what if Leftism is just a fantasy?

[© tweed]

I just watched this horrible 'debate' between ex-Leftist David Horowitz, turned a total animal in typical apostate fashion, and Slavoj Zizek.  and most of the stuff that Horowitz said was just paranoid nonsense: Obama is a communist, egged on by Latin American dictators, Hamas and the PLO are most responsible for the Palestinians' problems, etc.  just horrific stuff.  but nonetheless a few things resonated, and within it a creeping crisis of faith that has been lingering is bubbling to the surface, painfully.

first, a) that Leftism is a secular faith, something that I have proudly claimed on these very pages.  to backtrack a bit, he argues that the vast majority of humans are unable to live with the cold reality that life is meaningless, that we are alive for but a half of a blink of an eye, only to fade into obscurity, soon to be forgotten... and while religion 'defers' this compensatory dream of redemption into the next life, Leftism demands it happen now, with wild dreams of a mythic proletarian revolution (details depending, varying by the strand).  and that this vision is at odds with the core of human nature, so that when Leftists actually take power (read: Bolsheviks), they are faced with this dilemma that can only be resolved by eating at the quantity of liberty.

the allure of Lacan for me is not that he is 'right', just that he is cool and provides plenty of 'empty containers' that I can use to place my own thoughts into boxes that make them sound more profound than they are.  one of these is negation: the Woman does not exist, there is no sexual relation.  I can live with all that.  but, what I cannot live with, at this moment: what if the Revolution does not exist?

[© tweed]

I will not claim that the following is an open-and-shut, but: as has been long known, any struggle against capital that is successful is will have to cross national boundaries.  more later, gotta go

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good stuff in the most recent New Left Review.

By ‘left’ I mean a root-and-branch opposition to capitalism. But such
an opposition has nothing to gain, I shall argue, from a series of overweening
and fantastical predictions about capitalism’s coming to an
end. Roots and branches are things in the present. The deeper a political
movement’s spadework, the more complete its focus on the here and
now. No doubt there is an alternative to the present order of things. Yet
nothing follows from this—nothing deserving the name political. Left
politics is immobilized, it seems to me, at the level of theory and therefore
of practice, by the idea that it should spend its time turning over
the entrails of the present for signs of catastrophe and salvation. Better
an infinite irony at prescrai and maruflicchio—a peasant irony, with an
earned contempt for futurity—than a politics premised, yet again, on
some terracotta multitude waiting to march out of the emperor’s tomb.

[© tweed]

this article/dude is really brilliant.

http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2954