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

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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.
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