[discuss-dan] Critique: What does the new left stand for?

["Doug Bohm" <doug@denverradio.org>]

Complacent Too Long: Protest Too Little
___________________________________________________________

By Robert Krause    Robert.Krause@aya.yale.edu


"If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution"
-- Emma Goldman


Outrageous charges have been levied against the "New Left" by the popular
press and even by presumably left leaning press. The New Republic Journal
last spring ran an article whose title sums up the attitude of the press
left, right and (?) center, "The New Left: Bold, Fun, and Stupid." In much
of the presses depiction of the new left the activists are described as
being theoretically and politically naive, even "stupid". The attacks
directed at a whole group of people are either misinformed or are attempts
to misinform the readers about a current political movement. Perhaps the
writers of these political journals have been reading too much of their own
rhetoric.
   
Both the editors comments and Mr. Foer, the author of the New Republics
article "The New Left: Bold Fun and Stupid" begin their polemic with the
accusation that the "New Left" doesn’t have a "deeper critique of global
capitalism. In fact, claims Foer, "they’ve (the New Left) absorbed the
central lesson of the consumerist ethic they claim to loathe: Pleasure
sells". Foer goes on to state that he asked an anarchist (presumable during
the (Washington direct actions) to define their ideology, they responded
according to Foer, "Anarchism is like socialism without the state." Foer
sees this answer as naive and insufficient. I wonder what he expected during
an action? A strategy for fielding questions of political actions throughout
the political spectrum is to respond with slogans and Sound-Bits. One never
knows what sort of answer a person who is asking a question like that is
likely to be able to receive. After all a protest or direct action is not a
final exam of a graduate class in radical political economics.
 
What I would like to do here is respond to these criticisms with a brief
outline of what I understand to be the range of conceptual foundations of
this new left and their critique of capitalism. It is important to preface
this with the comment that in any movement participants will differ in their
individual interests and capabilities. Some will not have as developed
theoretical perspectives as others. Everyone is not an ivory tower
academician, and that’s wonderful. The grassroots and broad based quality of
this "New Left" is a sign of its strength. Unlike some of the
talk-till-we-drop leftists infighting well into impotence this new left is
content with being perhaps under-theorized (perhaps) and with protesting
along-side people who may differ in some way that could become significant
in the future. Having said that, there are some important criticisms that
the "New Left" is making, that the liberal left for the last 20-30 years has
failed to pursue.

Lets begin with Foer’s claim that incorporating a "Pleasure sells" or "Fun"
attitude is conceptually naive to the point of embracing the ideology they
desire to subvert. The left political analysis embraced from the puppeteers
to the anarchists is a long tradition from Kropotkin to Foucault.  The New
Left according to the words of Utah Phillips and Ani Difranco seek not only
"Bread but roses". Not coincidentally one of the best known of the puppeteer
groups is called "Bread and Puppet". This sound bite strikes to the heart of
one of the New Left’s core beliefs: we fight not only for livable wages,
just and representative governing bodies etc. but we also fight for quality
of life: Roses.  Explicitly we seek a world of social and economic justice
and a world that has room for humanism, joy and beauty. Issues the serious
academic left of old often overlook. Foucault’s "Dandy" is a possible icon
for this position. Along with this superficial and idealistic critique comes
a more serious discussion regarding the difference between the politics of
"pleasure" and the politics of "desire".  As Foucault, Deleuze and Guatarri,
and Baudrillard point out, desire is the insatiable commodity capitalism
essentially deals with. That is, desire is productive, because the
cultivation of endless new desires (a never ending stream of new products)
sucks individuals in our culture into a never ending morass where they must
forever produce more and more so they can continue to consume more and more.
This same ideology is our chief export. This culture colonialism by the
capitalist first world throughout the world seeks to transform the world
into a global version of the Roman vomitoriums.  The drive that the
Republicans, Democrats, (and yes, even Marxists) have to continue to grow
the economy ours, theirs and the worlds, by having our every experience of
life mediated through capitalism is itself a serious problem.

