UR-Values Of The Right, Center and Left

I doubt that there IS anything of what you call “left”, Ian.

A political actor has to be organized, otherwise it doesn’t exist. It seems that the only ones that bother about organizing things nowadays are the rentiers. They seem, between them, have organized what is generally called “the centrists” and “the ultra-right”.

There may be some differences between factions of the rentiers, that decide which one of these they support. Probably banking and equity funds support the centrists, while real estate and raw materials, and perhaps platforms, support the ultra-right. But it would require some research to establish the facts.

The direct producers don’t organize anything any longer (as they did roughly 1850-1950), and for that reason don’t get their interests considered. What happens in the world is decided by compromises, but only compromises between the mobilized, says Susan Strange.

Don’t mourn, organize!

Hmm, I think what is called the center has attitudes very similar to what you attribute to the right. Yes, they care about money (but so does the right; they like cruelty but they like money just as much). I think they by and large *also* privately think people deserve their hardships for not being as “smart” or “savvy” as the center-winners, but they believe it’s a bit gauche to say so outright, although they often can’t really help themselves and insinuate it. They may not take enjoyment in the cruelty per se like the hogs on the right do, but they see it as a necessary thing to keep them in their rightful place.

https://www.fredgao.com/p/rebooting-american-hegemony-a-chinese

From the Inside China website here’s a good analysis of Trump’s thinking about the place of the US in global affairs.

Ian i don’t know if you ever read it, but this from Rick Perlstein is a classic. He gets right to the Ur values of the right … but misses the center. I think today his article describes the centrists the best.

Check out, “The Long Con”
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

“Trust me with your life, but not your money or your wife” seems the prevailing attitude.

@Daniil Adamov:

“There are times when, remembering how my people and my ancestors have fared under a regime of dedicated friends of all humanity, how well they have been “helped”, I feel very glad we don’t have a serious left left in Russia anymore. “Centrists” like Putin aren’t nearly as hazardous to have in power, and I’m not even a fan of Putin. Self-righteous fanatics out to “help” us are more dangerous than plain old opportunistic careerists.”

I believe H.L. Mencken wrote something to that effect. For that matter, Celine’s Third Law readeth thusly: “And honest politician is a national catastrophe”.

By this schema, the Bolsheviks, who I believe did enjoy their cruelties, must have been closet RWs. They were hated by the capitalist countries, not for those cruelties but because they confiscated private wealth.

sociopaths

Why doesn’t every country have an organization… without apology and with public support, defends against enemies of the common good?

I especially wonder what happened to “the Left”. And, I suppose I wonder, too, what happened to “the center” and “the right”.

erased any sense of integrity

It is like “caring” in any mode need not apply.
————

Imagine a society where for several generations brain damaging industrial waste was put into the water, every child was injected 70 or so times with heavy metals that accumulate in the brain, the food was bathed in literal poison, and the amount of pills ingested exceeded the servings of fresh veggies consumed.
Scratch that there’s no need to imagine that society. We’re living it. Every single day. Is it any surprise what it’s all become?

I think a lot of people wondering “Where did the left go? Why isn’t there a strong unified left?” kind of haven’t been paying attention.

We live in a capitalist system. The left is inherently opposed to that system–the far left is opposed to it root and branch, the social democratic left wants to make it a smaller part of a mixed economy, which from the perspective of capitalists is just as intolerable. Capitalism is all about growth, including encompassing more and more of the whole social/political economy; shrinking is anathema.

The people who wield power in that system do not like being opposed. They exert money and power to stop that from happening. That involves everything from placing cops in left wing groups who work at fracturing them and pushing them towards stupid tactics, to slanted media, to pouring lots of money into right wing and centre-right political organizations, to funding certain kinds of studies and not others at universities, to fiddling algorithms on social media so people won’t get feeds from lefties. The surprising thing is not that there is currently not much of a “left” in the Anglosphere and many other parts of the Western “First World”, the surprising thing is that with the forces inherently arrayed against the left there ever is much of one.

The only thing that keeps left wing politics in existence is that the grievances of the non-owning class are so strong and obvious that it’s hard to keep at least a few people from figuring it out.

@bruce wilder

That “brand disclosure” at the end of Citarella’s article is a joke, it’s obviously not meant to be taken at face value.

