What ‘left’ means
Most people who think they are ‘left’ do not know.
This article proceeds from what I wrote about NDP two weeks back.
It also relies on my article about political personalities from last year.
So I will use my professor Raccoon graphics as feature image for this, and write partly in professor Raccoon mode again. This annoys some people. However, what I am saying needs to be said, and widely listened to.
Scanning the net, you would get the impression that few people are saying what I am saying here. I think a lot of people are, though usually in different terms than I use. It is the most subversive thing imaginable to the Atlantic oligarchy, so it is very hard to get it through the algorithms to any significant number of people.
Even where it gets through, many people are not going to like this very much. Especially, people who presently think they are on the left. Especially, activists of the Canadian NDP political party. I aim this especially at that group of people.
This section may be hard to follow. I am weaving together several concepts which are new to many people. It gets complicated.
NDP needs to disappear up its own ass. It will need some encouragement to do so. This will be necessary if we are going to ever have a serious social movement in Canada.
Every effective movement for reform of a polity was launched by starting a new political party. This is true for both left and right movements. It is true for all reasonably effective left progressive movements, such as in Venezuela or Brazil.
In countries where needed social movements fail to get going, it is due to two problems. One is the failure to make a full break from existing fake ‘left’ parties. The second is the misidentification of what are actual left issues.
Examples of this are all over, but one of the worst is Canada’s NDP. This is where I left off with the previous article. I am going to start here with another aspect to this phenomenon.
A lot of ideological right wing movements have been able to get going simply because there is no effective left movement or party to counter them. The ordinary people of a country are being badly harmed by liberal policies and so called ‘neoliberal’ economics. They look for a political party which can apply left wing solutions and it is not there.
By the way, neoliberal is a stupid term. Neoliberal economics is identical with old liberal economics. The basic ideas are the same.
People are still confused because liberals of the post war years, the ‘golden thirty’, found it expedient to allow some social programs and social reforms. Liberalism has long returned to normal liberalism. There is not much ‘Neo’ about it.
The trend in ‘Liberal Democracies’ is for the oligarchy to create phony left parties which work to move everything to the right. Then they create new right wing fake ‘populist’ groups. What fake right populism is about is taking issues which should belong to a left populism, distorting them, and turning them into right wing issues.
This distortion of left populist issues is an important concept.
It is also important to understand what the word ‘populist’ properly means. It is the politics of normal, non ideological people. It is opposed to ideology and to the interests of oligarchy.
There is real populism. Then there is fake populism, designed to bait and switch people. There can be real conservative populism. I have even seen legitimate liberal populism.
The real dividing line of concern here is between fake versus real populism. Fake populism is always ideological. Real, non ideological movements from left, center, and right can work together. However, only the left can create progress.
So, again; normal, ordinary people are being driven to desperation by rampant economic liberalism. The real solutions for their problems are with left populism, which is driven deep underground.
In Canada, no political party or movement is really offering normal folks any answer. Political Liberals tend to think things are going fine. They cannot understand what is bothering people.
The ideological left is always about ideological purity before anything. Everyone has to show they are fully committed to the movement’s ideals. These ideas are usually other worldly, offer no real world solutions, are of no interest to normal people, and are often very insulting and obnoxious to them.
Orthodox Marxists have degraded into a subset of the ‘Purity above all’ mentality. Anything not happening according to their theory cannot be legitimate.
All these bad tendencies are aligned, one way or other, with financial capitalism. This is opposed by industrial capitalists, or productivist capitalists, who are always offended by financialists, They want political power in order to change things.
To get power, they have to get part of the public to vote for them. Most people would be really disturbed by their actual views and intentions, so they have to keep those hidden until they can get power. They have to bamboozle the public.
In order to do this, what they have learned to do with some success, is to coopt left issues. They pretend to offer the public solutions which they are not getting from the left and center of the political spectrum.
This is, of course, a bait and switch. The public thinks it is being offered solutions for their problems. They may get partial solutions, but they discover too late than they are also getting a fascistic program which creates even worse problems for them.
