[[link removed]]

WHAT IS LEFT?  
[[link removed]]


 

Rebecca Solnit
February 23, 2024
Literary Hub
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Rebecca Solnit on the perennial divisions of the American Left:
“It should be a modest request to ask that ‘left’ not mean
supporters of authoritarian regimes.” _

ripped paper, Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik

 

In late 1936 George Orwell, like so many young idealists from Europe
and the USA, went off to fight fascism in Spain. By the spring of 1937
he realized he was in a war with not two but three sides. The USSR was
holding back a full Spanish revolution while attacking the socialists
and anarchists outside its control.

Facing prison and possible execution himself, not from the fascists,
but the Soviet-allied forces, Orwell fled Spain. His immediate
commander, Georges Kopp, was imprisoned, and the leader of his militia
unit, Andres Nin, was tortured and assassinated by an agent of
Stalin’s secret police. Orwell would spend the rest of his life
trying to clarify that in his time the left meant both idealists
committed to human rights, equality, and justice and supporters of a
Stalinism that was the antithesis of all those things.

He wrote after he got back to England:

When I left Barcelona in June the jails were bulging… But the point
to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists
but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too
much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the
people responsible for putting them there are… the communists.

Some of the pro-Stalin left believed the sunny propaganda about the
USSR and some of them knew better but went with the Stalinist notion
that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, that the gulags
and lies and mass executions were the price of the ticket to some form
of utopia that would soon arrive after everything else had been
quashed. There are similar rifts in the left of our time, which is
both obvious and seldom addressed outright.

What is the left? I wish I knew. When the Russian Federation invaded
Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the fact that some sector of what is
supposed to be the left excused, justified, or even rooted for the
Putin regime was, among other things, a reminder that “left” has
long meant a grab bag full of contradictions. Later came the “peace
marches” that argued the US should withdraw support and Ukraine
should surrender.

Recent stories about these sectors of the left stumping for the
Chinese government and downplaying its human rights abuses are
reminders that this is an ongoing problem that takes many forms.
I’ve seen genocide denial among this left: excusing
[[link removed]] the
Chinese in the case of the Uyghur people, justifying the invasion and
subjugation of Tibet, denying the Holodomor—the Soviet genocide
through induced famine in 1930s Ukraine—even whitewashing
[[link removed]] the Pol
Pot era in Cambodia, and siding with Assad as he wages a brutal war
against the Syrian people.

It should be a modest request to ask that “left” not mean
supporters of authoritarian regimes soaked in their own people’s
blood.

It should be a modest request to ask that “left” not mean
supporters of authoritarian regimes soaked in their own people’s
blood. But the people and groups and agendas grouped together as the
left contain not just contradictions but sworn enemies. Some of the
loudest pro-Putin people are now clearly part of the right; some
continue to claim the mantle of the left, begging the question of what
the left is.

You could call this just a problem of nomenclature. Put that way, it
might seem like a small problem, but being unable to distinguish and
describe differences can be a large one. A few years ago I said to a
man working for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, at a point
when he and the campaign were dealing with a lot of attacks from
people who considered themselves the true left, “It’s as if we
called fire and water by the same name.”

Perhaps the left/right terminology that originated with the French
Revolution has, more than two centuries later, outlived its
appositeness. (In the French National Assembly of 1789, the royalists
members sat to the right, the radicals to the left, and thus the terms
were born.) The left I love is passionately committed to universal
human rights and absolute equality and often is grounded in rights
movements, including the Black civil rights movement. I sometimes
think of the current US version as a latter-day version of Jesse
Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.

This rainbow left pitches a big tent and as such is often more
welcoming to, say, things like religion—after all, the Black church
played a huge role in that movement, Cesar Chavez and Dorothy Day were
among the devout Catholic radicals in American history, and Indigenous
spirituality is central to many land rights and climate
campaigns—while many traditional leftists often scorn organized
religion.

I’d argue that because of its intersectional understanding of both
problems and solutions, this left is more radical—radically
inclusive, radically egalitarian—than those who treat race and
gender as irrelevancies or distractions (including the men, from Ralph
Nader in 2000 on, who’ve been dismissive of reproductive rights as
an essential economic justice as well as rights issue). Perhaps it’s
seen as less radical because bellicosity is often viewed as the
measure of one’s radicalness.

Perhaps the left/right terminology that originated with the French
Revolution has, more than two centuries later, outlived its
appositeness.

Likewise, this rainbow left often has radical aims but is pragmatic
about how to realize them. This might be because it includes a lot of
people for whom social services and basic rights are crucial to
survival, people who are used to compromise, as in not getting what
they want or getting it in increments over time. All or nothing purity
often means choosing the nothing that is hell for the vulnerable and
I-told-you-so for the comfortable.

That’s the Rainbow Coalition-ish left; the other left has some
overlap in its opposition to corporate capitalism and US militarism,
but very different operating principles. It often feels retrograde in
its goals and its views, including what I think of as economic
fundamentalism, the idea that class trumps all else (and often the
nostalgic vision of the working class as manly industrial labor rather
than immigrants everywhere from nail salons to app-driven delivery
jobs to agricultural fields).

