Left of the Left: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2022

I sometimes view humanity’s sordid past as one long, interminable tale chronicling organized bands of murderous thugs trying to exterminate each other. Much as I admire the sentiment of pacifism and humanism, I’m neither a pacifist nor a humanist. Homicide seems to be part of our species, with genocide often its inevitable conclusion.

I’ve been on the left of the Left for most of my life; from being a left anarchist in my youth to a half-assed libertarian Marxist today. That means embracing a vision of stateless, classless global communism even as I abhor the terrors perpetrated by Leninist movements and regimes. I consider all forms of Fascism an abomination, and I dismiss the red-brown sophistry of Third Positionism as fascist sleight-of-hand. In the wake of the precipitous 1989-91 collapse of the Communist bloc, there’s been an upsurge of tankyism/campism on the Left that sees world conflict in terms of US-led imperialism versus any and all opposition to imperialism. That anti-imperialist “camp” is considered socialist by default, even when it’s in defense of patently capitalist, authoritarian, totalitarian, even outright fascist regimes. Then there’s the steady rehabilitation of overtly Fascist/Nazi politics. Last column I commented that, when I was growing up I only saw Nazis as fictional TV characters. Now I see them unashamedly flaunting their fascism in the Republican Party and in demonstrations I’ve recently organized against.

So why do I identify with the Left, despise the Right, and consistently choose socialism over barbarism every time?

Revolution, war, chess: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2022

“Shachmat,” Uri said in Hebrew, then English, “checkmate.”

I was stunned. I’d dominated the chess board as white, with eleven of my sixteen pieces intact and pushing aggressively into black’s territory. I’d mercilessly attacked him throughout the game until he had only a half dozen pieces left on the board. I was just about to deliver the coup de grâce when he put me in check with his remaining knight, then checkmated me with his remaining bishop.

“Another game?” Uri asked, the right side of his face and his right arm marked by a stroke.

New Socialist Movement: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?” April 2021

 

Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy
—Polish proverb

It wasn’t my scene.

I attended Stuart Shuffman’s book release party for Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco sometime in November, 2007. Stuart initially xeroxed his zine at Kinko’s and personally distributed it to stores and shops around the city. His handmade publication was about to become a conventional paperback travel guide produced by a now-defunct independent publishing company that would offer a New York City edition the next year. His Guide to Living Cheaply combined two of my favorite things—zines and cheap eats—under the imprimatur “you are young, broke and beautiful” but the raucous release event wasn’t for me.

The once and future Left: “What’s Left?” June 2019 (MRR #433)

Let’s talk about dysfunctional relationships.

We love them from a distance, even going so far as to make movies about them. From Richard Burton’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s tortuous on-again off-again love affair that fans believed underlaid the ferocious film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, to punk rock’s murder/suicide darlings Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen who were the subject of the eponymous biopic Sid and Nancy, we’re fascinated by such emotional human train wrecks. Richard Kruspe of the sketchy brutalist band Rammstein commented that being in a band is “like a relationship. It’s a marriage without sex.” Vin Diesel’s movie xXx featured a clip of Rammstein playing “Feuer frei!” Dysfunctional musicians in dysfunctional bands is a tired old trope.

The history of larger human institutions is equally fraught with social dysfunction. “If measured by the number of lives it destroyed,” wrote author Elizabeth Gilbert, “Then you can’t find a worse alliance than the marriage between the Nazi Party and the Catholic Church, sealed with the Reichskonkordat treaty in 1933. Like many abused wives, the Church initially thought it would be protected by its powerful husband (from Communism, in this case), but instead became complicit in unthinkable psychopathy.” Today, the European Union is often criticized as a marriage of convenience that has since gone awry. “This one has sabotaged the siesta, those gorgeous lire, French-baked baguettes,” author Stacy Schiff comments. “Down this road lies a Starbucks on every Slovenian corner.” The battle over Brexit continues to remind both Britain and the continent of how unsatisfactory the European Union has become.

