Metaphors are powerful. Metaphors are poetry disguised as prose. People who use metaphors claim they’re a shortcut to truth and meaning.
Last month I used the biological metaphor of species complex to tease out additional structure and definition of the usual Left/Right political compass. In the process I promised to cover various social contexts in given historical periods that illustrate increased Left/Right political conversions and crossovers but instead managed to drop yet another metaphor by using Mao’s metaphor with politics and war. From the 1960s war on poverty and the 1970s war on drugs to the 21st century wars on terrorism and the truth, the metaphor of war has been much used and abused. Instead, I’ll use another metaphor from Mao to “put politics in command” in coming to terms with political change, conversion, and crossover socially and historically. In the process, I will renege on my previous promise by severely limiting the scope of this inquiry to the rise of and interplay between the New Left and the New Right. Continue reading →
August 1, 2018
Categories: 1960s, 1968, 1970s, affluence, affluent society, anarchism, austerity, Barry Goldwater, bourgeoisie, capitalism, communism, fascism, France 1968, hippie, Industrial Workers of the World, Karl Hess, Karl Marx, Labor Movement, Leninism, Mao, Maoism, Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Politics, socialism, Stalinism, Third World, Trotskyism . Tags: "Red-Brown alliance", "the Communist bloc", "the Free World", 1960s, 1970s, Alain de Benoist, anarchism, anti-Vietnam War movement, “put politics in command”, “right-wing Gramscianism", back-to-the-land movement, Barry Goldwater, Black Power movement, Blair, bourgeois triumphalism, Cold War, Communis, communism, Culture Wars, Dreamer of the Day, ecology movement, Ellen Meiksins Wood, European New Right (nouvelle droite/ENR), fascism-by-euphemism, Fernand Braudel, Frankfurt School, gay movement, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE), hippie youth counterculture, Immanuel Wallerstein, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), intentional urban communities, John Lichfield, Karl Hess, Karl Marx, Kevin Coogan, left-right libertarian unity, Leninism, Mao, Maoism, Mark Kurlansky, Marxism, metapolitics, Mouvement Communiste, Murray Bookchin, neo-Marxism, Neoliberalism, New Communist Movement, New Left, New Right, non-aligned movement, organized labor, Paris 1968, Reagan, Robert Brenner, Situationism, Situationists, social democracy, socialism, spectacle, Stalinism, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Telos, Thatcher, The Civil Rights movement, Third World solidarity movement, Trotskyism, women's movement, world systems theory . Author: leftyhooligan . Comments: Leave a comment
I received a letter yesterday from my leftist penpal via the Multiverse Postal Service. We’ve been discussing the origins of the Cold War in our respective parallel universes. I quote from his lengthy missive below:
What's Left? 