After I posted about Hezbollah I remembered the Panthers in the US. They were exactly the sort of organization I was thinking of when I thought of Hezbollah. Racism being what it is in the US, they never had a chance to become a national force.

Just listened to a long podcast from Danny Haiphong with Brian Berletic and Carl Zha. Berletic is well-situated to see the way the US seeks to undermine nations in Asia. He makes a point of stressing how important it is to protect media and education.

That answers my question about why there has been nothing here like Hezbollah since the Panthers. The US is ground zero for using the media and schools to corrupt and misguide the public. When people have been deliberately misled for generations, it might take generations to grow out of it.

Clinton, Obama, Biden. If they really did help, Trump wouldn’t exist.
——
When most leftists talk about the “left” they don’t mean limousine liberals (when there was a left liberals were universally considered on the right). They don’t mean people who think the system is great and the change needed is to allow minorities in the ruling and oppressing classes. They don’t mean people who think proper pro-noun use is a primary issue.

Political economy is about power. The ruling class has it. This is why the ruling class has such masses of wealth because they use their power to enrich themselves and harm everyone else. Power is similar to a black hole. The more a class has the more they accumulate as they buy the media, schools, government and so on.
A decent rule of thumb to tell if someone is a leftist. Do they want to reduce power disparity in significant ways between the ruling and ruled classes? If no they aren’t a leftist.

This is one of the best threads recently on this site, not just the central post but the variety of responses also bring out more nuance and specifics both.

As to the real Left, I think we need to go back to 19th century (or even earlier) Anarchist thinkers, like Peter Kropotkin with the idea of mutual aid among both human and animal populations, & I am also open to some (only) of the Christian Socialists such as Tolstoy’s ideas and practice. One could also mention M. Bakunin, (Which is similar to some of Gandhi’s nationalist, anti-Imperialist practice in India, despite the cultural and religious differences.) Feminist leaders who promoted women’s bodily autonomy and rights also go into this basket of genuine populists or progressives (the ones who weren’t eugenicists, or anti-black of course.) People who put these ideas into action, including on battlefields, were the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno, who fought against both the White Reactionary Slavs and also the Red Crew, for the sake of local autonomy and freedom, as well as the militants in the Durruti Column during the Spanish Civil War.

The Marxists are a different kettle of fish. While Karl was a solid economist and sociologist, he got mixed up with the delusion that political ideas could become materially reified as actual “scientific” nodes, then he created a teleological certainty that the Revolution would win, and exactly what lines it would follow. This is absurd, and shows the kind of historical blinkered thinking that Fukuyama later displayed with “The American Century.”

Marxism’s offspring tended to include the sadistic streak that one commenter mentions early. If we follow the “Enlightenment”categorical error that Voltaire made, that humans could be bettered or pushed to higher levels of “perfectability”, and that the most Enlightened and Wise (Greek ideal of the “philosopher king”) not only have the right but the DUTY to push the Lessers upward, we see what ultimately resulted with many Communist Cults.

I met my first Sparticist Youth League Member at age 17 as a college freshman. I was not deeply sophisticated politically, but I could immediately see that despite some level of genuine universalist idealism, this person was a fanatic incapable of critical thinking outside of the dogma being sold, and that his group’s schemes for change would only lead to a kind of Cult Hive Mind which radically excluded freedom of thought and action.

Whomever brought up Christopher Hitchens hit the nail on the head. These “ex”-Trotskyists, Leninists, Stalinists, followers of Chairman Bob Avakian thought have high levels of energy and commitment, BUT their Utopia is a dystopian Cargo Cult in most respects. If one looks at the historical legacy of both the Soviet Union and the Chinese Revolution, one has to recognize that the latter, despite Mao’s wildly fluctuating beliefs and diktats over decades (I read one of the severely anti-Mao biographies, but even it could not hide some successes) had more resiliency and more ability to change course and adapt to wider currents, this even when perverted by Capitalism post-Mao, the mission to serve the majority still has some validity (despite the type of corruption we see in every political system, which clearly exists there.) Even the “Red Guards” during the Cultural Revolution contributed to progress (of a kind) and certainly putting the old Landlord–Rentier classes out into the fields for a few decades to learn what it’s like to walk in a poor wo/man’s shoes is led to better outcomes than the Stalinist Gulags or immediate executions of “class enemies.” I am no Sinologist but I attribute this partial success to the “middle way” of the historical “Middle Kingdom” and deeper sociological aspects of the culture, Confucianism to an extent– also I’d assume in a place so heavily populated that whole “rugged, individual, pioneer, don’t-need-nobody-else, gonna pull myself up by my bootstraps” bullshit just doesn’t resonate with many. (Elements of Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong swallowed by the Western Borg excepted.)

