The Left: Understanding Our Divisions

Another effort at trying to make some sense of a wildly divided US left.

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I've written a lot of articles on the subject of the many divisions within the contemporary left, including as recently as a few weeks ago, in an effort to make as much sense as can be made of the young folks in Minneapolis protesting antiwar activists for being supporters of empire, and doing so in the name of anarchism.  Massive divisions within the left characterize modern life in the US in particular, and these divisions exist on top of an already tremendous political divide within society as a whole.

Though I've made many efforts at explaining the roots of the various political divides and why they manifest the way they do today, I have been entirely unimpressed by my own explanatory efforts.  The proof is in the pudding, and I continually encounter people who have read some of what I've written on this subject who are still convinced that all of my attackers must really be coming from the far right.  Or I hear statements from well-meaning but somewhat confused arts journalists saying that I'm being attacked "by the left," which is a bit of a strange concept to try to apply to someone whose livelihood is entirely fueled by left groups.

So, this piece is going to be yet another effort at explanation, this time armed with a simple graph.  This graph occurred to me yesterday, and the more I think about it, the more I believe that it goes a long way to making sense of the different tendencies on the left currently and historically, why there is such a wide variety of approaches to applying radical ideas, and why left groups and social movements are capable of holding such wildly differing orientations around making social change happen. 

To illustrate the divide we're talking about a little:

How is it that most of my gigs around the world are organized by anarchist and socialist groups, but it is also a group that calls itself anarchist that is actively trying to get all of my gigs canceled every time one is booked?

How is it that one group led by people with horizontal organizing methods often associated with anarchism can mobilize 60,000 people to get tear-gassed constantly for days, who still manage to shut down the WTO meetings in Seattle, while another group also calling itself anarchist can denounce those organizers as reformists, preferring to smash corporate businesses or attempt to burn down a police station instead?

How is it that one party calling itself socialist can run a country and squander public resources on tax breaks for the rich, while another party calling itself socialist can organize a program to effectively eliminate hunger and illiteracy in a country once full of the hungry and illiterate?  How is it that one socialist group can work smoothly within a coalition of other groups struggling towards a common aim such as rent control or public health care, while another socialist group can only stand outside of the meetings trying to sell a newspaper that mostly criticizes the other socialist groups involved?

Much hay is made by various elements of the left, currently and for a long time now, about supposed distinctions between, say, groups or organizing methods allegedly based in thinking coming out of traditions that have names like socialism, anarchism, communism, or social democracy.  People throw around concepts like consensus-based decision-making, horizontal organizing, and democratic centralism, or they condemn these things as "utopian" or "vanguardist" or whatever other insulting terms people want to use.

During the very long period of time before there were any countries run by people calling themselves socialists, social democrats, communists, or anarchists, these political distinctions were blurrier.  Once various situations happened like the rebellions of 1848 in Europe, and various major reforms and even revolutions after that in different countries, the distinctions between different elements of the left became clearer, with some leftists in power sentencing other leftists to death; with some leftists running governments with armies and regular displays of tanks and missile systems parading down the avenue in places like Moscow or Havana, with other leftists on the sidelines of state power deriding these leftists as "tankies."

When we back away from ideological theories and assess actual practice, whether we're talking about the past few years, the past few decades, or the past century, it seems to me that certain patterns emerge that are especially notable.  Whether we're talking about groups or social movements that identify with one or another political tendency -- anarchist, socialist, social democrat, etc. -- some groups make serious progress, and others fall apart.  Of course there are always other very significant factors involved with these situations, such as state repression, corporate media brainwashing efforts, etc.  But the way groups organize and orient towards society has a huge determining effect on success or failure, and staying power of a movement.

The pattern that emerges is one where the more successful social movements are the ones that tend to embrace flexibility when it comes to tactics, strategies, and even ideological orientation, depending on the times, and what actually works under the circumstances.  The more successful movements are also the ones who have a clear tendency towards inclusiveness, towards building bridges and alliances to achieve common goals.