A critique of Fourth Worldism

No more Negative Ned. Instead of critiquing Leftist practice and politics as I often do, I’m writing about something positive and hopeful this essay. To develop some PMA. I wrote a stupider version of this critique many years ago, from which I split off my July 17, 2017, piece called “San Cristobal and Zomia, an exercise in fantasy.” And like that essay, this commentary is not an official MRR column. It’s not Hooligan canon, but apocrypha.

***

Lenin formulated his theory of imperialism in 1900 which differentiates the world capitalist economy into the capitalist national centers of European empire and their exploited colonial periphery. In a Marxist anti-imperialist context, French social scientist Alfred Sauvy coined the term Third World in 1952 as an analog to the Third Estate of the French Revolution. Also jumping off from Leninist anti-imperialism, Mao propounded his Three Worlds Theory by 1974 in which the First World is the developed capitalist nations, the Second World is the socialist nations posing as an international alternative, and the Third World is the orthodox category of undeveloped, underdeveloped and developing  nations. Starting in 1974, Immanuel Wallerstein charted the differentiation of the present world capitalist economy via the consolidation of nation-states and national economies into the fully developed core region, an undeveloped, underdeveloped and developing exploited periphery, and a semi-peripheral region in between. These tripartite schemas imply a fourth geographic tier, a Fourth World in Maoism and an outer periphery in the case of Wallerstein encompassing the marginal territories and peoples incapable of consolidating viable nation-states and national economies.

Right-of-center sellouts: “What’s Left?” October 2011, MRR #341

Needless to say, politics suck.

Yet, in the wake of the recent debt ceiling Congressional debacle, nearly all of my liberal friends, and even some of my radical comrades, are making excuses. Obama made strategic blunders in negotiating with the GOP. Or, the president is congenitally weak due to his innate desire for consensus and compromise. Or, the office Obama occupies is constitutionally powerless, toothless, incapable of standing up to Congress in the debt ceiling negotiations.

Bullshit.

I agree with Glenn Greenwald who, on 8-1-11 on Salon (salon.com), commented: “The evidence is overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare, which he is likely to get with the Super-Committee created by this bill.” Obama isn’t a progressive. He isn’t a liberal. He isn’t even a moderate. Obama is a right-of-center asswipe bent on destroying this country’s working classes, poor, and people of color. Drew Westen only scratched the surface when he took Obama to task in his article “What Happened to Obama?” in the 8-6-11 issue of the New York Times for abandoning the Democratic Party’s tradition of reform as advanced by Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt.

People forget history. They also forget some basic truths about American politics. The Democrats and Republicans are the two faces of a single ruling class. Each party acts when the other cannot. The party in power initiates the action that the party in opposition finds politically inexpedient. The Democrats were labeled soft on Communism, so the Republican Nixon opened relations with Red China. The Republicans were considered hostile to the poor, so the Democrat Clinton gutted federal welfare programs. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and Obama should be understood in this context.

The anti-political opposition to this status quo fares little better.
The tactical and strategic depth of the present day antiauthoritarian milieu is nonexistent. As a recent joke has it, two anarchists are hiding behind a dumpster, manufacturing Molotov cocktails. One anarchist turns to the other and says: “What exactly are we going to target with these Mollies?” The second anarchist retorts: “What are you, some kind of intellectual?”

Then there’s the recent crop of insurrectionists, a motley mix of anti-statist communists and insurrectionary anarchists who take their lead from the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, and who throw around slogans like “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing” and “We Are The Crisis.” When radical autonomist feminist Marxist Silvia Federici was asked about the role of feminism in recent insurrectionary and occupationist actions, she commented: “The problem, I believe, is when these actions become an end in themselves, carried out, as ‘We are the crisis’ states, ‘for no reason.’ For in this case, in the absence of any articulated objective, what comes to the foreground tends to be the glorification of risk-taking.”

Loren Goldner, in describing why 60s radicals rarely returned to their Leninist, Maoist and Guevaraist origins once they got a taste of ultraleft politics, quipped: “Once you have played grand master chess, you rarely go back to checkers.” If American politics amounts to a game of checkers then, by analogy, today’s anarchists and communists haven’t even mastered tic tac toe.