There is no Real Left in the US (& in the West generally) for reasons that are well-known. The New Deal’s success in “raising all boats” (well, mainly the white and middle-class boats, but the other ones rose somewhat also) primed a counter-revolution of the intellectual Right (what we’d now call the Dark Web or Alt-Right) thru well-connected PMC people like the Lewis Powell memo about how to take things back for the “Betters.”
Using fringe ideas of (ex-Trotskyists like Hitchens) the Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman and “Austrian School” wackos, the ideology of Neo-Liberalism was formed by Elites. Worthy political shills like Reagan and Thatcher were recruited to spread and institute it. The world was purely material, and your ranking in economic success determined your worth. Clear as the “clouds in my coffee.”

Stupid, prosperous whites (due to unions in many cases) voted for Reagan in 1980 to “get government off my back,” have more freedumb, “stick it to the man,” etc. –at a time when the mildly Left PMC was mostly on the side of the actual poor and vulnerable, albeit taking their little kickback for virtue, “doing well by doing good” in the Institutional Welfare state, as Ian notes of the current iteration.

They got what was intended, not what was promised, of course, and the result is a hollowed out, Rust Belt post-industrial Hellscape of poverty and extractive government agencies (local cops, rip-off Health “Care”, precarity, the Surveillance State, etc.) that is now a majority of urban America. Their Unions got gutted along with their paychecks, but hey, they did vote for it!!

So the Right “comes to the rescue” to “fix” the problems that they created, with the full collusion of the “Lesser Evil” Good Cops, to be sure. The latter lack sincerity, just see as one obvious example the Congressional/Senatorial gerontocrats like Pelosi et al during the BLM movement’s heyday dressing up in “African Kente cloth” and taking a knee (the ones who were capable and not in wheelchairs) for “Black Lives.” While building Cop City in Georgia, and Joe’s response to “Defund the Police” was “More Money and More Guns and More Police.”

Every Right Wing person I have ever met fervently supports and practices what Ian calls out, and indeed “the Right’s ur-value is cruelty to the weak and outsiders.” I tend to believe that every committed right-winger is deeply wounded and hurt inside (based on observation) and practicing “Misery loves company” wants to spread that vibe. But they are to be commended for their sincerity. Their hatred, fear and violence is right out in the open, on display. “I don’t care whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia was in MS-13 or not, he was still here ILLEGALLY so he belongs in prison!! (or dead).” It doesn’t matter whether his parents brought him here as a small child or not. Whereas when a Successful (thus Worthy) person gets into trouble, mitigating excuses are always found. Look up the “Cash for Kids” Judge, who threw kids into for-profit prisons for kickbacks. The Biden Administration let him out with other “deserving” (read, well-off) prisoners during Covid and Joe eventually gave him a full pardon, despite several dead children and scores more traumatized for life.

I thank SomeofParts’ linking to the Chinese thought on MAGA in the “Hegemony” link, as I can here quote Thucydides’ “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” which is now the universal, central ethos of the worst Western governments– UK, Germany, U$ of course, US dependencies like Honduras & El Salvador and many more, Orban’s Hungary. The Zionist Entity. Not Russia, however, they learned something from the 5 million premature deaths of mainly men after the Soviet Union collapsed from (US-imposed via Yeltsin) looting of pensions, austerity, hunger and alcoholism) during their first 5 years of “freedom.” As others note, they are now in the “Center” camp, Neoliberal but for now not excessively so relative to the pure Neolib West.

Another indicator of where we were headed in the 90s was the sociological essay Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” about the breakdown of small association groups (bowling leagues, Elks’ Lodges, Bridge Clubs, etc.) in the late 20th century– if more Americans had read this and not Fukuyama’s Fuckery (which even he has largely walked away from, to his credit), our boat might be on a higher tide, but nope!!