Then there is the flip side of these tendencies.  There are limits in terms of how flexible is good before it's no longer good anymore, just as there are limits to how inclusive is too inclusive.  A united front against poverty is probably not very useful if it's so ideologically flexible that it welcomes wealthy capitalists who don't want to be taxed.  The group advocating for the rights of children would be right to exclude convicted pedophiles from joining.

But aside from these sorts of obvious examples, it is generally the less successful movements that have been strategically inflexible and culturally exclusive.  There is also a clear pattern that when nefarious forces such as police agencies or their troll farms want to sow division within a movement, they will push groups and individuals towards thinking in terms of an inflexible, ineffective strategic orientation, and towards more and more exclusive ways of thinking about organizing.

Classic examples of inclusive-oriented organizing are the Industrial Workers of the World, where "inclusive" is in the very name of a union seeking to organize the entire industrial working class into One Big Union, rejecting divisions of race, gender, religion, or national origin.  

The inclusive-oriented organizer in this case doesn't deny the existence of divisions along various lines, but opts to organize the working class while working through the problems that arise in the process.  The more exclusive orientation dictates that potential members of the union must be vetted for political impurities -- for backwards perspectives on race, gender, or sexual orientation -- before they can be welcomed into the group.

Likewise, the orientation that calls for a flexible approach to a changing reality, whether it's announcing a new five-year plan from the Politburo or adjusting the parameters of a local community organizing initiative, when one method doesn't work well, other methods are considered.  The less flexible approach says if something doesn't work at first, try the same thing again harder and see if it works that time.  

It's clear why this continuum exists, and will continue to -- sometimes what's needed is more determination and more effort, rather than a new strategy.  Sometimes what's needed is drawing a harder line, rather than welcoming a broader array of people into the fold.

If nothing else, understanding these continuums and the dynamics involved hopefully helps make sense of certain divides within the contemporary, especially online left, and the element of the left that has been prominent on the streets of Portland and other cities in the US in recent years, particularly around 2020, when some of the limitations around the more rigid and exclusive orientations became manifestly clear.

For example:

The inclusive orientation says talk to those we have differences with and let's try to understand each other, what our differences really are, and what we have in common.  The exclusive orientation says don't talk to those people, they're not like us, talking to them endangers the rest of us and invites them to poison our minds with their false consciousness.

The organizer oriented towards strategic/tactical flexibility might think taking over the local police station is a great idea, but will be able to reassess that notion when the crowd that shows up with this idea in mind numbers fewer than 100.  Those with a rigid organizational structure or orientation will not reassess regardless of circumstances, and will just fight another losing battle, ever hopeful for a different outcome.

Or to take my very specific example, you can have an anarchist group with one sort of orientation organizing a concert for me, with another anarchist group boycotting the very same concert.  You can have one group that believes in communication across political lines and making every effort to build a broad-based movement, and another group that accuses that group of collaborating with fascists.  And both of these groups can call themselves anarchists, socialists, or social democrats -- and regularly do.

I know I'm not alone in having a hard time reconciling the fact that one group of people on the left can thank me for my endeavors to communicate, and to understand the attraction of the far right for some people, with the intent of drawing more hearts and minds to a sensible, anti-racist, egalitarian left sort of perspective, while another group identifying itself as on the left can vociferously denounce me as a fascist collaborator for exactly the same activities.  It does indeed require quite a bit of explanation to make sense of the way well-intended people can ultimately arrive at such insanely differing perspectives.

For me, the two continuums represented in our graph here (flexibility and inclusivity) are helpful in understanding the different elements of society that tend to identify as anarchists.  

There is on the one hand the more or less invisible majority, those flexible in their approaches, looking to start or build a movement.  Think the global justice movement that in the US we would tend to identify with the turn of the century, or later, Occupy Wall Street.

