Episode 272 of RevolutionZ presents and comments on a recent Rebecca Solnit essay about two strands of left thought and activism, a bit through history and a bit today. In the song, Which Side Are You On, is it right and left, or is it right and left and other left, where the latter two are far from a single thing?
Episode 272 of RevolutionZ presents and comments on a recent Rebecca Solnit essay about two strands of left thought and activism, a bit through history and a bit today. In the song, Which Side Are You On, is it right and left, or is it right and left and other left, where the latter two are far from a single thing?
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. I hope you will take a moment to visit our Patreon page at patreoncomrevolutionz that's actually patreoncom slash revolutionz or our archive page on znetworkorg, which is our sponsoring organization, where you can access all past episodes and learn how to get automatic delivery as well, recently including video versions. And all past is a lot, since this is our 270 second consecutive episode, although it is also a bit of a first. Fairly often I have, as an episode, read something of mine written earlier as an article, but for Revolution Z, interjecting comments as I went through in hopes of giving the words additional and immediate relevancy. This time too, I am going to present an article and interject comments spontaneously, as I do so, but in this case, what I am going to present was written not by me but by the brilliant feminist activist literary word Smith, rebecca Solnit. Her piece was featured on Z about a week or so ago, although it was first published by literary hub. Still a week or so before that and another little time gap before that, I guess a month or so, I did what I now see as a related episode, and then also an article titled To Be or Not To Be Marxist. The logic of that was simple the concerns I had with Marxism as theory, as vision, as strategy, matter now, if at all, in their implications for activists. Now, I spelled out some of those, but I hadn't made it as concrete with examples as I might ought to have. So for now, or perhaps a week or two from now, I was thinking about doing a follow-up episode that would add current examples, and that is, I think, what Solnit has done on her own agenda and in her, I think, brilliantly conceived, titled and written piece what is Left. And she did it so well, probably without any awareness of the Marxism piece, so much better, honestly, than I would have done it, that when I read her piece I decided, instead of doing something myself quite similar in focus, I would convey to you her piece and, for that matter, if you aren't familiar with her other work, Rebecca Solnit herself, by way of her own words. And beyond doing that, I would only interject a few of my reactions along the way. Her title, what is Left, perfectly set the scene. I took it to mean okay, what do we mean by left? What does the label designate? What does the label exclude? Or is it too muddy, too imprecise to designate or exclude clearly? Here then is her peace. What is left? Solnit starts.
Speaker 1:In late 1936, george Orwell, like so many other young idealists from Europe and the USA, went off to fight fascism in Spain. By the spring of 1937, he realized he was in a war with not two but three sides. The USSR was holding back a full Spanish Revolution while attacking the Socialists and anarchists outside its control. Facing prison and possible execution himself, not from the fascists but from the Soviet Allied forces, orwell fled Spain. His immediate commander, George's cop, was imprisoned and the leader of his militia unit, andres Nin, was tortured and assassinated by an agent of Stalin's secret police. Orwell would spend the rest of his life trying to clarify that in his time, the left meant both idealists committed to human rights, equity and justice and supporters of Stalinism. That was the antithesis of all those things I interject.
Speaker 1:Here is her topic. How could this term left be useful if it encompassed so much? Pretty much all social concepts have fuzzy borders socialism, feminism, anarchism, among others, but to include something and its opposite is too fuzzy, isn't it? Solnit continues. He wrote after he got back to England and this is now Solnit quoting Orwell.
Speaker 1:When I left Barcelona in June, the jails were bulging. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not fascists but revolutionaries. They are there not because their opinions are too much to the right, but because they are too much to the left, and the people responsible for putting them there are the communists. I interject, think on that for a second. Lots of revolutionaries seeking an end to capitalism were witnessing these Spanish revolutionaries people. They went to aid and join in life-risking battle, besieged not merely by Franco and the fascists, but also by Stalin and the communists, who a great many of them they had aligned with for years and even decades. Even the mental and emotional turmoil which, for example, orwell himself felt Solnit continues.
Speaker 1:Some of the pro Stalin left, she tells us, believed the sunny propaganda about the USSR, and some of them knew better but went with the Stalinist notion that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, that the gulags and lies and mass executions were the price of the ticket to some form of utopia that would soon arrive after everything else had been quashed. And then Solnit gets to today. There are similar rifts in the left in our time, which is both obvious and seldom addressed outright, I interject. I think Solnit is right about the current rifts being similar not just in form, but also substance and perhaps even motivation. At any rate, solnit continues what is the left? I wish I knew when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022,.
