Labels
What is labelled as the American far-left strikes me as hopelessly naive. Naive because they fail to realize the Marxist/anarchist project has been completely coopted by hipsterdom. All they want is a middle-class life for everyone, and their faith and dedication would make a Soviet look like a conservative. This faith in the future and constant use of imperatives are still very romantic, maybe deeply engrained in the myth of the American Revolution. What is missing is the equivalent of a May 1968, a great disillusionment, where everyone gets together, but one side is just greedy (see the desire to be middle-class), still working within a normative system of values. What is missing is the same process that led us to Baudrillard, Zizek, Levinas, Deleuze ...

Yes, I am rambling.
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Sasha said…
You are right! Is not the labeling schema entirely skewed by what is considered 'centrist' in this country (U.S.A.), which is in fact a semi-Fascist, neo-Colonial order based upon Dershowitzian regressiveness? The U.S.-Left is hopelessly disenfranchised already by the simply effect of its label, which has cast it to the fringe before the game has begun! Even when we understand that it is not 'Centrist' (or right wing in actuality), and for that reason has difficulty winning the ideological battles, we find the Left running against the structure of U.S. polity. For every political system, there is a nomenklatura - a contingent of sophisticates who can traverse the symbolic planes of consistency that arise out of political systems. In other words, for Capitalism, there is a specific meaning of Liberal and Conservative, and a particular type of politician who fits these molds. Under 'Leftist' Communism, on the other hand, those labels arrive at different significance; Left and Right, Conservative and Liberal - these identities bear vastly different significance after revolution. The point being, in U.S. politics, the plateau of consciousness never excels beyond the vulgar, Capitalist nomenklatura, disenfranchizing automatically the Left. In a place where Center is 'Right wing' and 'Left Wing' is still Liberal, Laissez-Fair Capitalist, the vocabulary presumes a kind of lack of periphery. Which brings me to the ultimate question: who actually believes this shit!? If the workers are exploited are they not smart enough to simply stop working?
10:22 PM
François Luong said…
Uh? When did you write this? And how come it didn't appear in my mailbox?
11:35 PM
François Luong said…
Americans like categories. Categories are quaint.
11:36 PM
Sasha said…
I wrote it yesterday night. Again, yes, Americans like categories so long as they mean nothing. One has only to look at Reagan, the king of quaint, and the kitsch Conservativism that he represented. Never mind that Reagan synchronously built up Big Agribusiness and the State Capitalist (i.e. Fascist) Military Industrial Complex, consolidating power within the State-Business apparatus. He was still the President of the people - that ever homely representation of good family values - again, we have Petain's model of conservative(/fascist) political economy: work, family, patriarchy. To Reagan's Fascism, it seemed for a moment like Liberalism, meaning so-called 'Free Markets,' was a return to the Left. After all, if we look deeper, Reagan's State Capitalist industrial complexes resembled, with its subsides and government intervention, more the Soviet Union in its Brezhnevian Conservativism than it did the Capitalism of the bourgeoisie. However, the return to Free-Market Liberalism (Neo-Liberalism) with Clinton's NAFTA, WTO, etc. simply reified those patterns of capitalist accumulation corresponding to State Capitalism. Nobody who has read Rosa Luxemburg should be surprised. What we find through the mirror game of labels and ideologies is the fundamental truth that Capitalism, played at any level, ultimately results in the accumulation of wealth and power while Democracy becomes a catch phrase to cover for Capitalist reification. In the end there is no ideology, there are only the exploited and the exploiters engaged in a symbiotic dialectical relationship in which both reaffirm each other consciously or unconsciously as the conditions of history may decide.
9:42 AM
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