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Title: Thoughts on the Left Author: Ron Tabor Date: June 2019 Language: en Topics: critique of leftism, political correctness, The Utopian Source: Retrieved on 11th August 2021 from http://utopianmag.com/archives/tag-The%20Utopian%20Vol.%2018.3%20-%202019/thoughts-on-the-left/ Notes: Published in The Utopian Vol. 18.3.
Some time ago, Eric posted comments about the attitude he thinks we
should take toward the #MeToo movement and, by implication, toward
similar movements, and to the left as a whole. He urged us to take what
he called a “balanced” approach.
As far as I can see, what a “balanced” approach is depends on one’s
perspective. I believe that I have a “balanced” analysis of the #MeToo
movement, but it is far more critical of that movement than I believe
Eric’s is. Rather than starting with my feelings about the #MeToo
movement, I’d like to try to explain my reactions to it in the broader
context of other recent and current left-wing movements.
Despite a concern about many of the issues these movements have been
raising, I find some aspects of these movements, and of the left as a
whole, very disturbing.
A year or so ago, the historian Josh Zeitz wrote a piece for
Politico.com that compared the student movement of today with the
student movement of the 1960s. He focused on the Free Speech Movement at
the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, which he seemed to
take as emblematic of the 1960s student movement as a whole. Zeitz was
struck by the fact that in launching the Free Speech Movement, students
at Berkeley fought to free themselves from the tutelage of the campus
authorities, insisting that students had the right and the ability to
act, and to be treated, as adults rather than as children. Specifically,
students were demanding the right to engage freely in political activity
in support of causes (at the time, primarily the Civil Rights movement)
of their choice. This was a direct challenge to the “in loco parentis”
self-conception of the campus authorities, the notion that these
authorities had the duty to act in lieu of the students’ parents.
Zeitz found this stance to be contrary to what he saw as the attitude of
the contemporary student movement. Rather than demanding that the
authorities allow students to be and to act as adults, the recent
movement was demanding that the campus authorities protect students from
the rigors of contemporary society, that is, the students were insisting
that the campus authorities act as stand-ins for their parents. Thus,
one of the central demands of the movement was that the campus
authorities ban “extremists” from speaking on campus. Another was that
the authorities provide them with “safe spaces” and that they otherwise
protect them from what one university professor termed
“micro-aggressions”, actions, even words, that students perceive to be
racist, sexist, and/or otherwise offensive, no matter how slight these
might be. In response, campuses around the country have adopted
extremely strict speech and behavior codes that have resulted in many
people — professors, other campus personnel, and students — being
brought up on charges before various types of disciplinary committees.
Of course, there should exist procedures through which campus personnel
or students who commit criminal acts (such as racial or sexual assaults)
can be brought up on changes and subject to appropriate penalties, but
that is a far cry from insisting that anybody and everybody who makes a
comment that another person merely perceives as being racist, sexist, or
just insensitive should be hauled before a disciplinary committee and
subject to censure, suspension, expulsion, or termination. To Zeitz, the
contrast was striking. In the 1960s, the students involved in the Free
Speech Movement were demanding free speech. Today’s students are
demanding that the authorities limit speech, that they legislate what
can and cannot be said. This is consistent with various reports I’ve
heard in recent years that the political atmosphere on many campuses is
stifling, as liberal and leftist students, professors, and university
administrators attempt to enforce “Political Correctness” on others.
I found Zeitz’s analysis both insightful and convincing (as far as it
goes). It suggests that much of the recent and perhaps current movement
among students is, to some degree, authoritarian. Of course, those of us
who were involved in the movement of the 60s remember very well that
while the student movement of that era may have started as a
quasi-libertarian one (remember SDS’s “participatory democracy”?), it
did not remain so. Specifically, SDS and most of the left movement as a
whole ended up being sharply divided into competing factions, almost all
of which were authoritarian in the extreme, militant supporters of
totalitarian regimes and authoritarian/totalitarian movements. Despite
this, because the movement of the 1960s, however it began, soon became
focused on opposing US imperialism and its various manifestations (the
war in Vietnam, the invasion of Cuba and the ongoing hostility to the
Castro regime, the Cold War generally), the movement’s attitude toward
the US government and its agencies, the US ruling class, and
American-style capitalism in general was extremely hostile. The
authorities it supported were those who ruled other countries (Russia,
China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, etc.) and those who
led national liberation struggles in the Third World. In contrast,
today’s movement fights to convince or even force campus authorities,
and by extension authority as a whole (including the federal
government), to use its muscle to impose liberal-left students’ demands
and political beliefs on others.
The authoritarianism that characterizes the student movement can be seen
in other recent movements. Take the Black Lives Matter movement. It is
undoubtedly true that Black people, and particularly young Black men,
have been and continue to be victims of brutal and arbitrary police
repression, particularly, a willingness, even eagerness, on the part of
many police officers and police departments around the country, to shoot
and/or otherwise kill Black people. The struggle to stop this deserves
to be supported by all decent-minded and socially-concerned people.
