Comments on: Who are the Left?

By: pdm

pdm — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 18:49:29 +0000

The real divisions right now are between those of us willing to let lapse our participation in our democracy and those of us who refuse to be quiet. Between those who’ll eat bullshit and those who won’t. Between citizen and subject. You’ll find both kinds on both sides. I disagree——I think that conserative ideology is INHERENTLY one that reduces us into OBJECTS (to be used, abused and disposed as the Chosen Few see fit), as opposed to living, breathing, thinking beings. Patriarchy reduces women to sex objects, capitalism reduces workers to profit/productivity objects, white supremacy reduces non-white folks into hate objects, religious fascism (be it Zionism, Islamo-fascism or right wing Christianity) does the same for persons of different religions—-or the unbelivers. The great impetus for the great social-change revolutions of our time (civil-rights, socialism, feminism, anti-Zionism, etc.) is those “objects” who ain’t gonna put up with that shit no more……

By: Conrad barwa

Conrad barwa — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 14:32:21 +0000

Roger, I will have to check the quote but I have a sinking suspicion that you are right; in which case I will have to eat my words;) By the way, have you read Nicholas Shakespeare’s novel about the Sendero L., The Dancer Upstairs? Excellent novel. Haven’t read the book but I have seen the film, which is very well made. There is, though, a strongly reactionary reading of the text which annoyed me very much – all committed to anyform of radical social change are presented as nihilists. Even being generous the work seems like a plea for middle-class liberalism as a solution to the political and economic problems faced in the nameless Latin American country and comes off as unconvincing. In the film at least, it is not really clear why the police captain, witnessing the corrupt order and the discrimination inherent in it, decides to prop it up; a sort of ‘whisky priest’ analogy comes to mind but I just didn’t quite buy the whole concept.

By: roger

roger — Sun, 08 Feb 2004 15:53:23 +0000

Conrad Hmm. As I remember the comment to Foucault that you are talking about, it wasn’t the Sendero Luminoso, which wasn’t well known in France in the seventies—hell, it was clandestine even in its native Peru, and by the time it announced itself—with the grotesque stunt of hanging dogs from poles—Foucault was dead. It was from a French Maoist group. Foucault, in his interviews, sometimes played a sort of ideological chicken—for instance, praising the “September massacres” as an example fo spontaneous justice. Which is rather like praising lynching in the South as an example of spontaneous justice. On the other hand, I rather like Foucault’s devil may care attitude—he used interviews to try out ideas. Foucault would have made a hell of a blogger. By the way, have you read Nicholas Shakespeare’s novel about the Sendero L., The Dancer Upstairs? Excellent novel.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Sun, 08 Feb 2004 15:25:12 +0000

Conrad, as I remember it, Deleuze’s “support for sympathisers of the Red Army Faction in the then FRG and the Peruvian Shining Path” was confined to not supporting their illegal extradition to face what he thought of as trumped up charges before unjust tribunals. Not exactly the same as supporting the tactics and ideology of either group. Roger, as far as tactics go I would agree with you for the most part. Deleuze organised the defence of one of the lawyers for the accused in the Baader-Meinhof Gang, when he had fled to France after being accused of illicitly passing on information to the organisation. It was also when he had a final split with Foucault who refused to participate in a petition and attempts for repatriation; from the selected writings on the issue at the time; what was at stake was not the truth of the charges, these were seen as tangential but rather the problems of authoritarian control that any accused of anti-state terrorism would face in such a trial; and given his distrust of such disciplinary regimes, Deleuze’s opposition to it, independent of the ‘innocence’ of the accused. As for the Sendero Luminoso; this is not exactly a new item; on and off Deleuze supported the ideology of various Maoist movements and groups though his ideology and notions of any social and political utopia were significantly more revolutionary and libertarian than theirs. Again, I think it is in one of the volumes of interviews with Foucault, where a Shining Path member expresses some puzzlement as to why exactly Deleuze is sympathetic to their position, saying that Satre’s support is understandable given his political programme and reading of historical materialism, while Foucault’s support was based on his concern with confinement and repressive structures of surveillance/control. All this doesn’t mean that either of these figures supported or endorsed terrorism of any kind on some sort of blanket level; but they did not a priori discard it as a tool and they certainly did not see it as the kind of repulsive or consuming danger that more orthodox Liberals and Social Democrats did. This is to be expected given the strong anti-Humanist streak in their works and thinking, traceable back to the influence of Structuralist Althusserian Marxism; and problems of subjectivity and agency, which recur in their social schema. Which isn’t to say that they automatically espoused violence, but just that their approach to it was very different from traditional Liberal Democratic paradigm and to expect them to condemn or reject it on moral or political grounds is quite mistaken.