In another camp we have groupings that tend towards the youthful and black-clad, who have been embracing particular, confrontational tactics for a long time.  In the flexibility spectrum they tend towards rigidity, as far as tactics go.  In recent decades this element has tended to self-identify as Black Bloc, as antifascists, and occasionally as Antifa, or some variation thereof.  There have been many variants of this tendency just over the past couple decades in the US.

What has been of particular concern for me and many other people who may come from various left tendencies but who tend to agree on a whole set of basic understandings of the world, has been the rise in particular in the US and in Germany of a tendency coming out of the anarchist/antifascist scene which, ostensibly from a vantage point of being against fascism, puts most of its focus on rooting out antisemitism and "red/brown tendencies" within the left, and identifying and conducting cancellation campaigns against those found to be committing thought crimes.  Both in Germany and in the US this has regularly involved antifascists of Jewish heritage like myself being accused of antisemitism and having fascist tendencies.

At best, this political tendency within certain antifascist circles in places like Freiberg and Portland is a problematic distraction caused by very confused people, having the effect of sowing confusion and doubt within left circles around a host of different people and groups.  At worst, this tendency is a reaction by state actors intent on debilitating and destroying developments happening in society and on the left that may have concerned the powers-that-be.  

But what we now have is a warped political tendency that seems to think the biggest problem in the world today is antisemitism on the US and European left.  As the self-proclaimed Jewish State razes refugee camps in the West Bank and deprives the people of Gaza of clean water to drink, as the victims of US imperialism prepare to starve en masse in Afghanistan, as the climate crisis worsens by the minute, the obsession of this little group around rooting out antisemitism on the left in the US seems that much more freakish.  What we now have are cases of Muslims in places like Berlin being immediately suspect by these alleged anarchists for being antisemites, until they demonstrate themselves not to be.

This is a political tendency very focused on questions of guilt and innocence, which has been so focused for so long on excluding those they consider to be dissenters from their doctrine that it's a tendency that is at this point fundamentally destructive.  It's also very easy to see why people would look at the things they say and assume they're a rightwing, racist, Islamophobic, and pro-Israel tendency, because that's just what they can easily appear to be.

Among anarchists and antifascists in other European countries, outside of Germany, and more generally around the world, the worldview of this faction obsessed with left antisemitism is not the norm.  Antifascists in most of the world are especially focused on developments in places like Israel, because of the oppression of the Palestinians, and war crimes committed by imperial armies like those of the US, the UK, and client states thereof.  

Most antifascists in Germany and the US probably share the orientation of their global compatriots, which in Germany is known as "anti-imperialist," whereas the tendency represented in Portland by pseudo-intellectuals like Shane Burley is known by its adherents in Germany as the Anti-German school of thought.  In the US, this divergent tendency made up of contemporary leftwing witch-hunters seems to want to avoid naming itself, preferring instead to position itself as if it represents the mainstream of antifascist thought and practice today.

There's no doubt that social media algorithms, polarized corporate media camps, and subterfuge on the part of other nefarious actors are responsible for the proliferation of the ideologically rigid and profoundly exclusive outlook we find ourselves swimming in today.  But for those of us who are trying to do something useful in this world, and trying to find our way within this mess of a societal conversation around identity politics, who's more marginalized, who's the victim and who's the oppressor, who's guilty, who has the right to an opinion, who should be excluded and who shouldn't, my advice is to follow the examples of the social movements that have been the most effective and the most threatening, which have invariably been rooted in an ethos of inclusion, solidarity, and tactical flexibility.

And beware of those whose orientation smacks of the puritan, those who are more concerned with guilt and innocence than with effecting actual change, and those who regularly make calls to exclude one or another individual due to their perceived transgressions, or a political tendency due to its perceived impurities.  If they're not just woefully confused individuals, they might be cops.

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Dear world: I have a bunch of gigs in the Pacific Northwest two weekends from now! I’m still holding out for the possibility of another gig or two in the midwestern US in early October. Anybody…? And plans for Scandinavia in November and in France and elsewhere in Europe in February continue to evolve swimmingly, with plenty of more room for additional gigs if anyone might be inclined to organize something else!