Speaker 1:The fact that some sector of what is supposed to be the left excused, justified or even rooted for the Putin regime was, among other things, a reminder that left the concept, the label has long meant a grab bag full of contradictions. Later came the peace marches that argued the US should withdraw support and Ukraine should surrender. Recent stories about these sectors of the left stumping for the Chinese government and downplaying its human rights abuses are reminders that this is an ongoing problem that takes many forms. I've seen genocide denial among this left, excusing the Chinese in the case of the Uighur people, justifying the invasion and subjugation of Tibet, denying the holodomor, the Soviet genocide through induced famine in 1930s, ukraine Even whitewashing the Pol Pot era in Cambodia and siding with Assad now as he wages a brutal war against the Syrian people. It should be a modest request to ask that left not mean supporters of authoritarian regimes soaked in their own people's blood, but the people and groups and agendas grouped together as the left contain not just contradictions but sworn enemies. Some of the loudest pro-Putin people are now clearly part of the right. Some continue to claim the mantle of the left, begging the question of what the left is.
Speaker 1:You could call this just a problem of nomenclature. Put that way, it might seem like a small problem, but being unable to distinguish and describe differences can be a large one, a large problem that is. A few years ago, I said to a man working for Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign at a point when he and the campaign were dealing with a lot of attacks from people who considered themselves the true left. Quote it's as if we called fire and water by the same name. Perhaps the left-white terminology that originated with the French Revolution has, more than two centuries later, outlived its appositeness. In the French National Assembly of 1789, the royalist members sat to the right, the radicals to the left, and thus the terms were born.
Speaker 1:I interject Solnit is methodically making a case that one word left is covering more than one content. It was, and still is, often true, and not just with the word left. When the US used the label Socialist to refer to the Soviet Union, its motive, we can reasonably guess, was to tarnish the idea of socialism with the reality of Soviet actions. When the Soviet Union called itself socialist, it was trying to take advantage of positive connotations of the label to paper over its actions. One word, two meanings, rather like what Solnit is highlighting for the word left. Solnit continues.
Speaker 1:The left I love is passionately committed to universal human rights and absolute equality and often is grounded in rights movements, including the Black Civil Rights Movement. I sometimes think of the current US version as a latter-day version of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. This rainbow left pitches a big tent and as such, is often more welcoming to say things like religion. After all, the Black Church played a huge role in that movement. Civil Rights Movement, cesar Chavez and Darthy Day were among the devout Catholic radicals in American history. An indigenous spirituality is central to many land rights and climate campaigns.
Speaker 1:While many traditional leftists often scorn organized religion, I'd argue that, because of its intersectional understanding of both problems and solutions, this left is more radical, radically inclusive, radically egalitarian than those who treat race and gender as irrelevancies or distractions, including the men from Ralph and Ader in 2000 on, who've been dismissive of reproductive rights as an essential economic justice as well as rights issue. Perhaps it's seen as less radical because bellicosity is often viewed as the measure of one's radicalness. I interject. I have a minor disagreement here. I think I would say not just or mainly bellicosity though I wouldn't want to argue that bellicosity is not a part of the story, but instead the concepts that define and orient one type left as compared to another type left yield the myopia about the non-economic sides of life of one as compared to the other. Solnit continues. Perhaps the left-right terminology that originated with the French Revolution has, more than two centuries later, outlived its appositiveness.
Speaker 1:Likewise, this rainbow left often has radical aims but is pragmatic about how to realize them. This might be because it includes a lot of people for whom social services and basic rights are crucial to survival, people who are used to compromise, as in not getting what they want or getting it in increments over time. All or nothing purity often means choosing the nothing. That is hell for the vulnerable, and I told you so for the comfortable. I interject. In addition to being broader, solnit's preferred left understands that reformism is a problem or, if you prefer, part of the problem, but that winning reforms on the way to fundamental change is part of the solution. Solnit continues, that's the rainbow coalitionist left.
Speaker 1:The other left has some overlap in its opposition to corporate capitalism and US militarism, but very different operating principles. It often feels retrograde in its goals and its views, including what I think of as economic fundamentalism, the idea that class trumps all else and often the nostalgic vision of the working class as mainly industrial labor rather than immigrants, everywhere, from nail salons to app-driven, delivery jobs to agricultural fields. This other left continues. Solomon is often so focused on the considerable sins of the United States it overlooks or denies those of other nations, particularly those in conflict with the USA, decrying imperialism at home but excusing it abroad, and apparently seeing USA to Ukraine through the lens of American invasions of Iraq and Vietnam, rather than the more relevant US role in the European alliance against Germany and Italy in the Second World War. It often embraces whatever regime or leader opposes the US, even when that means siding with serious human rights abuses and inequalities, as if the sins of the one erased or undid the sins of the other. It tends to rage against Democrats more than Republicans. This becomes the slippery slope down which some of the loud white men of the last several years have slid, to become explicit rather than implicit defenders of the right. They often do so by attacking opponents of the right in the name of some abstract principle that just happens to serve the right. Thus they can pretend they do not serve the Republican Party, but find fault again and again with everyone who opposes it.
