let us carry on a good and loyal polemic; let us give the world an example of learned and far-sighted tolerance, but let us not, merely because we are at the head of a movement, make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of logic, the religion of reason. Let us gather together and encourage all protests, let us brand all exclusiveness, all mysticism; let us never regard a question as exhausted, and when we have used our last argument, let us begin again, if need be, with eloquence and irony. On that condition, I will gladly enter your association. Otherwise — no! - Proudhon to Karl Marx, Lyon, 1846 - As Noam Chomsky and numerous others have astutely observed in recent decades, The Left as it is historically known in the US and in much of the Western World is dead and has been for some time, with its corpse picked over by identity politics panderers, self-serving academics looking to cast themselves as would-be leaders, excessively romantic activist daydreamers, and social liberal snakeoil salesmen. The Left wasnt merely killed by some phantom Right or crushed by omnipotent scumdogs of the capitalist pig universe. It killed itself, mostly, by choking on its own hubris and bleeding out its suicidal gutshots of revolution and dogma as its theories and proclamations became even more detached from the everyday realities of common folk in the West and stubbornly clung to Eurocentricism and White Supremacy in ignoring the common folk of the non-Western globalized world. And the elder Proudhon, in his letter to a quite childish Marx, wrote the epitaph years before most people even had a concept of Left-Right politics. Not to die alone, however, her perpetual lover The Right threw itself on its sword as well, with monarchies and divine rule and rights to property giving way to a less extreme - but still exploitive - form of state and finance industry liberalism, dominated by belief in both natural law and a less religious hierarchy of dominance. All that we have left after two centuries, far removed from the intellectual creativity and spark of the European Enlightenment and Ages of Reason and Rebellion, are a handful of spare parts held together by power alone under the guise of Legitimate, Legal Rule of the Authoritarian Center and everybody else who is left outside looking in, starving from the yard as the masters die in their estates we built for them. There are really no needs to make left or right distinctions in the globalized world, because its nothing more than a game of in Turn Back the Clock idealism constantly at odds with everyday realism and struggle. What is ultimately needed is not a mere critique of our oppressors as some vague, Ph.D level public intellectual tail for us dogs to chase but a greater understanding of what makes the oppressor, what drives men and women to follow those they know hold no real rights to control their destinies in such non-consensual ways. No, no large mass of people are rushing out to join anarchist collectives or Socialist Workers Parties or Revolutionary Communists anymore than theyre rushing out to join the KKK or the Anti-Catholic League. Those few who are are merely The Walking Dead of what was left after the reconciliation of state liberals and socialists to form our New Cooperative Nationalist Authority apocalypse. Most people, particularly the non-political, are simply struggling to understand and living under tremendous anxieties and fears while being more willing to experiment and try new things in order to escape it all. But instead of being more open and actually tolerant, whats Left of the Left is just as draconian and petty and paternalistic and nannyish as the worst Establishment supporter. Most of humanity simply gave up on resistance and revolution for the same reason Proudhon rejected Marxs silly notions, for the same reason the old individualists and liberal socialists walked out on the International as the Collectivists and Marxists bickered over which mob rule was better for the working man. And while that has indeed created a vacuum that has led to our current sad state of human affairs, it also gives new hope and offers new opportunities for a less dogmatic, more organically evolutionary set of resistive adaptation and experimentation. As the powerful and wealthy mix and match to create essentially Rich Guy/Powerful State Market Communism, people are acting out freed from ideology by picking up what the Ruling Classes discarded in making the Globalized Frankensteins Monster - things like cooperation, solidarity with limits, individual liberty, collective responsibility, mutual aid and self-ownership, agency and flexibility in defining it. Its the unspoken, the unradicalized, who are pushing the most progress simply by living, not the would-be Revolutionaries screaming from the soap box. Perhaps, as Lao Tse postulated centuries ago, the way that can be spoken is not the true way? Perhaps its time to acknowledge that while Adam Smiths invisible hand has been both condemned and championed by those with stakes in economic idealism, the other invisible hand is how we react as a species without even knowing were impacting change?
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 16:43:23 +0000
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