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Paul Kingsnorth's avatar

Another good one. An observation from me though, which you can take or leave: both this post and the last spend a lot of time worrying around what 'the left' is, and whether or not the 'woke' crowd are part of it. As someone who was a fellow traveller with 'the left' for a long time in my younger days, and now tries to avoid labels as much as possible, I see this as part of the problem.

Another way of saying this is to ask: does it matter what any of these labels say? What would happen if you abandoned them all and judged ideas and people on their merits? One of the things I always found most objectionable about the 'left', even in the days when, as you say, it was actually concerned about the global corporate economy, was its obsessive tribalism. perhaps as you are just extricating yourself from this cult, this still hangs around your neck, and you worry too much about who is in or out?

While I see where you're coming from, I don't think it works to say, 'ah, wokeness isn't the left, the left is this other, better, thing.' Not least because, in reality, the left has almost always been an 'urban middle class movement'. The Sans Culottes made up perhaps 10% of the French Revolution, for example, and that revolution's leaders were mostly aristocrats. The Bolsheviks were intellectuals and immigrant agitators from well off backgrounds. Che Guevara was the son of a wealthy bourgeois doctor with a private income. 'The people' in most cases are both more conservative (small c) and more powerless than their supposed spokespeople, which is why things like the Vendee happen.

It helped me a lot when I saw that the left has always been an elite movement, mostly wanting to enact change from above. I try these days to distinguish between revolution (elite leftism) and rebellion (usually ground-up populism.) Not that 'the people' are necessarily inherently virtuous, but at least they can speak for themselves.

Maybe the left are part of the problem too.

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JC_Collins's avatar

Another excellent post.

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