[lbo-talk] what's left

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Mon Apr 26 09:02:49 PDT 2010


shag carpet bomb wrote:


> i agree with julio. if you don't have a marxist/heavy user of marxish
> analysis of social problems, then you aren't a leftist.

If I understood Julio's post correctly, he said anyone on the side of workers' struggles is a leftist, regardless of ideology.


> that doesn't mean i don't work with liberals or progressives or
> democrats or whatever. it just means that, in the end, we have
> different aims. someone with a marxist analysis wants to change the
> system; someone without one wants to reform it and keep capitalism in
> place.

[...]


> if a non-leftist was running that workshop, she would counsel people
> to come to see the issue as a personal problem to be worked out with
> therapy or an attitude adjustment, she would teach people coping
> mechanisms, or she would help people find employment elsewhere if the
> situation is unbearable. depending on the situation, she might counsel
> using the HR department or suing the company.
>
> those are two very different ways of putting a marxist analysis into
> practice, and those differences matter. the first person, the leftist,
> is in her small way trying to change the world. the second person is
> trying to get the individual to accommodate herself to it. for the
> first, the answer is solidarity. for the second, the answer is the
> individual.

You're saying three things here. You say a leftist is someone with a Marxish analysis of social problems. You say a leftist is someone not content with reforming capitalism; they want to abolish it. And you say a leftist is someone who, like the woman at the WJC, advocates a social-change/solidarity approach to solving problems, rather than an individualistic approach.

In a Venn diagram sense, these are three overlapping circles of enormously different sizes. Of all the people who take a social-change (vs. individualistic) attitude toward social problems, the percentage who consider themselves Marxists or say they want to abolish capitalism must be pretty tiny. Have you ever looked at an issue of PM, the popular-front newspaper from the 1940's? When they covered labor, race and other social issues, they took sides, they wrote intensely and passionately, and with a definite social-change perspective. But I think only a very small number of the staff would have said they're Marxists, or out to abolish capitalism. Most would have called themselves liberals.

On a much more mundane level, I read the articles in the American Prospect on labor issues, and they obviously all take, in a general sense, a pro-solidarity, non-individualistic line. Yet the people who write them (and, to the extent that they agree with the articles, the people who read them) are almost all nice liberals who love Obama, etc. None of them are Marxists or anything close. If you have to want to abolish capitalism to be on the left, then in the 1930's John L. Lewis was not on the left. Whatever you think of John L. Lewis, any definition of the Depression-era US left that would exclude him seems pretty odd to me. Certainly it doesn't at all correspond to how most people perceived things at the time.

(Parenthetically, there's another point: You mention wanting to end, rather than reform, capitalism. But based on previous threads it seems that you don't insist on any particular definition of what it would mean to "end capitalism." So it seems as if to be "for ending capitalism" is more a statement of identity than a concrete position.)

Of course, I don't disagree with you that it's usually pretty obvious when someone is "more on the liberal end," as opposed to "more on the leftist end." But there seems to be a mania for drawing bright lines for purposes of identity-stability.

SA



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