Agency castration: A state of mind that views historical change with terror and anxiety, and has a radically pessimistic and deeply reactionary view of Human agency. The hidden goal of therapism and those who practice it. The common view that all we could do in the anti-war movement was riot in the streets or submit was a product of agency castration.
Anti-humanism: A state of profound self hatred that expresses itself as a desire for the extermination of your own species, usually dressed up as some form of environmentalism. Members of the earth liberation front celebrated the outbreak of AIDS because of their anti-humanism.
Anarcho-hoboism: A street culture of Anarchism that glorifies illiteracy, homelessness, alcoholism, narcotic addiction, living under bridges, eating out of trash cans, refusing to bathe, and owning as many dogs as possible. Most gutter punks are anarcho-hoboists.
Apparat-chic: A style of dress and behavior that is fashionable on the socialist side of the protest ghetto. Fellow travelling as mindless consumerism. A leather jacket with a hammer and sickle on it is apparat-chic.
Botskyism: A heretical deviation from leftobotism in which one mindless program is replaced by another that has even less public support or relation to political realty. Socialist action is botskyism, as it is a purged deviation from the leftobot Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and is even more marginal.
Cause-jacking: Using a cause that has public support to push a cottage industry sectarian agenda that has nothing to do with it. Speeches about Mumia at anti-war marches are cause-jacking.
Disposable radicalism: Modern consumerism, in all its toxicity and emptiness, dressed up as a form of "revolutionary" politics. Buying a Che t-shirt is an act of disposable radicalism, as is wearing it to a protmar.
Feminoid: A degenerate form of feminism that claims to liberate women while uncritically accepting the most sexist and reactionary cultural stereotypes about them. The claim that reason is a "male construction" is feminoid.
Intellectual pacifism: A fear of debate and disagreement within the left so paralyzing that it is often indistinguishable from a mute acceptance of the status quo. The world social forum has failed to address the crisis of meaning on the left in large part because of its culture of intellectual pacifism.
Holocaustalgia: A tendency among socialists to look back on the "good old days" when eastern socialism was busy murdering millions of people and the western left was a puppet of the KGB. Sam Macy of the WWP often engaged in holocaustalgia.
Leftbotomized: The precipitous intellectual decline that often follows long term residence in leftyworld. This is different from being leftarded in that the person was not idiotic to begin with, and the process is, in theory, reversible. The staggering decline of Stan Goff's ability to write, as demonstrated by comparing Full spectrum disorder and Sex & war, is a clear sign that he has been leftbotomized.
Leftobotic: A form of leftism that mindlessly follows a failed program and is completely unable to observe current conditions or intelligently adapt to them. The anti-war movement is leftobotic
Leftology: A type of leftism, mainly conspiracy theory, that is so stupid and delusional that is is difficult to tell from Ufology. Trutherism is a leftology.
Leftyworld: The alternate cultural universe that most members of the "radical" left live in. Only members of leftyworld believe that socialists represent "the people".
Loserism: Valorizing failure as morally superior to victory. Glorifying people or political programs that are complete failures. Ralph Nader's racist comments about Obama were motivated mostly by his bitter loserism.
Marxist-lennonist: The politics of left wing celebrities, mostly rock stars. The ideology of the music video. Rage against the machine is marxist-lennonist.
Multi-level marxism: A type of leftism that has more in common with Amway than anything else. The ISO is known for its mult-level marxism.
Protmar: A protest march organized by stalinoids. The entire cultural milieu of stalinoid protest marching. Any artifact or practice of the stalinoid protest march. Selling unreadable maoist newspapers is very protmar.
Saddamism: The glorification of foriegn leaders or regimes who oppose the United States, or the west, despite the fact that their ideology is a type of fascism and they murderously suppress there own left. Support for the Iranian regime (as opposed to the Iranian people) is a species of saddamsim.