Now to examine several important political issues, to demonstrate how this is done. Also, to demonstrate a standard, a test for real left issues.
Conservatism leaves people stuck in a safe but stagnating past. Liberalism leaves people endlessly arguing about the present. Leftism enhances people’s life potential and points to the future.
This latter is a very important concept. It is the test for determining the validity of any issues, people, or institutions claiming to be on the left.
Now, to some left economic issues. The issue which seems to over ride anything else these days is the fear created by the ‘climate change’ trope. First let us be clear, this is the phoniest of phony issues.
Yet people are demoralized by the fear that a warming planet will lead to economic collapse and an apocalypse. Thus we must stop using fossil fuels. The fact that the consequences of that would be as grim as anything predicted for ‘climate change’ is, so far, impossible to get through the propaganda storm set up by financial capitalism.
The aim of the climate hysteria is to put through measures which would lead to the deindustrialization and depopulation of the world. This has been a long term goal of factions within the globalist oligarchy, the ‘Huxleyans’, for a couple of centuries. Thus, opposing it is the ultimate ‘left’ issue.
However, so far mostly right wing fake populist groups are opposing the climate trope. These are, of course, set up by the productivist capitalists, the opposite pole of irrationality to the depopulators. These people want infinite expansion in a finite world, just for the sake of expansion, and without regard to the waste and depletion of resources.
Some left groups are starting to question ‘climate’. That is a good sign. The measures to suppress fossil fuel use are impairing the quality of life of normal people in many ways.
The ‘climate’ issue has given cover for the creation of several regressive taxes. That is, taxes which weigh more heavily on those with lower incomes.
Fuel taxes increase the cost of most means of getting around. They increase the cost of moving consumer goods around, thus their final price. This increases living costs, which are a much bigger part of the living costs of low income people, compared to those with higher incomes.
Renewable energy sources cannot replace fossil fuels in the near future. Turning to them will inevitably reduce economic activity. This will make local industries uncompetitive with those countries which use the full range of energy sources.
This will reduce the quantity and quality of employment for ordinary people. Less revenue will be available to fund social services. The standard of living will fall, probably quite drastically.
There is a strong correlation between ample energy from multiple sources, reducing the costs of living for ordinary people, and their increasing quality of life. There is no correlation between use of fossil fuels and the gross temperature changes in the atmosphere, and warming would not be a problem if it were happening. However, attempts to communicate this are met with a highly organized and vicious suppression.
There is very little which is coming out to challenge this nonsense. Yet it is a very clear left issue, effecting quality of life for normal people. This would be the first objective of a real left party in Canada.
The financial capitalists have a great deal invested in maintaining this falsehood. It is critical to their long range plans. If a real left movement can defeat them on this, they are likely finished.
There is another right wing issue, which should be a left issue, which is driven by a lot of intimidation. That is, migration into Canada. Generally, the fake left drives it and the fake right wing populists pretend to oppose it.
Some of the pro migration fake left are so absurd as to demand the abolition of national borders. Anyone should be able to move anywhere they want. The obvious consequence would be the collapse of national governments, and the services they provide.
Life would become nasty, brutish, and short, for the migrants as well as the natives of these countries. This would not bother the elites of all these countries. Their aim is always to break down national government as much as possible.
These governments are critical to the quality of life of ordinary people. Thus, mass migration as a weapon of class war is something for the real left to vigorously oppose.
Another aim of immigration is to drive down wages and drive up rents. This is a special problem for Canada, which was built on immigration. At one time immigration served a purpose. Now, it is a cheap solution of elites, to solve economic problems caused by falling productivity.
In recent years immigration has been pushed so hard in Canada as to create a “population bomb” problem. This is usually a problem in underdeveloped countries with high birth rates. The population expands faster than the economy, resulting in declining per capita incomes.
The fake left uses the “racist” trope to attack anyone criticizing mass immigration. Then the business liberals insist that immigration leads to economic growth. They deny that it leads to lower wages, lower overall productivity, and problems with rental availability.
This is an obvious issue for a real left party. Most normal people know that excessive immigration is harming the country. Even most recent immigrants know this and will support limits.