This other left is often so focused on the considerable sins of the
United States it overlooks or denies those of other nations,
particularly those in conflict with the USA, decrying imperialism at
home but excusing it abroad (and apparently seeing US aid to Ukraine
through the lens of American invasions of Iraq and Vietnam rather than
the more relevant US role in the European alliance against Germany and
Italy in the Second World War). It often embraces whatever regime or
leader opposes the US, even when that means siding with serious human
rights abuses and inequalities, as if the sins of the one erased or
undid the sins of the other. It tends to rage against Democrats more
than Republicans

This becomes the slippery slope down which some of the loud white men
of the last several years have slid to become explicit rather than
implicit defenders of the right. They often do so by attacking
opponents of the right in the name of some abstract principle that
just happens to serve the right; thus they can pretend they do not
serve the Republican Party but find fault, again and again, with
everyone who opposes it.

The Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine brought to the surface some
of the old conflicts in what the left is and should be. Not a few
people claiming the mantle of the left have been cheerleaders of Putin
and Russia for some time. Putin is, of course, an authoritarian, a
petroleum-fueled oligarch who might be the world’s richest man
[[link removed]],
an obstacle to climate action, the leader of an international white
Christian nationalist
[[link removed]] revival,
a vicious human rights abuser whose domestic enemies have a habit of
dying suddenly, a homophobe
[[link removed]], misogynist
[[link removed]],
and antisemite
[[link removed]],
and he’s involved in an imperialist war to annex the sovereign
nation of Ukraine. You can’t get much further to the right.

This other left is often so focused on the considerable sins of the
United States it overlooks or denies those of other nations.

But many in this version of the left insist that somehow the US forced
Russia’s hand, or it was all NATO’s fault and NATO was just a US
puppet, and Russia was somehow a victim acting in self-defense. Jan
Smoleński [[link removed]] and Jan
Dutkiewicz [[link removed]] were
among the many Eastern European critics who called this
“westsplaining,” writing that though these arguments are supposed
to be anti-imperialist…

…they in fact perpetuate imperial wrongs when they continue to deny
non-Western countries and their citizens agency in geopolitics.
Paradoxically, the problem with American exceptionalism is that even
those who challenge its foundational tenets and heap scorn on American
militarism often end up recreating American exceptionalism by
centering the United States in their analyses of international
relations.

Of course all this muddle about Russia is not new. Western leftists
fell in love with Russia during the revolution from which the Soviet
Union arose. Some—the anarchist Emma Goldman among them—became
disillusioned early on, but for others, nothing could shake the
devotion. All through the history of the USSR, it had its defenders in
the west, when that meant denying the gulags, the show trials and
executions, the attempt to control everything everyone did and said,
the ethnic cleansing and cultural and sometimes literal genocide of
many non-Russian populations from Crimean Tatars to Siberian reindeer
herders to Muslim Kazakhs. When it was an ally during the Second World
War, the mainstream West supported Stalin and the USSR (which of
course then included Ukraine). This is cited to their credit, often
while overlooking the fact that Stalin had earlier signed a
non-aggression pact with the Nazi government, dividing up Eastern
Europe between the two.

While some of his peers who became disillusioned with communism and
the Stalinists shifted right, Orwell was loyal to the left and pushed
back at conservatives who tried to claim him and his books _Animal
Farm_ and _Nineteen Eighty-Four. _But he was disturbed all his life
by the conflicts and contradictions of what left means._ _

I wonder now if the vicious persecution of leftists, communists,
socialists, and progressives by the postwar American right, made
people avoid analysis and statements that could weaken or divide their
own side. That is, had there been no McCarthyism, might the left
itself have cleaned house and clarified its positions? Might it have
taken on the widespread mistake of supporting Stalin and other
authoritarians?

There’s no answer to that, because there was McCarthyism and it was
brutal. It left us with direct legacies, including what McCarthy’s
righthand man, Roy Cohn, taught his protégé Donald Trump about
ruthlessness, manipulation, lying, and winning at all costs. (One of
the ironies of what I call the left-wing men of the right was their
constant claim that talk about Russian intervention on behalf of Trump
was McCarthyism, as if somehow anticommunism had anything to do with
the facts in the case or assessments of the current government of
Russia.)

But this lack of clarity about what the left is and what principles
are essential to it continue to create confusion and spread credit and
blame between two different camps. It’s an old conundrum but maybe
the solution is as simple as truth in labeling and clarity in
categories.

Rebecca Solnit [[link removed]]

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of
twenty-five books on feminism, environmental and urban history,
popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking,
hope and catastrophe. She co-edited the 2023 anthology _Not Too Late:
Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility_. Her other
books include _Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence;
Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell:
The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster;_ and _A Field
Guide to Getting Lost_. A product of the California public education
system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for
the _Guardian_, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change
International, and in 2022 launched the climate project Not Too Late
(nottoolateclimate.com).

 [link removed] [[link removed]]

* Rebecca Solnit
[[link removed]]
* Left Politics
[[link removed]]
* authoritarian regimes
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]