Circumstances recently led to a renewed contact between me & someone I hadn’t talked to in at least 20 years, a former friend who became an Alt-Right nut and then a full on Neo-Nazi (a very bright and well educated once-Lefty person who in his mid-20s revolted against his parents’ Quaker upbringing), & I took the opportunity to tease him in a friendly way, “Congratulations, K, you were right and I was wrong, you guys won, I’m guessing you’re a Curtis Yarvin guy, right?” He stated no, he supported nothing around Trump, clearly an idiot. Instead he’s become a “National Bolshevist” which is a fascist cult wanting to join the worst aspects of Nazism and Stalinism!! We won’t be in contact again, though we stayed civil during the brief exchange, as the old They Might Be Giants song “You and your racist friend” states, some people just aren’t fun to be around and shouldn’t be invited to the party.

So among the preceding group, where (if anywhere) do I find allies? Last year we had a Gaza Peace Camp outside City Hall that lasted 2.5 months before city lawfare destroyed it, and on the day we had a 250 person protest against the Dem. party genocide enablers who had a convention in town, the DSA band did opening songs and entertainment. They were great, but they are far too timid and moderate, there’s an astronomically small chance they could one day create some minor reforms, but no way will they create a revolution. Electoralism is pointless, if you don’t know that, you’re about as much worth my time as my insane Hitler-Stalinist former friend.

Mutual self-help groups that aren’t condescending or Patron-Client based are an option to me. I started out talking about Dorothy Day-style Christian activists I knew in my early 20s. These people sometimes do a lot of good, and despite having no truck for Christianity or conventional religion, these people are sincerely kind and do something nobody in the Industrial Health Care system would do, which is “First Do No Harm.” I never once had any of these people throw “Jesus” names into my face or get me to sign up for their Cult like the Spartacists did, either. I did counter-protest defending an abortion clinic against some nuns I knew slightly, but again, these people weren’t carrying rifles or even those sickening aborted fetus blown-up pictures (others were), they were a little classier than that.

Loose affinity groups doing small actions of conscience along anti-authoritarian lines appeal to me strongly as well. When I lived in Oakland, California, I had a lot of interaction with Food Not Bombs and countless other groups. Where I currently live, there’s not much available like that, there is mostly only a few Far Righties and a bunch of dumb, smug Shit Libs, the young organizers of the Gaza Peace Camp were sincere but, sadly, only one has stayed committed and active, the others have collapsed into personal chaos or what Murray Bookchin (at one time an interesting thinker, later just a dumb centrist scold) deprecated as “lifestyle Anarchism.” When Murray (who I met once face to face thru a mentor college professor) started spewing that, I didn’t even think it was real, but stick around long enough and even the dumbest fringe ideas will come to fruition.

If I’m lucky and smart, by late this year or early next I’ll be in Mexico and search for options there. I think the US is dying, and not peacefully in bed with loving family around either . . .

There are healthy cultures out there that don’t rip-off, poison, jail or kill their residents in massive numbers out there. Mexico is the most immediately accessible to me, though it has its share of problems.

The US, with the other predator states I listed above, will soon be an international pariah to 85% of the world (at least), healthy cultures will thrive. If there were a revolution in this country— Oops!! Never mind. I’d just as soon expand on the idea of a sky-God redeeming me as indulge that nonsense. Things will go down in flames, I think. I expect as much “Boom” as whimpering, if not more. Do the polarize, hypnotized, divided and doped residents of the United Snakes have the strength or wisdom of the Romanian people shown in the executions of Ceausescu & his wife in 1989? I think not. I presume Elon, Peter Thiel and the rest will still be running things here thru whichever cutout faction serves for the foreseeable future.

@ someofparts,

” Why doesn’t every country have an organization like Hezbollah within it’s borders that, without apology and with public support, defends against enemies of the common good with political organizing and armed resistance? ”

Because many countries have an official government strong enough and well-armed enough and violent enough that such an organization is shut down as soon as it is noticed. Only in a country with a Government too weak to enforce its Monopoly of Violence can a Hezbollaform-type organization arise.

