A Positive Program

[Gordon Fitch]

Chip Berlet:
> But isn't it sometimes important to ask...what are the broad parameters of the
> left?  I would argue that being anti-elite or anti-regime is not enough. There
> are plenty of fascists who are anti-regime and want to protect civil liberties
> (at least until they are in power).
> 
> Valuing people over property is a start.
> 
> But also some sort of systemic analysis, whether that is based in Marxism, or
> anarchism, or feminism, or critical race theory, or queer theory, or some social
> justice version of religious or spiritual traditions.
> 
> But without the focus on people and systems, anti-regime/anti-elite politics has
> historically turned into forms of right-wing populism that victimize oppressed
> populations. Not a left sort of thing, eh?

I think the Left is the rejection of slavery, or more repletely,
mastery-slavery.  It's very common for individuals and groups
to reject slavery, struggle for freedom, and then impose
slavery on somebody else, that is, to move from Left to Right.
Sometimes they practically do it in the middle of a sentence.
Elaborate intellectual systems don't seem to prevent this
sad failure.  It's just one of the problems we have to deal
with.