  Once we sang songs after dinner around a piano at home, now we watch TV,
and buy CD’s of professionals we don’t know and who aren’t accessible to us.
This cultural change creates people who are afraid or unwilling to sing,
dance, or do art unless it is "professional."  We used to go for walks in
the woods to experience being with nature. Now our very experience has been
co-modified by ever increasing consumer crap needed to enter nature: Gortex,
hiking shoes, mountain bikes, ad nauseum.  Desire is productive because when
you desire you work to obtain the product that is believed will satiate this
insatiable need and in doing so you produce.  Pleasure is not productive,
pleasure is an end in itself:  Roses.  Punks, know their artists.  Their
artists are often accessible to them.  I have friends who have gone out with
Ani after a show.  Part of the new political left’s agenda then is a serious
introspective critique about how capitalist desire for wealth, power, and
respect (Weber) often through a naive and unexamined embrace of the
technological perspective (Heidegger) can be mitigated through deliberately
cultivated relationships with self, others, society, technology and the
world (Heidegger, Foucault).  This micro analysis frequently is combined in
the new left with a macro critique that economic growth and the ecstatic
orgiastic celebration of the "triumph of capitalism" and promotion of this
growth all over the world will have serious if not deadly (as in world
deadly) side effects.  That is, we cannot continue the level of consumption
and growth without 1) running out of non-renewable resources and 2) damaging
perhaps beyond repair our biosphere.

Now these are serious global economic critiques not only of capitalism but
also of Marxism and any economic ideology that holds that continual growth
is a desirable social end.  The fundamental policies of the IMF/World Bank
and the WTO then on this account are seriously flawed.  The goal to open and
keep patent world market with the ends of increasing the "standard of
living" both for the first and third worlds is environmentally catastrophic
if we maintain an ideology of insatiable desire.  We will kill ourselves and
perhaps the planet.

As far as the workers of the world go, while it may be true that the threat
to first world labor is the growth of a competitive third world, it is also
true that the policies of the World Bank in particular have left many third
world countries terribly in debt.  And while it may be argued that
significant portions of loaned monies have been misused and mismanaged by
the dictators and corrupt state governments, it is also the case that the
structural adjustment programs of the IMF/World Bank have wreaked havoc in
many states with existent and previously more functional infrastructures
than after the conditions and specifications of loans from the World Bank
and IMF.

The details of those this is not the proper context to delve into, however,
readers might want to consult Joseph Stiglitz’s article entitled, "The
Insider" (April 17&24, TNR) that addressed some of these issues.

The critiques of this IMF/World Bank offered by demonstrators and activists
offered in the form of slogans "More world, No Bank" are simplifications of
complex and often diverse opinions regarding what should be done. Radical
revision of existing systems, altogether new economic systems and regulatory
bodies that are democratically elected, and getting rid of the IMF/World
Bank altogether are examples of the range of opinions held.  It means little
to say that some positions are better thought out than others, but the depth
of thought is hardly the point.  No one is about to say OK anarchist
generation Xer, go ahead and create a new economic system.  Capitalism is
hardly about to roll over and die.  That being the case the entrenched
nature of the existing system speaks to how it is that anarchist punks,
union workers, Earth First!ers, the Green Party, and so many others can
stand united despite differing agendas. As progress is made and policy
changes or institution changes occur the groups that stood side by side will
be forced to reconcile or separate. Until then however groups with differing
ideologies and agendas can stand together unified unlike the stupid
infighting among the intellectual subdivisions of the political left for the
last who knows how long. Stupidity, Mr. Foer, is not individuals with
differing agendas (many of whom may have not read Baukunin or Kropotkin or
even Marx) standing together united in an understanding that something has
gone very awry. Rather stupidity is well read leftists arguing forever about
whether Trotsky, Lenin or Mao have it right and so do nothing in the face of
environmental disaster or oppressive non-democratic bodies imposing economic
burdens on the people of the world.


Robert G. Krause, teaches philosophy at Quinnipiac University and at Western
Connecticut State University. He is a Clinical Instructor at Yale University
where he lectures and instructs in Bioethics and in Psychotherapy. He is
also the Faculty Advisor at WCSU for a student activist group Youth for
Justice and he is a member of CGAN.


Douglas Bohm 303.525.2962 doug@denverradio.org <mailto:doug@denverradio.org>

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