By: roger

roger — Sat, 07 Feb 2004 20:37:41 +0000

By: Glenn Condell

Glenn Condell — Sat, 07 Feb 2004 03:34:08 +0000

This is all very interesting, but we’ll never really get close to what the left (or indeed the right) actually ‘is’; any small piece of common ground would be dwarfed by acres of disagreement. And what to do with it once we find it? This was always true, but is perhaps truer now than ever. Wayne Eastman’s interest-based method seems in this time of realignments to be the most sensible approach. A more salient exercise than definition might be to limn the uses of this bipolar typology and how effective they are; ie, the way a casual classification as either left or right casts the subject into a straightjacket of assumptions, the shackles of which few people have the time or energy to shake off. You see it all the time and there are plenty of examples of left to right, but right to left classification is far more pronounced from my admittedly progressive perspective. ‘The left’ is a hold-all for anything that doesn’t chime with the ascendant US hubris (now starting to crack thank God) – read any Brooks or Friedman or Hitchens.. the way anyone who stands opposed to the war and it’s provenance is tarred as being a ‘full-mooner’ from Planet Chomsky… the way us Mums and Dads and church groups and yes, long-haired students were tarred as ‘far left’ or ‘anti-American left’ or ‘extreme’ or ‘fringe’ – or at the very least as sheep being skilfully mustered by covens of wicked far lefties, ‘effectively’ in cahoots with Saddam. As Quiggers says ‘Hardly anyone is seriously committed to the traditional central plank of Marxism-Leninism, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in the developed countries’… so despite the strenuous efforts of well paid right wing (there I go!) commentators to paint a scarifying picture of a long dead threat (ie; widespread actual communism), most of us who read beyond the headlines know it is a crock. We simply refused to eat shit; it’s that simple. What bothers me is how far this meme-disease seems to progressed in the US; a development of great importance for the rest of us. The phrases ‘the left’ or ‘liberals’ have been so successfully traduced by a media owned and largely operated by people whose interests are not surprisingly best served by Republicans, that the real threat coming from the right has been obscured. Joe Sixpack and Jenny Sixpack will be voting in November and their decision to a large extent determines the trajectory of all our lives for the next four years, in truth well beyond. I’m not satisfied that they go into this armed with the facts, or even with a range of easily available viewpoints through which to arrive at an informed outcome. (I’m obviously a native of Planet Chomsky..) Too many of them have had anti-liberal attitudes imprinted in them… they understand that expressions of hate for progressives (or fierce support of the right) will earn them media approval (or at least a pretence of tolerant distance)while your occasional liberal utterance is abused, ridiculed, marginalised. And so you write a sign saying ‘Goddam morans – Go USA!’ and harrass those few brave souls who refuse to eat the ordure you swallow without blinking. You find yourself vigorously agreeing with aggressive songbird Toby Keith and burning your Dixie Chicks CDs, wondering what you ever saw in those ‘Fat Slags’. A determined and sustained political distortion has existed in the US since Nixon and this has prevented the home of the brave from truly becoming the leader of the free world. The right only manages to lose when it overreaches itself, which it does on a regular basis thank God. Happily for them Diebold and other Republican-linked voting machine makers have stepped into the breach to help with the threat of increased Democrat turnout in November. I have made contact with a number of fairly well-known conservatives over the last year or two, generally those who’ve joined the ‘Disillusiond Right-wingers Club’ in that time. Normally I respond to pieces they’ve written on Iraq; the sinister leadup and the disastrous results. I make the point that our differences still exist (they still want to allow foxhunting or abolish single mother welfare or whatever and I still want progressive taxation and proportional representation et al) but that the relative unimportance of such divisions is thrown into sharp relief at a time like this, when all informed people with a degree of decency are appalled at what has been done in their name. The real divisions right now are between those of us willing to let lapse our participation in our democracy and those of us who refuse to be quiet. Between those who’ll eat bullshit and those who won’t. Between citizen and subject. You’ll find both kinds on both sides.

By: Conrad barwa

Conrad barwa — Sat, 07 Feb 2004 01:38:41 +0000

I’ll observe that AFAIK, no mainstream left party (my first sense of Left) opposed the Kosovo intervention I think this is largely true with a handful of exceptions, of the mainstream European parties; from what I can recall, only the Italian PRC (Reformed Communists opposed the NATO intervention and the French PCF confined itself to issuing even-handed condemnations of both the bombing and the ethnic cleansing. However, I was not simply referring to the stance of the organised mainstream Leftist parties; much of the divisions were intra-party ones. Polls in the run-up to the campaign, frex indicated that 40% of the SPD membership opposed the intervention and some fancy footwork was needed by the party leadership to block an antiwar measure at the party conference; Green party members in both France and Germany were not enthused by their leaders’ apathy or endorsement of the war either. Little of this reflected directly onto representational politics directly but there were quite important and serious divisions of opinion within this part of the political spectrum nonetheless. or the war in Afghanistan (there were, as I noted, reservations) and all, except the British Labour Party, opposed the war in Iraq. Perhaps, though I suppose gaps open up between the cadres and the leadership here. Even in the case of the British Labour party the latter had to push through an unpopular measure that wasn’t really going down very well with its membership.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sat, 07 Feb 2004 00:39:35 +0000

To defend my statements on Kosovo and Iraq, I’ll observe that AFAIK, no mainstream left party (my first sense of Left) opposed the Kosovo intervention* or the war in Afghanistan (there were, as I noted, reservations) and all, except the British Labour Party, opposed the war in Iraq. By contrast, most (or at least large sections) of the Jacobin left opposed Kosovo, Afghanistan and all the others I’ve mentioned. The