Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Karl Marx
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852
There’s no Left left.
riffing on Gertrude Stein
Does history repeat? Are we living through a rerun of the interwar period (1918-1939) with a repeat of the wealth-crazed Roaring Twenties, the dark rise of Fascism, the growing international crisis, and the imminent threat to progressive politics if not all of civilization as we know it? Karl Marx was using the debacle of Louis Bonaparte rhetorically to elicit historical comparisons, bitterly mocking the political situation of his time after the dismal defeat of the 1848 revolutionary wave. Dialectics kept him from falling into the aphoristic thinking of liberal historiography a la Santayana. In reviewing the current state of affairs, I’m tempted to sidestep Marx’s biting humor to acknowledge that history often happens first as tragedy and second as even greater tragedy.
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April 1, 2019
Categories: 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, American Empire, anarchism, Baghdad, capitalism, communism, guerrilla warfare, Henry Kissinger, imperialism, Islam, Israel, Karl Marx, Kurdistan, left communism, Leninism, Maoism, Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Politics, socialism, Soviet Union, Spain 1936-39, Stalinism, Trotskyism, ultraleftism . Tags: "Free World", "Syria In Brief", 1975, 1991, 2003, 2011, al-Qaida, American imperialism, anti-imperialism, Ba'athist party, Bashar al-Assad, battles for Kirkuk and Mosul, CIA, Cold War, communism, Damascus, David Graeber, Debbie Bookchin, decolonization, Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, Emergency Committee for Rojava, European imperialism, Falangists, fascism, Franco, George H.W. Bush, Grey Wolves, Henry Kissinger, imperialism, IS, Islamic State, Islamist militias, Israel, Karl Marx, Kurdish autonomy, Kurdish rebellions, Kurdistan, Kurdistan Regional Government, Kurds, libertarian socialism, Manifesto of the Sixteen, Maoist, Marxism-Leninism, modern decolonization movements, nation-state, national liberation struggles, national self-determination, nationalism, Nixon Administration, Noam Chomsky, northern Iraq, Peter Kropotkin, PYD/YPG/SDF, Rojava, Rosa Luxemburg, Santayana, Saudi Arabia, self-determination, Shiite rebellion, socialism, socialism or barbarism, socialist struggles for national liberation, Soviet bloc, Soviet Union, Spain 1936-39, Stalinist, Syria, Syrian Democratic Forces, tankie, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Third World, Trotskyist, Turkey, Turkish imperialism, YPG . Author: leftyhooligan . Comments: Leave a comment
What's Left? 