(Quotations in this section are from David Graeber’s Revolutions in Reverse)

There is a materialist basis for imagination. Your imagination is not infinite, even if it feels so. You are a product of a certain position within a certain set of institutions, and this informs what you find reasonable and unreasonable, in many large and small ways.

David Graeber characterizes the Left as the politics of the imagination, while characterizing the Right as the politics of violence:

Right and Left political perspectives are founded, above all, on different assumptions about the ultimate realities of power. The Right is rooted in a political ontology of violence, where being realistic means taking into account the forces of destruction. In reply the Left has consistently proposed variations on a political ontology of the imagination, in which the forces that are seen as the ultimate realities that need to be taken into account are those forces (of production, creativity…) that bring things into being.

In the same essay, he also — not coincidentally — says that structural violence results in oppressors dealing mostly in potential violence, and oppressed dealing mostly in imagination:

A constant staple of 1950s situation comedies, in America, were jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes of course were always told by men. Women’s logic was always being treated as alien and incomprehensible. One never had the impression, on the other hand, that women had much trouble understanding the men. That’s because the women had no choice but to understand men… this sort of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind is a perennial feature of patriarchal families: structures that can, indeed, be considered forms of structural violence insofar as the power of men over women within them is, as generations of feminists have pointed out, ultimately backed up, if often in indirect and hidden ways, by all sorts of coercive force. But generations of female novelists — Virginia Woolf comes immediately to mind — have also documented the other side of this: the constant work women perform in managing, maintaining, and adjusting the egos of apparently oblivious men — involving an endless work of imaginative identification and what I’ve called interpretive labor …while those on the bottom spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and actually caring about, those on the top, but it almost never happens the other way around… Structural inequality — structural violence — invariably creates the same lopsided structures of the imagination. And since… imagination tends to bring with it sympathy, the victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneficiaries, or at least, to care far more about them than those beneficiaries care about them. In fact, this might well be (aside from the violence itself) the single most powerful force preserving such relations.

The connection seems obvious: the Left is the anti-hierarchical ideology iteratively designed (or, equivalently, memetically evolved) to justify the interests of the oppressed, while the Right is the pro-hierarchical ideology memetically evolved (or, equivalently, iteratively designed) to justify the interests of the oppressors.

The Right focuses on treating violence as more important because that is what oppressors are trained to be good at. This is not necessarily literal, physical violence:

when one side has an overwhelming advantage, they rarely have to actually resort to actually shooting, beating, or blowing people up. The threat will usually suffice. This has a curious effect. It means that the most characteristic quality of violence — its capacity to impose very simple social relations that involve little or no imaginative identification — becomes most salient in situations where actual, physical violence is likely to be least present.

Mostly, in modern societies, oppressors deploy violence through being much better at navigating bureaucracies (especially police bureaucracies) than the oppressed are.

The Left, on the other hand, focuses on imagination because that is what the oppressed are trained to be good at.

Neither is particularly likely to be correct, of course — it’s motivated reasoning on both sides.

Further complicating this is the actual role of imagination: due to imagination, you can have Leftist oppressors and Rightist oppressed.

As Graeber notes, structural violence, because it causes the oppressed to spend so much time imagining the perspective of the oppressor, causes the oppressed to both identify and sympathize with their oppressor. A class structure naturally produces class unconsciousness — and, this applies equally to other hierarchies such as gender, race, neurotypicality, etc., etc..

At the same time as the oppressed can come to identify with the oppressor, the oppressor can come to — if not identify with the oppressed — then certainly best understand the structure of society, and consider how it might be changed. This happens because, while much of the real labor of the oppressed is interpretive labor — labor in the exercise of their imagination, at least “in the sphere of industry, it is generally those on top that relegate to themselves the more imaginative tasks (i.e., that design the products and organize production)”:

Creativity and desire — what we often reduce, in political economy terms, to “production” and “consumption” — are essentially vehicles of the imagination. Structures of inequality and domination, structural violence if you will, tend to skew the imagination. They might create situations where laborers are relegated to mind-numbing, boring, mechanical jobs and only a small elite is allowed to indulge in imaginative labor, leading to the feeling, on the part of the workers, that they are alienated from their own labor, that their very deeds belong to someone else. It might also create social situations where kings, politicians, celebrities or CEOs prance about oblivious to almost everything around them while their wives, servants, staff, and handlers spend all their time engaged in the imaginative work of maintaining them in their fantasies. Most situations of inequality, I suspect, combine elements of both.

To restate: one of the less measurable ways that hierarchies can be oppressive is by reserving the ability to do anything really interesting to those at the top — or, at least, those not at the bottom. It is, for the most part, the middle- or sometimes upper-classes who are allowed to not starve (either from drawing revenues from their work, or through external revenues) while they devote themselves to fantasizing and creating artistic representations of their fantasies — or, who are afforded the opportunity to derive wages from inventing or designing — or, who are able to engage in the much-lauded entrepreneurial innovation so often at the rhetorical heart of capitalism. Obviously, there are exceptions: a few exceptional artists, the occasional backyard inventor, a self-made rags-to-riches entrepreneur here and there. I speak in generalities.

Or, put another way: those on the bottom of the class system are not allowed training and practice in imagining anything other than their immediate surroundings. More directly: most of those most able to imagine and understand alternatives to the system are going to be those who come from and receive wealth. Even if someone extremely imaginative is lower class, they will likely not be able to take the risks necessary to be paid for creative work — and, incidentally, this is (perhaps) the root of a lot of working-class right-wing sentiment.

I noted before that the leaders of (successful) Marxist vanguard parties were always middle-class. I then asked and answered the question of how it was that they were allowed to be in charge. I could equally well have flipped the question around: why would the sons of middle-class families aspire to be socialist revolutionaries?

They were often at it for over a decade before they reached success, and any rational accounting would have expected them to fail. If this was only a matter of group self-interest — as the Left insists that all politics is — their material incentives would have caused them to give up, long before their more oppressed comrades. Further, it seems hard to say that even the most oppressed would have had any interest in the extremely-high-risk strategy of socialist revolution rather than liberal reform.

What motivates these most radical, most violent, leftists is not group self-interest: it is, very clearly, narrative-based motivation. This explains how leftist movements are often founded (Marx, Kropotkin, etc.) and led (Mao, Lenin, Che, etc.) by middle- or upper-class class-defectors.

This also squares well with the observation that it is not those who have been oppressed for centuries that are most likely to violently revolt: rather, it is those who see their gains as coming too slowly or reversing who are likely to revolt. The former sort does not rebel because they have no narrative that things should be otherwise — their experience is one of miserable stasis, and so miserable stasis is what they come to expect. The latter sort does rebel, because their conditions cause them to construct a narrative of social and technological progress. When this narrative is contradicted by external events, either perceived stagnation or perceived reversal, they derive a narrative-based motivation for political action.