Moving society to the left

I am going to take a break today from the hilarious analysis of the Biden Problem to examine two artifacts of Left discourse. The first is something provoked by Ben Norton in an interview with Briahna Joy Gray. The second is an article by Nick Pemberton, titled Tucker Carlson, The Post-Left, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Each of these pieces demonstrates a problem with Left discourse. First, the interview:

And much as I might sympathize with Ben Norton -- and I greatly sympathize with Ben Norton -- I still feel obliged to argue that what's coming down the pipeline is not "fascism." Fascism was a dynamic ideology for a dynamic time. Hitler tried to conquer the world. Franco in fact conquered Spain. Mussolini conquered Ethiopia. Fascism was an ideology for the time between the two world wars, in which what was left of the old monarchies had disintegrated but the Cold War global order had not yet been established.

Our era does not share the dynamism of 1919-1939. The best that was said of Mussolini was that he made the trains run on time. Neither Biden nor Trump cares if the trains run on time. Fascism was motivated by nostalgia -- nostalgia for a time, specifically 1884-1885, when the Great Powers of Europe could decide to carve up Africa on a whim. Hitler was motivated by the US conquest of the native peoples of North America and of its enslavement of Africans. If you want to think of a leader who acted out of nostalgia for the fascists, think of George W. Bush, who conquered Iraq and destroyed our civil liberties. In sum, the authoritarianism that dominates the red states today is real, and definitely a bad thing. But if it were in fact fascism, our fight against it would take the character of the French Maquis in their fight against the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators, and not of Tennessee legislators.

Rather, our era appears as a total descent into a new Dark Age, an age in which -- as Antonio Gramsci once said -- the old is dying but the new cannot yet be born. To continue the Gramsci quote: "in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." The Republican and Democratic Parties are, then, morbid symptoms. I suppose such forces as dominate those parties could become fascist if they were to discover some of the dynamism that characterized fascism. But that hasn't happened so far, and to the extent that it would happen, it would be a minor interruption in the slow-motion disintegration of global systems which characterizes our era. What we have now is, well, imagine if the Three Stooges were to be granted global dominion by a plutocratic elite and allowed to perpetrate their slapstick violence upon the rest of us unopposed. Or imagine if our cutest house-cats were to grow to the size of monsters.

"Moving people to the left," Ben Norton's goal, is not all by itself going to prevent such a Dark Age. (It might work if combined with something else.) The terms "Left" and "Right," apparently, refer to the seating chart of the National Assembly which was formed at the beginning of the French Revolution. So if we are to move people to the left, does that mean we should have another French Revolution? Will another French Revolution mitigate climate change, or bring peace to Ukraine?

Here are more questions. If we are against neoliberalism, does that make us Right -- or Left?

If we defend the Palestinians against incursions by Israeli settlers, are we "Right" for endangering "Israel's right to exist," or are we "Left" for defending general human rights?

Now, clearly, I can be assumed to be on the "Left" for opposing capitalism, whereas the "Right" is in favor of eternal capitalism, infinite exploitation on a finite planet. But capitalism is not an "issue." Capitalism is a religion, the Religion of Money, and I am attempting to become an apostate. Under capitalism, capital is sacred. And capital is money designed to make more money, or M - C - M' according to the discourse laid out in the fourth chapter of the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital. The problems arise when we try to lay out all of politics as if it were made up of "issues."

Okay, now the Pemberton piece. Nick Pemberton's piece in today's Counterpunch, "Tucker Carlson, The Post-Left, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," encounters those problems. Pemberton argues that anyone who supports Tucker Carlson in any way is a member of the "Post-Left." Pemberton moreover argues that "the post-left cheers on Russia and China, and while I certainly think there is a case for doing so, they have never actually articulated what their case is." (If you want to sit by, popcorn in hand, and watch as Russia and China allow the rest of the world to defy the US-led hegemonic political order, does that make you Left or Post-Left?)

If you actually go to the "Post-Left Watch" page on Twitter, you'll see their mission statement:

Highlighting and keeping receipts on post-left (right-wing politics with vaguely leftist aesthetics) pundits and podcasters.

But it's unclear that all of the people who went on Tucker Carlson's show counted -- or count -- as advocates of right-wing politics. (Pemberton's piece has a list of them.) And it's also unclear as to whether Tucker Carlson's being fired from FOX "news" "must be celebrated as a form of democracy and freedom." These issues deserve my focused apathy. I really don't care. Under capitalism FOX "news" is enshrined as a market leader in entertainment-propaganda, a force for crap in the world. Firing Carlson will not improve them.

In the same vein, I also don't care about any of Briahna Joy Gray's doubts about the candidacies of RFK Jr. or Marianne Williamson. The point of RFK Jr. and of Marianne Williamson is that they are not Joe Biden, and the longer and louder their candidacies are, the more likely it will be that we will get to see the real, material, physical human being named Joe Biden. Nick Pemberton would like to make some room in his life for an ideology which isn't "materialist." Here's what he says:

Just about all of the pro-Carlson Left have renounced the Leftist label. They are Post-Left. I am able to see this because I confess to taking a similar dark turn. I wanted to replace ideology with class. I wanted to replace an ideological approach with a material approach.