Those who live in such a country can always try organizing a Hezbollah-lite without the visible capacity for violence which would make a State feel threatened enough to take action against it. Some states wouldn’t even allow that. The CPC shut down Falun Gong as soon as the CPC saw that Falun Gong had the organizational ability to call numerous people out onto the streets in protest of this or that. And Falun Gong possesed zero violence-application potential of any kind.

This seems like some sort of category error. It’s trying to basically frame things in moral terms.

Fundamentally leftism, at least of the Marxist variety, is about the working class, ie people who actually do things for a living and who make up the vast majority of the population, taking control to further their own objective, material self-interest (and right wing reactionaries are doing the same in the opposite direction. ‘Centrists’ are mostly just a different flavor of right wing that, having carved out a relatively comfortable niche in the capitalist hierarchy (where they erroneously believe that because they have a bigger paycheck, own a few stock, and can take a couple vacations a year they aren’t still essentially explored workers) want things to basically stay the same. Whether any of this is kind or moral are arbitrary value judgements. And to reduce it to a personalized motivation of wanting to prevent or inflict suffering seems wrong.

As for the USSR, the legacy is far more good than bad. It dragged the east, kicking and screaming at times, into modernity. That Russia, or any of the former Soviet states, are anything other than impoverished farming hovels today is entirely a Soviet inheritance.

Most of the ‘crimes’ of the USSR are either grossly exaggerated (the Holodomor wasn’t a targeted genocide famine, gulags were essentially just the prison system of the country, some better than others, the bad ones bad because of a lack of rural development, and the total number of prisoners hugely exaggerated by hack writers like Solzhenitsyn, and so on), or outright fictitious.

It was a compromised project from the start, partly from Bolshevik intolerance of ideological dissent (disagreeing with the Bolsheviks didn’t automatically make someone a ‘counter-revolutionary’ is something they never really grasped), and partly from justified concessions to war time circumstances that left unfortunate legacies.

And remember: the Soviet Union started behind, and stayed behind. Marx and Engels always anticipated the workers revolution happening in some already highly developed capitalist state like Germany or England. It wasn’t supposed to happen in a backward place like Russia. And when the follow up revolution in Germany failed, Russia was left isolated. Now it had to both try to modernize, and keep pace with the hostile capitalist west, before it could ever reach a point of trying to jump to ‘true communism’. Very similar story as well with China, though they’ve learned lessons from the Soviet failure.

I’ll also add that a lot of Stalin’s actions were in the context of this isolation. To survive alone the USSR had to rapidly develop. Trotsky conceded he would have done a lot of what Stalin did, thought maybe not always in exactly the same ways. And was Stalin justified? Well…the Soviet Union, after multiple five year plans, went toe to toe with Nazi Germany and won. So you tell me.

To be honest, my opinion is that power on the left will not be built in the belly of the beast, in the “first world” imperialist West, particularly the Anglosphere. At least not unless and until society really starts to splinter, so much that the normal control mechanisms also start to splinter. Until then, I mostly see progress happening at the periphery; right now the top three countries I’m looking at are Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. None of them perfect, and Venezuela in particular massively sanctioned so as to try to break the power of a good example.

But still, in Venezuela the communal movement continues to build from below, with some government help. Nicaragua continues to see big improvements in the living standards and everyday lives of ordinary people. Bolivia has taken control of key natural resources and forced a much better deal, and you know someone’s doing a good job when there’s a US-backed right wing coup, and they still manage to recover from it. Pity they’ve got some big time infighting on the left, but still it seems like there’s good stuff being done.

Mexico is less radical, but the current administration is a pretty strong social democratic one which is making significant strides and showing some solidarity with other Latin American leftists. And there are strong left wing movements all over Latin America. Even in Brazil, while Lula’s party is in the end pretty much liberal, there are outfits like the Movimiento Sin Tierra that are strong and have potential. And of course Cuba continues to hang tough under incredibly concerted attack that does them massive damage.

Down there is where we should be looking for leadership. My political beliefs are closer to Bolivarian than to those of any other existing political formation I’m aware of.

Here is a Murray Bookchin article on what he chose to call “Lifestyle Anarchism”.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-social-anarchism-or-lifestyle-anarchism-an-unbridgeable-chasm