Despite this, the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement seemed to
go out of their way to alienate people who were not absolutely in
lock-step with their slogans and methods. As an example, I refer to an
incident that occurred on one campus, I believe in one of the
southeastern states, which I believe to be indicative of the movement as
a whole. In response to an incident of racist abuse of some kind (I
don’t remember the details), a dean issued a statement to the campus
denouncing the incident and the individual or individuals who
perpetrated it. She concluded her statement with two slogans: (1) Black
Lives Matter! (2) All Lives Matter! Outraged, the Black Lives Matter
movement and its allies on the campus raised such a stink about the
dean’s use of the slogan “All Lives Matter” that she was forced to
resign her position. Apparently, she had not been informed that,
according to the Black Lives Matter movement, to say that “All Lives
Matter” is the equivalent of saying that Black lives really don’t
matter.
There is something absurd about the insistence that to say that “all
lives matter” automatically means to say that Black lives do not matter.
But more than the absurdity is the authoritarianism implied in the
attempt to control precisely how people express themselves, and
therefore, how they think. I certainly believe, very strongly, that
“Black lives matter”, but I also believe, very strongly, that all lives
matter. Not only are these ideas not counterposed, they are integrally
connected. My support for the struggle against police (and system-wide)
violence against Black people is part (a very important part) of my
support for the struggle to create a better, more humane, more peaceful
world for everybody. Black lives matter BECAUSE all lives matter; all
lives matter BECAUSE Black lives matter.
Moreover, the tactical idiocy of this stance of the Black Lives Matter
movement is mind-boggling. It seems virtually designed to offend anybody
and everybody who is not already in complete agreement with the movement
and its tactics. How can one expect to win allies from among other
sectors of the population by explicitly rejecting the slogan “All Lives
Matter”? How does the movement expect Latinos, Asians, Native Americans,
and working-class white people to respond to this? All fair-minded
people ought to be particularly concerned to convince all those,
including white people with racist attitudes, who do not yet understand
the peculiar situation Black people have faced and still face in this
country, that justice and freedom for Black people does not necessarily
come at the expense of other people. The idea that the Black struggle
for justice and freedom necessarily comes at the expense of other
people, particularly white people, is the line — the analysis, politics,
and overall ideology — of the organized racists, the white supremacists,
the white nationalists, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nazis! Whatever their
intentions, the stance of the Black Lives Matter movement in fact
supports and promotes the analysis and ideology of the racists.
One might write this off as a minor tactical difference between the
Black Lives Matter movement and people who see the issue as I do. But,
given what happened to the dean of the university I referred to above,
is there any reason to believe that I or anyone else who thinks as I do
would be listened to if I attempted to explain my point of view to the
members of the movement? More likely, I would be run off, if not beaten
up, if I were to express my position in their presence.
I sense the same authoritarian tendencies in the #MeToo movement. It is
my firm understanding that a fundamental demand of the movement is that
“all survivors are automatically to be believed.” I understand where
this is coming from. I recognize that it emerges out of a situation in
which, for far too long, women who have claimed to have been raped,
assaulted, groped, touched, harassed, or discriminated against have not
been listened to; instead, they have been accused of “making a mountain
out of a molehill”, imagining the events in question, whining, and
acting hysterically, and have been debased, denigrated, dismissed, or
ignored. But to go all the way over to the other extreme, to insist that
every woman (and not just women) who claims to have sexually assaulted
or molested is automatically to be believed is, to me, ridiculous. Some
people in some situations lie, bend the truth, or do not necessarily
remember things accurately. Not everybody is honest; not all women are
honest. There are all sorts of reasons why people lie, but the fact is,
they sometimes do. So, to me, to insist that all women who claim to have
been sexually assaulted are automatically be believed is absurd.
The other side of this is that to believe this and to insist on this is
to deny those accused of carrying out such attacks of even the semblance
of democratic rights and due process. It’s to take a step backward from
the level of democratic rights that have become the generally accepted
norms of modern society. In fact, it means going back to trials for
witchcraft, or to take something more recent, the methods of
totalitarian police states, under which merely to come from a certain
class means that one is automatically presumed guilty and subject to
imprisonment, exile, years in a concentration camp, or shot in the back
of the head. Although they may not realize it, to the degree that the
movement is authoritarian.
In this case, too, the tactical idiocy of the position is astounding. It
runs the risk of alienating all people, including long-time supporters
of women’s rights (including women), who do not fall completely in line
with the #MeToo movement’s position. But beyond this, like the other
examples I have cited, it reflects a very deep-seated, and to me rather
frightening, strain of authoritarianism in the movement. “Our way or the
highway!” “If you are not 100% with us, you are against us; you are an
enemy.” “If you doubt any of us, you are perpetrator of male supremacy”,
a supporter of the patriarchy.
I might be willing to write all this off as a question of tactical
differences and to see this in the framework of “critical support” for
the movement. But I am prevented from doing so largely because of a
visceral reaction, a deep fear in fact, of what this and other current
liberal-left movements represent. This is made even stronger by the fact
that the authoritarianism I sense in these movements is shared by the
broader left. Several things strike me about the current left
organizations and the left as a whole.