Yet the issue is tricky for the fake populist right. The productivist industrial capitalists behind it really do want more and cheaper labor. They are uninterested in actually raising productivity; that would require investment and skills.
The usual way by which right wing populists finesse this is to attack immigrants, rather than than the immigration system or immigration policies. They create prejudice against immigrants, which helps to control them. Their supporters generally do not notice they are not really in favor of reducing the numbers of immigrants.
Nonetheless, immigration is a hot button issue. Populist parties, real or fake, must seem to be on the right side of it. This is yet another reason why so much NDP support is going to the conservatives.
Besides these economic issues, or ‘bread and butter’ issues, are the cultural issues. This may mean the effort of global financialists to demoralize and break down society. It may also mean the campaigns of ideological conservative groups to ‘reestablish’ the ‘traditional values’ which never really existed.
The job of a real left is to determine what kind of ‘values’ actually lead to a healthy society. This means using sociology in a right way. However, creating a healthier social environment should come naturally to people once malign influences are removed.
The biggest example of social demoralization is the campaign to eliminate gender. Trans women are women, gender is a social construct, and so on. There is nothing really new about this kind of thing; the ancient Manicheans, the medieval Albigensians, the early modern Shakers all tried to eliminate gender.
Often, what they are trying to eliminate is reproduction. Worse, they are usually trying to control people by setting an impossible and weird standard of perfection. To be accepted among the perfect ones, you have to deny and suppress your own biology.
A proper left approach to these issues is not to go back to punishing people for being homosexual. That may be the right populist approach. It is not to try to create forty different gender identities.
All forms of identity politics are to be rejected. People cannot really change the gender they were born with. Yet everything reasonable should be done to enable people to feel comfortable with themselves. Most people will support that.
A very big question is what form a left/socialist movement to transform society should take. It is clear that this will not happen without violence. There may be little violence if the local establishment realizes it will lose if it tries to violently suppress the transformation.
Pacifism has nothing to do with socialism. As one wise old man some time ago put it, to be pacifist is to be objectively pro Fascist. This is a matter of the most elementary common sense, said he.
A real left is synonymous with socialism. Someone who claims to be ‘left’ and support progress but not socialism is a liberal, or an outright faker. Most of the political conflict in the world is about the need to transform away from capitalism to socialism.
However, the left should stop using terms like Communist or Marxist.
Communism is really the idea that we can get to left anarchism by a slow route. That is, no governments, money, or private property. No one serious believes in that anymore.
Marx is the start point for all useful thinking about economics and society. Everyone who is a serious leftist is a Marxist. However, that is why the term has become generally meaningless.
Critical theory about social economics has evolved far beyond Marx and in many different directions. Some of them are very useful. Others are invalid.
After Marx the most valuable left thinker has been Gramsci. He pointed out that the Bolshevik revolution largely failed. Any kind of revolutionary movement or party needs to take a more gradual approach. Yet it still must be willing and able to defend itself against violence from the oligarchy.
Thus, the most pathetic ‘leftists’ are the ones who want to argue Bolshevik party politics forever. They are the same people who deny that ‘communist’ China is a socialist country and a good model of how to run one. They are ideological.
The last thing which should be said about defining leftism is the efforts by many right wing disinformation groups to turn the definition of left and socialist upside down. Various globalist aligned groups, like the Fabians, claim to be socialists. They are extreme right wing.
Yet this allows industrialist/productivist groups to define globalist financialist groups as ‘socialist’. The troubles brought on ordinary people by financial capitalism are actually the result of socialism. We are living under socialism.
Some of these people will claim that the Nazis were a socialist party. Of course, this is all about using words to mean their opposite.
‘Socialism’ is about organizing a political economy to meet the needs of the whole society, not an oligarchy. ‘Left’ means whatever favors improving the quality and possibilities in life for the ordinary people of a society.
At present, Canada is desperately in needs of a new political party committed to those principles. It must recognize the kind of resistance which will be directed at it by the oligarchy. Thus, it must be organized and motivated to take power by whatever means are necessary and to put these principles into effect.