Speaker 1:The Putin regime's invasion of Ukraine brought to the surface some of the old conflicts and what the left is and should be. Not a few people claiming the mantle of the left have been cheerleaders of Putin and Russia for some time. Putin is, of course, an authoritarian, petroleum fueled oligarch who might be the world's richest man, an obstacle to climate action, the leader of an international right-questioned nationalist revival, a vicious human rights abuser whose domestic enemies have a habit of dying suddenly, a homophobe, misogynist and anti-Semite, and he's involved in an imperialist war to annex the sovereign nation of Ukraine. You can't get much further to the right. This other left is often so focused on the considerable sins of the United States that it overlooks or denies those of other nations. But many in this version of the left insist that somehow the US forced Russia's hand, or it was all NATO's fault and NATO was just a US puppet and Russia was somehow a victim acting in self-defense. Jan Smolensky and Jan Dukowicz apologies for mispronunciations were among the many Eastern European critics who called this West-splaining, writing that, though these arguments are supposed to be anti-imperialist, they in fact perpetuate imperial wrongs when they continue to deny non-Western countries and their citizens agencies in geopolitics. Paradoxically, the problem with American exceptionalism is that even those who challenge its foundational tenets and heaps scorn on American militarism often end up recreating American exceptionalism by centering the United States in their analyses of international relations.
Speaker 1:Of course, all this muddle about Russia is not new. Western leftists fell in love with Russia during the revolution from which the Soviet Union arose. Some, the anarchist emigrant among them, became disillusioned early on, but for others nothing could shake the devotion. All through the history of the USSR it had its defenders in the West, when that meant denying the gulags, the show trials, the executions, the attempt to control everything everyone did and said, the ethnic cleansing and cultural and sometimes literal genocide of many non-Russian populations, from Crimean Tatars to Siberian reindeer herders, to Muslim Kazakhs. When it was an ally during the Second World War, the mainstream West supported Stalin and the USSR, which of course, then included Ukraine. This is cited to their credit, often while overlooking the fact that Stalin had earlier signed a non-aggression proct with the Nazi government, dividing up Eastern Europe between the two. While some of his peers, who became disillusioned with communism and the Stalinists, shifted to the right, orwell was loyal to the left and pushed back at conservatives who tried to claim him and his books Animal Farm in 1984. He was disturbed all his life by the conflicts and contradictions of what left means.
Speaker 1:I wonder now if the vicious persecution of leftists, communists, socialists and progressives by the post-war American right made people avoid analysis and statements that could weaken or divide their own side. That is, had there been no McCarthyism, might the left itself have cleaned house and clarified its positions? Might it have taken on the widespread mistake of supporting Stalin and other authoritarians? There is no answer to that, because there was McCarthyism and it was brutal. It left us with direct legacies, including what McCarthy's right hand man, roy Cohn, taught his protégé, donald Trump, about ruthlessness, manipulation, lying and winning at all costs. One of the ironies of what I call the left wing men of the right was their constant claim that talk about Russian intervention on behalf of Trump was McCarthyism, as if somehow anti-communism had anything to do with the facts in the case or assessments of the current government of Russia.
Speaker 1:But this lack of clarity about what the left is and what principles are essential to it continues to create confusion and spread credit and blame between two different camps. It's an old conundrum, but maybe the solution is as simple as truth in labeling and clarity in categories. So that is the end of Stalin's piece. I think it is, if you read it yourself, a brilliantly written essay. Of course that doesn't mean I like everything in it or, to my mind, more important, that I am not a little irked. I guess that it didn't look further under the surface of the two lefts In particular et why one often clings to economistic class uber-allus formulations and sometimes, or even often, can't perceive or just ignores or alibis away authoritarian politics, racial injustice, agenda violence, as well as what I call coordinator class rule of the economy as prices of what is actually a dystopian utopia. And I also fear that some could unread, so to speak, solnitz's essay, spinning it to be either anti-left because it is critical of the other left, or as saying that what went wrong with the glorious Russian Revolution was only Stalin and not deeper problems of Leninism, trotskyism and even Marxism. But I think, beyond any of that.
Speaker 1:Solnitz applied her writing talents to do one limited but highly important thing.
Speaker 1:She adroitly put on the table key problems of today's other left. The question now is will people read her words? And for those who do, will they have the wherewithal and even the courage to do as Solnitz did and face and address troubling facts, or will people just ignore or spin it all? As Solnitz says, we need clarity in categories, labels and concepts in order to see what is out there clearly, to think about it wisely and to act to change it effectively. And that last is the point, after all, and, as far as I can see, also the purpose of Solnitz's essay. If you want to react, to ask questions about or criticize this episode presenting Solnitz's essay, please visit znetworkorg and from there check the upper left little row of icons. The last one links to Z's discord system and has diverse channels for explorations, debates, etc. Including one that is devoted to Revolution Z. If you have an incredible memory, the link to Z's discord is discordgg slash capital J K capital Z HA capital, f capital, j for capital.
Speaker 1:H, capital Q.
Speaker 2:Let me read that once more Discordgg slash capital J K capital Z HA capital F. Capital J for capital H. Capital Q.
Speaker 1:And that said, this is Michael Albert signing off. Until next time for Revolution Z.