One is their ignorance; another is their arrogance. Very few people know
anything. They don’t read books; in fact, they don’t read much of
anything at all. They watch TV or read an article or two on-line. Yet,
they run around absolutely convinced that their view of the world is
right, that their analysis of what’s going on is correct, and that their
proposals to address the situation are the only ones worth considering.
I certainly don’t think this is something new about the current left;
much, if not most, of the left always has been like this. I remember the
left-wing activists of my parents’ generation (including my parents) who
were absolutely convinced that the Soviet Union and the other “socialist
countries” were, if not paradise on Earth, at least truly progressive
societies that were fighting fascism, ending economic and social
injustice, and liberating workers, oppressed nationalities, women, and
eventually, all of humanity. They denounced as vile lies and slander the
reports in the capitalist media about the complete lack of democratic
rights in these societies, about forced collectivization, the show
trials, the forced labor camps, the deportation of entire ethnic groups,
and all the other atrocities committed by these bestial regimes. They
denounced all who thought differently as fascists, agents of
imperialism, dupes, ignoramuses, or idiots. As is obvious today, these
people were completely deluded. But when their world and everything they
believed in collapsed, very few of them, if any, thought to do some
serious reading, to look back at what they believed, to think long and
hard to try to figure out what happened and how they could have been so
blind. Most hardly even blinked but kept on thinking and acting as they
always had, and denouncing all who disagreed with them.
I do not exempt my own generation from this critique. The blind
adulation of Cuba, China, Vietnam, and for some, even Russia. The
shouting down of all who dared criticize the regimes and leaders they
idolized. The militant embrace of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism,
Guevarism. The denunciation of all who disagreed with them (including
us, who at least were anti-Stalinist, and we represented a tiny, tiny
portion of that left). Do I need to go on?
If anything, I think today’s left is worse. Although many leftists of
our generation did not read much, today’s leftists, like just about
everybody else in this society, read even less, a lot less. But beyond
the ignorance (and the arrogance) is the fact that the authoritarianism
of the movement has become even more salient. At least the political
activists of the 60s were opposed to university administrators and to
the US government and its agencies. Today’s left is so statist that it
looks to the US government as its potential ally; it seeks to win it
over to its causes. To today’s socialists, “socialism” means the
government, the existing capitalist state, taking on ever more social
tasks. Look at Bernie Sanders, look at the DSA! Their solution to
everything is the federal government expanding its role, assuming ever
more roles and taking over ever larger sectors of society: Medicare for
All; the Green New Deal. To today’s socialists, “seizing state power”
means supporting Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and implementing
his statist program, via executive action if necessary.
Perhaps it is just my old age and my cynicism talking, but I am actually
afraid of this movement. Despite the fact that I share many of the
current left’s concerns and agree with many of its demands, I do not
want this movement to succeed. I don’t want it to grow. For this reason,
I have, for some time now, described my political position as being “on,
but not of, the left.” I despise the current left, and virtually all its
tendencies. This includes the contemporary anarchist movement. Most of
the younger anarchists I have met seem to me to be as ignorant, as
arrogant, and as authoritarian as the explicitly statist leftists. True,
as anarchists, their goal is not the seizure of state power, as is that
of the reformist and the revolutionary statist left organizations. But
by their attitudes and their stances, they feed the same authoritarian,
even totalitarian, atmosphere. They are, if anything, even more fervent
in promoting some of the absurdities of “identity politics” than the
liberals and statist leftists.
Please do not misunderstand me. I do not now, and never will, consider
myself to be a conservative. I despise the conservatives and the entire
right-wing movement. It is as bad as or worse than the left. But I do
not like or support the left. For me, it is not a question of “critical
support.” I do not want it to gain state power in hopes that, in so
doing, it will somehow expose itself. What I would like to see, and if
possible help build, is a movement that exists in a totally different
political dimension than the traditional left-right spectrum. Call it
“up” (or even “down”). It is for freedom and justice, for a humane
world. It does not seek to impose its views and its “solutions” through
the state, whether “capitalist” or “socialist”. (To me, as an anarchist,
there are no good states.) I would like to see a movement that seeks to
win people to its views by discussion and persuasion, not by coercion,
not by shouting people down, not by denouncing all who disagree as
fascists, idiots, ignoramuses, or class (or race/gender) enemies. The
world I envision can only exist if it is created and supported by the
overwhelming majority of the world’s people. Short of that, we will only
get what we now have, or perhaps something worse.
Eric might not consider my attitude to be “balanced.” It is certainly
not the approach we took in the 1960s and 1970s. But times have changed.
The movements and the left have changed. I have changed, and my politics
have changed. Among other things, I am much more aware of the existence
and dangers of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, including, and in
particular, on the left.
Perhaps the attitude I have outlined will render us irrelevant,
incapable of tactically “intervening” in the contemporary movement.
However, it is how I feel. Are there others out there who feel as I do?