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.
