The Left, Where It Is, Some Observations and Suggestions
This is a response, too long for a comment, to:
The first thing that any would-be left needs right away is to know how to respond effectively, and to actually respond in a timely manner, to any and all denunciations of socialism or communism and invocations of patriotism that come from the establishment, whether it be from Trump, De Santis, Eric Adams, or any other Democrat or Republican. The usual suspects in power have again started playing this rhetorical game of slurring any leftward movement (or just leftish ideas) before it even gets its legs as beyond the pale. Unfortunately, this has proved historically to be very effective in making majorities or significant enough minorities believe that any attempt or policy that has as its aim the redistribution of wealth and political power more fairly to any degree is a mortal threat. Speaking of propaganda, if this primary propaganda is not very quickly smothered while it is still inchoate, then no propaganda will be.
Thus, if Eric Adams says on Memorial Day that he's proud to be among the "38 percenters" of true patriots and declaims self-righteously that there is not enough patriotism in the country, the response must immediately be that "patriotism" is not owned by Eric Adams, that as Emma Goldman said, "patriotism" is a menace to liberty, etched in stone as the last refuge of a scoundrel, and only radical nationalists seeking power for themselves, not patriots, preoccupy themselves with other people's patriotism or alleged lack thereof. Patriots have no desire to impose, and they do not seek to impose, their love of country on others because they are secure in the things about their country that to them make it great, such as freedom and democracy, and they understand that, to be a free society, it means that people do not go around supervising other people's political, religious, or moral beliefs, and appoint themselves to determine whether anyone else's beliefs of this nature are sufficiently correct. This is a filthy tyrannical impulse that, every time it is expressed, exposes the person who expresses it as an enemy of democracy and a free polity.
The socialism-communism epithet is trickier because it contains a grain of truth and exposes things that are incoherent or untenable about traditional left-wing thought, but nonetheless it is crucial to not let the epithet grow. Frequently the leftish response to a yammering vilification of socialism-communism by, say, Trump, is to try to distinguish, say, Bernie or the DSA from “genuine socialism” by pointing out that what the latter calls for is actually an old-school Scandinavian-style social democracy, as if the people denouncing socialism-communism or their audience gave a flying shit about that. This is a weak, defensive response that just harms the credibility of any left-wing cause by its sheepish capitulation to the anti-communist paradigm that also needs to be smothered if the left is to get anywhere in the future. Instead, the response must be, first, to describe precisely what the rhetorical strategy is - to denounce the slightest leftward movement as an existential risk, thereby keeping the center of gravity, as Parenti said, dressing off to the right - then, after that, to openly declare without shame one’s commitment to basic economic and political rights whatever they are called.
Enter incoherence. The left has not been good on details (can this finally be acknowledged?),1 and has shown, if not as much contempt as the right for genuine democracy (Is that the goal? It’s not clear.), then surely its own destructive style thereof that is about as damaging to the “ameliorative project”. Anarchists, communists, socialists, and syndicalists have all had useful ideas but they tend in the end to too much generality and useless revolutionary rhetoric that is insufferably self-congratulatory and that no general population would ever accept, not necessarily to its discredit. It is long past time for the (would-be) left to examine itself, and take some intellectual responsibility for the pit that it is in, whatever might be the other causes of its impotence, e.g. the FBI, etc. Left ideas need work, if not a total overhaul. The main ideas of the left cannot just continue to advert to Marx, or some variation of Marx, perpetually forecasting the revolution or posing social change as a cataclysmic proposition that portends but in the end (most of the time) dishonestly retreats from the massive violence that that implies, not if the rhetoric emanating from the Communist Manifesto, or unalloyed anarchist communism, is the most useful thing to be advanced.
Toward the left’s credible intellectual renewal, initially there are three writers whom it would be productive to consult at this point: Bertrand Russell (Proposed Roads to Freedom), Walter Karp (you can search his articles in Harper’s magazine from the late 1970s and 1980s; his books are out of print, e.g. Liberty Under Siege, the Politics of War, but find them if you can), and Peter Kropotkin (Emma Goldman too, and Marx, but only for his analysis of capitalism). These three combined, and in their checks on each other, confer the benefit of being simultaneously exponents of democracy and certain traditional ideas of the left, people who take the traditional left and its ideas seriously, are committed to them but not dogmatically wedded to them, and have the most specific proposals to make short of Revolution, although they do not exclude revolution, whatever that may mean today given current technology.
Not that the left side of the political spectrum has no specific ideas. It does. For example, here is a recent list of leftish demands for the United States: “The agenda is simple, bring the United States into line with most industrialized democracies: radically cut defense spending, provide national health insurance, invest in green infrastructure, raise minimum wages, forgive student debt, provide free state higher education, encourage re-unionization and provide monthly stipends during the pandemic.” The traditional “revolutionary” left, which latter day leftists certainly wish to revive inasmuch as they seek to “overthrow the system”, could be counted on to reject the above list as not radical enough without necessarily explaining what’s missing from it. It thereby leaves large tracts of necessary thinking vague, and invites people to wonder if the new boss will be just the same as the old boss.