneration, still does not allow for total autocracy of state power. In this sense, one could describe the West as a moderate right.

However, no matter how one applies these terms today, they always create confusion. It is therefore time to banish them from political and ideological language.

In the Byzantine Empire, there was once a civil war between two parties, one calling itself the Red and the other the Blue. This bloody conflict revolved around nothing more than a struggle between supporters of two different sports clubs. The current battle between “right” and “left” is reminiscent of this absurd war. Such absurdity, to varying degrees, is inherent in all so-called historical conflicts. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Catholics and Protestants, adherents of old beliefs and new beliefs, fought against each other. The Reformation, which had begun as a spiritual movement against religious formalism, abuse of power, and priestly fraud, introduced, where it succeeded, a new dogmatic formalism and new priestly rule modeled after the old Church. Ultimately, the two parties, in whose names countless people were sacrificed on pyres and battlefields, differed only in their phraseology. The true revolutionaries of that era, however, were humanists and mystics, people who belonged to neither party and were equally denounced and persecuted by both. This recurring historical situation cannot be adequately described by saying that extremes meet. In reality, it is not about two extremes but about distortions. True extremes, such as freedom and tyranny, justice and oppression, humanity and barbarism, do not converge.

Thus, it cannot be a solution to seek a so-called middle between two extremes, which would consist of a mixture of both. Instead, it is necessary to recognize and discard unreal masks for what they are. The words “right” and “left” once had meaning when “right” still meant conservative and “left” liberal. Today, they are deceptive hallucinations that block the view of true opposites and potential commonalities.

In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants still engage in bloody battles today. Similarly, the entire political battlefield is dominated by anachronistic terms and slogans. In their name, governments rule, and rebellions arise. In their name, wars are fought and people tortured. Real and new things can only happen outside this world of phrases and beyond these bloody pseudo-conflicts.

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Before you go, I’ve enabled pledges if you’d consider supporting this work in the future. —Tom Goyens

1. Libertarian, here, refers to the common European meaning of anti-authoritarian socialism, not the American meaning of free market, minimal government ideology.

2. Rocker, “Zur Betrachtung der Lage in Deutschland und die Möglichkeiten einer freiheitlichen Bewegung,” in Rudolf Rocker Papers #381, IISH.

3. [Editor’s note] The Stakhanovite movement was a Soviet labor campaign of the 1930s that promoted higher productivity and socialist competition. Many workers resented it because it increased production demands, and critics risked being denounced as “wreckers.”