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Title: The Left Today Author: John Zerzan Language: en Topics: Alfredo M. Bonanno, insurrectionist, Noam Chomsky, post-left, Social Forum Source: Retrieved on August 9, 2009 from http://www.greenanarchy.org/index.php?action=viewwritingdetail&writingId=235 Notes: From Back to Basics volume #2 — The Problem of the Left
Alas, still around to some degree, going through the motions and in some
cases finding new ways to repackage the same old shit.
The eternally superficial liberal-left “progressives” are as
transparently averse to liberation as are the few surviving leninoids.
The Social Forum, in its “Global” as well as more local forms, is a
recent catch-all for leftists, including communists looking for a home
in the post-Soviet Union era. At anti-G8 Genoa in 2001, Genoa Social
Forum partisans did their best to deliver anarchists to the police and
worked hard afterwards to spread lies about the Black Bloc effort in
Genoa. At last year’s Global Social Forum in Porto Alegre these statists
— or those in charge, anyway — spent their time praising Brazilian
president Lula’s leftist regime and having anarchists physically
attacked in the streets. Closet “anarchist” Noam Chomsky is one of the
main Social Forum leaders.
The “anti-state communists” we still have with us, although they seem to
be going nowhere. The term has appeal to some, but is meaningless and
contradictory. The anti-state commies have yet to criticize mass
production and global trade, because they apparently want to preserve
all the techno-essentials of the modern setup. It is impossible to have
global production and exchange without government — call it by any name
you like — to coordinate and regulate any such mass system.
Michael Albert’s participatory economics (“parecon”) holds that the
state function could be replaced by an enormous amount of meeting-hours
by everyone, in order to set production and trade quotas, etc. If one’s
priority is to run a world just like the one we now endure, I guess such
an unappealing blueprint somehow makes sense.
A rather different phenomenon is the (largely European)
“insurrectionalist” stance, which seems to be a kind of amorphous hybrid
of several contradictory tenets. In order to maximize the unity required
to achieve an insurrectionary condition, insurrectionalists find it
useful to minimize a potentially non-unifying discussion of specifics.
But this approach runs the risk of tending toward suppression of ideas.
Meanwhile, insurrectionalist theorist Alfredo Bonanno can espouse
national liberation fronts (states-in-waiting), while others in this
camp are very lucidly anti-civilization (Bonanno, it should be added,
has been prosecuted repeatedly and imprisoned in Italy for his
courageous resistance over the years). Maybe insurrectionalism is less
an ideology than an undefined tendency, part left and part anti-left but
generally anarchist.
What all these left-leaners lack is a willingness to confront the basics
of domination with the resolve and pointed questioning required if
domination is to be erased.