There is no left wing left.

[jonquil]

For anyone who still thinks that there is a liberal left left. Chris Hedges has this one nailed.

truthdig.com/report/item/the … t_20101031

The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for “moderation.” And while we waste our time talking nonsense, the engines of corporate power—masked, ruthless and unexamined—happily devour the state.

The loss of a radical left in American politics has been catastrophic. The left once harbored militant anarchist and communist labor unions, an independent, alternative press, social movements and politicians not tethered to corporate benefactors. But its disappearance, the result of long witch hunts for communists, post-industrialization and the silencing of those who did not sign on for the utopian vision of globalization, means that there is no counterforce to halt our slide into corporate neofeudalism. This harsh reality, however, is not palatable. So the corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.

[…]

The Rally to Restore Sanity, held in Washington’s National Mall, was yet another sad footnote to the death of the liberal class. It was as innocuous as a Boy Scout jamboree. It ridiculed followers of the tea party without acknowledging that the pain and suffering expressed by many who support the movement are not only real but legitimate. It made fun of the buffoons who are rising up out of moral swamps to take over the Republican Party without accepting that their supporters were sold out by a liberal class, and especially a Democratic Party, which turned its back on the working class for corporate money.

Fox News’ Beck and his allies on the far right can use hatred as a mobilizing force because there are tens of millions of Americans who have very good reason to hate. They have been betrayed by the elite who run the corporate state, by the two main political parties and by the liberal apologists, including those given public platforms on television, who keep counseling moderation as jobs disappear, wages drop and unemployment insurance runs out. As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash. Only when it appropriates this rage as its own, only when it stands up to established systems of power, including the Democratic Party, will we have any hope of holding off the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.

Wall Street’s looting of the Treasury, the curtailing of our civil liberties, the millions of fraudulent foreclosures, the long-term unemployment, the bankruptcies from medical bills, the endless wars in the Middle East and the amassing of trillions in debt that can never be repaid are pushing us toward a Hobbesian world of internal collapse. Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words.

[turtle]

The left is still there. It will always be. We have maxed the credit card. Both left and right are screwed up. I am for the middle. Where are they?

[jonquil]

@turtle

The left is still there. It will always be. We have maxed the credit card. Both left and right are screwed up. I am for the middle. Where are they?

Individual leftists still exist, but they have no power or place in government.

The rightwing media that works in line with corporatism, which virtually owns the government, is the major force at play in this country right now. Many would call it fascism.

[1xyz1]

there is a left but it seems to be under the dominance of right wing, doesn’t it?

[Silhouette]

@jonquil

Individual leftists still exist, but they have no power or place in government.

The rightwing media that works in line with corporatism, which virtually owns the government, is the major force at play in this country right now. Many would call it fascism.

Governments are almost exclusively made up of right wingers. They are in favour of Capitalism, that is, and are direct beneficiaries of it. They aren’t just owned by the right wing, they ARE the right wing.

The two extremes of realistic options we have left (excuse the pun) are:
Capitalism with state interference - which government members benefit from, because obviously they ARE the state. And,
Capitalism without state interference - which government members also benefit from, because they are all direct beneficiaries of a free market due to their sway and financial riches.
Whether these powerful people are counted as individuals or a collective state makes no difference - it is still fascism in either case.

The left is not included in the above range. Left parties are tiny - surprisingly so, and nobody takes them seriously if they remember or know that they exist at all. The media constantly reinforces that the above range is the only one available. In doing so, they have long since launched a successful ideological campaign that has associated all Leftist terminology with ineffectiveness, unrealistic desperation and by associating it with failed attempts of the past.
Nobody thinks the left:
a) is big enough to do anything,
b) has anything new, and
c) has anything practically realistic to it to not fail again.

Leftist counter-campaigns attempt to associate right wing problems with left wing solutions, and they do so correctly. But beyond this, they cannot seem to overcome the above 3 problems.

[Jakob]

The left has no ground to stand on as long as it doesn’t avow the hardness of the world.

It’s like Marx said, not as the anarchists say; capitalism transforms, through a dialectic with increasing demand, a different form of capitalism: socialism.
The left wing as a consistent entity cannot exist. It is always radical, transforming, self-incriminating and absolving, brilliant and absurd. In neurobiology it is seen as activity in the (pre)frontal lobes whereas conservative, right wing, hardlinerspoliticks stems from much deeper, closer to the fear centers and reptile brain.

I can’t help but conclude that none of the two sides to this dichotomy are in themselves sustainable. They need an actively disrupting dichotomy to persist, to keep the debate hot and the minds sharp. Competing ideas about the distributions of both physical and metaphysical goods are propagated by both physical and metaphysical means, as tension between desire and privilege, or privilege and necessity, form the basis of this constantly self-challenging phenomenon, human culture. The only way to persist as a left wing is to use the given of it’s mor(t)al enemy, find a commonly valued ground, and pick a fight.

As currency is information, the radical left has devised a weapon again; Julian Assange is now playing the game at a level on which I haven’t seen a politically unaffiliated man in my lifetime yet. He’s set out so many threats that he is now prepared to turn himself in? I wonder what this is going to amount to. Just another bubble of rebellion which bursts by the first touch of hard power? Or is this significant?

[jonquil]

@1xyz1

there is a left but it seems to be under the dominance of right wing, doesn’t it?

There is no left in power, though… to our great detriment. Since rightwing corporate fascism is basically inhuman and ultimately destructive to humans and the ecosystems needed to support life, I can only conclude that most of humanity is in the grip of insanity.