Date: Sat, 1 May 1999 23:11:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Shawn P. Wilbur" <swilbur-AT-wcnet.org>
Subject: re: Fuck the Left?


Whooboy, what a lot of todo about labels. Seems to me this is all a lot
easier than we're making it on each other.

On Sat, 1 May 1999, danceswithcarp wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 1 May 1999, Unka Bart wrote:
> 
> > Nicholas G, the European poster-boy for the cause of those who wear their
> > undershorts entriely too small, writes:
> 
> One of you better ones, bart.  Heh-heh.
> 
> > >>But seriously, why do you ( and many others ) insist on keeping up this
> > >>anti-leftist bullshit when you know that so many of us here, especially the
> > >>europeans, consider ourselves leftists!?
> > 
> > Why on earth should an anarchist define him or herself in statist terms?

With all due respect, Bart, it seems like you're giving a lot away if you
let "the left" become nothing more than a "statist term." And, here,
you're trying to give it away for other folks - define their definitions.
I can understand why folks wouldn't want to call themselves "leftists,"
why even "statists" wouldn't want to, but i have a lot harder time
understanding why Nicholas and Brian ought to be hassled for taking a
different strategy with regard to political identifications. 

> That's one way of putting it and I'd also include the media and political
> hacks in here too.  The thing about "leftist" that irritates me is it
> plugs you right into a niche on the scale:  If you are a "leftist" you
> only have so much "Room To Move." (John Mayall)  Also it prematurely
> committs you to a position, and often this is a position that will leave
> you with eggola on your face.  Finally, one might have a multitude of
> thoughts on a multitude of issues and which one is it that determines
> where on this spectrum of "Right," "Middle," and "Left" you come down at?

This is a completely logical criticism - corrollary to Bart's - which
slides right on by the fact that the actual history of "leftisms" has
honored this simple "spectrum" more in the breach than otherwise. As you
point out, it's pretty hard to be in one place on the spectrum when there
isn't *really* one spectrum. I would venture to say that the American Left
(tm) is no exception to that rule, particularly in its current, rather
pathetic state. (The "mainstream left" here certainly does take "duck and
cover" as its primary political position...) 

> The accepted radical "leftist" position on say, just about anything is
> that middle-aged white xtian males are at the center of the porblem.  The
> truly sad part of this is like most myths and legends this is based on a
> bit of truth, a small bit:  SOME middle-aged white white xtian males
> normally are at the center of the porblem.

Yep, there are indeed SOME people for whom a weird embrace of "political
correctness" or some such has become a kind of secular fundamentalism.
Those folks often want to speak *as if* they were "the left" and represent
all it is, was, or will be - while, often, being entirely ignorant of any
of the history at issue. (Ah, for the good old days, when we joked about
"not being politically correct" precisely as a self-reflexive guard
against imagining ourselves - i'm speaking now of "radical" academics, my
old gang - a new vanguard or chosen people.) 

I'm just not sure i want to give these folks the credit for being the
heirs of any of the possible "leftist" traditions. Why not just call them
"folks looking for an easy explanation" and lump them with the other
fundamentalists (since we can't seem to give up lumping folks)?

Part of my porblem with "anti-leftism" boils down to this: if, for
example, Nicholas wants to call himself a "leftist," and try to make that
mean something specifically anti-statist, i'm inclined to back him in the
attempt, over any number of dictionaries and magazines-prone-to-cruises. 

> The porblem of this "leftist" view is that ALL of us middle-aged white
> males should have some kind of guilt complex over the sins of a very few
> and therefore we all should endeavour to purge ourselves of the sins that
> make us "guilty" of wallowing in some gender-oriented skin-color
> privilege.    

I've had the unenviable job of teaching some version of that line - the
lowest common denominator (or New University Standard) of multi-culti -
off and on for the last 10 years. The trick is to account for various
kinds of systematic privilege without reducing singular individuals to
new, improved stereotypes. The universities, of course, want kinder,
gentler stereotypes, dressed up as "basic literacies" of one sort or
another. A fair number of academics know better, but bow to various sorts
of pressures and constraints - not least a sense that students can't
handle a more nuanced, rigorous look at the issues. But students, for the
most part, can-but-won't because these are silly required courses imposed
by university administrations that give a damn about nothing beyond
running their peculiar kind of business, taught by mostly-unsupervised
grad student and part-time workdogs (like me, in my non-bookstore life).

