Postone here

I’m very modest at this point. I think that it would help if there was talk about issues that are real. Certain ways of interpreting the world such as, “the world would be a wonderful place if it weren’t for George Bush, or the United States,” are going to lead us nowhere, absolutely nowhere. We have to find our way to new forms of true international solidarity, which is different than anti-Americanism. We live in a moment in which the American state and the American government have become a fetish form. It’s similar to the reactionary anti-capitalists who were anti-British in the late 19th century—you don’t have to be pro-British to know that this was a reification of world capital.

And this gadgie adds…

Iraqi Ba’athism, and the struggle against it, continues to confound today’s Anti-War movement. Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson and founder of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), exemplifies the problematic stances that the movement has assumed. In 2004 Clark volunteered to defend Hussein at his trial before the Iraqi Special Tribunal, speaking out against the unfairly “demonized Saddam Hussein.” The sight of a prominent opponent of the Iraq War publicly defending Hussein should have caused serious alarm among the Left for the obvious reason that it directly challenged solidarity between the Anti-War movement and the Iraqi Left, which struggled against dictatorship for three decades.

I highly recommend the Platypus International journal of critical letters and emancipatory politics.

It has a load of good shit and that.

What is a platypus?

On surviving the extinction of the Left a story is told about Karl Marx’s collaborator and friend Friedrich Engels, who, in his youth, as a good Hegelian Idealist, sure about the purposeful, rational evolution of nature and of the place of human reason in it, became indignant when reading about a platypus, which he supposed to be a fraud perpetrated by English taxidermists. For Engels, the platypus made no sense in natural history.

Later, Engels saw a living platypus at a British zoo and was chagrined. Like Marx a good materialist, and a thinker receptive to Darwin’s theory of evolution, which dethroned a human-centered view of nature, Engels came to respect that “reason” in history, natural or otherwise, must not necessarily accord with present standards of human reason.

This is a parable we find salutary to understanding the condition of the Left today.

In light of the history of the present, we might ask, what right does the Left have to exist?

Every right — as much as the platypus has, however difficult it might be to categorize!

We maintain that past and present history need not indicate the future. Past and present failures and losses on the Left should educate and warn, but not spellbind and enthrall us.

Hence, to free ourselves, we declare that the Left is dead. — Or, more precisely, that we are all that is left of it.

This is less a statement of fact than of intent. The intent that the Left should live, but the recognition that it can, only by overcoming itself. And we are that overcoming!

So, then, what are we?

We are thinkers on the Left educated and warned by the history of the 20th Century — but not terrorized by it! “Let the dead bury the dead.” Our actions might redeem their suffering yet.

We are motivated, after failed and betrayed attempts at emancipation, and in light of their inadequate self-understanding, to re-appropriate this history in service of possibilities for emancipatory struggle in the present — and the future.

Towards such ends, we might begin (perhaps provocatively) with the list of names that indicate the thoughts and problems issuing from events that, reading history against the grain (with Benjamin), still speak to us in the present: Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Adorno. — Not much more than what is represented by these figures, but absolutely nothing less.

We will overcome any easy and false recognition of such names, and all received wisdom about the thoughts and actions identified with them, to better possible critical recognition and development of our purpose.

In the history of the Left, the dates 1848 and 1917, but less 1968, and not 1989: the aftermath of ambiguous defeats and victories; but, more, the insights yielded by defeats, and the recognition of a present and a history that need not have been, for a future that need not yet be. The restive spirits of 1848 and 1917, in their unfulfilled possibilities, will continue to speak to an unredeemed future.

The history of modernity is not finished yet, nor will it be, short of redeeming its promise. Therefore, we do not share the (mislaid) feelings of exhaustion with the modern, but we recognize a certain abdication of its emancipatory transformation, which haunts us with its necessity.

We recognize our necessity.

We agree with the young Marx in “the ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Unlike Hegel in his struggle against Romantic despair after 1789, we recognize the necessity of our present only as “bad.” Our present does not deserve affirmation or even respect, for we recognize it only for what came to be when the Left was destroyed and liquidated itself.

And so, with the story of Engels and the platypus, let us begin to address the improbable but not impossible tasks and project of the next Left.