The problem here is not in the wish to overcome ideology, for what could be more idealistic than that? The problem is believing that you really could have an ideology that is solely materially informed.

But Nick Pemberton is still not enough of a materialist. And, right now, America needs to be "materially informed" enough to understand how comically stupid it is for the Democrats to run Joe Biden for another term. America is clearly not there yet.

Okay, break's over.

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Cassiodorus's picture

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

unreality is a deep subject to peruse, but in the case of slippery joe
one that is important to consider. We (the voters) will not have a
respectable choice in the matter of who performs what duty to
either party that presents themselves as our potential leaders.

Why are people so afraid of change?

PS another term for Biden is brain dead

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I am self identifying as "ACTUAL LEFT". I would say there is no left left in the Dem party.

TC appeared to be moving to the actual left over the last year or two. Moving (but not really there) towards anti war. Moving towards freedom of speech and freedom of press even for people he disagreed with, and for people standing against the war machine. Moving towards having some level of compassion for poor and homeless who he was starting to see as victims of a brutal economic regime.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@wouldsman It's kind of snooty to say Russell Brand is "not a Leftist."

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

@Cassiodorus The part that I saw I really liked. I believe that was the moment Tucker seemed to have a breakthrough about his comments towards the poor and homeless.
I don't think I have ever said that RB was not a leftist. I would actually label him as an "ACTUAL LEFTIST".

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@Cassiodorus Now that I have one more quick moment to comment- I do agree with you that it would be snooty to say RB is not a leftist. Not sure exactly what the tipping point of who is a leftist and who is not. But, yes, IMHO RB is a leftist.
One of the determinants of leftism might be willingness to follow information to its logical conclusion. And RB and Jimmy D meet that standard. And TC sure seemed to be headed that way?

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Cassiodorus's picture

@wouldsman keeps people from thinking about outcomes, and goes far deeper than "identity politics." Of course, the obsession with identity has attained its fullest flower in antiracist politics. And so, for instance, Ibram X. Kendi's book How to Be an Antiracist is all about who is and who isn't a racist, as if it mattered, which it doesn't. The well-sourced summary of Kendi's argument given in Wikipedia is concise:

Kendi argues that the opposite of racist is anti-racist rather than simply non-racist, and that there is no middle ground in the struggle against racism; one is either actively confronting racial inequality or allowing it to exist through action or inaction.

Everyone, of course, "allows racism to exist" every hour of every day, and "being a racist" or "being an antiracist" is of no importance in this regard. I'm trying to imagine what antiracist politics of this sort would have looked like in the Sixties, but fortunately for history there was no consensus in the SCLC to say anything remotely similar to "we should be against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, because Lyndon Johnson is a racist." One should note in this regard that Lyndon Johnson was indeed a racist -- a really ugly one -- though he did end the apartheid regime in the South by forcing through Congress the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other such accompanying legislation.

Of course, a brief Google search of Kendi will reveal a takedown of his thinking in the Black Agenda Report, and a rather laudatory blurb on him attached to the World Economic Forum webpage. But, of course, not much is achieved in identifying Ibram X. Kendi, except to say that his logic appears to have infested that of Nick Pemberton. It is of no importance to identify who is and who isn't a "leftist," much less a "post-leftist." Better outcomes do not require that we start by keeping lists of who is naughty and who is nice so that Santa Claus may devote his attention to the right places.

What's important is that there be an outcome to the present-day social drama that is not capitalist, in which our brightest and most interesting people spend their lives improving the world rather than "pursuing careers," and in which the majority of humankind is no longer consumed 24-7-365 by the struggle to attain the basic necessities of life. Figuring out how to get that outcome is our first task.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

A good specimen of that: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-meaning-of-tucker-carlson/

I also recommend Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett; some very trenchant zingers in there, if you can recognize them.

Pat yourselves on the back, Caucus99ers; I heard predictions of "realignment" HERE before ANYONE else was willing to face it (most still aren't, of course, but they clearly will not be the ones making history).

As I've said often enough before group identity is what is wrong with Humanity, and "wingedness" is obsolete and inherently divisive.

The prophets Lao Tzu, Abraham, Francis Bacon, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Peter Ustinov, and many more all warned us in their own ways against these superficial "false idols".

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

Is nothing more than people on the right who have finally moved left.
They don't bring the baggage of Dem ID politics but they may carry right wing baggage. This causes paradoxes like mistrusting govt for being corrupted by Big Pharma, but still trusting Reaganism and deregulation. They've finally woke up about neocons, but still believe in Republicans.
Slowly, however, they are moving past "support our troops" and into "fuck the neverending war machine".
The bulk of the right, however, are racist xenophobe Magahatssoles who can't see Trump is oligarchy

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