If you can't do more than pass around stereotypes in the classroom, who
would expect the media to do more than peddle whatever it is that they
think sells soap. As you remark later, carp, all the thinking has been
done. 

(You can, of course, do a lot more than the minimum in the classroom, but
you have to be willing to piss off students, colleagues, supervisors and
such by either talking heresy or demonstrating that education *isn't* a
lost cause, and making their resignation look as bad as it really is. I
taught a Philosophy of Feminism class a couple of years ago, and was
having a really good time making a strong philosophical and historical
case for feminism - without the tired biologisms and easy answers - but a
fair number of my students really *hated* it. Their taxonomies were
challenged, so they had to think again, so that even though i was building
an argument that made feminist thought and activism even more central to
(ah, what the heck) "the left" and its history, quite a few of them
weren't gonna budge. "The are 5 kinds of feminism...and that's it. Don't
you know anything?" asked one of them. She was not one of the dozen or so
who learned to love Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre along the
way...)

> Well, bovine feces on that:  Me and my fambly never owned no slaves; never
> exterminated no Indiginous Peoples What Were Here Before The Euro-Trash
> Got Here; never owned a business so we could exploit people; never were
> part of the military-industrial complex; never practiced segregation;
> never beat our wives (well, my daddy and my grand-daddy did, but I didn't
> and they didn't ask my permission when they did); never spilled oil in
> envoironmentally sensitive places; never owned stock; never went off on
> some xtian-sponsored crusade (but I did get to attend some truly awesome
> pentecostal tent-revivals when I was a kid--more screwing of other's wives
> went on there than at a country club); never belonged to exclusive clubs
> and societies; AND WE WERE NEVER ASKED BY ANY OF THESE PEOPLE THAT DID
> THIS KIND OF STUFF FOR OUR PERMISSION TO DO IT.

Amen - on a couple of counts. But what gets complicated here is that what
got done got done in a way that made virtues of a sort - "white, male,
christian" virtues - of some pretty nasty stuff. A culture (for lack of a
better term) dominated by the SOME was created out of social arrangements
where those people nonetheless could get away with doing things "in our
name" or in the name of various possible identitarian categories we might
or might not be included in. The current "whiteness studies," whatever
their flaws, have at least given us a road back towards specificity,
refusing to accept a label by which, among other things, responsibility
can be diffused.

I've been quiet about the NATO intervention, mostly, i admit, because i've
had a bad cold and the bookstore has been keeping me very busy. (Manning
the pumps is hard work...) But my basic reaction when someone asks me
whether or not i "support NATO" is that my "support" is pretty much
immaterial. "WE WERE NEVER ASKED BY ANY OF THESE PEOPLE THAT DID THIS KIND
OF STUFF FOR OUR PERMISSION TO DO IT" - from long before the Kosovo
intervention began. So i can speculate along with the best of them about
what the best possible outcome of this horrible mess is, and play armchair
general. The "best cases" i can think of, from the point of view of
minimizing the suffering of the people of Kosovo, are barely even
desirable options. And i just haven't wrapped my little head around
whatever it would take to think them through "as an anarchist." Stuck in
the midst of a statist clusterfuck, there seems to be only a range of
possible compromises.

> So the en vogue radical leftist attack on the dominant white male culture
> is truly loopy if you ask me, and I simply don't agree with it.  If I
> don't agree with it, then how can I be a "leftist?"

By contesting the foolishness from underneath the same umbrella. 

> > Hell, I'm not even a real anarchist, but even this old rutabaga can see
> > that the entire raison d'etre of anarchy is the elimination of the state.
> > That being the case, it seems mighty silly to label yourself in statist
> > terms.

I wonder if it's more a matter of using the terms at hand, which are,
under the (state-dominated) circumstances, likely to stink a bit of the
state. Don't we all...just a bit?

> It doesn't even matter if it's "statist" bart; let yourself be labeled and
> you are then ideologically pigeonholed.  Classical anarchy is anti-state,
> anti-hierarchy.  You, me, goat, josh, even brine-oh and maybe chuck0 have
> extended the "anti" part to include tradtional cultural structures and
> labels that do just as much imprisoning and enslaving as the institutions
> themnselves do.

