Speech and Defeat: The Left That No Longer Knows What to Say

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Oriol Corcoll Arias

It is well known that Twitter (now X) is a discursive cesspool saturated with noise. It’s a cacophonous hodgepodge where trolls, dogmas, and conflicting opinions converge almost ballistically. The disenchanted bulwark of the generation talks the most and listens the least. Yet in magical moments, crouched in the trench and praying that nothing explodes too close, a ray of sunlight illuminates the scene. Time stops. A bird sings. An idea emerges. A tweet that makes you think.

A few days ago, Vilaweb published an article by Joan Ramon Sala i Cullell entitled És el moment de trencar amb l’esquerra actual. Sala i Culell, an author who knows what he is doing, hit the nail by arguing that the current left lacks transformative capacity. He described the new left almost as an automaton rusted by bureaucracy and sterile emotions. It presents itself as an analog remora faltering in the current context. In short, it is a left incapable of being an active, shaping part of a coherent political reality. There is undoubtedly a structural problem. But could it also be that this left has stopped speaking with meaning? The substance of the debate may be purely discursive. What if they are victims of an entrenched semantics that prevents them from harmonizing with the present?

This new left — in Catalonia, Spain, and worldwide — does not lack passion when speaking of deliberative structures, empowerment, constituent assemblies, and citizenship… yet it loses its way due to the immediacy anxiety brought about by new technologies. It ends up reduced to a background murmur, a tide that splashes the receiver with verbal pomposity that only interests those already within its clique. Like a religious liturgy, this repetitive auditory ritual serves more to confirm the identity of its participants than to effect any transformation. Thus emerges the paradox of the new left, the semantic absurdity: it purports to include yet excludes. Words are spoken, but little of substance is conveyed.

One might ask Sala i Cullell: isn’t it time to break with the current left through a semantic revolution?

The reader should take Wittgenstein’s words — “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” — as a guiding principle. Isn’t it true that if the words we think and communicate — in Saussure’s sense, with signifier and signified — are relics of an exhausted past, then the political imaginary they seek to construct will also be outdated? What fails is the associated idea and the most unconscious part of the left’s lexicon, bound as it is to a historically complex past. Anachronistic words that, although once horizon-expanding, now act as closed doors. Predictable and empty echoes are automated, generating rejection among the moderate left.

Gramsci warned that decisive political struggle does not occur solely in the institutional arena but in the battle for common sense—a war of ideas. If the meaning of words holds power over them, there is another theoretical approach as well. What Gramsci called cultural hegemony was later developed by Bourdieu’s sociology. Language is symbolic capital. Ultimately, the one who wins this war of ideas is the one who imposes legitimizing words—words capable of creating and delineating an entire reality. If the current left has a problem with its linguistic sign, it cannot be considered legitimate or a generator of political reality. This is how the hegemonic narrative of Capital gains strength.

Capital has always understood—thanks in part to an education neither devalued nor corrupted by an absurd pedagogy that defends nonexistent sensitivities—that words must create mental frameworks favorable to its objectives. It is enough to observe the results on the right: a problem is identified, distorted with a strategic touch of populism, and the ever-familiar words—freedom, security, order, prosperity—are embraced with renewed enthusiasm. And these, too, are words of the past! Moreover, as Bourdieu would argue, they have been legitimized by their resonance with the social context.

According to Lakoff, the formation of mental frameworks largely stems from the moral metaphor that structures conservative discourse around the idea that society should be like a family living under the protection of a strict yet generous pater familias, representing authority, discipline, and individual responsibility. An almost divine paternal figure who, in a dangerous world, promises prosperity and shelter to those who strive and obey. This mental framework creates legitimate signs because it can emotionally connect with the recipient’s need for security in fear and uncertainty. But what mental framework does the left possess?

By getting stuck in self-referential and often academic language, the left’s linguistic sign is devoid of feeling. If on the right was the figure of the “protective father” as a divine image, the new left presents a poor, pagan, mortal being—a progenitor dazzled by a past that will never return. And it is here that, like any outdated father, it borders on pathos. Not only is it incapable of creating new metaphors, but it also lives within a linguistic sign that reaffirms the trauma of having been a hero of the past. It is nothing more than political junk in today’s context.

In short, a semantic revolution of the left is necessary. It will fail to convince if it does not learn to create new mental frameworks through a new linguistic legitimacy, and the battle will be lost. The struggle of our time is not so much political as it is linguistic. It is a dictionary revolution that, in a purely Gramscian sense, will enable the battle of ideas to be won. And beware! The left quickly falls into cosmetic operations, neo-progressive band-aids that seek a superficial facelift. This is not about copywriting. Everything must be sanitized. The new sign must be coherent with the historical context and reject rancid, exclusionary academicism.

Finally, never fall into the trap of modern times and the accelerated discourse of the right. The new left must learn to be quieter and listen better. It is unnecessary to be the fastest in replying, tweeting, having a slogan, or positioning itself. One must reclaim the introspective pause to speak with meaning.

If language is the matrix of political thought, the left cannot afford to keep speaking in worn-out formulas. It must relearn how to talk to act again.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons