Posted on 08/20/2002 8:04:39 AM PDT by Leisler
The language of leftism is out of date. It desperately needs reconstruction and revitalisation, if the Left is ever to regain its proper status as a voice of ethical critique of materialistic modern society.
As a registered Democrat who voted for the fringe-left Ralph Nader for President in 2000, I am well aware of the decline in prestige and effectiveness of leftist organisations since their high point in the 1960s. The large demonstrations against globalisation two years ago, for example, made scarcely a ripple in the US and have already been forgotten. One problem is that too many leftist periodicals are run by callow cliques whose vaunted populism is a mask for snobbery.
Leftist analysis has been slow to adjust to the massive expansion of the service sector after the Second World War. In the US, salaries of skilled manual labourers have long exceeded those of mid-level office staff. Leftists consistently misinterpret mass media and new technology, which they treat with paranoid theories of manipulation and “commodification” coined by writers schooled before the Second World War (before the birth of television).
The communications revolution has blurred traditional class lines. But the Left still doggedly invokes paradigms from early industrialisation, applicable today only to the Third World. It finds “oppression” under every rock and reduces contemporary society to rote battles of the “powerful” and the “powerless”.
The Left is wilfully blind to the enormous contributions that capitalism has made to democracy and individualism. Over the past two centuries capitalism has raised the standard of living and enhanced the health and life expectancy for untold millions in the West and elsewhere. It has stimulated new ideas and fostered free speech.
When they call for the redistribution of wealth, leftists are endorsing an authoritarian system that, wherever it has been tried, has resulted in economic stagnation and a sapping of cultural energy. Such concentration of power in the State creates its own tyrannical master class. Without the profit motive, few are inclined to work for long. The play of the market, rather than government engineering, is more reliable for long-term job creation. When jobs are varied and plentiful, ethnic and racial tensions diminish.
Only a lunatic fringe on the far Left is still calling for revolution, a smashing of the social order, but it must be acknowledged how widespread that idea was in the 1960s. Most leftists do believe that, without them, the naive proletariat would wallow for ever in ignorance and slavery. Unless they are volunteering hands-on service in blighted neighbourhoods, however, most leftists are far removed from working-class life. Many are wordsmiths — journalists or academics who run in packs. Leftism has become wordplay — a refuge for bourgeois intellectuals guilty about their comfort and privilege.
The crisis of the Left was signalled 20 years ago by academe’s retreat into post-structuralism — an elitist, jargon-filled methodology practised by literati with scant knowledge of history. In the US, liberalism too is confused, alternating between a genteel humanitarianism credulously craving government programmes to an overtly Machiavellian power politics.
Because the Left has been programmatically anti-business, it has been unable to reform the business practices that generate prosperity in the West. A strong, articulate Left could have roused public resistance to the Marie Antoinette corporate culture of the past 15 years, which climaxed in recent revelations of monumental fraud.
As smaller companies were swallowed up in transnational conglomerates, plant closings produced superficial cost-cutting, rewarded by skyrocketing compensation for top management. Boards of directors went limp, while stockholders were helpless. An honest, respected Left would have been well positioned to render aid when and where it was needed.
The most radical task facing contemporary leftism is a purgation and reclamation of its own rhetoric.
But still voted for Nader.
Ya.
When they call for the redistribution of wealth, leftists are endorsing an authoritarian system that, wherever it has been tried, has resulted in economic stagnation and a sapping of cultural energy. Such concentration of power in the State creates its own tyrannical master class. Without the profit motive, few are inclined to work for long. The play of the market, rather than government engineering, is more reliable for long-term job creation. When jobs are varied and plentiful, ethnic and racial tensions diminish.
Translation: the left was wrong.
The principal weakness of leftist political doctrine is, IMHO, an over-adherence to some of its Marxist roots, specifically that social class is to be defined in economic terms. If this is accurate then the class relationships that are the underpinnings of the Marxist historical dynamic are invalidated by the changing economic status, or as Paglia states In the US, salaries of skilled manual labourers have long exceeded those of mid-level office staff.
This is the real victory of the proletariat, not a "dictatorship" as Marx proposed, but a rise in economic status with regard to the bourgeousie that essentially eliminates their former class rivalry, at least in economic terms. In cultural terms this is debatable, and may be in part responsible for the red/blue nation split we noted in the last election.
There is a third measure beyond the economic and cultural, the political, the separation of which from the economic is not allowed under Marxist theory, nor is the class mobility which gave rise to it. America's self-proclaimed "ruling class" maps to economic or cultural classes very imperfectly, in fact, is rapidly becoming an entity of itself: Such concentration of power in the State creates its own tyrannical master class. The left stubbornly refuses to recognize this fact, preferring to ignore this class in theory and attempt to suborn it in practice. This dichotomy describes where Lenin left Marx, but that was three-quarters of a century ago and the left is yet to really account for that, preferring instead to substitute murky jargon for theory and increasingly stale cliches for practice.
Marx had a phrase for this, too, "alienation." It wasn't supposed to happen to the left.
That's been a persistent problemo with Camille's writing - her tendency toward affected constructs instead of the clean, crisp, concise sentences that would make her writing more powerful.
One is rarely one's best editor.
Michael
Let's just put this in plain English. Manual laborers are rewarded more in a Marxian society because their loyalty is more easily bought. The thick-headed are a natural target for class warfare, since many of the simple-minded resent their smarter neighbors. Call it Marx's Revenge Of The Boneheads.
Michael
When told that HillaryCare would force small businesses to close, Ms Clinton responded that she could not be responsible for "undercapitalised" businesses.
Small companies live in fear of reaching the magic number of 12 employees, at which point they become nationalized.
Long-term "service" to The Bent One will have that effect.
Here's one place where the left is losing it, IMHO - they can still work up class envy between poor and wealthy, (that stubborn adherence to economic measures I mentioned) but the class of the poor and the class of the proletariat aren't the same anymore. A wise fellow once said "the poor ye have with ye always," and if He was right it's a mighty shaky foundation for leftist politics. I think that's why the latter are shrinking in effectiveness, if Paglia is right on that account (and increasing in stridency).
(You get this way debating Marx with Marxists. Don't hate them, pity them. They expend tremendous amounts of intellectual energy clinging to the demonstrably invalid.)
It sounded elitist to me.
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