I'm not sure i buy this: "let yourself be labeled and you are then
ideologically pigeonholed." Maybe "let yourself be labeled and expect to
be misunderstood (particularly if it's a bad or historically vexed
label.)" Unless we're such products of a consumer culture that we only
deal with one another's "brand names" then the problem is something
different - and maybe it's less of a problem. If "ideologically
pigeonholed" means that folks blind to history and sigularity, and blinded
by ideology will think something silly about my politics if i call myself
a "leftist," then fair enough. People think silly things about me because
i call myself an anarchist. Fine - and not really my problem. If, on the
other hand, *i* think silly things about myself *just* because i call
myself an anarchist, then - although i will be indistinguishable from a
very large number of self-identified "leftist activists" - i'm really just
another consumer. And real anarchists should probably call me out on my
shit, rather than leaving me the field while they go "outside." 

It should be clear by now that part of the reason i continue to call
myself a christian is that i sort of hate to let authoritarians and
boneheads hijack the whole tradition - particularly when they don't seem
to be able to read the basic texts...

> > Even Brian buys into this nonsense:
> > 
> > >As do many American anarchists, like myself.  Not to mention the fact that
> > >Das Carpital was a yippie (Youth International Party) in days gone by--right-
> > >wing organization?  Not hardly.  And he's anti-capitalist and anti-
> > >authoritarian...where else on the political spectrum would he be placed?
> 
> Actually, I was going to respond to this.  A "spectrum" is linear.  If I'm
> in a spectrum I'm covering colors all over it because while the majority
> of my overall positions may be "left" in the linear diagramming, some are
> "right" and some aren't even in the visible wave lengths.
> 
> > Well, Brian, old buddy, this here "spectrum" is actually a circle.  Just
> > like the earth; walk far enough in either direction and you get back where
> > you started.  Take either the right or left; at the extreme they are
> > indistinguishable absolute dictatorships.  Hardly the stuff of good
> > anarchism, I should think; but what do I know...?  And besides I digress...
> 
> Yeah, if you have to give it a shape circles wirk (WIRK?) as well as as
> lines.  Perhaps a shape-shifter an even better metaphor.  I forget though,
> bart, when we visited that Tibetan Bonze and walked around it why did they
> insist we walk clockwise?  
>
> > But in answer to your question viz brother Carpo, where he (or any good
> > anarchist) should stand is *Outside* the "political" spectrum.
> 
> Fuggin'A-right, Bubba.  And I'm serious.  Each and every position a person
> takes should be one based on new thinking and not on thinking by
> extension-- the latter of which seems to be more and more the case:  I
> took (A) position, which led me to (B) which led me to (C), so now when I
> am confronted with a decision I very simply go to (D) because it is
> "consistent" and a natural progression.  

It's probable that we should stand *against* any simple model of the
diversity of political positions. To the extent that calling oneself a
"leftist" encourages simplification, then it's probably a bad thing. But i
find it hard to believe that the general paralysis of self-identified
"leftists" has much to do with adherence to a bad spatial model of
politics or any other aspect of a bad label. New thinking is certainly
needed, but it has to start somewhere, find a purchase somewhere. i
suspect, as it has in the past, that new thinking will continue to find
new uses for old labels. Whether "right" and left" are among those that
find another lease on life ought to come out of the struggles to make them
do particular kinds of, erm, political work.

> > "Political" is all about "statism."
> > 
Shit. Can't be "political." Can't be "work." We're against that stuff.
Sorry, gang, i cross these things out of my dictionary when i get the
word, but...

Why not just call statism shitty politics as we fight for something
different in the way of governing ourselves?

> > >Face it, Carpotkin, you're a leftist...an armed, drunken, twisted, anti-
> > >authoritarian leftist...but a leftist nonetheless.
> > 
> > I rather think that the Carpmeister is, like this jaded old warrior,
> > outside the spectrum.  One doesn't have to be a pure anarchist to see that
> > this "right" and "Left" bullshit don't feed the dawg.  A pox, a *POX* I
> > say, on both of their houses, sirah!
> 
Too late, Bart, there's worse than a pox on both "houses" - and better.  
There's history and conflict, always working to unravel the staid
stupidities. Facing the kind of political-economic monoculture we do face
now - and assuming that this quibbling about labels is anything more than
a consumerist neurosis - maybe we ought to be pointing out the cracks in
those edifices. 

> Same-same, kimosabe.  I'd rather have the legroom of a fullsized car.  My
> feet feel the need to move sometimes.

Agreed, which is why i'm scratching those words out in pencil. Never know
when they might come in handy. Always try to be aware that they may be
doing someone with the right sort of ideas some good right now.
> 
> carp
> 
-shawn