The Sectarian Left

The Left truly confuses me. Truth be told, I don't know many leftists, nor do I seek out their company. I am perfectly content conversing and associating with the apolitical, and even the capitalist apologist  (evidently)! Very few of the people I speak to, let alone those I converse with about socio-political issues, share even the most remotely radical views. The only guy I do speak to, rarely, about the radical left is a high school friend of mine, and even then I don't know the guy very well and we barely scrape the surface of the huge, messy, divisive body of theory that is the radical Left. But one thing which I have noticed about the Left is the amount of vitriol that is directed against fellow leftists. It utterly confuses me. I have seen no parallel on the reactionary Right.

If anything, the conservative, anti-libertine right appears more stable and united than ever before, as it has been assailed by the secular state. Often, multi-faith meetings (themselves a sign of how far the reactionary Right has come in unity) have resulted in unprecedented consensus on topics of social policy, e.g. anti-abortion stances, discriminatory laws, etc. Not only has the religious right smoothed over major historical internal conflict, but the right more generally, including the misguided right libertarians, have been coaxed into an uneasy, but solid coalition. It is clearly evident in the Liberal Party of Australia, where the neoliberals who champion individual freedoms and equal opportunity are silently complicit in their electorate-maximising coexistence with social conservatives who seek to limit the rights of individuals and their right to be treated equally. (Note I refer to the so-called 'equality of opportunity' that right libertarians allegedly guarantee under a free-market system - impossible, might I add - not the equality guaranteed under conditions of statelessness and collectivist mutual agreement).

Why is it then that the left is so pathetically fragmented? Even today, the Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Alliance bicker and spit over little policy platform issues that stop them from becoming a single Leftist tendency. They're both Trotskyist organisations, for (a nonexistent) god's sake! If even these two extremely similar organisations can't find enough common ground to stop attacking one another, how is the infinitely diverse Left, comprised of labour, environmental, feminist and post-colonialist movements supposed to achieve unity? Even within the labour movement, the radical left is bitterly divided. Anarchists, Kautskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Hoxhaists, Castroists, council-communists, and the list goes on. We're too busy attacking one another to mount a concerted offensive against the Right and a mass-publicity campaign that is necessary to the creation of a mass workers' coalition of parties. For example, to Shanaz (an anarchist), I'm a Trotskyist, to Trotskyists, I'm an anarchist, to Stalinists, I'm a 'social fascist', to Maoists, I'm a capitalist roader, and to most Keynesians, I'm a communist. Shanaz doesn't have a problem with my apparent Trotskyism, but many others certainly would. And that is a problem.

While some say that the lively 'debate' (more like civil conflict) within the Left is a sign of its vitality, the marginalisation of radical leftist tendencies has been near-universal. A movement can hardly be considered vivacious if its membership is restricted to single-digit percentages of national populations, ESPECIALLY if the movement claims to be a mass-movement that representes the workers, peasants and other disenfranchised of today's society. It is clearly failing to achieve its goals. And this is because too many of our brightest minds divert far too much of their intellectual faculties to ripping one another to pieces. So once again, I pose the question: why? Why are we so divided, even today, when capitalism is in its deepest crisis in 70 years and US hegemony is fracturing and collapsing piece by rotten piece?

I can see three reasons for our divisiveness: (1) our long history of internal disagreement, from Marx and Bakunin's initial split in the First International; (2) our culture of distrust and paranoia, which dates back to the Russian Revolution; and (3) a surplus of egos and intellectual insularity within the movement - most members are highly educated academic-types who are too concerned with the maintenance of their own ideological purity to recognise the biggest challenge that is facing the Left today - the challenge of being a real political force that can radicalise the complacent populations of today's capitalist societies.

I'm going to stop here because I've procrastinated for too long now. I'll discuss those three points at a later date. I need leftist friends... People who I can relate to as well, not just ideological puritans who will decry me as this or that. In the meantime, I will try to convince you all why left libertarianism is infinitely superior to right libertarianism, and that, indeed, right libertarianism does not deserve the mantle of 'libertarianism' that is reserved for the true ideological successor of early classical liberalism. It should be called 'corporate tyrannicalism' or something.

Radically yours,

Gaff



Oh, late clarification: by Left, I don't mean the Labour Party, the US Democrats, and all those other bullshit 'Third Way' parties that effectively adopted Thatcherism and Reaganism (except maybe their far-left members). By Left, I mean those political philosophies and strains of economic thought that embrace revolutionary change through social upheaval.