Sectocide: Politically self-destructive behavior, usually in the form of purges or party splits. The circular firing squad. Historically motivated by real differences or struggles for power, today it seems to be motivated by the need to turn your aggression against the person standing next to you on the barricade because no one else will take you even remotely seriously. The split in the WWP during the 2004 election was sectocidal.
Stalinoid: A style of politics that resembles stalinism in its exterior forms and paranoic pathologies, if not in its political contents. A degraded and stupid survival of Stalinism. International ANSWER is stalinoid.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Friday, August 6, 2010
Reifying the Left
Comrade!
Once, during the course of a debate about the failures of the modern left, I was told by a Marxist that I was “reifying the left”. At first I took this to be just another example of how leftists hide behind meaningless technical jargon (and god knows Marxists have elevated that to a high art). After thinking about the comment, however, it became clear to me that this was an inadvertent confession of something profound:
We relate ourselves to a fantasy image of the “left” rather than to the reality. I have been just as guilty of this as anyone.
Any movement has a tension between the ideal and the real, the hope and the actuality. The modern left, however, has a vast abyss. Taken at face value, the modern left has little attractive about it. It is ugly, stupid, and profoundly conservative. So we ignore what is in our face every day in favor of an image that we keep carefully segregated from our real experiences, because to do otherwise would tend to destroy our self esteem and our social identity.
So this blog is an exercise is deliberately “reifying the left”, snatching it out of the theoretical and abstract realm, throwing it to flounder and asphyxiate on the hard cold ground of the “thing-world”, so that it can be given an autopsy and then properly buried. This blog is about the ideas, but only as they relate to the left of the "thing-world", and more about the implicit ideas of the modern left that it demonstrates by its actions, and its inactions. This isn't meant to be a sectarian blog, because I think all of the sects are equally hopeless at this point, although not equally stupid or equally evil. I am going to put your sacred cows in my gun sights.
My politics, to the extent that they are even of the left, are of a libertarian left tradition that was exterminated, both politically and physically, by Leninism. You could triangulate my position on the old left somewhere between Alexander Herzen, Victor Serge, and Richard Wright. My modern politics could be triangulated somewhere between Frank Furedi, Chris Hedges, and John Gray. So if I sound like a Libertarian around here sometimes, that is because I am a Libertarian, albeit one of the left wing variety.
Once, during the course of a debate about the failures of the modern left, I was told by a Marxist that I was “reifying the left”. At first I took this to be just another example of how leftists hide behind meaningless technical jargon (and god knows Marxists have elevated that to a high art). After thinking about the comment, however, it became clear to me that this was an inadvertent confession of something profound:
We relate ourselves to a fantasy image of the “left” rather than to the reality. I have been just as guilty of this as anyone.
Any movement has a tension between the ideal and the real, the hope and the actuality. The modern left, however, has a vast abyss. Taken at face value, the modern left has little attractive about it. It is ugly, stupid, and profoundly conservative. So we ignore what is in our face every day in favor of an image that we keep carefully segregated from our real experiences, because to do otherwise would tend to destroy our self esteem and our social identity.
So this blog is an exercise is deliberately “reifying the left”, snatching it out of the theoretical and abstract realm, throwing it to flounder and asphyxiate on the hard cold ground of the “thing-world”, so that it can be given an autopsy and then properly buried. This blog is about the ideas, but only as they relate to the left of the "thing-world", and more about the implicit ideas of the modern left that it demonstrates by its actions, and its inactions. This isn't meant to be a sectarian blog, because I think all of the sects are equally hopeless at this point, although not equally stupid or equally evil. I am going to put your sacred cows in my gun sights.
My politics, to the extent that they are even of the left, are of a libertarian left tradition that was exterminated, both politically and physically, by Leninism. You could triangulate my position on the old left somewhere between Alexander Herzen, Victor Serge, and Richard Wright. My modern politics could be triangulated somewhere between Frank Furedi, Chris Hedges, and John Gray. So if I sound like a Libertarian around here sometimes, that is because I am a Libertarian, albeit one of the left wing variety.
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