The Post-Left Era
OPEDS
In 1971 Germaine Greer shook the feminist camp with her book The Female Eunuch, a witty, passionate but ultimately too personal account of politics that remained safely within the bounds of bourgeois rebellion.
By Batu Caliskan
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here exists no Left in the West in the modern age; Leftists are extant in small, isolated enclaves, but there is no genuine Leftist movement. The absence of the Left has terrible implications, not only for the future of Western nations, but also for the nations still subjected to Western hegemony through the mechanistic workings of the world governments and the duplicitous narrative of Liberalism.
I. Devolution of the Western Left
There, at one critical point in history, existed a genuine Left, a Left that was unequivocally committed to the ideals of self-determination and liberation for all peoples. For all intents and purposes, the Left, and with it the promise of an emergent revolutionary class, is gone. The historic Left, composed of dissident communists, “red” anarchists of the syndicalist persuasion, radical socialists, and the like, has been replaced by the New “Left”, a political scam of a movement that perpetuates globalism, New Class managerialism, entrenching capitalism, and atomistic individualism, all under the guise of freedom for the downtrodden. What exists now, in modern Western society, is not the Left, in any meaningful sense, but rather, a flimsy simulacrum that vaunts the rhetoric of the historic Left without understanding or committing to it.
II. The Composition of the New “Left”
In the United States, in particular, the New Left came into prominence within the late decades (60s and 70s, noticeably) of the twentieth-century. When describing the New Left, it is important not only to describe the general composition of the movement, but also the personalities that it attracts. The champions of the New Left, prime examples being disillusioned university youth, wayward pseudo-political liberal bohemians, libertine hedonists, and other marginal, effete deviants, were largely a product, and continuation, of a conservative post-war American society.
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Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, during the heady days of the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 70s. Vietnam served as a uniting force and inspiration for many leftists but the tactics and strategies for genuine revolution remained painfully elusive.
[dropcap]At the end of the World War II[/dropcap], the world was witness to the transformation of America into a global empire; it escaped relatively-unscathed from the horrors of the war, and was free to pursue its own trajectory of unprecedented economic prosperity at the dawn of the “Golden Age”. The financial security that this prosperity birthed facilitated the gradual entrenching of the New Class, a conglomeration of social engineers, white-collar managerialists, planners, technocrats, and professionals entirely detached from the realities of the working-class1. The crass materialism (in a non-philosophical sense) of suburban New Class lifestyles, and the rigidity it carried, propelled a whole generation towards a rebellion which, in a kind of tragic irony, preserved the conservative impulses of the era in a more implicit fashion.
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Germaine at 75. She has aged gracefully, and some say mellowed, but her revolutionary contribution shrinks with each passing year.
All the attempted rebellion of the New Left amounted to was a re-packaging of reactionary ideals into different forms. The energy directed towards the liberation of American racial minorities was diverted into support for the abomination of affirmative action, a policy intended to assimilate the racial underclasses into the White, Liberal majority’s institutional pathology by means of entrance into the university system, which remains as the primary point of access to a managerialist, upper-class lifestyle. The danger and intrigue concomitant to revolutionarism, particularly that of anarchism, was bottled like a commodity and sold en masse to the public in the form of the “anarchist” punk-rock bands of the late twentieth century. Women’s demands for liberation from male dominance in the private and public spheres manifested in the rise of the “sexual liberation” of the 1970s2, which only furthered women’s traditional oppression by disguising sexual humiliation as the epitome of sexual liberation.
III. The Institutional Pathology of the New Left
The Left has collapsed into a sad state of degeneracy; it is now possible for any political illiterate to advance a claim to Leftism. The reason for this is that the New Left is apolitical, non-committal, and highly unserious; it reduces politics to recreational lifestylism. This pathology is inherent not only to communist circles, but to anarchist ones, an observation the late political theoretician, Murray Bookchin, expounded upon in several of his works against the post-Left anarchists3.
The ideology of the New Left is dangerous precisely because it subdues all radical consciousness, usurps genuine Leftist movements, and monopolizes all claims to the revolutionary traditions of the historic Left. For the recreational “Leftist”, politics is just another game to indulge in. He is not interested in constructing the myth of revolutionary violence (used in the Sorelian sense4) necessary to liberate the working-class nor is he interested in serious subversion of the existing politico-economic structure that permeates through the Western world so thoroughly. He may complain of the excesses of capitalism here and there, but not only does he lack a reasoned, cohesive insight into the intimate workings of corporate capitalism, he is also not willing to relinquish the crass consumerism (and the lifestylism it produces) that capitalism nurtures so effectively. He touts the rhetoric of violent resistance without understanding its implications on the personal, and is content to spout any denunciations against the existing capitalist order, as long as his personal comfort and state of mind remain intact. The irony lies in the fact that the recreational Leftist who clings to this lifestylism, and who putatively champions for the underprivileged, oppressed, etc., is the bitterly-hated class enemy of the downtrodden, including revolutionaries of the criminal (and non-criminal) working class, lumpenproletariats, the racial “underclasses”, and other supposed dregs of society.
IV. A March Backwards
Never before has there been a worse historical cycle to inherent. Whatever the cause of this decline may be, one thing can be noted; the post-Left era is upon us. The New Left was never the Left, is not the Left, and will never be the Left, contrary to the shrill insistences and reckless conflations of Right-wing ideologues. It has no potential, no vision, and no spirit; it is the shell of the former Left, a crude imitation that is extant due to its intimate association with the conservative forces of modern Western hegemony and Liberal capitalism.
V. A Much-Needed Revival
This morass exists because we, those unfortunate enough to witness the emergence of this historical trend, are not serious; we were not serious when cries of “Make love, not war” substituted the slogan of “Make jobs, not war”, when anti-capitalist rhetoric was reduced to exosemantic gang-signs for pseudo-Leftists to flash on whim, or when the ravings of the post-Leftists were in vogue among the self-proclaimed “anarchist” milieu.
It is time to abandon the New Left; it is no accident that it ended up in its current state. Whatever ideological praxis may dominate after its collapse, it is clear that the intellectual stagnation we witness today is no step forward.
References
2 Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax a Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. North Melbourne, Vic.: Spinifex, 2011. Print.
3 Bookchin, Murray. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Edinburgh: AK, 1995. Print.
4 Sorel, Georges, T. E. Hulme, and J. Roth. Reflections on Violence. Glencoe, IL: Free, 1950. Print.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Batu Caliskan is a Turkish writer who has written for various journals, including Attack the System and RADIX, on the question of decentralization, anti-statism, race relations, and the modern Left.
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